Ideas

by Peter Watson

  But travel from east to west did continue to increase. First the pasha of Egypt, then the sultan of Turkey, then the shah of Persia each dispatched students to Paris, London and other Western capitals. To begin with they were after military know-how, but this entailed learning French, English and other European languages and once they could do so, these envoys were free to read whatever came their way. Even here, however, they were in a sense handicapped. This was because Islam regarded Christianity as an earlier form of revelation, and it therefore made no sense to go backwards. Their chief interests in the West, therefore, lay in economics or in politics.48

  Islamic envoys in the western European countries were interested chiefly in two political ideas, the first being patriotism, coming from France and England in particular. This appealed especially to the younger Ottoman politicians, who realised that if an Ottoman patriotism could be fashioned, it might unite the very varied populations and tribes of the empire by means of a common love of territory, which would also mean a common allegiance to its ruler. The second idea was nationalism. This was more of a central and eastern European notion and referred mainly to ethnic and linguistic identities. The longer-term effects of this idea were far less successful, tending to divide and disrupt, rather than unify.49

  Outside politics, the topics which attracted most interest of the envoys were the status of women, science and music. ‘Islam permits both polygamy and concubinage. Muslim visitors to Europe speak with astonishment, often with horror, of the immodesty and forwardness of Western women, of the incredible freedom and absurd deference accorded to them, and of the lack of manly jealousy of European males confronted with the immorality and promiscuity in which their womenfolk indulge.’50 This attitude stemmed from basic Islamic law, according to which there were three groups which did not enjoy full protection–unbelievers, slaves and women.51 Interest in mathematics and astronomy was growing in Muslim India in the late eighteenth century and Newton’s Principia Mathematica was translated into Persian in the second decade of the nineteenth century by a Muslim in Calcutta. Incubators were invented in Egypt and vaccination against smallpox introduced in Turkey.52

  There have been various theories for this ‘asymmetry’ of achievement in the Arab/Islamic world.53 One argument relates it to the ‘exhaustion’ of precious metals in the Middle East, coinciding with the discovery by Europeans of gold and silver and other precious resources in the New World. One biological theory puts the Arabic failure down to the prevalence of cousin marriage in Islamic countries. Another biological theory blames the poor goat which, by stripping the bark off the trees and tearing up grass by the roots, condemned once-fertile lands to become deserts. Others have drawn attention to the relative abandonment of wheeled vehicles in the pre-modern Middle East, though this seems more to beg the question than answer it. ‘Familiar in antiquity, they became rare in medieval centuries, and remained so until they were reintroduced under European influence or rule.’54

  None of these explanations seems satisfactory. For one reason, by this time the Islamic world no longer equated to the Middle East–there were many Muslims in India and further east, and in Africa. As was mentioned earlier, Islam had been immensely successful in its spread around the world–judged in purely spiritual (rather than in material) terms, the faith that had originally been Arab had been exceedingly successful, second to none as an export. And so the wider answer, about the ‘asymmetry’, if there is one, surely lies in the great opening-up of the world, in the age of exploration, which provided Europeans with access to vast tracts of fresh land, in Africa, Australia and the Americas, with their associated flora, fauna and natural resources and, above all, their huge markets which allowed for trade, innovation and capital formation on an unprecedented scale. This is the simplest explanation, and the most convincing.

  In France in the seventeenth century the king, Louis XIV, was told that the Portuguese settlements in India were not as secure as they might be and saw his chance. Without fuss, he added six young Jesuits–all scientists as well as prelates–to a mission he was sending to Siam.55 The men were put ashore in the south of India, the first of the French (as opposed to Portuguese) ‘Indian missions’ which were to gain both fame and notoriety for the ordeals they endured and for their collection of Lettres édifiantes et curieuses which gave detailed accounts of their experiences. These Jesuits were far more sympathetic and accommodating to the Indians than their previous colleagues. This was shown expressly in the so-called ‘concessions’ which they allowed regarding Catholic worship–these became known as the rites malabars or cérémonies chinoises, a hybrid form of worship, which was denounced in Rome and eventually condemned in 1744. But if this tolerant approach didn’t satisfy the Vatican, it appealed to the abbé Bignon, the French king’s librarian and the man who reorganised the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris. He requested the missionaries to be alert for Indic manuscripts, which he was keen to obtain to form the backbone of an Oriental library. In 1733, in the Lettres édifiantes, the Jesuits announced their response: the discovery of one of the ‘big game’ of the hunt, a complete Veda, long thought to have been lost.56 (It was in fact a complete Rig Veda in Grantha characters.*) Had the French Jesuits not taken the tolerant, accommodating approach that they did, it is unlikely they would have got close enough to local clerics and intellectuals to have been shown the Hindu scriptures in the first place, nor might they have realised what they had. Some years later, owing to Vatican intolerance, Jesuit relations with literate Indians deteriorated and shipments from the subcontinent were discontinued. By then, however, Europe had been exposed to Sanskrit and this turned into a major intellectual event.

