Lumières orientales et Orient des Lumières (French Edition)

The outcome was similar on both fronts—the British succeeded in gradually eliminating all French influence, in India in particular. After a brief sketch of the preliminary forays by European scholars in this field in the 17th century, I shall first assess the contributions of the French Jesuits in India. Then I shall outline various philosophical publications, based on Indian texts of doubtful authenticity, by British and French researchers in India.

In a third stage, I will deal with the crucial turning point of direct access to authentic documents of Ancient India by British and French scholars. In the fourth stage of this paper, I will describe the gradual ascendancy obtained by British scholars in publishing reliable English translations of Ancient Indian texts as well as dictionaries and grammar manuals of Sanskrit and various other modem Indian languages.

These were to serve as reference books for scholars in France, Holland and Germany. Before concluding, I will take a brief look at the dates of the founding of Schools and Institutes for Oriental studies in France and in Britain respectively, since they illustrate the different approaches adopted by the two countries. Navigation and trade with Asiatic countries had been inaugurated with the creation of national trading companies from onwards.

The British East India Company was set up that very year and was to last until The Dutch East India Company existed from until The French East India Company was the shortest-lived among the European trading companies; launched in by Colbert during the reign of Louis XIV, it ceased to exist a little over one hundred years later, in Then the English Jesuit Thomas Stephens compiled a "Christian Purana" in in the Marathi language, and published for the first time in Europe a grammar of an Indian language namely Konkani, spoken on the west coast , in It was published posthumously In Leyden in This included philosophical observations on Indian practices.

Thus, several European nations were present in India in the 17th century and their representatives often undertook the transmission of Indian traditions to their respective countries, with the assistance of Indian interpreters and specialists who supplied them with details while they were in India.

In response to this appeal, in , the Jesuit Le Gac sent back manuscripts including a copy of three of the four ancient Vedas.

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Father Beschi, also a Jesuit, sent back a manual of Tamil grammar in Thus, for the first time in Europe, a whole series of Indian texts, based or reproduced directly from authentic documents were available for consultation. During this period between and , the British presence in India was purely commercial.

The British had not as yet felt the need, nor the interest to study Indian languages or Indian documents. So, at this stage, the French were definitely ahead of the British in their exploration of Indian texts and culture. Since they had no knowledge of Sanskrit or other Indian languages, they had to depend on local intermediaries and sources. Thus several errors of interpretation, and a false attribution of recent rewritings and approximate summaries of religious texts to authentic and very ancient sources appear.

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Similarly, Alexander Dow tended to reduce all of Hindu philosophy to dogma on metempsychosis in his History of Hindostan, in Nevertheless, Dow had learnt Persian which was the language used by the Mughal administration and court officials. Dupleix, who had been in charge of the French settlements in India from to , was summoned back to France quite suddenly in due to various criminal charges brought against him by the shareholders of the French East India Company.

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He was replaced by Lally-Tollendal who committed a series of strategical errors in the wartorn landscape of peninsular India. Thus, at his return to France in , the French in India had lost the major part of their territories and settlements to the British. The Treaty of Paris, signed in , which put an end to the Seven-Years' war between France and Britain , left France in a considerably weakened position in India as elsewhere.

This text was widely diffused and believed to be authentically Indian and authentically ancient until when the British researcher Francis Ellis obtained proof from the Catholic mission in Pondicherry that it was in fact a compilation made by French missionaries on paper produced in Europe in the first half of the 18th century, with the help of a Bengali scribe. Thus Ellis concluded rightly that this text did not stem from ancient Indian sources, but was simply a reflection of information circulating among French missionaries in the 18th century!

Thus Modave, Voltaire, Anquetil-Duperron and baron de Sainte-Croix had been misled, and had contributed towards misleading the public. Maridas had sent a copy of his translation to the French minister Bertin in Paris, who communicated it to the Orientalist de Guignes in Then, in , Maridas sold the same translation to Foucher d'Obsonville, presenting it as an integral translation of an ancient Sanskrit text.

Foucher published it in under the title Bagavadam ou doctrine indienne, ouvrage indien canonique. Aspirations for long-term political supremacy in India had dawned in their minds. Support from the traditional Indian elites, together with access to Indian jurisprudence and texts on age-old social customs were deemed to be useful means of strengthening and expanding their supremacy in North East India. And it so happened that the British Governor-General of Bengal appointed in , who held office until , was none other than Warren Hastings, who spoke Persian fluently and was greatly interested in Indian literature and documents.

Thanks to him, Halhed published in his Code of Gentoo Law, based on a compilation in Persian of ancient Hindu texts, and a manual of Bengali grammar in Gladwin published his Sanskrit-Persian dictionary in And Wilkins was already working on the Sanskrit text of the Bhagavad Gita, and on the Hitopadesha compilation of the Panchatantra fables.

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Gentil, for instance, sent Anquetil-Duperron a Sanskrit copy of the Upanishads, just before he left India for the last time in Jacques Maissin from his residence in the Ile de France where he had retired, sent two precious manuscripts, written on palm leaves, to the Royal Library in Paris in The second, in Tamil, presents a series of legendary tales concerning the Shriranganatha temple of Shrirangam near Tiruchirapalli.

In , Anquetil-Duperron, who had returned to France from his first and only voyage to India in , published the translation of the Zend Avesta which he had obtained from Parsi priests in Surat. As an introduction to this text, he published the journal of his travels in India between and It is in this work that he expressed the intuition that the "Sandracottos" mentioned in Greek documents compiled at the time of Alexander the Great's invasion of India in BC, was in fact Chandragupta Maurya whose descendant, Emperor Ashoka, became one of the most important diffusers of Buddhism in Asia.

This momentous discovery, claimed later on by William Jones, became the foundation of all the chronology of ancient Indian history. Maison de la Recherche 4 rue des Irlandais Paris France. OpenEdition is a web platform for electronic publishing and academic communication in the humanities and social sciences. Desktop version Mobile version.

Results per book Results per chapter. Search inside the book. Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle Serie: Monde anglophone Place of publication: Paris Year of publication: Contents Presentation About the author Serge Soupel. Serie On the same subject By the same author. Jean Cazemajou and Jean-Michel Lacroix ed. Fulvio Caccia and Jean-Michel Lacroix ed.

Deuxième partie. Aspects littéraires

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