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| The
Hindu Phenomenon |
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HINDU
NATIONALISM : THE FIRST PHASE
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This
story has been ably told, apart from O.P. Kejariwal, by P.J.
Marshall in his The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth
Century2 and David Kopf in his
British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of
Indian Modernisation 1773-18353. We
do not need to go over that ground again except to make a couple of
points. It will be in order to quote here Sir William Jones's famous
statement on Sanskrit because it helped restore Hindu
self-confidence to a great extent, though it also gave birth to the
Aryan race and Aryan invasion/migration theory which has not been
disposed off till today despite the absence of any worthwhile
evidence outside the uncertain discipline of philology. According to
him:
- The Sanskrit language..., "whatever
be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than
the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely
refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger
affinity both in the roots of verbs and in the form of grammar,
than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong
indeed, that no philologer could examine all three, without
believing them to have sprung from some common source, which,
perhaps no longer exists...there is a similar reason, though not
quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the
Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the
same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be
added to the same family."4
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Hindu Nationalism: The First Phase |
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