Indomania

philia for Indian culture

Indomania or Indophilia refer to the special interest that India, Indians and their cultures and traditions have generated across the world, more specifically among the cultures and civilisations of the Indian subcontinent, as well those of the Arab and Western worlds (particularly in Germany). The initial British interest in governing their newly absorbed territories awoke the interest in India, in particular its culture and ancient history. Later the people with interests in Indian aspects came to be known as Indologists and their subject as Indology. Its opposite is Indophobia.

On Wings of Song,
Sweetheart, I carry you away,
Away to the fields of the Ganges,
Where I know the most beautiful place.. ~ Poem by Heinrich Heine

Quotes edit

  • An old worldview where Palestine and the Hebrews were the center of the world began to be challenged by a new one where the Indo-Europeans and their original home were seen as the creative center of the world, and ever since then India, Tibet, and the Himalayas have also assumed a special place in Western mythical geography as an alternative axis mundi to "Semitic" Jerusalem and Israel.
    • Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. p. 38.
  • It is there in (Aryavarta) we must seek not only for the cradle of the Brahmin religion but for the cradle of the high civilization of the Hindus, which gradually extended itself in the west to Ethiopia, to Egypt, to Phoenicia; in the East to Siam, to China and Japan; in the South to Ceylon, to Java and to Sumatra; in the North to Persia, to Chaldea, and to Colchis, whence it came to Greece and to Rome and at length to the distant abode of the Hyperboreons."
    • Count Magnus Fredrik Ferdinand Bjornstjerna (1779-1847), Die Theogonie, Philosophie und Kosmogonie der Hindus
  • When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the fact—above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe—we discover there are many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race, the native land of the highest philosophy.
    • Victor Cousin. source: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Anthony Parel.Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • J.G. Herder also saw in India the "lost paradise of all religions and philosophies", the "cradle of humanity", the "eternal home", the "eternal Orient ... waiting to be rediscovered within ourselves". This is high praise, indeed, but it does not mean that he ever thought that India supplanted the West. Any such thought was far from his mind. What he meant was that India represented humanity's childhood, its innocence, as Hellenism represented its "adolescence" and Rome its "adulthood". Similarly, while Indians were "the gentlest branch of humanity", Christianity was the religion of "purest humanity".
    • J.G. Herder cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.
  • Mankind’s origins can be traced to India, where the human mind got the first shapes of wisdom and virtue with a simplicity, strength and sublimity which has—frankly spoken—nothing, nothing at all equivalent in our philosophical, cold European world.
    • J.G. Herder. source: Sacred Jewels of Yoga: Wisdom from India’s Beloved Scriptures, Teachers, Masters and Monks, Dave DeLuca. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • O holy land [India], I salute thee, thou source of all music, thou voice of the heart and ‘Behold the East—cradle of the human race, of human emotion, of all religions.’
    • J. G. Herder. source: Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, John James Clarke. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • India has always been an object of yearning, a realm of wonder, a world of magic... India is the land of dreams. India had always dreamt—more of the bliss that is man’s final goal. And this has helped India to be more creative in history than any other nation. Hence the effervescence of myths and legends, religions and philosophies, music, and dances, and the different styles of architecture.
    • Friedrich Hegel . source: A Survey of Hinduism, Klaus K. Klostermaier Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • It strikes everyone in the beginning, to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature, a land so rich in intellectual products and with the profoundest order of thought …
    • Friedrich Hegel .source: The Philosophy of History, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for.
    • Friedrich Hegel .source: A Survey of Hinduism, Klaus K. Klostermaier Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • Without being known too well, it [India] has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans as a wonderland. Its fame, which it has always had with regard to its treasures, both its natural ones, and in particular, its wisdom, has lured men there.
    • Friedrich Hegel .source: Contesting the Master Narrative, Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House. and in Halbfass, Wilhelm India and Europe State University of New York Press. New York J 988 p. 2
  • "India as a land of Desire formed an essential element in general history. From the most ancient times downwards, all nations have directed their wishes and longings to gaining access to the treasures of this land of marvels, the most costly which the earth presents, treasures of nature - pearls, diamonds, perfumes, rose essences, lions, elephants, etc. - as also treasures of wisdom. The way by which these treasures have passed to the West has at all times been a matter of world historical importance bound up with the fate of nations."
    • in Panikkar, K M Asia and Western Dominance Collier Books 1969 New York p.21
  • Immanuel Kant suggested that “The culture of the Indians, as is known, almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India.”
    • Kant, I. quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.
