Max Müller (1823-1900), a well-known German Indologist at the Oxford University, is famous as the pioneer who dedicated his career to the translation of the Rig Veda and other ancient Indian Sanskrit manuscripts into English. He has been highly respected by Indians, from his contemporaries including Swami Vivekanand to many in the post-colonial modern India. His photo has graced Indian stamps; several linguistic institutes and roads in India are named in his honor, and his work is held in high regard by naive Indian students.
However, it is high time that we ask ourselves if Mr. Müller was truly worthy of such high accolades. There is no denying the fact that he spent over 30 years of his life translating the Rig Veda from Sāyaṇācārya‘s commentary, the Rig Veda Samhita. This is indeed a mammoth achievement, however, it’s important to examine his motivation behind such a project. We should try to understand why someone such as Müller, a devout Christian, would have undertaken such an arduous task of translating ancient texts of a country that itself was being ruled by his primary sponsor, the East Indian Company. Did he really want to learn the profound wisdom of the Vedas, the cultural heritage of the country that he never set foot in even once in his lifetime? Or could there be a sinister motive behind his research enterprise?
This article attempts to examine Max Müller’s views on Rig Veda, India and her people, and his motivation behind the translation projects, using his own writings. This article also discusses some possible repercussions of his work that, to this day, continue to affect how modern Indians see their own heritage.
Unscientific dating of Vedas
Müller’s attitude towards ancient Indian scriptures can be seen in the way he casually arrived at the dating of the Rig Veda. In his 1865 lecture on the Vedas (Chips from a German workshop), he postulated the age of Vedas, as a little over a thousand years BCE merely on the basis of the purported dating of Sāyaṇācārya’s commentary, without any scientific evidence. Historians of free India never had the will to question or explore this unscientific conclusion, and a vast majority of Indians blindly believe this dating as something set in stone.
“What I had to do, first of all, was to copy not only the text, but the commentary of the Rig-veda, a work which when finished will fill six of these large volumes. The author or rather the compiler of this commentary, Sâyana Âkârya, lived about 1400 after Christ, that is to say, about as many centuries after, as the poets of the Veda lived before, the beginning of our era. “
His conclusion was based on works by native Sanskrit scholars dating around 600 BC, in which every verse and hymn of the Veda was accurately counted and explained as Sutras.
“So that we want previously to 600 b.c., when every syllable of the Veda was counted, at least two strata of intellectual and literary growth, of two or three centuries each; and are thus brought to 1100 or 1200 b.c. as the earliest time when we may suppose the collection of the Vedic hymns to have been finished. This collection of hymns again contains, by its own showing, ancient and modern hymns, the hymns of the sons together with the hymns of their fathers and earlier ancestors; so that we cannot well assign a date more recent than 1200 to 1500 before our era, for the original composition of those simple hymns which up to the present day are regarded by the Brahmans with the same feelings with which a Mohammedan regards the Koran, a Jew the Old Testament, a Christian his Gospel.“
In other words, since he was unable to trace back the antiquity of the Veda beyond 1500 BCE, he simply assumed 1500 BC as the approximate creation date of the Veda! With such a compressed timeline, it became nearly impossible to fit the historic works such as Ramayan and Mahabharat into the chronology. As a consequence, these historical epics are now assumed to be mere mythological fictions. Where previously, the great heroes of these epics – Lord Rama and Lord Krishna – were revered as incarnations of Bhagavan Vishnu, to be modeled upon as the ideals, they have become objects of ridicule in modern India, where attempts are even made to depict the antagonists as heroes.
