Eugen Hultzsch and the Rediscovery of India's Past

Dr Eugen Hultzsch

India's past seemed like a forgotten dream as ancient India did not write Historcial Chronicles in the manner in which the Western World did. Dates, Dynasties, Events, Kingdoms and Empires fade in and out of view like a vaudeville stuck in an erratic routine. Reflections upon the past, if it happened at all, took place against a literary tradition framed by the Great Epics and distorted images created by court poets, geneologists and bards. The situation was so full of dispair that Hegel even though that India was extra territorial to History and his favorite "pupil" Karl Marx even triumphantly declared that "India vegetates in the eeth of time". The person who rescued India from such charecterizations is Dr Eugen Hultzsch, a Prussian, who made India his Karma Bhumi. 

Eugen Hultzsch was born in Dresden on the 29th of March 1857 and died in Halle on the 16th of November 1927. During the course of his life he transformed the very study of Indian History by undertaking extensive and detailed researches on various aspects of Indian Epigraphy and Paleography,  His Inscriptions of Ashoka was the first major investigation towards establishing the chronology of the great emperor and the inter relationship between the Major and Minor Rock Edicts. Th text of the Inscriptions published by him have not been improved and till this day Historians plunder Hultzsch' work for material on the reign of this Maurayan Emperor. Unfortunately, in Indian Universities, thanks to the dominance of the Marxists who sought to make the younger generation as ignorant and dogmaic as themsevlves, ensured that training in Epigraphy and Paleography is abandoned. In India we have "Historians" like Romila Thapar and others who write on Ashoka without having read any of his Inscriptions in the original. If the Emperor is known today, it is largely due to Hultzsch.

Indian inscriptions on stone   and copper plate surfaces were known from the time of the Antiquarian, Col. Colin Mackenzie. While the more recent Vijayanagara epigraphs written in Telugu or Kannada scripts were read and published by administrator scholars like Elliot, Ravenshaw and others, early inscriptions especially in the Tamil region remained a closed book until Eugen Hultzsch arrived on the scene. On 21st of November 1886, Hultzsch took charge as the Epigraphist of the Archaeological Sorvey of India, Southern Circle. His remit was to document the rich corpus of epigraphs inscribed on the walls of Temples in the region and he undertook this task with vigour and great determination, ably assisted by V Venkkaya, his loyal assistant. The first major task that he undertook was to decipher and publish the inscriptions at Mamallapuram. He wrote in an article in Epigraphia Indica vol X thta "Mahabalipuram can be reached by boat from Buckingham Canal". How distant that seems when we imagine the scene today. Hultzsch collected all the inscriptions found in the site and published them in the very first volume of South Indian Inscriptions, a series that is still extant and has now reached volume 37. Dr.  S. Swaminathan has continued the tradition and has published 3 volumes of Chola Inscriptions in this series. The outstanding contribution of Hultzsch lay in his identification of the biruda, Atyantakama, with the King Narashimhavarman,a Pallava monarch. This method of dating monuments based on the inscriptions found inscribed on its surface or fabric has remained the backbone of ancient Indian Historiography. Hultzsch turned his attention to the Great Temple constructed by Rajaraja I (985-1014) at Tanjavur, his Capital. The Rajarajesvara Temple contains 56 Chola Inscriptions the majority of which were issued by the King and his immediate family. Hultzsch not only published all the Inscriptions found in the temple, but also translated them into English, a feat no other Epigraphist since has achieved  and published them in three volumes. Apart from these works, Hultzsch wrote extensive articles on important inscriptions in the flagship journal devoted to Indian Epigraphy, Epigraphia Indica. His attempt at recovering the dynastic succession of medieval dynasties like the Alupas, Rashtrakutas and the Chalukyas set the framework for the study of the medieval history of South India.

Dr Eugen Hultzsch arrived in India on October 22, 1884 by steamer sailing to Bombay, now Mumbai, from Trieste, Between 1884 and May 1885 he extensively toured the country in search of Sanskrit, Pali texts and documents. He presented two reports to Government on his discoveries and his Reports can still be read as specimens of critical texual criticism. Both his Reports are availbale on archive.org.  He paid particulat attention to the Saivite Mutts at Tiruvidaimaradur and Tiruvisainallur. His predecessor Brunell worked around the Saraswathi Mahal Library and Hultzsch extended the scope of his search. His notes sugget that the medieval period, particularly the Vijayanagara Period, witnessed the creation of a large corpus of commentaries on the various Srauta texts. The  reasons for this have not yetbeen ascertained. Using the colophons of the texts, Hultzsch notonly identified the author but endeavoured to fit him in a tree of texts and he is thus a pioneer in manuscript research in India. 

In the field of Numismatics, Eugen Hultzsch made a singular contribution by arranging the coins of the Madurai Sultans in a chronological framework. Starting with the enigmatic reference to moslem rulers in Madurai, a region traditionally associated with the Pandyas in the Rahela of Ibn Batutta, Hultzsch reconstructed the sequence of rulers almost to the end of the Sultanate follwing the attack by the Vijayanagara prince, Kumara Kampana. 

Looking back at the contribution of savants like Eugen Hultzsch it is certain that Edward Said was wrong when he postulated a direct link between knowledge and political power. It is certainly true that Hultzsch worked in a colonial framework but his contribution certainly trascended an imperial power structure. When Eugen Hultzsch returned to Europe he took with him 483 Sanskrit Manuscripts which he sold to the Bodleian Library, Oxford Universty.

He took up a Professorship in the field of Indology at halle University upon his retirement and died in that city where he is burried.