Richard Garbe (1857–1927)

[KALKI]

Richard Garbe (1857–1927) a professor at the University of Tübingen, had earned his reputation through his scholarship on Indian philosophy, particularly his work on reconstructing the Bhagavad Gita in its original form.

His year-long trip to India in 1885 was financed by the Prussian government through its Ministry of Culture and the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Garbe kept a detailed record of his experiences in India, which he published in 1889 under the title Indian Travel Sketches. Garbe's travels and reactions to the East are especially interesting because he was one of a handful of nineteenth-century German Indologists (scholars of Indian culture and antiquity) who actually visited India.

He had devoted a large part of his life to the study of the Sankhya, consoled himself with the thought that 'in Kapila's doctrine, for the first time in the history of the world, the complete independence and freedom of the human mind, its full confidence in its own powers, were exhibited."

(source: Philosophy of Hinduism - By Galav p. 35).