India

Delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1882, these seven lectures were addressed chiefly to young Englishmen preparing for the Indian Civil Service. Max Müller, a pioneering Sanskrit scholar, uses them to argue that India rewards patient study rather than the casual contempt many colonial administrators carried with them. He surveys the antiquity of the Vedas, the character of Hindu religious thought, and the human interest of Sanskrit literature, meeting common objections along the way and closing with lessons drawn from the Veda and the Vedanta. The tone throughout is that of an enthusiast urging students to read the scriptures for themselves. As a record of nineteenth-century European engagement with Indian religion and philosophy, it marks an early moment when the West began to take Hindu thought seriously.