It Must
Be Borne In Mind That No Englishman Has Ever Been Loved So Well
By The Natives As This
Old and courageous friend of the Maharana
of Oodeypur, who, in his turn, was so friendly towards the natives
that
The humblest of them never saw a trace of contempt in his
demeanour. He wrote before ethnology had reached its present stage
of development, but his book is still an authority on everything
concerning Rajistan. Though the author's opinion of his work was
not very high, though he stated that "it is nothing but a
conscientious collection of materials for a future historian,"
still in this book is to be found many a thing undreamed of by any
British civil servant.
Let our friends smile incredulously. Let our enemies laugh at
our pretensions to penetrate the world-mysteries of Aryavarta,"
as a certain critic recently expressed himself. However pessimistic
may be our critics' views, yet, even in the event of our conclusions
not proving more trustworthy than those of Fergusson, Wilson,
Wheeler, and the rest of the archeologists and Sanskritists who
have written about India, still, I hope, they will not be less
susceptible of proof. We are daily reminded that, like unreasonable
children, we have undertaken a task before which archaeologists
and historians, aided by all the influence and wealth of the
Government, have shrunk dismayed; that we have taken upon ourselves
a work which has proved to be beyond the capacities of the Royal
Asiatic Society.
Let it be so.
Let everyone try to remember, as we ourselves remember, that not
very long ago a poor Hungarian, who not only had no means of any
kind but was almost a beggar, traveled on foot to Tibet through
unknown and dangerous countries, led only by the love of learning
and the eager wish to pour light on the historical origin of his
nation. The result was that inexhaustible mines of literary
treasures were discovered. Philology, which till then had wandered
in the Egyptian darkness of etymological labyrinths, and was about
to ask the sanction of the scientific world to one of the wildest
of theories, suddenly stumbled on the clue of Ariadne. Philology
discovered, at last, that the Sanskrit language is, if not the
forefather, at least - to use the language of Max Muller - "the elder
brother" of all classical languages. Thanks to the extraordinary
zeal of Alexander Csoma de Koros, Tibet yielded a language the
literature of which was totally unknown. He partly translated it
and partly analyzed and explained it. His translations have shown
the scientific world that (1) the originals of the Zend-Avesta,
the sacred scriptures of the sun-worshippers, of Tripitaka, that
of the Buddhists, and of Aytareya-Brahmanam, that of the Brahmans,
were written in one and the same Sanskrit language; (2) that all
these three languages - Zend, Nepalese, and the modern Brahman
Sanskrit - are more or less dialects of the first; (3) that old
Sanskrit is the origin of all the less ancient Indo-European
languages, as well as of the modern European tongues and dialects;
(4) that the three chief religions of heathendom - Zoroastrianism,
Buddhism and Brahmanism - are mere heresies of the monotheistic
teachings of the Vedas, which does not prevent them from being
real ancient religions and not modern falsifications.
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