Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

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Manusmriti
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/7/20


Vyasa too, the son of Parasara before mentioned, has decided, that 'the Veda with its Angas, or the six compositions deduced from it, the revealed system of medicine, the Puranas, or sacred histories, and the code of Menu were four works of supreme authority, which ought never to be shaken by arguments merely human.’

It is the general opinion of Pandits, that Brahma taught his laws to Menu in a hundred thousand verses, which Menu explained to the primitive world, in the very words of the book now translated, where he names himself, after the manner of ancient sages, in the third person, but in a short preface to the law tract of Nared, it is asserted, that 'Menu, having written the laws of Brahma in a hundred thousand slocas or couplets, arranged under twenty-four heads in a thousand chapters, delivered the work to Nared, the sage among gods, who abridged it, for the use of mankind, in twelve thousand verses, and gave them to a son of Bhrigu, named Sumati, who, for greater ease to the human race, reduced them to four thousand; that mortals read only the second abridgement by Sumati, while the gods of the lower heaven, and the band of celestial musicians, are engaged in studying the primary code, beginning with the fifth verse, a little varied, of the work now extant on earth; but that nothing remains of NARED’s abridgement, except an elegant epitome of the ninth original title on the administration of justice.' Now, since these institutes consist only of two thousand six hundred and eighty five verses, they cannot be the whole work ascribed to Sumati, which is probably distinguished by the name of the Vriddha, or ancient Manava, and cannot be found entire; though several passages from it, which have been preserved by tradition, are occasionally cited in the new digest.

A number of glosses or comments on Menu were composed by the Munis, or old philosophers, whose treatises, together with that before us, constitute the Dherma sastra, in a collective sense, or Body of Law; among the more modern commentaries, that called Medhatithi, that by Govindaraja, and that by Dharani-Dhera, were once in the greatest repute; but the first was reckoned prolix and unequal; the second concise but obscure; and the third often erroneous. At length appeared Culluca Bhatta; who, after a painful course of study and the collation of numerous manuscripts, produced a work, of which it may, perhaps, be said very truly, that it is the shortest, yet the most luminous, the least ostentatious, yet the most learned, the deepest, yet the most agreeable, commentary ever composed on any author ancient or modern, European or Asiatick. The Pandits care so little for genuine chronology, that none of them can tell me the age of Culluca, whom they always name with applause; but he informs us himself, that he was a Brahmen of the Varendra tribe, whose family had been long settled in Gaur or Bengal, but that he had chosen his residence among the learned, on the banks of the holy river at Casi. His text and interpretation I have almost implicitly followed, though I had myself collated many copies of Menu, and among them a manuscript of a very ancient date: his gloss is here printed in Italicks; and any reader, who may choose to pass it over as if unprinted, will have in Roman letters an exact version of the original, and may form some idea of its character and structure, as well as of the Sanscrit idiom which must necessarily be preserved in a verbal translation; and a translation, not scrupulously verbal, would have been highly improper in a work on so delicate and momentous a subject as private and criminal jurisprudence.

Should a series of Brahmens omit, for three generations, the reading of Menu, their sacerdotal class, as all the Pandits assure me, would in strictness be forfeited; but they must explain it only to their pupils of the three highest classes; and the Brahmen, who read it with me, requested most earnestly, that his name might be concealed; nor would he have read it for any consideration on a forbidden day of the moon, or without the ceremonies prescribed in the second and fourth chapters for a lecture on the Veda: so great, indeed, is the idea of sanctity annexed to this book, that, when the chief native magistrate at Banares endeavoured, at my request, to procure a Persian translation of it, before I had a hope of being at any time able to understand the original, the Pandits of his court unanimously and positively refused to assist in the work; nor should I have procured it at all, if a wealthy Hindu at Gaya had not caused the version to be made by some of his dependants, at the desire of my friend Mr. [Jacques Louis Law de Clapernon? or Baron Jean Law de Lauriston?] Law. [1776]

"In relation to his Translation, it was made by the orders of Mr. Barthelemi, First Counselor in Pondicherry. Having a great number of interpreters for him, he had them translate some Indian works with all possible accuracy: but the wars of India & the ruin of Pondicherry resulted in the loss of all that he had gathered on these objects: and only the last translation of Zozur, of which only one complete copy remains, between the hands of M. Teissier de la Tour nephew of M. leConsr. Barthelemy. It's certain the one that we made the copy that we have in the Library of His Majesty, and which no doubt had not had time to complete when M. de Modave embarked to return to Europe."

I have not been able to gather any information on Tessier -- or Teissier -- de la Tour. Louis Barthelemy is much better known; although his career in India runs parallel to that of Porcher des Oulches, of the two he is the more prominent one and holds the highest offices. His name appears repeatedly in the official documents of the French Company. He was born at Montpellier, circa 1695, came to India in 1729, and stayed there until his death at Pondicherry, on 29 July 1760. He served at Mahe, was a member of the council at Chandernagore, and was called to Pondicherry in 1742. His duties at Pondicherry were twice interrupted in later years: in 1748 he was appointed governor of Madras, and in 1753-54 he preceded Porcher as commander of Karikal. He rose to the rank of "second du Conseil Superieur," and in the short period in 1755, between the departure of Godeheu and the arrival of de Leyrit, Barthelemy's name appears first on all official documents. It should perhaps be mentioned, first, that on 22 February 1751 Barthelemy represented the father of the bride at the wedding of Jacques Law -- Dupleix was the witness for the bridegroom --, and second, that on 8 August 1758 he was godfather of Jacques Louis Law. These two entries seem to suggest that he was indeed close to the Law family, whose interpreter has been given credit for the translation of the EzV (see p. 28). It should also be pointed out that Barthelemy died more than half a year after Maudave -- and the EzV -- reached Lorient on 2 February 1760.

-- The Ezourvedam Manuscripts, Excerpt from Ezourvedam: A French Veda of the Eighteenth Century, Edited with an Introduction by Ludo Rocher


The first Director General for the [French East India] Company was François de la Faye,...

La Faye was the owner of an extensive art collection, two hotels in Paris, and another in Versailles. When he acquired the ancient château de Condé in 1719, he commissioned the most fashionable artists of his time and the architect Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni for elaborate improvements....

The Marquis was a member of the French Academy, a director of the French India Company, and accordingly, was a very rich man. In his mansion in Paris, he often received such famous people as Voltaire and Crébillon...

At a later date, the castle belonged to the Count de la Tour du Pin Lachaux, through his marriage with the niece of the Marquis de la Faye...

In 1814, the Countess de Sade, the daughter-in-law of the famous Marquis de Sade, inherited Condé from her cousin, La Tour du Pin. Since this time and up to 1983, the castle remained the property of the Sade family, who restored it with much care after the two World Wars.

-- French East India Company, by Wikipedia


The Persian translation of Menu, like all others from the Sanscrit into that language, is a rude intermixture of the text, loosely rendered, with some old or new comment, and often with the crude notions of the translator; and though it expresses the general sense of the original, yet it swarms with errours, imputable partly to haste, and partly to ignorance: thus where Menu says, that emissaries are the eyes of a prince, the Persian phrase makes him ascribe four eyes to the person of a king; for the word char, which means an emissary in Sanscrit, signifies four in the popular dialect.

-- Institutes of Hindu Law: Or, The Ordinances of Menu, According to the Gloss of Culluca. Comprising the Indian System of Duties, Religious and Civil, Verbally translated from the original Sanscrit, With a Preface, by Sir William Jones


Highlights:

The Manusmṛiti ... was one of the first Sanskrit texts to have been translated into English in 1776, by Sir William Jones, and was used to formulate the Hindu law by the British colonial government...

Over fifty manuscripts of the Manusmriti are now known, but the earliest discovered, most translated and presumed authentic version since the 18th century has been the "Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) manuscript with Kulluka Bhatta commentary". Modern scholarship states this presumed authenticity is false, and the various manuscripts of Manusmriti discovered in India are inconsistent with each other, and within themselves, raising concerns of its authenticity, insertions and interpolations made into the text in later times...

The title Manusmriti is a relatively modern term and a late innovation, probably coined because the text is in a verse form...

[T]he text version in modern use, according to Olivelle, is likely the work of a single author or a chairman with research assistants.

Manusmriti, Olivelle states, was not a new document, it drew on other texts, and it reflects "a crystallization of an accumulated knowledge" in ancient India....

The text is composed in metric Shlokas (verses), in the form of a dialogue between an exalted teacher and disciples who are eager to learn about the various aspects of dharma....

The verses 12.1, 12.2 and 12.82 are transitional verses. This section is in a different style than the rest of the text, raising questions whether this entire chapter was added later. While there is evidence that this chapter was extensively redacted over time, however it is unclear whether the entire chapter is of a later era....

The structure and contents of the Manusmriti suggest it to be a document predominantly targeted at the Brahmins (priestly class) and the Kshatriyas (king, administration and warrior class). The text dedicates 1,034 verses, the largest portion, on laws for and expected virtues of Brahmins, and 971 verses for Kshatriyas...

Chapter 7 of the Manusmriti discusses the duties of a king, what virtues he must have, what vices he must avoid. In verses 7.54 - 7.76, the text identifies precepts to be followed in selecting ministers, ambassadors and officials, as well as the characteristics of well fortified capital. Manusmriti then lays out the laws of just war, stating that first and foremost, war should be avoided by negotiations and reconciliations. If war becomes necessary, states Manusmriti, a soldier must never harm civilians, non-combatants or someone who has surrendered, that use of force should be proportionate, and other rules. Fair taxation guidelines are described in verses 7.127 to 7.137...

Sinha, for example, states that less than half, or only 1,214 of the 2,685 verses in Manusmriti, may be authentic. Further, the verses are internally inconsistent. Verses such as 3.55-3.62 of Manusmriti, for example, glorify the position of women, while verse such as 9.3 and 9.17 do the opposite. Other passages found in Manusmriti, such as those relating to Ganesha, are modern era insertions and forgeries...

There are so many contradictions in the printed volume that, if you accept one part, you are bound to reject those parts that are wholly inconsistent with it. (...) Nobody is in possession of the original text...

Scholars doubt Manusmriti was ever administered as law text in ancient or medieval Hindu society. David Buxbaum states, "in the opinion of the best contemporary orientalists, it [Manusmriti] does not, as a whole, represent a set of rules ever actually administered in Hindustan. It is in great part an ideal picture of that which ... ought to be law".

Donald Davis writes, "there is no historical evidence for either an active propagation or implementation of Dharmasastra [Manusmriti] by a ruler or any state – as distinct from other forms of recognizing, respecting and using the text. Thinking of Dharmasastra as a legal code and of its authors as lawgivers is thus a serious misunderstanding of its history"....

Prior to the British colonial rule, Sharia (Islamic law) for Muslims in South Asia had been codified as Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, but laws for non-Muslims –- such as Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis –- were not codified during the 600 years of Islamic rule...

In the 18th century, the earliest British of the East India Company acted as agents of the Mughal emperor... The administration ... relying upon co-opted local intermediaries that were mostly Muslims and some Hindus in various princely states... exercised power by ... adapting to law practices as explained by the local intermediaries. The existing legal texts for Muslims, and resurrected Manusmriti manuscript thus helped the colonial state ...

For Muslims of India, the British accepted sharia as the legal code for Muslims, based on texts such the al-Sirjjiyah and Fatawa-i Alamgiri written under sponsorship of Aurangzeb. For Hindus and other non-Muslims such as Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis and Tribal people, this information was unavailable. The substance of Hindu law, was derived by the British colonial officials from Manusmriti...

Manusmriti ... was not in use for centuries during the Islamic rule period of India. The officials resurrected Manusmriti, constructed statements of positive law from the text for non-Muslims, in order to remain faithful to its policy of using sharia for the South Asian Muslim population. Manusmriti, thus played a role in constructing the Anglo-Hindu law, as well as Western perceptions about ancient and medieval era Hindu culture from the colonial times. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im states the significance and role of Manusmriti in governing India during the colonial era as follows (abridged),


The [British] colonial administration began the codification of Hindu and Muslim laws in 1772 and continued through the next century, with emphasis on certain texts as the authentic "sources" of the law and custom of Hindus and Muslims, which in fact devalued and retarded those dynamic social systems. The codification of complex and interdependent traditional systems froze certain aspects of the status of women, for instance, outside the context of constantly evolving social and economic relations, which in effect limited or restricted women's rights. The selectivity of the process, whereby colonial authorities sought the assistance of Hindu and Muslim religious elites in understanding the law, resulted in the Brahminization and Islamization of customary laws [in British India]. For example, the British orientalist scholar William Jones translated the key texts Al Sirjjiyah in 1792 as the Mohammedan Law of Inheritance, and Manusmriti in 1794 as the Institutes of Hindu Law or the Ordinances of Manu. In short, British colonial administrators reduced centuries of vigorous development of total ethical, religious and social systems to fit their own preconceived European notions of what Muslim and Hindu "law" should be...


Along with Manusmriti (Manava Dharmasastra), ancient India had between eighteen and thirty six competing Dharma-sastras, states John Bowker. Many of these texts have been lost completely or in parts.

-- Manusmriti, by Wikipedia


The Manusmṛiti (Sanskrit: मनुस्मृति), also spelled as Manusmruti,[1] is an ancient legal text among the many Dharmaśāstras of Hinduism.[2] It was one of the first Sanskrit texts to have been translated into English in 1776, by Sir William Jones,[2] and was used to formulate the Hindu law by the British colonial government.[3][4] It can be considered as the world's first constitution as it contains laws regarding society, taxes, warfare, etc.

To possess ourselves of a clear idea of what government is, or ought to be, we must trace it to its origin. In doing this we shall easily discover that governments must have arisen either out of the people or over the people. Mr. Burke has made no distinction. He investigates nothing to its source, and therefore he confounds everything; but he has signified his intention of undertaking, at some future opportunity, a comparison between the constitution of England and France. As he thus renders it a subject of controversy by throwing the gauntlet, I take him upon his own ground. It is in high challenges that high truths have the right of appearing; and I accept it with the more readiness because it affords me, at the same time, an opportunity of pursuing the subject with respect to governments arising out of society.

But it will be first necessary to define what is meant by a Constitution. It is not sufficient that we adopt the word; we must fix also a standard signification to it.

A constitution is not a thing in name only, but in fact. It has not an ideal, but a real existence; and wherever it cannot be produced in a visible form, there is none. A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting its government. It is the body of elements, to which you can refer, and quote article by article; and which contains the principles on which the government shall be established, the manner in which it shall be organised, the powers it shall have, the mode of elections, the duration of Parliaments, or by what other name such bodies may be called; the powers which the executive part of the government shall have; and in fine, everything that relates to the complete organisation of a civil government, and the principles on which it shall act, and by which it shall be bound. A constitution, therefore, is to a government what the laws made afterwards by that government are to a court of judicature. The court of judicature does not make the laws, neither can it alter them; it only acts in conformity to the laws made: and the government is in like manner governed by the constitution.


Can, then, Mr. Burke produce the English Constitution? If he cannot, we may fairly conclude that though it has been so much talked about, no such thing as a constitution exists, or ever did exist, and consequently that the people have yet a constitution to form.

Mr. Burke will not, I presume, deny the position I have already advanced- namely, that governments arise either out of the people or over the people. The English Government is one of those which arose out of a conquest, and not out of society, and consequently it arose over the people; and though it has been much modified from the opportunity of circumstances since the time of William the Conqueror, the country has never yet regenerated itself, and is therefore without a constitution.

I readily perceive the reason why Mr. Burke declined going into the comparison between the English and French constitutions, because he could not but perceive, when he sat down to the task, that no such a thing as a constitution existed on his side the question. His book is certainly bulky enough to have contained all he could say on this subject, and it would have been the best manner in which people could have judged of their separate merits. Why then has he declined the only thing that was worth while to write upon? It was the strongest ground he could take, if the advantages were on his side, but the weakest if they were not; and his declining to take it is either a sign that he could not possess it or could not maintain it.

Mr. Burke said, in a speech last winter in Parliament, "that when the National Assembly first met in three Orders (the Tiers Etat, the Clergy, and the Noblesse), France had then a good constitution." This shows, among numerous other instances, that Mr. Burke does not understand what a constitution is. The persons so met were not a constitution, but a convention, to make a constitution.

The present National Assembly of France is, strictly speaking, the personal social compact. The members of it are the delegates of the nation in its original character; future assemblies will be the delegates of the nation in its organised character. The authority of the present Assembly is different from what the authority of future Assemblies will be. The authority of the present one is to form a constitution; the authority of future assemblies will be to legislate according to the principles and forms prescribed in that constitution; and if experience should hereafter show that alterations, amendments, or additions are necessary, the constitution will point out the mode by which such things shall be done, and not leave it to the discretionary power of the future government.

A government on the principles on which constitutional governments arising out of society are established, cannot have the right of altering itself. If it had, it would be arbitrary. It might make itself what it pleased; and wherever such a right is set up, it shows there is no constitution. The act by which the English Parliament empowered itself to sit seven years, shows there is no constitution in England. It might, by the same self-authority, have sat any great number of years, or for life. The bill which the present Mr. Pitt brought into Parliament some years ago, to reform Parliament, was on the same erroneous principle. The right of reform is in the nation in its original character, and the constitutional method would be by a general convention elected for the purpose. There is, moreover, a paradox in the idea of vitiated bodies reforming themselves.

From these preliminaries I proceed to draw some comparisons....

-- Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine


Over fifty manuscripts of the Manusmriti are now known, but the earliest discovered, most translated and presumed authentic version since the 18th century has been the "Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) manuscript with Kulluka Bhatta commentary".[5] Modern scholarship states this presumed authenticity is false, and the various manuscripts of Manusmriti discovered in India are inconsistent with each other, and within themselves, raising concerns of its authenticity, insertions and interpolations made into the text in later times.[5][6]

The metrical text is in Sanskrit, is variously dated to be from the 2nd century BCE to 3rd century CE, and it presents itself as a discourse given by Manu (Svayambhuva) and Bhrigu on dharma topics such as duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues and others.


Image
Matsya protecting Vaivasvata Manu and the seven sages at the time of Deluge/Great Flood

Manu (Sanskrit: मनु) is a term found with various meanings in Hinduism. In early texts, it refers to the archetypal man, or to the first man (progenitor of humanity). The Sanskrit term for 'human', मानव (IAST: mānava) means 'of Manu' or 'children of Manu'. In later texts, Manu is the title or name of fourteen mystical Kshatriya rulers of earth, or alternatively as the head of mythical dynasties that begin with each cyclic kalpa (aeon) when the universe is born anew. The title of the text Manusmriti uses this term as a prefix, but refers to the first Manu – Svayambhuva, the spiritual son of Brahma.

According to Puranas, each kalpa consists of fourteen Manvantaras, and each Manvantara is headed by a different Manu. The current universe, is asserted to be ruled by the 7th Manu named Vaivasvata.

In Vishnu Purana, Vaivasvata, also known as Sraddhadeva or Satyavrata, was the king of Dravida before the great flood. He was warned of the flood by the Matsya (fish) avatar of Vishnu, and built a boat that carried the Vedas, Manu's family and the seven sages to safety, helped by Matsya. The tale is repeated with variations in other texts, including the Mahabharata and a few other Puranas. It is similar to other flood such as that of Gilgamesh and Noah.

-- Manu (Hinduism), by Wikipedia


The text's fame spread outside Bharat (India), long before the colonial era. The medieval era Buddhistic law of Myanmar and Thailand are also ascribed to Manu,[7][8] and the text influenced past Hindu kingdoms in Cambodia and Indonesia.[9]

Manusmriti is also called the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra or Laws of Manu.[10]

Nomenclature

The title Manusmriti is a relatively modern term and a late innovation, probably coined because the text is in a verse form.[10] The over fifty manuscripts discovered of the text, never use this title, but state the title as Manava Dharmasastra (Sanskrit: मानवधर्मशास्त्र) in their colophons at the end of each chapter. In modern scholarship, these two titles refer to the same text.[10]

Chronology

Eighteenth-century philologists Sir William Jones and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel assigned Manusmriti to the period of around 1250 BCE and 1000 BCE respectively, which from later linguistic developments is untenable due to the language of the text which must be dated later than the late Vedic texts such as the Upanishads which are themselves dated a few centuries later, around 500 BCE.[11] Later scholars, shifted the chronology of the text to between 200 BCE and 200 CE.[12][13] Olivelle adds that numismatics evidence, and the mention of gold coins as a fine, suggest that text may date to the 2nd or 3rd century CE.[14]

Most scholars consider the text a composite produced by many authors put together over a long period. Olivelle states that the various ancient and medieval Indian texts claim revisions and editions were derived from the original text with 100,000 verses and 1,080 chapters. However, the text version in modern use, according to Olivelle, is likely the work of a single author or a chairman with research assistants.[15]

Manusmriti, Olivelle states, was not a new document, it drew on other texts, and it reflects "a crystallization of an accumulated knowledge" in ancient India.[16] The root of theoretical models within Manusmriti rely on at least two shastras that pre-date it: artha (statecraft and legal process), and dharma (an ancient Indian concept that includes duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues and others discussed in various Dharmasutras older than Manusmriti).[16] Its contents can be traced to Kalpasutras of the Vedic era, which led to the development of Smartasutras consisting of Grihyasutras and Dharmasutras.[17] The foundational texts of Manusmriti include many of these sutras, all from an era preceding the common era. Most of these ancient texts are now lost, and only four of have survived: the law codes of Apastamba, Gautama, Baudhayana and Vasishtha.[18]

Structure

The modern version of the text has been subdivided into twelve Adhyayas (chapters), but the original text had no such division.[19] The text covers different topics, and is unique among ancient Indian texts in using “transitional verses” to mark the end of one subject and the start of the next.[19] The text can be broadly divided into four, each of different length. and each further divided into subsections:[19]

1. Creation of the world
2. Source of dharma
3. The dharma of the four social classes
4. Law of karma, rebirth and final liberation

The text is composed in metric Shlokas (verses), in the form of a dialogue between an exalted teacher and disciples who are eager to learn about the various aspects of dharma.[20] The first 58 verses are attributed by the text to Manu, while the remaining more than two thousand verses are attributed to his student Bhrigu.[20] Olivelle lists the subsections as follows:[21]

Sources of the law

The Dharmasya Yonih (Sources of the Law) has twenty-four verses, and one transition verse.[21] These verses state what the text considers as the proper and just sources of law:

वेदोऽखिलो धर्ममूलं स्मृतिशीले च तद्विदाम् । आचारश्चैव साधूनामात्मनस्तुष्टिरेव च ॥

Translation 1: The whole Veda is the (first) source of the sacred law, next the tradition and the virtuous conduct of those who know the (Veda further), also the customs of holy men, and (finally) self-satisfaction (Atmana santushti).
[22]
Translation 2: The root of the religion is the entire Veda, and (then) the tradition and customs of those who know (the Veda), and the conduct of virtuous people, and what is satisfactory to oneself.[23]

— Manusmriti 2.6
वेदः स्मृतिः सदाचारः स्वस्य च प्रियमात्मनः । एतच्चतुर्विधं प्राहुः साक्षाद् धर्मस्य लक्षणम् ॥

Translation 1: The Veda, the sacred tradition, the customs of virtuous men, and one's own pleasure, they declare to be the fourfold means of defining the sacred law.
[22]
Translation 2: The Veda, tradition, the conduct of good people, and what is pleasing to oneself – they say that is four fold mark of religion.[23]

— Manusmriti 2.12


This section of Manusmriti, like other Hindu law texts, includes fourfold sources of Dharma, states Levinson, which include Atmana santushti (satisfaction of one's conscience), Sadachara (local norms of virtuous individuals), Smriti and Sruti.[24][25][26]

Dharma of the four Varnas

Further information: Varna (Hinduism)

• 3.1 Rules Relating to Law (2.25 – 10.131)
• 3.1.1 Rules of Action in Normal Times (2.26 – 9.336)
• 3.1.1.1 Fourfold Dharma of a Brahmin (2.26 – 6.96) (contains the longest section of Manusmriti, 3.1, called dharmavidhi)[19]
• 3.1.1.2 Rules of Action for a King (7.1 – 9.324) (contains 960 verses, includes description of institutions and officials of state, how officials are to be appointed, tax laws, rules of war, the role and limits on the power of the king, and long sections on eighteen grounds for litigation, including those related to non-delivery under contract, breach of contract, non-payment of wages, property disputes, inheritance disputes, humiliation and defamation, physical assault, theft, violence of any form, injury, sexual crimes against women, public safety, and others; the section also includes rules of evidence, rules on interrogation of witnesses, and the organisation of court system)[27]
• 3.1.1.3 Rules of Action for Vaiśyas and Śūdras (9.326 – 9.335) (shortest section, eight rules for Vaishyas, two for Shudras, but some applicable laws to these two classes are discussed generically in verses 2.26 – 9.324)[28]
• 3.1.2 Rules of Action in Times of Adversity (10.1 – 11.129) (contains revised rules on the state machinery and four varnas in the times of war, famine or other emergencies)[29]
• 3.2 Rules Relating to Penance (11.1 – 11.265) (includes rules of proportionate punishment; instead of fines, incarceration or death, discusses penance or social isolation as a form of punishment for certain crimes)[29]

The verses 6.97, 9.325, 9.336 and 10.131 are transitional verses.[21] Olivelle notes instances of likely interpolation and insertions in the notes to this section, in both the presumed vulgate version and the critical edition.[30]

Determination of Karmayoga

The verses 12.1, 12.2 and 12.82 are transitional verses.[21] This section is in a different style than the rest of the text, raising questions whether this entire chapter was added later. While there is evidence that this chapter was extensively redacted over time, however it is unclear whether the entire chapter is of a later era.[31]

• 4.1 Fruits of Action (12.3-81) (section on actions and consequences, personal responsibility, action as a means of moksha – the highest personal bliss)[31]
• 4.2 Rules of Action for Supreme Good (12.83-115) (section on karma, duties and responsibilities as a means of supreme good)[31]

The closing verses of Manusmriti declares,

एवं यः सर्वभूतेषु पश्यत्यात्मानमात्मना । स सर्वसमतामेत्य ब्रह्माभ्येति परं पदम् ॥
He who thus recognizes in his individual soul (Self, Atman), the universal soul that exists in all beings,
becomes equal-minded towards all, and enters the highest state, Brahman.


— Manusmriti 12.125, Calcutta manuscript with Kulluka Bhatta commentary[32][33]


Contents

The structure and contents of the Manusmriti suggest it to be a document predominantly targeted at the Brahmins (priestly class) and the Kshatriyas (king, administration and warrior class).[34] The text dedicates 1,034 verses, the largest portion, on laws for and expected virtues of Brahmins, and 971 verses for Kshatriyas.[35] The statement of rules for the Vaishyas (merchant class) and the Shudras (artisans and working class) in the text is extraordinarily brief. Olivelle suggests that this may be because the text was composed to address the balance "between the political power and the priestly interests", and because of the rise in foreign invasions of India in the period it was composed.[34]

On virtues and outcast

Manusmriti lists and recommends virtues in many verses. For example, verse 6.75 recommends non-violence towards everyone and temperance as key virtues,[36][37] while verse 10.63 preaches that all four varnas must abstain from injuring any creature, abstain from falsehood and abstain from appropriating property of others.[38][39]

Similarly, in verse 4.204, states Olivelle, some manuscripts of Manusmriti list the recommended virtues to be, "compassion, forbearance, truthfulness, non-injury, self-control, not desiring, meditation, serenity, sweetness and honesty" as primary, and "purification, sacrifices, ascetic toil, gift giving, vedic recitation, restraining the sexual organs, observances, fasts, silence and bathing" as secondary.[40] A few manuscripts of the text contain a different verse 4.204, according to Olivelle, and list the recommended virtues to be, "not injuring anyone, speaking the truth, chastity, honesty and not stealing" as central and primary, while "not being angry, obedience to the teacher, purification, eating moderately and vigilance" to desirable and secondary.[40]

In other discovered manuscripts of Manusmriti, including the most translated Calcutta manuscript, the text declares in verse 4.204 that the ethical precepts under Yamas such as Ahimsa (non-violence) are paramount while Niyamas such as Ishvarapranidhana (contemplation of personal god) are minor, and those who do not practice the Yamas but obey the Niyamas alone become outcasts.[41][42]

On personal choices, behaviours and morals

Manusmriti has numerous verses on duties a person has towards himself and to others, thus including moral codes as well as legal codes.[43] This is similar to, states Olivelle, the modern contrast between informal moral concerns to birth out of wedlock in the developed nations, along with simultaneous legal protection for children who are born out of wedlock.[43]

Personal behaviours covered by the text are extensive. For example, verses 2.51-2.56, recommend that a monk must go on his begging round, collect alms food and present it to his teacher first, then eat. One should revere whatever food one gets and eat it without disdain, states Manusmriti, but never overeat, as eating too much harms health.[44] In verse 5.47, the text states that work becomes without effort when a man contemplates, undertakes and does what he loves to do and when he does so without harming any creature.[45]

Numerous verses relate to the practice of meat eating, how it causes injury to living beings, why it is evil, and the morality of vegetarianism.[43] Yet, the text balances its moral tone as an appeal to one's conscience, states Olivelle. For example, verse 5.56 as translated by Olivelle states, "there is no fault in eating meat, in drinking liquor, or in having sex; that is the natural activity of creatures. Abstaining from such activity, however, brings greatest rewards."[46]

On rights of women

Manusmriti offers an inconsistent and internally conflicting perspective on women's rights.[47] The text, for example, declares that a marriage cannot be dissolved by a woman or a man, in verse 8.101-8.102.[48] Yet, the text, in other sections, allows either to dissolve the marriage. For example, verses 9.72-9.81 allow the man or the woman to get out of a fraudulent marriage or an abusive marriage, and remarry; the text also provides legal means for a woman to remarry when her husband has been missing or has abandoned her.[49]

It preaches chastity to widows such as in verses 5.158-5.160, opposes a woman marrying someone outside her own social class as in verses 3.13-3.14.[50] In other verses, such as 2.67-2.69 and 5.148-5.155, Manusmriti preaches that as a girl, she should obey and seek protection of her father, as a young woman her husband, and as a widow her son; and that a woman should always worship her husband as a god.[51] In verses 3.55-3.56, Manusmriti also declares that "women must be honored and adorned", and "where women are revered, there the gods rejoice; but where they are not, no sacred rite bears any fruit".[52][53] Elsewhere, in verses 5.147-5.148, states Olivelle, the text declares, "a woman must never seek to live independently".[54]

Simultaneously, states Olivelle, the text presupposes numerous practices such as marriages outside one's varna (see anuloma and pratiloma), such as between a Brahmin man and a Shudra woman in verses 9.149-9.157, a widow getting pregnant with a child of a man she is not married to in verses 9.57-9.62, marriage where a woman in love elopes with her man, and then grants legal rights in these cases such as property inheritance rights in verses 9.143-9.157, and the legal rights of the children so born.[55] The text also presumes that a married woman may get pregnant by a man other than her husband, and dedicates verses 8.31-8.56 to conclude that the child's custody belongs to the woman and her legal husband, and not to the man she got pregnant with.[56][57]

Manusmriti provides a woman with property rights to six types of property in verses 9.192-9.200. These include those she received at her marriage, or as gift when she eloped or when she was taken away, or as token of love before marriage, or as gifts from her biological family, or as received from her husband subsequent to marriage, and also from inheritance from deceased relatives.[58]

Flavia Agnes states that Manusmriti is a complex commentary from women's rights perspective, and the British colonial era codification of women's rights based on it for Hindus, and from Islamic texts for Muslims, picked and emphasised certain aspects while it ignored other sections.[47] This construction of personal law during the colonial era created a legal fiction around Manusmriti's historic role as a scripture in matters relating to women in South Asia.[47][59]

On statecraft and rules of war

Chapter 7 of the Manusmriti discusses the duties of a king, what virtues he must have, what vices he must avoid.[60] In verses 7.54 - 7.76, the text identifies precepts to be followed in selecting ministers, ambassadors and officials, as well as the characteristics of well fortified capital. Manusmriti then lays out the laws of just war, stating that first and foremost, war should be avoided by negotiations and reconciliations.[60][61] If war becomes necessary, states Manusmriti, a soldier must never harm civilians, non-combatants or someone who has surrendered, that use of force should be proportionate, and other rules.[60] Fair taxation guidelines are described in verses 7.127 to 7.137.[60][61]

Authenticity and inconsistencies in various manuscripts

Patrick Olivelle, credited with a 2005 translation of Manusmriti published by the Oxford University Press, states the concerns in postmodern scholarship about the presumed authenticity and reliability of Manusmriti manuscripts.[5] He writes (abridged),

The MDh [Manusmriti] was the first Indian legal text introduced to the western world through the translation of Sir William Jones in 1794. (...) All the editions of the MDh, except for Jolly's, reproduce the text as found in the [Calcutta] manuscript containing the commentary of Kulluka. I have called this as the "vulgate version". It was Kulluka's version that has been translated repeatedly: Jones (1794), Burnell (1884), Buhler (1886) and Doniger (1991). (...)