Subtle missionary – the true intent of Veda translation
Towards the end of his career, Müller gave a series of lectures on his theory of “The Science of Religion”. He articulates his views on why a comparative study of non-Christian texts and religions is essential from the context of Christianity itself. The following quotes occur in his introductory essay (Preface for Chips from a German workshop, 1867) on this theory:
“The Science of Religion will for the first time assign to Christianity its right place among the religions of the world; it will show for the first time fully what was meant by the fulness of time; it will restore to the whole history of the world, in its unconscious progress towards Christianity, its true and sacred character. …. The Science of Language has taught us that there is order and wisdom in all languages, and that even the most degraded jargons contain the ruins of former greatness and beauty. The Science of Religion, I hope, will produce a similar change in our views of barbarous forms of faith and worship; and missionaries, instead of looking only for points of difference, will look out more anxiously for any common ground, any spark of the true light that may still be revived, any altar that may be dedicated afresh to the true God.“
The one true God in Christianity is the ‘creator of heaven and earth, and the savior of humanity from all sins‘. This concept is based on the Christian belief that human birth itself happens due to sin, and only the true God and/or His son Jesus Christ can liberate human beings from that sin. This is in stark contradiction to the Hindu concepts of divinity, creation, as well as principles of karma and reincarnations. Hinduism regards a human birth as a golden opportunity to realize the soul’s true nature, and is definitely not a sin! The quoted statement above shows the myopic view of Mr. Müller in spite of having spent a major part of his career translating the sacred Veda. It also shows his true allegiance to the missionaries who were single-mindedly focused on converting Hindus to Christianity with complete support from the British administration. He considered his work an important tool for enabling and expediting these conversions.
“If missionaries could show to the Brahmans, the Buddhists, the Zoroastrians, nay, even to the Mohammedans, how much their present faith differs from the faith of their forefathers and founders, if they could place into their hands and read with them in a kindly spirit the original documents in which these various religions profess to be founded, and enable them to distinguish between the doctrines of their own sacred books and the additions of later ages, an important advantage would be gained, and the choice between Christ and other Masters would be rendered far more easy to many a truth-seeking soul.“
That Müller was a Christian missionary in disguise, is evident from the disgust he showed towards Hindu gods and dharmic practices in his 1873 lecture on missions:
“It is true there are millions of children, women, and men in India who fall down before the stone image of Vishṇu, with his four arms, riding on a creature half bird, half man, or sleeping on the serpent; who worship Śiva, a monster with three eyes, riding naked on a bull, with a necklace of skulls for his ornament. There are human beings who still believe in a god of war, Kârtikêya, with six faces, riding on a peacock, and holding bow and arrow in his hands; and who invoke a god of success, Gaṇeśa, with four hands and an elephant’s head, sitting on a rat. Nay, it is true that, in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, the figure of the goddess Kali is carried through the streets of her own city, Calcutta, her wild disheveled hair reaching to her feet, with a necklace of human heads, her tongue protruded from her mouth, her girdle stained with blood. All this is true; but ask any Hindu who can read and write and think, whether these are the gods he believes in, and he will smile at your credulity. How long this living death of national religion in India may last, no one can tell: for our purposes, however, for gaining an idea of the issue of the great religious struggle of the future, that religion too is dead and gone.” Ironically these words are coming from a man who had never visited India and had no real understanding of the Indian way of living.
In Life and letters of Max Müller, he enthusiastically wrote about the conversion of Indians to Christianity:
“India is much riper for Christianity than Rome or Greece were at the time of St. Paul. The rotten tree has for some time had artificial supports, because its fall would have been inconvenient for the Government. But if the Englishman comes to see that the tree must fall, sooner or later, then the thing is done, and he will mind no sacrifice either of blood or of land. For the good of this struggle I should like to lay down my life, or at least to lend my hand to bring about this struggle.“
In fact, he was very well-regarded by the Christ Church cleric E B Pusey who wanted Müller to lead the Boden chair of Oxford’s Sanskrit studies. In Pusey’s own words – “Your work will form a new era in the efforts for the conversion of India, and Oxford will have reason to be thankful that, by giving you a home, it will have facilitated a work of such primary and lasting importance for the conversion of India, and which, by enabling us to compare that early false religion with the true, illustrates the more than blessedness of what we enjoy.“.
A letter written in December 1866 to his wife (Life and letters), makes it abundantly clear that Müller’s real intent was to uproot unsuspecting Hindus from their belief system, and thus prime them for conversion to newer faith(s):
“I hope I shall finish that work, and I feel convinced, though I shall not live to see it, that this edition of mine and the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India, and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what that root is, is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years.“
In an 1867 letter written to Dr. Milman, the Dean of St Paul’s (Life and letters), he further reaffirmed his intent, while discussing strategies to support new converts so they in turn can continue the mission.
