Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar

The Story

Bhandarkar belonged to the first generation of Indians trained in Western academic methods who decided to turn those methods on their own civilisation. Educated in Bombay, he rose to become a professor of Sanskrit and history, teaching at Elphinstone College and later in Poona, where he shaped students who would shape Indian scholarship for a century.

His subjects were unglamorous and exacting — Sanskrit grammar, Vedic ritual, inscriptions, coins, the dynasties of the Deccan. In each he insisted on evidence, dating and comparison, insisting that Bhārat's past deserved the same rigor Europeans demanded of Greece and Rome. His work on coins helped establish Indian numismatics as a serious science.

He was among the founders of the gathering that became the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, established in Pune in 1917 in his memory — an institution that went on to produce the critical edition of the Mahabharata, one of the great scholarly achievements of modern Bhārat.

Bhandarkar's deepest argument was that reverence and rigour are not opposites. By studying tradition precisely, he gave Indians the confidence to claim their own history as knowledge, not merely as faith — a gift the national movement used constantly.