The belief in the authenticity of Kulluka's text was openly articulated by Burnell (1884, xxix): "There is then no doubt that the textus receptus, viz., that of Kulluka Bhatta, as adopted in India and by European scholars, is very near on the whole to the original text." This is far from the truth. Indeed, one of the great surprises of my editorial work has been to discover how few of the over fifty manuscripts that I collated actually follow the vulgate in key readings.

— Patrick Olivelle, Manu's Code of Law (2005)[5]


Other scholars point to the inconsistencies and have questioned the authenticity of verses, and the extent to which verses were changed, inserted or interpolated into the original, at a later date. Sinha, for example, states that less than half, or only 1,214 of the 2,685 verses in Manusmriti, may be authentic.[62] Further, the verses are internally inconsistent.[63] Verses such as 3.55-3.62 of Manusmriti, for example, glorify the position of women, while verse such as 9.3 and 9.17 do the opposite.[62] Other passages found in Manusmriti, such as those relating to Ganesha, are modern era insertions and forgeries.[64] Robert E. Van Voorst states that the verses from 3.55-60 may be about respect given to a woman in her home, but within a strong patriarchal system.[65]

Nelson in 1887, in a legal brief before the Madras High Court of British India, had stated, "there are various contradictions and inconsistencies in the Manu Smriti itself, and that these contradictions would lead one to conclude that such a commentary did not lay down legal principles to be followed but were merely recommendatory in nature."[6] Mahatma Gandhi remarked on the observed inconsistencies within Manusmriti as follows,

I hold Manusmriti as part of Shastras. But that does not mean that I swear by every verse that is printed in the book described as Manusmriti. There are so many contradictions in the printed volume that, if you accept one part, you are bound to reject those parts that are wholly inconsistent with it. (...) Nobody is in possession of the original text.

— Mahatma Gandhi, An Adi-Dravida's Difficulties[66]


Commentaries

There are numerous classical commentaries on the Manusmṛti written in the medieval period.

Bhāruci is the oldest known commentator on the Manu Smṛti. Kane places him in the late 10th or early 11th century,[67] Olivelle places him in the 8th century,[68] and Derrett places him between 600-800 CE.[68][69] From these three opinions we can place Bhāruci anywhere from the early 7th century CE to the early 11th century CE. Bhāruci's commentary, titled Manu-sastra-vivarana, has far fewer number of verses than the Kullūka-Calcutta vulgate version in circulation since the British colonial era, and it refers to more ancient texts that are believed to be lost. It is also called Raja-Vimala, and J Duncan M Derrett states Bharuci was "occasionally more faithful to his source's historical intention" than other commentators.[70]

Medhātithi commentary on Manu Smṛti has been widely studied. Scholars such as Buhler, Kane, and Lingat believe he was from north India, likely the Kashmir region. His commentary on Manusmriti is estimated to be from 9th to 11th century.[71]

Govindarāja's commentary, titled Manutika, is an 11th-century commentary on Manusmriti, referred to by Jimutavahana and Laksmidhara, and was plagiarised by Kullūka, states Olivelle.[72]

Kullūka's commentary, titled Manvarthamuktavali, along with his version of the Manusmrti manuscript has been "vulgate" or default standard, most studied version, since it was discovered in 18th-century Calcutta by the British colonial officials.[72] It is the most reproduced and famous, not because, according to Olivelle, it is the oldest or because of its excellence, but because it was the lucky version found first.[72] The Kullūka commentary dated to be sometime between the 13th to 15th century, adds Olivelle, is mostly a plagiary of Govindaraja commentary from about the 11th century, but with Kullūka's criticism of Govindaraja.[72]

Nārāyana's commentary, titled Manvarthavivrtti, is probably from the 14th century and little is known about the author.[72] This commentary includes many variant readings, and Olivelle found it useful in preparing a critical edition of the Manusmriti text in 2005.[72]

Nandana was from south India, and his commentary, titled Nandini, provides a useful benchmark on Manusmriti version and its interpretation in the south.[72]

Other known medieval era commentaries on Manusmriti include those by Sarvajnanarayana, Raghavananda and Ramacandra.[72][73]

Significance and role in history

In ancient and medieval India


Scholars doubt Manusmriti was ever administered as law text in ancient or medieval Hindu society. David Buxbaum states, "in the opinion of the best contemporary orientalists, it [Manusmriti] does not, as a whole, represent a set of rules ever actually administered in Hindustan. It is in great part an ideal picture of that which, in the view of a Brahmin, ought to be law".[74]

Donald Davis writes, "there is no historical evidence for either an active propagation or implementation of Dharmasastra [Manusmriti] by a ruler or any state – as distinct from other forms of recognizing, respecting and using the text. Thinking of Dharmasastra as a legal code and of its authors as lawgivers is thus a serious misunderstanding of its history".
[75] Other scholars have expressed the same view, based on epigraphical, archaeological and textual evidence from medieval Hindu kingdoms in Gujarat, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, while acknowledging that Manusmriti was influential to the South Asian history of law and was a theoretical resource.[76][77]
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In British India

Main article: Hindu law

Prior to the British colonial rule, Sharia (Islamic law) for Muslims in South Asia had been codified as Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, but laws for non-Muslims –- such as Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis –- were not codified during the 600 years of Islamic rule.[78] With the arrival of the British colonial officials, Manusmriti played a historic role in constructing a legal system for non-Muslims in South Asia and early Western perceptions about the ancient and medieval Indian society.[4]

In the 18th century, the earliest British of the East India Company acted as agents of the Mughal emperor.
As the British colonial rule took over the political and administrative powers in India, it was faced with various state responsibilities such as legislative and judiciary functions.[79] The East India Company, and later the British Crown, sought profits for its British shareholders through trade as well as sought to maintain effective political control with minimal military engagement.[80] The administration pursued a path of least resistance, relying upon co-opted local intermediaries that were mostly Muslims and some Hindus in various princely states.[80] The British exercised power by avoiding interference and adapting to law practices as explained by the local intermediaries.[81] The existing legal texts for Muslims, and resurrected Manusmriti manuscript thus helped the colonial state sustain the pre-colonial religious and political law and conflicts, well into the late nineteenth century.[79][80][82] The colonial policy on the system of personal laws for India, for example, was expressed by Governor-General Hastings in 1772 as follows,

That in all suits regarding inheritance, marriage, caste and other religious usages or institutions, the law of the Koran with respect to Mahometans [Muslims], and those of the Shaster with respect to Gentoos [Hindus] shall be invariably be adhered to.

— Warren Hastings, August 15, 1772[83]


For Muslims of India, the British accepted sharia as the legal code for Muslims, based on texts such the al-Sirjjiyah and Fatawa-i Alamgiri written under sponsorship of Aurangzeb.[84][85][86] For Hindus and other non-Muslims such as Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis and Tribal people, this information was unavailable.[79] The substance of Hindu law, was derived by the British colonial officials from Manusmriti, and it became the first Dharmasastra that was translated in 1794.[2][4] The British colonial officials, for practice, attempted to extract from the Dharmaśāstra, the English categories of law and religion for the purposes of colonial administration.[87][88]

The British colonial officials, however, mistook the Manusmriti as codes of law, failed to recognise that it was a commentary on morals and law and not a statement of positive law.[82][84] The colonial officials of the early 19th century also failed to recognise that Manusmriti was one of many competing Dharmasastra texts, it was not in use for centuries during the Islamic rule period of India.[82][84] The officials resurrected Manusmriti, constructed statements of positive law from the text for non-Muslims, in order to remain faithful to its policy of using sharia for the South Asian Muslim population.[4][82][84] Manusmriti, thus played a role in constructing the Anglo-Hindu law, as well as Western perceptions about ancient and medieval era Hindu culture from the colonial times.[89] Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im states the significance and role of Manusmriti in governing India during the colonial era as follows (abridged),[85]

The [British] colonial administration began the codification of Hindu and Muslim laws in 1772 and continued through the next century, with emphasis on certain texts as the authentic "sources" of the law and custom of Hindus and Muslims, which in fact devalued and retarded those dynamic social systems. The codification of complex and interdependent traditional systems froze certain aspects of the status of women, for instance, outside the context of constantly evolving social and economic relations, which in effect limited or restricted women's rights. The selectivity of the process, whereby colonial authorities sought the assistance of Hindu and Muslim religious elites in understanding the law, resulted in the Brahminization and Islamization of customary laws [in British India]. For example, the British orientalist scholar William Jones translated the key texts Al Sirjjiyah in 1792 as the Mohammedan Law of Inheritance, and Manusmriti in 1794 as the Institutes of Hindu Law or the Ordinances of Manu. In short, British colonial administrators reduced centuries of vigorous development of total ethical, religious and social systems to fit their own preconceived European notions of what Muslim and Hindu "law" should be.

— Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharia[85]


Outside India

The Dharma-sastras, particularly Manusmriti, states Anthony Reid,[90] were "greatly honored in Burma (Myanmar), Siam (Thailand), Cambodia and Java-Bali (Indonesia) as the defining documents of the natural order, which kings were obliged to uphold. They were copied, translated and incorporated into local law code, with strict adherence to the original text in Burma and Siam, and a stronger tendency to adapt to local needs in Java (Indonesia)".[90][91][92] The medieval era derived texts and Manusmriti manuscripts in Southeast Asia are, however, quite different than the "vulgate" version that has been in use since its first use in British India. The role of then extant Manusmriti as a historic foundation of law texts for the people of Southeast Asia has been very important, states Hooker.[93]

Comparison with other dharmasastras

Further information: Dharma and Dharmashastra

Along with Manusmriti (Manava Dharmasastra), ancient India had between eighteen and thirty six competing Dharma-sastras, states John Bowker.[17] Many of these texts have been lost completely or in parts, but they are referred to in other ancient Indian texts suggesting that they were influential in some regions or time. Of the numerous jurisprudence-related commentaries and Smriti texts, after Manu Smriti and other than the older Dharma Sutras, Yajnavalkya Smriti has attracted the attention of many scholars, followed by Narada Smriti and Parashara Smriti (the oldest Dharma-smriti).[94] Evidence suggests that Yajnavalkya Smriti, state Ghose and other scholars, was the more referred to text than Manu Smriti, in matters of governance and practice. This text, of unclear date of composition, but likely to be a few centuries after Manusmriti, is more "concise, methodical, distilled and liberal".[95] According to Jois,

Regarding the 18 titles of law, Yajnavalkya follows the same pattern as in Manu with slight modifications. On matters such as women's rights of inheritance and right to hold property, status of Sudras, and criminal penalty, Yajnavalkya is more liberal than Manu. (...) He deals exhaustively on subjects like creation of valid documents, law of mortgages, hypothecation, partnership and joint ventures.

— M Rama Jois, Legal and Constitutional History of India[96]


Jois suggests that the Yajnavalkya Smriti text liberal evolution may have been influenced by Buddhism in ancient India.[95] The Yajnavalkya text is also different from Manu text in adding chapters to the organisation of monasteries, land grants, deeds execution and other matters. The Yajnavalkya text was more referred to by many Hindu kingdoms of the medieval era, as evidenced by the commentary of 12th-century Vijñāneśvara, titled Mitakshara.[97]

Modern reception

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Views on Manusmriti have varied among Indian leaders. Ambedkar burnt it in 1927...

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while Gandhi found it a mix of lofty as well as contradictory teachings. Gandhi suggested a critical reading, and rejection of parts that were contrary to ahimsa.[98][99]

The Manusmrti has been subject to appraisal and criticism.[100] Among the notable Indian critics of the text in the early 20th century was Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who held Manusmriti as responsible for caste system in India. In protest, Ambedkar burnt Manusmrti in a bonfire on December 25, 1927.[99] While Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar condemned Manusmriti, Mahatma Gandhi opposed the book burning. The latter stated that while caste discrimination was harmful to spiritual and national growth, it had nothing to do with Hinduism and its texts such as Manusmriti. Gandhi argued that the text recognises different callings and professions, defines not one's rights but one's duties, that all work from that of a teacher to a janitor are equally necessary, and of equal status.[99] Gandhi considered Manusmriti to include lofty teachings but a text with inconsistency and contradictions, whose original text is in no one's possession.[98] He recommended that one must read the entire text, accept those parts of Manusmriti which are consistent with "truth and ahimsa (non-injury or non-violence to others)" and the rejection of other parts.[98]

The Manu Smriti was one of the first Sanskrit texts studied by the European philologists. It was first translated into English by Sir William Jones. His version was published in 1794.[101] This interest in its translation was encouraged by British administrative requirements, which they believed to be legal codes. In fact, states Romila Thapar, these were not codes of law but social and ritual texts.[102]

A Louis Jacolliot translation of the Calcutta version of "Law of Manu" was reviewed by Friedrich Nietzsche. He commented on it both favourably and unfavorably:

He deemed it "an incomparably spiritual and superior work" to the Christian Bible, observed that "the sun shines on the whole book" and attributed its ethical perspective to "the noble classes, the philosophers and warriors, [who] stand above the mass."[103] Nietzsche does not advocate a caste system, states David Conway, but endorses the political exclusion conveyed in the Manu text.[104] Nietzsche considered Manu's social order as far from perfect, but considers the general idea of a caste system to be natural and right, and stated that "caste-order, order of rank is just a formula for the supreme law of life itself", a "natural order, lawfulness par excellence".[105][106] According to Nietzsche, states Julian Young, "Nature, not Manu, separates from each other: predominantly spiritual people, people characterized by muscular and temperamental strength, and a third group of people who are not distinguished in either way, the average".[105] He wrote that 'To prepare a book of law in the style of Manu means to give a people the right to become master one day, to become perfect, - to aspire to the highest art of life.'[106]

The Law of Manu was also criticised by Nietzsche. He, states Walter Kaufmann, "denounces the way in which the 'Law of Manu' dealt with the outcastes, saying that there is nothing that outrages our feelings more ... ."[107] Nietzsche wrote, "these regulations teach us enough, in them we find for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial, we learn that the concept of pure blood is the opposite of a harmless concept."[108]


In his book Revolution and Counter-Revolution in India, leader B. R. Ambedkar asserted that Manu Smriti was written by a sage named Brigu during the times of Pushyamitra of Sangha in connection with social pressures caused by the rise of Buddhism.[109] However, historian Romila Thapar considers these claims to be exaggerations. Thapar writes that archaeological evidence casts doubt on the claims of Buddhist persecution by Pushyamitra.[110] Support of the Buddhist faith by the Shungas at some point is suggested by an epigraph on the gateway of Bharhut, which mentions its erection "during the supremacy of the Shungas"[111] Hinduism does not evangelise.[112]

Pollard et al. state that the code of Manu was derived to answer questions on how men could rebuild their societies following a series of floods.[113][verification needed] Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of Arya Samaj, held the text to be authentic and authoritative.[114] Other admirers of the text have included Annie Besant.[115]

Friedrich Nietzsche is noted to have said "Close the Bible and open the Manu Smriti. It has an affirmation of life, a triumphing agreeable sensation in life and that to draw up a lawbook such as Manu means to permit oneself to get the upper hand, to become perfection, to be ambitious of the highest art of living."[116]

Editions and translations

• The Institutes of Hindu Law: Or, The Ordinances of Manu, Calcutta: Sewell & Debrett, 1796.
• Translation by G. Bühler (1886). Sacred Books of the East: The Laws of Manus (Vol. XXV). Oxford.
• Pranjivan Harihar Pandya (ed.), Manusmriti; With a commentary called Manvarth Muktavali by Kullooka Bhatt, Bombay, 1913.
• Ganganath Jha, Manusmriti with the Commentary of Medhatithi, 1920, ISBN 8120811550
• J.I. Shastri (ed.), Manusmriti with Kullukabhatta Commentary (1972-1974), reprinted by Motilal Banarsidass, ISBN 9788120807662.
• Ramacandra Varma Shastri, Manusmr̥ti: Bhāratīya ācāra-saṃhitā kā viśvakośa, Śāśvata Sāhitya Prakāśana, 1997.
• Olivelle, Patrick (2004). The Law Code of Manu. New York: OUP. ISBN 0192802712.
• Olivelle, Patrick (2005). Manu's Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-195-17146-2.

See also

• Classical Hindu law
• Classical Hindu law in practice
• Hindu law
• Dharmaśāstra
• Apastamba Dharmasutra
• Kalpa (Vedanga)
• Kalpa Sūtra
• Gentoo Code
• Vajrasuchi Upanishad
• Arthashastra

Notes

1. Manusmriti, The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (2009), Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195134056, See entry for Manusmriti
2. "Flood (1996), page 56".
3. P Bilimoria (2011), The Idea of Hindu Law, Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, Volume 43, pages 103-130
4. Donald Davis (2010), The Spirit of Hindu Law, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521877046, page 13-16, 166-179
5. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 353-354, 356-382
6. G Srikantan (2014), Entanglements in Legal History (Editor: Thomas Duve), Max Planck Institute: Germany, ISBN 978-3944773001, page 123
7. Steven Collins (1993), The discourse of what is primary, Journal of Indian philosophy, Volume 21, pages 301-393
8. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 3-4
9. Robert Lingat (1973), The Classical Law of India, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520018983, page 77
10. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 18-19, 41
11. William Wilson Hunter. The Indian Empire: Its People, History and Products. Routledge. p. 114.
12. For composition between 200 BCE and 200 CE see: Avari, p. 142. For dating of composition "between the second century BCE and third century CE" see: Flood (1996), p. 56. For dating of Manu Smriti in "final form" to the 2nd century CE, see: Keay, p. 103. For dating as completed some time between 200 BCE and 100 CE see: Hopkins, p. 74. For probable origination during the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD, see: Kulke and Rothermund, p. 85. For the text as preserved dated to around the 1st century BCE. see: "Manu-smriti". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2013-10-08.
13. Glimpses of Indian Culture, Dinkar Joshi, p.51 ISBN 9788176501903
14. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 24-25
15. Patrick Olivelle (2005). Manu's Code of Law. Oxford University Press. p. 19. ISBN 0195171462.
16. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 41-49
17. John Bowker (2012), The Message and the Book: Sacred Texts of the World's Religions, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0300179293, pages 179-180
18. Patrick Olivelle (1999), Dharmasutras - the law codes of ancient India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-192838822, pages xxiv-xxv, 280-314
19. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 7-8
20. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 25-27
21. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 9-10
22. The Laws of Manu 2.6 with footnotes George Bühler (Translator), The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 25, Oxford University Press
23. Brian Smith and Wendy Doniger (1992), The Laws of Manu, Penguin, ISBN 978-0140445404, pages 17-18
24. David Levinson (2002), Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, Volume 1, SAGE Publications, ISBN 978-0761922582, page 829
25. Davis Jr, Donald R. (2007). "On Ātmastuṣṭi as a Source of Dharma". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 127 (3): 279–96.
26. Werner Menski, Hindu Law: Beyond Tradition and Modernity (Delhi: Oxford UP, 2003), p.126 and Domenico Francavilla, The Roots of Hindu Jurisprudence: Sources of Dharma and Interpretation in Mīmāṃsā and Dharmaśāstra. Corpus Iuris Sanscriticum. Vol. 7 (Torino: CESMEO, 2006), pp.165–76.
27. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 10-15, 154-205
28. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 16, 8-14, 206-207
29. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 16-17, 208-229
30. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 237-350, 914-982
31. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 10, 17-19, 230-236, 290-292
32. Robert Lingat (1973), The Classical Law of India, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520018983, page 86
33. The Laws of Manu 12.125 George Bühler (Translator), The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 25, Oxford University Press, page 513
34. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 16, 62-65
35. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, page 41
36. The Laws of Manu 6.75 George Bühler (Translator), The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 25, Oxford University Press, page 212
37. J Duncan M Derrett (1975), Bharuci's commentary on the Manusmrti, Schriftenreihe des Sudasien-Instituts der Universitat Heidelberg, ISBN 978-3515018586, page 23
38. The Laws of Manu 10.63 George Bühler (Translator), The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 25, Oxford University Press, page 416
39. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 208-214, 337
40. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, page 275
41. The Laws of Manu 4.204 George Bühler (translator), The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 25, Oxford University Press, page 160-161
42. J Duncan M Derrett (1975), Bharuci's commentary on the Manusmrti, Schriftenreihe des Sudasien-Instituts der Universitat Heidelberg, ISBN 978-3515018586, pages 30, 439-440
43. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 31-32
44. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, page 97
45. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, page 140
46. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 31-32, 138-147, 558-593
47. Flavia Agnes (2001), Law and Gender Inequality: The Politics of Women's Rights in India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195655247, pages 41-45
48. Robert Lingat (1973), The Classical Law of India, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520018983, page 84
49. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 190-207, 746-809
50. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 31-32, 108-123, 138-147
51. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 98, 146-147
52. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, page 111
53. Sanskrit: यत्र नार्यस्तु पूज्यन्ते रमन्ते तत्र देवताः । यत्रैतास्तु न पूज्यन्ते सर्वास्तत्राफलाः क्रियाः
The Laws of Manu 3.55-3.56 George Bühler (Translator), The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 25, Oxford University Press, page 85
54. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, page 146
55. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 31-32, 194-207, 755-809
56. Robert Lingat (1973), The Classical Law of India, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520018983, pages 83-84
57. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 182-193, 659-706
58. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 200-201, 746-809
59. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im (2010), Islam and the Secular State, Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0674034563, pages 149, 289
60. Robert Lingat (1973), The Classical Law of India, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520018983, pages 81-82
61. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 154-166, 613-658
62. J Sinha (2014), Psycho-Social Analysis of the Indian Mindset, Springer Academic, ISBN 978-8132218036, page 5
63. Arun Kumbhare (2009), Women of India: Their Status Since the Vedic Times, ISBN 978-1440156007, page 56
64. A Narain (1991). Robert Brown (ed.). Ganesh: Studies of an Asian God. State University of New York Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-7914-0656-4.
65. Robert E. Van Voorst. Anthology of World Scriptures. Cengage. p. 43. ISBN 978-1-305-88800-5.
66. Mahatma Gandhi, Hinduism According to Gandhi, Orient Paperbacks (2013 Reprint Edition), ISBN 978-8122205589, page 129
67. Kane, P. V., History of Dharmaśāstra, (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1975), Volume I, Part I, 566.
68. Olivelle, Patrick, "Dharmaśāstra: A Literary History", page 29.
69. J Duncan M Derrett (1975), Bharuci's commentary on the Manusmrti, Schriftenreihe des Sudasien-Instituts der Universitat Heidelberg, ISBN 978-3515018586
70. J Duncan J Derrett (1977), Essays in Classical and Modern Hindu Law, Brill Academic, ISBN 978-9004048089, pages 10-17, 36-37 with footnote 75a
71. Kane, P. V., History of Dharmaśāstra, (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1975), Volume I, Part II, 583.
72. Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pages 367-369
73. Visvanath Narayan Mandlik (1886), Manavadharmaśastram, 5 volumes, OCLC 83427487
74. David Buxbaum (1998), Family Law and Customary Law in Asia: A Contemporary Legal Perspective, Springer Academic, ISBN 978-9401757942, page 204
75. Donald Davis (2010), The Spirit of Hindu Law, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521877046, page 14
76. Werner Menski (2009), Hindu Law: Beyond Tradition and Modernity, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195699210, Chapters 2 & 4
77. Donald R Davis Jr (2005), Intermediate Realms of Law: Corporate Groups and Rulers in Medieval India, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Volume 48, Issue 1, pages 92–117
78. Lariviere, Richard W. (November 1989). "Justices and Paṇḍitas: Some Ironies in Contemporary Readings of the Hindu Legal Past". Journal of Asian Studies. Association for Asian Studies. 48 (4): 757–769. doi:10.2307/2058113. JSTOR 2058113.
79. Tomothy Lubin et al (2010), Hinduism and Law: An Introduction (Editors: Lubin and Davis), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521716260, Chapter 1
80. Washbrook, D. A. (1981). "Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India". Modern Asian Studies. 15 (3): 649–721. doi:10.1017/s0026749x00008714. JSTOR 312295.
81. Kugle, Scott Alan (May 2001). "Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia". Modern Asian Studies. Cambridge University Press. 35 (2): 257–313. doi:10.1017/s0026749x01002013. JSTOR 313119.
82. Ludo Rocher (1978), Hindu Conceptions of Law, Hastings Law Journal, Volume 29, pages 1283-1297
83. Rocher, Ludo (1972). "Indian Response to Anglo-Hindu Law". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 92 (3): 419–424. JSTOR 600567.
84. Michael Anderson (1995), Institutions and Ideologies: A SOAS South Asia Reader (Studies in Asian Topics, Editors: David Arnold, Peter Robb), Routledge, ISBN 978-0700702848, Chapter 10;
K Ewing (1988), Sharia and ambiguity in South Asian Islam, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520055759
85. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im (2010), Islam and the Secular State, Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0674034563, pages 149-150
86. A digest of Moohummudan law on the subjects to which it is usually applied by British courts of justice in India Neil Baillie, Smith, Elder & Co. London
87. Ludo Rocher, "Hindu Law and Religion: Where to draw the line?" in Malik Ram Felicitation Volume. ed. S.A.J. Zaidi (New Delhi, 1972), 190–1.
88. J.D.M. Derrett, Religion, Law, and the State in India (London: Faber, 1968), 96; For a related distinction between religious and secular law in Dharmaśāstra, see Lubin, Timothy (2007). "Punishment and Expiation: Overlapping Domains in Brahmanical Law". Indologica Taurinensia. 33: 93–122. SSRN 1084716.
89. For reviews of the British misappropriations of Dharmaśāstra, see: Lariviere, Richard W. (November 1989). "Justices and Paṇḍitas: Some Ironies in Contemporary Readings of the Hindu Legal Past". Journal of Asian Studies. Association for Asian Studies. 48 (4): 757–769. doi:10.2307/2058113. JSTOR 2058113. and Rocher, Ludo (June 1993). "Law Books in an Oral Culture: The Indian Dharmaśāstras". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 137 (2): 254–267. JSTOR 986732.
90. Anthony Reid (1988), Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680: The lands below the winds, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0300047509, pages 137-138
91. Victor Lieberman (2014), Burmese Administrative Cycles, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691612812, pages 66-68; Also see discussion of 13th-century Wagaru Dhamma-sattha / 11th century Manu Dhammathat manuscripts discussion
92. On Laws of Manu in 14th-century Thailand's Ayuthia kingdom named after Ayodhya, see David Wyatt (2003), Thailand: A Short History, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0300084757, page 61;
Robert Lingat (1973), The Classical Law of India, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520018983, pages 269-272
93. Hooker, M. B. (February 1978). "The Indian-Derived Law Texts of Southeast Asia". The Journal of Asian Studies. 37 (2): 201–219. doi:10.2307/2054162. JSTOR 2054162.
94. M Rama Jois (2004), Legal and Constitutional History of India, Universal Law Publishing, ISBN 978-8175342064, pages 19-34
95. M Rama Jois (2004), Legal and Constitutional History of India, Universal Law Publishing, ISBN 978-8175342064, page 31
96. M Rama Jois (2004), Legal and Constitutional History of India, Universal Law Publishing, ISBN 978-8175342064, pages 31-32
97. M Rama Jois (2004), Legal and Constitutional History of India, Universal Law Publishing, ISBN 978-8175342064, page 32
98. Mahatma Gandhi, Hinduism according to Gandhi, Orient Paperbacks (2013 Reprint Edition), ISBN 978-8122205589, page 129
99. Nicholas Dirks (2001), Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691088952, pages 266-269
100. For objections to the work by feminists, see: Avari, pp. 142-143.
101. For Manu Smriti as one of the first Sanskrit texts noted by the British and translation by Sir William Jones in 1794, see: Flood (1996), p. 56.
102. For British interest in Dharmashastras due to administrative needs, and their misinterpretation of them as legal codes rather than as social and ritual texts, see: Thapar (2002), pp. 2-3.
103. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1888), 56-57.
104. Daniel Conway (1997), "Nietzsche and the Political", Routledge, ISBN 978-0415100694, page 36
105. Julian Young (2010), "Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography", Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521871174, page 515
106. Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, Aaron Ridley, Cambridge University Press, P.58
107. Walter Kaufmann (2013), Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691160269, pages 225-226
108. Walter Kaufmann (1980), From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691013671, page 215
109. "19A.Revolution and Counter Rev.in Ancient India PART I".
110. Romila Thapar, Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Oxford University Press (1960) p. 200.
111. John Marshall, "An Historical and Artistic Description of Sanchi", from A Guide to Sanchi, citing p. 11. Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing (1918). Pp. 7-29 on line, Project South Asia.
112. K. V. Rao, Socialism, Secularism, and Democracy in India, pp. 28-30. Nagendra K. Singh, Enforcement of Human Rights in Peace and War and the Future of Humanity,p. 35. Martinus Nijhoff (1986) ISBN 9024733022
113. Pollard;Rosenberg;Tignor, Elizabeth;Clifford;Robert (2011). Worlds Together Worlds Apart. New York, New York: Norton. p. 285. ISBN 9780393918472.
114. The Light of Truth, Chapter 4
115. The Pedigree of Man: Four Lectures Delivered at the Twenty-eighth Anniversary Meetings of the Theosophical Society, at Adyar, December, 1903. Theosophical Publishing Society. 1904.
116. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, vol. 1.

References

• Jha, Ganganath (1920). Manusmṛti with the Manubhāṣya of Medhātithi. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. ISBN 81-208-1155-0.
• Flood, Gavin (1996). An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43878-0.
• Hopkins, Thomas J. (1971). The Hindu Religious Tradition. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
• Koenraad Elst: Manu as a Weapon against Egalitarianism. Nietzsche and Hindu Political Philosophy, in: Siemens, Herman W. / Roodt, Vasti (Hg.): Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche's Legacy for Political Thought, Berlin / New York 2008, 543–582.
• Keay, John (2000). India: A History. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3797-0.
• Kulke, Hermann; Rothermund, Dietmar (1986). A History of India. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 0-88029-577-5.
• Thapar, Romila (2002). Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-24225-4.
• Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "The Laws of Manu" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
• Olivelle, Patrick (2010). "Dharmasastra: A Literary History". In Lubin, Timothy; Krishnan, Jayanth; Davis, Jr. Donald R. (eds.). Law and Hinduism: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521716260.
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Rigveda
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/7/20


According to [Auguste] Barth, the Vedic literature was already marked by a complicated theology. Far from being the work of a pastoral Aryan people, who collated their beliefs into the Rig Vedic hymns, Barth held that the Rig Vedic literature was,
pre-eminently sacerdotal, and in no sense a popular one…Neither in the language nor in the thought of the Rig-Veda have I been able to discover that quality of primitive natural simplicity which many are fain to see in it. The poetry it contains appears to me, on the contrary, to be of a singularly refined character and artificially elaborated, full of allusion and reticences, or pretensions to mysticism and theosophic insight; and in the manner if its expression is such as reminds one more frequently of the phraseology in use among certain small groups of initiated than the poetic language of a large community... In all these respects the spirit of the Rig-Veda appears to me to be more allied than is usually supposed to that which prevails in the other Vedic collections, and in the Brahmanas.

