The election in 1860 for the position of Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford was a competition between two candidates offering different approaches to Sanskrit scholarship. One was Monier Williams, an Oxford-educated Englishman who had spent 14 years teaching Sanskrit to those preparing to work in British India for the East India Company. The other, Max Müller, was a German-born lecturer at Oxford specialising in comparative philology, the science of language. He had spent many years working on an edition of the (an ancient collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns) and had gained an international reputation for his scholarship. Williams, in contrast, worked on later material and had little time for the "continental" school of Sanskrit scholarship that Müller exemplified. Williams regarded the study of Sanskrit as a means to an end, namely the conversion of India to Christianity. In Müller's opinion, his own work, while it would assist missionaries, was also valuable as an end in itself.

The election came at a time of public debate about British rule in India in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Opinions were divided on whether greater efforts should be made to convert India or whether to remain sensitive to local culture and traditions. Both men battled for the votes of the electorate (the Convocation of the university, consisting of over 3,700 graduates) through manifestos and newspaper correspondence. Williams laid great stress in his campaign on the intention of the original founder of the chair, that the holder should assist in converting India through dissemination of the Christian scriptures. Müller's view was that his work on the was of great value for missionary work, and published testimonials accordingly. He also wanted to teach wider subjects such as Indian history and literature to assist missionaries, scholars, and civil servants – a proposal that Williams criticised as not in accordance with the original benefactor's wishes. The rival campaigns took out newspaper advertisements and circulated manifestos, and different newspapers backed each man. Although generally regarded as superior to Williams in scholarship, Müller had the double disadvantage (in the eyes of some) of being German and having liberal Christian views. Some of the newspaper pronouncements in favour of Williams were based on a claimed national interest of having an Englishman as Boden professor to assist with the work of governing and converting India.

Special trains to Oxford were provided on the day of the election, 7 December 1860, for non-resident members of Convocation to cast their votes. At the end of the hard-fought campaign, Williams won by a majority of over 220 votes. Thereafter, he helped to establish the Indian Institute at Oxford, received a knighthood, and held the chair until his death in 1899. Müller, although deeply disappointed by his defeat, remained in Oxford for the rest of his career, but never taught Sanskrit there. The 1860 election was the last time that Convocation chose the Boden professor, as this power was removed in 1882 as a result of reforms imposed by Parliament. , the professorship is still in existence, and is now one of the last remaining Sanskrit professorships in the United Kingdom.

Background

The position of Boden professor at the University of Oxford was established by the bequest of Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Boden of the Bombay Native Infantry, who died in 1811. His will provided that on the death of his daughter (which occurred in 1827), his estate should pass to the university to fund a Sanskrit professorship. His purpose was to convert the people of India to Christianity "by disseminating a knowledge of the Sacred scriptures among them". The university statutes governing the chair provided that the professor should be chosen by the members of Convocation – all those who had obtained the Oxford degree of Master of Arts, whether or not they taught in the university – rather than by the professors and college fellows.Beckerlegge, p. 193. At the time of the 1860 election, there were 3,786 members of Convocation.Evison, p. 2. According to the religious historian Gwilym Beckerlegge, the professorship was regarded at the time as "prestigious and handsomely remunerated". An editorial in the British national newspaper The Times in 1860 said that the professorship was "one of the most important, most influential, and most widely known institutions at Oxford, not to say in the whole civilised world." It paid between £900 and £1,000 per year for life.Chaudhuri, p. 221.

The first Boden professor, Horace Hayman Wilson, was elected in 1832 and died on 8 May 1860. The election for his successor came at a time of public debate about the nature of British missionary work in India, particularly after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The East India Company, which controlled the British territories until they were absorbed into the British Empire in 1858, had had a general policy until 1813 of non-interference with Indian customs, including religion. Christian missionaries required a licence to proselytise. In practice, most could operate without a licence, except for Evangelicals, who were regarded as too radical in an age when Christians from other backgrounds were more prepared to be tolerant of other faiths. As the Evangelical movement grew in strength, it pressed for greater efforts to bring Christianity to India, and so the company relaxed its approach to missionaries in 1813.Beckerlegge, p. 186. After 1858, the British government was reluctant to provoke further unrest by interference with local traditions and religion, but many of those charged with running India were themselves Evangelicals sympathetic to efforts to convert the country. As Beckerlegge has commented, "the furtherance of Christian mission had become inextricably bound up with attempts to define Britain's role in India and indeed to justify Britain's presence in India."Beckerlegge, p. 187. The issue was whether Britain was there simply to govern India or to "civilise" it, and if the latter, whether to draw up or destroy India's existing culture and religion. Many of those who supported increased missionary work in India, says Beckerlegge, regarded the events of 1857 as "nothing less than a divine judgment" on Britain's failure to bring Christianity to the country.Beckerlegge, p. 202.

