Indologists

"Admitting the Hindu and Alexandrian authors [such as Diophantus], to be nearly equally ancient, it must be conceded in favor of the Indian algebraist, that he was more advanced in the science […] In the whole science [of algebra], he [Diophantus] is very far behind the Hindu writers […] he is hardly to be considered as the inventor, since he seems to treat the art as already known."

""The ancient language of India, the polished Sanskrit, not unallied to Greek and various other languages of Europe, may yet contribute something to their elucidation, and still more to the not unimportant subject of general grammar."'"

"Acting on Hacker's wishes, the editor of his collected works excluded the author's polemical Christian writings from the compilation... Many such polemical writings also appeared in fringe religious pamphlets and propaganda literature which are unknown to most scholars. Hacker's suppression of this material compromised his integrity as an objective scholar, as it misled readers into thinking his writings on Hinduism were objective evaluations when in fact they were, in Andrew Nicholson's words, the work of a 'Christian polemicist'. In his posthumously published writings, Hacker is as explicit in his support for Christianity as he is in his attack on contemporary Hinduism."

"Connected as those highly polished and refined languages [Sanskrit and Arabic] are with other tongues, they deserve to be studied for the sake of the particular dialects and idioms to which they bear relation; for their own sake, that is, for the literature which appertains to them; and for the analysis of language in general, which has been unsuccessfully attempted on too narrow ground, but may be prosecuted, with effect, upon wider induction."

"Early in A.D. 1366 the Sultan opened his first regular campaign against Vijayanagar. Originating in an after-dinner jest, it ended only after such slaughter that Firishtah computes the victims on the Hindu side alone as numbering no less than half a million."

"They (the allies) slaughtered the people without mercy; broke down the temples and palaces; and wreaked such savage vengeance on the abode of the kings, that, with the exception of a few great stone-built temples and walls, nothing now remains but a heap of ruins to mark the spot where once the stately buildings stood. They demolished the statues, and even succeeded in breaking the limbs of the huge Narasimha monolith. Nothing seemed to escape them. They broke up the pavilions standing on the huge platform from which the kings used to watch the festivals and overthrew all the carved work. They lit huge fires in the magnificently decorated buildings forming the temple of Vitthalasvami near the river, and smashed its exquisite stone sculptures. With fire and sword, with crowbars and axes, they carried on day after day their work of destruction. Never perhaps in the history of the world has such havoc been wrought, and wrought so suddenly, on so splendid a city; teeming with a wealthy and industrious population in the full plentitude of prosperity one day, and on the next seized, pillaged, and reduced to ruins, amid scenes of savage massacre and horrors beggaring description … such was the fate of this great and magnificent city. It never recovered, but remained forever a scene of desolation and ruin. At the present day the remains of the larger and more durable structures rear themselves from amongst the scanty cultivation carried on by petty farmers, dwellers in tiny villages scattered over the area once so populous."

"De Couto, describing the death of Rama Raya, states that Hussain Nizam Shah cut off his enemy's head with his own hand, exclaiming, "Now I am avenged of thee! Let God do what he will to me!""

"'The third day saw the beginning of the end. The victorious Mussulmans had halted on the field of battle for rest and refreshment, but now they had reached the capital, and from that time forward for a space of five months Vijayanagar knew no rest. The enemy had come to destroy, and they carried out their object relentlessly. They slaughtered the people without mercy; broke down the temples and palaces, and wreaked such savage vengeance on the abode of the Kings, that, with the exception of a few great stone-built temples and walls, nothing now remains but a heap of ruins to mark the spot where once stately buildings stood. They demolished the statues, and even succeeded in breaking the limbs of the huge Narasimha monolith. Nothing seemed to escape them. They broke up the pavilions standing on the huge platform from which the kings used to watch festivals, and overthrew all the carved work. They lit huge fires in the magnificently decorated buildings forming the temple of Vitthalaswami near the river, and smashed its exquisite stone sculptures. With fire and sword, with crowbars and axes, they carried on day after day their work of destruction. Never perhaps in the history of the world has such havoc been wrought, and wrought so suddenly, on so splendid a city; teeming with a wealthy and industrious population in the fun plenitude of prosperity one day, and on the next seized, pillaged, and reduced to ruins, amid scenes of savage massacre and horrors beggaring description' The loot must have been enormous. Couto states that amongst other treasures was found a diamond as large as a hen's egg, which was kept by the Adil Shah.'"