-- Claiming India: French Scholars and the Preoccupation with India During the Nineteenth Century, by Jyoti Mohan, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010


I have a larger vision or fantasy of original Indian Buddhism as an ocean with many icebergs, each representing the local textual traditions...of the different parts of the Indian world. Those icebergs are mostly gone...We have the Pali canon...the partial Sanskrit canon...They had a common core but they had many different texts in and around that basic commonality... and... there's no hope of finding them mainly for a simple physical reason, the climate of...India proper is such that organic materials...never last for more than a few hundred years. There are really no really old manuscripts in India proper. You only get the ancient manuscripts from the borderlands of India, in this case Gandhara which has a more moderate climate.

-- One Buddha, 15 Buddhas, 1,000 Buddhas, by Richard Salomon


Image
Rigveda (padapatha) manuscript in Devanagari, early 19th century. After a scribal benediction (śrīgaṇéśāyanamaḥ Au3m), the first line has the first pada, RV 1.1.1a (agniṃ iḷe puraḥ-hitaṃ yajñasya devaṃ ṛtvijaṃ). The pitch-accent is marked by underscores and vertical overscores in red.

The Rigveda (Sanskrit: ऋग्वेदः ṛgvedaḥ, from ṛc "praise"[2] and veda "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns. It is one of the four sacred canonical texts (śruti) of Hinduism known as the Vedas.[3][4]

The Rigveda is the oldest known Vedic Sanskrit text.[5] Its early layers are one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language.[6][note 2] The sounds and texts of Rigveda have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE.[8][9][10] The philological and linguistic evidence indicates that the bulk of the Rigveda Samhita was composed in the northwestern region (Punjab) of the Indian subcontinent, most likely between c. 1500 and 1200 BCE,[11][12][13] although a wider approximation of c. 1700–1100 BCE has also been given.[14][15][note 1]

The text is layered consisting of the Samhita, Brahmanas, Aranyakas and Upanishads.[note 3] The Rigveda Samhita is the core text, and is a collection of 10 books (maṇḍalas) with 1,028 hymns (sūktas) in about 10,600 verses (called ṛc, eponymous of the name Rigveda). In the eight books – Books 2 through 9 – that were composed the earliest, the hymns predominantly discuss cosmology and praise deities.[16][17] The younger books (Books 1 and 10) in part also deal with philosophical or speculative questions,[17] virtues such as dāna (charity) in society,[18] questions about the origin of the universe and the nature of the divine,[19][20] and other metaphysical issues in their hymns.[21]

Some of its verses continue to be recited during Hindu rites of passage celebrations (such as weddings) and prayers, making it probably the world's oldest religious text in continued use.[22][23]

Dating and historical context

Further information: Historical Vedic religion, Vedic period, and Proto-Indo-Aryan

Image
A map of tribes and rivers mentioned in the Rigveda.

Image
Geographical distribution of the Late Vedic era texts. Each of major regions had their own recension of Rig Veda (Sakhas), and the versions varied.[3]

Dating

According to Jamison and Brereton, in their 2014 translation of the Rigveda, the dating of this text "has been and is likely to remain a matter of contention and reconsideration". The dating proposals so far are all inferred from the style and the content within the hymns themselves.[24] Philological estimates tend to date the bulk of the text to the second half of the second millennium.[note 1] Being composed in an early Indo-Aryan language, the hymns must post-date the Indo-Iranian separation, dated to roughly 2000 BCE.[25] A reasonable date close to that of the composition of the core of the Rigveda is that of the Mitanni documents of northern Syria and Iraq (c. 1450–1350 BCE), which also mention the Vedic gods such as Varuna, Mitra and Indra.[26][27] Other evidence also points to a composition close to 1400 BCE.[28][29]

The Rigveda's core is accepted to date to the late Bronze Age, making it one of the few examples with an unbroken tradition. Its composition is usually dated to roughly between c. 1500–1200 BCE.[note 1] According to Michael Witzel, the initial codification of the Rigveda took place at the end of the Rigvedic period at ca. 1200 BCE, in the early Kuru kingdom.[30] According to Asko Parpola, the Rigveda was systematized around 1000 BCE, at the time of the Kuru kingdom.[31]

Historical and societal context

The Rigveda is far more archaic than any other Indo-Aryan text. For this reason, it was in the center of attention of western scholarship from the times of Max Müller and Rudolf Roth onwards. The Rigveda records an early stage of Vedic religion. There are strong linguistic and cultural similarities with the early Iranian Avesta,[32][33] deriving from the Proto-Indo-Iranian times,[34] often associated with the early Andronovo culture (or rather, the Sintashta culture within the early Andronovo horizon) of c. 2000 BCE.[35]

The Rigveda offers no direct evidence of social or political system in Vedic era, whether ordinary or elite.[36] Only hints such as cattle raising and horse racing are discernible, and the text offers very general ideas about the ancient Indian society. There is no evidence, state Jamison and Brereton, of any elaborate, pervasive or structured caste system.[36] Social stratification seems embryonic, then and later a social ideal rather than a social reality.[36] The society was semi-nomadic and pastoral with evidence of agriculture since hymns mention plow and celebrate agricultural divinities.[37] There was division of labor, and complementary relationship between kings and poet-priests but no discussion of relative status of social classes.[36] Women in Rigveda appear disproportionately as speakers in dialogue hymns, both as mythical or divine Indrani, Apsaras Urvasi, or Yami, as well as Apāla Ātreyī (RV 8.91), Godhā (RV 10.134.6), Ghoṣā Kākṣīvatī (RV 10.39.40), Romaśā (RV 1.126.7), Lopāmudrā (RV 1.179.1–2), Viśvavārā Ātreyī (RV 5.28), Śacī Paulomī (RV 10.159), Śaśvatī Āṅgirasī (RV 8.1.34). The women of Rigveda are quite outspoken and appear more sexually confident than men, in the text.[36] Elaborate and esthetic hymns on wedding suggest rites of passage had developed during the Rigvedic period.[36] There is little evidence of dowry and no evidence of sati in it or related Vedic texts.[38]

The Rigvedic hymns mention rice and porridge, in hymns such as 8.83, 8.70, 8.77 and 1.61 in some versions of the text,[39] however there is no discussion of rice cultivation.[37] The term "ayas" (metal) occurs in the Rigveda, but it is unclear which metal it was.[40] Iron is not mentioned in Rigveda, something scholars have used to help date Rigveda to have been composed before 1000 BCE.[41] Hymn 5.63 mentions "metal cloaked in gold", suggesting metal working had progressed in the Vedic culture.[42]

Some of the names of gods and goddesses found in the Rigveda are found amongst other belief systems based on Proto-Indo-European religion, while most of the words used share common roots with words from other Indo-European languages.[43] However, about 300 words in the Rigveda are neither Indo-Aryan nor Indo-European, states the Sanskrit and Vedic literature scholar Frits Staal.[44] Of these 300, many – such as kapardin, kumara, kumari, kikata – come from Munda or proto-Munda languages found in the eastern and northeastern (Assamese) region of India, with roots in Austro-Asiatic languages. The others in the list of 300 – such as mleccha and nir – have Dravidian roots found in the southern region of India, or are of Tibeto-Burman origins. A few non-Indo-European words in the Rigveda – such as for camel, mustard and donkey – belong to a possibly lost Central Asian language.[44][45][note 4] The linguistic sharing provide clear indications, states Michael Witzel, that the people who spoke Rigvedic Sanskrit already knew and interacted with Munda and Dravidian speakers.[47]

The earliest text were composed in northwestern regions of the Indian subcontinent, and the more philosophical later texts were most likely composed in or around the region that is the modern era state of Haryana.[41]

Text

Composition


The "family books" (2–7) are associated with various clans and chieftains, containing hymns by members of the same clan in each book; but other clans are also represented in the Rigveda. The family books are associated with specific regions, and mention prominent Bharata and Pūru kings.[48]

Tradition associates a rishi (the composer) with each ṛc (verse) of the Rigveda.[49] Most sūktas are attributed to single composers; for each of them the Rigveda includes a lineage-specific āprī hymn (a special sūkta of rigidly formulaic structure, used for rituals). In all, 10 families of rishis account for more than 95 per cent of the ṛcs

Book Sage Region[48] Āprī Ṛcas[50]

Collection and organisation

The codification of the Rigveda took place late in the Rigvedic or rather in the early post-Rigvedic period at ca. 1200 BCE, by members of the early Kuru tribe, when the center of Vedic culture east from the Punjab into what is now Uttar Pradesh.[30] The Rigveda was codified by compiling the hymns, including the arrangement of the individual hymns in ten books, coeval with the composition of the younger Veda Samhitas.[51] According to Witzel, the initial collection took place after the Bharata victory in the Battle of the Ten Kings, under king Sudās, over other Puru kings. This collection was an effort to reconcile various factions in the clans which were united in the Kuru kingdom under a Bharata king.[52][note 5] This collection was re-arranged and expanded in the Kuru Kingdom, reflecting the establishment of a new Bharata-Puru lineage and new srauta rituals.[53][note 6]

The fixing of the samhitapatha (by enforcing regular application of sandhi) and of the padapatha (by dissolving Sandhi out of the earlier metrical text), occurred during the later Brahmana period, in roughly the 6th century BCE.[55]

The surviving form of the Rigveda is based on an early Iron Age collection that established the core 'family books' (mandalas 2–7, ordered by author, deity and meter[56]) and a later redaction, coeval with the redaction of the other Vedas, dating several centuries after the hymns were composed. This redaction also included some additions (contradicting the strict ordering scheme) and orthoepic changes to the Vedic Sanskrit such as the regularization of sandhi (termed orthoepische Diaskeuase by Oldenberg, 1888).

Organisation

Mandalas


The text is organized in ten "books", or maṇḍalas ("circles"), of varying age and length.[57] The "family books", mandalas 2–7, are the oldest part of the Rigveda and the shortest books; they are arranged by length (decreasing length of hymns per book) and account for 38% of the text.[58][59]

The hymns are arranged in collections each dealing with a particular deity: Agni comes first, Indra comes second, and so on. They are attributed and dedicated to a rishi (sage) and his family of students.[60] Within each collection, the hymns are arranged in descending order of the number of stanzas per hymn. If two hymns in the same collection have equal numbers of stanzas then they are arranged so that the number of syllables in the metre are in descending order.[61][62] The second to seventh mandalas have a uniform format.[58]

The eighth and ninth mandalas, comprising hymns of mixed age, account for 15% and 9%, respectively. The ninth mandala is entirely dedicated to Soma and the Soma ritual. The hymns in the ninth mandala are arranged by both their prosody structure (chanda) and by their length.[58]

The first and the tenth mandalas are the youngest; they are also the longest books, of 191 suktas each, accounting for 37% of the text. Nevertheless, some of the hymns in mandalas 8, 1 and 10 may still belong to an earlier period and may be as old as the material in the family books.[63] The first mandala has a unique arrangement not found in the other nine mandalas. The first 84 hymns of the tenth mandala have a structure different than the remaining hymns in it.[58]

Hymns and prosody

Each mandala consists of hymns or sūktas (su- + ukta, literally, "well recited, eulogy") intended for various rituals. The sūktas in turn consist of individual stanzas called ṛc ("praise", pl. ṛcas), which are further analysed into units of verse called pada ("foot" or step).

The hymns of the Rigveda are in different poetic metres in Vedic Sanskrit. The meters most used in the ṛcas are the gayatri (3 verses of 8 syllables), anushtubh (4×8), trishtubh (4×11) and jagati (4×12). The trishtubh meter (40%) and gayatri meter (25%) dominate in the Rigveda.[64][65][66]

Meter[note 7] Rigvedic verses[67]

Transmission

As with the other Vedas, the redacted text has been handed down in several versions, including the Padapatha, in which each word is isolated in pausa form and is used for just one way of memorization; and the Samhitapatha, which combines words according to the rules of sandhi (the process being described in the Pratisakhya) and is the memorized text used for recitation.

The Padapatha and the Pratisakhya anchor the text's true meaning,[68] and the fixed text was preserved with unparalleled fidelity for more than a millennium by oral tradition alone.[26] In order to achieve this the oral tradition prescribed very structured enunciation, involving breaking down the Sanskrit compounds into stems and inflections, as well as certain permutations. This interplay with sounds gave rise to a scholarly tradition of morphology and phonetics.

Learning by memory is sometimes supposed to be a more faithful method of recording than writing, but it is open to greater dangers of corruption. In the case of the Vedas, where there was no doctrinal motive for change, and where extraordinary means were taken to preserve a pure text, there are remarkable differences in hymns found in the recensions of the various schools. We find the same feature in passages preserved both in Pali and Sanskrit works. Another fruitful source of corruption due to memorizing is the difficulty of determining the source or authorship of particular documents. The Buddhists themselves, when the ascription of some of the canonical works to Buddha himself has appeared too incongruous, have attributed them to one or other of the more famous disciples.

-- The Life of Buddha as Legend and History, by Edward Joseph Thomas


It is unclear as to when the Rigveda was first written down. The oldest surviving manuscripts have been discovered in Nepal and date to c. 1040 CE.[3][69] According to Witzel, the Paippalada Samhita tradition points to written manuscripts c. 800-1000 CE.[70] The Upanishads were likely in the written form earlier, about mid-1st millennium CE (Gupta Empire period).[26][71] Attempts to write the Vedas may have been made "towards the end of the 1st millennium BCE". The early attempts may have been unsuccessful given the Smriti rules that forbade the writing down the Vedas, states Witzel.[26] The oral tradition continued as a means of transmission until modern times.[72]

Recensions

Recension: a revised edition of a text; an act of making a revised edition of a text.

-- Recension, by Google Dictionary


Several shakhas ("branches", i. e. recensions) of Rig Veda are known to have existed in the past. Of these, Śākala Shākha is the only one to have survived in its entirety. Another shakha that may have survived is the Bāṣkala, although this is uncertain.[73][74][75]

The surviving padapatha version of the Rigveda text is ascribed to Śākala.[76] The Śākala recension has 1,017 regular hymns, and an appendix of 11 vālakhilya hymns[77] which are now customarily included in the 8th mandala (as 8.49–8.59), for a total of 1028 hymns.[78] The Bāṣkala recension includes eight of these vālakhilya hymns among its regular hymns, making a total of 1025 regular hymns for this śākhā.[79] In addition, the Bāṣkala recension has its own appendix of 98 hymns, the Khilani.[80]

In the 1877 edition of Aufrecht, the 1028 hymns of the Rigveda contain a total of 10,552 ṛcs, or 39,831 padas. The Shatapatha Brahmana gives the number of syllables to be 432,000,[81] while the metrical text of van Nooten and Holland (1994) has a total of 395,563 syllables (or an average of 9.93 syllables per pada); counting the number of syllables is not straightforward because of issues with sandhi and the post-Rigvedic pronunciation of syllables like súvar as svàr.

Three other shakhas are mentioned in Caraṇavyuha, a pariśiṣṭa (supplement) of Yajurveda: Māṇḍukāyana, Aśvalāyana and Śaṅkhāyana. The Atharvaveda lists two more shakhas. The differences between all these shakhas are very minor, limited to varying order of content and inclusion (or non-inclusion) of a few verses. The following information is known about the shakhas other than Śākala and Bāṣkala:[82]

• Māṇḍukāyana: Perhaps the oldest of the Rigvedic shakhas.
• Aśvalāyana: Includes 212 verses, all of which are newer than the other Rigvedic hymns.
• Śaṅkhāyana: Very similar to Aśvalāyana
• Saisiriya: Mentioned in the Rigveda Pratisakhya. Very similar to Śākala, with a few additional verses; might have derived from or merged with it.

Manuscripts

Image
Rigveda manuscript page, Mandala 1, Hymn 1 (Sukta 1), lines 1.1.1 to 1.1.9 (Sanskrit, Devanagari script)

The Rigveda hymns were composed and preserved by oral tradition. They were memorized and verbally transmitted with "unparalleled fidelity" across generations for many centuries.[26][83] According to Barbara West, it was probably first written down about the 3rd-century BCE.[84][85] The manuscripts were made from birch bark or palm leaves, which decompose and therefore were routinely copied over the generations to help preserve the text.

Versions

There are, for example, 30 manuscripts of Rigveda at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, collected in the 19th century by Georg Bühler, Franz Kielhorn and others, originating from different parts of India, including Kashmir, Gujarat, the then Rajaputana, Central Provinces etc. They were transferred to Deccan College, Pune, in the late 19th century. They are in the Sharada and Devanagari scripts, written on birch bark and paper. The oldest of the Pune collection is dated to 1464. The 30 manuscripts of Rigveda preserved at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007.[86]

Due to the ephemeral nature of the manuscript material (birch bark or palm leaves), surviving manuscripts rarely surpass an age of a few hundred years.

-- Vedas, by Wikipedia


Of these thirty manuscripts, nine contain the samhita text, five have the padapatha in addition. Thirteen contain Sayana's commentary. At least five manuscripts (MS. no. 1/A1879-80, 1/A1881-82, 331/1883-84 and 5/Viś I) have preserved the complete text of the Rigveda. MS no. 5/1875-76, written on birch bark in bold Sharada, was only in part used by Max Müller for his edition of the Rigveda with Sayana's commentary.

Müller used 24 manuscripts then available to him in Europe, while the Pune Edition used over five dozen manuscripts, but the editors of Pune Edition could not procure many manuscripts used by Müller and by the Bombay Edition, as well as from some other sources; hence the total number of extant manuscripts known then must surpass perhaps eighty at least.[87]

Scripts

Rigveda manuscripts in paper, palm leaves and birch bark form, either in full or in portions, have been discovered in the following Indic scripts:

• Devanagari (Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Nepal)[88][89][90]
• Grantha (Tamil Nadu)[91][92]
• Malayalam (Kerala)[93]
• Nandinagari (South India)[94]
• Sharada (Kashmir)[95][96]

Comparison

The various Rigveda manuscripts discovered so far show some differences. Broadly, the most studied Śākala recension has 1017 hymns, includes an appendix of eleven valakhīlya hymns which are often counted with the eighth mandala, for a total of 1028 metrical hymns. The Bāṣakala version of Rigveda includes eight of these vālakhilya hymns among its regular hymns, making a total of 1025 hymns in the main text for this śākhā. The Bāṣakala text also has an appendix of 98 hymns, called the Khilani, bringing the total to 1,123 hymns. The manuscripts of Śākala recension of the Rigveda have about 10,600 verses, organized into ten Books (Mandalas).[97][98] Books 2 through 7 are internally homogeneous in style, while Books 1, 8 and 10 are compilation of verses of internally different styles suggesting that these books are likely a collection of compositions by many authors.[98]

The first mandala is the largest, with 191 hymns and 2006 verses, and it was added to the text after Books 2 through 9. The last, or the 10th Book, also has 191 hymns but 1754 verses, making it the second largest. The language analytics suggest the 10th Book, chronologically, was composed and added last.[98] The content of the 10th Book also suggest that the authors knew and relied on the contents of the first nine books.[98]

The Rigveda is the largest of the four Vedas, and many of its verses appear in the other Vedas.[99] Almost all of the 1875 verses found in Samaveda are taken from different parts of the Rigveda, either once or as repetition, and rewritten in a chant song form. Books 8 and 9 of the Rigveda are by far the largest source of verses for Sama Veda. Book 10 contributes the largest number of the 1350 verses of Rigveda found in Atharvaveda, or about one fifth of the 5987 verses in the Atharvaveda text.[98] A bulk of 1875 ritual-focussed verses of Yajurveda, in its numerous versions, also borrow and build upon the foundation of verses in Rigveda.[99][100]

Contents

Altogether the Rigveda consists of:

• the Samhita (hymns to the deities, the oldest part of the Rigveda)
• the Brahmanas, commentaries on the hymns
• the Aranyakas or "forest books"
• the Upanishads

In western usage, "Rigveda" usually refers to the Rigveda Samhita, while the Brahmanas are referred to as the "Rigveda Brahmanas" (etc.). Technically speaking, however, "the Rigveda" refers to the entire body of texts transmitted along with the Samhita portion. Different bodies of commentary were transmitted in the different shakhas or "schools". Only a small portion of these texts has been preserved: The texts of only two out of five shakhas mentioned by the Rigveda Pratishakhya have survived. The late (15th or 16th century) Shri Guru Charitra even claims the existence of twelve Rigvedic shakhas. The two surviving Rigvedic corpora are those of the Śākala and the Bāṣkala shakhas.

Hymns

See also: Anukramani

See also: Rigvedic deities

The Rigvedic hymns are dedicated to various deities, chief of whom are Indra, a heroic god praised for having slain his enemy Vrtra; Agni, the sacrificial fire; and Soma, the sacred potion or the plant it is made from. Equally prominent gods are the Adityas or Asura gods Mitra–Varuna and Ushas (the dawn). Also invoked are Savitr, Vishnu, Rudra, Pushan, Brihaspati or Brahmanaspati, as well as deified natural phenomena such as Dyaus Pita (the shining sky, Father Heaven), Prithivi (the earth, Mother Earth), Surya (the sun god), Vayu or Vata (the wind), Apas (the waters), Parjanya (the thunder and rain), Vac (the word), many rivers (notably the Sapta Sindhu, and the Sarasvati River). The Adityas, Vasus, Rudras, Sadhyas, Ashvins, Maruts, Rbhus, and the Vishvadevas ("all-gods") as well as the "thirty-three gods" are the groups of deities mentioned.[citation needed]

• Mandala 1 comprises 191 hymns. Hymn 1.1 is addressed to Agni, and his name is the first word of the Rigveda. The remaining hymns are mainly addressed to Agni and Indra, as well as Varuna, Mitra, the Ashvins, the Maruts, Usas, Surya, Rbhus, Rudra, Vayu, Brhaspati, Visnu, Heaven and Earth, and all the Gods. This Mandala is dated to have been added to Rigveda after Mandala 2 through 9, and includes the philosophical Riddle Hymn 1.164, which inspires chapters in later Upanishads such as the Mundaka.[17][101][102]
• Mandala 2 comprises 43 hymns, mainly to Agni and Indra. It is chiefly attributed to the Rishi gṛtsamada śaunahotra.[citation needed]
• Mandala 3 comprises 62 hymns, mainly to Agni and Indra and the Vishvedevas. The verse 3.62.10 has great importance in Hinduism as the Gayatri Mantra. Most hymns in this book are attributed to viśvāmitra gāthinaḥ.[citation needed]
• Mandala 4 comprises 58 hymns, mainly to Agni and Indra as well as the Rbhus, Ashvins, Brhaspati, Vayu, Usas, etc. Most hymns in this book are attributed to vāmadeva gautama.[citation needed]
• Mandala 5 comprises 87 hymns, mainly to Agni and Indra, the Visvedevas ("all the gods'), the Maruts, the twin-deity Mitra-Varuna and the Asvins. Two hymns each are dedicated to Ushas (the dawn) and to Savitr. Most hymns in this book are attributed to the atri clan.[citation needed]
• Mandala 6 comprises 75 hymns, mainly to Agni and Indra, all the gods, Pusan, Ashvin, Usas, etc. Most hymns in this book are attributed to the bārhaspatya family of Angirasas.[citation needed]
• Mandala 7 comprises 104 hymns, to Agni, Indra, the Visvadevas, the Maruts, Mitra-Varuna, the Asvins, Ushas, Indra-Varuna, Varuna, Vayu (the wind), two each to Sarasvati (ancient river/goddess of learning) and Vishnu, and to others. Most hymns in this book are attributed to vasiṣṭha maitravaruṇi.[citation needed]
• Mandala 8 comprises 103 hymns to various gods. Hymns 8.49 to 8.59 are the apocryphal vālakhilya. Hymns 1–48 and 60–66 are attributed to the kāṇva clan, the rest to other (Angirasa) poets.[citation needed]
• Mandala 9 comprises 114 hymns, entirely devoted to Soma Pavamana, the cleansing of the sacred potion of the Vedic religion.[citation needed]
• Mandala 10 comprises additional 191 hymns, frequently in later language, addressed to Agni, Indra and various other deities. It contains the Nadistuti sukta which is in praise of rivers and is important for the reconstruction of the geography of the Vedic civilization and the Purusha sukta which has been important in studies of Vedic sociology.[36] It also contains the Nasadiya sukta (10.129) which deals with multiple speculations about the creation of universe, and whether anyone can know the right answer.[19] The marriage hymns (10.85) and the death hymns (10.10–18) still are of great importance in the performance of the corresponding Grhya rituals.

Rigveda Brahmanas

See also: Brahmana

Of the Brahmanas that were handed down in the schools of the Bahvṛcas (i.e. "possessed of many verses"), as the followers of the Rigveda are called, two have come down to us, namely those of the Aitareyins and the Kaushitakins. The Aitareya-brahmana[103] and the Kaushitaki- (or Sankhayana-) brahmana evidently have for their groundwork the same stock of traditional exegetic matter. They differ, however, considerably as regards both the arrangement of this matter and their stylistic handling of it, with the exception of the numerous legends common to both, in which the discrepancy is comparatively slight. There is also a certain amount of material peculiar to each of them.

Image
Devi sukta, which highlights the goddess tradition of Hinduism is found in Rigveda hymns 10.125. It is cited in Devi Mahatmya and is recited every year during the Durga Puja festival.

The Kaushitaka is, upon the whole, far more concise in its style and more systematic in its arrangement features which would lead one to infer that it is probably the more modern work of the two. It consists of 30 chapters (adhyaya); while the Aitareya has 40, divided into eight books (or pentads, pancaka), of five chapters each. The last 10 adhyayas of the latter work are, however, clearly a later addition though they must have already formed part of it at the time of Pāṇini (c. 5th century BCE), if, as seems probable, one of his grammatical sutras, regulating the formation of the names of Brahmanas, consisting of 30 and 40 adhyayas, refers to these two works. In this last portion occurs the well-known legend (also found in the Shankhayana-sutra, but not in the Kaushitaki-brahmana) of Shunahshepa, whom his father Ajigarta sells and offers to slay, the recital of which formed part of the inauguration of kings.

While the Aitareya deals almost exclusively with the Soma sacrifice, the Kaushitaka, in its first six chapters, treats of the several kinds of haviryajna, or offerings of rice, milk, ghee, etc., whereupon follows the Soma sacrifice in this way, that chapters 7–10 contain the practical ceremonial and 11–30 the recitations (shastra) of the hotar. Sayana, in the introduction to his commentary on the work, ascribes the Aitareya to the sage Mahidasa Aitareya (i.e. son of Itara), also mentioned elsewhere as a philosopher; and it seems likely enough that this person arranged the Brahmana and founded the school of the Aitareyins. Regarding the authorship of the sister work we have no information, except that the opinion of the sage Kaushitaki is frequently referred to in it as authoritative, and generally in opposition to the Paingya—the Brahmana, it would seem, of a rival school, the Paingins. Probably, therefore, it is just what one of the manuscripts calls it—the Brahmana of Sankhayana (composed) in accordance with the views of Kaushitaki.

Rigveda Aranyakas and Upanishads

See also: Aranyaka and Upanishads

Each of these two Brahmanas is supplemented by a "forest book", or Aranyaka. The Aitareyaranyaka is not a uniform production. It consists of five books (aranyaka), three of which, the first and the last two, are of a liturgical nature, treating of the ceremony called mahavrata, or great vow. The last of these books, composed in sutra form, is, however, doubtless of later origin, and is, indeed, ascribed by Hindu authorities either to Shaunaka or to Ashvalayana. The second and third books, on the other hand, are purely speculative, and are also styled the Bahvrca-brahmana-upanishad. Again, the last four chapters of the second book are usually singled out as the Aitareya Upanishad,[104] ascribed, like its Brahmana (and the first book), to Mahidasa Aitareya; and the third book is also referred to as the Samhita-upanishad. As regards the Kaushitaki-aranyaka, this work consists of 15 adhyayas, the first two (treating of the mahavrata ceremony) and the 7th and 8th of which correspond to the first, fifth, and third books of the Aitareyaranyaka, respectively, whilst the four adhyayas usually inserted between them constitute the highly interesting Kaushitaki (Brahmana-) Upanishad,[105] of which we possess two different recensions. The remaining portions (9–15) of the Aranyaka treat of the vital airs, the internal Agnihotra, etc., ending with the vamsha, or succession of teachers.

Significance

The text is a highly stylized poetical Vedic Sanskrit with praise addressed to the Vedic gods and chieftains. Most hymns, according to Witzel, were intended to be recited at the annual New Year Soma ritual.[106] The text also includes some nonritual poetry,[106] fragments of mythology, archaic formulas, and a number of hymns with early philosophical speculations.[107] Composed by the poets of different clans, including famed Vedic rishis (sages) such as Vishvamitra and Vasishtha, these signify the power of prestige therewith to vac (speech, sound), a tradition set in place.[106] The text introduced the prized concepts such as Rta (active realization of truth, cosmic harmony) which inspired the later Hindu concept of Dharma. The Rigvedic verses formulate this Rta as effected by Brahman, a significant and non-self-evident truth.[106] The text also contains hymns of "highly poetical value" – some in dialogue form, along with love stories that likely inspired later Epic and classical poets of Hinduism, states Witzel.[107]

According to Nadkarni, several hymns of the Rigveda embed cherished virtues and ethical statements. For example, verses 5.82.7, 6.44.8, 9.113.4, 10.133.6 and 10.190.1 mention truthful speech, truthful action, self-discipline and righteousness.[108][109] Hymn 10.117 presents the significance of charity and of generosity between human beings, how helping someone in need is ultimately in the self-interest of the helper, its importance to an individual and the society.[18][110] According to Jamison and Brereton, hymns 9.112 and 9.113 poetically state, "what everyone [humans and all living beings] really want is gain or an easy life", even a water drop has a goal – namely, "simply to seek Indra". These hymns present the imagery of being in heaven as "freedom, joy and satisfaction", a theme that appears in the Hindu Upanishads to characterize their teachings of self-realization.[111][112]

Monism debate

While the older hymns of the Rigveda reflect sacrificial ritual typical of polytheism,[113] its younger parts, specifically mandalas 1 and 10, have been noted as containing monistic or henotheistic [worship of a single god while not denying the existence or possible existence of other deities] speculations.[113]

Nasadiya Sukta (10.129):
There was neither non-existence nor existence then;
Neither the realm of space, nor the sky which is beyond;
What stirred? Where? In whose protection?

There was neither death nor immortality then;
No distinguishing sign of night nor of day;
That One breathed, windless, by its own impulse;
Other than that there was nothing beyond.

Darkness there was at first, by darkness hidden;
Without distinctive marks, this all was water;
That which, becoming, by the void was covered;
That One by force of heat came into being;

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?
Gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whether God's will created it, or whether He was mute;
Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not;
Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,
Only He knows, or perhaps He does not know.
—Rigveda 10.129 (Abridged, Tr: Kramer / Christian)[19] This hymn is one of the roots of Hindu philosophy.[114]


A widely cited example of such speculations is hymn 1.164.46:

They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, and he is heavenly nobly-winged Garutman.
To what is One, sages give many a title they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan.

