declarations by church bodies (like the Southern Baptist convention in
1999) that Hindus in the US needed to be “evangelized” perpetuate this
image of a less than civilized India. This is hardly a perspective that
engenders understanding or serious scholarship.
Romanticism
The apparent opposite of the arrogance of pejorative attitudes is that of
selective romanticism. The romantic view of India goes back to at least the
Greek period when Herodotus, Horace, and others rhapsodized about
India’s fantastic wealth and extreme forms of religion. Basing his comments
on reports from travelers and the presence of Buddhists and Jain ascetics
in certain cities of the Mediterranean region, the Greek historian Herodotus,
writing in the fifth century BCE, for example, wrote of enormous ants,
gigantic eels, fabulous gold and jewelry, as well as religious extremities.^4
This tendency toward romantic overstatement in both India and the West
is found in a whole range of writers, travelers, and scholars. In American
history, this attitude was expressed, for example, in Walt Whitman’s cele-
bration of India’s “primordial wisdom”: India was the “soothing cradle of
man,” “the past lit up again,” “the old, most populous, wealthiest of Earth’s
lands,” the home of “wisdom’s birth,” “reason’s early paradise,” and source
of “innocent intuitions.”^5
Romanticism has sometimes taken a dangerous turn as when it feeds into
certain forms of nationalism. In nineteenth-century Germany, for example,
many intellectuals discovering Indian thought through still imperfect
translations, saw in the texts affirmation of their own beliefs. Schopenhauer
wrote of the Upanis.adic collection that it was an “incomparable book” that:
stirs the spirit to the very depths of the soul. From every sentence deep,
original, and sublime thoughts arise and the whole is pervaded by a high
and holy and earnest spirit. Indian air surrounds us and original
thoughts of kindred spirits. And oh, how thoroughly is the mind here
washed clean of all early engrafted Jewish superstitions, and of all
philosophy that cringes before these superstitions. In the whole world
there is no study except that of the originals, so beneficial and so
elevating as that of the Oupnekhat. It has been the solace of my life; it will
be the solace of my death.^6In a similar vein, Nietzsche, in first reading a translation of the Laws
of Manu, saw in its presumed attitudes toward untouchables (can.d.a ̄las) a
verification of his own sense of the “superman” (Ubermensch) and the
inferiority of those not considered “A ̄ryan.”^7
4 On Wearing Good Lenses