The Rt. Hon. F. Max Mueller

The Right Honourable F. MAX MUELLER

I

“If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow–in some parts a very paradise on earth–I should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life and has found solutions of some of them which well-deserved the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant–I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we, who have been nurtured almost exclusively in the thoughts of Greeks and Romans and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact, more human, a life not for this life only but a transfigured and eternal life–again I should point to India.”

The Right Hon. F. Max Mueller made this statement in London in 1842 in the first of his seven lectures on the subject: “India: What can it teach us?” to the British candidates for the Indian Civil Service. While mentioning that India has alsomany things to learn from Europe, he said that young Britishers, who had to spend about twenty-five years in India, would feel at home in India if, before they left England, they learnt about the life and literature of India. He was however careful to point out that the India he had in view was not the India of the modern cities like Calcutta, Madras and Bombay but the India of a few thousands of years ago and the contemporary India of the village communities, the true India of Indians. Max Mueller was not indulging in a panageric of ancient and rural India but describing what he learnt of them from Sanskrit literature, which he studied with remarkable zeal and perseverance for several decades, and of contemporary events in India from his place in the University of Oxford, without visiting India himself.

Whether he intended it or not, the timing of his lectures had the effect of creating in the minds of the British members of the Indian Civil Service proceeding to India respect for Indians and also of engendering self-respect and self-confidence in Indians, and particularly the Hindus, who were dispirited as the result of the Indian defeat in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and were looked down upon by the victorious British rulers. Even earlier, in 1829, Lord William Bentinck, then Governor-General, had, in his bold and famous Minute outlawing Sati, regretted that the Hindus had become the slaves of a succession of foreign invaders and resolved to help them to join the ranks of the independent nations of the world, which they deserved. The need to put heart in them was greater after the Mutiny, and Max Mueller’s lectures served that purpose to some extent, even as in India Mrs. Annie Besant helped to build up the morale of Hindus. To restore self-confidence among those who felt that they were down and out was the greatest service that any friends of India could have rendered. Gopal Krishna Gokhale admitted that the Indian National Congress could not have been initiated by Indians in 1885, but only by a Britisher like Allan Octavian Home. Max Muller, like Hume, was one of the greatest foreign friends of India.

Max Mueller was born in Germany on December 6, 1823. He got interested in India by his study of Sanskrit in Germany and France. He secured his Doctorate at the early age of twenty. He published his translation of Sanskrit classic, Hitopadesa, in 1844, when he was twenty-one. In Paris he attended lectures by Eugene Burnouf on the Hymns of the Rig Veda. When the great German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who appreciated the Upanishads but dismissed the Rig Veda as mere “priestly rubbish”, Max Muller decided to study the Rig Veda, with Sayana’s commentary. He migrated to England in 1846 and became Professor of European Languages in the Oxford University, but his main interest, Sanskrit. Though he was the most competent candidate for the Boden Professorship of Sanskrit, the University did not select him because his views on Christianity were more rational than orthodox, and his politics were more liberal than that of Oxford. The University, however, created a new chair of Comparative Philology for him. He retired from it in 1875, and devoted himself to his gigantic project of the publication of the Sacred Books of the East in several volumes! Apart from this monumental publication, Max Mueller published Science of Language, Science of Mythology Science of Religion and several other books and, among them, on Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and the “Six Systems of Indian Philosophy.”

Max Mueller was greatly interested in Brahmo Samaj of Keshab Chandra Sen, and Prarthana Samaj of Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar. Of his theory of the evolution of human thought, somewhat like Darwin’s Theory of Organic Evolution, he said:

“The bridge of thoughts that span the whole of history of the Aryan world has its first arch in the Veda, and its last in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In the Veda we watch the first unfolding of the human mind as we can watch it nowhere else. Life seems simple, natural and childlike....While in the Veda we may study the childhood, we may study in Kant’s Critique the perfect manhood of the Aryan mind. It has passed through many phases, and every one of them has left its mark.”

