“If it were not for the Vedas, the university alone would not keep me in London… I like to compare myself to an Indian muni, who forsakes other concerns for a while to read the Vedas in peace and at-tain Indra’s heaven, which in my case might be some German university.” Friedrich Rosen thus wrote his teacher Bopp in 1830. Rosen was the first PhD in Sanskrit at a German university and the first professor of Sanskrit at a British university. He is the author of the first edition and translation of the first book of the Rigveda, with notes incomplete at his untimely death, and the first edition and translation of the oldest Arabic treatise on algebra. Yet more momentous was the help Rosen gave to continental scholars from Humboldt, Schlegel, and Burnouf to beginners, with sources uniquely accessible in England. He was a scrupulous philologist and viewed language as a means to access the cultures of the past. Drawing primarily from a vast correspondence including August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt, most of it unpublished, this biography documents and analyzes Rosen’s resolve and its impact on the rise of European Indology. In tracing his life and career, the book highlights the scholarly circumstances, opportunities, and challenges that prevailed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the first university trained Indologists took the field. They lived and moored a new academicized, professionalized, and transnational discipline.weiterlesen