Indomania

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

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.


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

  • 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.
    • Blavatsky, H. P. 1975. From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House. 1st ed 1892. 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
  • But the evidence of her past glories lies in her literature. What people in all the world can boast of such a literature, which, were the Sanscrit less difficult, would be more studied than now? Hitherto the general public has had to rely for information on a few scholars who, notwithstanding their great learning and trustworthiness, are unequal to the task of translating and commenting upon more than a few books out of the almost countless number that, notwithstanding the vandalism of the missionaries, are still left to swell the mighty volume of Sanscrit literature.

C

  • 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

  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Friedrich Hegel, as quoted in Panikkar, K M Asia and Western Dominance Collier Books 1969 New York p.21
  • 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
  • The Hindus are the gentlest branch of humanity. They do not with pleasure offend anything that lives; they honor that which gives life and nourish themselves with the most inno¬ cent of foods, milk, rice, the fruits of the trees, the healthy herbs which their motherland dispenses . . . Moderation and calm, a soft feeling and a silent depth of the soul characterize their work and their pleasure, their morals and mythology, their arts and even their endurance under the most extreme yoke of humanity.
    • J.G. Herder, as quoted in Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding, Motilal Banarasidass Publishers Pvt. Limited, Delhi, 1990. Also quoted in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.
  • The mythology, as well as the cosmogony of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, were borrowed from the doctrines of the Brahmins.
    • John Holwell, quoted in Marshall, P. J. 1970. The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century. Camhridge: Cambridge University Press. Quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 1.

J

  • 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

  • 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

  • [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

  • 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.
  • 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; that only Brahmanism can provide those fragments of their teaching which have come down to us with the clarity which they do not possess.
    • Friedrich Majer, as quoted in Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding, Motilal Banarasidass Publishers Pvt. Limited, Delhi, 1990. Also quoted in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.
  • [From India emanated] "a torrent of light and the flow of reason and Right"... At its starting point, man arose in India, the birthplace of races and of religions, the womb of the world.
    • Michelet, Jules. 1864. Bible de I'humanite. Paris: Chamerot., Febvre, Lucien. 1946. Michelet. Paris: Traits., As 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)
  • 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.

N

  • 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, quoted from Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

P

  • 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

  • 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
  • Here is the actual source of all languages, all the thoughts and poems of the human spirit; everything, everything without exception comes from India.
    • Friedrich Schlegel, Letter to Ludwig Tieck of 15 December, 1803, Vorlesungen über Universalgeschichte" (1805-1806); Werke, J.-J. Anstett ed., Vol. XIV, Munich 1960. p. xxxi. Quoted in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.
  • And O! how the mind is here washed clean of all its early ingrafted Jewish superstition ! It is the most profitable and elevating reading which is possible in the world. It has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death.

T

  • 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

  • I am convinced that everything—astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.—comes to us from the banks of the Ganges.
    • Enfin, monsieur, je suis convaincu que tout nous vient des bords du Gange, astronomie, astrologie, métempsycose, etc.
    • Voltaire, Lettres sur l'origine des sciences et sur celle des peuples de l'Asie adressés à M. de Voltaire par M. Bailly et précédées de quelques lettres de M. de Voltaire a l'auteur, Paris 1777, quoted in E. F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (2001), Ch. 1
  • It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry...But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmans' science not been been long established in Europe.
    • C’est d’abord une remarque très-importante que Pythagore alla de Samos au Gange pour apprendre la géométrie, il y a environ deux mille cinq cents ans au moins, et plus de sept cents ans avant notre ère vulgaire, si récemment adoptée par nous. Or, certainement Pythagore n’aurait pas entrepris un si étrange voyage si la réputation de la science des brachmanes n’avait été dès longtemps établie de proche en proche en Europe, et si plusieurs voyageurs n’avaient déjà enseigné la route.
    • Voltaire, Fragments historiques sur l'Inde. Quoted in Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
  • 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.
    • It becomes not us, who were only barbarians when these people were learned and refined, to dispute their antiquity.
    • Mais enfin il nous a démontré que les Gangaridos avaient écrit une mythologie, bonne ou mauvaise, il y a cinq mille ans, comme le savant et judicieux jésuite Parennin nous a démontré que les Chinois étaient réunis en corps de peuple vers ces temps-là. Et s’ils l’étaient alors, il fallait bien qu’ils le fussent auparavant : de grandes peuplades ne se forment pas en un jour. Ce n’est donc pas à nous, qui n’étions que des sauvages barbares quand ces peuples étaient policés et savants, à leur contester leur antiquité. Il se peut que, dans la foule des révolutions qui ont dû tout changer sur la terre, l’Europe ait cultivé des arts et connu des sciences avant l’Asie ; mais il n’en reste aucun vestige, et l’Asie est pleine d’anciens monuments.
    • Voltaire, Fragments historiques sur l'Inde.
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