Kashinath Trimbak Telang

Kashinath Trimbak Telang was born in Bombay in 1850 and educated at Elphinstone College. He became one of the leading advocates of the Bombay bar, a judge of the Bombay High Court in 1889 and vice-chancellor of the University of Bombay in 1892. He was active in the public life of his time as a social reformer and an advocate of education, and he was among the founders of the Indian National Congress in 1885.

Alongside his legal career he was a Sanskrit scholar of real standing. He wrote on the history of Sanskrit literature, defending the independence and antiquity of Indian works against European scholars who traced them to Greek models, and edited Sanskrit texts for publication.

After an English verse rendering of the Bhagavad Gītā, he made the prose translation of the Gītā, the Sanatsujātīya and the Anugītā for Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East, published as volume 8 in 1882. His long introduction argued for the Gītā’s antiquity and its unity as a single poem, against those who saw it as a patchwork of later additions, and his translation, close and plainly worded, remains a standard one; it is the version this Library cites by chapter and verse. He died in 1893, at forty-three.