"Reverend Sherring was a devout, and maybe a s lightly bigoted evangelist member of the London Missionary Society. He was dead against idol worship. As he has written idolatry is a word denoting all that is wicked in imagination and impure in practice. IdolatJy is a demon- an incarnation of all evil. And yet he said it would not be difficult, I believe, to find twenty temples in all Benares of the age of Aurangzeb, or from 1658 to 1707. The same unequal proportion of old temples, as compared with new, is visible throughout the whole of northern India. Hi s description of the desecration of temples b y the thousand, and their blatant conversion into either mosques, mausoleums, dargahs, palaces or pleasure houses has to be seen to be believed."

"Reverend Sherring continued, the diminutive size of nearly all the temples in India except for the south that exist is another powerful testimony to the stringency of the Mohammedan rule: It seems clear, that, for the most part, the emperors forbade the Hindus to build spacious temples, and suffered them to erect only small structures, of the size of cages,for their idols, and these of no pretensions to beauty. The consequence is, that the Hindus of the present day, blindly following the example of their predecessors of two centuries ago, commonly build their religious edifices of the same dwarfish size as formerly."

"When Babylon was struggling with Nineveh for supremacy, when Tyre was planting her colonies, when Athens was growing in strength, before Rome had become known, or Greece had contended with Persia, or Cyprus had added lustre to the Persian monarchy, or Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem, and the inhabitants of Judaea had been carried into captivity, she (Varanasi) had already risen to greatness, if not to glory."

"In his view, if there is one circumstance respecting the Mohammedan period which Hindus remember better than another, it is the insulting pride of the Musulmans (sic), the outrages which they perpetrated upon their religious convictions, and the extensive spoilation of their temples and shrines. When we endeavour to ascertain what the Mohammedans have left to the Hindus of their ancient buildings in Benares, we are startled at the result of our investigations. Although the city is bestrewn with temples, it is unlikely that there are many which are old."

"The Europeans should clearly understand that this spirit of Mohammedanism is unchangeable, and that, if by any mischance, India should again come into the possession of men ofthis creed, all the churches and colleges and all the Mission institutions, would not be worth a week's purchase. So wrote Reverend Mathew Atmore Sherring. The Muslims had done no harm to the Christians of British India. But he was so upset at the vandali sm he saw in Benares that he could not help speaking out."

"The entire area is called Benares; and the religious privileges of the city are extended to every portion of it. Whoever dies in any spot of this enclosure is, the natives think, sure of happiness after death; and so wide is the application of this privilege, that it embraces, they say, even Europeans and Mohammedans, even Pariahs and other outcasts, even liars, murderers, and thieves. That no soul can perish in Benares is, thus, the charitable superstition of the Hindus."

"There is no doubt, in our mind, that the Ad-Bisheswar temple stood on this site, and was destroyed by the Mohammedans, who, as usual, transferred its stones to their own mosque."

"Thus, NS Indologist Erich Frauwallner says, in Pollock’s account: “Frauwallner argued that the special meaning of Indian philosophy lay in its being ‘a typical creation of an aryan people’, that its similarities with western philosophy derived from ‘the same racially determined talent’, and that it was a principal scholarly task of Indology to d emonstrate this fact. Reiterating an axiom of NS doctrine, that ‘Wissenschaft in the strict sense of the word is something that could be created only by nordic Indo-Germans’, Frauwallner adds, ‘From the agreement in scientific character of Indian and European philosophy, we can draw the further conclusion that philosophy as an attempt to explain the world according to scientific method is likewise a typical creation of the Aryan mind.’""