— Rigveda 1.164.46, Translated by Ralph Griffith[115][116]


Max Müller notably introduced the term "henotheism" for the philosophy expressed here, avoiding the connotations of "monotheism" in Judeo-Christian tradition.[116][117] Other widely cited examples of monistic tendencies include hymns 1.164, 8.36 and 10.31,[118][119] Other scholars state that Rigveda includes an emerging diversity of thought, including monotheism, polytheism, henotheism and pantheism, the choice left to the preference of the worshipper.[120] and the Nasadiya Sukta (10.129), one of the most widely cited Rigvedic hymns in popular western presentations.

Ruse (2015) commented on the old discussion of "monotheism" vs. "henotheism" vs. "monism" by noting an "atheistic streak" in hymns such as 10.130.[121]

Examples from Mandala 1 adduced to illustrate the "metaphysical" nature of the contents of the younger hymns include: 1.164.34: "What is the ultimate limit of the earth?", "What is the center of the universe?", "What is the semen of the cosmic horse?", "What is the ultimate source of human speech?"; 1.164.34: "Who gave blood, soul, spirit to the earth?", "How could the unstructured universe give origin to this structured world?"; 1.164.5: "Where does the sun hide in the night?", "Where do gods live?"; 1.164.6: "What, where is the unborn support for the born universe?"; 1.164.20 (a hymn that is widely cited in the Upanishads as the parable of the Body and the Soul): "Two birds with fair wings, inseparable companions; Have found refuge in the same sheltering tree. One incessantly eats from the fig tree; the other, not eating, just looks on.".[21]

Reception in Hinduism

Shruti


The Vedas as a whole are classed as "shruti" in Hindu tradition. This has been compared to the concept of divine revelation in Western religious tradition, but Staal argues that "it is nowhere stated that the Veda was revealed", and that shruti simply means "that what is heard, in the sense that it is transmitted from father to son or from teacher to pupil".[122] The Rigveda, or other Vedas, do not anywhere assert that they are apauruṣeyā, and this reverential term appears only centuries after the end of the Vedic period in the texts of the Mimamsa school of Hindu philosophy.[122][123][124] The text of Rigveda suggests it was "composed by poets, human individuals whose names were household words" in the Vedic age, states Staal.[122]

The authors of the Brāhmana literature discussed and interpreted the Vedic ritual.

Sanskrit grammatarians

Main article: Vyākaraṇa

Yaska (4th c. BCE), a lexicographer, was an early commentator of the Rigveda by discussing the meanings of difficult words. In his book titled Nirukta Yaska, asserts that Rigveda in the ancient tradition, can be interpreted in three ways - from the perspective of religious rites (adhiyajna), from the perspective of the deities (adhidevata), and from the perspective of the soul (adhyatman).[125] The fourth way to interpret the Rigveda also emerged in the ancient times, wherein the gods mentioned were viewed as symbolism for legendary individuals or narratives.[125] It was generally accepted that creative poets often embed and express double meanings, ellipses and novel ideas to inspire the reader.[125]

Medieval Hindu scholarship

By the period of Puranic Hinduism [(c. 650 – c. 1100 CE)], in the medieval period, the language of the hymns had become "almost entirely unintelligible", and their interpretation mostly hinged on mystical ideas and sound symbolism.[126]

According to the Puranic tradition, Ved Vyasa compiled all the four Vedas, along with the Mahabharata and the Puranas. Vyasa then taught the Rigveda samhita to Paila, who started the oral tradition.[127] An alternate version states that Shakala compiled the Rigveda from the teachings of Vedic rishis,
and one of the manuscript recensions mentions Shakala.[127]

Madhvacharya a Hindu philosopher of the 13th century provided a commentary of the first 40 hymns of Rigveda in his book Rig Bhashyam.[note 8] In the 14th century, Sāyana wrote an exhaustive commentary on the complete text of Rigveda in his book Rigveda Samhita.[note 9] This book was translated from Sanskrit to English by Max Muller in the year 1856. H.H. Wilson also translated this book into English as Rigveda Sanhita in the year 1856. Both Madvacharya and Sayanacharya studied at the Sringeri monastery.

A number of other commentaries (bhāṣyas) were written during the medieval period, including the commentaries by Skandasvamin (pre-Sayana, roughly of the Gupta period), Udgitha (pre-Sayana), Venkata-Madhava (pre-Sayana, c. 10th to 12th centuries) and Mudgala (after Sayana, an abbreviated version of Sayana's commentary).[128]

Some notable commentaries from Medieval period include:

Title / Commentary / Year / Language / Notes

Rig Bhashyam / Madhvacharya / 1285 / Sanskrit / Commentary on the first 40 hymns of the Rigveda. The original book has been translated to English by Prof.K.T. Pandurangi accessible here
Rigveda Samhita / Sāyaṇācārya / 1360 / Sanskrit / Sāyaṇācārya a Sanskrit scholar wrote a treatise on the Vedas in the book Vedartha Prakasha (Meaning of Vedas made as a manifest). The Rigveda Samhita is available here. This book was translated from Sanskrit to English by Max Muller in the year 1856. H.H.Wilson also translated this book into English as Rigveda Sanhita in the year 1856.


Arya Samaj and Aurobindo movements

In the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, reformers like Swami Dayananda Saraswati (founder of the Arya Samaj) and Sri Aurobindo (founder of Sri Aurobindo Ashram) discussed the philosophies of the Vedas. According to Robson, Dayananda believed "there were no errors in the Vedas (including the Rigveda), and if anyone showed him an error, he would maintain that it was a corruption added later".[129]

According to Dayananda and Aurobindo the Vedic scholars had a monotheistic conception.[130]

The period during which the many texts included within the Veda (literally “The Knowledge”) were composed, collected and arranged into a canon lasted approximately 1200 years (c. 1600-400 BCE). The Vedic texts were orally composed and were transmitted from teacher to pupil, as they are to this day in some parts of South Asia, without the aid of script...

Monotheistic traditions first referred to in the later portions of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata (c. 3rd-4th Century CE), attributed authorship of the Veda to God, as did, from around the 6th century CE, the influential philosophical school of Nyāya...

c. 400 BCE–400 CE. This period saw myriad changes in the religious and political culture of northern and central India, many of them brought about by the rise to prominence of Buddhism and, to a lesser extent, Jainism. These changes and their far-reaching consequences are too numerous to list here, though mention should be made of the transformation of the Vedic priesthood (the Brahmins) into proponents of a tremendously successful religious and socio-political ideology based on Brahminical superiority (see Dharmaśāstra), and of the emergence of monotheistic traditions which, without wholly repudiating the authority of the Veda and its sacrificial cult, established new forms of worship centred upon the veneration of images of god in temples and at shrines. The foundations laid by these innovations gave support to a religious culture which is retrospectively identified as “Hindu” as distinct from “Vedic”.

Although the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa include, though by no means confine themselves to, much of the same sort of religious, ethical and metaphysical doctrine as can be found in earlier Sanskrit literature, they do so within a framework derived from more popular (as opposed to priestly) storytelling traditions. Both were recited and performed by bards at the courts of rulers and, unlike the Veda, they were not memorised word for word but could incorporate new themes, subplots and characters in each retelling... the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa claim to address themselves to women as well as men, and to members of all social classes. As with the Vedas, regional and cultural differences among the Brahmins responsible for transmitting the Sanskrit epics led to there being numerous versions of both texts, and both have been handed down in two principal recensions, one from the north and one from the south of India...

The central story of the Mahābhārata tells of a bitter succession conflict, culminating in an 18-day war, between two sets of cousins for the ancestral realm of the Bhārata clan, the kingdom of Kurukṣetra in northern India. The most celebrated (and studied and translated) section of the Mahābhārata is the Bhagavadgītā (“The Song of the Lord”), which has often been treated, both by medieval commentators and modern scholars, as an independent text...The Gītā, as it is affectionately known, takes place about midway through the story as the two sides are lining up for battle, and it consists mostly of Kṛṣṇa’s exhortation to Arjuna, one of the major heroes of the Mahābhārata, to go forth and fight. Arjuna’s unwillingness to do so derives from the fact that many of his family members and former teachers are among the enemy. Kṛṣṇa, who is ostensibly Arjuna’s charioteer, reveals himself to be the supreme god, manifest on earth in order to restore dharma. His exhortation primarily involves a discussion of traditional concepts (e.g. sacrifice, dharma and karma) set within a new monotheistic framework...Scholars generally agree that the identification of Kṛṣṇa with Viṣṇu belongs to the latest layers of the Mahābhārata (it is not found in the Gītā itself)...

The Rāmāyaṇa (“The Career of Rāma”), which tells the story of the exemplary warrior-prince Rāma and his retrieval of his devoted wife Sītā from her evil abductor King Rāvaṇa, also claims in one of the apparently later layers of the text that it is equal in authority to the Veda...Rāma is worshipped by millions of Hindus, either as the supreme god or as an incarnation (avatāra) of Viṣṇu...For many millions of the Hindus who worship in these, the Rāmāyaṇa is the exemplary narrative of god’s life as a man engaged in the destruction of evil and the restoration of dharma...

Like the Sanskrit epics, the Purāṇas align themselves with the Veda, the rituals and myths of which they appropriate, adapt and expand to fit with their own monotheistic (or, better, henotheistic) theology...their contents are a miscellaneous collection of complex cosmologies, elaborate genealogies, stories of the exploits of deities and kings, and descriptions of law codes, rituals and pilgrimages to holy places...the Purāṇas also offer some of the earliest examples, within a Hindu context, of the idea of the holiness of manuscripts...

Especially important in this regard is the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, composed in South India in the 9th- 10th century CE....The main focus of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa is the adoration of Kṛṣṇa as the supreme god, and it tells numerous stories of Kṛṣṇa’s exploits, including his romantic adventures with the cowherd girls.

-- A religion of the book? On sacred texts in Hinduism, by Robert Leach
[/quote]


Sri Aurobindo gave commentaries, general interpretation guidelines, and a partial translation in The secret of Veda (1946).[note 10] Sri Aurobindo finds Sayana's interpretation to be ritualistic in nature, and too often having inconsistent interpretations of Vedic terms, trying to fit the meaning to a narrow mold. According to Aurobindo, if Sayana's interpretation were to be accepted, it would seem as if the Rig Veda belongs to an unquestioning tradition of faith, starting from an original error.[131] Aurobindo attempted to interpret hymns to Agni in the Rigveda as mystical.[130] Aurobindo states that the Vedic hymns were a quest after a higher truth, define the Rta (basis of Dharma), conceive life in terms of a struggle between the forces of light and darkness, and sought the ultimate reality.[130]
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Contemporary Hinduism

[x]
The hymn 10.85 of the Rigveda includes the Vivaha-sukta (above). Its recitation continues to be a part of Hindu wedding rituals.[132][133]

Rigveda, in contemporary Hinduism, has been a reminder of the ancient cultural heritage and point of pride for Hindus, with some hymns still in use in major rites of passage ceremonies, but the literal acceptance of most of the textual essence is long gone.[134][135] Musicians and dance groups celebrate the text as a mark of Hindu heritage, through incorporating Rigvedic hymns in their compositions, such as in Hamsadhvani and Subhapantuvarali of Carnatic music, and these have remained popular among the Hindus for decades.[134]

According to Axel Michaels, "most Indians today pay lip service to the Veda and have no regard for the contents of the text."[136] According to Louis Renou, the Vedic texts are a distant object, and "even in the most orthodox domains, the reverence to the Vedas has come to be a simple raising of the hat".[134] According to Andrea Pinkney, "the social history and context of the Vedic texts are extremely distant from contemporary Hindu religious beliefs and practice", and the reverence for the Vedas in contemporary Hinduism illustrates the respect among the Hindus for their heritage.[134]

Hindu nationalism

See also: 10,000 years of Hinduism

The Rig Veda plays a role in the modern construction of a Hindu identity, portraying Hindus as the original inhabitants of India.

Hinduism is itself a modern term, not used before the latter half of the 18th century, and with no obvious equivalents in Indic languages before that time. Applying the term Hinduism to the past, then, is frequently problematic, though in general modern scholarship is in agreement that there are important continuities between the present-day phenomenon of Hinduism and codes of ritual practice, narrative traditions and religious customs that emerged in South Asia in the second half of the first millennium before the Common Era (BCE).

-- A religion of the book? On sacred texts in Hinduism, by Robert Leach


The Rigveda has been referred to in the "Indigenous Aryans" and Out of India theory. Dating the Rig Veda as contemporaneous, or even preceding the Indus Valley Civilisation, an argument is made that the IVC was Aryan, and the bearer of the Rig Veda.[137][138] Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in his Orion: Or Researches Into The Antiquity Of The Vedas (1893) has concluded that the date of composition of Rigveda dates at least as far back as 6000–4000 BCE based on his astronomical research into the position of the constellation Orion.[139] These theories are controversial, and not accepted or propagated in mainstream scholarship.[140][141]

Translations

Like all archaic texts, the Rigveda is difficult to translate into a modern language.[142][143] According to Staal, "The Rigveda is the earliest, the most venerable, obscure, distant and difficult for moderns to understand – hence is often misinterpreted or worse: used as a peg on which to hang an idea or a theory."[144] According to Jamison and Brereton, "There are no closely contemporary extant texts, which makes it difficult to interpret."[145] and early translations contained straightforward errors.[122] Another issue is the choice of translation for technical terms such as mandala, conventionally translated "book", but more literally rendered "cycle".[122][146]

The first published translation of any portion of the Rigveda in any European language was into Latin, by Friedrich August Rosen (Rigvedae specimen, London 1830). Predating Müller's first printed edition (editio princeps) of the text by 19 years, Rosen was working from manuscripts brought back from India by Colebrooke. H. H. Wilson was the first to make a translation of the Rig Veda into English, published in six volumes during the period 1850–88.[147] Wilson's version was based on the commentary of Sāyaṇa, a Sanskrit scholar of 14th century, who provided a commentary on the complete text of Rigveda in his book Rigveda Samhita;[note 11] and Wilson also translated Sāyaṇa's commentary into English as Rigveda Sanhita in the year 1856.

Müller published the most studied edition of the Rig Veda Samhita and Padapatha in 6 volumes Muller, Max, ed. (W. H. Allen and Co., London, 1849).[148] It has an English preface[149] The birch bark from which Müller produced his translation is held at The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, India.[150] Müller also translated Sāyaṇa's commentary translated from Sanskrit to English.

Karl Friedrick Geldner completed the earliest scholarly translation of Rigveda in 1920s, in German. This was published in 1951.[148] Louis Renou completed the first French translation between 1955 and 1969, while Elizarenkova completed a Russian translation between 1989 and 1999.[148] Griffith's English translation came earlier, in 1892. However, Griffith's philology was outdated even in the 19th-century and questioned by scholars.[148] H.D. Velankar's translations published over the 1950s and 1960s were significant improvements over Griffith's translation.[148] Translations of shorter cherrypicked anthologies have been published by Wendy Doniger in 1981, and by Walter Maurer in 1986. According to Jamison and Brereton, these anthologies "tend to create a distorted view of the Rigveda".[148]

In 1994, Barend A. van Nooten and Gary B. Holland published the first attempt to restore Rigveda in its entirety in the poetic form. They identified elements that appeared to them as inappropriate combinations and obscuring the meaning of the text. They restructured the text into a poetic form.[151]

Some notable translations of the Rig Veda include:

Title / Commentary/Translation / Year / Language / Notes

Rigvedae specimen Friedrich August Rosen 1830 Latin Partial translation with 121 hymns (London, 1830). Also known as Rigveda Sanhita, Liber Primus, Sanskrite Et Latine (ISBN 978-1275453234). Based on manuscripts brought back from India by Henry Thomas Colebrooke.
Rig-Veda, oder die heiligen Lieder der Brahmanen Max Müller 1856 German Partial translation published by F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig. In 1873, Müller published an editio princeps titled The Hymns of the Rig-Veda in the Samhita Text. He also translated a few hymns in English (Nasadiya Sukta).
Ṛig-Veda-Sanhitā: A Collection of Ancient Hindu Hymns H. H. Wilson 1850–88 English Published as 6 volumes, by N. Trübner & Co., London.
Rig-véda, ou livre des hymnes A. Langlois 1870 French Partial translation. Re-printed in Paris, 1948–51 (ISBN 2-7200-1029-4).
Der Rigveda Alfred Ludwig 1876 German Published by Verlag von F. Tempsky, Prague.
Rig-Veda Hermann Grassmann 1876 German Published by F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig
Rigved Bhashyam Dayananda Saraswati 1877–9 Hindi Incomplete translation. Later translated into English by Dharma Deva Vidya Martanda (1974).
The Hymns of the Rig Veda Ralph T.H. Griffith 1889–92 English Revised as The Rig Veda in 1896. Revised by J. L. Shastri in 1973.
Der Rigveda in Auswahl Karl Friedrich Geldner 1907 German Published by Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart. Geldner's 1907 work was a partial translation; he completed a full translation in the 1920s, which was published after his death, in 1951.[152] This translation was titled Der Rig-Veda: aus dem Sanskrit ins Deutsche Übersetzt. Harvard Oriental Studies, vols. 33–37 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1951–7). Reprinted by Harvard University Press (2003) ISBN 0-674-01226-7.
Hymns from the Rigveda A. A. Macdonell 1917 English Partial translation (30 hymns). Published by Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Series of articles in Journal of the University of Bombay Hari Damodar Velankar 1940s–1960s English Partial translation (Mandala 2, 5, 7 and 8). Later published as independent volumes.
Rig Veda – Hymns to the Mystic Fire Sri Aurobindo 1946 English Partial translation published by N. K. Gupta, Pondicherry. Later republished several times (ISBN 9780914955221)
RigVeda Samhita Pandit H.P. Venkat Rao, LaxmanAcharya and a couple of other Pandits 1947 Kannada Sources from Saayana Bhashya, SkandaSvami Bhashya, Taittareya Samhita, Maitrayini Samhita and other Samhitas. The Kannada translation work was commissioned by Maharaja of Mysore Jayachama Rajendra Wodeyar. The translations were compiled into 11 volumes.
Rig Veda Ramgovind Trivedi 1954 Hindi
Études védiques et pāṇinéennes Louis Renou 1955–69 French Appears in a series of publications, organized by the deities. Covers most of Rigveda, but leaves out significant hymns, including the ones dedicated to Indra and the Asvins.
ऋग्वेद संहिता Shriram Sharma 1950s Hindi
Hymns from the Rig-Veda Naoshiro Tsuji 1970 Japanese Partial translation
Rigveda: Izbrannye Gimny Tatyana Elizarenkova 1972 Russian Partial translation, extended to a full translation published during 1989–1999.
Rigveda Parichaya Nag Sharan Singh 1977 English / Hindi Extension of Wilson's translation. Republished by Nag, Delhi in 1990 (ISBN 978-8170812173).
Rig Veda M. R. Jambunathan 1978–80 Tamil Two volumes, both released posthumously.
Rigvéda – Teremtéshimnuszok (Creation Hymns of the Rig-Veda) Laszlo Forizs (hu) 1995 Hungarian Partial translation published in Budapest (ISBN 963-85349-1-5)
The Rig Veda Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty 1981 English Partial translation (108 hymns), along with critical apparatus. Published by Penguin (ISBN 0-14-044989-2). A bibliography of translations of the Rig Veda appears as an Appendix.
Pinnacles of India's Past: Selections from the Rgveda Walter H. Maurer 1986 English Partial translation published by John Benjamins.
The Rig Veda Bibek Debroy, Dipavali Debroy 1992 English Partial translation published by B. R. Publishing (ISBN 9780836427783). The work is in verse form, without reference to the original hymns or mandalas. Part of Great Epics of India: Veda series, also published as The Holy Vedas.
The Holy Vedas: A Golden Treasury Pandit Satyakam Vidyalankar 1983 English
Ṛgveda Saṃhitā H. H. Wilson, Ravi Prakash Arya and K. L. Joshi 2001 English 4-volume set published by Parimal (ISBN 978-81-7110-138-2). Revised edition of Wilson's translation. Replaces obsolete English forms with more modern equivalents (e.g. "thou" with "you"). Includes the original Sanskrit text in Devanagari script, along with a critical apparatus.
Ṛgveda for the Layman Shyam Ghosh 2002 English Partial translation (100 hymns). Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi.
Rig-Veda Michael Witzel, Toshifumi Goto 2007 German Partial translation (Mandala 1 and 2). The authors are working on a second volume. Published by Verlag der Weltreligionen (ISBN 978-3-458-70001-2).
ऋग्वेद Govind Chandra Pande 2008 Hindi Partial translation (Mandala 3 and 5). Published by Lokbharti, Allahabad
The Hymns of Rig Veda Tulsi Ram 2013 English Published by Vijaykumar Govindram Hasanand, Delhi
The Rigveda Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton 2014 English 3-volume set published by Oxford University Press (ISBN 978-0-19-937018-4). Funded by the United States' National Endowment for the Humanities in 2004.[153]


See also

• Keśin
• Mayabheda

Notes

1. It is certain that the hymns of the Rig Veda post-date Indo-Iranian separation of ca. 2000 BCE and probably that of the relevant Mitanni documents of c. 1400 BCE. Philological estimates tend to date the bulk of the text to the second half of the second millennium:
 Max Müller: "the hymns of the Rig-Veda are said to date from 1500 B.C."[154]
 The EIEC (s.v. Indo-Iranian languages, p. 306) gives 1500–1000 BCE.
 Flood and Witzel both mention c. 1500–1200 BCE.[11][12]
 Anthony mentions c. 1500–1300 BCE.[13]
 Thomas Oberlies (Die Religion des Rgveda, 1998, p. 158) based on 'cumulative evidence' sets a wide range of 1700–1100 BCE.[155] Oberlies 1998, p. 155 gives an estimate of 1100 BCE for the youngest hymns in book 10.[156]
 Witzel 1995, p. 4 mentions c. 1500–1200 BCE. According to Witzel 1997, p. 263, the whole Rig Vedic period may have lasted from c. 1900 BCE to c. 1200 BCE: "the bulk of the RV represents only 5 or 6 generations of kings (and of the contemporary poets)24 of the Pūru and Bharata tribes. It contains little else before and after this “snapshot” view of contemporary Rgvedic history, as reported by these contemporary “tape recordings.” On the other hand, the whole Rgvedic period may have lasted even up to 700 years, from the infiltration of the Indo-Aryans into the subcontinent, c. 1900 B.C. (at the utmost, the time of collapse of the Indus civilization), up to c. 1200 B.C., the time of the introduction of iron which is first mentioned in the clearly post-gvedic hymns of the Atharvaveda."
2. According to Edgar Polome, the Hittite language Anitta text from the 17th century BCE is older. This text is about the conquest of Kanesh city of Anatolia, and mentions the same Indo-European gods as in the Rigveda.[7]
3. The associated material has been preserved from two shakhas or "schools", known as Śākalya and Bāṣkala. The school-specific commentaries are known as Brahmanas (Aitareya-brahmana and Kaushitaki-brahmana) Aranyakas (Aitareya-aranyaka and Kaushitaki-aranyaka), and Upanishads (partly excerpted from the Aranyakas: Bahvrca-brahmana-upanishad, Aitareya-upanishad, Samhita-upanishad, Kaushitaki-upanishad).
4. The horse (ashva), cattle, sheep and goat play an important role in the Rigveda. There are also references to the elephant (Hastin, Varana), camel (Ustra, especially in Mandala 8), ass (khara, rasabha), buffalo (Mahisa), wolf, hyena, lion (Simha), mountain goat (sarabha) and to the gaur in the Rigveda.[46] The peafowl (mayura), the goose (hamsa) and the chakravaka (Tadorna ferruginea) are some birds mentioned in the Rigveda.
5. Witzel: "The original collection must have been the result of a strong political effort aiming at the re-alignment of the various factions in the tribes and poets' clans under a post-Sudås Bharata hegemony which included (at least sections of) their former Pūru enemies and some other tribes.[52]
6. Witzel: "To sum up: as has been discussed in detail elsewhere [Early Sanskritization], the new Kuru dynasty of Parik it, living in the Holy Land of Kuruk etra, unified most of the Rigvedic tribes, brought the poets and priests together in the common enterprise of collecting their texts and of “reforming” the ritual."[54]
7. The total number of verses and meter counts show minor variations with the manuscript.[67]
8. See Rig Bhashyam.
9. See Rigveda Samhita.
10. See [1]
11. See Rigveda Samhita.

