The Translations: Lost and Found

He's little spoken of today, but Horace Hayman Wilson was the first to translate the Rig Veda, the most ancient of Indo Aryan scriptures, into English. Published in six volumes between 1850 and 1888, Wilson is also credited with getting the 18 Puarans -our principal source of stories about the gods and goddesses, into English.

Of these, the Vishnu Purana, which tells the stories of the ten avataras, was published in 1840. Wilson, who was secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal between 1811 and 1833, was also the first to translate Kalidas's Meghaduta in 1813.

Another prominent but mostly forgotten name here is that of Henry Thomas Colebrook, who lived in India between 1806 and 1815. Colebrook made a critical study of the Vedas, and wrote an influential essay in 1805 on the Vedas which was what lain the foundation of European interest in these ancient texts. When he went back to England, Colebrook took back with him manuscripts of the Vedas and other texts, which were copied and widely disseminated among Orientalists in Europe, and led to a spate of translations and research papers.

Much of the post-colonial discourse in India has tended to skirt the contribution of these and other "Indologists" to widening what we know of our ancient history, and texts. With the exception of William Jones and, possibly James Princep who has an impressive memorial in his name on the banks of the Hooghly in Kolkata, few but scholars know of the role of men like Charles Wilkins who was the first Englishman to learn Sanskrit thoroughly, or Brian Hodgson who was the East India Company's administrator in Kathmandu between from 1820 to 1843, and collected hordes of Buddhist manuscripts in Sanskrit.

It was the Asiatic Society in Bengal, founded in 1784, that helped to assemble the disparate efforts of all these men, but much of this history remains unknown to all but scholars. It is this cloud of oblivion that an ongoing exhibition at the capital's India International Centre (IIC) on the "Treasures of Human Knowledge at the Asiatic Society, Kolkata" seeks to lift. The exhibition titled "Time Past and Time Present", is part of IIC's annual four-day festival of arts.

Post colonial discourse in India tends to focus on the negative consequence of Empire – and rightly so – but the IIC exhibition is an eye-opener on how the British efforts at cataloguing, surveying, and mapping India, albeit for its own narrow political-economic purposes, also created a huge repository of knowledge about our own ancient culture, science, history and religious systems. In many cases, what we know about these subjects is still limited to what pioneers like Jones, Colebrook, Wilson and others uncovered during this period.