August Willhelm Schlegel

Bonn has been so interesting. I mean the Oriental Institute in Bonn. Aside from the colleagues and students, all great, as a side-track of working on the Orissa project history, I started to get interested in the Institute here – founded over 200 years ago by its first professor August Willhelm Schlegel. As I am sure is no surprise, compared to da da da dumm Ludwig B, who is everywhere, Professor Schlegel is almost totally ignored by the Bonn city, with no statue etc – he was a translator of Shakespeare and the Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita (which of course he translated into Latin, not German, but influencing von Humboldt and Hegel). A founding moment of orientalism, actual. Then, much to my curiosity, it turns out that for two years in the 1830s here in Bonn he was teaching a certain young law student called Karl Marx. There are even two reports by Schlegel on this student, though brief, they say he was diligent and hard working. Other university reports focus on Marx’s drinking and a duel, but I guess Marx was attentive to Schlegel’s classes because all though his work as you know there are deeply informed references to the Indian epics, and indeed to the Jagannath temple – the no doubt much exaggerated, even apocryphal, story Europeans liked to tell was clearly repeated here, where devotees were said to be sacrificed/sacrificing by throwing themselves under the chariot of Lord Jagannath as he perambulated arounf the streets of Puei once a year. Fable or not, Marx cheekily transposes this in Capital’s worming day chapter as an allegory for the British parliament who decides, by passing the 1830 Factory Acts, to no longer throw its own children to be crushed under the wheels of the factory.