"When we endeavour to ascertain what the Mohammedans have left to the Hindus of their ancient buildings in Benares, we are startled at the result of our investigations. Although the city is bestrewn with temples in every direction, in some places ve1y thickly, yet it would be difficult, I believe, to find twenty temples, in all Benares, of the age of Aurungzeb, or from 1658 to 1707. The same unequal proportion of old temples, as compared with new, is visible throughout the whole of Northern India. Moreover, the diminutive size of nearly all the temples that exist is another powerful testimony to the stringency of the Mohammedan rule. It seems clear, that, for the most part, the emperors forbade the Hindus to build spacious temples, and suffered them to erect only small structures, of the size of cages, for their idols, and these of no pretensions to beauty.... If there is one circumstance respecting the Mohammedan period which Hindus remember better than another, it is the insulting pride of the Musulmans, the outrages which they perpetrated upon their religious convictions, and the extensive spoliation of their temples and shrines. It is right that Europeans should clearly understand, that this spirit of Mohammedanism is unchangeable, and that, if, by any mischance, India should again come into the possession of men and this creed, all the churches and colleges, and all the Mission institutions, would not be worth a week's purchase."

"A British civil servant had a great deal to say about Mathura in the 1870s. F.S. Growse belonged to the Bengal Civil Service and was the Collector of Mathura district. I quote from his 'Mathura: A District Memoir,' Bulands hahr 1882: The neighbourhood is crowded with sacred sites, which for many generations have been reverenced as the traditionary scenes of Krishna's adventures; but thanks to Muhammedan intolerance, there is not a single building of any antiquity either in the city itself or its environs. Its most famous temple - that dedicated to Kesava Deva- was destroyed, as already mentioned, in 1669, the eleventh year of the reign of the iconoclastic Aurangzeb. The mosque erected on its ruins is a building of little architectural value, but the natural advantages of its lofty and isolated position render it a striking feature in the landscape."

"...The sacrarium has been utterly razed to the ground,t the chapel toners were never completed, and that over the choir, though the most perfect, has still lost several of its upper stages. This last was of slighter elevation than the others, occupying the same relative position as the spirelet over the sanetus bell in western ecclesiology., The loss of the towers and of the lofty arcaded parapet that surmounted the walls has terribly marred the effect of the exterior and given it a heavy stunted appearance ; while, as a further disfigurement, a plain masonry wall had been run along the top of the centre dome. It is generally believed that this was built by Aorangzeb for the purpose of desecrating the temple, though it is also said to have been put up by the Hindus themselves to assist in some grand ill ami- nation. It either case it was an ugly modern excrescence, and its removal was the very first step taken at the commencement of the recent repairs."