References

1. https://sites.google.com/a/vedicgranth. ... obile=true
2. Derived from the root ṛc "to praise", cf. Dhātupātha 28.19. Monier-Williamstranslates Rigveda as "a Veda of Praise or Hymn-Veda".
3. Michael Witzel (1997), The Development of the Vedic Canon and its Schools : The Social and Political Milieu, Harvard University, in Witzel 1997, pp. 259–264
4. Antonio de Nicholas (2003), Meditations Through the Rig Veda: Four-Dimensional Man, ISBN 978-0595269259, p. 273
5. Stephanie W. Jamison; Joel Brereton (2014). The Rigveda: 3-Volume Set. Oxford University Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-19-972078-1.
6. Edwin F. Bryant (2015). The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp. 565–566. ISBN 978-1-4299-9598-6.
7. Edgar Polome (2010). Per Sture Ureland (ed.). Entstehung von Sprachen und Völkern: glotto- und ethnogenetische Aspekte europäischer Sprachen. Walter de Gruyter. p. 51. ISBN 978-3-11-163373-2.
8. Wood 2007.
9. Hexam 2011, p. chapter 8.
10. Dwyer 2013.
11. Flood 1996, p. 37.
12. Witzel 1995, p. 4.
13. Anthony 2007, p. 454.
14. Oberlies 1998 p. 158
15. Lucas F. Johnston, Whitney Bauman (2014). Science and Religion: One Planet, Many Possibilities. Routledge. p. 179.
16. Werner, Karel (1994). A Popular Dictionary of Hinduism. Curzon Press. ISBN 0-7007-1049-3.
17. Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (2014), The Rigveda : the earliest religious poetry of India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199370184, pp. 4, 7–9
18. C Chatterjee (1995), Values in the Indian Ethos: An Overview, Journal of Human Values, Vol 1, No 1, pp. 3–12;
Original text translated in English: The Rig Veda, Mandala 10, Hymn 117, Ralph T. H. Griffith (Translator);
19.
 Original Sanskrit: Rigveda 10.129 Wikisource;
 Translation 1: Max Muller (1859). A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature. Williams and Norgate, London. pp. 559–565.
 Translation 2: Kenneth Kramer (1986). World Scriptures: An Introduction to Comparative Religions. Paulist Press. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-8091-2781-8.
 Translation 3: David Christian (2011). Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. University of California Press. pp. 17–18. ISBN 978-0-520-95067-2.
 Translation 4: Robert N. Bellah (2011). Religion in Human Evolution. Harvard University Press. pp. 510–511. ISBN 978-0-674-06309-9.
20. Examples:
Verse 1.164.34, "What is the ultimate limit of the earth?", "What is the center of the universe?", "What is the semen of the cosmic horse?", "What is the ultimate source of human speech?"
Verse 1.164.34, "Who gave blood, soul, spirit to the earth?", "How could the unstructured universe give origin to this structured world?"
Verse 1.164.5, "Where does the sun hide in the night?", "Where do gods live?"
Verse 1.164.6, "What, where is the unborn support for the born universe?";
Verse 1.164.20 (a hymn that is widely cited in the Upanishads as the parable of the Body and the Soul): "Two birds with fair wings, inseparable companions; Have found refuge in the same sheltering tree. One incessantly eats from the fig tree; the other, not eating, just looks on.";
Rigveda Book 1, Hymn 164 Wikisource;
See translations of these verses: Stephanie W. Jamison; Joel Brereton (2014). The Rigveda: 3-Volume Set. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-972078-1.
21. Antonio de Nicholas (2003), Meditations Through the Rig Veda: Four-Dimensional Man, ISBN 978-0595269259, pp. 64–69;
Jan Gonda, A History of Indian Literature: Veda and Upanishads, Volume 1, Part 1, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, ISBN 978-3447016032, pp. 134–135;
22. Klaus Klostermaier (1984). Mythologies and Philosophies of Salvation in the Theistic Traditions of India. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-88920-158-3.
23. Lester Kurtz (2015), Gods in the Global Village, SAGE Publications, ISBN 978-1483374123, p. 64, Quote: "The 1,028 hymns of the Rigveda are recited at initiations, weddings and funerals...."
24. Stephanie W. Jamison; Joel Brereton (2014). The Rigveda: 3-Volume Set. Oxford University Press. pp. 5–6. ISBN 978-0-19-972078-1.
25. Mallory 1989.
26. Witzel, Michael (2003). "Vedas and Upanisads". In Flood, Gavin (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. pp. 68–69. ISBN 978-0631215356. The Vedic texts were orally composed and transmitted, without the use of script, in an unbroken line of transmission from teacher to student that was formalized early on. This ensured an impeccable textual transmission superior to the classical texts of other cultures; it is, in fact, something like a tape-recording of ca. 1500–500 BCE. Not just the actual words, but even the long-lost musical (tonal) accent (as in old Greek or in Japanese) has been preserved up to the present. On the other hand, the Vedas have been written down only during the early second millennium CE, while some sections such as a collection of the Upanishads were perhaps written down at the middle of the first millennium, while some early, unsuccessful attempts (indicated by certain Smriti rules forbidding to write down the Vedas) may have been made around the end of the first millennium BCE
27. "As a possible date ad quem for the RV one usually adduces the Hittite-Mitanni agreement of the middle of the 14th cent. B.C. which mentions four of the major Rgvedic gods: mitra, varuNa, indra and the nAsatya azvin)" M. Witzel, Early Sanskritization – Origin and development of the Kuru state Archived 5 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine
28. The Vedic People: Their History and Geography, Rajesh Kochar, 2000, Orient Longman, ISBN 81-250-1384-9
29. Rigveda and River Saraswati: class.uidaho.edu
30. Witzel 1997, p. 261.
31. Asko Parpola (2015). The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization. Oxford University Press. p. 149. ISBN 9780190226930.
32. Oldenberg 1894 (tr. Shrotri), p. 14 "The Vedic diction has a great number of favourite expressions which are common with the Avestic, though not with later Indian diction. In addition, there is a close resemblance between them in metrical form, in fact, in their overall poetic character. If it is noticed that whole Avesta verses can be easily translated into the Vedic alone by virtue of comparative phonetics, then this may often give, not only correct Vedic words and phrases, but also the verses, out of which the soul of Vedic poetry appears to speak."
33. Bryant 2001:130–131 "The oldest part of the Avesta... is linguistically and culturally very close to the material preserved in the Rigveda... There seems to be economic and religious interaction and perhaps rivalry operating here, which justifies scholars in placing the Vedic and Avestan worlds in close chronological, geographical and cultural proximity to each other not far removed from a joint Indo-Iranian period."
34. Mallory 1989 p. 36 "Probably the least-contested observation concerning the various Indo-European dialects is that those languages grouped together as Indic and Iranian show such remarkable similarities with one another that we can confidently posit a period of Indo-Iranian unity..."
35. Mallory 1989 "The identification of the Andronovo culture as Indo-Iranian is commonly accepted by scholars."
36. Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (2014), The Rigveda : the earliest religious poetry of India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199370184, pp. 57–59
37. Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (2014), The Rigveda : the earliest religious poetry of India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199370184, pp. 6–7
38. Michael Witzel (1996), Little Dowry, No Sati: The Lot of Women in the Vedic Period, Journal of South Asia Women Studies, Vol 2, No 4
39. Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (2014), The Rigveda : the earliest religious poetry of India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199370184, pp. 40, 180, 1150, 1162
40. Chakrabarti, D.K. The Early Use of Iron in India (1992) Oxford University Pressargues that it may refer to any metal. If ayas refers to iron, the Rigveda must date to the late second millennium at the earliest.
41. Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (2014), The Rigveda : the earliest religious poetry of India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199370184, p. 5
42. Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (2014), The Rigveda : the earliest religious poetry of India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199370184, p. 744
43. Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (2014), The Rigveda : the earliest religious poetry of India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199370184, pp. 50–57
44. Frits Staal (2008). Discovering the Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights. Penguin. pp. 23–24. ISBN 978-0-14-309986-4.
45. Franklin C Southworth (2016). Hans Henrich Hock and Elena Bashir (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of South Asia: A Comprehensive Guide. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 252–255. ISBN 978-3-11-042330-3.
46. among others, Macdonell and Keith, and Talageri 2000, Lal 2005
47. Michael Witzel (2012). George Erdosy (ed.). The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 98–110 with footnotes. ISBN 978-3-11-081643-3., Quote (p. 99): "Although the Middle/Late Vedic periods are the earliest for which we can reconstruct a linguistic map, the situation even at the time of the Indua Civilisation and certainly during the time of the earliest texts of the Rigveda, cannot have been very different. There are clear indications that the speakers of Rigvedic Sanskrit knew, and interacted with, Dravidian and Munda speakers."
48. Witzel 1997, p. 262.
49. In a few cases, more than one rishi is given, signifying lack of certainty.
50. Talageri (2000), p. 33
51. Witzel 1991, p. 6.
52. Witzel 1997, p. 263.
53. Witzel 1997, p. 263-264.
54. Witzel 1997, p. 265.
55. Keith, Arthur Berriedale (1920). Rigveda Brahmanas: the Aitareya and Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇas of the Rigveda. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. p. 44.
56. H. Oldenberg, Prolegomena,1888, Engl. transl. New Delhi: Motilal 2004
57. George Erdosy 1995, pp. 68–69.
58. Pincott, Frederic (1887). "The First Maṇḍala of the Ṛig-Veda". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Cambridge University Press. 19 (4): 598–624. doi:10.1017/s0035869x00019717.
59. Stephanie W. Jamison; Joel P. Brereton (2014). The Rigveda. Oxford University Press. pp. 10–11. ISBN 978-0-19-937018-4.
60. Barbara A. Holdrege (2012). Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture. State University of New York Press. pp. 229–230. ISBN 978-1-4384-0695-4.
61. George Erdosy 1995, pp. 68-69, 180-189.
62. Gregory Possehl & Michael Witzel 2002, pp. 391-393.
63. Bryant 2001, pp. 66–67.
64. Kireet Joshi (1991). The Veda and Indian Culture: An Introductory Essay. Motilal Banarsidass. pp. 101–102. ISBN 978-81-208-0889-8.
65. A history of Sanskrit Literature, Arthur MacDonell, Oxford University Press/Appleton & Co, p. 56
66. Stephanie W. Jamison; Joel P. Brereton (2014). The Rigveda. Oxford University Press. p. 74. ISBN 978-0-19-937018-4.
67. Friedrich Max Müller (1891). Physical Religion. Longmans & Green. pp. 373–379.
68. K. Meenakshi (2002). "Making of Pāṇini". In George Cardona; Madhav Deshpande; Peter Edwin Hook (eds.). Indian Linguistic Studies: Festschrift in Honor of George Cardona. Motilal Banarsidass. p. 235. ISBN 978-81-208-1885-9.
69. The oldest manuscript in the Pune collection dates to the 15th century. The Benares Sanskrit University has a Rigveda manuscript of the 14th century. Older palm leaf manuscripts are rare.
70. Michael Witzel (1997), The Vedic Canon and Its Political Milieu, p. 259, footnote 7
71. Wilhelm Rau (1955), Zur Textkritik der Brhadaranyakopanisad, ZDMG, 105(2), p. 58
72. Stephanie W. Jamison; Joel Brereton (2014). The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India. Oxford University Press. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-19-937018-4.
73. Michael Witzel says that "The RV has been transmitted in one recension (the śākhāof Śākalya) while others (such as the Bāṣkala text) have been lost or are only rumored about so far." Michael Witzel, p. 69, "Vedas and Upaniṣads", in: The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, Gavin Flood (ed.), Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005.
74. Maurice Winternitz (History of Sanskrit Literature, Revised English Translation Edition, 1926, vol. 1, p. 57) says that "Of the different recensions of this Saṃhitā, which once existed, only a single one has come down to us." He adds in a note (p. 57, note 1) that this refers to the "recension of the Śākalaka-School."
75. Sures Chandra Banerji (A Companion To Sanskrit Literature, Second Edition, 1989, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, pp. 300–301) says that "Of the 21 recensions of this Veda, that were known at one time, we have got only two, viz. Śākala and Vāṣkala."
76. Maurice Winternitz (History of Sanskrit Literature, Revised English Translation Edition, 1926, vol. 1, p. 283.
77. Mantras of "khila" hymns were called khailika and not ṛcas (Khila meant distinct "part" of Rgveda separate from regular hymns; all regular hymns make up the akhilaor "the whole" recognised in a śākhā, although khila hymns have sanctified roles in rituals from ancient times).
78. Hermann Grassmann had numbered the hymns 1 through to 1028, putting the vālakhilya at the end. Griffith's translation has these 11 at the end of the eighth mandala, after 8.92 in the regular series.
79. cf. Preface to Khila section by C.G.Kāshikar in Volume-5 of Pune Edition of RV (in references).
80. These Khilani hymns have also been found in a manuscript of the Śākala recension of the Kashmir Rigveda (and are included in the Poone edition).
81. equalling 40 times 10,800, the number of bricks used for the uttaravedi: the number is motivated numerologically rather than based on an actual syllable count.
82. Stephanie W. Jamison & Joel P. Brereton 2014, p. 16.
83. Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (2014), The Rigveda : the earliest religious poetry of India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199370184, pp. 13–14
84. Barbara A. West (2010). Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Asia and Oceania. Infobase. p. 282. ISBN 978-1-4381-1913-7.
85. Michael McDowell; Nathan Robert Brown (2009). World Religions at Your Fingertips. Penguin. p. 208. ISBN 978-1-101-01469-1.
86. "Rigveda". UNESCO Memory of the World Programme. Archived from the original on 17 January 2014.
87. cf. Editorial notes in various volumes of Pune Edition, see references.
88. John Collinson Nesfield (1893). A Catalogue of Sanscrit MSS.: Existing in Oudh Discovered Oct.-Dec. 1874, Jan.-Sept. 1875, 1876, 1877, 1879-1885, 1887-1890. pp. 1–27.
89. Rigvedasamhita, Rigvedasamhita-Padapatha and Rigvedasamhitabhashya, Memory of the World Register, UNESCO (2006), page 2, Quote: "One manuscript written on birch bark is in the ancient Sharada script and the remaining 29 manuscripts are written in the Devanagari script. All the manuscripts are in Sanskrit language."
90. Julius Eggeling (1887). Vedic manuscripts (Catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts in the library of the India office: Part 1 of 7). India Office, London. OCLC 492009385.
91. Arthur Coke Burnell (1869). Catalogue of a Collection of Sanskrit Manuscripts. Trübner. pp. 5–8.
92. A copy of the Rigveda samhita Books 1 to 3 in Tamil Grantha script is preserved at the Cambridge University Sanskrit Manuscript Library (MS Or.2366). This talapatrapalm leaf manuscript was likely copied sometime between mid-18th and late-19th-century. Ṛgveda Saṃhitā (MS Or.2366), University of Cambridge, UK
93. A B Keith (1920). Rigveda Brahmanas, Harvard Oriental Series, Vol 25. Harvard University Press. p. 103.
94. Colin Mackenzie; Horace Hayman Wilson (1828). Mackenzie Collection: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental Manuscripts and Other Articles Illustrative of the Literature, History, Statistics and Antiquities of the South of India. Asiatic Press. pp. 1–3.
95. Michael Witzel (1997), The Vedic Canon and Its Political Milieu, Harvard University, p. 284
96. Rigvedasamhita, Rigvedasamhita-Padapatha and Rigvedasamhitabhashya, Memory of the World Register, UNESCO (2006), page 3, Quote: "A particularly important manuscript in this collection is the one from Kashmir, written on birch bark, in the Sharada script (No. 5/1875-76)."
97. Avari 2007, p. 77.
98. James Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics at Google Books, Vol. 7, Harvard Divinity School, TT Clark, pp. 51–56
99. Antonio de Nicholas (2003), Meditations Through the Rig Veda: Four-Dimensional Man, ISBN 978-0595269259, pp. 273–274
100. Edmund Gosse, Short histories of the literatures of the world, p. 181, at Google Books, New York: Appleton, p. 181
101. Robert Hume, Mundaka Upanishad, Thirteen Principal Upanishads, Oxford University Press, pp. 374–375
102. Max Muller, The Upanishads, Part 2, Mundaka Upanishad, Oxford University Press, pp. 38–40
103. Edited, with an English translation, by M. Haug (2 vols., Bombay, 1863). An edition in Roman transliteration, with extracts from the commentary, has been published by Th. Aufrecht (Bonn, 1879).
104. Paul Deussen, Sixty Upanishads of the Veda, Volume 1, Motilal Banarsidass, ISBN 978-8120814684, pp. 7–14
105. Paul Deussen, Sixty Upanishads of the Veda, Volume 1, Motilal Banarsidass, ISBN 978-8120814684, pp. 21–23
106. Witzel, Michael (2003). "Vedas and Upanisads". In Flood, Gavin (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. pp. 69–70. ISBN 978-0631215356.
107. Witzel, Michael (2003). "Vedas and Upanisads". In Flood, Gavin (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. p. 71. ISBN 978-0631215356.
108. M.V. Nadkarni (2011). Ethics for our Times: Essays in Gandhian Perspective: Second Edition. Oxford University Press. pp. 205–206. ISBN 978-0-19-908935-2.
109. Nadkarni, M.V. (2011). "Ethics in Hinduism". Ethics For Our Times. Oxford University Press. pp. 211–239. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198073864.003.0010. ISBN 978-0-19-807386-4.
110. Stephanie W. Jamison (2014). The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India. Oxford University Press. pp. 1586–1587. ISBN 978-0-19-937018-4.
111. Stephanie W. Jamison (2014). The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India. Oxford University Press. pp. 1363–1366. ISBN 978-0-19-937018-4.
112. Stephanie Jamison; Joel Brereton (2014). The Rigveda: 3-Volume Set. Oxford University Press. pp. 1363–1365. ISBN 978-0-19-972078-1.
113. see e.g. Jeaneane D. Fowler (2002), Perspectives of Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Hinduism, Sussex University Press, ISBN 978-1898723936, pp. 38–45
114. GJ Larson, RS Bhattacharya and K Potter (2014), The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume 4, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691604411, pp. 5–6, 109–110, 180
115. "The Rig Veda/Mandala 1/Hymn 164 – Wikisource, the free online library". En.wikisource.org. 14 April 2012. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
116. Stephen Phillips (2009), Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth: A Brief History and Philosophy, Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0231144858, p. 401
117. Garry Trompf (2005), In Search of Origins, 2nd Edition, Sterling, ISBN 978-1932705515, pp. 60–61
118. Thomas Paul Urumpackal (1972), Organized Religion According to Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, Georgian University Press, ISBN 978-8876521553, pp. 229–232 with footnote 133
119. Franklin Edgerton (1996), The Bhagavad Gita, Cambridge University Press, Reprinted by Motilal Banarsidass, ISBN 978-8120811492, pp. 11–12
120. Elizabeth Reed (2001), Hindu Literature: Or the Ancient Books of India, Simon Publishers, ISBN 978-1931541039, pp. 16–19
121. a "strong traditional streak that (by Western standards) would undoubtedly be thought atheistic"; hymn 10.130 can be read to be in "an atheistic spirit". Michael Ruse (2015), Atheism, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199334582, p. 185.
122. Frits Staal (2009), Discovering the Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights, Penguin, ISBN 978-0143099864, pp. xv–xvi
123. D Sharma (2011), Classical Indian Philosophy: A Reader, Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0231133999, pp. 196–197
124. Jan Westerhoff (2009), Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195384963, p. 290
125. Harold G. Coward 1990, p. 106.
126. Frederick M. Smith, 'Purāņaveda,' in Laurie L. Patton (ed.), Authority, Anxiety, and Canon: Essays in Vedic Interpretation, SUNY Press 1994 p. 99. Arthur Llewellyn Basham, Kenneth G. Zysk, The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism ,Oxford University Press, 1989 p. 7, Ram Gopal, The History and Principles of Vedic Interpretation, Concept Publishing Company, 1983 ch.2 pp. 7–20
127. Roshen Dalal (2014). The Vedas: An Introduction to Hinduism's Sacred Texts. Penguin Books. pp. 16–17, See also the glossary on Vyasa. ISBN 978-81-8475-763-7.
128. edited in 8 volumes by Vishva Bandhu, 1963–1966.
129. Salmond, Noel A. (2004). "Dayananda Saraswati". Hindu iconoclasts: Rammohun Roy, Dayananda Sarasvati and Nineteenth-Century Polemics Against Idolatry. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. pp. 114–115. ISBN 978-0-88920-419-5.
130. The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo by V. P. Varma (1960), Motilal Banarsidass, p. 139, ISBN 9788120806863
131. Sri Aurobindo 1998, p. 20-21.
132. N Singh (1992), The Vivaha (Marriage) Samskara as a Paradigm for Religio-cultural Integration in Hinduism, Journal for the Study of Religion, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 31–40
133. Swami Vivekananda (2005). Prabuddha Bharata: Or Awakened India. Prabuddha Bharata Press. pp. 362, 594.
134. Andrea Pinkney (2014), Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia (Editors: Bryan Turner and Oscar Salemink), Routledge, ISBN 978-0415635035, pp. 31–32
135. Jeffrey Haines (2008), Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics, Routledge, ISBN 978-0415600293, p. 80
136. Axel Michaels (2004), Hinduism: Past and Present, Princeton University Press, p.18; see also Julius Lipner (2012), Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, Routledge, p.77; and Brian K. Smith (2008), Hinduism, p.101, in Jacob Neusner (ed.), Sacred Texts and Authority, Wipf and Stock Publishers.
137. N. Kazanas (2002), Indigenous Indo-Aryans and the Rigveda, Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 30, pp. 275–289;
N. Kazanas (2000), 'A new date for the Rgveda', in G. C. Pande (Ed) Chronology and Indian Philosophy, special issue of the JICPR, Delhi;
N. D. Kazanas (2001), Indo-European Deities and the Rgveda, Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 30, pp. 257–264,
ND Kazanas (2003), Final Reply, Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 31, pp. 187–189
138. Edwin Bryant (2004), The Quest for the Origins of the Vedic Culture, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195169478
139. Tilak, Bal Gangadhar (2 June 2008). Orion: Or Researches Into The Antiquity Of The Vedas. Kessinger Publishing, LLC. ISBN 978-1436556910.
140. Agrawal, D. P. (2002). Comments on "Indigenous IndoAryans". Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 30, pp. 129–135;
A. Parpola (2002), 'Comments on "Indigenous Indo-Aryans"', Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 30, pp. 187–191
141. Michael Witzel, The Pleiades and the Bears viewed from inside the Vedic texts, EVJS Vol. 5 (1999), issue 2 (December);
Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate. Aditya Prakashan. ISBN 978-81-86471-77-7.;
Bryant, Edwin and Laurie L. Patton (2005) The Indo-Aryan Controversy, Routledge/Curzon, ISBN 978-0700714636
142. John J. Lowe (2015). Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit: The Syntax and Semantics of Adjectival Verb Forms. Oxford University Press. p. 329. ISBN 978-0-19-870136-1.
143. Stephanie W. Jamison & Joel P. Brereton 2014, pp. 3, 76.
144. Frits Staal (2009), Discovering the Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights, Penguin, ISBN 978-0143099864, p. 107
145. Stephanie W. Jamison & Joel P. Brereton 2014, p. 3.
146. A. A. MacDonnel (2000 print edition), India's Past: A Survey of Her Literatures, Religions, Languages and Antiquities, Asian Educational Services, ISBN 978-8120605701, p. 15
147. Wilson, H. H. Ṛig-Veda-Sanhitā: A Collection of Ancient Hindu Hymns. 6 vols. (London, 1850–88); reprint: Cosmo Publications (1977)
148. Stephanie W. Jamison; Joel Brereton (2014). The Rigveda: 3-Volume Set. Oxford University Press. pp. 19–20. ISBN 978-0-19-972078-1.
149. "Rig – Veda – Sanhita – Vol.1". Dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080. 21 March 2006. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
150. "The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute : The Manuscript Department". Bori.ac.in. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
151. B. van Nooten and G. Holland, Rig Veda. A metrically restored text. Cambridge: Harvard Oriental Series 1994, Review, Thomson and Slocum
152. Stephanie W. Jamison & Joel P. Brereton 2014, pp. 19–20.
153. neh.gov, retrieved 22 March 2007.
154. Müller 1892.
155. Oberlies 1998, p. 158.
156. Oberlies 1998, p. 155.

Bibliography

Editions


• Stephanie W. Jamison; Joel P. Brereton (2014). The Rigveda. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-937018-4.
• editio princeps: Friedrich Max Müller, The Hymns of the Rigveda, with Sayana's commentary, London, 1849–75, 6 vols., 2nd ed. 4 vols., Oxford, 1890–92.
• Theodor Aufrecht, 2nd ed., Bonn, 1877.
• Sontakke, N. S. (1933). Rgveda-Samhitā: Śrimat-Sāyanāchārya virachita-bhāṣya-sametā. Sāyanachārya (commentary) (First ed.). Vaidika Samśodhana Maṇḍala.. The Editorial Board for the First Edition included N. S. Sontakke (Managing Editor), V. K. Rājvade, M. M. Vāsudevaśāstri, and T. S. Varadarājaśarmā.
• B. van Nooten und G. Holland, Rig Veda, a metrically restored text, Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1994.
• Rgveda-Samhita, Text in Devanagari, English translation Notes and indices by H. H. Wilson, Ed. W. F. Webster, originally in 1888, Published Nag Publishers 1990, 11A/U.A. Jawaharnagar, Delhi-7.

Commentary

• Sayana (14th century)
o ed. Müller 1849–75 (German translation);
o ed. Müller (original commentary of Sāyana in Sanskrit based on 24 manuscripts).
o ed. Sontakke et al., published by Vaidika Samsodhana Mandala, Pune (2nd ed. 1972) in 5 volumes.
• Rgveda-Samhitā Srimat-sāyanāchārya virachita-bhāṣya-sametā, ed. by Sontakke et al., published by Vaidika Samśodhana Mandala, Pune-9, 1972, in 5 volumes (It is original commentary of Sāyana in Sanskrit based on over 60 manuscripts).
• Sri Aurobindo (1998), The Secret of veda (PDF), Sri Aurobindo Ashram press
• Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire (Commentary on the Rig Veda), Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-22-5 Rig Veda - Hymns to the Mystic Fire - Sri Aurobindo - INDEX
• Raimundo Pannikar (1972), The Vedic Experience, University of California Press

Philology

• Harold G. Coward (1990). The Philosophy of the Grammarians, in Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies Volume 5 (Editor: Karl Potter). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-81-208-0426-5.
• Vashishtha Narayan Jha, A Linguistic Analysis of the Rgveda-Padapatha Sri Satguru Publications, Delhi (1992).
• Bjorn Merker, Rig Veda Riddles In Nomad Perspective, Mongolian Studies, Journal of the Mongolian Society XI, 1988.
• Thomas Oberlies, Die Religion des Rgveda, Wien 1998.
• Oldenberg, Hermann (1894). Hymnen des Rigveda. 1. Teil: Metrische und textgeschichtliche Prolegomena. Berlin 1888. (please add), Wiesbaden 1982.
• —Die Religion des Veda. Berlin 1894; Stuttgart 1917; Stuttgart 1927; Darmstadt 1977
• —Vedic Hymns, The Sacred Books of the East Vol l. 46 ed. Friedrich Max Müller, Oxford 1897
• Adolf Kaegi, The Rigveda: The Oldest Literature of the Indians (trans. R. Arrowsmith), Boston, Ginn and Co. (1886), 2004 reprint: ISBN 978-1-4179-8205-9.
• Mallory, J. P.; et al. (1989). "Indo-Iranian Languages in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture". Fitzroy Dearborn (published 1997).

Historical

• Anthony, David W. (2007), The Horse The Wheel And Language. How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped The Modern World, Princeton University Press
• Avari, Burjor (2007), India: The Ancient Past, London: Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-35616-9
• Bryant, Edwin (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-513777-4.
• Dwyer, Rachel (2013), What Do Hindus Believe?, Granta Books, ISBN 9781847089403
• Flood, Gavin D. (1996), An Introduction to Hinduism, Cambridge University Press
• George Erdosy (1995). The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-014447-5.
• Hexam, Irving (2011), Understanding World Religions: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, ISBN 9780310314486
• Gregory Possehl; Michael Witzel (2002). "Vedic". In Peter N. Peregrine; Melvin Ember (eds.). Encyclopedia of Prehistory. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4684-7135-9.
• Lal, B.B. 2005. The Homeland of the Aryans. Evidence of Rigvedic Flora and Fauna & Archaeology, New Delhi, Aryan Books International.
• Talageri, Shrikant: The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, 2000. ISBN 81-7742-010-0
• Witzel, Michael (1995), "Early Sanskritization: Origin and Development of the Kuru state" (PDF), EJVS, 1 (4), archived from the original (PDF) on 20 February 2012
• Witzel, Michael (1997), "The Development of the Vedic Canon and its Schools: The Social and Political Milieu", Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts: New Approaches to the Study of the Vedas, Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora; vol. 2, Cambridge: Harvard University Press
• Wood, Michael (2007), The Story of India Hardcover, BBC Worldwide, ISBN 9780563539155

External links

• Media related to Rig Veda at Wikimedia Commons

Text

For links to translations, see Translations section above.
• Devanagari and transliteration experimental online text at: sacred-texts.com
• ITRANS, Devanagari, transliteration online text and PDF, several versions prepared by Detlef Eichler
• Transliteration, metrically restored online text, at: Linguistics Research Center, Univ. of Texas
• The Hymns of the Rigveda, Editio Princeps by Friedrich Max Müller (large PDF files of book scans). Two editions: London, 1877 (Samhita and Pada texts) and Oxford, 1890–92, with Sayana's commentary.
• Works by or about Rigveda at Internet Archive

Dictionary

• Rigvedic Dictionary by Hermann Grassmann (online database, uni-koeln.de)
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Friedrich August Rosen
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/8/20

Image
Friedrich August Rosen

Friedrich August Rosen (2 September 1805 in Hannover – 12 September 1837 in London) was a German Orientalist, brother of Georg Rosen and a close friend of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. He studied in Leipzig, and from 1824 in Berlin under Franz Bopp. He was briefly professor of oriental literature at the University of London and became secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1831.

His Rigvedae specimen, excerpts from the Rigveda based on manuscripts brought back from India by Colebrooke, were enthusiastically received by European academia as the first authentic evidence of the archaic Vedic Sanskrit language. His most important work was an edition of the entire Rigveda, left incomplete at his premature death shortly after his 32nd birthday. His translation of the first book of the Rigveda appeared posthumously in 1838. The remaining books remained unedited for another five decades, until the editio princeps of Max Müller in 1890-92.


Rosen also produced the first English translation of the Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala of al-Khwārizmī, in 1831.

Works

• "Radices linguae sanscritae" (Berlin 1827).
• Rigvedae specimen (London, 1830)
• the Algebra of Mohammed ben Musa (London 1831)
• Rigveda-Sanhita, "liber primus, sanscrite et latine" (London 1838)

References

• Meyers Konversationslexikon
• Rosen, Friedrich in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie

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Frederick Rosen (né Friedrich August Rosen) (1805–1837)
by UCL Bloomsbury Project
Accessed: 9/8/20

He was a German-born scholar of Sanskrit who was working in Paris when he was became one of the first appointments made by the Council of the University of London (later University College London).

In May 1828, at the age of 22, he was appointed Professor of Sanskrit, to which were soon added Arabic and Persian, and in 1829, after the resignation through ill health of the elderly John Borthwick Gilchrist, Hindustani.

The University’s Education Committee agreed at its meeting of 26 November 1828 to ask Rosen to “equip himself” to teach Hindustani as soon as possible, since Gilchrist was too ill to give the classes (Committee Minutes 1828–1829, UCL Records Office).

In July 1828 he also offered to teach Latin until the vacancy was filled after the sudden resignation of the first appointee to the Chair of Latin (or Roman Language and Literature, as it was then called), Rev. John Williams, three months before the University was due to open to students.

In fact, Rosen was not needed, as Thomas Hewitt Key had been swiftly appointed in Williams’s place (Council Minutes, vol. I, 18 and 24 July 1828, UCL Records Office).

In October 1830 Rosen did step in to help, this time by taking over the teaching of the Professor of German, Ludwig von Mühlenfels, who had asked for a leave of absence (Council Minutes, vol. II, 15 October 1830, UCL Records Office).

Though clearly one of the most distinguished appointments to the new university, Rosen was not well treated by his employer; he was the most glaring victim of the professorial salaries system adopted by the institution.

The Council left it late to decide on the method and amount which Professors should be paid; money was tight, and the idea was that salaries should be a proportion of the fees paid by students, with a smaller proportion (one third) going to the University chest for general purposes.

But the Council, though it overestimated the number of students who would eventually enrol, realised that in the early years a guaranteed salary would be required.

It decided in July 1828, only two months before the opening of the University, that Professors should receive a guaranteed sum of £300 if the fees fell short of this amount, or £250 for staff in clinical medicine and surgery, as it was understood that they would earn from the outside work they already undertook in hospitals and other institutions (Council Minutes, vol. I, 10 July 1828, UCL Records Office).

These guarantees were kept in place for the first three years of the university’s existence, after which they were abandoned, leaving several Professors in severe financial difficulty.

The language professors were even worse off, as they were not included in the original guarantee, it being assumed that they would “derive an income from private pupils” (Education Committee, 27 October 1828, Committee Minutes 1828–1829, UCL Records Office).

This was hardly the case for Rosen.

In January 1830 two members of Council, Joseph Hume and James Loch, corresponded about the need for young men to be taught Oriental Languages before going to India and therefore the desirability that the East India Company, for which Hume had worked, should contribute towards the salary of Rosen.

After all, Rosen had been “brought over from Prussia” by the University because he was known to be “the most celebrated man on the Continent, or in England, for the joint knowledge of Sanscrit [sic], Arabic & Persian, to what he has added, Hindustani” (Joseph Hume to James Loch, 17 January 1830, Loch Papers MS Add 131, UCL Special Collections).

Two months later the Education Committee recommended that Rosen be guaranteed the lowly sum of £150 a year in addition to his proportion of “the fees he may receive from his pupils”, which the committee must have known would be little or nothing (Council Minutes, vol. II, 27 March 1830, UCL Records Office).

Rosen stuck to his task on this meagre salary, but resigned with some other colleagues on a matter of principle in July 1830, in protest at the removal of the Professor of Anatomy, Granville Sharp Pattison.

In 1834 he accepted the invitation to return as Professor of Oriental Languages, but died, poor and unmarried, in September 1837, days after his 32nd birthday (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, H. Hale Bellot, University College London 1826–1926, 1929).

In addition to his connections to University College London, Rosen was employed at the British Museum.

In May 1834 he was engaged by the Museum“to assist in revising and correcting the Catalogue of the Syriac MSS, his remuneration to be 20/- for one day’s service in each week” (Committee Minutes, 10 May 1834, vol. XIII, British Museum Central Archive).

From April 1835 Rosen was employed on the catalogue three days a week (Committee Minutes, 11 April 1835, vol. XIV, British Museum Central Archive).

After his premature death in 1837, the Museum commissioned the sculptor Richard Westmacott to make a bust of him “that the same might be preserved in the British Museum in memory of the worth, services and learning of that much to be lamented gentleman” (Committee Minutes, 20 April 1839, vol. XVII, British Museum Central Archive).

A copy of the catalogue of Syriac manuscripts, on its completion in 1839, was ordered by the Trustees to be sent to Rosen’s father in Germany (Committee Minutes, 22 January 1839, vol. XVII, British Museum Central Archive).

Rosen was also a contributor to the Penny Cyclopaedia published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

Twelve letters from Rosen to Thomas Coates, Secretary of the SDUK, between 1829 and 1836 (as listed in Janet Percival, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1826-1848: A Handlist of the Society’s Correspondence and Papers, 1978) are now lost from UCL Special Collections, and no further details of Rosen’s articles appear in Monica Grobel, ‘The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 1826–1846’, unpub. MA thesis, University of London, 1933.

However, Charles Knight, the SDUK’s publisher, wrote in his memoirs that Rosen had contributed to the Penny Cyclopaedia “all the articles on Oriental literature from ‘Abbasides’ to ‘Ethiopian Language’ ” (Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century: With a Prelude of Early Reminiscences, vol. II, 1864).

***********************

Friedrich August Rosen
by Wikisource
Accessed: 9/8/20

ROSEN, FRIEDRICH AUGUST (1805–1837), Sanskrit scholar, son of Friedrich Ballhorn Rosen, a legal writer, was born at Hanover on 2 Sept. 1805. His early education was conducted at the Göttingen Gymnasium, and in 1822 he entered the university of Leipzig, where he abandoned law in favour of oriental studies. Resolving to devote himself specially to Sanskrit, he removed to Berlin in 1824 to enjoy the advantage of Bopp's lectures. The results are partly to be seen in his ‘Corporis radicum Sanscritarum prolusio’ (Berlin, 1826), and its sequel ‘Radices Sanscritæ’ (Berlin, 1827), the originality and importance of which have been fully recognised by later scholars.

Rosen's desire for a post in the Prussian legation at Constantinople not being realised, he went in 1827 to Paris to study Semitic languages under Silvestre de Sacy; but he had scarcely settled there when he received an invitation to fill the chair of oriental languages at the recently (1826) founded University College of London, which was opened for study in 1828.

For two years he persevered in the uncongenial task of giving practical elementary lessons in Persian, Arabic, and Hindustani to the students at the college. Donaldson says that to Rosen ‘we really owe indirectly the first application of comparative philology to the public teaching of the classical languages, a merit which has been too readily conceded to the Greek and Latin professors, who merely transmitted … information derived from their German colleague’ (New Cratylus, 3rd edit. p. 55).

His remarkable linguistic powers had attracted the notice of Henry Thomas Colebrooke [q. v.], by whose advice he afterwards brought out the ‘Algebra of Mohammed ben Musa,’ in Arabic and English, in the publications of the Oriental Translation Fund, in 1831—a singular illustration of versatility. Believing that the connection he was forming with men of learning and influence in London would procure him the means of continuing his researches, he resigned, in July 1830, the professorship at University College, and endeavoured to make a modest income by writing for the ‘Penny Cyclopædia,’ revising the volume on ‘The Hindoos’ for the Library of Entertaining Knowledge (to which he contributed an original sketch of Indian literature), editing Haughton's ‘Bengali and Sanskrit Dictionary,’ and giving lessons in German [see Haughton, Sir Graves Champney].

While thus struggling to maintain himself he never lost sight of his ambition to produce something monumental in Sanskrit scholarship. In 1830 he issued his ‘Rig-vedæ Specimen,’ and his spare time thenceforward was devoted to preparing a text and Latin translation of the ‘Rigveda,’ the first volume of which (‘Rigveda Sanhita lib. prim.’) was published by the Oriental Translation Fund in 1838—after the young scholar's premature death. He had been reinstated at University College as professor of Sanskrit in 1836, but recognition came too late. Overwork, and the struggle for bare subsistence, had broken his health. At the last he decided to return to his family in Germany, but died in Maddox Street, London, on 12 Sept. 1837, when he had only just reached the age of thirty-two.

