Boden Professor of Sanskrit

The position of Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford was established in 1832 with money bequeathed to the university by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Boden, a retired soldier in the service of the East India Company.

Quotes

• I do hereby give and bequeath all and singular my said residuary estate and effects, with the accumulations thereof, if any, and the stocks, funds, and securities whereon the same shall have been laid out and invested, unto the University of Oxford, to be by that body appropriated in and towards the erection and endowment of a Professorship in the Shanskreet [sic] language, at or in any or either of the Colleges in the said University, being of opinion that a more general and critical knowledge of that language will be a means of enabling my countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian Religion, by disseminating a knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures amongst them, more effectually than all other means whatsoever.
  • Extract from Joseph Boden's will, 15 August 1811 "Oxford". The Observer. 19 November 1827. p. 2. ProQuest 473899496.

• I must draw attention to the fact that I am only the second occupant of the Boden Chair, and that its founder Colonel Boden stated most explicitly in his will that the special object of his munnificent bequest wass to promote the translation of Scriptures into Sanskrit, so as to enable his countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian Religion.... My very first public lecture delivered after my election in 1860 was on "The Study of Sanskrit in Relation to Missionary Work in India".
  • Monier Monier-Williams Sanskrit English Dictionary, Oxford, 1899, Preface 9-10. quoted in Shourie, Arun (1994). Missionaries in India: Continuities, changes, dilemmas. New Delhi : Rupa & Co, 1994 157-9

• One might think this position would have endeared Max Muller to missionaries, but in fact it did not. Rather, they found him entirely too sympathetic to the "heathen" and suspected him of being insufficiently committed to the faith. Accordingly, in 1860 he was passed over for Oxford's Boden chair in Sanskrit, which carried responsibility for preparing the Sanskrit-English dictionary, both of which were intended, under the terms of Lt-Col Boden's will, to advance the conversion of Indians to Christianity, not to foster English understanding or respect for India.
  • Bruce Lincoln, on Müller's views in his early career that English colonialists should "wean" Indian brethren from Aryan myths to convert them to the Gospel, in Theorizing Myth : Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (1999), p. 68

• If the electoral system of Oxford professors in the middle of the nineteenth century had been different, and Max Müller had instead been appointed to the Boden chair of Sanskrit which had fallen vacant eight years before, western Sanskrit scholarship might have taken an entirely different course. Colonel Boden’s bequest, however, had stipulated that the main aim in teaching Sanskrit in the west should be to make progress in converting the heathen of India. .... A handbill (Bodleian MS. Eng. c. 2807) distributed towards the end of the vigorous campaign that took place must however have told him that the writing was on the wall:
  The Professorship is not for Oxford alone.
  It is not for ‘The Continent and America’.
  It is for India.
  It is for Christianity.
  • Thomson, K. (2009). A still undeciphered text: How the scientific approach to the Rigveda would open up Indo-European studies. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 37(1-2), 1-72.