page_title: 1860 Boden Professor of Sanskrit election
section_title: Subsequent events
hierarchical_section_title: 1860 Boden Professor of Sanskrit election / Subsequent events
caption_attribution_description: English: Oxford - Balliol College One of my favourite views, across the appropriately-named Broad Street.
context_page_description: 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 Rig Veda, 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. For Müller, his work, while it would assist missionaries, was also valuable as an end in itself.
  The election came at a time of public debate about Britain's role in India in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
context_section_description: Williams was Boden professor until his death in 1899, although he retired from teaching (while retaining the title) in 1887 because of his health. He took as the title for his inaugural lecture "The Study of Sanskrit in Relation to Missionary Work", in keeping with his views as to the role of the chair. Thomas notes that as the East India Company had switched to using English rather than Sanskrit or Persian for its work, "a natural source of students had already dried up not long after the Boden Chair was inaugurated [in 1832]". Williams helped establish the Indian Institute at Oxford, proposing the idea in 1875 and helping to raise funds for the project on his visits to India, and persuaded the university to add a degree course in oriental studies. His publications included translations of plays and grammatical works. He received a knighthood in 1886, and was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1887, when he changed his surname to become Sir Monier Monier-Williams.
  Robinson Ellis was required to attend Williams's lectures despite his low opinions of the new professor's abilities. Williams said that Ellis's "whole demeanour was that of a person who would have welcomed an earthquake or any convulsion of nature which would have opened a way for him to sink out of my sight". Overall, Williams won over most of those who had opposed his election, with the exception of Müller.
  For Müller, losing the election was "a decisive turning point in his scholarly and intellectual life", according to Chaudhuri. It meant that Müller was never to teach Sanskrit at Oxford, although he remained there until his death in 1900; nor did he ever visit India. Greatly disappointed by not winning the chair, Müller "regularly avoided or snubbed Monier Williams and his family on the streets of Oxford", according to Williams. He was appointed to a chair of comparative philology in 1868, the first Oxford professorship to be established by the university itself without money from royal or private donations. He wrote a letter of resignation in 1875 when the university proposed to award an honorary doctorate to Williams, giving as his reason that he wanted to spend more time studying Sanskrit. Friends attempted to talk him out of it, and the university then appointed a deputy professor to discharge his duties, an honour he greatly appreciated.
  The Indian historian Rajesh Kochhar, noting the East India Company's support for Müller, commented that "Oxford professors may have had their own reasons for their assessment of him, but the Company and the natives both found him very relevant." Despite his electoral defeat, he enjoyed a high reputation at Oxford and beyond: he "occupied a central role in the intellectual life of the nation", according to Beckerlegge, and was "viewed by the world as a model of academic success" (as Dowling puts it). Dowling considers that "[w]ithin his own lifetime, Müller was discredited as a linguistic scientist" and has "little relevance" to later models of the study of language. In Beckerlegge's opinion, Müller's views about the nature of Christian missionary work showed the difficulty at that time for Christian academics "actively working to promote a more tolerant and even-handed study of other religious traditions".
  Of the other candidates, Cowell was elected as the first Sanskrit professor at the University of Cambridge in 1867, supported by Müller and others. Griffith was principal of his college from 1861 until 1878 (succeeding Ballantyne); he carried out further work in India after his retirement, and died there. Ballantyne resigned as principal because of health problems and returned to England, where he served as librarian to the India Office (a position that Wilson had held in addition to the professorship) until his death in 1864.
  The academic Jeremy Dibble (in his biography of the composer John Stainer, a friend of Müller) has written that the election "amply foreshadowed the ensuing battle between contemporary sacred and secular forces in the university, the anachronism of Oxford's syst
caption: Balliol College, to which the Boden chair has been attached since university reforms in 1882
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