  ‘Only after 1771 does the world become truly round; half the intellectual map is no longer blank.’ These are the words of Raymond Schwab, the French scholar, in his book The Oriental Renaissance, a title he took from Edgar Quinet who, in 1841, described the arrival of many Sanskrit manuscripts in Europe in the eighteenth century and compared them with the impact of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.57 I have adopted Quinet and Schwab’s title for this chapter, and in what follows have relied heavily on their work. What Schwab meant was that the arrival of the Hindu manuscripts, together with the deciphering, at much the same time, of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was an event more or less comparable with the arrival of the ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts, many in Arabic translation, that had transformed European life in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (see above, Chapter 17). Schwab himself felt that the discovery of the Sanskrit language and its literature was ‘one of the great events of the mind’.58

  This transformation began almost certainly in 1771 when Abraham Anquetil-Duperron, ‘an obscure luminary’, published his translation of the Zend Avesta in France. This, says Schwab, was ‘the first time anyone had succeeded in breaking into one of the walled languages of Asia’.59 Anquetil was described by Edward Said as a French scholar and ‘ecumenist of beliefs (Jansenist, Catholic, and Brahmin)’. He transcribed and translated the Zend Avesta while in Surat, ‘freeing,’ in Schwab’s words, ‘the old humanism from the Mediterranean basin.’60 He was the first Western scholar to visit India expressly for the purpose of studying their scriptures. At first he called Sanskrit Sahanscrit, Samcretam or Samscroutam.†

  The real start of the Oriental renaissance, however, properly began with the arrival in Calcutta of William Jones and the establishment of the Bengal Asiatic Society on 15 January 1784. This society was established by a group of highly talented English civil servants, employed by the East India Company, who, besides their official day-to-day duties helping to administer the subcontinent, also pursued broader interests, which included language studies, the recovery and translation of the Indian classics, astronomy and the natural sciences. Four men stood out. These were, first, Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the governor of Bengal, and a highly controversial politician, who was later impeached for corruption (and, after a trial that lasted, on and off, for seven years, acquitted), but througho
ut it all energetically encouraged the activities of the society.61 It was Hastings who ensured that learned Brahmans gathered at Fort William to supply the most authentic texts, which illustrated Indic law, literature and language. The others in the group were William Jones, a judge, Henry Colebrooke (the ‘Master of Sanskrit’) and Charles Wilkins. Between them, these men accomplished three things. They located, recovered, and translated the main Indian Hindu and Buddhist classics, they kick-started the investigation of Indian history, and Jones, in a brilliant flash of insight, uncovered the great similarities between Sanskrit on the one hand and Greek and Latin on the other, in the process reshaping history in a manner we shall explore throughout the rest of this chapter.

  These men were all brilliant linguists, Jones especially. The son of a professor of mathematics, he was, on top of everything else, an accomplished poet. He published poems in Greek at the age of fifteen, while at sixteen–having learned Persian from ‘a Syrian living in London’–he translated Hafiz into English.62 He later said that he had studied twenty-eight languages and had a thorough knowledge of thirteen.

  Apart from Jones’ breakthrough, the next most eye-catching was Jean François Champollion’s, in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. In 1822 Champollion wrote his famous Letter to M. Dacier, which provided the key to the hieroglyphic script, making use of the trilingual Rosetta Stone, brought back from Egypt, as its key. ‘On the morning of September 14, 1822, Champollion ran across the rue Mazarine on which he lived, into the library of the Institut des Inscriptions, where he knew he would find his brother, [Jean Jacques] Champollion-Figeac, at work. He cried out to him, “I’ve got it,” went home, and fell unconscious. Coming out of a five-day coma, he immediately picked up the sequence of a waking dream that was almost as old as he was, and asked for his notes. On the 21st he dictated a letter to his brother, dated the next day, which he read to the Académie des Inscriptions on the 27th.’63

  The process of decipherment has since become well known. The fact that there were three languages on the Rosetta Stone was both an opportunity and a hindrance. One language, Greek, was known. Of the other two, one was ideogrammatic, the figuration of ideas, and the other alphabetic, the representation of spoken sounds.64 The ideographs were broken when it was realised that a certain small number of unknown characters, often repeated, must be vowels and that cartouches were reserved for the names of kings, with the father following the son (‘A, son of B’). Champollion realised that the unknown alphabetic script was a translation of the Greek, and the hieroglyphics a form of shorthand of the same message.