  • One might think this position (that the English colonialist should convert their Indian "brethren" to the Gospel) would have endeared Max Muller to missionaries, but in fact it did not. Rather, they found him entirely too sympathetic to the "heathen" and suspected him of being insufficiently committed to the faith. Accordingly, in 1860 he was passed over for Oxford's Boden chair in Sanskrit, which carried responsibility for preparing the Sanskrit-English dictionary, both of which were intended, under the terms of Lt-Col Boden's will, to advance the conversion of Indians to Christianity, not to foster English understanding or respect for India
    • Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship by Bruce Lincoln, 1999. p. 68.
  • If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life... again I should point to India.
  • It is surely astounding that such a system as the Vedanta should have slowly been elaborated by the indefatigable and intrepid thinkers of India thousands of years ago, a system that even now makes us feel giddy as in mounting the last steps of the swaying spire of a Gothic cathedral. None of our philosophers, including Heraclitus, Plato, Kant or Hegel, has ventured to erect such a spire, never frightened by storms or lightning. Stone follows on stone in regular succession after once the first step has been made, after once it has been clearly seen that in the beginning there can have been One, as there will be but One in the end, whether we call it Atman or Brahman.
    • Max Müller. source: The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, Max Müller Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • “Thanks to the labors of a science which is comparatively recent, and more especially to the researches of the students of Hindu and Egyptian antiquities, it is very much easier today than it was not so long ago to discover the source, to ascend the course and unravel the underground network of that great mysterious river which since the beginning of history has been flowing beneath all the religions, all the faiths, and all the philosophies: in a word, beneath all the visible and everyday manifestations of human thought. It is now hardly to be contested that this source is to be found in ancient India. Thence in all probability the sacred teaching spread into Egypt, found its way to ancient Persia and Chaldea, permeated the Hebrew race, and crept into Greece and the north of Europe, finally reaching China and even America.”
    • Maeterlink, Maurice, in The Great Secret) (Niranjan Shah, Indian Origins of Ancient Civilizations, International Vedic Vision Foundation, New York, 2011, p.4. Quoted from Stephen Knapp, Mysteries of the Ancient Vedic Empire [1]
  • "It will no longer remain to be doubted that the priests of Egypt and the sages of Greece have drawn directly from the original well of India." ... "Towards the Orient, to the banks of the Ganges and the Indus, it is there that our hearts feel drawn by some hidden urge - it is there that all the dark presentiments point which lie in the depths of our hearts... In the Orient, the heavens poured forth into the earth."
    • F. Majer (1771-1818) cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.
  • In India I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it. Inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything but possessed by nothing.
    • Philostratus, in his book Life of Apollonius of Tyana, recognized the experience of Apollonius in India, he writes what Apollonius described. Quoted in "Brand New World: How Paupers, Pirates, and Oligarchs are Reshaping Business", .74, by Max Lenderman
  • Everything without exception is of Indian origin...
    • Friedrich Schlegel, Letter to Ludwig Tieck of 15 December, 1803, quoted by Leon Poliakov in The Aryan Myth. Quoted in A Look at India From the Views of Other Scholars, by Stephen Knapp [2]
    • Longer quote: "Here is the actual source of all languages, all the thoughts and poems of the human spirit; everything, everything without exception comes from India." cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.
  • Whether directly or indirectly all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies... the oriental antiquity could, if we consented to deepen it, bring us back more safely towards the divine....
    • Friedrich Schlegel, Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, quoted by Roger-Pol Droit in L’Oubli de I’Inde, Paris Presses Universitaires de France, 1989, p. 129. Quoted in A Look at India From the Views of Other Scholars, by Stephen Knapp [3]
  • There is no language in the world, even Greek, which has the clarity and the philosophical precision of Sanskrit. India is not only at the origin of everything, she is superior in everything, intellectually, religiously or politically and even the Greek heritage seems pale in comparison.
    • Friedrich Schlegel,source: Arise, O India, François Gautier. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • The Indians possessed a knowledge of the true God, conceived and expressed in noble, clear and grand language … Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealization of reason, as set forth by the Greeks, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of oriental idealism, like a feeble spark in the full flood of the noonday sun.
    • Friedrich Schlegel, source: Philosophy, Qabbala and Vedanta, Maurice Fluegel. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • Another great name belonging to this movement was that of Schopenhauer. His interest in Indian religion was first aroused by reading Anquetil Dupperon's Latin translation of Oupnekhat (1801-1802), itself a translation from a Persian version. He was deeply moved and he found its reading "the most rewarding and edifying", and its philosophy "the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death". After this he continued to take a deep interest in India. In Indians, he found the "most noble and ancient people", and their wisdom was the "original wisdom of the human race". He spoke of India as the "fatherland of mankind", which gave the "original religion of our race" and "oldest of all world view". He thought of the Upanishads as the "fruit of the most sublime human knowledge and wisdom", documents of "almost superhuman conception" whose authors could "hardly be thought of as mere mortals". He expressed the hope that European peoples "who stemmed from Asia ... would also re-attain the holy religions of their home".
