On September 29, 1820, the Honorable Company’s cruiser Benares, which had been patrolling the Persian Gulf, docked at the English port of Bombay. It did not carry any passengers except for one, who had boarded the ship at Bushehr. Evidently a stranger to these parts, the passenger called on Mountstuart Elphinstone, the governor of Bombay, to present his credentials immediately after he alighted the vessel and passed through the Custom House.
Not only was he a foreigner without a British permit, the visitor was also skint. However, he received a warm welcome from the governor, who seems to have recognised a kindred soul in Rasmus Kristian Rask. Unlike most travellers, Rask had not come to India in search of riches. He was seeking wealth of a different kind: the overflowing riches of Asiatic languages which he hoped would help him understand the source and antiquity of European languages.
From a very early age, Rask had been attracted to the study of languages. Born in 1787, Rask had been able to obtain scholarships to study at the best institutions in Denmark. Though enrolled as a theology student at the University of Copenhagen in 1807, Rask was drawn to languages. He began a systematic study of Danish and its immediate neighbours: Swedish, English, Dutch, German, Russian and the older Gothic and Anglo-Saxon languages.
Guide to the Icelandic or Old Nordic language (Copenhagen, 1811).
Rask embarked on a serious investigation into the history and sources of languages from 1811, when the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences announced a competition to identify the progenitor of Scandinavian languages. Rask spent two years in Iceland studying Icelandic and other Northern languages. His essay, which eventually won the prize, concluded that these languages had an ancestor in common with Greek and Latin. Theories about language families had been bandied about for two centuries; the affinity of European languages to Sanskrit was widely known but it was only in the 19th century that systematic studies of languages and their interrelationships were undertaken. There was a fiercely competitive spirit among European language scholars and Rask, with his prodigious language skills, was well positioned to play a prominent role in the field. By 1818, he had numerous publications to his credit including grammars of the Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon languages.
Rask was no armchair scholar. Having spent two years in Iceland, he had realised the benefits of personally visiting the places where the languages he was studying were spoken. One of his theories postulated the affinity between Scandinavian and Caucasian languages. There was only one way to test this theory: study those languages firsthand, and what better way to do that than to visit the Caucasian countries. In 1818, he set off from Stockholm for St. Petersburg where he spent a year learning Russian and Sanskrit. After managing to arrange funding for his travels from the King of Denmark, he went to Moscow in 1819 from where he travelled down the Volga to the Caucasus. In March 1820, he reached Persia, his original destination. En route he studied Georgian, Turkish and Persian.
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Other than being suspected as a spy in Georgia, Rask’s travels, though arduous, were pleasant enough. But he was disappointed with his experiences in Persia. Though he visited Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz, Rask was unable to access manuscripts in the ancient Persian languages. Rather than turning back disappointed, he decided to press on to Bombay by sea.
In 1820, they were two Danish settlements in India: Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) in South India and Fredricksnagore (Serampore) on the River Hooghly, a few miles north of Calcutta. However, the connections between Denmark and India were few and far in between. The journey by sea took over six months and a reply to letters written to Denmark would be received a year or two later, if at all. Only adventurers could muster the nerve to embark on such a perilous journey. It was very rare for a Danish scholar to land up unannounced in Bombay.
In Bombay, Rask was soon drawn into the Literary Society of Bombay, the hub of intellectual activities for the city’s European residents. The Society had been established in 1804 to study and document, like its Calcutta predecessor the Asiatic Society, all aspects of Asiatic culture, history and languages. Mountstuart Elphinstone, whom Rask described as “a man who may have few equals in learning and any kind of culture”, was then the president of the Literary Society. A few weeks after Rask’s arrival in Bombay, Elphinstone nominated him to the membership of the Society, which was duly accepted.
Furdoonjee Murzban (1787–1847).
When he arrived in Bombay, Rask made a surprising discovery: “I found in Bombay a considerable number of Persians (Fire-worshippers).” Since he had picked up a little Persian during his travels, he was able to converse with the Parsis and conduct a more effective search for manuscripts. And as he describes in a letter written in November 1820, “after incredible effort, I was able to reach the Source itself, which has been hidden and inaccessible to English officials. I had earnestly wished to buy the entire collection. Considering the extreme rarity and inaccessibility of these things as well as the internal value of the language (based on an examination and the history, etc.), the price was not excessive. However it was impossible for me to raise so much money.”
Though the ‘Source’ is not identified in Rask’s letters, it was a Parsi named Furdoonjee Murzban (1787–1847). He was the proprietor of a printing press, the first to be established by an Indian in Bombay. He had also been binding books for the Literary Society of Bombay from 1811. Murzban, who was the same age as Rask, was well-versed in Persian and seems to have inherited a valuable collection of manuscripts from his forefathers.
