Antoine Jean Saint-Martin. 1822. “Notice sur l’ancienne histoire de l’Inde et sur les historiens du Kaschmyr en particulier.” Journal asiatique. December 1822. pp. 361–368.
Here we have, in 1822, a French Orientalist debunking the assertion that India is devoid of history before the Muslim conquests. Saint-Martin believes the notion of an India without history is absurd on its face:
Il est difficile d’imaginer l’existence d’une grande nation civilisée, assez indifférente à tout ce qui la concerne, pour ne pas chercher à en conserver le souvenir…
Saint-Martin brings up the many local histories and genealogies still preserved in India; these are more than sufficient to show a concern for history. And if one were to examine these local histories in conjunction with the epigraphical evidence, one could write a perfectly respectable history of India.
Saint-Martin then cites an article1 published by Abel-Rémusat in the Journal des savans, in order to demonstrate that Chinese and Japanese Buddhist texts may also preserve hitherto lost historical data. His enthusiasm for these sources may seem quaint to us now:
| Les données consignées dans cette notice présentent un degré de précision et d’exactitude très-remarquable, et tout-à-fait propre à donner à l’histoire indienne des bases scientifiques d’une haute certitude. | The data presented in this article give a very remarkable degree of precision and exactness, and entirely sufficient to grant to Indian history a scientific basis of great certainty. |
Saint-Martin then describes H. H. Wilson’s recent discussion of the history of Kaśmīra before the Muslim conquests, and he spends the rest of the article discussing the sources used by Wilson. Wilson used primarily the Rājataraṅgiṇī, an eleventh-century history of Kaśmīra. Saint-Martin is confident that this and other texts will be a source of great interest to Orientalists and to scholars of antiquity more generally.
1: Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. 1821. “Sur la succession des trente-trois premier Patriarches de la religion de Bouddha.” Journal des savans. January 1821. pp. 6–15. ↩