"In his Mathura: A District Memoir, Growse has recorded his exhaustive survey and research about Brajbhoomi. He was so overhelmed by the vandalism that visited the area repeatedly, that he wrote feelingly, although his home was in far away England. To quote: thanks to Muhammadan intolerance, there is not a single building of any antiquity either in the city itself or its environs.Its most famous temple - that dedicated to Kesava Deva (Krishna) - was destroyed in 1669, the eleventh year of the reign of the iconoclast Aurangzeb (Alamgir was also his name). The mosque (idgah) erected on its ruins is a building of little architectural value. Mahmud Ghazni was however the first iconoclast to vandalise Mathura. That was in 1017 AD about which Growse wrote: If any one wished to construct a building equal to it, he would not be able to do so without expending a hundred million dinars, and the work would occupy two hundred years, even though the most able and experienced workmen were employed. Orders were given that all the temples should be burnt with naphtha and fire and levelled with the ground. The city was given up to plunder for twenty days. Among the spoils are said to have been five great idols of pure gold with eyes of rubies and adornments of other precious stones, together with a vast number of smaller silver images, which, when broken up, formed a load for more than a hundred camels. The total value of the spoils has been estimated at three millions of rupees; while the number of Hindus carried away into captivity exceeded 5,000.... To go back to Aurangzeb, over two centuries after the desecration, Growse felt that: of all the sacred places in India, none enjoys a greater popularity than the capital of Bra}, the holy city of Mathura. For nine months in the year, festival follows upon festival in rapid succession and the ghats and temples are daily thronged with new troops of way-worn pilgrims. So great is the sanctity of the spot that its panegyrists do not hesitate to declare that a single day spent at Mathura is more meritorious than a lifetime passed at Benares. All this celebrity is due to the fact of it being the birthplace of the demi-god Krishna. In his chapter entitled The Bra} Mandai, the Ban Yatra and the Holi as Growse puts it: Not only the city of Mathura, but with it, the whole of the western half of the district has a special interest of its own as the birthplace and abiding home of Vaishnava Hinduism. It is about 42 miles in length with an average breadth of 30 miles and is intersected throughout by the river Jamuna. In the neighbourhood is Gokul and Brindaban, where the divine brothers Krishna and Balaram grazed their herds. He continues: Almost every spot is traditionally connected with some event in the life of Krishna or of his mythical mistress Radha."

"Neither from the intrinsic evidence of indigenous literature, nor from the facts of recorded history, is it permissible to infer the simultaneous existence in the country of an alien-speaking race at any period"

"The four temples, commenced in honour of this event,, still remain, though in a ruinous and hitherto sadly neglected condition. They hear the titles of GoLind Deva, Gopi-nath, Jngal-Hishor and Madan Mohan. The first named is not only the finest of this particular series, hut is the most impressive religions edifice that Hindu art has ever produced, at least in Upper India."

""The existence of such a race is simply assumed by those who find it convenient to represent as non-aryan any formation which their acquaintance with unwritten Aryan speech in its growth and decay is too superficial to enable them at once to identify" (320). He further complained that "a derivation from Sanskrit by the application of well-established but less popularly known phonetic and grammatical laws, is stigmatized as pedantic" (320)."

""So many names that at a hasty glance appear utterly unmeaning can be traced back to original Sanskrit forms as to raise a presumption that the remainder, though more effectively disguised, will ultimately be found capable of similar treatment: a strong argument being thus afforded against those scholars who hold that the modern vernacular is impregnated with a very large non-Aryan element" (Growse 1883, 353)."

"'The question of an adequate standpoint [i.e., epistemology] for the evaluation and comparison of different cultural traditions has been decided by the course of history itself, and it has been decided in favor of Europe. European thought has to provide the context and categories for the exploration of all traditions of thought.'"

"During Gobineau's lifetime, the old theory of the Asian origin of the European languages and traditions, and of cultural movements from the East to the West, increasingly gave way to speculations on primeval movements from the West to the East, and on Aryan migrations from Europe, specifically Northern Europe, or even the North Pole, to India. According to these speculations, the European or Northern invaders gave their superior culture to the Indians and then lost their superiority through mixing with the local inhabitants and perished in a climate for which they were not suited. In 1903, E. de Michelis summarized this view by stating that Asia, and India in particular, was not the 'cradle', but the 'grave of the Aryans'."

"The caste system and the Aryan invasion assume a paradigmatic place in Gobineau's conservative and pessimistic historiography and racial ideology."

"The Ekalingamahdatmya is clearly sufficiently preoccupied with the Muslim invasions of North India to raise directly the issue of how and why the Muslims could have overrun the land. Indeed as we have just seen it asks forthright how the images of the Hindu Gods, which it regards as the Gods themselves, could have been broken and battered by the unbelievers. The central stories of the text, the stories designed to explain the origins of the holy site and its images, I believe should be understood in this broader context of the text. Doing so reveals the consummate artistry that is at work in the reshaping of the underlying puranic stories to fit its special circumstances: the curse of Parvati, making the hard-hearted Gods into stones, is aptly suited to a period in history when building of more precious materials was a clear invitation to disaster. The Ekalingamabatmya may use the understatement of story telling, but it is nonetheless a valuable testimony to fears and attitudes in this perilous period of Indian religious history."

