Nineteenth Century German Indology

<strong>Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences</strong> a Lecture <strong>Nineteenth Century German Indology A view from the Archives</strong> <strong>Heidrun Brückner</strong> University of Würzburg, Germany <strong>3rd December 2015</strong> The talk will sketch the development of German Indology, starting with the translation of Sakuntala, the work of the Schlegel brothers and the institution of the first chair of Sanskrit in 1818 at Bonn. It will then focus in particular on the so-called Petersburg dictionary, a bilingual dictionary Sanskrit and German, published between 1855 and 1875 as a cooperative European and international project under the direction of Otto Böhtlingk (1815-1904). A rich archive consisting of hundreds of letters written by the main editors and other contributors to the dictionary has been recovered and collated from Tübingen, Berlin, Yale, St. Petersburg and other places. This archive allows researchers to develop alternative approaches to the history of an old discipline. Heidrun Brückner is professor of Indology at the Institute of Cultural Studies of East and South Asia, University of Würzburg, Germany. She has previously worked at the Universities of Heidelberg and Tubingen. She is interested in, and has published widely in both German and English, on Sanskrit drama, Advaita Vedanta, and the history of German Indology, as well as on South Indian performance traditions, oral and written, both "folk" / popular and classical. She is also an accomplished translator of Kannada/Tulu texts into German and English, as most recently in an annotated translation of The Tübingen Tulu Manuscript - Two South Indian Oral Epics Collected in the 19th Century (2015).