He was buried in Kensal Green cemetery, where a monument was erected to him by English friends and scholars. There is also a bust of him in the ‘large room,’ behind the reading room, of the British Museum.

Just before his death he had helped to edit the ‘Miscellaneous Essays’ of H. T. Colebrooke, who predeceased him by six months; and he was also assisting in the preparation of the catalogue of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Museum (‘Cat. Cod. MSS. … pars prima, Codices Syriacos et Carshunicos amplectens’ published in 1838), and in the ‘Catalogue of Sir R. Chambers's Sanskrit Manuscripts’ (1838). He was for many years honorary foreign and Germany secretary to the Oriental Translation Fund and a member of the committee.

[Klatt in Allgem. Deutsch. Biogr. s.v.; Ann. Report of Royal Asiatic Society, 1838, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. v. p. vii, 1839; P. von Bohlen's Autobiographie; Ann. Reg. lxxix. 207, 1837; information from J. M. Horsburgh, esq., secretary of University College, and Professor Cecil Bendall; Brit. Mus. Cat.]
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Alois Anton Führer
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/8/20

-- Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist, by Andrew Huxley

-- Mr. [Bernard] Houghton and Dr. [Alois Anton] Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences, by Andrew Huxley

-- Lumbini On Trial: The Untold Story. Lumbini Is An Astonishing Fraud Begun in 1896, by T. A. Phelps

-- The Piprahwa Deceptions: Set-ups and Showdown, by T.A. Phelps

-- Investigation of the Correctness of the Historical Dating, by Wieslaw Z. Krawcewicz, Gleb V. Nosovskij and Petr P. Zabreiko

-- Alois Anton Führer, by Wikipedia

-- The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer: An Archaeological Scandal, by Charles Allen

-- William Claxton Peppe: Persons of Indian Studies, by Prof. Dr. Klaus Karttunen

-- Monograph On Buddha Shakyamuni's Birth-Place: The Nepalese Tarai, by Alois Anton Fuhrer

-- Georg Bühler, by Wikipedia

-- Archaeological Survey of India, by Wikipedia

-- Vincent Arthur Smith, by Wikipedia

-- ART. XXIX.—The Conquests of Samudra Gupta, by VINCENT A. SMITH, M.B..A.S., Indian Civil Service

Highlights:

In 1896, accompanied by the local Nepalese governor, General Khadga Shamsher, Führer discovered a major inscription on a pillar of Ashoka, an inscription which, together with other evidence, confirmed Lumbini as the birthplace of the Buddha.
The pillar itself had been known for sometime already, as it had already been reported by Khadga Shamsher to Vincent Arthur Smith a few year earlier. Führer made his great discovery when he dug the earth around the pillar and reported the discovery of the inscription in a pristine state about one meter under the surface.

Führer claimed that the locals called the site "Rummindei", which he identified with the legendary "Lumbini", whereas it was found that the site was only called "Rupa-devi".

The authenticity of the discovery has long been doubted, and was openly disputed in a 2008 book by British writer Charles Allen.

Following the discovery of the pillar, Führer relied on the accounts of ancient Chinese pilgrims to search for Kapilavastu, which he thought had to be in Tilaurakot. Unable to find anything, he started excavating some structures he said were stupas, and was in the process of faking pre-Mauryan inscriptions on bricks, when he was caught in the act by Vincent Arthur Smith. The inscriptions were bluntly characterized by Smith as "impudent forgeries".

Around the same time, Führer was selling fake relics "authentified" but an inexistent inscription of Upagupta, the preceptor of Ashoka, to Shin U Ma, an important monk in Burma. He wrote to the Burmese monk: "Perhaps you have seen from the papers that I succeeded in discovering the Lumbini grove where Lord Buddha was born", noting that "you have unpacked the sacred relics of our Blessed Lord Buddha which are undoubtedly authentic, and which will prove a blessing to those which worship them faithfully". An "authentic tooth relics of the Buddha" sent by Führer in 1896 turned out to have been carved from a piece of ivory, and another sent in 1897 was that of a horse. The forgery was reported in 1898 to the British North-Western Provinces Government in India by Burmologist and member of the Burma commission Bernard Houghton, and started an enquiry which would lead to Führer's resignation on 16 September 1898...

These discoveries, at the time they were made, generated fantastic praise for the work of Führer. According to the New York Post (3 May 1896) the Nigliva discovery "seems to carry the origin of Buddhism much further back". The Liverpool Mercury (29 December 1896) reports that the discovery that Lumbini (also called Paderia) was "the actual birthplace of the Buddha ought to bring devout joy to about 627,000,000 people". The Pall Mall Gazette (18 April 1898) related that the Piprahwa discovery "contains no less a relic than the bones of the Buddha himself".

Führer's archaeological career ended in disgrace. Führer came under suspicion from March 1898 following the reported forgeries of the Buddha's relics.

A formal inquiry was launched into his activities, but officials struggled to find a "printable" reason for Führer's dismissal. Führer was officially confronted by Vincent Arthur Smith, who reported the forgeries of the Buddha's relics. Führer was exposed as "a forger and dealer in fake antiquities". Smith also blamed Führer for administrative failures in filing his reports to the Government, and for a false report about his preparations for future publications on his archaeological research: Führer was obliged to admit "that every statement in it [the report] was absolutely false." The false inscriptions supposed to authentify the Buddha relics were not mentioned in the investigations, apparently out of fear of casting doubt on the other epigraphical discoveries made by Führer. Similarly, the false publication of the ancient Burmese inscriptions, were the object of an institutional cover-up, which would not come to light before 1921, with the revelation of their inexistence made by Charles Duroiselle.

In 1901, Vincent Arthur Smith, after retirement, chose to reveal the blunt truth about the Nepalese discoveries and published a stark analysis of Führer's activities, apparently worried that "the reserved language used in previous official documents has been sometimes misinterpreted". In particular, Smith said of Führer's description of the archaeological remains at Nigali Sagar that "every word of it is false", and characterized several of Führer's epigraphic discoveries as "impudent forgeries". However Smith never challenged the authenticity of the Lumbini pillar inscription and the Nigali Sagar inscription discovered by Führer.

Under official instructions from the Government of India, Führer's resignation was accepted and he was relieved of his positions, his papers seized and his offices inspected by Vincent Arthur Smith on 22 September 1898. Führer had written in 1897 a monograph on his discoveries in Nigali Sagar and Lumbini, Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's birth-place in the Nepalese tarai, which was withdrawn from circulation by the Government.

-- Alois Anton Führer, by Wikipedia


On 8 April 1898 Bühler drowned in Lake Constance, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Contemporary accounts mostly attributed it to an accident, but it has been speculated that it was a suicide motivated by Bühler's connections to a scandal involving his former student Alois Anton Führer.

-- Georg Bühler, by Wikipedia


Image
Anton Alois Führer (1853-1930)
Born: November 26, 1853, Limburg an der Lahn, Germany
Died: November 5, 1930 (aged 76), Binningen, Switzerland

Alois Anton Führer (26 November 1853 – 5 November 1930) was a German Indologist who worked for the Archaeological Survey of India.[1] He is known for his archaeological excavations, which he believed proved that Gautama Buddha was born in Lumbini, Nepal.[2] Führer's archaeological career ended in disgrace as "a forger and dealer in fake antiquities", and he had to resign from his position in 1898.[3]

Early life

Alois Anton Führer was born on 26 November 1853 in Limburg an der Lahn, Germany, into a German Catholic family. He studied Roman Catholic theology and Oriental studies at the University of Würzburg, ordinated in 1878 and received his PhD in 1879. His Sanskrit lecturer, Julius Jolly, was associated with the Bombay School of Indology. Probably due to him, he was appointed as a teacher of Sanskrit at St Xavier's Institute in Bombay (now Mumbai).[4]


Professor Julius Jolly (28 December 1849 – 24 April 1932) was a German scholar and translator of Indian law and medicine.

Jolly was born in Heidelberg, the son of physicist Philipp Johann Gustav von Jolly (1809–1884), and studied comparative linguistics, Sanskrit, and Iranian languages in Berlin and Leipzig. His doctoral thesis was Die Moduslehre in den alt-iranischen Dialekten ("Moods in Ancient Iranian Dialects"). Jolly became a Professor in the University of Würzburg in 1877, in the fields of comparative linguistics and Sanskrit. In 1882–1883 he visited India as Tagore professor of law, Calcutta, where he gave twelve lectures later published as Outlines of an History of the Hindu Law of Partition, Inheritance and Adoption (1885).

In 1896, Jolly contributed to Grundriss der Indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde ("Encyclopedia of Indo-Aryan Research"), later revised by Jolly and in 1928 translated by Balakrishna Ghosh under the title Hindu Law and Custom. In this volume, Jolly discussed family law and heirship, the law of things and obligations, offences and penalties, court procedure and customs and traditions. In 1901 he also contributed a study of Indian medicine, still considered one of the most complete and reliable studies of the history of Indian medical literature.

Jolly edited the law books of Vishnu, Narada, and Manu, and translated the first two for the Sacred Books of the East (Vol. 7, The Institutes of Visnu, 1880; and Vol. 33, The Minor Law-Books: Brihaspati, 1889). He retired in 1922, when he became co-editor of the Journal of Indian History, but continued to give lectures in Würzburg till 1928. He published a new critical edition of Kautilya's Arthashastra in collaboration with R. Schmidt in the "Panjab Sanskrit Series", 1923–1924.


Jolly was an honorary doctor of medicine of Georg August University of Göttingen and Oxford University.

-- Julius Jolly (Indologist), by Wikipedia

In 1882, Führer was able to publish two lectures about Hindu Law in the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.[5] Retrospectively, the lectures have been shown to be almost entirely plagiarized from earlier works: only about one tenth of the content has been shown to be his own.[5]

Führer left the Catholic Church around 1884 and converted to Anglicanism which cost him his job; he returned to Germany, from where he applied for a new job in the museum in Lucknow in India.[6]

Appointment in India and archaeological activities

Image
Building of the Choti Chattar Manzil, initial location of the Lucknow Provincial Museum.

Curator of Lucknow Provincial Museum

Führer came back to India in 1885 and on his arrival Alfred Comyn Lyall appointed him Curator of the Lucknow Provincial Museum. Führer started work in March and immediately set about improving the museum. Impressed by the changes, Lyall, the Chair of the Museum's Management Committee, wrote to Calcutta asking whether a part-time job for Führer could be found with the Archaeological Survey of India.[6] He thus came to hold a double appointment, one as Curator at the museum and the other as Archaeological Surveyor to the North-Western Provinces. As his Progress Reports show, he was part of the N-W.P. and Oudh Circle of the Archaeological Survey.[6]

Nepal (1886)

In 1886, Führer was instructed by the government of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh and the Government of India to carry out an expedition to Nepal.[7]

Mathura glory (1889-1891)

Image
General view of the excavations in January 1889 at the Jain site of Kankali Tila, Mathura.

Later, Führer carried out very successful excavations at the Kankali Tila site of Mathura between 1889 and 1891 which improved understanding of the history of Jainism and gained him a reputation "as the most successful of the professional excavators".[8] Still, Führer's reports continued to be the result of extensive plagiarization, taking especially from the work of his superior Georg Bühler at that time, although this is not clear-cut and may only be the result of intensive cooperation between the two.[8] Führer's reports are also noted for being particularly vague and lacking details.[8]

From 1888 started severe lobbying aimed at reducing Government expenses, and at curtailing the budget of the Archaeological Survey of India, a period of about ten years known as the "Buck crisis", after the Liberal Edward Buck.[9] In effect, this severely threatened the employment of the employees of the ASI, including Führer, who had just started a family and become a father.[9] These existential threats to his livelihood may have become "a motive for misbehaviour" on the part of Führer.[9]

Ramnagar failure (1891)

In 1891, Führer started excavations at the Ramnagar site of Ahichchhatra.[10][9] The excavations were quite disappointing.[9] Pressured by the need to get results, Führer started to report invented discoveries, such as ancient dated inscriptions that never existed, and non existent Jain inscriptions.[9] Heinrich Lüders would later be able to show that the supposed Jain inscriptions were fakes compiled from earlier real inscriptions found in Mathura.[9] In 1912 Lüders summarized "As all statements about epigraphical finds that admit of verification have proved to be false, it is very likely that no inscriptions at all have turned up".[9]

In 1912, the German Indologist Heinrich Lüders identified in the Lucknow Provincial Museum forged inscriptions in Brahmi on artifacts belonging to Führer's excavations at Mathura and Ramnagar, forgeries which he attributed to Führer himself.[11][12] Some of the forged inscriptions were direct copies of inscriptions on other objects, previously published in Epigraphia Indica.[11][13]

Sanchi inscriptions (1891-1892)

Führer went to Sanchi during the 1891–1892 season and recovered tens of unpublished donative inscriptions, but these could not have the impact he hoped for.[9] Only a new inscription by King Ashoka, for example, could achieve sufficient impact with public opinion.[9]

Meanwhile, Edward Buck announced in 1892 that the Archaeological Survey of India would be shut down and all ASI staff would be dismissed by 1895, in order to generate savings for the Government's budget.[9][14] The prospect of being fired anyway may have prompted Führer to act recklessly with his discoveries in a desperate attempt to avoid that fate.[9] A great discovery within the next three years for example might be able to turn public opinion and save the funding of the ASI.[9]

Burma invented inscriptions (1893-1894)

Reports of Führer's Burma "discoveries"


Image
Führer's Burma discoveries in The Indian Antiquary Vol-xxiii (1894).[15]

Image
Führer's Burma "discoveries" in the Gazeteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States in 1900.[16][17]

In 1893–1894, Führer was on a survey tour to Burma. In 1894, he published in his Progress Reports of the Epigraphical Section in the Working Season of 1893–94 the revolutionary discovery of three ancient Gupta inscriptions he said he found at Pagan and Tagaung in Burma, which pushed back the epigraphical knowledge of interactions with India by close to six centuries, generating huge acclaim.[18][19][20] He elaborated a detailed description of the inscriptions he had supposedly found, without ever producing a drawing or a photographic proof, although he had a draftsman and a photographer with him on the expedition.[21][18][22] Large extracts of his report were reproduced in The Indian Antiquary Vol-xxiv (1895).[23][24] His "discovery" was taken at face value, and its conclusions repeated by many scholarly works such as the Gazeteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States in 1900, before being adopted by popular works as well: "by the early 1900s, anyone with an interest in the archeology of Burma had ample opportunity to read about the Gupta inscriptions in Fuhrer's own words".[25][26]

It was only uncovered many years later that the inscriptions were actually inexistent, a fact which was revealed openly by Charles Duroiselle in 1921: "This Sanskrit inscription never existed, but was invented in toto by Dr Fuhrer while on a tour in Burma".[27]

Charles Duroiselle (1871-1951) was a French-born Burmese historian and archaeologist. He was a noted Pali scholar and epigrapher, and published monographs on Mandalay Palace and other related Burmese subjects. Throughout his career, he excavated over 120 monuments; his findings and acquisitions were meticulously documented and published in annual reports.

A member of the École française d'Extrême-Orient, he served as a Professor of Pali at the University of Rangoon. He also served as a Superintendent, Archaeological Survey of Burma from 1912 to 1940, succeeding Taw Sein Ko. In March 1910, he co-founded the Burma Research Society along with colleagues including John Sydenham Furnivall, May Oung, and Pe Maung Tin. The following year, the Journal of the Burma Research Society, was launched. He retired in 1939.

Publications

• A practical grammar of the Pāli language (1906)
• Jinacarita, or, The career of the conqueror: a Pāli poem (1906)
• Epigraphia Birmanica (1919)
• A list of inscriptions found in Burma (1921)
• Guide to the Mandalay Palace (1925)
• The Ānanda temple at Pagan (1937)

-- Charles Duroiselle, by Wikipedia


Source analysis shows that he imagined the content of these inscriptions by basing himself on older publications and a list of kings from the Indian Hatthipala Jataka.[28][27] These events marked "a scandalous career of forgery which would, some years later, come to an end in Kapilavastu".[18][29]

Nigali-Sagar pillar of Ashoka (1895)

Nigali Sagar pillar with inscription


Image
Image
Nigali Sagar pillar stump with exposed inscription, and separated top portion.[30]

Main article: Nigali Sagar

The Nigali Sagar pillar (also called "Nigliva" pillar) was initially discovered by a Nepalese officer on a hunting expedition in 1893.[31][32] In March 1895, Führer inspected the Nigali Sagar pillar, one of the pillars of Ashoka, and identified a Brahmi inscription said to be also from the time of Ashoka.[33]

Besides his description of the pillar, Führer made a detailed description of the remains of a monumental "Konagamana stupa" near the Nigali Sagar pillar,[34] which was later discovered to be an imaginative construct.[35] Furher wrote that "On all sides around this interesting monument are ruined monasteries, fallen columns, and broken sculptures", when actually nothing can be found around the pillar.[36] In the following years, inspections of the site showed that there were no such archaeological remains, and that, in respect to Führer's description "every word of it is false".[37] It was finally understood in 1901 that Führer had copied almost word-for-word this description from a report by Alexander Cunningham about the stupas in Sanchi.[38]

For the time being, the announcement of these great "discoveries" succeeded in bringing the "Buck Crisis" to an end, and the ASI was finally allowed in June 1895 to continue operations, subject to yearly approval based on successful digs every year.[18] Georg Bühler, writing in July 1895 in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, continued to advocate for the preservation of the Archaeological Survey of India, and expressed that what was needed were "new authentic documents" from the pre-Ashokan period, and they would "only be found underground".[18][39]

Lumbini Ashoka inscription (1896)

Lumbini pillar inscription


Image
The Ashoka inscription mentioning the birth of the Buddha, in Lumbini.

Main article: Lumbini pillar inscription

In 1896, accompanied by the local Nepalese governor, General Khadga Shamsher, Führer discovered a major inscription on a pillar of Ashoka, an inscription which, together with other evidence, confirmed Lumbini as the birthplace of the Buddha.[40] The pillar itself had been known for sometime already, as it had already been reported by Khadga Shamsher to Vincent Arthur Smith a few year earlier.[40] Führer made his great discovery when he dug the earth around the pillar and reported the discovery of the inscription in a pristine state about one meter under the surface.[40]

Führer claimed that the locals called the site "Rummindei", which he identified with the legendary "Lumbini", whereas it was found that the site was only called "Rupa-devi".[41]

The authenticity of the discovery has long been doubted,[42] and was openly disputed in a 2008 book by British writer Charles Allen.[43]

Following the discovery of the pillar, Führer relied on the accounts of ancient Chinese pilgrims to search for Kapilavastu, which he thought had to be in Tilaurakot. Unable to find anything, he started excavating some structures he said were stupas, and was in the process of faking pre-Mauryan inscriptions on bricks, when he was caught in the act by Vincent Arthur Smith.[44][45] The inscriptions were bluntly characterized by Smith as "impudent forgeries".[37]

Dealings in forged relics of the Buddha and false inscriptions

Around the same time, Führer was selling fake relics "authentified" but an inexistent inscription of Upagupta, the preceptor of Ashoka, to Shin U Ma, an important monk in Burma.[46][37][47] He wrote to the Burmese monk: "Perhaps you have seen from the papers that I succeeded in discovering the Lumbini grove where Lord Buddha was born", noting that "you have unpacked the sacred relics of our Blessed Lord Buddha which are undoubtedly authentic, and which will prove a blessing to those which worship them faithfully".[48] An "authentic tooth relics of the Buddha" sent by Führer in 1896 turned out to have been carved from a piece of ivory, and another sent in 1897 was that of a horse.[48] The forgery was reported in 1898 to the British North-Western Provinces Government in India by Burmologist and member of the Burma commission Bernard Houghton, and started an enquiry which would lead to Führer's resignation on 16 September 1898.[49]

Piprahwa (1898)

In January 1898, Führer was again involved in a major discovery, that of the reliquaries at Piprahwa, but apparently arrived only after the discovery was made, and apparently did not have time to tamper with the evidence.[50]

Acclaim

These discoveries, at the time they were made, generated fantastic praise for the work of Führer.[51] According to the New York Post (3 May 1896) the Nigliva discovery "seems to carry the origin of Buddhism much further back".[51] The Liverpool Mercury (29 December 1896) reports that the discovery that Lumbini (also called Paderia) was "the actual birthplace of the Buddha ought to bring devout joy to about 627,000,000 people".[51] The Pall Mall Gazette (18 April 1898) related that the Piprahwa discovery "contains no less a relic than the bones of the Buddha himself".[51]

Dismissal from government service in India

Führer's archaeological career ended in disgrace. Führer came under suspicion from March 1898 following the reported forgeries of the Buddha's relics.[52]

Inquiry

A formal inquiry was launched into his activities, but officials struggled to find a "printable" reason for Führer's dismissal.[53] Führer was officially confronted by Vincent Arthur Smith, who reported the forgeries of the Buddha's relics.[53] Führer was exposed as "a forger and dealer in fake antiquities".[54] Smith also blamed Führer for administrative failures in filing his reports to the Government, and for a false report about his preparations for future publications on his archaeological research: Führer was obliged to admit "that every statement in it [the report] was absolutely false."[55] The false inscriptions supposed to authentify the Buddha relics were not mentioned in the investigations, apparently out of fear of casting doubt on the other epigraphical discoveries made by Führer.[53] Similarly, the false publication of the ancient Burmese inscriptions, were the object of an institutional cover-up, which would not come to light before 1921, with the revelation of their inexistence made by Charles Duroiselle.[53][56]

Image
Führer's own report on his discoveries in Nepal, entitled Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's birthplace, 1897, was withdrawn from circulation.[57]

In 1901, Vincent Arthur Smith, after retirement, chose to reveal the blunt truth about the Nepalese discoveries and published a stark analysis of Führer's activities, apparently worried that "the reserved language used in previous official documents has been sometimes misinterpreted".[37][58] In particular, Smith said of Führer's description of the archaeological remains at Nigali Sagar that "every word of it is false", and characterized several of Führer's epigraphic discoveries as "impudent forgeries".[37][58] However Smith never challenged the authenticity of the Lumbini pillar inscription and the Nigali Sagar inscription discovered by Führer.[59]

Sanctions

Under official instructions from the Government of India, Führer's resignation was accepted and he was relieved of his positions, his papers seized and his offices inspected by Vincent Arthur Smith on 22 September 1898.[60] Führer had written in 1897 a monograph on his discoveries in Nigali Sagar and Lumbini, Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's birth-place in the Nepalese tarai,[61] which was withdrawn from circulation by the Government.[57]

Führer was dismissed and returned to Europe with his family. He died on 5 November 1930 in Binningen, Switzerland.

Führer was replaced as Curator of the Lucknow Museum by Edmund Smith, previously the Province's Architectural Surveyor.[62] The excavations in the Nepal Terai were entrusted to Babu Purna Chandra Mukherji, who published the results of his investigations in 1903 in A report on a tour of exploration of the antiquities in the Tarai, Nepal the region of Kapilavastu, in which A. Smith included an introduction entitled "Preparatory note" which details several of the forgeries made by Führer.[63][62]

Religious life

Führer had an unusual religious career. He served as a Catholic priest, but in 1887 converted to Anglicanism. Following his expulsion from government service in India, Führer made plans to become a Buddhist monk. Quoting the Ceylon Standard, the Journal of the Mahabodhi Society noted: "Much interest has been excited in Buddhist and other circles at the prospect of Dr Führer coming to Ceylon to join the Buddhist priesthood. The Press notices recently made regarding this gentleman have given rise to grave suspicion. We understand that Dr Führer will have an opportunity given him of refuting the charges made against him before he is accepted by the leading Buddhists here as an exponent of the religion of Buddha."[64] These plans seem to have come to nothing because in 1901 Führer re-converted to the Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland and worked as a priest from 1906–1930.[65]

Works

• Führer, Alois Anton (1896). List of Christian tombs and monuments of archaeological or historical interest and their inscriptions in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, Allahabad: Government Press, N.-W.P. and Oudh
• Führer, Alois Anton, ed. (1909). Śrīharṣacaritamahākāvyam - Bāṇabhaṭṭa's biography of King Harshavardhana of Sthāṇīśvara with Śaṅkara's commentary, Saṅketa, text and commentary with critical notes. Bombay: Government Central Press
• Führer, Alois Anton; Hultzsch, E; Burgess, James (1892-1894). Epigraphia Indica : a collection of inscriptions supplementary to the Corpus inscriptionum Indicarum, Calcutta: Government printing
• Führer, Alois Anton (1897). Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's birth-place in the Nepalese tarai. Allahabad : Govt. Press, N.W.P. and Oudh.

References

1. "Fuehrer, Alois Anton (1853-1930)". Indologica - Digitalisate (in German). 21 September 2010. Retrieved 2014-03-28.
2. Führer, AA (1897). Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's Birth-Place in the Nepalese Tarai. Allahabad: Government Press, North-Western Provinces and Oudh. pp. 1–48.
3. Beckwith, Christopher I. (2015). Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia. Princeton University Press. pp. 235–236. ISBN 9781400866328.
4. Huxley, Andrew (2010). "Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 20 (4): 489–502. doi:10.1017/S1356186310000246. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 40926240.
5. Huxley, Andrew (2010). "Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 20 (4): 490. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 40926240.
6. Huxley, Andrew (2010). "Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 20 (4): 489–502. doi:10.1017/s1356186310000246., see note 18 citing India Office Records, Archaeology and Epigraphy, Proceedings 4-18, File no. 6 of 1898, but however add Part B. doi:10.1017/S1356186310000246. The same events with some further details in Charles Allen, The Buddha and Dr Führer (London: Haus, 2008), p. 33 but without supporting references.
7. Huxley, Andrew (2010). "Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 20 (4): 492. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 40926240.
8. Huxley, Andrew (2010). "Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 20 (4): 494–495. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 40926240.
9. Huxley, Andrew (2010). "Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 20 (4): 496–498. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 40926240.
10. "Some years later A. Führer undertook the excavation of a temple without much result." in Possehl, Gregory L. (2003). "Ahichchhatra". Oxford Art Online. doi:10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.t001219.
11. Allen, Charles (2010). The Buddha and Dr. Führer: An Archaeological Scandal. Penguin Books India. p. 242. ISBN 978-0-14-341574-9.
12. Lüders, H. (1912). "On Some Brahmi Inscriptions in the Lucknow Provincial Museum". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland: 153–179, and especially 176–179. JSTOR 25189994.
13. Lüders, H. (1912). "On Some Brahmi Inscriptions in the Lucknow Provincial Museum". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland: 153–179. ISSN 0035-869X. JSTOR 25189994.
14. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 66. ISSN 0967-828X. JSTOR 23750866.
15. Harvey, G. E. (2019). History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 The Beginning of the English Conquest. Routledge. p. 211. ISBN 978-0-429-64805-2.
16. Gazeteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States (PDF). 1900. p. 193.
17. Harvey, G. E. (2019). History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 The Beginning of the English Conquest. Routledge. p. 211. ISBN 978-0-429-64805-2.
18. Huxley, Andrew (2010). "Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 20 (4): 499–502. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 40926240.
19. Harvey, G. E. (2019). History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 The Beginning of the English Conquest. Routledge. p. 211. ISBN 978-0-429-64805-2.
20. May, Reginald Le; May, Reginald Stuart Le (1938). A Concise History of Buddhist Art in Siam. CUP Archive. p. 93.
21. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 70. JSTOR 23750866.
22. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 59–82. doi:10.5367/sear.2011.0030. ISSN 0967-828X. JSTOR 23750866.
23. Education Society’s Press, Byculla Bombay (1895). The Indian Antiquary Vol-xxiv(1895). p. 275 "Source of Sanskrit words in Burmese".
24. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 62. ISSN 0967-828X. JSTOR 23750866.
25. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 71. JSTOR 23750866.
26. Harvey, G. E. (2019). History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 The Beginning of the English Conquest. Routledge. p. 211. ISBN 978-0-429-64805-2.
27. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 60–61. ISSN 0967-828X. JSTOR 23750866.
28. Duroiselle, Charles (1921). A list of inscriptions found in Burma. Rangoon Superintendent, Government Print., Burma. p. ii, note 1.
29. Finot, L. (1922). "Review of Report of the Superintendent, Archæological Survey, Burma, for the year ending 31st March 1921; Report of the Superintendent, Archæological Survey, Burma, for the year ending 31st March 1922; A List of Inscriptions found in Burma. Part 1. The List of Inscriptions arranged in the order of their dates". Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient. 22: 208. JSTOR 43730466.
30. Führer, Alois Anton (1897). Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's birth-place in the Nepalese tarai /. Allahabad : Govt. Press, N.W.P. and Oudh.
31. "In 1893 a Nepalese officer on a hunting expedition found an Asokan pillar near Nigliva, at Nigali Sagar." Falk, Harry. The discovery of Lumbinī. p. 9.
32. Waddell, L. A.; Wylie, H.; Konstam, E. M. (1897). "The Discovery of the Birthplace of the Buddha". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland: 645–646. JSTOR 25207894.
33. Smith, Vincent A. (1897). "The Birthplace of Gautama Buddha". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland: 616. ISSN 0035-869X. JSTOR 25207888.
34. Führer, Alois Anton (1897). Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's birth-place in the Nepalese tarai /. Allahabad : Govt. Press, N.W.P. and Oudh. p. 22.
35. Thomas, Edward Joseph (2000). The Life of Buddha as Legend and History. Courier Corporation. ISBN 978-0-486-41132-3.
36. ""On all sides around this interesting monument are ruined monasteries, fallen columns, and broken sculptures." This elaborate description was not supported by a single drawing, plan, or photograph. Every word of it is false." in Rijal, Babu Krishna; Mukherji, Poorno Chander (1996). 100 Years of Archaeological Research in Lumbini, Kapilavastu & Devadaha. S.K. International Publishing House. p. 58.
37. Mukherji, P. C.; Smith, Vincent Arthur (1901). A report on a tour of exploration of the antiquities in the Tarai, Nepal the region of Kapilavastu;. Calcutta, Office of the superintendent of government printing, India. p. 4.
38. Falk, Harry. The discovery of Lumbinī. p. 11.
39. Bühler, G. (1895). "Some Notes on Past and Future Archœological Explorations in India". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland: 649–660. ISSN 0035-869X. JSTOR 25197280.
40. Weise, Kai (2013). The Sacred Garden of Lumbini: Perceptions of Buddha's birthplace. UNESCO. pp. 63–64. ISBN 978-92-3-001208-3.
41. Thomas, Edward J. (2013). The Life of Buddha. Routledge. p. 18, note 3. ISBN 978-1-136-20121-9.
42. Thomas, Edward J. (2002). History of Buddhist Thought. Courier Corporation. p. 155, note 1. ISBN 978-0-486-42104-9.
43. Allen, Charles (2008). The Buddha and Dr. Führer: an archaeological scandal. London: Haus. ISBN 9781905791934.
44. Dhammika, Shravasti (2008). Middle Land, Middle Way: A Pilgrim's Guide to the Buddha's India. Buddhist Publication Society. p. 41. ISBN 978-955-24-0197-8.
45. "Fuhrer's attempt to associate the names of eighteen Sakyas, including Mahanaman, with the structures, on the false claim of writings in pre-Asokan characters, was fortunately foiled in time by V.A. Smith, who paid a surprise visit when the excavation was in progress. The forgery was exposed to the public." in East and West. Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente. 1979. p. 66.
46. "As pointed out by Smith, in his preparatory note to Mukharji's Report, the inscriptions were 'impudent forgeries', and Führer had even gone to the extentextent of furnishing as proof fake relics of the Buddha, and a forged inscription of Upagupta, the preceptor of Ashoka..." in Singh, Upinder (2004). The discovery of ancient India: early archaeologists and the beginnings of archaeology. Permanent Black. p. 320. ISBN 978-81-7824-088-6.
47. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 71–72. JSTOR 23750866.
48. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 72–74. JSTOR 23750866.
49. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 72–76. JSTOR 23750866.
50. Ciurtin, Eugen. "Review of Charles ALLEN, The Buddha and Dr Führer: An Archaeological Scandal [New Delhi: Penguin, 2010]": 542.
51. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 65. JSTOR 23750866.
52. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 74–77. JSTOR 23750866.
53. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 76–77. JSTOR 23750866.
54. Beckwith, Christopher I. (2017). Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia. Princeton University Press. pp. 234–235. ISBN 978-0-691-17632-1.
55. WILLIS, MICHAEL (2012). "Dhār, Bhoja and Sarasvatī: from Indology to Political Mythology and Back". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 22 (1): 152. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 41490379.
56. Finot, L. (1922). "Review of Report of the Superintendent, Archæological Survey, Burma, for the year ending 31st March 1921; Report of the Superintendent, Archæological Survey, Burma, for the year ending 31st March 1922; A List of Inscriptions found in Burma. Part 1. The List of Inscriptions arranged in the order of their dates". Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient. 22: 208. JSTOR 43730466.
57. Thomas, Edward Joseph (2000). The Life of Buddha as Legend and History. Courier Corporation. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-486-41132-3.
58. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 77. JSTOR 23750866.
59. Smith, vincent A. (1914). The Early History Of India Ed. 3rd. p. 169.
60. Willis, M. (2012). "Dhar, Bhoja and Sarasvati: From Indology to Political Mythology and Back". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 22 (1): 129–53. doi:10.1017/S1356186311000794. Smith's report is given in the appendix to this article and is available here: [1].
61. Führer, Alois Anton (1897). Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's birth-place in the Nepalese tarai. Allahabad : Govt. Press, N.W.P. and Oudh.
62. Allen, Charles (2010). The Buddha and Dr. Führer: An Archaeological Scandal. Penguin Books India. p. 178. ISBN 978-0-14-341574-9.
63. The report (criticism of Führer pages 3-4):Mukherji, P. C.; Smith, Vincent Arthur (1901). A report on a tour of exploration of the antiquities in the Tarai, Nepal the region of Kapilavastu;. Calcutta, Office of the superintendent of government printing, India.
64. Anon, Journal of the Calcutta Mahabodhi Society 10.8-9 (December 1901 and January 1902), p. 1.
65. Arx, Urs von (2005). In Marco Jorio, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz vol. 4, Basel: Schwabe

Further reading

• Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 59–82. doi:10.5367/sear.2011.0030.
• Lüders, H. (Jan. 1912 ). On Some Brahmi Inscriptions in the Lucknow Provincial Museum, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, pp. 153–179 – via JSTOR (subscription required)
• Phelps, T.A. 'Lumbini On Trial: The Untold Story' (2008)
• Phelps, T.A. 'The Piprahwa Deceptions': Setups and Showdown'.

