There is only one German Indologist Indians have any reason to remember. It was Herman Grassmann, the mathematician, who translated the Rg Veda. Sadly, he dealt a death blow to the notion that its language had remained pristine rather than undergone phonetic changes like other ancient languages. We may contrast him with Alfred Ludwig, an Austrian, whose translation began to appear at the same time as Grassmann but which was more in conformity with the Brahmanas and later Hindu texts. No doubt, both built on original research done in India by H.H Wilson who relied on Sayana's commentary.
Max Mueller, who did not visit India but used the East India Company's manuscripts- is only remembered as a solar myth. Still, at the turn of the last century, there were many who believed his assertion that
The bridge of thoughts and sighs that spans the whole history of the Aryan world has its first arch in the Veda, its last in Kant's Critique. ... While in the Veda we may study the childhood, we may study in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the perfect manhood of the Aryan mind. ... The materials are now accessible, and the English-speaking race, the race of the future, will have in Kant's Critique another Aryan heirloom, as precious as the Veda—a work that may be criticised, but can never be ignored.
Sadly an evil Jew named Einstein showed that Kant was wrong. There are no synthetic a priori truths. As for the Vedas, they are theistic and just as good or bad as any other 'uncreated Scripture' in the sense that either they instil Faith or they fail to do so.
In the Seventies, Niradh Chaudhuri wrote a book about Mueller as well as one about Clive. No Indian read either. Niradh was stupid and mad. Around the time of Independence, he had written for a crazy pro-Fascist magazine called 'the New English Review' run by Douglas Jerrold, a director of the publishing firm Eyre & Spottiswoode. Perhaps Niradh was posing as some sort of brown Colonel Blimp so as to earn a bit of money. But he went on to write a long autobiography in that persona and then committed himself to incarnating that farcical cartoon character.
Ian Almond, about whom I have written before, takes a different view in the conclusion to his 'The thought of Niradh Chaudhuri'.
Today, we might say the book’s primary value is the perspective it (unwittingly) offers on the interface between philology and imperialism.
There was none. Hanover had become a centre of Persian and Sanskrit study at a time when it was still in personal union with England. But, at a later point, German Indology acquired a life of its own. Grassman wasn't translating the Rg Veda in the hope of getting English gold. He was a school teacher who wanted to be promoted to the rank of College lecturer. Sadly, his great mathematical discoveries were not recognised in his life-time.
Almost four years later, Edward Said’s Orientalism would appear for the first time. Mueller’s close interaction with some of the most senior figures in the British establishment (he receives letters of gratitude from viceroys and is on good terms with dukes, generals and governors) is reported by Chaudhuri in some detail and seems to prefigure in a much less conscious way the relationship Said would go on to delineate between a will to fully annotate the Rig Veda and a desire to help the British obtain ‘a second conquest [of India] by education’.
Fuck off! The 'second conquest' was the crushing of the Mutiny. Mueller's talk of Christianizing India was an attempt to deflect attacks upon him by reason of his supposed Latitudinarianism. Mueller had taught modern languages at Oxford and did not want to get the reputation of a corrupter of youth. He applied for but failed to get a Professorship in Sanskrit in 1860. The post went to Monier Williams who was born in Bombay. Later a chair in comparative philology was created for Mueller. This was a time when Emperor Napoleon III was still seen as a threat and the Germans were viewed in a positive light. Williams & Wilson (the previous Boden Sanskrit professor) weren't academically brilliant but they knew India and, in Williams' case, were willing to pretend that their aim was to Christianize India. But, old India hands knew this was just pretence. It may be mentioned that Williams brought Shyamji Krishna Varma to Oxford. Varma would become a great patron of the revolutionaries- e.g. the Savarkar brothers.
Mueller may not have been a native informant, but he seems to have been a willing foreign advisor
He was an immigrant who taught languages. The Germans had set up a 'Max Mueller Bhawan' in Delhi were my sister studied German. Perhaps they bought copies of Niradh's shitty book.
What was Niradh's motivation for undertaking this donkey work? The nutter wanted a platform to repeat his stupid lies about Hinduism. Being a Kayastha, he hated Brahmins and wanted to denigrate the sacred texts which were their hereditary possession.
The criticism is intense and delivered without any mollification: there is ‘not a scrap of evidence’ to believe (as Mueller did) the Rig Veda formed any part of historical Hinduism
The evidence is that millions of Brahmins say so. It is the priests who decide what is or isn't part of their religion. Some shitty MA (fail) has no authority in the matter.
; Mueller’s view of the development of Sanskrit literature was ‘peculiar’ – what he regarded as a ‘Renaissance of Sanskrit literature was most probably its first birth’.
Buddhists and Jain savants switched from Pali or Magahi to Paninian Sanskrit at the same time that there was increased courtly literature in it. This was a renaissance. No new language was created at the time mentioned by Mueller. There's a good reason Niradh failed his M.A. He had shit for brains.
Mueller was ‘wrong in thinking’ that Classical Sanskrit was artificial, he ‘was not right’ in positing a difference between a Northern and a Southern Aryan (274).
