The Legacy of Eugen Hultzsch: Pioneering Epigraphy and Manuscript Research in India

Venkata RaghothamIn Indian history, reflections of the past were shaped by the great epics and often distorted by court poets, genealogists and bards. But one man transformed the very study of the subject through research in epigraphy and palaeography. Though not celebrated for his work, Eugen Hultzsch, a Prussian, worked extensively on inscriptions of the Tamil region, which remained a closed book until his arrival.Hultzsch reached India on Oct 22, 1884, sailing by steamer from Trieste to Bombay. Between late 1884 and May 1885, he toured the country in search of Sanskrit and Pali texts, presenting two reports to the govt that remain models of critical textual study. Both are available today on archive.org.He paid particular attention to the Saivite mutts at Tiruvidaimarudur and Tiruvisainallur. While his predecessor Brunell had worked in the Saraswathi Mahal Library, Hultzsch expanded the scope of exploration. His notes suggest that the medieval period, especially under the Vijayanagara rulers, saw the creation of a vast corpus of commentaries on Srauta texts, though the reasons for this are unclear. By using colophons to identify authors and place them within a textual lineage, Hultzsch pioneered manuscript research in India.His study of inscriptions of Ashoka was the first major attempt to establish the chronology of the emperor and the relationship between the major and minor rock edicts. The texts he published remain definitive, still mined by historians for material on the Mauryan reign.On Nov 21, 1886, 29-year-old Hultzsch became epigraphist of the Archaeological Survey of India, southern circle. His mandate was to document the vast body of temple inscriptions in the region, assisted by his loyal aide V Venkayya.His first major assignment was to decipher and publish the inscriptions at Mamallapuram. In Epigraphia Indica, he writes that “Mahabalipuram can be reached by boat from Buckingham Canal.” Hultzsch gathered all inscriptions from the site and published them in the first volume of South Indian Inscriptions, a series that continues to this day, now at volume 37.Hultzsch’s most outstanding contribution was his identification of the Biruda Atyantakama with the Pallava monarch Narasimhavarman. This method of dating monuments based on inscriptions carved into their surfaces has remained the backbone of ancient Indian historiography.Hultzsch next turned to the great temple built by Rajaraja I (985–1014) at Thanjavur, his capital. The Rajarajesvara temple contains 56 Chola inscriptions, most issued by the king and his immediate family. Hultzsch documented all and also translated them into English.In numismatics, Hultzsch made a lasting contribution by arranging the coins of the Madurai Sultans into a chronological sequence. Beginning with the enigmatic references to Muslim rule in Madurai, a region long associated with the Pandyas in Ibn Battuta’s Rahela, he reconstructed the line of sultans almost up to the Vijayanagara conquest led by Kumara Kampana.When Hultzsch returned to Europe, he carried with him 483 Sanskrit manuscripts, later sold to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He went on to hold a professorship in Indology at Halle University, where he lived out his final years and was laid to rest on Nov 16, 1927.(The writer is a retired professor ofhistory from Pondicherry University)