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The Vedas were the common bond of friendship
between the two. Both contributed to the 19th century Indian Renaissance
by opening doors of Vedic studies to commoners. The non-priestly classes
carried the word of god to all and sundry beyond the hallowed precinct of
pathshalas. The Ved was the new household word. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the
friend-philosopher and guide of both the urban and rural folks in India
and the German-Aryan Friedrich Max Muller, who brought the Rig Veda from
cloistered closets to libraries and studies of English speaking
intellentisia were both contemporaries. Swami Dayanand Saraswati was born
in 1824 at Tankara in Gujarat in a Brahmin family. F. Max Muller was born
in 1823 at Dessau in Germany in a scholar’s house. The former revolted
against his father’s orthodoxy, renounced the world in his youth
voluntarily and pursued the Vedic studies the hard way till he was 39. He
took to teaching the Vedas to those who cared to learn. He was drawn to the masses. The latter lost
his father at the age of four, lived in penury but went to college in
Leipzig, fought duels but earned a Ph.D at 20. The Vedic Sanskrit was his
first love. In pursuit of Vedic knowledge Max Muller traveled to Berlin,
Paris and London before finally settling down at Oxford. Swami Dayanand Saraswati and Friedrich. Max
Muller never met each other face to face. And yet they were friends. Their
mission was a common one: make man a good human being. ``back to the
Vedas,’’ was the clarion call given by Swami Dayanand Saraswati. Max
Muller regarded Vedanta as ``acme of human thought. Of his 77 years of
life Max Muller had devoted almost a quarter of a century to the editing
and publication of the Rig veda. Swami Dayanand Saraswati devoted almost
all his 59 years in this world to the study, interpretation and writing of
a commentary on the Vedas. Both were devoted souls. Swami Dayanand Saraswati devoted his entire
time and energy to upliftment of the downtrodden, both the dalits and the
women. He was both a religious reformer and a social reformer. The impact
of his reforms was felt far and wide, even beyond boundaries of India. But
the Rishi-Sanyasi never left the shores of his motherland. He encouraged
his followers of the Arya Samaj to travel far and wide to achieve the aim,
of universal brotherhood as enunciated by the Vedas. His disciple Shyamji
Krishna Verma – a revolutionary and a freedom fighter – propagated the
Vedic philosophy of life all over Europe in the late 19th century. Max
Muller heard of and read about Swami Dayanand Saraswati just about that
time. In his book, ``my Indian friends,’’ Max Muller devoted an entire
chapter to the Swami. Max Muller had not met most of his Indian friends
but only heard of them. In some cases like that of Swami Dayanand
Saraswati ,Ved was the common factor of friendship. In other cases it was
Christianity which drew Max Muller to his Indian friends. Many a time Max
Muller saw himself as an evangelist and a crusader charged with the
mission with converting Indians to Christianity lock, stock and barrel. In his boyhood days Max Muller’s imagination
was fired by a picture portraying the Ganges lapping Varanasi ghats. He
longed to see the real scene himself. How sad, his wish was never
fulfilled. In his younger fays he had no money to defray travel expenses
and when he became a man of means, he was too old to travel to India
around the Cape of Good Hope as the Suez Canal had not been dug then. Max
Muller started learning language in his early student days. He was
thrilled that his compatriots and classmates knew nothing about the
alphabets of the language he was mastering obviously it is a fallacy to
think that Germans are past masters of Vedas and Sanskrit. Swami Dayanand
Saraswati has written in his treatise ``Satyarth Prakash,’’ that a
German principal who was in correspondence with him found it difficult to
get the Sanskrit letters translated into German language. No wonder Max
Muller had to move to Berlin, Paris and London looking for original
Sanskrit texts and teachers before finally settling down in the oxford
university where he realized his dream. Notwithstanding major differences of opinion
in the interpretation of Vedic mantras (Ved Bhashya) between the two Vedic
scholars, Swami Dayanand Saraswati held F. Max Muller in high esteem. The
India ascetic gave the German Indologist an honorific name in Sanskrit, ``Moksha
Mooler.’’ One may recall that the ultimate goal of a soul as per the
Vedic philosophy of life is `Moksha.’ `Moksha’ means freedom from the
cycle of birth, death and rebirth and the soul lives in that blessed state
of pristine joy. The Moksha of a soul depends on the quality of karma,
that is action or inaction in the worldly life. One wonders whether Max
Muller really realized the importance of his Sanskrit name given by Swami
Dayanand Saraswati. As per historical evidence available in India, the two
Vedic giants were never in correspondence. Even ``My Indian Friends’’
by Max Muller gives no indication to the exchange of letters, if any,
between the two scholars. The long distance friendship cultivated in
absentia did not deter Swami Dayanand Saraswati from pointing out major
mistakes (minor ones could be overlooked) in Max Muller edited six volumes
of the Rig Veda, both text and commentary. Understandably Max Muller
relied on the Vedic commentary of Sayancharya on grounds of availability.