Paninian Sanskrit could be artificial rather than natural in the sense that it was possible to construct texts which simultaneously conveyed two different narratives. There is always some difference between people in different geographical areas. Southern Sanskrit authors did sometimes write in a different manner just as Indians sometimes wrote a different type of Persian poetry from that which was usual in Iran.
Worse still, Chaudhuri paints Mueller as delusional : ‘the ancient India which he regarded as the highest and most valuable was his own creation’ (275).
No delusion is involved in celebrating the object of your study. What was delusional was Niradh's fantasy of himself as a philologist or an authority on Hinduism. He knew little about either. The reason Indians didn't beat the shit out of him was because he was a frail dwarf. Still, if any Kayastha started giving himself airs, you could suggest he was related to Niradh and then ask how many pieces of silver Niradh was paid for betraying his employer- Sarat Chandra Bose?
The Erasmus of the nineteenth-century suddenly becomes a deluded Orientalist.
In the opinion of a guy who failed his MA in History at the Black Hole of Calcutta University.
The four-page volte-face on Chaudhuri’s part – which does not really occur with the same intensity again – gives some idea of the fervour with which Chaudhuri clung to his own
malice and hatred of Brahmins.
historical positions, so that no-one who contradicted them (not even the venerated Max Mueller himself) would escape Chaudhuri’s wrath.
Everyone escapes the wrath of a spiteful dwarf.
Almond says
Oxford took Mueller into its bosom;
because he had proper academic credentials and did a good enough job
the most it would ever offer Chaudhuri was residency.
because he wasn't an academic. He was a nutter who had been promoted by crazy ex-Fascists after the War. Fortunately, the Tory party would go in a 'Butskellite' direction. But then RA Butler came from a family of old India hands.
Ian doesn't seem to understand that Mueller was a naturalized British subject.
German culture was always an important reference point for Chaudhuri –
he didn't understand it anymore than he understood Indian culture.
in the Autobiography he writes how Waitz, Mommsen and Ranke were scholar models for him in his youth –
Models he failed to emulate in any respect.
but what is striking in Scholar Extraordinary is how Germany begins to emerge at the expense of England.
I suppose he was learning about Germany and was passing on the information he acquired.
British Indology is seen as contaminated because, unlike its German counterpart, it had closer contact with present-day Hindus and therefore was influenced by the ‘decadence’ and ‘fossilization’ of their imperial subjects.
In other words, the Brits knew what they were talking about. The Germans didn't.
Even more negatively, British culture is criticized because it never accepted ‘Hindu civilization’ as an element in their ‘mental formation’ and ‘cultural activity’ (again, in contrast to Germany).
Some Brits embraced Hindu or Buddhist ideas. Indeed, some embraced Islam. Some British women did more than embrace such ideas. They settled in India and worked actively for Indian independence.
In portraying British rule in India as a crude, native-hating phenomenon unwilling to heed a German’s wiser words of benign governance,
There were plenty of Britishers who offered yet wiser, more practical, suggestions. A.O Hume ended up a Vegetarian and a Vedantin. He founded the Indian National Congress.
Chaudhuri takes his criticism of the practice of Empire (not the idea) one step further. In a book largely dedicated to German philology, where English academics appear petty and quarrelsome, a love of all things German seems to eclipse Chaudhuri’s love of the English.
German philology could attract great minds like that of Hermann Grassmann. It is said that the 'seminar' system evolved alongside Sanskrit studies.
Whilst this never quite reaches the Indian nationalist love of Germany Chaudhuri always repudiated (Subashchandra Bose et al.), it is interesting to see a more benign version of it produced
I was born in Germany. There was never any such love. True, some Indians who had settled in Germany during the inter-war period praised the discipline of the people and the comradely relations between employers and employees, but once Hitler came to power, Indians were forbidden to take jobs there. Vikram Seth's uncle- who later married a German Jew- had to relocate to practice as a dentist. He lost an arm while in the Army fighting the Nazis in Italy. He had a dental practice in Hendon. I recall a neighbour of ours, there, whom Nambiar had forced to join the Waffen SS during the war. I don't suppose this was a thing he boasted of. Hendon is a Jewish neighbourhood.
The British always held that there was a 'good' German who was a dreamy, irenic, Anglophile and a 'bad' German who was militaristic and whose 'hymn of hate' was directed against England because England stood for liberty. It is no surprise that Niradh should have adopted this view and decided that Germans who chose to become British subjects were the good Germans.
Gramsci's notion of hegemony has no application to India. Princes with a lot of power didn't need to bother with learning English. The British Political Agent would speak courteously to them in their own tongue. Some Indian men did learn English in order to earn a living from Institutions created or maintained by the British. The Indian lawyer had to master the same sort of jurisprudence as the English lawyer. The same was true of the Indian Professor or Parliamentarian. But the Brits acquired no 'hegemony' thereby. Nor was it the case that when a British Indian army officer learned Urdu, that some Nizam or Nawab gained hegemony over him.
