10 h 8 minAudiobook13 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What can a country teach those who arrive expecting only to govern it?
In India: What Can It Teach Us?, F. Max Müller asks future Indian Civil Service officials to become students of the people they will govern. His lectures explore Sanskrit, sacred texts and philosophy. He argues that understanding India matters not only for scholarship, but for treating its people with honesty and respect.
Müller follows the kinship of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, turns to the hymns of the Rig-Veda, and considers questions about the self in the Upanishads. He also challenges English prejudice about Indian truthfulness. Throughout, you encounter both the confidence and the blind spots of a Victorian scholar making his case.
What you’ll discover
- Languages with shared roots Follow Müller's account of how Sanskrit opens paths into the shared history of languages.
- Hymns carried by memory Explore the Rig-Veda through Müller's discussion of hymns handed down before they were written.
- Names and religious ideas Consider his theory that naming the sun, dawn and storm helps shape early religion.
- Questions beneath appearances Meet the Upanishads' questions about the self and what lies behind the visible world.
- Respect against inherited prejudice See Müller confront a damaging stereotype and ask future officials to judge people fairly.
Who will love it
For readers who love the history of ideas, religion, language or the British Empire, and who enjoy hearing a Victorian scholar make his case in his own terms.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- India belongs at the centre of history
- Sanskrit opened a new science of language
- Language proves kinship but not race
- The Vedas hold the earliest Aryan thought
- Religion grows from naming the unseen
- Indians deserve fair judgment on truthfulness
- Indian philosophy asks the deepest questions
- Buddhism and the Indian view of time
- What India can teach and how views changed
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India: What Can It Teach Us?
by F. Max Müller · 1883
Müller brings Sanskrit, the Vedas and Indian philosophy before future officials, urging knowledge before rule.
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In short
India: What Can It Teach Us? is a course of lectures by Friedrich Max Müller, a German-born scholar who spent most of his working life at Oxford. He gave them at Cambridge in 1882 for young men preparing to enter the Indian Civil Service, and the book followed in 1883.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
India belongs at the centre of history
Müller opens by telling his listeners that most of them will soon sail for India, and that they should go as students as well as rulers. He says the common view of India as a distant land of curiosities is mistaken. In his eyes it is a country where the human mind developed some of its choicest gifts and thought hard about the greatest problems of life.
He sets out to show this with evidence rather than praise. India, he says, preserved in its Sanskrit books a record of thought that reaches back further than any other literature of the Aryan family. A Greek or a Roman can be studied in his own later writings. But the earliest stage of the mind of our own linguistic family can be seen best in India.
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What is India: What Can It Teach Us about?
It is a series of lectures by Max Müller on what the study of India offers. He covers Sanskrit, the Vedas, the growth of religion, Indian philosophy, Buddhism and the character of the Indian people.
Who was India: What Can It Teach Us written for?
Müller gave the lectures at Cambridge in 1882 to candidates for the Indian Civil Service. He wanted future British officials to understand and respect the language, beliefs and history of the people they would govern.
What did Max Müller mean by Aryan?
He used Aryan for a family of languages and the people who first spoke their parent tongue. He insisted it described language, not blood or race, and warned against speaking of an Aryan race.
The author
F. Max Müller
1823–1900 · German-born British philologist
Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) was a German-born philologist who lived and worked in Oxford, England. He studied Sanskrit and comparative religion. He published Lectures on the Science of Language in 1861 and 1864, and India: What Can It Teach Us? in 1883. He edited the Sacred Books of the East series.
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