  When the Bengal Asiatic Society was instituted, in 1784, Warren Hastings was offered the presidency, but declined, and so it was offered to Jones. He had been in India barely eighteen months. His great discovery, the relationship of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, was first aired in his third anniversary address to the Asiatic Society. Each year for eleven years he commemorated the founding of the society with a major address, several of which were important statements on Eastern culture. But his third address, ‘On the Hindus’, delivered on 2 February 1786, was by far the most momentous. He said: ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.’65

  It is difficult for us today to grasp the full impact of this insight. In linking Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, and in arguing that the Eastern tongue was, if anything, older than and superior to the Western languages, Jones was striking a blow against the very foundations of Western culture and the (at least tacit) assumption that it was more advanced than cultures elsewhere. A major ‘reorientation’ in thought and attitude was needed. And it was more than merely historical. Anquetil’s translation of the Zend Avesta was the first time an Asian text had been conceived in a way that completely ignored both the Christian and classical traditions. This is why Schwab said the world only became truly round now: the history of the East was at last on a par with that of the West, no longer subordinate to it, no longer necessarily a part of that history. ‘The universality of the Christian God had been ended and a new universalism put in its place.’ In his study of the French Société Asiatique, Felix Lacôte said in an article entitled ‘L’Indianisme’ that ‘Europeans doubted that ancient India was worth the trouble of knowing. This was a tenacious prejudice against which Warren Hastings still had to struggle in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.’66 Nevertheless, by 1832 things had been turned upside down and the German romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel took a different line. He said that his own century had produced more knowledge of India than ‘the twenty-one centuries since Alexander the Great’.67 (Schlegel was, like Jones, a linguistic prodigy. He spoke Arabic and Hebrew by the time he was fifteen and, at the age of seventeen, when he was still a pupil of Herder, he lectured on mythology.68) In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Max Müller, a German Orientalist who became the first professor of comparative philology at Oxford, said this: ‘If I were asked what I considered the most important discovery of the nineteenth century with respect to the ancient history of mankind, I should answer by the following short line: Sanskrit Dyaus Pitar = Greek Zeùs ????? = Latin Juppiter = Old Norse Tyr.’69

  Sanskrit was the key. But it was not the only breakthrough. Schwab identifies five major discoveries of this era, all of which produced a comprehensive reorientation in thought. These were the deciphering of Sanskrit in 1785, of Pahlavi in 1793, the cuneiforms in 1803, hieroglyphics in 1822 and Avestan in 1832–‘these were all openings in the long-sealed wall of languages’. One immediate effect of these events was that the study of the Far East was demystified for the first time, moving beyond the conjectural. The Laudian chair of Arabic had been established at Oxford since c. 1640 but Indic and Chinese studies now began in earnest.70

  In 1822, the English sent back from Asia to London the sacred books of Tibet and Nepal that were coming to light. The most important of these was the Buddhist canon–one hundred volumes in Tibetan, eighty in Sanskrit–which were discovered and sent west by the English ethnologist Brian Hodgson. It was as a result of the translations of these texts that Western scholars became aware of the similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, as discussed above in Chapter 8. In Germany the philosopher of history Johann Gottfried von Herder was deeply affected by Anquetil’s translation of the Zend Avesta and was moved to render certain verses of Wilkins’ English text of the Bhagavad Gita (translated in 1784) into German. But for Herder his main transformation came when he read a German translation of Jones’ English version of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala (1789). Schwab sets out the significance of this as follows: ‘It is well known how Herder, in rekindling for a deciphered India the enthusiastic interest that had been felt for an imagined India, spread among the Romantics the idea of placing the cradle of the divine infancy of the human race in India.’71 Likewise the German translations of the Bhagavad Gita and Gita Govinda, published in the first decade of the nineteenth century, had a tremendous influence on Friedrich Schleiermacher, F. W. Schelling, August Schlegel, J. C. Schiller, Novalis and, eventually, on Johann Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer.

  But it was the Shakuntala that ‘remained the great miracle’. As well as seducing Herder, it gripped Goethe, who didn’t much care for the polytheism of Hinduism but nonetheless penned the lines: ‘Nenn’ ich Sakontala dich, und so ist alles gesagt’(‘When I mention Shakuntala the similarities between the similarities between a, everything is said’). Shakuntala was one of the influences that prompted Schlegel to learn Sanskrit. Jones became as famous for his translation of Shakuntala as for his identification of the similarities between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek. Goethe called
him ‘the incomparable Jones’. ‘Shakuntala was the first link with the authentic India and the basis on which Herder constructed an Indic fatherland for the human race in its infancy.’72 Heine modelled several of his verses on Shakuntala. In France, in 1830, the appearance of Antoine-Léonard de Chézy’s translation of Kalidasa’s classic ‘was one of the literary events that formed the texture of the nineteenth century, not just by its direct influence but by introducing unexpected competition into world literature.’73 Chézy’s translation included Goethe’s famous verses as an epigraph, in which the German poet confessed that Shakuntala was ‘among the stars that made his nights brighter than his days’. Lamartine saw in Chézy’s translation ‘the threefold genius of Homer, Theocritus and Tasso combined in a single poem’.74 By 1858 Shakuntala was so well-known in France, and so well-regarded, that it became a ballet at the Opéra de Paris, with music by Ernst Reyer and a scenario by Théophile Gautier.