“I have myself the strongest belief in the growth of Christianity in India, There is no country so ripe for Christianity as India, and yet the difficulties seem enormous. …“
To the Duke of Argyll, he wrote in December 1868 about the importance of his work and how it could help govern the natives of India. He also spoke about how the next conquest of India would be through education:
“India has been conquered once, but India must be conquered again, and that second conquest should be a conquest by education… The results of the educational work carried on during the last twenty years are palpable everywhere… India can never be anglicized, but it can be reinvigorated. By encouraging a study of their own ancient literature, … a new national literature may spring up, impregnated with Western ideas, yet retaining its native spirit and character. The two things hang together.”
This was strong and vocal support for the newly minted Macaulian education system, which was designed to replace, with force if necessary, the Sanskrit-based education system in India with an English education system. In Macaulay’s words, the purpose of this system was to ‘form a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect‘. More than 200 years since Mr. Müller’s prediction has more than come true.
In the same letter, Müller also predicted the doom of Hinduism:
“As to religion, that will take care of itself. The missionaries have done far more than they themselves seem to be aware of, nay, much of the work which is theirs they would probably disclaim. The Christianity of our nineteenth century will hardly be the Christianity of India. But the ancient religion of India is doomed—and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?”
With the recent news of missionaries involved in a full swing conversion of entire villages in various parts of India, whether it’s Southern India, Punjab, or Bihar, lamentably this prediction also appears to be coming true.
“Aryan” race theory and the start of the Dravidian myth
In the ‘lecture on the Vedas’ (Chips, p1) published in 1865, Müller inadvertently reveals the true reason for spending the prime of his career on a translation project. As the first westerner to come up with the “Aryan” race theory and to link European Christians to Vedic “Aryans”, he not only rejected their Jewish origins in spite of Bethlehem being claimed as Christ’s birthplace but also linked the modern-day English and other European languages to Sanskrit, calling them ‘Indo-European languages’.
“As the language of the Veda, the Sanskrit, is the most ancient type of the English of the present day, (Sanskrit and English are but varieties of one and the same language,) so its thoughts and feelings contain in reality the first roots and germs of that intellectual growth which by an unbroken chain connects our own generation with the ancestors of the Aryan race, …. We are by nature Aryan, Indo-European, not Semitic: our spiritual kith and kin are to be found in India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany; not in Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Palestine. “
This clearly shows his superficial understanding of Sanskrit. “Arya (आर्य)” in Sanskrit means “noble” or “honorable”. The term is probably as old as Sanskrit itself which clearly originated in the Indian soil. To use this term blatantly as the name of a hypothetical race shows his clear need to establish racial superiority over Indians. This gross blunder may have later inspired Hitler to identify himself with the “Aryan” race to claim superiority over the Jewish people.
In India, what it can teach us, the concept of racial discrimination by the supposedly fair-skinned “Aryans” was emphasized:
“Indra is the leader in battles, the protector of the bright Aryans, the destroyer of the black aboriginal inhabitants of India. ” Statements like this attempt to build a narrative that portrays “Daanavaas” or “Asuraas” of Indian scriptures as black original inhabitants of India, who as his narrative suggested, were subdued by the fair-skinned Aryans settled in the north.
Müller was also the first to propose the now-debunked Aryan Invasion Theory, where Aryans descended supposedly from central Asia, and with the help of warlike gods like Indra, pushed the native aborigines down to the south. He called these Aryans “Southern Aryans” in contrast with their “Northern Aryan” brothers who supposedly inhabited Europe, mainly Germany and other Slavic regions.
“We see the Aryan tribes taking possession of the land, and under the guidance of such warlike gods as Indra and the Maruts, defending their new homes against the assaults of the black-skinned aborigines as well as against the inroads of later Aryan colonists.”
Yet he contradicts himself on these racial distinctions, without considering whether it was consistent with his own proposed theory:
“Even if Sanskrit were more of a dead language than it really is, all the living languages of India, both Aryan and Dravidian, draw their very life and soul from Sanskrit.“
In all probability, Müller’s narrative was a reflection of how fair-skinned Europeans’ have traditionally mistreated dark-skinned natives in Africa, America, and Australia. Nevertheless, a deeply divisive narrative of the Aryan-Dravidian fault line was created, that continues to divide Indian minds to this day.