Rask also tried to learn the ancient Persian languages at Bombay. “I tried to obtain instruction in Zend and Pahlavi from the most learned Parsi dustoors, but the influence of the rich merchants over them compelled them to conceal their wisdom in the most careful way. However, I soon discovered (partly from printed books in Gujarati) that little or nothing had been lost to me, and that I could just as easily on my own discover the structure and arrangement of these languages.”
The printed Gujarati books Rask referred to were those printed by Murzban at his printing press in the previous five years. They would have included Gujarati translations of the Dabestan (1815), the Khordeh Avesta (1818) and Bundahishn (1819). Why was Murzban willing to part with his valuable collection of manuscripts? Perhaps he was aware that the Parsi community in Gujarat possessed multiple copies of these texts. Maybe he needed to raise capital to fund the newspaper – The Bombay Samachar – he would start in 1822. The price he quoted for the 30 manuscripts in his possession was Rs 1,500, a handsome sum of money for those days.
Title page of Dabestan (Bombay, 1815).
Rask, however, did not have money with him though he was expecting some funds from Denmark. The more time Rask spent in Bombay, the more his credit seems to have increased. The Bombay government extended a credit line which enabled him to meet his immediate expenses and purchase a few manuscripts. In November, he managed to obtain a loan of Rs 1,000 from Forbes & Co, one of the largest trading firms in Bombay, which enabled him to purchase the entire manuscript collection, plus a few printed books. Rask was aware that he had managed to buy an invaluable treasure: “I say with confidence that such a collection does not exist in India and even less in any other country in the world. One of the books is five hundred years old, which is an extraordinarily high age for manuscripts here in India.”
More than their antiquarian value, Rask was concerned with their use for his linguistic studies: “It is of greater value than any Sanskrit collection can now be; Sanskrit is a well-known and fairly well-structured language and there exists a lot of literature, but Zend and Pahlavi are hidden in the thickest darkness. They are based on some original written language, and also constitute one or two of the most significant links in the whole chain of tongues which is spoken by the human race.” He seems to have studied these manuscripts during his travels; from Madras, he sent an essay on the Zend language to the Literary Society of Bombay for inclusion in its Transactions. As no further volumes of Transactions were printed after 1821, the essay is now lost.
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From Bombay, Rask proceeded to Calcutta overland via Benares. He was especially looking forward to meet his fellow countrymen at Serampore. However, he fell seriously ill and suffered hallucinations during which he accused his Danish hosts of plotting his murder which, not surprisingly, soured his relations with them. He sought refuge in Tranquebar and hoped to return home direct on a Danish ship. On one hand, he wanted to stay in India for three or four years and study its languages while on the other, his health was gradually worsening.
During a brief sojourn of eight months in Sri Lanka, Rask managed to acquire a treasure trove of Pali and Sinhala palm-leaf manuscripts. That Rask was a genius in his subject is illustrated by the fact that he could compose an elementary grammar of Pali within a few weeks of his arrival at Colombo. He also printed a Sinhalese syllabary in Danish before he left Sri Lanka. After returning to Tranquebar, Rask left India in 1822 on a Danish ship and reached Copenhagen in May 1823, nearly seven years after he first left it. Thus ended his great Indian journey.
Rasmus Rask’s tombstone at Copenhagen (erected 1842).
Back home, Rask immersed himself in his language studies and continued to make important contributions to the field. As he had never graduated, he had to wait until 1831 before he was appointed professor of Oriental languages at the University of Copenhagen. Though he published a small monograph in Danish titled On the age and authenticity of the Zend language and Zendavesta (1826), he never ventured to make a deeper study of the manuscripts he collected in India. Neither did he write the much awaited travelogue. Perhaps the only reminder of Rask’s heroic trip to India is his tombstone, installed after his untimely death in 1832, which has inscriptions in Sanskrit and Arabic.
The manuscript treasures acquired by Rask in Bombay are now housed in the Royal Danish Library and have been used by successive generations of researchers to study the Zoroastrian religion and the languages associated with it. Rask is now acknowledged as one of the founders of comparative linguistics and the formulation of an Indo-European family of languages has been universally accepted.
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to research associate Silvia Veronika Hufnagel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for drawing my attention to the collection of Rask’s letters, Breve fra og til Rasmus Rask (1941–1968).
Murali Ranganathan is a writer and historian researching the 19th century with a special focus on print history and culture.