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Max Muller records an interesting incident. Freidrich Rosen was a
noted German scholar, one of the pioneers of western students who
turned to Vedic studies in the early years of the last century. It
appears one day when he was busy in the British Museum copying out
the hymns of the Rig Veda, Raja Rammohan Roy—the leading light of
the Indian Renaissance—came in and was surprised, disagreeably, at
the work Rosen was engaged in. He admonished the scholar not to
waste any time on the Vedas and advised him to take to the
Upanishads instead. We do not know if Rosen swallowed the advice
at all obviously not. For he was still engaged in the Veda at the
time of his death and his edition of the First Book of the Rig
Veda with Latin translation did appear later. The incident is
noteworthy for the light it sheds on the mental attitude of the
cultured and educated Indians of the time towards the Veda. The
outlook of the educated section of our countrymen as regards the
Vedic hymns has undergone little change even after more than a
century today. And this is no wonder. For they have but dutifully
followed all along in the footsteps of the European professors who
have, as a class, studied and regarded the Vedas, more as
specimens of antiquarian and philological interest than as records
of any sustaining value. To them the Vedas are study-worthy not
for anything intrinsically significant but for the side-lights
they throw on the social and other conditions of their times. By
themselves the Vedic hymns are 'singularly deficient in
simplicity, natural pathos or sublimity', they have 'no sublime
poetry as in Isaiah or Job or the Psalms of David'. They are
primitive chants where 'cows and bullocks are praised in most
extravagant expressions' as among the 'Dinkas and Kaffirs in
Africa whose present form of economics must be fairly in agreement
with that of the Vedic Aryan'. Even such a famous scholar as
Oldenburg must needs note that here is 'the grossly flattering
garrulousness of an imagination which loves the bright and the
garish', while Winterneitz records, with approval evidently, that
Leopold Von Schroder finds similarity between some of these hymnal
chants and 'notes written down by insane persons which have been
preserved by psychiatrists'.
Not all from the West, however, have reacted in the manner noted
above. Some have brought to bear a more sympathetic and closer
understanding on their studies of the Veda and have confessed to a
remarkable widening of the vistas of their higher mental horizons
after their study of these Books. There is Brunnhofer, for
instance, who is constrained to exclaim: 'The Veda is like the
lark's morning trill of humanity awakening to the consciousness of
its greatness.'
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