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Archaeological Survey of India
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Image
Archaeological Survey of India
Abbreviation: ASI
Motto: प्रत्नकीर्तिमपावृणु [Google translate: Mitochondria]
Formation: 1861
Headquarters: 24 Tilak Marg, New Delhi, India - 110001
Region served: India
Parent organisation: Ministry of Culture, Government of India
Budget: ₹1,246.75 crore (US$170 million) (2020-2021)[1]
Website asi.nic.in Edit this at Wikidata

The Archaeological Survey of India is an Indian government agency attached to the Ministry of Culture that is responsible for archaeological research and the conservation and preservation of cultural monuments in the country. It was founded in 1861 by Alexander Cunningham who also became its first Director-General.

Major General Sir Alexander Cunningham KCIE CSI (23 January 1814 – 28 November 1893) was a British army engineer with the Bengal Engineer Group who later took an interest in the history and archaeology of India.

The Bengal Engineer Group (BEG) (informally the Bengal Sappers or Bengal Engineers) is a military engineering regiment in the Corps of Engineers of the Indian Army. The unit was originally part of the Bengal Army of the East India Company's Bengal Presidency, and subsequently part of the British Indian Army during the British Raj. The Bengal Sappers are stationed at Roorkee Cantonment in Roorkee, Uttarakhand.

The Bengal Sappers are one of the few remaining regiments of the erstwhile Bengal Presidency Army and survived the Rebellion of 1857 due to their "sterling work" in the recapture by the East India Company of Delhi and other operations in 1857–58. The troops of the Bengal Sappers have been a familiar sight for over 200 years in the battlefields of British India with their never-say-die attitude of Chak De and brandishing their favourite tool the hamber.

-- Bengal Engineer Group, by Wikipedia


In 1861, he was appointed to the newly created position of archaeological surveyor to the government of India; and he founded and organised what later became the Archaeological Survey of India.

He wrote numerous books and monographs and made extensive collections of artefacts. Some of his collections were lost, but most of the gold and silver coins and a fine group of Buddhist sculptures and jewellery were bought by the British Museum in 1894...

Along with his older brother, Joseph, he received his early education at Christ's Hospital, London. Through the influence of Sir Walter Scott, both Joseph and Alexander obtained cadetships at the East India Company's Addiscombe Seminary (1829–31), followed by technical training at the Royal Engineers Estate at Chatham. Alexander joined the Bengal Engineers at the age of 19 as a Second Lieutenant and spent the next 28 years in the service of British Government of India. Soon after arriving in India on 9 June 1833, he met James Prinsep. He was in daily communication with Prinsep during 1837 and 1838 and became his intimate friend, confidant and pupil. Prinsep passed on to him his lifelong interest in Indian archaeology and antiquity.

James Prinsep FRS (20 August 1799 – 22 April 1840) was an English scholar, orientalist and antiquary. He was the founding editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and is best remembered for deciphering the Kharosthi and Brahmi scripts of ancient India. He studied, documented and illustrated many aspects of numismatics, metallurgy, meteorology apart from pursuing his career in India as an assay master at the mint in Benares.

-- James Prinsep, by Wikipedia


From 1836 to 1840 he was ADC [aide-de-camp (a personal assistant or secretary to a person of high rank)]to Lord Auckland, the Governor-General of India.

The Governor-General of India (from 1858 to 1947 the Viceroy and Governor-General of India, commonly shortened to Viceroy of India) was the representative of the monarch of the United Kingdom and after Indian independence in 1947, the representative of the Indian head of state. The office was created in 1773, with the title of ‘Governor-general of the Presidency of Fort William’. The officer had direct control only over Fort William, but supervised other East India Company officials in India. Complete authority over all of British India was granted in 1833, and the official came to be known as the "governor-general of India".

-- Governor-General of India, by Wikipedia


During this period he visited Kashmir, which was then not well explored...

In 1841 Cunningham was made executive engineer to the king of Oudh. In 1842 he was called to serve the army in thwarting an uprising in Bundelkhand by the ruler of Jaipur. He was then posted at Nowgong in central India before he saw action at the Battle of Punniar in December 1843. He became engineer at Gwalior and was responsible for constructing an arched stone bridge over the Morar River in 1844–45. In 1845–46 he was called to serve in Punjab and helped construct two bridges of boats across the Beas river prior to the Battle of Sobraon.

In 1846, he was made commissioner along with P. A. Vans Agnew to demarcate boundaries. Letters were written to the Chinese and Tibetan officials by Lord Hardinge, but no officials joined. A second commission was set up in 1847 which was led by Cunningham to establish the Ladakh-Tibet boundary, which also included Henry Strachey and Thomas Thomson. Henry and his brother Richard Strachey had trespassed into Lake Mansarovar and Rakas Tal in 1846 and his brother Richard revisited in 1848 with botanist J. E. Winterbottom. The commission was set up to delimit the northern boundaries of the Empire after the First Anglo-Sikh War concluded with the Treaty of Amritsar, which ceded Kashmir as war indemnity expenses to the British. His early work Essay on the Aryan Order of Architecture (1848) arose from his visits to the temples in Kashmir and his travels in Ladakh during his tenure with the commission. He was also present at the battles of Chillianwala and Gujrat in 1848–49. In 1851, he explored the Buddhist monuments of Central India along with Lieutenant Maisey and wrote an account of these.

In 1856 he was appointed chief engineer of Burma, which had just been annexed by Britain, for two years; and from 1858 served for three years in the same post in the North-Western Provinces. In both regions, he established public works departments. He was therefore absent from India during the Rebellion of 1857. He was appointed Colonel of the Royal Engineers in 1860. He retired on 30 June 1861, having attained the rank of Major General.

Cunningham had taken a keen interest in antiquities early in his career. Following Jean-Baptiste Ventura, general of Ranjit Singh, who inspired by the French explorers in Egypt had excavated the bases of pillars to discover large stashes of Bactrian and Roman coins, excavations became a regular activity among British antiquarians.

In 1834 he submitted to the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal an appendix to James Prinsep's article on the relics in the Mankiala stupa. He had conducted excavations at Sarnath in 1837 along with Colonel F. C. Maisey and made careful drawings of the sculptures. In 1842 he excavated at Sankassa and at Sanchi in 1851. In 1854 he published The Bhilsa Topes, an attempt to establish the history of Buddhism based on architectural evidence.

By 1851, he also began to communicate with William Henry Sykes and the East India Company on the value of an archaeological survey. He provided a rationale for providing the necessary funding, arguing that the venture


... would be an undertaking of vast importance to the Indian Government politically, and to the British public religiously. To the first body it would show that India had generally been divided into numerous petty chiefships, which had invariably been the case upon every successful invasion; while, whenever she had been under one ruler, she had always repelled foreign conquest with determined resolution. To the other body it would show that Brahmanism, instead of being an unchanged and unchangeable religion which had subsisted for ages, was of comparatively modern origin, and had been constantly receiving additions and alterations; facts which prove that the establishment of the Christian religion in India must ultimately succeed


Following his retirement from the Royal Engineers in 1861, Lord Canning, then Viceroy of India, appointed Cunningham archaeological surveyor to the Government of India. He held this appointment from 1861 to 1865, but it was then terminated through lack of funds...

After his department was abolished in 1865, Cunningham returned to England and wrote the first part of his Ancient Geography of India (1871), covering the Buddhist period; but failed to complete the second part, covering the Muslim period. During this period in London he worked as director of the Delhi and London Bank. In 1870, Lord Mayo re-established the Archaeological Survey of India, with Cunningham as its director-general from 1 January 1871. Cunningham returned to India and made field explorations each winter, conducting excavations and surveys from Taxila to Gaur. He produced twenty-four reports, thirteen as author and the rest under his supervision by others such as J. D. Beglar. Other major works included the first volume of Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (1877) which included copies of the edicts of Ashoka, The Stupa of Bharhut (1879) and the Book of Indian Eras (1883) which allowed the dating of Indian antiquities. He retired from the Archaeological Survey on 30 September 1885 and returned to London to continue his research and writing.

-- Alexander Cunningham, by Wikipedia


History

ASI was founded in 1861 by Alexander Cunningham who also became its first Director-General. The first systematic research into the subcontinent's history was conducted by the Asiatic Society, which was founded by the British Indologist William Jones on 15 January 1784. Based in Calcutta, the society promoted the study of ancient Sanskrit and Persian texts and published an annual journal titled Asiatic Researches. Notable among its early members was Charles Wilkins who published the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita in 1785 with the patronage of the then Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings. However, the most important of the society's achievements was the decipherment of the Brahmi script by James Prinsep in 1837. This successful decipherment inaugurated the study of Indian palaeography.

Formation of the ASI

Image
Sir Alexander Cunningham

Armed with the knowledge of Brahmi, Alexander Cunningham, a protégé of Prinsep, carried out a detailed survey of the Buddhist monuments which lasted for over half a century. Inspired by early amateur archaeologists like the Italian military officer, Jean-Baptiste Ventura, Cunningham excavated stupas along the width, the length and breadth of India. While Cunningham funded many of his early excavations himself, in the long run, he realised the need for a permanent body to oversee archaeological excavations and the conservation of Indian monuments and used his stature and influence in India to lobby for an archaeological survey. While his attempt in 1848 did not meet with success, the Archaeological Survey of India was eventually formed in 1861 by a statute passed into law by Lord Canning with Cunningham as the first Archaeological Surveyor. The survey was suspended briefly between 1865 and 1871 due to lack of funds but restored by Lord Lawrence the then Viceroy of India. In 1871, the Survey was revived as a separate department and Cunningham was appointed as its first Director-General.[2]

1885–1901

Cunningham retired in 1885 and was succeeded as Director General by James Burgess. Burgess launched a yearly journal The Indian Antiquary (1872) and an annual epigraphical publication Epigraphia Indica (1882) as a supplement to the Indian Antiquary. The post of Director General was permanently suspended in 1889 due to a funds crunch and was not restored until 1902. In the interim period, conservation work in the different circles was carried out by the superintendents of the individual circles.

"Buck crisis" (1888-1898)

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Sir Edward Charles Buck (1838-1916), Civil servant in Bengal, India

From 1888 started severe lobbying aimed at reducing Government expenses, and at curtailing the budget of the Archaeological Survey of India, a period of about ten years known as the "Buck crisis", after the Liberal Edward Buck.[3] In effect, this severely threatened the employment of the employees of the ASI, such as Alois Anton Führer, who had just started a family and become a father.[3]

In 1892, Edward Buck announced that the Archaeological Survey of India would be shut down and all ASI staff would be dismissed by 1895, in order to generate savings for the Government's budget.[3][4][3] It was understood that only a fantastic archaeological discovery within the next three years for example might be able to turn public opinion and save the funding of the ASI.[3]

Image
Alois Anton Führer own report on his discoveries, entitled Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's birthplace, 1897, was withdrawn from circulation by the Government.[5]

Great "discoveries" were indeed made with the March 1895 discovery of the Nigali Sagar inscription, which succeeded in bringing the "Buck Crisis" to an end, and the ASI was finally allowed in June 1895 to continue operations, subject to yearly approval based on successful digs every year.[6] Georg Bühler, writing in July 1895 in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, continued to advocate for the preservation of the Archaeological Survey of India, and expressed that what was needed were "new authentic documents" from the pre-Ashokan period, and they would "only be found underground".[6][7]

Another momentous discovery would be made in 1896, with the Lumbini pillar inscription, a major inscription on a pillar of Ashoka discovered by Alois Anton Führer. The inscription, together with other evidence, confirmed Lumbini as the birthplace of the Buddha.[8]


In 1896, accompanied by the local Nepalese governor, General Khadga Shamsher, Führer discovered a major inscription on a pillar of Ashoka, an inscription which, together with other evidence, confirmed Lumbini as the birthplace of the Buddha.[40] The pillar itself had been known for sometime already, as it had already been reported by Khadga Shamsher to Vincent Arthur Smith a few year earlier. Führer made his great discovery when he dug the earth around the pillar and reported the discovery of the inscription in a pristine state about one meter under the surface.

Führer claimed that the locals called the site "Rummindei", which he identified with the legendary "Lumbini", whereas it was found that the site was only called "Rupa-devi".

The authenticity of the discovery has long been doubted, and was openly disputed in a 2008 book by British writer Charles Allen.


Following the discovery of the pillar, Führer relied on the accounts of ancient Chinese pilgrims to search for Kapilavastu, which he thought had to be in Tilaurakot. Unable to find anything, he started excavating some structures he said were stupas, and was in the process of faking pre-Mauryan inscriptions on bricks, when he was caught in the act by Vincent Arthur Smith. The inscriptions were bluntly characterized by Smith as "impudent forgeries".


-- Alois Anton Fuhrer, by Wikipedia


The organization was rocked when Führer was unmasked in 1898, and was found to file fraudulous reports about his investigations. Confronted by Smith about his archaeological publications and his report to the Government, Führer was obliged to admit "that every statement in it [the report] was absolutely false."[9] Under official instructions from the Government of India, Führer was relieved of his positions, his papers seized and his offices inspected by Vincent Arthur Smith on 22 September 1898.[10] Führer had written in 1897 a monograph on his discoveries in Nigali Sagar and Lumbini, Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's birth-place in the Nepalese tarai,[11] which was withdrawn from circulation by the Government.[12] Führer was dismissed and returned to Europe.

1901–1947

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John Marshall

The post of Director General was restored by Lord Curzon in 1902. Breaking with tradition, Curzon chose a 26-year-old professor of classical studies at Cambridge named John Marshall to head the survey. Marshall served as Director General for a quarter of a century and during his long tenure, he replenished and invigorated the survey whose activities were fast dwindling into insignificance. Marshall established the post of Government epigraphist and encouraged epigraphical studies. The most significant event of his tenure was, however, the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization at Harappa and Mohenjodaro in 1921. The success and scale of the discoveries made ensured that the ress made in Marshall's tenure would remain unmatched. Marshall was succeeded by Harold Hargreaves in 1928. Hargreaves was succeeded by Daya Ram Sahni.

Sahni was succeeded by J. F. Blakiston and K. N. Dikshit both of whom had participated in the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjodaro. In 1944, a British archaeologist and army officer, Mortimer Wheeler took over as Director General. Wheeler served as Director General till 1948 and during this period he excavated the Iron Age site of Arikamedu and the Stone age sites of Brahmagiri, Chandravalli and Maski in South India. Wheeler founded the journal Ancient India in 1946 and presided over the partitioning of ASI's assets during the Partition of India and helped establish an archaeological body for the newly formed Pakistan.

1947–2019

Wheeler was succeeded by N. P. Chakravarti in 1948. The National Museum was inaugurated in New Delhi on 15 August 1949 to house the artifacts displayed at the Indian Exhibition in the United Kingdom.

Madho Sarup Vats and Amalananda Ghosh succeeded Chakravarti. Ghosh's tenure which lasted until 1968 is noted for the excavations of Indus Valley sites at Kalibangan, Lothal and Dholavira. The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act was passed in 1958 bringing the archaeological survey under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture. Ghosh was succeeded by B.B. Lal who conducted archaeological excavations at Ayodhya to investigate whether a Ram Temple preceded the Babri Masjid. During Lal's tenure, the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act (1972) was passed recommending central protection for monuments considered to be "of national importance". Lal was succeeded by M. N. Deshpande who served from 1972 to 1978 and B. K. Thapar who served from 1978 to 1981. On Thapar's retirement in 1981, archaeologist Debala Mitra was appointed to succeed him - she was the first woman Director General of the ASI. Mitra was succeeded by M. S. Nagaraja Rao, who had been transferred from the Karnataka State Department of Archaeology. Archaeologists J. P. Joshi and M. C. Joshi succeeded Rao. M. C. Joshi was the Director General when the Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992 triggering Hindu-Muslim violence all over India. As a fallout of the demolition, Joshi was dismissed in 1993 and controversially replaced as Director General by Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Achala Moulik, a move which inaugurated a tradition of appointing bureaucrats of the IAS instead of archaeologists to head the survey. The tradition was finally brought to an end in 2010 when Gautam Sengupta an archaeologist, replaced K.M Srivastava an IAS officer as Director General.He was again succeeded by Pravin Srivastava, another IAS officer. Srivastava's successor and the present incumbent, Rakesh Tiwari is also a professional archaeologist.

Organisation

The Archaeological Survey of India is an attached office of the Ministry of Culture. Under the provisions of the AMASR Act of 1958, the ASI administers more than 3650 ancient monuments, archaeological sites and remains of national importance. These can include everything from temples, mosques, churches, tombs, and cemeteries to palaces, forts, step-wells, and rock-cut caves. The Survey also maintains ancient mounds and other similar sites which represent the remains of ancient habitation.[13]

The ASI is headed by a Director General who is assisted by an Additional Director General, two Joint Directors General, and 17 Directors.[14]

Circles

The ASI is divided into a total of 30 circles[15] each headed by a Superintending Archaeologist.[14] Each of the circles are further divided into sub-circles. The circles of the ASI are:

1. Agra
2. Aizawl
3. Amravati
4. Aurangabad
5. Bengaluru
6. Bhopal
7. Bhubaneswar
8. Chandigarh
9. Chennai
10. Dehra Dun
11. Delhi
12. Dharwad
13. Goa
14. Guwahati
15. Hyderabad
16. Jaipur
17. Jodhpur
18. Kolkata
19. Lucknow
20. Mumbai
21. Nagpur
22. Patna
23. Raipur
24. Raiganj
25. Ranchi
26. Sarnath
27. Shimla
28. Srinagar
29. Thrissur
30. Vadodara

The ASI also administers three "mini-circles" at Delhi, Leh and Hampi.[15]

Directors-General

The Survey has had 29 Directors-General thus far. Its founder, Alexander Cunningham served as Archaeological Surveyor between 1861 and 1865.[2]

1. 1871−1885 Alexander Cunningham
2. 1886−1889 James Burgess
3. 1902−1928 John Marshall
4. 1928−1931 Harold Hargreaves
5. 1931−1935 Daya Ram Sahni
6. 1935−1937 J. F. Blakiston
7. 1937−1944 K. N. Dikshit
8. 1944−1948 Mortimer Wheeler
9. 1948−1950 N. P. Chakravarti
10. 1950−1953 Madho Sarup Vats
11. 1953−1968 Amalananda Ghosh
12. 1968−1972 B. B. Lal
13. 1972−1978 M. N. Deshpande
14. 1978−1981 B. K. Thapar
15. 1981−1983 Debala Mitra
16. 1984−1987 M. S. Nagaraja Rao
17. 1987−1989 J. P. Joshi
18. 1989−1993 M. C. Joshi
19. 1993−1994 Achala Moulik
20. 1994−1995 S. K. Mahapatra
21. 1995−1997 B. P. Singh
22. 1997−1998 Ajai Shankar
23. 1998−2001 S. B. Mathur
24. 2001−2004 K. G. Menon
25. 2004−2007 C. Babu Rajeev
26. 2009−2010 K. N. Srivastava
27. 2010−2013 Gautam Sengupta
28. 2013−2014 Pravin Srivastava
29. 2014−2017 Rakesh Tewari
30. 2017-2020 Usha Sharma
31. 12 may 2020 to present V Vidyawati

"In major bureaucratic reshuffle, 35 secretaries, additional secretaries named". livemint.com/. 22 July 2017. Retrieved 15 September 2017.</ref>

Museums

India's first museum was established by the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1814. Much of its collection was passed on to the Indian Museum, which was established in the city in 1866.[16] The Archaeological Survey did not maintain its own museums until the tenure of its third director-general, John Marshall. He initiated the establishment of various museums at Sarnath (1904), Agra (1906), Ajmer (1908), Delhi Fort (1909), Bijapur (1912), Nalanda (1917) and Sanchi (1919). The ASI's museums are customarily located right next to the sites that their inventories are associated with "so that they may be studied amid their natural surroundings and not lose focus by being transported".

A dedicated Museums Branch was established in 1946 by Mortimer Wheeler, which now maintains a total of 50 museums spread across the country.[17]

Library

The ASI maintains a Central Archaeological Library in the Archaeological Survey of India headquarters building in Tilak Marg, Mandi House, New Delhi. Established in 1902, its collection numbers more than 100,000 books and journals. The library is also a repository of rare books, plates, and original drawings.

The Survey additionally maintains a library in each of its circles to cater to local academics and researchers.[18]

Publications

The day-to-day work of the survey was published in a series of periodical bulletins and reports. The periodicals and archaeological series published by the ASI are:

Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum

It consists of a series of seven volumes of inscriptions discovered and deciphered by archaeologists of the survey. Founded in 1877 by Alexander Cunningham, a final revised volume was published by E. Hultzsch in 1925.

Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy

The first volume of the Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy was brought out by the epigraphist -E. Hultzsch in 1887. The bulletin has not been published since 2005.

Epigraphia Indica

Epigraphia Indica was first published by the then Director-General, J. Burgess in 1888 as a supplementary to The Indian Antiquary. Since then, a total of 43 volumes have been published. The last volume was published in 1979. An Arabic and Persian supplement to the Epigraphia Indica was also published from 1907 to 1977.

South Indian Inscriptions

The first volume of South Indian Inscriptions was edited by E. Hultzsch and published in 1890. A total of 27 volumes were published till 1990. The early volumes are the main source of historical information on the Pallavas, Cholas and Chalukyas.

Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India

It was the primary bulletin of the ASI. The first annual report was published by John Marshall in 1902–03. The last volume was published in 1938–39. It was replaced by Indian Archaeology: A Review.

Ancient India

The first volume of Ancient India was published in 1946 and edited by Sir Mortimer Wheeler as a bi-annual and converted to an annual in 1949. The twenty-second and last volume was published in 1966.

Indian Archaeology: A Review

Indian Archaeology: A Review is the primary bulletin of the ASI and has been published since 1953–54. It replaced the Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India.

1. 1953-54
2. 1954-55
3. 1955-56
4. 1956-57
5. 1957-58
6. 1958-59
7. 1959-60
8. 1960-61
9. 1961-62
10. 1962-63
11. 1963-64
12. 1964-65
13. 1965-66
14. 1966-67
15. 1967-68
16. 1968-69
17. 1969-70
18. 1970-71
19. 1971-72
20. 1972-73
21. 1973-74
22. 1974-75
23. 1975-76
24. 1976-77
25. 1977-78
26. 1978-79
27. 1979-80
28. 1980-81
29. 1981-82
30. 1982-83
31. 1983-84
32. 1984-85
33. 1985-86
34. 1986-87
35. 1987-88
36. 1988-89
37. 1989-90
38. 1991-92
39. 1992-93
40. 1993-94
41. 1994-95
42. 1995-96
43. 1996-97
44. 1997-98
45. 1998-99

State government archaeological departments

Apart from the ASI, archaeological work in India and conservation of monuments is also carried out in some states by state government archaeological departments. Most of these bodies were set up by the various princely states before independence. When these states were annexed to India after independence, the individual archaeological departments of these states were not integrated with the ASI. Instead, they were allowed to function as independent bodies.

• Haryana State Directorate of Archaeology & Museums (formed in 1972 by upgrading the cell that was earlier under the education department)
• Orissa State Archaeology Department (1965)
• Andhra Pradesh Department of Archeology and Museums
• Karnataka State Department of Archaeology (1885)
• Kerala State Archaeology Department (formed in 1959 by merging Travancore State Archaeology Department (est 1910) and Cochin State Archaeology Department (est 1925))
• Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department (1961)

Department of archaeology and museum, Government of West Bengal

Criticism

In 2013, a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report found that at least 92 centrally protected monuments of historical importance across the country which have gone missing without a trace. The CAG could physically verify only 45% of the structures (1,655 out of 3,678). The CAG report said that the ASI did not have reliable information on the exact number of monuments under its protection. The CAG recommended that periodic inspection of each protected monument should be done by a suitably ranked officer. The Culture ministry accepted the proposal.[19] Author and IIPM Director Arindam Chaudhuri said that since the ASI is unable to protect the country's museums and monuments so they should be professionally maintained by private companies or through the public-private-partnership (PPP) model.[20]

In May 2018, the Supreme Court of India said that the ASI was not properly discharging its duty in maintaining the World Heritage Site of Taj Mahal and asked the Government of India to consider whether some other agency be given the responsibility to protect and preserve it.[21]

In popular culture

The fictional character Kakababu, in Sunil Gangopadhyay's famed Kakababu series, is an ex-Director of the Archaeological Survey of India.

See also

• Lists of State Protected Monuments in India
• List of World Heritage Sites in India
• Lists of Indian Monuments of National Importance
• Delhi Archaeological Society
• Survey of India, India's central agency in charge of mapping and surveying.
• Geological Survey of India

References

1. "Expenditure Budget, Ministry of Culture". Retrieved 6 June 2020.
2. "History". Archaeological Survey of India. Retrieved 7 April 2015.
3. Huxley, Andrew (2010). "Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 20 (4): 496–498. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 40926240.
4. Huxley, Andrew (2011). "Mr Houghton and Dr Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences". South East Asia Research. 19 (1): 66. ISSN 0967-828X. JSTOR 23750866.
5. Thomas, Edward Joseph (2000). The Life of Buddha as Legend and History. Courier Corporation. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-486-41132-3.
6. Huxley, Andrew (2010). "Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 20 (4): 499–502. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 40926240.
7. Bühler, G. (1895). "Some Notes on Past and Future Archœological Explorations in India". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland: 649–660. ISSN 0035-869X. JSTOR 25197280.
8. Weise, Kai (2013). The Sacred Garden of Lumbini: Perceptions of Buddha's birthplace. UNESCO. pp. 63–64. ISBN 978-92-3-001208-3.
9. WILLIS, MICHAEL (2012). "Dhār, Bhoja and Sarasvatī: from Indology to Political Mythology and Back". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 22 (1): 152. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 41490379.
10. Willis, M. (2012). "Dhar, Bhoja and Sarasvati: From Indology to Political Mythology and Back". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 22 (1): 129–53. doi:10.1017/S1356186311000794. Smith's report is given in the appendix to this article and is available here: [1].
11. Führer, Alois Anton (1897). Monograph on Buddha Sakyamuni's birth-place in the Nepalese tarai. Allahabad : Govt. Press, N.W.P. and Oudh.
12. Thomas, Edward Joseph (2000). The Life of Buddha as Legend and History. Courier Corporation. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-486-41132-3.
13. "Monuments". Archaeological Survey of India. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
14. "Organisation". Archaeological Survey of India. Retrieved 7 April 2015.
15. "Circles". Archaeological Survey of India. Retrieved 7 April 2015.
16. "The Asiatic Society". Archived from the original on 8 April 2015. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
17. "Museums". Archaeological Survey of India. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
18. "Central Archaeological Library". Archaeological Survey of India. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
19. "92 ASI-protected monuments missing - Times of India". The Times of India. Retrieved 14 May 2018.
20. Pioneer, The. "India's monumental mess". The Pioneer. Retrieved 14 May 2018.
21. "Archaeological Survey of India failed, explore tasking Taj Mahal upkeep to another body: SC to Centre - Times of India". The Times of India. Retrieved 10 May 2018.

External links

• Official website
• World Heritage, Tentative Lists, State : India—UNESCO
• Dholavira: a Harappan City, Disstt, Kachchh, Gujarat, India, India (Asia and the Pacific), Date of Submission: 03/07/1998, Submission prepared by: Archaeological Survey of India, Coordinates: 23°53'10" N, 70°11'03" E, Ref.: 1090

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Archaeological Survey of India Annual Report

1907-8
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

Postby admin » Wed Sep 09, 2020 3:36 am

Société Asiatique
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/8/20

As for the diffusion of such work as Lane's, there were not only the various societies of useful knowledge but also, in an age when the original Orientalist program of aiding commerce and trade with the Orient had become exhausted, the specialized learned societies whose products were works displaying the potential (if not actual) values of disinterested scholarship. Thus, a program of the Societe asiatique states:

To compose or to print grammars, dictionaries, and other elementary books recognized as useful or indispensable for the study of those languages taught by appointed professors [of Oriental languages]; by subscriptions or by other means to contribute to the publication of the same kind of work undertaken in France or abroad; to acquire manuscripts, or to copy either completely or in part those that are to be found in Europe, to translate or to make extracts from them, to multiply their number by reproducing them either by engraving or by lithography; to make it possible for the authors of useful works on geography, history, the arts, and the sciences to acquire the means for the public to enjoy the fruits of their nocturnal labors; to draw the attention of the public, by means of a periodic collection devoted to Asiatic literature, to the scientific, literary, or poetic productions of the Orient and those of the same sort that regularly are produced in Europe, to those facts about the Orient that could be relevant to Europe, to those discoveries and works of all kinds of which the Oriental peoples could become the subject: these are the objectives proposed for and by the Societe asiatique.