When he, however, ventured on his own, he went wrong. In a major work, ``Rigvedadi
Bhashya Bhumika,’’ (chapter 8) Swami Dayanand Saraswati writes in
Hindi which is translated as under:-‘’ ``…the
eminent scholar Moksha Muller and others(Europeans) have not interpreted
mantras correctly…In this context Dr Moksha Muller saheb has written in
his Sanskrit Sahitya that Aryans realized the existence of GOD much later
and that there is no proof that the Vedas are very ancient…That the
mantra was evolved 200 years after the Chhand part…But the
interpretation of Dr Moksha Muller Saheb is not correct…``Chhand,’’
``Mantra,’’ and ``Nigam,’’ - these are three names of Vedas only.
Those who differentiate among them are not trustworthy.’’ It is worth noting that even while criticizing
erroneous interpretation of the Vedas by Max Muller, Swami Dayanand
Saraswati was correct in etiquettes, courteous and generous. The address
was polite, viz. Dr Moksha Muller sahib.’’ During a seminar on Max
Muller, a German scholar was quizzed on the ``how and why,’’of the
eminent German Indologist of the 19th century wishing to baptize all
Indians. Was it an antidote to Swami Dayanand Saraswati’s Arya Samaj
which was committed to converting one and all to the Vedic Dharma. The
21st century German scholar laid the blame at the door of those Indians
who came in direct contact with Max Muller in France and England. They,
being the Brahma Samajists, had leanings towards Christianity and led Max
Muller up the garden path. The Evangelist in Max Muller had the better of
the Vedic interpreter and the Indologist par excellence. Two eminent Arya Samajists admired the
extra-ordinary writings and speeches of Max Muller eulogizing the Vedic
religion, culture and above all the ``Truthful character of the
Hindus.’’ Swami Dayanand Saraswati’s hear must have been gladdened
by F. Max Muller’s seven lectures delivered in 1882 at the Cambridge
University for the candidates of the elite Indian Civil Service. In 1883,
before Swami Dayanand Saraswati’s demise, the seven lectures were
published by Longman in a book form titled ``INDIA: What can it teach
us?’’ The book was a great morale booster for the Indians and
obviously a set back for racist-imperialists. Swami Vivekanand, after
meeting F. Max Muller in Oxford was appreciative of the German scholar’s
unadulterated love for India and said:``…And what love he bears towards
India. I wish I had hundredth part of that love for my own
motherland.’’ Swami Dayanand Saraswati and F. Max Muller
shared one more love, shared one more passion, name SANSKRIT. Both were
great scholars of Sanskrit and also protagonist par excellence. Both
encouraged the youth to learn Sanskrit in different parts of the world. In
the first flush of his Vedic preachings the great Arya Sanyasi himself
founded Sanskrit pathshalas and exhorted people to donate generously for
their upkeep. On his part, Max Muller advised the young Englishmen who
were ICS candidates to learn Sanskrit, to delve deep into the rich
oriental heritage. The German Indologiast admired: ``the antique state of
preservation in which that Aryan language has been handed down to
us.’’ Exhorting the British administrators not to lose sight to ``our
nearest intellectual relatives,’’ that is Aryas of India, Max Muller
recalled their contribution to developing the man’s mind, thus:``…the
Aryas of India, the framers of the most wonderful language, the Sanskrit,
the fellow workers in the construction of our fundamental concepts, the
fathers of the most natural of natural religions, the makers of the most
transparent of mythologies, the inventors of the most subtle philosophy
and the givers of the most elaborate laws.’’ |
