Heritage of India - A Selection of the Author’s Lectures on India and Previously Published in “What can India Teach us”

The true history of the world must always be the history of the few; and as we measure the Himalaya by the height of Mount Everest we must take the true measure of India from the poets of the Veda the sages of the Upanishads the founders of the Vedanta and Sankhya philosophies and the authors of the oldest law-books and not from the millions who are born and die in their villages and who hav [...] The Bhagavadgita the plays of Kalidasa such as Sakuntala oar UrvasI a few episodes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana such as those of Nala and the Yagnadattabadha the fables of the Hitopadesa and the sentences of Bhartrihari are no doubt extremely curious; and as at the time when they first became known in Europe they were represented to be of extreme antiquity and the work of a people [...] We mean by primitive the earliest state of man of which from the nature of the case we can hope to gain any knowledge; and here next to the archives hidden away in the secret drawers of language in the treasury of words common to all the Aryan tribes and in the radical elements of which each word is compounded there is no literary relic more full of lessons to the true anthrpologist to t [...] We mean by primitive the earliest state of man of which from the nature of the case we can hope to gain any knowledge; and here next to the archives hidden away in the secret drawers of language in the treasury of words common to all the Aryan tribes and in the radical elements of which each word is compounded there is no literary relic more full of lessons to the true anthrpologist to t [...] But the first cosmological separation of the two always points to the want of light and the impossibility of distinction during the night and the gradual lifting up of the blue sky through the rising of the sun.2' In the Homeric hymns22 the Earth is addressed as 'Mother of gods the wife of the starry Heaven ;' and the Heaven or Ether is often called the father.