JOURNAL OF THE ASIATIC SOCIETY VOLUME LXI No. 2 2019 THE ASIATIC SOCIETY 1 PARK STREET r KOLKATA © The Asiatic Society ISSN 0368-3308 Edited and published by Dr. Satyabrata Chakrabarti General Secretary The Asiatic Society 1 Park Street Kolkata 700 016 Published in August 2019 Printed at Desktop Printers 3A, Garstin Place, 4th Floor Kolkata 700 001 Price : 400 (Complete vol. of four nos.) CONTENTS ARTICLES Learning from the Indological Researches of our Early Native Masters K. Paddayya 1 Sabyasachi Bhattacharya: In memoriam Amiya Kumar Bagchi 31 Humane Journey into the Nature of Human Culture : A Personal Narrative S. B. Chakrabarti 61 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre : A Defining Moment in the Nationalist Movement Amiya K. Samanta 79 GLEANINGS FROM THE PAST The Indian Aborigines and Their Administration B. S. Guha 137 NOTES ON GLEANINGS Comments on The Indian Aborigines and their Administration Rajat Kanti Das 167 REVIEW ARTICLE Workshop on Professional Ethics of Publication : A Review Satarupa Dattamajumdar, Samik Biswas and Sagarika Sur 173 BOOK REVIEW Ravi Korisettar (ed) Beyond Stones and More Stones, Volumes 1 (2017) and 2 (2018), Price Rs. 1200 each volume. Ranjana Ray 183 Ana Jelnikar, Universalist Hopes in India and Europe : The Worlds of Rabindranath Tagore and Srecko Kosovel, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016. Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty 189 LEARNING FROM THE INDOLOGICAL RESEARCHES OF OUR EARLY NATIVE MASTERS* K. PADDAYYA I am truly overjoyed to present myself once again at the time- honoured Asiatic Society in Kolkata. I am grateful to its Governing Council for their kind invitation to deliver this years Raja Rajendralala Mitra memorial lecture. Today is a day of remembrance as it marks the death anniversary of Rajendralala Mitra. In tune with the nostalgic spirit of the occasion, in this lecture I propose to highlight the contributions of some of the past masters of our land to early Indological studies and also explore the possibility of obtaining some useful insights from their work for dealing with contemporary academic and social issues. I must confess that this lecture is a cut- and-paste effort and its newness, if any, lies in bringing together information about the work of native scholars of the early colonial period from eastern, southern and western parts of the country. Let us begin with how it all started. The establishment of the Asiatic Society on 15 January 1784 marks the first institutionalized effort to gain knowledge about the Asiatic lands. The founder Sir William Jones envisaged the Societys projected goal as one of initiating inquiries into Man and Nature; whatever is performed by the one, or produced by the other (Jones 1807a: 5). Indeed the Asiatic Society served as the mother of all institutions devoted to Oriental studies and almost every branch of investigation dealing with the region had its beginnings in the learned proceedings of the Society. It inaugurated what is called New Orientalism (Trautmann 2009a: 156). Sir Williams own eleven anniversary discourses to the Society are a class apart and known for their broad sweep and many wonderful insights. These are aimed at finding links among the Asiatic peoples the Hindus, the Arabs, the Tartars, the Chinese and the Persians * 2nd Raja Rajendralala Mitra Memorial Lecture delivered at the Rajendralala Mitra Bhavan, Salt Lake on 26th July 2019. 2 JOURNAL OF THE ASIATIC SOCIETY : Vol. LXI, No. 2, 2019 by undertaking a comparative study of their histories, languages, religions, cultures and philosophies. What was the final intent of this whole endeavour? In Sir Williams own words: the goal was to know who they severally were, whence, and when they came, where they now are settled and what advantage a perfect knowledge of them all may bring to our European world (Jones 1807b: 28). We may also recall here the gentle reprimand he had administered to his countrymen even before landing on the Indian soil: We are like the savages, who thought that the sun rose and set for them alone, and could not imagine that the waves,which surrounded their island, left coral and pearl upon any other shore (Jones 1807c: 166). These two statements not only reflect Sir Williams breadth of vision in scholarly matters but also his belief in the usefulness of true knowledge as a means for bringing together peoples and cultures of various lands. It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this universalistic attitude of mind in this age of hyper-nationalism and social and religious isolationism. The half-century that followed the establishment of Asiatic Society witnessed remarkable advances in the study of geography of Asiatic lands; their ancient history, languages and literature; philosophical and religious systems; epigraphical and numismatic records; art and architecture; and cultural traditions and practices (for a