Max Mueller was influenced increasingly by Vedanta which he called “a system in which human speculation seems to have reached its very acme,” and he confessed himself to be a Vedantist. A year before his death he wrote:

“I make no secret that all my life I have been fond of the Vedanta; I share Schopenhauer’s enthusiasm for the Vedanta and feel indebted to it for much that has been helpful to me in my passage through life.”

If ever there lived a man who, by inner struggles and by constant efforts throughout his whole life, came to embrace the highest spirit of India’s religious and philosophical heritage, that man was Max Mueller. Though he remained a Christian by denomination, his actual faith did not accord with orthodox Christianity.

Sogreat was his identification with Hinduism that he said on one occasion:

“As classical scholars yearn to seeRome and Athens, I yearn to see Benares and to bathe in the sacred waters of the Ganges.”

On another occasion he said:

“I feel I am always in Benares. I love to imagine this house (in Oxford) as Benares. I do not desire to see the geographical Benares with my physical eye. My idea of that city is so high that I cannot risk disillusionment.”

He loved to sign his name as Mokska Mueller Bhat! Swami Vivekananda, who had met him, said that he was a Vedantist of Vedantists, and had caught the real soul and melody of Vedanta.

In his last lecture he summarised his high appreciation of the value of the Veda and the Vedanta. Lest he be thought to have exaggerated it, he quoted with approval the opinion of the famous German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who had said:

“In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life–it will be the solace of my death.”

II

While Max Mueller’s interest in India was initiated by his love of Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy, he took active interest in the contemporary politics of India. Though he was not a politician in the ordinary sense, he was able to exercise significant influence on Indian politics because of his scholarly eminence, which gave him access to Queen Victoria, W. E, Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister, and several other leaders in British public life. He conceived his position in England as a spokesman of India her aspirations.

His attitude towards British rule in India was similar to that of the leading Indians of the day, like Mahadev Govind Ranade, Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, K. T. Telang and other Liberals, who frankly accepted British rule as ordained in the inscrutable dispensation of Providence for India’s good, but were critical of some of its aspects which they characterised as un-British and sought self-government within the British Empire.

In his first lecture to the British I. C. S. candidates, Max Mueller attempted to remove the prevailing prejudice that every thing in India was strange and different from the intellectual life of England, so that they might not feel life in India was an exile to them, In the second lecture he attempted to remove the prejudice that Hindus were an inferior in race and indignantly repudiated the sweeping charge that Hindus had no respect for truth.

He said:  

“Because in Calcutta or Bombay or Madras, Indians who are brought before Judges or who hang about law courts and bazaars, are not distinguished by an unreasoning and uncompromising love of truth, is it not a very vicious induction to say, in these days of careful reasoning, that all Hindus are liars?….I confess to a little nervous tremor whenever I see a sentence beginning with ‘The people of India’ or even with ‘All Brahmins’ or ‘All Buddhists’! What follows is almost invariably wrong.”

He did not wish to present an ideal picture of Indians but protested against indiscriminate abuse heaped on them as a whole. He condemned the History of British India by James Mill, which was prescribed to the I. C. S. candidates and which, he said, was most mischievous and was responsible for the greatest misfortunes that had happened in India and which traduced the character of Indians as a body.

