India: What Can It Teach Us?
A pioneering Oxford orientalist's case, made directly to future British administrators of India, that Sanskrit literature and the Veda are among the great intellectual achievements of the human mind — not a curiosity for philologists, but a body of thought worth taking as seriously as Plato or Kant.
Public-domain 1883 text (Project Gutenberg eBook #20847), reformatted for this site's reading layout. View the original, unmodified Project Gutenberg edition ↗
Book Summary
In 1882 the Cambridge Board of Historical Studies asked Friedrich Max Müller, the leading Sanskrit scholar of his day, to lecture to young men preparing for the Indian Civil Service — men who would soon govern India without, in most cases, any real education in what India had actually thought or written. Müller used the invitation to make a direct case for respect: opening with his now-famous claim that if asked under what sky the human mind has most deeply pondered the greatest problems of life, he would point to India, he spends Lecture I arguing that Sanskrit literature and Indian philosophy deserve to be read as seriously as Plato or Kant, not filed away as colonial curiosities.
Lecture II takes on a specific and, to his audience, practical prejudice: the widespread British administrative belief that Indians were characteristically untruthful. Müller examines this charge closely, drawing on missionary and official testimony as well as Sanskrit literature itself, and argues that the stereotype says more about the position of a subject people under foreign rule than about any inherent national character — a case he clearly hopes will unsettle the assumptions his future-civil-servant audience would otherwise carry into their postings.
Lectures III and IV turn to Sanskrit literature directly: its sheer human interest as a record of a civilization thinking through law, grammar, drama, and philosophy independently of Greece and Rome, followed by a direct rebuttal of the standing objections — that it is derivative, that it is unhistorical, that it has nothing to teach a modern European — which Müller answers point by point from the texts themselves.
The closing lectures move to religion proper: Lecture V draws out the practical and ethical "lessons" Müller finds in the Veda, Lecture VI surveys the Vedic deities as an early, unusually transparent record of how a people turned the forces of nature into gods, and Lecture VII closes the book with the Vedânta — the philosophical schools built on the Upanishads — presented as Indian thought's most mature answer to the question of the self's relation to the ultimate reality, and Müller's clearest statement of what, in his title's terms, India still has to teach the modern West.