    • Schopenhauer, cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.
  • The enthusiasm for Indian culture was widespread. Amaury de Riencourt in his The Soul of India tells us that philosophers like Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Schleiermacher, poets such as Goethe, Schillar, Novalis, Tieck and Brentano, historians like Herder and Schlegel, all acclaimed the discovery of Indian culture with cries of ecstasy: "India, the home of universal religion, the cradle of the noblest human race, of all literature, of all philosophies and metaphysics." And he adds that "this enthusiasm was not confined to Germany. The entire Romantic movement in the West put Indian culture on a lofty pedestal which the preceding Classical Movement had reserved for Greece and Rome."
    • Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.
  • Tolstoy, a late-comer, was also deeply influenced by Indian religious thought. Like Wagner, his introduction to it was through Burnouf and Schopenhauer. Beginning with his Confessions, there is no work of his "which is not inspired, in part by Hindu thought", to put it in the words of Markovitch quoted by Raymond Schwab in The Oriental Renaissance. He further adds that Tolstoy also "remains the most striking example, among a great many, of those who sought a cure for the western spirit in India".
    • Raymond Schwab, Tolstoy, cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.
  • India is the land of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of human speech, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition. The land that all men desire to see and having seen once even by a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of the rest of the globe combined.
    • Mark Twain source: Mark Twain On The Lecture Circuit, Paul Fatout Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.
    • Mark Twain source: The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order,Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • In 1760, Voltaire acquired a copy of Ezourvedam, a forgery of the Jesuits (most probably of Di Nobili). But even this served an unintended purpose. Voltaire with his acumen saw even in this document the voice of an ancient religion. While he praised Brahmins for having "established religion on the basis of universal religion", he also found that India was the home of religion in its oldest and purest form. He described India as a country "on which all other countries had to rely, but which did not rely on anyone else". He also believed that Christianity derived from Hinduism. He wrote to and assured Frederick the Great of Prussia that "our holy Christian religion is solely based upon the ancient religion of Brahma".
    • Voltaire cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.
  • I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It does not behoove us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indians and Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.
    • Voltaire, quoted in Sanskrit Reader 1: A Reader in Sanskrit Literature by Heiko Kretschmer
  • It is very important to note that some 2500 years ago at least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganga to learn geometry ... But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmins’ science not been long established in Europe.
    • Voltaire. source: Riding the Indian Tiger, William Nobrega and Ashish Sinha. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • The Veda was the most precious gift for which the West has ever been indebted to the East.
    • Voltaire, source: Eclectic Magazine: Foreign Literature, John Holmes Agnew and Walter Hilliard Bidwell Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • If India, whom the whole earth needs, and who alone needs no one, must by that very fact be the most anciently civilized land, she must therefore have had the most ancient form of religion. ... We have shown how much we surpass the Indians in courage and wickedness, and how inferior to them we are in wisdom. Our European nations have mutually destroyed themselves in this land where we only go in search of money, while the first Greeks travelled to the same land only to instruct themselves.
    • Voltaire, source: Fragments historiques sur l’Inde, Voltaire . Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • "Everything without exception is of Indian origin" "Whether directly or indirectly, all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies."
    • Voltaire, Lettres sur l'origine des sciences et sur celle des peuples de I 'Asie (first published Paris, 1777), letter of 15 December 1775 quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
  • If the Indians had remained unknown to the Tartars and to us, they would have been the happiest people in the world.
    • Voltaire, in Dharampal, Indian science and technology in the eighteenth century; some contemporary European accounts. Delhi, Impex India [1971] quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
  • Hindus are "a peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of hurting others or of defending themselves."
    • Voltaire, in Woodroffe, John George, Sir, Is India civilized? Essays on Indican culture. Madras, Ganesh & co., 1922. p. 36 quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
  • “Everything came to us from the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.” ... “our religion was hidden deep in India” and “incontestably comes to us from the Brahmans.” ... “Our nations have mutually destroyed each other on that very soil where we went to collect nothing but money, and where the first Greeks travelled for nothing but knowledge.”
    • Voltaire, in Jain, S., & Jain, M. (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books. vol 4. Introduction
  • Nixon said that American public opinion had been duped by India: “there’s a huge public relations campaign here. Many of our friends in the other party, and including, I must say, some of the nuts in our own party, soft-heads, have jumped on, have completely bought the Indian line. And India has a very great propaganda line.”
    • Richard Nixon, Nixon quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

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