After the departure of the British, it was no longer necessary to write correct English or give a shit about ideas which originated in England. But there was an incentive to conform to Global 'best practice'. This meant that ideas which first appeared in the more technologically advanced nations had to be imbibed and replicated.
At the margin, there may have been some 'Tardean mimetics' but, as Niradh observed, even the Sandhurst trained military officer changed into a dhoti at home. Moreover, his marriage was arranged with the consultation of astrologers and due consideration being given to gotra and pravara.
what consequences does a revision of Nirad Chaudhuri have for Subaltern Studies?
Can we mine his texts for the benefit of Grievance Studies? I suppose so. One could also show that 'Mein Kampf' is a plea for compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all heterosexual males.
More than thirty years have passed since the Subaltern scholars initiated their attempt at a history from below and outside
Hilariously, actual subalterns were becoming Chief Ministers at that time while Professors of Subaltern shite were hightailing it for Western Campuses. Still, if you were teaching imbeciles at Ivy League, it was cool to pretend one was actually in touch with Naxalite guerrillas in the Jungle.
– rejecting the standard narratives of elites
this was an 'elite' narrative conducted by people desperate to get the fuck out of India and onto some nice Western Campus
to focus on the unspoken and unrepresented players in nationalist movements.
Sadly, there are none such. I have just finished reading the autobiography of Gandhi's goat who expresses some rancour at the airs and graces that Mirabehn (Madeline Slade) gave herself. We can't decolonize Gandhi Studies till subaltern goats are given a voice by Dipshit Chakrobarty who should be milked much more regularly.
Scholars such as Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee have been quite dismissive of Chaudhuri, with Dipesh Chakrabarty perhaps more wisely seeing Chaudhuri as significant for what he was as for what he wrote.
He immigrated while in his Seventies. It's never too late to run away from a shithole. That's what is significant about Niradh. Go West old man!
Because Chaudhuri’s own historical reflections on modern India resembled the very elite-obsessed narratives (Gandhi, Nehru, Bose) the Subaltern school rejected, this is of little surprise;
Sadly, Gandhian goats are now rejecting the Subaltern School whose members ought to be milked more regularly.
Chaudhuri’s verbal unstoppability, moreover, not to mention his fluency in several languages, quite safely banishes him from the category of the voiceless subaltern.
Sadly, the subalterns were taking over politics in India by raising their voices and shouting imprecations against elites- e.g. those of Khan Market.
Still, if not their kids, their their grandkids would go to posh private colleges in Yourop/Amrika.
In all fairness to Chaudhuri, the provincial background of his East Bengali childhood was a lot less elitist than many of the scholars who have dismissed him;
it was irrelevant. People from humbler backgrounds had risen through academia to high positions. But so had people- like V.P Menon or Kamraj Nadar- who had to quit school at the age of 12.
his failure to procure a master’s degree from the University of Calcutta also excluded him from the conventional academic elite.
Politics was the royal road to power. Nobody greatly cared about Professors.
In Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty’s main use of Nirad Chaudhuri is as a constant moral barometer, disdainful of adda and intimate encounters,
He was a bore.
a self-thwarted attempt at modernity on two legs.
Ian's modernity walks on four legs.
Since it was Chaudhuri who (bearing in mind the title of Chakrabarty’s book) said India was the provincial edition of an English newspaper,
British newspapers could have brought out Indian editions. But there was no need. Incidentally, Thackeray wrote for a relative's Indian publication. More to the point, success in Indian journalism could open doors in England. Kipling started off as a journalist in India. Meredith Townsend got his start as an editor there. He returned to England to take over the Spectator.
Chakrabarty might have been better served by using Chaudhuri as an example of elite-production in action.
How? He wasn't part of the elite. I suppose, if he had become a lawyer and then a Judge or a Member of the Legislative Council, we could speak of 'elite production'.
If a book such as the Autobiography has any value for the Subaltern Studies group (other than as a mere social document), it is as a text which reflects the gestation process of an elite intellectual’s mind –
he was an 'unknown Indian'. He wasn't part of the elite.
the actual site where one glimpses ideology in process, where the various Gandhi/Nehru/Bose narratives were fomented, distilled and ultimately distributed.
Gandhi, Nehru & the Bose brothers had the chance to study in England and become barristers. That is 'elite production'. Failing your M.A isn't. Still, an Indian guy, settled in England, who gets paid a bit of money to write biographies of Mueller & Clive- who did very well out of their association with India- may be said to have achieved a modest sort of success. Still, I imagine, what warmed the cockles of Niradh's heart was the great academic acclaim attained by his second son. I believe his eldest is a successful photographer and his youngest is an industrialist in India. Whatever else he may have been, he was a success as a husband and a father. As for other East Bengalis, they have risen through hard work, enterprise and education and you can find them thriving in every corner of the world.
As for England, my decision to offer satyagraha by farting incessantly, led to the success of its Independence movement. Sadly, by some bureaucratic error, Rishi Sunak, not me, was appointed Prime Minister. As Max Mueller observed about the Vedic Shaunak Rishi, 'these fucking Punjabis enter a revolving door after you after you but come out of it first. Fuck you Rishi Sunak! Fuck you very much!'
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