Max Muller (1823-1900)
Source: Penguin Book, ISBN 0-14-100437-1
Max Muller (1823-1900) has long been regarded as the ‘Western Indologist par excellence’. He was born on 6 December, 1823 in Dessau, the capital of the German Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau. His father Wilhelm Muller (1794-1827), a famous poet and teacher, died leaving his wife and two young children in dire poverty, supported only by a modest pension. After his early years in Dessau, he was sent at the age of twelve to Leipzig to finish his schooling, receiving a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin. As a student at Leipzig University, he fought duels and left with a doctorate before he was twenty. After his wanderjahre spent in Berlin, Paris and London, he arrived in Oxford in 1848, where he settled. He became Taylorian Professor of Modern European Languages (1854), a Fellow of All Souls College (1858) and Professor of Comparative Philology (1868). Max Muller’s oeuvre was marked by encyclopedic range and scholarship. His edition of the Rig Veda (1849-73), and the forty-nine volumes of the Sacred Books of the East, made Max Muller pre-eminent among interpreters of Indian thought in the West. His work on Vedic literature, Sanskrit, philology, mythology and comparative religion aroused wide interest. He was an important influence not only on his Western contemporaries, but also on Indian thinkers. Max Muller died on 28 October, 1900.