(The following is a post by Jonathan Loar, Reference Librarian for South Asian collection, Asian Division.)
Figure 1: German Indologist Albrecht Weber (1825-1901). “Studi italiani di philologia indo-iranica 2,” 1898.
Between the end of the 18th and the start of the 19th century, India was becoming a major academic subject throughout Europe. The discovery that many words in the ancient Indian language Sanskrit (e.g., dasha – ten, akshi – eye, matr – mother, pitr – father) had cognates in classical Greek (deca, ophthalmos, métér, patér) and Latin (decem, oculus, mater, pater) captured the imaginations of philologists, such as Sir William Jones, H.T. Colebrooke, Charles Wilkins, and August and Friedrich Schlegel. Their translations of Sanskrit literature into English, French, and German introduced new Western audiences to the study of world philosophies and religions. (For example, Henry David Thoreau’s writings referenced and quoted from the 1785 Wilkins translation of the Bhagavad Gita, an important Hindu sacred text). Ultimately, what emerged from the work of the early philologists was Indology – the scholarly discipline predicated on understanding India chiefly through its ancient texts and languages.