Alfred Hillebrandt reconsidered.

• Author: Witzel, Michael

THE PRESENT VOLUME IS no. 28 of the by now more than thirty books of the series of collected articles, Kleine Schriften, of Indianists from the German-speaking countries.(1) In the quarter-century since its inception, this series has proven to be extremely useful in bringing together the often widely dispersed articles and reviews of those Indologists who have preceded us, as well as of a few famous contemporary scholars. This undertaking demonstrates how a comparatively small donation, in this case a legate of the late Tubingen Indologist and scholar of comparative religion, Helmut von Glasenapp, can make a considerable contribution to the development of our field. We wish that a similar institution existed in the English-speaking countries!(2)

The present volume has been edited by Rahul P. Das, of the University of Hamburg, otherwise known for his contributions to modern Indo-Aryan studies and (Vrksa-) Ayurveda. He has taken great pains, greater than usually found in this series, to make the volume comprehensive and accessible, especially by the addition of various detailed indexes. The present volume is his second in the series (the first commemorating the life and work of the Breslau Indologist W. Neisser, who was driven to suicide by the Nazis in 1941). Anyone who knows what amount of time is involved in publications of this sort will be grateful to R. P. Das for this service rendered to our field of study.

Alfred Hillebrandt (1853-1927; in the sequel, H.) was Privatdozent and then Professor of Sanskrit at Breslau(3) from 1878 onwards. His work is mainly concerned with the study of the Veda, and especially that of Vedic ritual and mythology. H.'s extensive book on Vedic mythology has recently been translated into English in India,(4) and his Rituallitteratur still is the only detailed description of the solemn Vedic ritual (as well as of the domestic rites), including also their little-studied correlation with Iran. An English translation would be quite useful even now, almost a hundred years after its publication. Hillebrandt has also edited and translated a number of texts, among them the Sankhayana Srautasutra and the Mudraraksasa, and he has written a number of studies on such topics as the appreciation of Kalidasa's work, the beginnings of Indian drama, and on old Indian politics, among which his pioneering work on the Kautiliya Arthasastra is worthy of remembrance and study. The list of his monographs contains some 25 titles (including a few more-or-less recent translations into English).

The present volume, however, presents us with a comprehensive and quite representative selection of his articles on Vedic and other Indian topics. Next to Vedic studies the book contains: problems of Sanskrit grammar and of Avestan philology,(5) articles on the history of Indian religion and philosophy, studies on the Arthasastra, and on the Indian drama. This section also includes a biographical sketch of A. F. Stenzler (1807-1887), among whose works the Elementarbuch der Sanskritsprache still is widely used in German-speaking countries. It is interesting to note that in the twenty years between its first publication in 1868 and the date of the biography, 1887, nearly 6,000 copies had been printed and sold--an indication of the great interest students and others had for Indian studies at that time, when many high school teachers wrote on Homer and Kalidasa in their Schulprogramme. However, already by the end of the eighties, when the last traces of the Romantic school had disappeared, interest in Sanskrit, too, has waned considerably, as the number of copies sold indicates.

Among Hillebrandt's papers, a number that are of historical or of lasting interest may be taken up here in some detail: his collection (1916) of notices in Sanskrit texts on the ancient materialists, a continuation of an earlier article contained in his book Alt-Indien (Breslau, 1890), 168ff., is one of the few early contributions to this still relatively little-studied subject.

The articles on Kautilya, whose Arthasastra he (together with Jolly) had discovered in or about 1908 in the Royal Library of Munich (now State Library), are among the first studies in this field; they preceded the independent work of Shamasastry, who published the text in 1909. In his first paper, H. identifies some 40 quotations found in various Sanskrit texts dealing with politics and compares them with the newly discovered MSS; he also gives a first summary of contents of the text. This is followed by a discussion of the authorship of the Arthasastra, published in 1915, and a study of the royal officials in the Veda.

In his articles on the old Indian drama H. deals with the criticism of the Mudraraksasa (1905),(6) preceded by a detailed review of Telang's edition (1884) and followed up by his own edition of the text (1912). He also took part in the discussion on the origins of the Indian drama. He stressed the popular origins, whether connected with Vedic ritual or not, of many of the aspects that have contributed to the genesis of the classical drama. In view of Kuiper's recent study, Varuna and Vidusaka, the article still is of interest. H. finds three types of akhyanas for Patanjali's period (c. 150 B.C.): those of the saubhika, those using pictures, and the granthika, and denies the puppet play a high antiquity.

An interesting sidelight is cast by his brief discussion of the traces of an old steyasastra, found in the Mrcchakatika and in various other texts, such as the Mahabharata. Interestingly, a text of this tradition has been discovered and published in the meantime.(7)

The series of articles is followed by a selection of the more important reviews written by Hillebrandt. They cover the same wide range as his own works. Among the more important ones, there is a short but significant discussion of Hulztsch's edition of an inscription containing the first act of a drama, the Parijatamanjari of Vijayasri. It is found at Dhar, the old capital of Malwa, and has a date corresponding to A.D. 1213. The inscription is of importance for a countercheck of the Prakrta grammarians and the actual practice of writing Pkt. MSS at the time, and it remains significant even when the few older MSS from Gujarat/Rajasthan and the little-used ones from the National Archives of Nepal (the former Bir Library) are compared thoroughly. Other more important reviews, such as the review of Telang's Mudraraksasa edition have been dealt with above, or will be mentioned immediately below (notable are those of works by Oldenberg, Geldner, and Caland). It is not out of place, perhaps, to remind the reader of some contributions by H. to Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics which deal with Indian: birth, death and disposal of the dead, Brahman, Dyaus, light and darkness, (Hindu) worship.

Hillebrandt's Kleine Schriften conclude, last but not least, with the amusing piece, "Die Gotter des Rgveda: Eine euhemeristische Skizze," which he published, like some of his political writing, under the pseudonym Fritz Bonsens. This is one of the few humorous pieces in Indian studies--if we disregard such tongue-in-check reviews as those of W. Rau of M. Shendge's book on the Indus civilization,(8) which incidentally follows the "euhemeristic method" of Pischel that Hillebrandt makes fun of when he begins his "study": "Indra once was a great rajan--just as today there still are rajans in India . . . ." H. tops all of this by his criticism of--himself: "Thus we see the whole mess clearing up, which had been created by older scholars such as Roth, M. Muller, A. Kuhn, and younger ones, Bergaigne, Bloomfield, Hillebrandt. The RV does not know of natural phenomena that have become gods--it only knows of men. Great, indeed, is Euhemerus".(9)

The book concludes with an index of names and subject matters, another of words in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and other languages, and a selective index of text places, often with the corresponding page numbers in modern, more accessible editions--yet another of Das' careful and unselfish contributions. He has even added four pages of corrigenda that he had noticed while editing the volume. He must have read each article with...