04-12-2004, 02:44 AM
HH, I hope I have not gven the impression that I consider MM to be a dolt. he was a highly intelligent individual with a very impressive and handsome face. In fact i do not disagree with much of what you say and i am very familiar with the quotations that you make. The german Government used to call the Goethe Institutes (in every other country) Max Mueller Bhavans in India and i grew up on a pablum of Max Mueller as a great appreciator of Indic tradiition.
But the fact remains he was hired by Macaulay for very ignoble reasons(anarya), a fact that he corroborated in letters to his daughter. MM was a complex individual (neither a saint nor a sinner) beset with the foibles which all of us lesser mortals battle everyday of our lives. He was never made a Boden Professor despite the fact that he coveted the post immensely. Some suspect that was because of his german nationality at a time when the English were rather ashamed of their German born Royalty. The problem with the MMs of the world is that after stripping away the facade of admiration which he prefessed for the Vedas and other texts, he caused immense damage to a nation and a people who had done him no harm. There is a rather complete treatment of his life and work and scholarship in chapter 3 of 'Politics of history' by Rajaram . The chapter is titled Max Mueller's ghost, appropriately in my opinion, because his shadow bedevils the conventional wisdom on Ancient indian History to this day.. One should also read Trautmans "Aryans and British India'. Trautman is a professor at a American Unviersity (Wisconsin ?) and is a student of Alexander basham. Trautman's book lays out in great detail the development of the pernicious notion of an 'Aryan' in the supposedly enlightened Europe of the nineteenth century. Despite later protestations from MM that Aryan does not signify race, his initial pronouncements gave rise to the highly destructive notions of the superiority of the Aryan race., the unintended consequences of which resulted in a great war with 50 million dead.
I am afraid history will judge Friedrich Maximillian Mueller to be a weak human being vulnerable to material blandishments. But then , such foibles are considered par for the course today and from a comparative standpoint he may not have been such a bad fellow after all.
But the fact remains he was hired by Macaulay for very ignoble reasons(anarya), a fact that he corroborated in letters to his daughter. MM was a complex individual (neither a saint nor a sinner) beset with the foibles which all of us lesser mortals battle everyday of our lives. He was never made a Boden Professor despite the fact that he coveted the post immensely. Some suspect that was because of his german nationality at a time when the English were rather ashamed of their German born Royalty. The problem with the MMs of the world is that after stripping away the facade of admiration which he prefessed for the Vedas and other texts, he caused immense damage to a nation and a people who had done him no harm. There is a rather complete treatment of his life and work and scholarship in chapter 3 of 'Politics of history' by Rajaram . The chapter is titled Max Mueller's ghost, appropriately in my opinion, because his shadow bedevils the conventional wisdom on Ancient indian History to this day.. One should also read Trautmans "Aryans and British India'. Trautman is a professor at a American Unviersity (Wisconsin ?) and is a student of Alexander basham. Trautman's book lays out in great detail the development of the pernicious notion of an 'Aryan' in the supposedly enlightened Europe of the nineteenth century. Despite later protestations from MM that Aryan does not signify race, his initial pronouncements gave rise to the highly destructive notions of the superiority of the Aryan race., the unintended consequences of which resulted in a great war with 50 million dead.
I am afraid history will judge Friedrich Maximillian Mueller to be a weak human being vulnerable to material blandishments. But then , such foibles are considered par for the course today and from a comparative standpoint he may not have been such a bad fellow after all.