LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 22:12 December 2022
ISSN 1930-2940

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Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians: A Study

Dr. S. Sridevi


Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1819)
Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Schlegel

Abstract

Friedrich Schlegel hails from a prestigious German academic family and was an Indologist like his famous brother August Wilhelm Schlegel who founded the concept of Romanticism in Germany. Sanskrit played a major role in German society in shaping aesthetics and literary styles and helped the new field of study of comparative philology. The Danish government had sent German missionaries to Malabar region and these missionaries took back a lot of knowledge about Tamil Nadu and Kerala, but these early works lost their prominence in German academia. Instead, Sanskrit took over as a leading and influential phenomenon. This paper tries to study Friedrich Schlegel’s important treatise “On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians” and understand if there are any reasons for the shift from Malabar languages to Sanskrit.

Keywords: Friedrich Schlegel, Sanskrit, Germany, Malabar

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) can be regarded as a German literary critic and a poet and philosopher. Early German Romanticism’s philosophical importance can now be reconsidered by studying the works of him. He was the youngest of five sons born in Hanover into a culturally prominent literary family. His father, Johann Adolf Schlegel, was a clergyman and wrote literary works; his uncle, Johann Elias, wrote dramas and was a literary critic; and his elder brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel translated Shakespeare’s plays into German and also emerged as a leading literary critic. In 1804 Schlegel developed an interest in the study of Sanskrit and Hindu texts. Schlegel’s work as explained in the long essay “On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians” studied the links between Sanskrit and the Indo-European languages, and developed the study of comparative grammar, a term which Schlegel himself coined in the text. The study of Hindu metaphysics created a shift in his religious thought, and he converted to Catholicism in April 1808, scholars argue. (Speight)

The Danish King Frederick IV acquired a colony for the Danish settlements in Tranquebar. The Danish East India Trading Company was gaining momentum in and around the place. Its Directors in Copenhagen wanted to get more profits through trading activities. The king also wanted to spread protestantism and Halle in Germany supplied missionaries, thanks to the zealous Pastor Prof. Francke to be sent to South India. All these missionaries, though Germans by birth, came to be called the Royal Danish Missionaries. The Missions Kollegium in Copenhagen failed to give these early German missionaries enough protection in the Danish colony Tranquebar. (Mohanavelu 26)

Mohanavelu's doctoral research was on the investigation of the “origin of German Indology'' and he traced its “development over the past three centuries in a particular branch - German Tamilology" (German Tamilology by C.S. Mohanavelu, Saiva Siddhanta, Chennai, 1993). He believes that “although German Indology” is historically associated with German Jesuit Heinrich Roth (1620-1668) “significant German interest in Indology” can be located from the year “1706, when Ziegenbalg arrived at Tranquebar, (Tarangampadi in Tamil) with a Royal Danish order to propagate the Gospel among the "Malabarians", as Tamils were known in Europe in those days” (Viswanathan).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. S. Sridevi
Professor of English
CTTE College
Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600011, India
sridevisaral@gmail.com
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