Orientalism organized itself systematically as the acquisition of Oriental material and its regulated dissemination as a form of specialized knowledge. One copied and printed works of grammar, one acquired original texts, one multiplied their number and diffused them widely, even dispensed knowledge in periodic form. It was into and for this system that Lane wrote his work, and sacrificed his ego. The mode in which his work persisted in the archives of Orientalism was provided for also. There was to be a "museum," Sacy said,

a vast depot of objects of all kinds, of drawings, of original books, maps, accounts of voyages, all offered to those who wish to give themselves to the study of [the Orient]; in such a way that each of these students would be able to feel himself transported as if by enchantment into the midst of, say, a Mongolian tribe or of the Chinese race, whichever he might have made the object of his studies.... It is possible to say ...that after the publication of elementary books on ...the Oriental languages, nothing is more important than to lay the cornerstone of this museum, which I consider a living commentary upon and interpretation [truchement] of the dictionaries.75


Truchement derives nicely from the Arabic turjaman, meaning "interpreter," "intermediary," or "spokesman." On the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West. The Orient, in short, would be converted from the personal, sometimes garbled testimony of intrepid voyagers and residents into impersonal definition by a whole array of scientific workers. It would be converted from the consecutive experience of individual research into a sort of imaginary museum without walls, where everything gathered from the huge distances and varieties of Oriental culture became categorically Oriental. It would be reconverted, restructured from the bundle of fragments brought back piecemeal by explorers, expeditions, commissions, armies, and merchants into lexicographical, bibliographical, departmentalized, and textualized Orientalist sense. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Orient had become, as Disraeli said, a career, one in which one could remake and restore not only the Orient but also oneself.

-- Orientalism, by Edward W. Said


The Société Asiatique (Asiatic Society) is a French learned society dedicated to the study of Asia. It was founded in 1822 with the mission of developing and diffusing knowledge of Asia. Its boundaries of geographic interest are broad, ranging from the Maghreb to the Far East. The society publishes the Journal asiatique. At present the society has about 700 members in France and abroad; its library contains over 90,000 volumes.

History

The establishment of the society was confirmed by royal ordinance on April 15, 1829. Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy was the first president.

Notable people

See also: Category:Members of the Société Asiatique

• Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat
• Jacques Bacot
• Jean Berlie
• Eugène Burnouf
• Jean-François Champollion
• Henri Cordier
• Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès
• Julius Klaproth
• Louis Finot
• Jean Leclant
• Sylvain Lévi
• Abdallah Marrash
• Gaston Maspero
• Paul Pelliot
• Joseph Toussaint Reinaud
• Ernest Renan
• Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin
• Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy
• İbrahim Şinasi
• Charles Virolleaud

List of the presidents of the Société

• 1822–1829: Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy
• 1829–1832: Jean-Pierre Abel Rémusat
• 1832–1834: Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy
• 1834–1847: Amédée Jaubert
• 1847–1867: Joseph Toussaint Reinaud
• 1867–1876: Julius von Mohl
• 1876–1878: Joseph Héliodore Garcin de Tassy
• 1878–1884: Adolphe Régnier
• 1884–1892: Ernest Renan
• 1892–1908: Barbier de Meynard
• 1908–1928: Émile Senart
• 1928–1935: Sylvain Lévi
• 1935–1945: Paul Pelliot
• 1946–1951: Jacques Bacot
• 1952–1964: Charles Virolleaud
• 1964–1969: George Coedès
• 1969–1974: René Labat
• 1974–1986: Claude Cahen
• 1987–1996: André Caquot
• 1996–2002: Daniel Gimaret
• 2002–present: Jean-Pierre Mahé
External links[edit]
• L'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
• Journal Asiatique
• Journal asiatique from 1822 to 1936
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

Postby admin » Wed Sep 09, 2020 6:11 am

Lorenz Franz Kielhorn
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/8/20

Image

Lorenz Franz Kielhorn (31 May 1840, Osnabrück - 19 March 1908, Göttingen) was a German Indologist.

He studied under Theodor Benfey at the University of Göttingen, where he became member of Burschenschaft (fraternity) Hannovera,[1], and under Adolf Friedrich Stenzler at Breslau and with Albrecht Weber in Berlin.[2]

A Burschenschaft is one of the traditional Studentenverbindungen (student fraternities) of Germany, Austria and Chile. Burschenschaften were founded in the 19th century as associations of university students inspired by liberal and nationalistic ideas. They were significantly involved in the March Revolution and the unification of Germany. After the formation of the German Empire in 1871, they faced a crisis, as their main political objective had been realized. So-called Reformburschenschaften were established, but these were dissolved by the National Socialist regime in 1935/6.

-- Burschenschaft, by Wikipedia


In 1862-65 he worked in Oxford, where he assisted Monier Williams in the production of a Sanskrit dictionary.[3] While here, he also consulted with Friedrich Max Müller, when the latter was working on his first edition of Rigveda.[4] From 1866 to 1881 he was a professor of Sanskrit at Deccan College in Pune, and after 1882, a professor at the University of Göttingen.[2]

Kielhorn's results from the handling of rich material that he himself partially collected and partially got sent, is mainly explained in Indian antiquary...

The Indian Antiquary, A journal of oriental research in archaeology, history, literature, language, philosophy, religion, folklore, &c, &c, (subtitle varies) was a journal of original research relating to India, published between 1872 and 1933. It was founded by the archaeologist James Burgess to enable the sharing of knowledge between scholars based in Europe and in India and was notable for the high quality of its epigraphic illustrations which enabled scholars to make accurate translations of texts that in many cases remain the definitive versions to this day. It was also pioneering in its recording of Indian folklore. It was succeeded by The New Indian Antiquary (1938-47) and the Indian Antiquary (1964-71).

-- The Indian Antiquary, by Wikipedia


and Epigraphia Indica.[5]


Epigraphia Indica was the official publication of Archaeological Survey of India from 1882 to 1977. The first volume was edited by James Burgess in the year 1882. Between 1892 and 1920 it was published as a quarterly supplement to The Indian Antiquary.

One part is brought out in each quarter year and eight parts make one volume of this periodical; so that one volume is released once in two years. About 43 volumes of this journal have been published so far. They have been edited by the officers who headed the Epigraphy Branch of ASI [Archaeological Survey of India].

-- Epigraphia Indica, by Wikipedia


After the death of Georg Bühler (1837-1898), he edited the "Grundriss der indoarischen Philologie". Together with Bühler, Kielhorn had initiated the series Bombay Sanskrit Series.[6]

Kielhorn was appointed an honorary Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) for his services in Pune. He received the honorary degree Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) from the University of Glasgow in June 1901,[7] and the honorary degree Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) from the University of Oxford in June 1902.[8]

Works

• Çāntanava’s Phitsūtra (with translation in Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, IV, 1866)
• Nāgojibhatta’s Paribhāşenduçekhara (translated in Bombay Sanskrit series 1868)
• Sanskrit grammar (1870, translated into German by Wilhelm Solf in 1888).[9]
• Kātyāyana and Patanjali (1876)
• The Vyākarana-mahābhāşya of Patanjali (3 volumes in Bombay Sanskrit series, 1880–85)
• Report on the search of Sanskrit manuscripts (1881)
• A grammar of the Sanskrit language (1888).

References

1. de:Burschenschaft Hannovera Göttingen
2. Otto Böhtlingk an Rudolf Roth by Otto von Böhtlingk, Rudolf von Roth, Heidrun Brückner, Gabriele Zeller, Agnes Stache-Weiske
3. Journal of Education (1908)
4. The life and letters of the right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller, Volume 1 by Friedrich Max Müller
5. Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal by Asiatic Society of Bengal
6. Handbuch der historischen Buchbestände. Niedersachsen A-G. by Bernhard Fabian, Felicitas Marwinski Friedhilde Krause Eberhard Dünninger, Paul Raabe
7. "Glasgow University jubilee". The Times (36481). London. 14 June 1901. p. 10.
8. "University intelligence". The Times (36789). London. 9 June 1902. p. 12.
9. Brockhaus' konversations-lexikon, Volume 14 Google Books

******************************

The history of the subjects of Indology and Tibetology at the University of Göttingen
by Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen
Accessed: 9/8/20

Benfey's occupation with indigenous Indian grammar was continued by Franz Kielhorn (1840-1908), who was appointed to Göttingen as his successor in 1881. Kielhorn, a student of Stenzler, had moved from England, where he worked with Monier-Williams and Max Müller, to Deccan College in Poona. There he was active from 1866 to 1881 as a professor of Sanskrit. On behalf of the Indian government he worked out a Sanskrit grammar based entirely on Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī. Kielhorn had been trained in the difficult and complex indigenous Indian grammar by Indian paits after he had already acquired the basics in Europe. And it was in this area that he developed all his philological mastery.

To this day, his text editions (Mahābhāṣya, Paribhāṣenduśekhara), translations (Paribhāṣenduśekhara) and investigations, written in a strict, almost laconic style, are unsurpassed. In cooperation with Georg Bühler, a student of Benfey in Göttingen, he initiated a new era in Sanskrit philology, based on the most precise language skills, averse to all speculation and characterized by the cooperation of historically and philologically trained Westerners and Indian ones deeply rooted in the learned tradition of their holy language Science. When Kielhorn was appointed to Göttingen in 1881, epigraphy was a second area of ​​work alongside research into Indian grammar. And on it, too, he achieved outstanding results and laid lasting foundations for all future research:

Kielhorn's epigraphic work was completed by his student Heinrich Lüders (1869-1943), who received his doctorate in 1894 with a thesis on Indian phonetics, completed his habilitation in 1899 with his study "About the Grantharecension des Mahabharata" and from then until 1903 as a private lecturer in Göttingen taught, continued in a similarly competent manner. With Bernhard Geiger, who habilitated in Göttingen in 1909 with a thesis on Patañjalis Mahābhāṣya, he also trained a student in the field of Indian grammar.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

Postby admin » Wed Sep 09, 2020 6:19 am

The Indian Antiquary
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/8/20

Image
Cover page of a 1931 edition of The Indian Antiquary

The Indian Antiquary, A journal of oriental research in archaeology, history, literature, language, philosophy, religion, folklore, &c, &c, (subtitle varies) was a journal of original research relating to India, published between 1872 and 1933. It was founded by the archaeologist James Burgess to enable the sharing of knowledge between scholars based in Europe and in India and was notable for the high quality of its epigraphic illustrations which enabled scholars to make accurate translations of texts that in many cases remain the definitive versions to this day. It was also pioneering in its recording of Indian folklore. It was succeeded by The New Indian Antiquary (1938-47) and the Indian Antiquary (1964-71).

James Burgess CIE FRSE FRGS MRAS LLD (14 August 1832[1] – 3 October 1916), was the founder of The Indian Antiquary in 1872[2] and an important archaeologist of India in the 19th century.

Burgess was born on 14 August 1832 in Kirkmahoe, Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Dumfries and then the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh.

He did educational work in Calcutta, 1856 and Bombay, 1861, and was Secretary of the Bombay Geographical Society 1868-73. He was Head of the Archaeological Survey, Western India, 1873, and of South India, 1881. From 1886-89 he was Director General, Archaeological Survey of India.

In 1881 the University of Edinburgh awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters (LLD).[4]

He retired to Edinburgh around 1892.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1894. He won its Keith Medal for 1897-99, and served as their Vice President 1908 to 1914.

He died on 3 October 1916, at 22 Seton Place in Edinburgh.

-- James Burgess (archaeologist), by Wikipedia


History

The Indian Antiquary was founded in 1872 by the archaeologist James Burgess CIE as a journal of original research relating to India. It was designed to enable the sharing of knowledge between scholars based in Europe and in India.[1][2]

The journal was a private venture,[3] although no contributor or editor was ever paid for their work and the editors often had to support the publication out of their own pockets.[3] Burgess was the first editor and he continued in that role until the end of 1884 when failing eyesight forced him to hand over to John Faithfull Fleet and Richard Carnac Temple.[3]

The late nineteenth century was marked by a great increase in the number of local historical societies in India and a similar increase in the number of Indians who could speak and write English, to the extent that by the 1920s the entire journal could have been filled with work by Indian contributors.[4] Volumes for 1925 to 1932 were published under the authority of the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1933, not).

The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI) is a long-established anthropological organisation, with a global membership. Its remit includes all the component fields of anthropology, such as biological anthropology, evolutionary anthropology, social anthropology, cultural anthropology, visual anthropology and medical anthropology, as well as sub-specialisms within these, and interests shared with neighbouring disciplines such as human genetics, archaeology and linguistics. It seeks to combine a tradition of scholarship with services to anthropologists, including students.

The RAI promotes the public understanding of anthropology, as well as the contribution anthropology can make to public affairs and social issues. It includes within its constituency not only academic anthropologists, but also those with a general interest in the subject, and those trained in anthropology who work in other fields.

The Institute's fellows are lineal successors to the founding fellows of the Ethnological Society of London, who in February 1843 formed a breakaway group of the Aborigines' Protection Society, which had been founded in 1837. The new society was to be 'a centre and depository for the collection and systematisation of all observations made on human races'.

Between 1863 and 1870 there were two organisations, the Ethnological Society and the Anthropological Society. The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1871) was the result of a merger between these two rival bodies. Permission to add the word 'Royal' was granted in 1907.

-- Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, by Wikipedia


The Ethnological Society of London (ESL) was a learned society founded in 1843 as an offshoot of the Aborigines' Protection Society (APS). The meaning of ethnology as a discipline was not then fixed: approaches and attitudes to it changed over its lifetime, with the rise of a more scientific approach to human diversity. Over three decades the ESL had a chequered existence, with periods of low activity and a major schism contributing to a patchy continuity of its meetings and publications. It provided a forum for discussion of what would now be classed as pioneering scientific anthropology from the changing perspectives of the period, though also with wider geographical, archaeological and linguistic interests.

In 1871 the ESL became part of what now is the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, merging back with the breakaway rival group the Anthropological Society of London...

The approach to ethnology current at the time of the Society's founding relied on climate and social factors to explain human diversity; the debate was still framed by Noah's Flood, and the corresponding monogenism of human origins. Prichard was a major figure in looking at human variability from a diachronic angle, and argued for ethnology as such a study, aimed at resolving the question of human origins...

The Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) was set up as a result of parliamentary committee activity, and was largely the initiative of Thomas Fowell Buxton. It produced reports, but in the wake of the Niger expedition of 1841 some of its supporters believed a case made on science was being sidelined in the activities of the APS.

The Niger expedition of 1841 was mounted by British missionary and activist groups in 1841-1842, using three British iron steam vessels to travel to Lokoja, at the confluence of the Niger River and Benue River, in what is now Nigeria. The British government backed the effort to make treaties with the native peoples, introduce Christianity and promote increased trade. The crews of the boats suffered a high mortality from disease.

The expedition was put into motion by an Exeter Hall meeting of 1 June 1840. It was chaired by Prince Albert. The organisers were the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa, set up in 1839 by Thomas Fowell Buxton. Buxton was promoting a grandiose "New Africa" policy, based on a series of treaties to be made in West Africa, the introduction of Christianity, and increased commerce, as set out in his book the previous year.

-- Niger expedition of 1841, by Wikipedia


The APS was founded by Quakers in order to promote a specific social and political agenda. The Ethnological Society, though primarily a scientific organization, retained some of its predecessor's liberal outlook and activist bent...

John Briggs became a Fellow of the ESL in 1845, and Brian Houghton Hodgson, also representing the ethnology of India, was at some point made an Honorary Fellow. William Augustus Miles was a member and published a paper on the aboriginal Australian culture.

After Prichard's death in 1848, the intellectual leader in the Society became Robert Gordon Latham. Links to the Aborigines' Protection Society were retained through the common membership of Hodgkin and Henry Christy, though the break was not completely amicable. The Ethnological Society in its early years lacked good contacts with officialdom, certainly compared to the RGS and its good working relationship with the Colonial Office. Governor George Grey was helpful to the Society, but he was an exception: it took until the end of the decade for the Society to begin to appreciate its marginal position with respect to the flow of information from the British colonies. Grey was an active member of the ESL while abroad as a colonial administrator, and his network included William Ellis, another member...

Thomas Richard Heywood Thomson delivered a paper in 1854 to the Society on interfertility, casting doubt on comments of Paweł Edmund Strzelecki about female infertility among Aboriginal Australians after they had given birth to a child with a white father. The communication was well received, but as a contribution to the ongoing debate on race, was far from settling the significant underlying issue.

James Hunt joined the ESL in 1854, and became a divisive figure because of his attacks on humanitarian attitudes of missionaries and abolitionists. He served as secretary from 1859 to 1862. He found an ally in John Crawfurd, who had retired from service as colonial diplomat and administrator for the East India Company. Crawfurd came to ethnology through its section in the BAAS. His published views on race were discordant with the Quaker and APS tradition in the ESL. Hunt and Crawfurd in 1858 tried to dislodge the President Sir James Clark at an ESL meeting, unsuccessfully, while Hodgkin was out of the country.

The 1860s saw a revived interest in ethnology, triggered by recent work, such as that involving flint implements and the antiquity of man. The Ethnological Society became a more of meeting-place for archaeologists, as its interests kept pace with new work; and during this decade the Society became a very different institution. The society's original members had mainly been military officers, civil servants, and members of the clergy, but by the early 1860s younger scientists had supplanted them. The background was of continuing encounters worldwide with many peoples; John Thomson the photographer who was recording them became a member in 1866. Thomas Henry Huxley, Augustus Lane Fox, Edward Tylor, Henry Christy, John Lubbock, and Augustus Wollaston Franks all figured prominently in the society's affairs after 1860.

In the years after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, the "Ethnologicals" generally supported Charles Darwin against his critics, and rejected the more extreme forms of scientific racism. The movement towards Darwinism was not one way, however, as evidenced by the Honorary Fellowship given to Robert Knox in 1860.

Robert Knox FRSE FRCSE MWS (4 September 1791 – 20 December 1862) was a Scottish anatomist, zoologist, ethologist and physician. He was a lecturer on anatomy in Edinburgh, where he introduced the theory of transcendental anatomy.

He is, however, now mainly remembered for his involvement in the Burke and Hare murders. An incautious approach to obtaining cadavers for dissection after the passage of the Anatomy Act and disagreements with professional colleagues ruined his career. A move to London did not improve matters.

His later pessimistic view of humanity contrasted sharply with his youthful attachment to the ideas of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Knox also devoted the latter part of his life to theorising on evolution and ethnology, as well as being one of the pioneers of scientific racism in Britain. His work on the latter further harmed his legacy and overshadowed his contributions to evolutionary theory...

Knox returned to Edinburgh by Christmas 1822. On 1 December 1823 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh...

Before the Anatomy Act of 1832 widened the supply, the main legal supply of corpses for anatomical purposes in the UK were those condemned to death and dissection by the courts. This led to a chronic shortage of legitimate subjects for dissection, and this shortage became more serious as the need to train medical students grew, and the number of executions fell. In his school Knox ran up against the problem from the start, since—after 1815—the Royal Colleges had increased the anatomical work in the medical curriculum. If he taught according to what was known as 'French method' the ratio would have had to approach one corpse per pupil.

As a consequence, body-snatching became so prevalent that it was not unusual for relatives and friends of someone who had just died to watch over the body until burial, and then to keep watch over the grave after burial, to stop it being violated.

In November 1827, William Hare began a new career when an indebted lodger died on him by chance. He was paid £7.10s (seven pounds & ten shillings) for delivering the body to Knox's dissecting rooms at Surgeons' Square. Now Hare and his accomplice, William Burke, set about murdering the city’s poor on a regular basis. After 16 more transactions, each netting £8-10, in what later became known as the West Port Murders, on 2 November 1828 Burke and Hare were caught, and the whole city convulsed with horror, fed by ballads, broadsides, and newspapers, at the reported deeds of the pair. Hare turned King's evidence, and Burke was hanged, dissected and his remains displayed.

Knox was not prosecuted, which outraged many in Edinburgh. His house was attacked by a mob of 'the lowest rabble of the Old Town,' and windows were broken. A committee of the Royal Society of Edinburgh exonerated him on the grounds that he had not dealt personally with Burke and Hare, but there was no forgetting his part in the case, and many remained wary of him.

Almost immediately after the Burke and Hare case, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh began to harry him, and by June 1831 they had procured his resignation as the Curator of the museum he had proposed and founded. In the same year he was obliged to resign his army commission to avoid further service in the Cape. This removed his last source of guaranteed income, but fortunately his classes were more popular than ever, with a record 504 students. His school moved to the grander premises of Old Surgeons' Hall in 1833 but his class declined after Edinburgh University made its own practical anatomy class compulsory in the mid-1830s. Knox continued to purchase cadavers for his dissection class from such shadowy figures as the 'Black Bull Man,' but the 1832 Anatomy Act made bodies more available to all anatomists, he quarrelled with HM Inspector of Anatomy over the supply of bodies, and his competitive edge was lost. In 1837 Knox applied for the chair in pathology at Edinburgh University but his candidature was blocked by eleven existing professors, who preferred to abolish the post rather than appoint him. In 1842 he was unable to make payments to the Edinburgh funeratory system, from which bodies were supplied to private schools, and he relocated to Glasgow where, still short of subjects for dissection, he closed his school in 1844. In 1847 the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh found him guilty of falsifying a student's certificate of attendance (a not uncommon practice in private schools) and refused to accept any further certificates from him, effectively banning him from teaching in Scotland. In the same year he was expelled from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and had his election retrospectively cancelled...

[U]ntil 1856 he worked on medical journalism, gave public lectures, and wrote several books, including his most ambitious work, The Races of Men in which he argued that each race was suited to its environment and "perfect in its own way."...

In his best-selling work, The Races of Men (1850), a "Zoological history" of mankind, Knox exaggerated supposed racial differences in support of his project, asserting that, anatomically and behaviourally, "race, or hereditary descent, is everything". He offered crude characterisations of each racial group: for example the Saxon (in which race he included himself) "invents nothing", "has no musical ear", lacks "genius", and is so "low and boorish" that "he does not know what you mean by fine art". No race was without its redeeming features, however; Knox described Saxons as "[t]houghtful, plodding, industrious beyond all other races, [and] a lover of labour for labour's sake". Such supposed racial characteristics meant that each race was naturally fitted for a particular environment and could not endure outside of it. While Knox maintained that all races were capable of some form civilized life, he maintained that a vast gulf stood between the limited attainments available to the 'negroid' and to most 'mongoloid' races on one hand and the much greater past achievements and future potential of white men on the other. The Black, Knox remarked, 'is no more a white man than an ass is a horse or a zebra'. Ultimately however, all races were "[d]estined ... to run, like all other animals, a certain limited course of existence", it mattering "little how their extinction is brought about". In 1862 Knox took the opportunity of a second edition of The Races of Men to defend the "much maligned races" of the Cape against accusations of cannibalism, and to rebuke the Dutch for treating them like "wild beasts".

From the perspective of a Lowland Scot Protestant, Knox's racist works espoused extreme racial hostility to Celts in general (including the Highland Scots and Welsh people, but particularly the Irish people). He considered the "Caledonian Celt" as touching "the end of his career: they are reduced to about one hundred and fifty thousand" and that the "Welsh Celts are not troublesome, but might easily become so." For Knox, "the Irish Celt is the most to be dreaded" and openy advocated their ethnic cleansing around the time that the Great Famine was happening, stating in The Races of Men: A Fragment (1850): "The source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. There is no getting over historical facts. Look at Wales, look at Caledonia; it is ever the same. [...] The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. The Orange club of Ireland is a Saxon confederation for the clearing the land of all Papists and Jacobites; this means Celts. If left to themselves, they would clear them out, as Cromwell proposed, by the sword; it would not require six weeks to accomplish the work. But the Encumbered Estates Relief Bill will do it better."

-- Robert Knox, by Wikipedia


The Anthropological Society of London (ASL) was founded in 1863 as an institutional home for those who disagreed with the Ethnological Society's politics (in terms of party loyalties, Stocking makes the political complexion of the ESL 75% Liberal to 25% Conservative, with the proportions reversed in the ASL).[44] On the topic of race, the Ethnological Society retained views descending from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who had a five-race theory but was a monogenist, and from Prichard.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (11 May 1752 – 22 January 1840) was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He was one of the first to explore the study of the human being as an aspect of natural history. His teachings in comparative anatomy were applied to his classification of human races, of which he claimed there were five, Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.

Blumenbach's peers considered him one of the great theorists of his day, and he was a mentor or influence on many of the next generation of German biologists, including Alexander von Humboldt...

Blumenbach's work included his description of sixty human crania (skulls) published originally in fascicules as Decas craniorum (Göttingen, 1790–1828). This was a founding work for other scientists in the field of craniometry. He divided the human species into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls)...

Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that 'individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other Africans as from Europeans'.

Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., depended on geography, diet, and mannerism.

Like other monogenists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Blumenbach held to the "degenerative hypothesis" of racial origins. Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian inhabitants of Asia (see Asia hypothesis), and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors such as the sun and poor diet. Thus, he claimed, Negroid pigmentation arose because of the result of the heat of the tropical sun, while the cold wind caused the tawny colour of the Eskimos, and the Chinese were fair-skinned compared to the other Asian stocks because they kept mostly in towns protected from environmental factors. He believed that the degeneration could be reversed in a proper environmental control and that all contemporary forms of man could revert to the original Caucasian race...

He did not consider his "degenerative hypothesis" as racist and sharply criticized Christoph Meiners, an early practitioner of scientific racialism, as well as Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, who concluded from autopsies that Africans were an inferior race. Blumenbach wrote three other essays stating non-white peoples were capable of excelling in arts and sciences in reaction against racialists of his time...


His ideas were adopted by other researchers who used them to encourage scientific racism....

Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism (racial discrimination), racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Historically, scientific racism received credence throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. Dividing humankind into biologically distinct groups is sometimes called racialism or race realism by its proponents. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.

Scientific racism employs anthropology (notably physical anthropology), anthropometry, craniometry, and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines, in proposing anthropological typologies supporting the classification of human populations into physically discrete human races, some of which might be asserted to be superior or inferior to others. Scientific racism was common during the period from the 1600s to the end of World War II. Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been criticized as obsolete and discredited, yet has persistently been used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.

After the end of World War II, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO's early antiracist statement "The Race Question" (1950): "The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering." Since that time, developments in human evolutionary genetics and physical anthropology have led to a new consensus among anthropologists that human race is a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one.

The term scientific racism is generally used pejoratively when applied to more modern theories, such as those in The Bell Curve (1994). Critics argue that such works postulate racist conclusions, such as a genetic connection between race and intelligence, that are unsupported by available evidence. Publications such as the Mankind Quarterly, founded explicitly as a "race-conscious" journal, are generally regarded as platforms of scientific racism because they publish fringe interpretations of human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, language, mythology, archaeology, and race.

-- Scientific racism, by Wikipedia


Blumenbach held that all living organisms "from man down to maggots, and from the cedar to common mould or mucor," possess an inherent "effort or tendency which, while life continues, is active and operative; in the first instance to attain the definite form of the species, then to preserve it entire, and, when it is infringed upon, so far as this is possible, to restore it." This power of vitality is "not referable to any qualities merely physical, chemical, or mechanical."

-- Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, by Wikipedia


The post-Darwin concept of human speciation was unacceptable to those forming the Anthropological Society.

-- Ethnological Society of London, by Wikipedia


[5] The first incarnation of the Antiquary ceased publication in 1933 with volume 62, number 783 (Dec. 1933),[5] two years after Richard Temple's death in 1931.[6] Several early volumes of the journal were reprinted by Swati Publications in Delhi, 1984.[7]

The New Indian Antiquary was published between 1938[8] and 1947, and the Indian Antiquary (described as the "third series") between 1964 and 1971.[9] (Volumes 14 to 62 of the original Antiquary were described as the "second series".)[10]

Content

The journal had an archaeological and historical focus, and in the late nineteenth century that naturally meant that epigraphy (the study of inscriptions as writing rather than as literature) would be one of the principal subjects covered in its pages.[11] Indeed, the Antiquary was the premier source of European scholarship on Indian epigraphy until the twentieth century and the official Indian government journal of epigraphy, the Epigraphia Indica, was published as a quarterly supplement to the Antiquary between 1892 and 1920.[3]

The Antiquary was printed at Mazgaon, Bombay, by the Bombay Education Society...

'Good morning, Padre,' the Englishman said cheerily. 'I know you by reputation well enough. Meant to have come over and called before this. I'm Creighton.'

'Of the Ethnological Survey?' said Father Victor. The Englishman nodded. 'Faith, I'm glad to meet ye then; an' I owe you some thanks for bringing back the boy.'


-- Kim, by Rudyard Kipling


and later the British India Press, but illustrations were produced in London by the firm of Griggs who were known for the accuracy of their work.[12] A high standard of reproduction was essential so that scholars could work on the epigraphic material without needing to see the originals.[12] Illustrations in the Antiquary were used by scholars such as Bhandarkar, Bhagvanlal Indraji, Georg Bühler, John Faithfull Fleet, Eggeling and B. Lewis Rice to decipher important inscriptions,[13] and in many cases their translations remain the definitive versions to this day.[11]

Over one thousand plates were included in The Indian Antiquary and the Epigraphia Indica over the first fifty years of publication, but having the illustrations produced abroad was not without its disadvantages. On one occasion during World War I, enemy action meant that expensive plates had to be sent from London three times before they reached Bombay safely.[12]

Another area where the Antiquary led was in recording folklore and folktales. Its publication of Punjab folktales was the first attempt to classify the events on which folk tales were based[4] and the pioneering work on north Indian folklore of William Crooke and Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube was printed in its pages.[14]

References

1. Prospectus in The Indian Antiquary, Part 1, 5 January 1872, p. 1.
2. "The Indian Antiquary" in The Antiquaries Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, April 1922, p. 148.
3. Temple, Richard Carnac. (1922) Fifty years of The Indian Antiquary. Mazgaon, Bombay: B. Miller, British India Press, pp. 3-4.
4. Temple, p. 7.
5. Jump up to:a b Indian antiquary. Suncat. Retrieved 10 January 2017.
6. Enthoven, R. E. "Temple, Sir Richard Carnac, second baronet (1850–1931), army officer and oriental scholar". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Revised by Jones, M. G. M. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 10 January 2017. (subscription or UK public library membership required)
7. The Indian Antiquary. Open Library. Retrieved 9 January 2017.
8. New Indian Antiquary. South Asia Archive, 2014. Retrieved 30 May 2014.
9. Indian Antiquary, British Library catalogue search, 29 May 2014.
10. Indian Antiquary, British Library catalogue search, 10 January 2017.
11. Salomon, Richard (1998) (10 December 1998). Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan Languages: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan Languages. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 219. ISBN 978-0-19-535666-3.
12. Temple, p. 6.
13. History, Archaeological Survey of India, 2011. Retrieved 30 May 2014.
14. "Introduction" by Sadhana Naithani in William Crooke; Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube (2002). Folktales from Northern India. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 38. ISBN 978-1-57607-698-9.

External links

• The Indian Antiquary at archive.org

*****************************

-- The Indian Antiquary, A Journal of Oriental Research in Archaeology, Epigraphy, Ethnology, Geography, History, Folklore, Languages, Literature, Numismatics, Philosophy, Religion, &c., &c., edited by Richard Carnac Temple, C.I.E., Major, Indian Staff Corps., Vol. 23, 1894

-- The Indian Antiquary, A Journal of Oriental Research in Archaeology, Epigraphy, Ethnology, Geography, History, Folklore, Languages, Literature, Numismatics, Philosophy, Religion, &c., &c., edited by Richard Carnac Temple, C.I.E., Major, Indian Staff Corps., Vol. 24, 1895

-- The Indian Antiquary, A Journal of Oriental Research in Archaeology, Epigraphy, Ethnology, Geography, History, Folklore, Languages, Literature, Numismatics, Philosophy, Religion, &c., &c., edited by Richard Carnac Temple, C.I.E., Major, Indian Staff Corps., Vol. 25, 1896
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