[KALKI]

The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) had initially put forward the idea that India was the cradle of all civilization in his book Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit. Deeply rooted in this academic notion of the times, Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829), and to a larger extent his brother August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), got inspired to critically study Indian languages, literatures and the systems of philosophy. This deep interest in India and its culture, finally led to the foundation of the study of Indology and comparative linguistics in German universities. In an enthusiastic letter, Friedrich von Schlegel wrote about the Sanskrit language: “Here is the source of all languages, all thought, and all poetics, everything, everything, generated in India, without exception.” In his work Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder (1808) he postulated a relationship between the peoples and languages of Asia and Europe. It was his brother August Wilhelm von Schlegel, who in 1819 became the first Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Bonn, and therefore the founder of German Indology. In his endeavour to proliferate Sanskrit texts in Europe, he got the types of the Devanagari alphabet made in Paris and brought them back to Bonn. The first Sanskrit book printed (around 1820) with these types in Europe was the Bhagavadgita accompanied by a Latin translation by Schlegel himself.