Place · university · United Kingdom
Oxford
The Boden chair of Sanskrit, founded in 1832 and fought over in a public election in 1860 between Monier Monier-Williams and Max Müller, made Oxford the institutional centre of British Sanskrit scholarship and of the Sacred Books of the East series.
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 51.752, -1.258
Worth knowing
The Boden professorship was endowed explicitly to help convert India to Christianity, which is stated in the founding will. What it actually produced was the critical study of Indian religion in Europe, and a body of translation that Indian reformers then used for their own purposes.
Connections (2)
- TransmissionSir William Jones
Jones told the Asiatic Society at Calcutta in 1786 that Sanskrit bore to Greek and Latin a stronger affinity than could possibly have been produced by accident, and that all three had sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists. That sentence founded comparative philology. Oxford institutionalised what followed — the Boden chair from 1832, the Max Müller and Monier-Williams rivalry, the Sacred Books of the East — on an endowment whose stated purpose had been conversion.
- TransmissionWeimar
Weimar in 1791 and Oxford in 1832 are the two beginnings of European Indology. Goethe's reading of Shakuntala in German, from Jones's English, from the Sanskrit, made Indian literature a European literary subject; the Boden chair made Sanskrit a British institutional one, endowed explicitly to help convert India. The same texts were being read for opposite reasons in the two cities.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “University of Oxford”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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