Misc. / Wales Prof...

[witzel at HUSC3.HARVARD.EDU]

On Wed, 9 Aug 1995, RAH wrote:

> Fellow Indologists,
> May I ask a few questions .....
> 1. In what year was the Wales Chair established at Harvard?
> Bob Hueckstedt

The two answers received so far are basically correct. Here some more 
details about the first few, somewhat amusing years of Indology in the US.
The answer about the Wales chair is not so straightforward as some might 
believe.

	The history of Sanskrit studies in America begins in the 1830's, 
when Edward Salisbury (1814-1901), a Yale graduate, went to Europe to 
explore the newly growing field of Oriental languages. When he returned 
in 1843 it was as Yale's first Professor of Arabic and Sanskrit 
studies.  	 

	His time in Tuebingen had overlapped with a visit there by a 
young physician named Henry Wales, a Harvard College graduate who 
has entered American literary history as the "student of old books and 
days, / To whom all tongues and lands were known" of Longfellow's Tales 
of a Wayside Inn.  Wales was interested in Sanskrit, and through an 1856 
legacy he provided for a Wales Chair in Sanskrit to be established at his 
old University. Its first holder was Whitney's foremost student, Charles 
Rockwell Lanman.

	Edward Salisbury who had studied at the Boston Latin school
and at Yale, with a degree in 1836, went to Europe and studied Arabic, 
Sanskrit with Bopp, Lassen and Bournouf. He was offered a Yale professorship 
of Arabic and Sanskrit "to suit convenience, without pay"...
However, in 1854, he gave up his chair at Yale for that of a Skt. 
professorship in in favor of  William D. Whitney (1827-94) who had begun, in 
the winter of 1848/9, to study Skt. even before he went to Yale and to Europe
where he studied with Bopp, and especially with R. Roth at Tuebingen. In 1869
Whitney was offered a position at Harvard but declined -- as the fama has it-- 
as he would have to teach French and German as well. He indeed gave just one 
course on Germanic languages. It was proposed that he do so at professorial 
level; when this became public, within one week a chair was established for
him. But he continued at Yale in 1870 where he took the chair for Comparative
Philolology.

	Instead James Bradstreet Greenough (1833-1901) began to teach 
Skt.at Harvard in 1872. Greenough, the Latin grammarian, commonly believed to
be the inventor of the "sight passage", offered first and second year 
courses as Latin elective. Between 1872 and 1880 he taught "Comparative 
Philology and Skt."(inspired by F.Bopp) 

	Charles Rockwell Lanman, (1850-1941) received a position at Harvard in 
1880. He had studied Sanskrit under Whitney,  Albrecht Weber in Berlin 
and Rudolf Roth in Tuebingen.  However, when he arrived at Harvard in 
1880 he did not become the Wales professor for the legacy was not 
offically probated until 1903. Lanman, however, was indeed the first to 
preside over a new Department of Indo-Iranian Languages, as it was then 
called and he continued as Wales professor until 1926. 


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Incidentally, to answer Ashok's QQ.: the chairs in Germany (beginning with 
Schlegel at Bonn in 1816-- for which the contemporary, Heinrich Heine, 
[History of German religion and philosophy, in French/German] can be 
read with great fun -- were established without any subsidy from Indian 
princes. They were funded (and continue to be so) by various virtually 
independent states such as Prussia (under its minister of culture, v. Humboldt)
and some others (Wuerttemberg: Tuebingen, Baden: Heidelberg, Bavaria: Munich,
Saxony: Leipzig, etc.), There are some 20 institutes of Indology now, 
usually several in each state.   

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M. Witzel
Wales Prof. of Sanskrit
Harvard University
617- 495 3295