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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. ~ Heinrich Heine


Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

B

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  • It has now become very clear to me that the Scandinavian, Egyptian, Greek, Central Asiatic, German and Slavonic gods were nearly all ... born in prehistoric India.
    • Helena Blavatsky, as quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 2

C

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  • We are constrained to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.
    • Victor Cousin, quoted in : Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage : India and Her Neighbors. [1]

H

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  • India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for.
    • Friedrich Hegel, as quoted in A Survey of Hinduism, Klaus K. Klostermaier. Also quoted in Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • Auf Flügeln des Gesanges,
    Herzliebchen, trag' ich dich fort,
    Fort nach den Fluren des Ganges,
    Dort weiß ich den schönsten Ort.
  • The bramins have formed their people to such a degree of gentleness, courtesy, temperance and chastity, or at least have so confirmed them in these virtues, that Europeans frequently appear, on comparison with them, as beastly, drunken or mad. In their air and language they are unconstrainedly elegant; in their behaviour, friendly; in their persons, clean; in their way of life, simple and harmless ... they are not destitute of knowledge, still less of quiet industry or nicely imitative art; even the lowest castes learn reading, writing and arithmetic. . . .
    • J.G. Herder, as quoted in Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe. p 186

J

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  • India is the world’s cradle : thence it is that the common mother in sending forth her children, even to the utmost west has, in unfading testimony of our origin bequeathed us the legacy of her language, her laws, her morale, her literature and her religion.
    • Louis Jacolliot, quoted in Swami Shraddananda, Hindu Sangathan, Saviour of the Dying Race (Delhi 1926)

K

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  • 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.
    • Immanuel Kant, quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins; quoted in Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe, page 186

L

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  • [Hindu philosophy] is the Ocean, we are but its clouds.... The key to everything is in India.
    • Lamartine, quoted in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)

M

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  • [From India emanated] "a torrent of light and the flow of reason and Right".
    • Jules Michelet, quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 1.
  • The year 1863 will remain cherished and blessed. It was the first time I could read India’s great sacred poem, the divine Ramayana.... This great stream of poetry carries away the bitter leaven left behind by time and purifies us. Whoever has his heart dried up, let him drench it in the Ramayana. Whoever has lost and wept, let him find in it a soothing softness and Nature’s compassion. Whoever has done too much, willed too much, let him drink a long draught of life and youth from this deep chalice....
    • Jules Michelet, quoted in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)
  • Everything is narrow in the Occident. Greece is small — I stifle. Judea is dry — I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, towards the deep Orient. There I find my immense poem, vast as India’s seas, blessed and made golden by the sun, a book of divine harmony in which nothing jars. There reigns a lovable peace, and even in the midst of battle, an infinite softness, an unbounded fraternity extending to all that lives, a bottomless and shoreless ocean of love, piety, clemency. I have found what I was looking for: the bible of kindness. Great poem, receive me!… Let me plunge into it! It is the sea of milk.
    • Jules Michelet, quoted in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)

P

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  • 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.

S

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  • Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealism of reason, as it is set forth by Greek philosophers, appears, in comparison with the abundant light and vigour of Oriental idealism, like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun—faltering and feeble, and ever ready to be extinguished.
    • Friedrich Schlegel, Indian Language, Literature, and Philosophy, p. 471, quoted in Max Müller, Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy (1894), p. 11

T

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  • 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, reported in Paul Fatout, Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit (1960), quoted in Salil Gewali, Great Minds on India (New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2013)
  • Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.
    • Mark Twain, reported in The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order (2007), quoted in Salil Gewali, Great Minds on India (2013)

V

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  • I am convinced that everything—astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.—comes to us from the banks of the Ganges.
    • Voltaire, quoted in E. F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (2001), Ch. 1
  • 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, Fragments historiques sur l’Inde, quoted in Salil Gewali, Great Minds on India (2013)
  • Everything without exception is of Indian origin. ... Whether directly or indirectly, all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies."
    • Voltaire, letter of 15 December 1775 in Lettres sur l'origine des sciences et sur celle des peuples de l'Asie (Paris, 1777), quoted in S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism (2008)
  • If the Indians had remained unknown to the Tartars and to us, they would have been the happiest people in the world.
    • Voltaire, quoted in Dharampal, Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century (Delhi: Impex India, 1971)
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