To repudiate Mill’s allegations, Max Mueller quoted extensively the testimonies of several British authorities who had long experience of Indians. Sir Thomas Munroe said: “I have had ample opportunity of observing the Hindus in every situation, and I can affirm that they are not litigious.” Col. Sleeman, who suppressed Thugee and had lied most of his time in rural India and among village communities, had said: “I have had before me hundreds of cases in which a man’s property, liberty and life depended upon his telling a lie, but he has refused to tell it.” Max Mueller asked how many English Judges could have said the same! He however made reservation that Hindus were truthful when left to themselves before the Muslim invasions. He could quote several authorities to testify that love of truth was the national character of Indians and asserted that there must be some good ground for the view. He contrasted how the French accused by English travellers as wanting in truthfulness, while the French described the British as untruthful! Mount Stuart Elphinstone had said that villagers were honest and sincere, and including Thugs and dacoits, the mass of crime was less in India than in England. If, under British rule, some Indians were not truthful, it was because they were obliged to resist force by fraud. Sir Thomas Munroe had said that the Hindus were not inferior to the nations of Europe, and if civilization was an article of trade between England and India, he was convinced that England would gain by the import cargo. Max Mueller added that he had been repeatedly told by English merchants that commercial honour stood higher in India than in any other country, and that a dishonoured bill was hardly known in India. After quoting several other authorities to the same effect, Max Mueller cautioned that he did not pretend that all Indians were angels, but what struck him was that, after nearly a thousand years of foreign rule, so much of Hindu truthfulness survived. In his final adjuration, he said:

“Certainly I can imagine nothing more mischievous, more dangerous, more fatal to the permanence of English rule in India than for the young Civil Servants to go to that country with the idea that it was a sink of moral depravity, an ant’s nest of lies, for no one is more sure to go wrong, whether in private or public life, as he who says in his haste: ‘All men are liars’.”

Though Max Mueller supported British rule in India, he pleaded for a more liberal policy towards Indians. He rejected all ideas that India should be ruled with a strong hand. In a letter to the Times, London, in 1883, he gave his support to the Ilbert Bill which sought to eliminate racial discrimination against Indian judges in criminal trials of Europeans, and condemned the “brutal logic which maintained that India was conquered by ‘blood and iron’ and must be ruled by ‘blood and iron!” He maintained that modern India had not had full justice done to it, and said so to Prime Minister, E. W. Gladstone. He presented a copy of his book, The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, to Lord Curzon with a view to impressing his plea that the English should not look down on Indians but should regard them as equals. He appealed to the English not to treat Indians as ‘born enemies or conspirators to be kept under by force, but as loyal subjects to be trusted.’

Max Mueller welcomed the Indian Council Bill of 1892 as at least a step in the right direction, and advised the Indian National Congress to accept it. In a letter published in the Times, he described the critics of the Bill as insects which were not worth powder and shot, and which could be more effectively killed by ignoring them than by learned arguments. He was happy that the of elections had been introduced in some responsible non-official bodies. He however regretted that he would not live to see a Parliament in Calcutta. He preferred Indians being represented in the British Parliament to Home Rule and fully supported, along with John Bright, the effort of Lal Mohan Ghose to be elected to the British House of Commons.

Max Mueller memorialised Queen Victoria to alleviate the conditions of child-widows in India and make the Women’s Fund available for the purpose. He opposed the salt-tax in India which he said, was considered in the whole history of the world as a disgrace to any civilised country. He drew up a petition to Queen Victoria for the release from prison of Bal Gangadhar Tilak. It was signed by Dadabhai Naorojj, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Sir William Wilson Hunter and others. In justification thereof, he stressed the statue of Tilak as a gentleman and scholar than as a politician, on ground of expediency.

Tilak said that no native of India could possibly be unalive to the influence which Max Mueller had all along exerted in making the British people to regard Indians with greater respect than they would have done otherwise.

Behramji M. Malabari said that Indian politicians regarded Max Mueller as one of their wisest and safesb guides, and Hindu reformers considered him as their final court of appeal. Romesh Chunder Dutt said: “I do not exaggerate when I state that for a period of half a century my countrymen have looked upon Professor Max Mueller, not only as the best interpreter of ancient Indian literature, but also as the truest friend of modern India.” In 1899, a few months before his death, Max Mueller wrote:

“What I feel, and what I wish my friends would feel with me, is that a country which, even in these unheroic days, could produce a Ram Mohan Roy, a Keshab Chandra Sen, a Malabari, and a Ramabai, is not a decadent country, but may look forward to a bright, sunny future, as it can look with satisfaction, and even pride, on four thousand years of a not inglorious history.”