"It was a commonplace in medieval accounts of kings that in fact the Muslims are incarnations of the demons, while the Hindu king who wages war against them is an incarnation of one of the Hindu Gods, whose function it is to descend to earth in human form and extirpate the demons, thus winning one more round in the on-going battle between the Gods and the demons (§). The comparison, then, that the Muslims do no more against the divine images than the demons have always done against the Gods themselves, suggests this deeper identification."

"When we compare the doctrines, aims, orgamzation of this (Pythagorean) brotherhood with Buddhistic monarchism, we are almost tempted to regards Pythagoras as the pupil of the Brahmins ... Dualism, Pessimism, metempsychosis, celibacy, a common life according to the rigorous rules, frequent self- examination, meditation, devotion, prohibitions against bloody sacrifices, kindliness towards all men, truthfulness, fidelity, justice, and all these elements are common to both."

"We pass at once into the magnificent edifice which bears the name of Panini as its architect and which Justly commands the wonder and admiration of everyone who enters, and which, by the very fact of its sufficing for all the phenomenon which language presents, bespeaks at once the marvelous ingenUity of its inventor and his profound penetration of the entire material of the language."

""The Sanscrit is the language which has retained the most primeval form and has adhered the most tenaciously to that parent ground. . . . [It] has preserved a great number of roots which have been lost in the other languages (Weber 1857, 6)"

"Since identifying experimentality as the whole criterion of self identity, it goes without saying that where it is absent self-identity too must necessarily be non-existant"

"there would be no distinction between truth and falsity in experience. There would be nothing to distinguish illusions from valid experiences. All experience would be suspect."

"A significant section of early Englishmen in India also found in Indian culture “a deep and appealing wisdom.” John Z. Holwell (1711-1798), in his Interesting Historical Events, relative to the Provinces of Bengal and the Empire of Indostan (1767), declared that “the world does not now contain annals of more indisputable antiquity than those delivered down by the ancient Brahmins.” He avowed that the people “from the earliest times have been an ornament to the creation if so much can with propriety be said of any known people upon earth.”"

"Holwell wrote in his preliminary discourse to the Religious Tenets of the Gentoos, "Having studiously perused all that has been written of the empire of Indostan, both as to its ancient as well as more modern state; as also the various accounts transmitted to us, by authors in almost all ages.... I venture to pronounce them all very defective, fallacious and unsatisfactory to an inquisitive searcher after truth; and only tending to convey a very imperfect and injurious resemblance of a people, who from the earliest times have been an ornament to the creation if so much can with propriety be said of any known people upon earth.""

"A mere description of the exterior manners and religion of a people, will no more give us a true idea of them than a geographical description of a country can convey a just conception of their laws and government. The traveller must sink deeper in his researches.... His telling us such and such a people, in the East or West Indies, worship this stork, or that stone, or monstrous idol; only serves to reduce in our esteem our fellow creatures to the most abject and despicable point of light. Whereas, was he skilled in the language of the people he describes, sufficiently to trace the etymology of their words and phrases, and capable of diving into the mysteries of their theology; he would probably be able to evince to us, that such seemingly preposterous worship, had the most sublime rational source and foundation.""

"[Dubois opined that Bible translations will] ‘expose the Christian religion and its followers to the ridicule of the public’."

"I have never seen anything in the history of the Egyptians and Jews," writes Abbe Dubois, forty years a resident of India, "that would induce me to believe that either of these nations, or any other on the face of the earth, have been established earlier than the Hindus, and particularly the Brahmans; so I cannot be induced to believe that the latter have drawn their rites from foreign nations. On the contrary, I infer that they have drawn them from an original source of their own. Whoever knows anything of the spirit and character of the Brahmans, their stateliness, their pride, and extreme vanity, their distance, and sovereign contempt for everything that is foreign, and of which they cannot boast to have been the inventors, will agree with me that such a people cannot have consented to draw their customs and rules of conduct from an alien country."

"But there is this vast difference between the ancient philosophers and the modern sages of India, that the former were too few in number to influence the public mind, and had not sufficient support, to combat successfully the errors into which the multitude had fallen ; whereas the Brahmans, from their numbers and the high consideration in which they are held, if they seriously desired it, and if their interest and passions. did not run the other way, might throw down by a single effort, the whole edifice of idolatry in India, and substitute without difficulty, in its room, the knowledge and worship of the true God; of whom they themselve still preserves the loftiest conceptions."

"In 1823, Dubois published a book titled—‘Letters on the State of Christianity in India’, which contained a short phrase—‘In which the conversion of the Hindoos is considered as impracticable’."

"The mythology, as well as the cosmogony of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, were borrowed from the doctrines of the Brahmins."

"With such simple tools the patient Hindu, thanks to his industry, can produce specimens of work which are often not to be distinguished from those imported at great expense from foreign countries."

"It must be admitted that the laws of etiquette and social politeness are much more clearly laid down, and much better observed by all classes of Hindus, even by the lowest, than they are by people of corresponding social position in Europe."

"And there is no stronghold of evil so impregnable as Brahmins."

". . . Euro-American Selves and Indian Others have not simply interacted as entities that remain fundamentally the same. They have dialectically constituted one another. Once one realizes the truth of this, he or she will begin to see that India has played a part in the making of nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe (and America) much greater than the "we" of scholarship, journalism, and officialdom would normally wish to allow. The subcontinent was not simply a source of colonial riches or a stage-setting in which Western hunters could stalk tigers, the sons of British merchants and aristocrats could make a financial killing, or the spiritualist find his or her innermost soul (or its Buddhist absence). More than that, India was (and to some extent still is) the object of thoughts and acts with which this "we" has constituted itself."

"Independence governments implemented secularism mostly by refusing to recognize the religious pasts of Indian nationalism, whether Hindu or Muslim, and at the same time (inconsistently) by retaining Muslim 'personal law' ."

"Throughout this book I have argued· that. the problem with orientalism is not just one of bias or o( bad motives and hence, confined to itself. The problem lies in my view, with the way in which the human sciences have displaced human agency on to essences in the first place. Taking up some leads of Collingwood, I have tried to show how an alternative approach that focuses on human agency might be constructed, and how it might be used, as a vantage­ point from which both to criticize previous scholarship and to reconstruct our knowledges of the human world. (264)"

"By the time that the Turko-Islamic conquerors arrived in North India, in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, Buddhism was no longer a religion of a floating population of itinerant monks but had become institutionalized in monasteries, which, supported by royal endowments of land as well as by donations from the mercantile communities, tended to become large academically oriented centres with permanent residents, vulnerable to outside attack, but still aloof from the rural masses (which only adopted random cultic elements from the religion). What happened, then, during the Islamic conquest, is that the academic (and soteriological / philosophical) tradition of Buddhism was uprooted in India itself, but replaced, outside the orbit of Muslim rule, by a variety of regional forms of Buddhism."

"The first conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing analysis is that ecology was a major factor determining the progress and character of the Islamic conquest of al-Hind. For one thing, the subcontinent was unsuitable for Mongol-style nomadism on account of the absence of sufficient good pasture land. With the Mongols failing to penetrate beyond its western periphery, the Indian subcontinent cannot really be said to have experienced a 'nomadic conquest' at all. In this respect the thirteenth-century situation in the north was unlike the Iranian plateau, where Mongol conquest was followed by extensive nomadization and destruction of agriculture."