detailed review, see Kejariwal 1988). These studies brought a new awareness about the Oriental lands among the European people. Indeed, these resulted in what Edgar Quinet later called the Oriental Renaissance which brought to Europe an antiquity more profound, more philosophical and more poetical than that of Greece and Rome (Schwab 1984: 11). A full century earlier, while referring to the corrective offered by Indological studies to the European mind, Max Mueller (1919: 6) similarly wrote that these make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human. While the electrifying effect which the new knowledge about the Oriental lands had on the European mind is conceded by one and all, we are still not clear about the various processes involved in its production. For example, was it all due to the efforts of European PADDAYYA : LEARNING FROM THE INDOLOGICAL RESEARCHES 3 workers? Or, were the indigenous scholars too involved in this knowledge creation effort? If so, what is the nature of their contribution or input to the total effort? Were they mere content-suppliers? Or, were they also originators of ideas? These are issues which are still wide open and deserve close attention. As a small effort in this direction, I wish to draw attention to some examples from the eastern, southern and western parts of the country to illustrate that the share of indigenious scholarship was significant and that it had an originality of its own. I Let us, first of all, consider the case of eastern India. It is well known that about a dozen Sanskrit Pandits were closely associated with the translation work of Sanskrit texts undertaken by the Bengal Government of East India Company headed by Warren Hastings. Mukherji (1985) has given a short account of the work of these native scholars. In addition, Sir William engaged a private tutor for learning Sanskrit. Ramlochan was the non-Brahmin scholar who taught Sanskrit grammar to him from 1785 and also helped him in matters dealing with ancient texts including reconstruction of the chronology of ancient India. Sir William described him as a pleasant old man of the medical cast, who teaches me all he knows of the Grammar (Cannon 1970: 682) and an excellent scholar, and a very sensible and unprejudiced man (Jones 1807d: 19). He benefited much more from the work of the Brahmin Pandit Radhakanta Sarman (for a short account of his career, see Rocher 1990). The context of this interaction is briefly as follows. In 1922 the civil servant F.E. Pargiters book Ancient Indian Historical Tradition appeared. In this book Pargiter went beyond the Vedic texts which are religious in nature and made an attempt to reconstruct ancient Indian dynastic history on the basis of Puranic and epic accounts. Thanks to the contributions of later workers we now know that ancient India had its own historical tradition called the itihasa- purana tradition and that it passed through two or three stages of development (Pathak 1966; Warder 1970; Thapar 1991, 1992; Sharma 2003). It is important to note here that Sir William already made the 4 JOURNAL OF THE ASIATIC SOCIETY : Vol. LXI, No. 2, 2019 first explicit attempt to use the Puranas and other indigenous writings for reconstructing ancient Indian history. He also warned that, while using these sources, one must take care not to mistake enigmas and allegories for historical verity (Jones 1807d: 2). He regarded truth as the very soul and essence of history. Sir William published his views in three papers, viz. On the Chronology of the Hindus (1788); A Supplement to the Essay on Indian Chronology (1788); and On Asiatic History, Civil and Natural (1793). He identified four stages in ancient Indian history, of which the first three were relegated to the realm of mythology. Regular history, according to him, began with the Magadhan kings in 2100 B.C. From our point of view, what is important is the fact that for his reconstruction of ancient Indian chronology Sir William depended to a great extent on Radhakanta Sarmans short treatise in Sanskrit called Puranarthaprakasa. This 21-page text has now been published by Ludo and Rosane Rocher (1996) with detailed notes about how Sir William acquired and used it for preparing his own essays. Here it is enough to note that Radhakanta Sarman composed it in late 1783-early 1784 entirely on the basis of information secured from the Puranas. The text consists of four parts: i) Kalasankhyaprakarana (Hindu reckoning of time); ii) Dharmanirupanaprakarana (religious texts of all kinds); iii) Sristyadivirupana(matters regarding creation); and iv) Rajavamsa (royal dynasties or lists of kings). It is the first attempt at writing a history of ancient India. A copy of the text was presented to Warren Hastings, at whose instance Radhakanta Sarman actually took up the task of composing it. Soon it was translated into Persian. It was this Persian edition which came to Sir Williams notice.