There were two schools of thought on whether Sanskrit should be taught for the purpose of assisting the administration and conversion of India, or for its own merits. The East India Company had provided instruction in Sanskrit to its employees at its college at Haileybury, Hertfordshire, and the College of Fort William in Calcutta, to educate them in local culture. For some, this led to an interest in Indian religion and culture as revealed in the Sanskrit texts. This was in contrast to the situation in continental Europe, where scholars examined Sanskrit as part of the "science of language", comparative philology, rather than for reasons of imperial administration. Fewer European scholars visited India, but many British Sanskritists had lived and worked there.Beckerlegge, p. 188. Some British scholars in other fields had strong doubts in any event about Sanskrit, as a "crude linguistic forgery pieced out of Latin and Greek", or as proving little "except a thoroughly unwelcome kinship between Briton and Brahmin", in the words of the American academic Linda Dowling.Dowling, p. 165.

Candidates

Although five men indicated their intent to seek the chair in 1860 or were proposed in their absence, in the end the two who contested the election were Monier Williams and Max Müller. Williams (known later in life as Sir Monier Monier-Williams) was the son of an army officer and was born in India. He studied briefly at Balliol College, Oxford, before training at Haileybury for the civil service in India. The death of his brother in battle in India led to him to return to Oxford to complete his degree. He also studied Sanskrit with Wilson before teaching this and other languages at Haileybury from 1844 until 1858, when it closed following the Indian rebellion. He prepared an English–Sanskrit dictionary, at Wilson's prompting, which the East India Company published in 1851; his Sanskrit–English dictionary was supported by the Secretary of State for India. As the Dutch anthropologist Peter van der Veer has written, Williams "had an Evangelical zeal" in line with the views that had inspired Boden to establish the chair.Van der Veer, p. 109.

Müller was from the German duchy of Anhalt-Dessau and took up Sanskrit at university as a fresh intellectual challenge after mastering Greek and Latin. At this time, Sanskrit was a comparatively new subject of study in Europe, and its connections with the traditional classical languages had attracted interest from those examining the nature and history of languages.Beckerlegge, p. 180. He obtained his doctorate from Leipzig University in 1843, aged 19, and after a year studying in Berlin he began work in Paris on the first printed edition of the Rig Veda (an ancient collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns). What was supposed to be a brief visit to England for research in 1846 turned into a lifelong stay. The Prussian diplomat Baron von Bunsen and Wilson persuaded the directors of the East India Company to provide financial support for Oxford University Press to publish the Rig Veda. Müller settled in Oxford in 1848 and continued his Sanskrit research, becoming Taylorian Professor of Modern European Languages in 1854 after three years as the deputy professor; in this post he was paid £500 per year, half the stipend of the Boden chair.Van der Veer, p. 108. A British subject from 1855, he was elected a fellow of All Souls College in 1858, "an unprecedented honour for a foreigner at that time", in the words of his biographer, the Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri.Chaudhuri, p. 220.

Three other scholars indicated an intention to stand for the chair, or were nominated by others, but withdrew before the ballot. The candidacy of Edward Cowell, Professor of Sanskrit at the Government College in Calcutta, was announced in The Times on 28 May 1860, where it was said that Wilson had pronounced him "eminently qualified" to succeed him. He later wrote from India refusing to stand against Müller. Ralph Griffith, a former Boden scholar who was a professor at the Government Sanskrit College in Benares, announced his candidacy in August 1860, but withdrew in November. James R. Ballantyne, principal of the college in Benares, was proposed in June 1860 by friends based in England, who described him as the "chief of British Sanscrit scholars".

Müller's manifesto

Müller announced his candidacy on 14 May 1860, six days after Wilson's death. His submission to Convocation referred to his work in editing the Rig Veda, saying that without it missionaries could not fully learn about the teachings of Hinduism, which impeded their work. He therefore considered that he had "spent the principal part of my life in promoting the object of the Founder of the Chair of Sanskrit."Beckerlegge, pp. 334–335. He promised to work exclusively on Sanskrit, and said that he would provide testimonials from "the most eminent Sanskrit scholars in Europe and India" and from missionaries who had used his publications to help "overthrow the ancient systems of idolatry" in India. In due course, he was able to provide a list of missionary societies that had requested copies of the Rig Veda from the East India Company, including the Church Missionary Society and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

Williams's manifesto