Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux: Pioneering Indologist
Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux (/krdu/; French: Coeurdoux [kdu]; 18 December 1691, Bourges, France – 15 June 1779, Pondicherry, French India) was a notable Indologist and French Jesuit missionary in South India.
Early learning
Curdoux entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1715, was ordained in 1725, and made his final religious vow as a Jesuit at Orléans in 1731. Shortly after, he departed for India, arriving in 1732 at the Madurai Mission (today in Tamil Nadu, southern India).
Indology: field of study
Indology, often known as South Asian studies, is the academic study of the Indian subcontinent's history, cultures, languages, and literature. It is a subset of Asian studies.
Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux: an Outstanding Indologist
Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, a renowned French Jesuit missionary in 18th-century South India, made an unmistakable imprint as an outstanding Indologist. Renowned for his linguistic prowess, Coeurdoux wrote a monumental Telugu-French-Sanskrit lexicon, which is still considered authoritative today. He was a passionate pupil of Jesuit philologist Jean Calmette, whose influence fueled Coeurdoux's deep interest in comparative linguistics. Max Müller referred to Coeurdoux as the "father of comparative philology" because his links with famous French Indologists such as Anquetil Duperron and Joseph Nicolas de l'Isle. Coeurdoux's renowned Mémoire, which he presented to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1767, astutely revealed startling connections between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and even German and Russian languages. Despite never returning to his homeland and his observations being used and misattributed by others after the French Revolution, the efforts of scholars such as J.J. Godfrey and Sylvia Murr in the twentieth century restored Coeurdoux's pivotal role in uncovering the relationship between Sanskrit and ancient European languages.
