Sir William Jones’ “discovery” of Sanskrit in the 18th century followed by the 19th century development of Comparative Philology profoundly shaped European identity. The process by which Comparative Philology produced the distinct fields of Classical Studies and Oriental Studies in the 19th century reflected the ethnocultural turmoil in England, France, and Germany as they crafted their national histories. The European Academy’s response to Sanskrit’s introduction into Western intellectual discourse provides a case study of European identity formation in two contrasting phases: an initial intra-European competitiveness which later evolved into a unified European academy.

First, the British, French, and German philologists who learned Sanskrit attempted to connect it to their own ethnolinguistic histories. Scholars from these three countries competed to find and translate Sanskrit manuscripts. The British East India Company, which sent Jones to Calcutta, promoted Sanskrit studies to create colonial laws concordant with ancient Sanskrit legal codes. With his philological training, Jones established the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, where he proposed in a lecture that Sanskrit was “more perfect than Greek, more refined than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.” His suggestion that these three ancient languages were related created a frenzy of academic interest in Sanskrit that shaped European identity beyond just the Saidian East-West cultural divide. 

Next, the French learned Sanskrit when Alexander Hamilton, the American statesman’s British cousin, was waylaid in France when hostilities erupted between France and England in 1803. Hamilton had studied under Jones and helped French scholars catalogue and translate the Sanskrit manuscripts acquired from Indian colonies. The Parisian Sanskritists wrote translations read by Europeans who eagerly sought Eastern wisdom. Hamilton’s student, Friedrich Schlegel, carried Sanskrit back to Germany, where his brother, August, was heading the Romanticism movement. Friedrich Schlegel’s theories about Indo-European languages were soon swept up in German Nationalism which sought an ancestral homeland for Germanic peoples in Ancient India.

However, this competitiveness diminished in 1843 when Franz Bopp published the first comparative grammar of Indo-European languages and suggested through meticulous linguistic analysis that Sanskrit pre-dated classical Greek. This initiated the second phase: the development of a unified European identity that could not stomach the idea that dark-skinned India boasted a more sophisticated intellectual heritage than Caucasian Europe – especially not when Europeans were colonizing India. European philologists united to find linguistic laws (e.g. Grimm’s Law and the Law of Palatals) through which they could demote Sanskrit’s status as the “mother” of Greek and Latin to merely their Oriental “cousin.” Classical Greek and Latin became the foundational languages of a new, allied European intellectual heritage. Although Classicists continued learning Sanskrit, they relegated it to a separate academic discipline, but continued to use Sanskrit’s grammatical structure to develop linguistics. Sanskrit grammar remained critical, but Sanskrit literature was pushed aside as inferior to those of the European Classical Tradition.

After studying Pāṇinian grammar (6th century BCE) with Brahmin pandits, European scholars imported the concept of verbal roots first described in that Sanskrit work, and began analyzing Greek and Latin morphology with this framework in mind. Ferdinand Saussure, the father of Semiotics and Linguistics, was a great scholar of Sanskrit. He wrote his dissertation on the use of the Genitive in Sanskrit, and became lecturer of Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva. In his private writings, he heavily critiques the Pāṇinian Grammar system’s flaws, as he sees them, his disdain ironically shows his great reliance on this ancient Sanskrit grammatical system for developing his own theory of linguistics and language. He, along with his predecessors, serves as an ideal example of the way the European Academy paralleled the European colonial ventures; while the latter sought the economic extraction of natural resources, the former extracted intellectual resources. Just like the natural resources, the intellectual resources were refined to European tastes, and employed to strengthen colonialist ideologies.

This project spotlights the convoluted interplay of Sanskrit and Classics when Europe was brimming with various intellectual movements such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Darwinism. Thus, the process by which Sanskrit studies divided Classical Philology from the globally inclusive field of Comparative Philology, revolutionized Western intellectual history and solidified a transnational European identity that has endured to the present in both Europe and America.

Bibliography

Franklin, Michael John. 1993. Sir William Jones Selected Poems and Prose. University of Wales Press.

Turner, James. 2014. Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Versluis, Arthur. 1993. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions. Religion in America Series. New York: Oxford University Press.

Whitney, William. 1874. Language and the Study of Language Twelve Lectures on the Principles of Linguistic Science. Cambridge University Press.

———. 1875. “Are Languages Institutions?” Popular Science Monthly 7 (June): 142–60.

———. 1911. “Philology.” Encyclopedia Britannica.