Eloquent discourse on the East

In 1882, Max Mueller, student of Indian literature and religion, delivered a series of lectures at Cambridge in which he spoke at length on his idea of India and what it represented for the world. To read these lectures, now in book form, is to encounter afresh the range of responses that were evoked by the subcontinent. A review by VASUDHA DALMIA.

INDOLOGISTS remember Friedrich Max Mueller (1823-1900) for his painstaking edition of the Rigveda with the commentary of Sayana (1849 to 1873) as also the 49 volumes of the series he titled Sacred Books of the East. But he is primarily remembered in India today for the role that he played in rehabilitating the value of Indian culture, as he understood it, in an increasingly imperialist and imperious Britain. He was a product of late German romanticism; of its poetic vocabulary and vision and its enthusiasm for the East, particularly India. His scholarship was deeply embedded in comparative philology, in philosophy and comparative mythology (a discipline he helped found). His authority in colonial India had no doubt also to do with his location in Oxford; he arrived there in 1848 and held professorial positions from 1854 onwards. His set of seven lectures entitled "India: What can it teach us?" was delivered in 1882 at the University of Cambridge to candidates of the Indian Civil Service at the invitation of the Board of Historical Studies. Later issued as a book, the lectures came, ironically, to mean more to Indian Nationalists than to those who set out to govern India. This new edition of the famous lectures has been printed on Max Mueller's centenary with the generous assistance of the German cultural organisation, the Goethe Institute (in India it is tellingly named after Max Mueller himself).

The lectures are in flowing diction, interspersed with long, poetic translations from the Vedas. The first lecture deals with the importance of Sanskrit literature (for Max Mueller this consistently means Vedic literature alone) and its significance for all the sciences, for philosophy, moral laws, mythology, language and ethnology. The second lecture is concerned with the truthful character of Hindus. The third has to do with the human interest of Sanskrit culture. The next three focus on the exclusive character of the Vedas (uninfluenced by Babylon and the Semitics), with the transcendent character of Vedic religion and Vedic deities. The last lecture has to do with the Veda and Vedanta. It is here, in speaking of the three Beyonds, the world of the gods, of the departed spirits, and the world of rita, or truth, that Max Mueller comes to speak of later Vedic literature, the Upanishads (barely mentioned elsewhere in the lectures) where, according to him, the speculation on the nature of religious thought reaches its fulfillment. There is mention, almost in passing, of two modern thinkers, Ram Mohan Roy and Keshab Chunder Sen, who had founded the Brahmo Samaj which was "Vedantic in spirit". On this rather slim evidence he is led to conclude that "(t)here is in fact, an unbroken continuity between the most modern and the most ancient phases of Hindu thought, extending over more than 3,000 years".

Acquiring knowledge of Sanskrit, Max Mueller views as discovery and conquest. He makes this clear in his dedication of the volume to E. B. Cowell, Professor of Sanskrit in Cambridge: "Every one of your own works marks a real advance, and a permanent occupation of new ground. But you know also how small a strip has as yet been explored of the vast continent of Sanskrit literature, and how much still remains terra incognita". He would want the candidates for the Indian Civil Service to know "our nearest intellectual relatives, the Aryans of India, the framers of the most wonderful language, the Sanskrit, the fellow-workers in the construction of our fundamental concepts, the fathers of the most natural of natural religions, the makers of the most transparent of mythologies, the inventors of the most subtle philosophy, and the givers of the most elaborate laws".(p.14)

All of this sounds most pleasing and flattering. Yet, what does India mean for Max Mueller and to whom does the "us" of the title refer? As far as the first is concerned, there are two distinct cut-off points in his understanding of the vast cultural complex that is India. On the one hand, his real India is village India, which has somehow managed to remain frozen in time. It is the idealisation of the German Romantics which is at work here, but also of Elphinstone, Malcolm and Munro, early 19th Century British administrators of what Eric Stokes first called the romantic paternalist school. There are profuse citations from them as also from Colonel Sleeman's Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official (1844), written in the 1830's in support of this proposition. Max Mueller is at pains to clarify however, "but I am not leading here for Gonds, or Bhils, or Santhals, and other non-Aryan tribes. I am speaking of the Aryan and more or less civilised inhabitants of India". (p.46)

In his own time, Max Mueller's thinking was in line with the historical and comparative method of Sir Henry Maine, as exemplified in his Village Communities East and West (1871). As Clive Dewey has pointed out in his article "Images of the Village Community", published in Modern Asian Studies in 1972, "The Indian and Teutonic village communities might be remote in time and space; but comparative method obliterated space and historical method obliterated time: both were simply varieties of the same species, the Aryan village community". The Indian village community was intact; it was truthful, honest and upright. None of this applied to the inhabitants of Indian towns and villages, their moral character had been permanently damaged by the successive invasions of the subcontinent.

