TWO FOREIGN WRITERS OF MAHABHARATA

 

THE BHAGAVAD GITA

For the Hindu philosophers, the Bhagavad Gita has been always of great importance. It was also translated from Sanskrit into other languages. As a work of literature, the epic was immensely important to the cultural life of India and even beyond her shores. According to Sargeant, the Gita is, "said to have been translated at least 200 times, in both poetic and prose forms". Richard Davis cites a count by Callewaert & Hemraj in 1982 of 1,891 translations of the Bhagavad Gita in 75 languages, including 273 in English. 

The Gita also found a rapt audience in the West. The Gita was first translated into English in India in 1785 by Charles Wilkins, a merchant with the East India company. Sir Charles Wilkins was an English typographer and an orientalist and founding member of the Asiatic Society. He is notable as the first translator of Bhagavad Gita into English. The first Sanskrit edition came out in 1806 under the supervision of Sir William Jones.

He was born at Frome in Somerset in 1749. He trained as a printer in 1770. He went to India as a printer and writer in the East India Company's service. His facility with language allowed him to quickly learn Persian and Bengali. In 1781 he was appointed as a translator of Persian and Bengali to the Commissioner of revenue and as Superintendent of the Company's Press. Wilkins moves to Varanasi where he studied Sanskrit under Kalinatha, a Brahmin Pandit. 

In this period he began work on his translation of the Mahabharata, securing strong support for his activities from the Governor of British India, Warren Hastings. Though he never completed the translation, portions were later published. The most important was his version of the Gita, published in 1785 as Bhagavat-Geeta or dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon (London: Nourse, 1785). In 1787 Wilkins followed the Geeta with his translation of The Heetopadesh of Vishnu Sharma in a series of Connected Fables, Interspersed with Moral Prudential and political Maxims. His translation of the Gita was itself soon translated into French 1787 and German 1802.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1788. In 1800 he was invited to take up the post of the first director of the India House Library, which became over time the world-famous 'India Office Library' (now British Library Oriental collections). During these years, he devoted himself to creating a font for Devanagari, "the divine script". In 1808 he published a Grammar of the Sanskrit Language King George IV gave him the batch of the Royal Guelphic Order and he was knighted in recognition of his services to the Oriental scholarship in 1833. He died in London at the age of 86.

The translation of Gita appealed both to the German romantics, notably Schlegel, Humboldt, and Goethe, and to the American transcendentalists. In 1823 the German scholar, August Wilhelm Von Schlegel produced a first-class edition of the Gita and added a Latin translation. August Wilhelm Schlegel was a linguistic philosopher and a translator of William Shakespeare's works into German. Schlegel was also the professor of Sanskrit in continental Europe and produced a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Along with his brother Friedrich August Wilhelm Schlegel, founded the academic discipline of Indology, the study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent. In 1823 he published a Latin translation of the Bhagavad Gita. This was the first of a self-financed, self-published series known as 'the Indian library', which also included a translation of the Ramayana and the Hitopadesha. 

 

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES