Friedrich Max Müller

“ But because I feel bound to protest against the indiscriminate abuse that has been heaped on the people of India from the Himalâya to Ceylon, do not suppose that it is my wish or intention to draw an ideal picture of India, leaving out all the dark shades, and giving you nothing but 'sweetness and light.' Having never been in India myself, I can only claim for myself the right and duty of every historian, namely, the right of collecting as much information as possible, and the duty to sift it according to the recognised rules of historical criticism. ”

“ Now what Colonel Sleeman continually insists on is that no one knows the Indians who does not know them in their village-communities—what we should now call their communes. It is that village-life which in India has given its peculiar impress to the Indian character, more so than in any other country we know. When in Indian history we hear so much of kings and emperors, of rajahs and maharajahs, we are apt to think of India as an Eastern monarchy, ruled by a central power, and without any trace of that self-government which forms the pride of England. ”

“ These may seem distant countries and forgotten people, and many might feel inclined to say, 'Let the dead bury their dead; what are those mummies to us?' Still, such is the marvellous continuity of history, that I could easily show you many things which we, even we who are here assembled, owe to Babylon, to Nineveh, to Egypt, Phoenicia, and Persia.
Every one who carries a watch, owes to the Babylonians the division of the hour into sixty minutes. It may be a very bad division, yet such as it is, it has come to us from the Greeks and Romans, and it came to them from Babylon. ”

“ If we regard the Indo-Europeans as neighbors of the Upper Asiatics, and the Semitic and Hamitic peoples next to them, we can understand how in consequence of a pressure of the Upper Asiatics on the Indo-Europeans these must again impinge upon the Semitic and Hamitic race. Whereas the latter were pushed toward Africa, where they imparted their migratory motion to the autochthonous races, as described above, the Semitic pressed into the seats occupied before by the Hamites, and allowed the Indo-Europeans room to expand unhindered east and west. ”

“ I shall not attempt to prove that Sanskrit literature is as good as Greek literature. Why should we always compare? A study of Greek literature has its own purpose, and a study of Sanskrit literature has its own purpose; but what I feel convinced of, and hope to convince you of, is that Sanskrit literature, if studied only in a right spirit, is full of human interests, full of lessons which even Greek could never teach us, a subject worthy to occupy the leisure, and more than the leisure, of every Indian Civil servant ”

“ Hence Europe may have been inhabited by only two races before the entrance of the Indo-Europeans, which latter is coincident with the appearance of the Etruscans and Celts, viz., by the Basques and Ligurians—a people of unknown ethnological character in the south, and the Upper Asiatic stems in the north. This settlement of the Upper Asiatic race in Europe, long before the immigration of the Indo-Europeans, presumes a migration of the former in the earliest dawn of antiquity.
In our opinion, it was this race which first gave the migratory impulse to the men inhabiting the Old World. ”

“ You will find yourselves everywhere in India between an immense past and an immense future, with opportunities such as the old world could but seldom, if ever, offer you. Take any of the burning questions of the day—popular education, higher education, parliamentary representation, codification of laws, finance, emigration, poor-law, and whether you have anything to teach and to try, or anything to observe and to learn, India will supply you with a laboratory such as exists nowhere else. ”

“ In the first place, I would observe that the presence of only thirty-four ribs in an equine race, whether ancient or modern, would not be by any means abnormal, or contrary to the laws of Nature; for it is fully agreed now that the number of these bones is far from being constant in our present horses. Indeed, Chauveau remarks as follows on the number of ribs in the horse: ‘We reckon for each lateral half of the thorax eighteen ribs. Not unfrequently we find nineteen, with an equal number of dorsal vertebræ in well-formed horses; but, then, most usually there are only five lumbar vertebræ.’ ”

“ India is not, as you may imagine, a distant, strange, or, at the very utmost, a curious country. India for the future belongs to Europe, it has its place in the Indo-European world, it has its place in our own history, and in what is the very life of history, the history of the human mind. ”

“ Among the Indian races, of whom only a few can be united linguistically in groups—as in respect to language the same heterogeneity prevails in America as among the negroes of Africa—still further migrations have been undertaken. These can easily be traced to their objective points. In North America such a point is the fruitful table-land of Mexico, toward which that stem, which in the north had attained among its kindred to a higher culture and greater strength, directed its victorious march. ”

“ And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that 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, not for this life only, but a transfigured and eternal life—again I should point to India. ”

“ Why should a study of Greek and 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, and command general respect, while a study of Sanskrit, and of the ancient poetry, the philosophy, the laws, and the art of India is looked upon, in the best case, as curious, but is considered by most people as useless, tedious, if not absurd. ”

“ If a young man who goes to India as a Civil servant or as a military officer, goes there fully convinced that the people whom he is to meet with are all liars, liars by nature or by national instinct, never restrained in their dealings by any regard for truth, never to be trusted on their word, need we wonder at the feelings of disgust with which he thinks of the Hindus, even before he has seen them ”

“ Whatever else we may have been, it is quite clear now that, many thousands of years ago, we were something that had not yet developed into an Englishman, or a Saxon, or a Greek, or a Hindu either, yet contained in itself the germs of all these characters. A strange being, you may say. Yes, but for all that a very real being, and an ancestor too of whom we must learn to be proud, far more than of any such modern ancestors, as Normans, Saxons, Celts, and all the rest. ”

“ There are many bright dreams to be dreamt about India, and many bright deeds to be done in India, if only you will do them. Though many great and glorious conquests have been made in the history and literature of the East, since the days when Sir William Jones landed at Calcutta, depend upon it, no young Alexander here need despair because there are no kingdoms left for him to conquer on the ancient shores of the Indus and the Ganges. ”

“ It gave me inexpressible pleasure to find myself in the midst of so noble an amphitheatre, almost encircled by the vast regions of Asia, which has ever been esteemed the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human genius, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in the laws, manners, customs, and languages, as well as in the features and complexions of men. ”

“ But do not let them cease to be marvels, like so many things which cease to be marvels because they happen every day. And do not think that there is nothing left for you to do. There are more marvels still to be discovered in language than have ever been revealed to us ; nay, there is no word, however common, if only you know how to take it to pieces, like a cunningly contrived work of art, fitted together thousands of years ago by the most cunning of artists, the human mind, that will not make you listen and marvel more than any chapter of the Arabian Nights. ”

“ Why do we want to know history? Why does history form a recognised part of our liberal education? Simply because all of us, and every one of us, ought to know how we have come to be what we are, so that each generation need not start again from the same point, and toil over the same ground, but, profiting by the experience of those who came before, may advance towards higher points and nobler aims. ”

“ I can hardly think of anything that you could safely predicate of all the inhabitants of India, and I confess to a little nervous tremor whenever I see a sentence beginning with 'The people of India,' or even with 'All the Brahmans,' or 'All the Buddhists.' What follows is almost invariably wrong. There is a greater difference between an Afghan, a Sikh, a Rajput, a Bengali, and a Dravidian than between an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, and a Russian yet all are classed as Hindus, and all are supposed to fall under the same sweeping condemnation. ”

“ All I wish to impress on you by way of introduction is that the results of the Science of Language, which, without the aid of Sanskrit, would never have been obtained, form an essential element of what we call a liberal, that is an historical education, an education which will enable a man to do what the French call s'orienter, that is, 'to find his East,' 'his true East,' and thus to determine his real place in the world; to know, in fact, the port whence man started, the course he has followed, and the port towards which he has to steer. ”

“ A scholar who studies Sanskrit in Germany is supposed to be initiated in the deep and dark mysteries of ancient wisdom, and a man who has travelled in India, even if he has only discovered Calcutta, or Bombay, or Madras, is listened to like another Marco Polo. In England a student of Sanskrit is generally considered a bore, and an old Indian Civil servant, if he begins to describe the marvels of Elephanta or the Towers of Silence, runs the risk of producing a count-out. ”

“ TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS.
In my first Lecture I endeavoured to remove the prejudice that everything in India is strange, and so different from the intellectual life which we are accustomed to in England that the twenty or twenty-five years which a Civil servant has to spend in the East seem often to him a kind of exile that he must bear as well as he can, but that severs him completely from all those higher pursuits by which life is made enjoyable at home. ”

“ In our time, when the study of history threatens to become almost an impossibility such is the mass of details which historians collect in archives and pour out before us in monographs it seems to me more than ever the duty of the true historian to find out the real proportion of things, to arrange his materials according to the strictest rules of artistic perspective, and to keep completely out of sight all that may be rightly ignored by us in our own passage across the historical stage of the world. ”

“ Are all these 253 millions of human beings to be set down as liars, because some hundreds, say even some thousands of Indians, when they are brought before an English court of law, on suspicion of having committed a theft or a murder, do not speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? ”

“ My chief sources of information with regard to the national character of the Indians in ancient times will be the works of Greek writers and the literature of the ancient Indians themselves. For later times we must depend on the statements of the various conquerors of India, who are not always the most lenient judges of those whom they may find it more difficult to rule than to conquer. ”

“ After they have passed their first examination for admission to the Indian Civil Service, and given proof that they have received the benefits of a liberal education, and acquired that general information in classics, history, and mathematics, which is provided at our Public Schools, and forms no doubt the best and surest foundation for all more special and professional studies in later life, they suddenly find themselves torn away from their old studies and their old friends, and compelled to take up new subjects which to many of them seem strange, outlandish, if not repulsive. ”