Oriental Renaissance

A few weeks ago, in a post, someone asked the question: "what has India contributed to the West in intellectual terms?". What are the ideas from India that have become part of the mainstream Western intellectual tradition?

This question intrigued me and I went looking. Didn't have to look too far before I found Raymond Schwab's "The Oriental Renaissance". First published in French in 1950 and translated into English in 1984, by Patterson-Black and Reinking with an excellent foreword by Edward Said, the book is subtitled "Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880" (Columbia University Press). His basic thesis is that the exploration and conquests in the Middle East and India during the establishment of imperialism inspired a vanguard of scholars like Anqueteil (translated Persian and Sanskrit to French), Jones (translated Sanskrit to English), Prinsep and others who brought Indian philosophy and religious concepts to the West. The conquest of Bengal in 1773 and the establishment of the East India company in what is now known as Kolkata led to a couple of decades of the export of ideas. It was only by about 1820 that English ideology changed from a reverence of Indian ideas and philosophies to a revulsion for anything native.

But, as Schwab points out, the "damage" was done. He details the influence that ideas from India had on the intellectuals of the period in France, Germany and England including Lamartine, Hugo, Wordsworth, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Nietzche and Wagner. It is truly eye-opening to read his quote from Wordsworth:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused...
A motion anda spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things
("Tintern Abbey")

This needs further attention, especially the reason for the change of the British viewpoint early in the nineteenth century.