And with this we come to the second cut-off point. "My interest lies altogether with the people of India, when left to themselves, (emphasis in the original) and historically I should like to draw a line after the year 1,000 after Christ. When you read about the atrocities committed by the Mohemmadan conquerors of India from time - that time to the time when England stepped in - and, whatever may be said by her envious critics, made at all events, the broad principles of common humanity respected once more in India, the wonder to my mind, is how any nation could have survived such an Inferno, without being turned into devils themselves". There is no question for Max Mueller that it was the Muslims who were the prime cause of decadence and moral degeneration of India: "I can only say that, after reading the accounts of the terrors and horrors of Mohammedan rule, my wonder is that so much of native virtue and truthfulness should have survived. You might as well expect a mouse to speak the truth before a cat as a Hindu before a Mohammedan judge". (p.66) All of this, especially in the present political configuration of the subcontinent, is disturbing, not to say dangerous.

When it comes to Sanskrit literature, there is a further cut-off point. It was yet another invasion, the Turanian, which put an end to Vedic culture and with that of all true literature. "If I call the invasion which is generally called the invasion of the Sakas, or the Scythians, or Indo-Scythians, or Turushkas, the Turanian invasion, it is simply because I do not as yet wish to commit myself more than I can help as the nationality of the tribes who took possession of India ... (p.78) After this invasion, life would go on of course, and there would be more works in Sanskrit, but the priestly caste would be deprived of patronage and would become corrupted. Literature of the period before the invasion, then, could be considered ancient and natural; "after the invasion, modern and artificial" (p.80), it could never be considered "living or national literature". This modern and artificial literature included the epics, the Puranas, the law books, the poetic works of Kalidasa.

We come finally to the "us" of the title. Whom does the "us" include? "We sturdy Northern Aryans" is the answer. It was the bracing cold of the climate, the harsh terrain of the North, which had formed their character as against the softer, more pliable variety of their brown brothers. "Our own character as formed under these influences, by iy inheritance, by education, by necessity. We all need a fighting-life; our highest ideal of life is a fighting life. We work till we can work no longer, and are proud, like old horses, to die in harness ... We point to the marvels of what we call civilisation - our splendid cities, our high roads and bridges, our ships, our railways, our telegraphs, our electric light, our pictures, our statues, our music, our theatres". (p.90)

What have these more fortunate beings to learn from those less well endowed with these marvels? "I do not deny that the manly vigour, the silent endurance, the public spirit, and the private virtues too of the citizens of European states represent one side, it may be a very important side, of the destiny which man has to fulfil on earth". (p.91) Yet, a little more rest and reflection could have done "us" good. There was need of transcendence, "the distinguishing feature of the Indian character ... using that word, not in its strict technical sense, as fixed by Kant, but in its more general acceptation, as denoting a mind bent on transcending the limits of empirical knowledge". (p.95) Apart from that, "it (the ancient literature of India) can teach us lessons, which nothing else can teach us, as to the origin of our own language, the first formation of our own concepts, and the true natural germs of all that is comprehended under the name of civilisation of the Aryan race, the race to which we and all the greatest nations of the world - the Hindus, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans, the Slavs and the Celts, and last, not least, the Teutons, belong". (p.107)

One use today of a reprint of such a work, that I could see, would be that Max Mueller's eloquent writing could open doors for prospective students of Indian history and culture in India, attracting them to the study of Sanskrit. After all, he saw the justification of his lectures in answering the question, why "a study of Sanskrit, and of the ancient poetry, the philosophy, the laws, and the art of India is looked upon, in the best case, as curious, but is considered by most people as useless, tedious, if not absurd?" But this could only come about if the volume was reissued, as this edition is not, with the kind of detailed notes and comments, qualifying, questioning or downright negating, that H. H. Wilson had once provided for James Mill's equally disturbing History of British India (1817).

India: What Can It Teach Us? F. Max Mueller, Preface by Ranjit Nair and an introduction by Johannes H. Voigt, Penguin Books India, 2000, Rs. 295.

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