A. B.'s Reviews > India: What Can It Teach Us

I wanted to read something firsthand from this great scholar -- the translator of both Kant and the Rig-Veda; and the editor of the Sacred Books of the East. And this book indeed delivered. It was also an interesting look at the context Mueller was writing in -- to correct racist misconceptions of India and its past; and bring forward the profundity of Indian thought.

The first lecture deals with the importance of studying Sanskrit and the ancient literature of India; which is held to be equally valuable to the traditional Classics syllabus of the West -- Greek and Latin literature.

The second lecture counters racist misunderstandings of India as a country of liars and cheats; rather optimistically countering the dominant narrative by the opposite narrative of the straightforwardness and truthfulness of Indians (both narratives are of course, equally simplistic). Contained herein is also the doctrine that the real India lies in the villages, not the colonial cities; which is what would so influence Gandhi.

The rest of the lectures deal with the human interest of Sanskrit literature, especially the Vedas which was Mueller's field of expertise. He holds the Vedas to be a profound repository of thought, one of the earliest developments of the religious temperament -- and thus holding the key to an early stage of the evolution of religion.

The fourth lecture counters the narrative that the Vedas are derivative -- holding the view that they are primarily autochthonous developments uninfluenced as a whole by other cultures. This should not be understood as a nationalistic narrative but as a statement of philological fact.

The fifth lecture concerns the religion of the Veda, the sixth lecture the deities of the Vedas, the seventh lecture delves into some of the funeral practices of the Hindus and the connection of the Vedas and Vedanta -- the system of philosophy that would become dominant among the educated classes of Indians. There is a lot of comparative philology about the roots of various Indo-Aryan gods and how they would show up in various cultures and languages with etymologically equivalent names. The seventh lecture decodes three kinds of religion in the Vedas -- the worship of the Devas (originally, the bright ones) from an anthropomorphising process of natural phenomena; ancestor worship in the Sraddhas; and the Atman-Brahman doctrine of the Upanishads. Mueller coins the term Kathenotheism or Henotheism to refer to the Vedic practice of worshipping a single God while not demoting others -- as opposed to both polytheism and monotheism.