Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2006 16:44:01 +0530

Subject: [ib] Sanskrit in America

Sanskrit in America: How the First Academic Vamsa Was
Established
By Francis C. Assisi
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
".......As early as the 1880s, the charter of
universities such as
Columbia, Pennsylvania, Chicago, California,
Michigan and Minnesota
stipulated that Sanskrit should be taught.
It was a time when Yale, Harvard and Johns
Hopkins
already had viable Sanskrit programs by
then. ......."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A specialist in South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago,
Maureen L.P. Patterson, was certainly not exaggerating when she
wrote at the end of a long and distinguished career as Chief
Librarian: "In the long sweep of India's historic past, measured in
yugas rather than millennia or centuries, the total American
experience of Indic civilization is but a ksana."

For those on the first rung of the 21st century it may be difficult to
realize how great a sensation was the intellectual discovery of India
by the West towards the end of the 18th century. Until then, the
historical and cultural horizon of Europe and America had been
practically entirely bounded by the Ancient East of the Bible, by
Greece and Rome. Now it was suddenly widened by the first
glimpses of the ancient civilizations of India and China.

India, had, on the strength of travellers' tales and missionaries'

reports, been reputed as an exotic and mysterious wonderland from
where anything might be expected. And when, thanks to the
pioneering efforts of some interested British officials such as Sir
William Jones and others, the first original Sanskrit works were
made accessible, the deep impression made by their contents was
doubled by the sensational fact, that their language proved akin to
Latin and Greek and the other languages of Europe while at the same
time it was older and more refined than any of them.

At once it lead to far reaching speculations. And along with Hebrew

in Ivy League schools and in divinity schools, Sanskrit too came to
take a place. That's why most of those who initially took interest in
Sanskrit were really prompted by a religious motive.

It was this discovery of Sanskrit alone that gave rise to a new branch
of research, comparative philology and modern linguistics in
general. The founder of this new science was a German, Franz
Bopp; and it has remained a favourite domain of German scholars
ever since. Sanskrit not only furnished to it important and even
indispensable raw material; the masterly analysis of their sacred
language by the ancient Indian grammarians opened up entirely new
vistas and gave some decisive inspirations to modern Western
scholars. The knowledge of Sanskrit has ever since been considered
indispensable for every worker in the field of linguistics.

As early as the 1880s, the charter of universities such as Columbia,

Pennsylvania, Chicago, California, Michigan and Minnesota
stipulated that Sanskrit should be taught. It was a time when Yale,
Harvard and Johns Hopkins already had viable Sanskrit programs by
then.

Although 2nd generation Desis are today forging a new vanguard in

South Asian Studies at American universities, interest in the study of
the Sanskrit language really goes back a century and a half.

Sanskrit studies in the United States may be said to have begun more
than 150 years ago with Edward Elbridge Salisbury (1814-1901)
who was appointed Professor of Sanskrit and Arabic at Yale in 1841.

As Salisbury wrote in 1848: "The very peculiarity of our national

destiny, in a moral point of view, calls upon us not only not to be
behind, but to be even foremost, in intimate acquaintance with
oriental languages and institutions. The countries of the West,
including our own, have been largely indebted to the East for their
various culture; the time has come when this debt should be repaid."

Salisbury, who graduated from Yale in 1832, had spent several years
abroad under Sanskritists Prof. Franz Bopp in Berlin and Prof.
Garcin de Tassy in Paris. After his appointment at Yale he once
again went to Europe and studied Sanskrit under Christian Lassen at
Bonn and Eugene Burnouf in Paris. It was Burnouf's two German
students, Rudolph Roth and Max Muller, who later on made a name
in European Sanskrit scholarship.

This background was fortuitous for America in the years to come. In

Paris it was not just Sanskrit; Modern India was not neglected.
Along with teaching of ancient Indian philology by Burnouf, the
teaching of Hindi and Urdu philology was actively carried on and
continued by Garcin de Tassy whose History of Hindu and
Hindustani Literature as well as translations of seminal works such
as the Ramacaritamanasa were well known.
Burnouf was among the first to realize that great progress could be
made in the morphology of European classical languages by
comparisons with Sanskrit, a cognate language in which the analysis
of forms was clearer and had even been carried to a degree unknown
elsewhere by grammarians of ancient India. Burnouf set out to make
use of Sanskrit to penetrate deeply into Indian culture and to
decipher other still unknown languages.

At the Inaugural lecture at the College de France, Burnouf

explained: "We shall analyse the scholarly language in which the
people originally expressed themselves, we shall read the immortal
works which are monuments of their genius…Let us venture to add,
however, if this course is to be devoted to philology, we shall not for
that exclude the study of events and ideas. Our eyes shall not be shut
against the most dazzling light ever to shine from the Orient and we
shall seek to understand the spectacle before us. This is India, with
its philosophy and its myths, its literature and its laws, which we
shall study through its language…It is our profound conviction that
just as the study of words, in so far as it can possibly be conducted to
the exclusion of ideas, is useless and frivolous, so words, as visible
signs of thought, are a solid and productive branch of learning. There
is no true philology without philosophy and history. The analysis of
language processes is also an inductive science and, if not the
science of the human soul, is at least that of the most extraordinary
faculty which it has been given to express itself"..

Around this time, in 1842, a group of New Englanders from the

Boston area, founded the American Oriental Society - which served
as the chief American organ for Oriental and especially for Indic
scholarship. Salisbury, whose interests were scholarly, was one of
the earliest members of the Society. Salisbury served as its Secretary
and later as its President for a total of 21 years and made large
financial gifts toward the Society's support.

Salisbury did three important things for Indic studies in the United
States; he discovered the first great American Sanskritist William
Dwight Whitney (1827-1894; he got him a secure position in a great
university where he could work to his full capacity and provided for
perpetuity of the chair then established; and he helped more than
anyone else to create a means of publication for Oriental studies.

Whitney had studied under Salisbury and later went to Germany to

study under Albrecht Weber and Rudolf Von Roth. Not long after
his return to America he was installed in his professorship at Yale
(1854).

Whitney was a man of wide attainments. He was one of the

collaborators in the production of the monumental seven-volume
Petersburg Sanskrit Dictionary. He made translations of the Atharva
Veda, with notes, in two volumes; he produced a masterly Sanskrit
Grammar (first edition 1879, reprinted in India eighty years later in
1961); he translated the Surya Siddhanta, and wrote extensively on
linguistic science and Indo-European philology.

Thus, Whitney established Indo-European philology and scientific

linguistics in the United States. His influence was widely felt
throughout the American academic world. With respect to the Indic
field, one academic has commented that all the Sanskritists in
America "either directly or indirectly are pupils of Professor
Whitney's".

According to the late Prof. Norman Brown of the University of

Pennsylvania, Whitney did indeed "establish a vamsa which, with
just a few notable exceptions, has included every Sanskritist
teaching in America since his time".

Himself a member of that vamsa, Brown notes that the greatest

misfortune the founder of the American vamsa suffered seems to be
that he never visited the land to which he devoted his life.

Ironically, Yale University itself was built upon America's lucrative

trade with India. Boston-born Elihu Yale went with his family's
business to England. From England he went to India in 1671 as a
writer for the East India Company. He rose steadily in rank until he
became Governor of Madras and a merchant prince in his own right,
amassing a great deal of wealth. He retired to England in the early
1700s and contributed substantially to the founding of the university
that today bears his name.

http://www.indolink.com/displayArticleS.php?id=072506090527

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