Father of caste imposition
Indian society from ancient times has been organized based on the varna and jati framework. There were four varnas – Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishyas, and Shudras – each with their own important function in the society. A person’s varna was determined by his/her capabilities or natural tendencies of working, not on the basis of birth. Jati, on the other hand, was a family name taken by birth. Although not mandatory, elders in a family would typically hand down their occupation or varna to the next generation. However, it was just as easy for a person to change his varna from the family tradition. Varnas were fluid and flexible occupations, whereas what we see today in the Indian society is a jumbled mess of fixed caste-based discriminations, the caste (or varna) being accredited to a person by birth. The seeds of this mixing of varnas and jatis and converting this well-oiled system into an evil caste system are first seen in Max Müller’s writings.
From India, what it can teach us, “When the great mass of the (Aryan) people had once settled down in their homesteads, the military and political duties seem to have been monopolized by what we call a caste.“
In his essay on Caste, Müller hypothesized with great conviction, this caste divide based on an improper understanding of Vedic hymns:
“How they were treated by the Brahmans, we may conclude from the following invocation: ‘Indra and Soma, burn the devils, destroy them, throw them down, ye two Buns, the people that grow in darkness! Hew down the madmen, suffocate them, kill them; hurl them away, and slay the voracious.’ .. ‘Indra and Soma, up together against the cursing demon! May he burn and hiss like an oblation in the fire! Put your everlasting hatred upon the villain who hates the Brahman, who eats flesh, and whose look is abominable.’ … This ancient division between Aryan and non-Aryan races, based on an original difference of blood, was preserved in later times as the primary distinction between the three twice-born castes and the Sûdra . The word “ârya ” (noble) is derived from “ãrya,” which means a householder, and , was originally used as the name of the third caste, or the Vaisyas. These Aryas or Vaisyas formed the great bulk of the Brahmanic society, and it is but natural that their name, in a derivative form, should have been used as a common name of the three classes into which these Aryas became afterward divided. How these three upper castes grew up we can see very clearly in the hymns, in the Brâhmanas, and in the legendary stories contained in the epic poems. The three occupations of the Aryas in India were fighting, cultivating the soil, and worshipping the gods.”
Knowingly or not, Müller portrayed the dark-skinned people of South India as the Asuras of these texts, without considering the fact that these same four varnas are found across the entire Indian subcontinent!
He also was among the first westerners to blame Brahmins for all the ills in the society:
“But the priests only were allowed to chant these songs, they only were able to teach them, and they impressed the people, with a belief that the slightest mistake in the words, or the pronunciation of the words, would rouse the anger of the god. Thus they became the masters of all religious ceremonies, the teachers of the people, the ministers of kings. Their favor was courted, their anger dreaded, by a pious but credulous race. … For a long time the three upper classes continued to consider themselves as one race, all claiming the title of Ârya, in contradistinction from the fourth caste, or the Sûdras.“
Unfortunately, this “Brahmin bashing” trend continues to this day and has resulted in immeasurable atrocities, such as the genocide of Maharashtrian Brahmins of 1948. Brahmin bashing, in the guise of protesting against so-called Brahminical patriarchy, is actually one of the top trends on Twitter, with even the “liberal” ex-CEO Jack Dorsey indulging in it.
Müller’s entire essay on Caste is a twisted narrative, with the core objective of dividing the Hindu society so they are more prone to the conversion tactics of the Christian missionaries:
“Caste, which has hitherto proved an impediment to the conversion of the Hindus, may in future become one of the most powerful engines for the conversion not merely of individuals, but of whole classes of Indian society.“
Summary
Thus the veteran Sanskrit and Indic scholar, Max Müller, managed to fool even great souls such as Swami Vivekananda and Lokmanya Tilak. He is held in high esteem by left-leaning historians of independent India, and his work still forms the basis of the biased Hinduphobic education system of modern India, continuing to divide and demean unsuspecting Hindus to this day. Today’s Indians are ashamed of their own culture and traditions. The Vedas that were once considered to be the backbone of Indian civilization are now neglected by the masses, with even so-called Brahmins taking great pride in NOT following their “patriarchal” stereotypes. Considering the state of today’s Hindu society, we can say that Max Müller ended up achieving his true intentions after all. It might even be an understatement to call him the “Father of modern Hinduphobia”.