Is India The light of world........

"Whatever sphere of the human mind may be selected for special study, whether language, religion, mythology, or philosophy, whether laws, customs, primitive art or primitive science, we must go to India, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up there, and there only...."

"Why should a study of Greek or Latin--of the poetry, the philosophy, the laws and the art of Greece and Italy--seem congenial to us, why should it excite even a certain enthusiasm.."

In France, Germany, and Italy, even in Denmark, Sweden,and Russia, there is a vague charm connected with the name of India.

One of the most beautiful poems in the German language is the _Weisheit der Brahmanen_, the "Wisdom of the Brahmans," by Rueckert, to my mind more rich in thought and more perfect in form than even Goethe's West oestlicher Divan.


Prof. Friedrich Maximilian Mueller, OXFORD, December, 1882.

 

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The light of the world with the caste system being used to enslave millions.

 

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They should get their population under control, treat women properly and stop locking up gay men.

On the other hand, they are democratic and have railways and cricket.

 

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Have you traveled to India recently? Have you traveled outside India?

Every culture in the world has some things to be proud of and some things to be ashamed of, putting one culture above another is fruitless. It produces nothing that is worthwhile. India has a long and noble culture. But like other cultures its has blemishes too.

 

Couldn't India just be one of the lights of the world? Why exclude others? I voted 'no'.

 

I voted "no" also. In many, many ways India is the backwaters of the world.

 

Yes indeed, the railways having been built in part by my maternal grandfather, in the days of the British empire before the war.

More seriously, India has contributed, as many ancient civilisations have done, much towards our modern world. But to use exceptionalist language such as "the light of the world" strikes me as absurd.

 

I voted 'no'.

I agree with that. Certainly, in order to get a full understanding of the human intellectual and cultural inheritance, one would have to take into account India's many contributions. (China's as well.)

Writing in 1882, Max Muller (an extremely important German-born Sanskritist who spent most of his career at Oxford) was arguing against the unfortunate Euro-centrism that still infected higher education in his day. I think that he was right.

I strongly agree with Muller that the best Indian contributions to certain subjects, in the arts, religion and philosophy particularly, are probably the equal of the best that the West has ever produced in those areas and just as worthy of study and appreciation.

But I don't think that I'd say that India is "the light of the world". That's an over-exaggeration. It's one of the major pieces in the world-mosaic though.

 

Did anyone actually read this poem?

http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Rückert, Friedrich/Gedichte/Die Weisheit des Brahmanen

 

Crikey, your grandpa must have been busy! There's thousands of miles of the stuff.

 

What about science though? Serious contributions there too?

 

I've skimmed through Rückert's poem. It seems to me to have little to do with India or Brahmans, but much more with the fashionable way in which Eastern thought was characteristically adapted and contrived by so many Europeans back then.

 

The E- book of his lectures:"https://archive.org/stream/indiawhatcanitte20847gut/20847.txt"
Prof. Friedrich Maximilian Mueller, OXFORD, December, 1882.

Its advisable to read it and then try to come up with arguments against facts from his E book....

 

The Light of the World is Jesus Christ.

 

Oh, but this is Sciforums. That's not how things are done here.

*tsk tsk*

 

That's why I only responded to the first quote in the original post. The rest of the quotes seemed to me to be largely irrelevant to the poll question. The ostensible subject of the thread seemed to be the value of India's contributions to world culture, not 19th century European literary reactions to them.

I have it on my e-reader, along with several of Muller's books, but I haven't read that particular one. I expect that it's probably a rewarding read.

(I should add that archive.org is an absolutely amazing place to find scanned copies (in multiple formats including pdf and epub) of much of the 19th and early 20th century academic literature on every subject imaginable. They've scanned all the old out-of-copyright books in many university libraries and made them available for free.)

If the topic is Max Muller's opinions expressed in that particular book, then sure, people will need to have read it in order to speak intelligently about it. But one needn't have read that one particular book in order to have informed opinions about Indian cultural contributions. Read Basham or something.

 

But how we understand India's contributions to world culture will depend precisely on the particular sources we read about India.

Reading 19th century European Orientalists will give a vastly different image of India than some anti-Indian British propaganda, for example.

 

BAD poll. Needs button "WHO CARES!"

 

Nobody sensible argues against facts.

But the question was not about a fact, or facts. It was about whether or not readers of this forums shared a particular, extreme and exceptionalist judgement, about the status of India.

And we don't.