Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

29

The Oriental Renaissance

At the very time the Portuguese were exploring the west coast of Africa, and then discovering Brazil and the Far East, the invention of printing was transforming the intellectual life of Europe. Though the growth of literacy represented considerable progress in a general sense, it also made it more difficult than ever for the Portuguese to keep to themselves the news of their momentous discoveries.

There seems little doubt that there were concerted attempts to keep the news secret. In the time of King John II (1481–1495), for example, the Portuguese Crown used oaths and all types of punishment, including death, to ‘dissuade’ people from leaking the news. In 1481, the Cortes petitioned the king to forbid foreigners – Genoese and Florentines especially – from settling in the kingdom because ‘they stole the royal secrets as to Africa and the islands’.¹ A little later, in 1504, King Manuel reaffirmed that complete secrecy be maintained in regard to south-eastern and north-eastern navigation – offenders would be put to death. ‘Thereafter, it would appear, all the charts, maps, and logs concerning the routes to Africa, India and Brazil were housed in the royal chartroom and placed under the custody of Jorgé de Vasconcelos.’² Several historians have argued that more than one official Portuguese chronicle of discovery was deliberately left uncompleted so as to preserve crucial information. Donald Lach, in his survey of Portugal’s control of information, says that a policy of suppressing news about African discovery and trade was almost certainly carried out by the Portuguese: ‘It is hard to believe that chance alone is sufficient to account for the fact that not a single work on the new discoveries in Asia is known to have been published in Portugal between 1500 and mid-century.’³

Such an embargo could not last. Portuguese cartographers peddled their services and their information on the overseas world, selling their inside knowledge to the highest bidders, as did navigators and merchants who had been on such voyages. Some people appear to have felt guilty about this and, very often, military details were omitted. But, gradually, as the sixteenth century lengthened, the discoveries became common currency. Tantalising hints were dropped in the general pronouncements of the Portuguese kings, who sent official communications to their fellow monarchs around Europe, and to the papacy. Another way information circulated was via the many Italian merchants in Lisbon, some of whom at least were Venetian spies. In this way, the route to India, although classified as a state secret, was the subject of several early accounts written by foreigners from inside Portugal. A general – if hazy – picture could be reconstructed by those interested in doing so.⁴ The Portuguese policy of secrecy, says Lach, was largely successful for about fifty years, but broke down around mid-century, when it became clear that Portugal could not maintain a monopoly on the spice trade. After about 1550 there was a great vogue for travel literature and it was also about now that the Jesuits began publishing their famous ‘letterbooks’. These provided the most comprehensive description of the Far East for many years.⁵

A series of papal bulls issued in the sixteenth century enabled the Portuguese Crown to create something that came to be called the padroado (not unlike the Spanish patronato). The Crown was granted the use of certain ecclesiastical revenues in Portugal for exploration and the right to propose to the papacy a number of candidates for the sees and ecclesiastical benefices of Africa and the Indies.⁶ In this way, in the Indies, Goa became established as the headquarters of Jesuit activity and, in 1542, four months after his arrival there, Francis Xavier addressed a letter to the father of his order in Rome in which he referred to Goa as already an ‘entirely Christian city’.⁷ (Its original name was Ticuari, which meant ‘Thirty Villages’.) With Xavier’s arrival in India, the Jesuits became the acknowledged leaders of the Christian missionary effort within the padroado.

Each of the early explorations had included missionaries or ecclesiastics of one kind or another, and many of them had written accounts of their experiences. But it was not until the Jesuits became active in overseas missions that a comprehensive system for correspondence was established and the dissemination of information became virtually routine. Ignatius Loyola explicitly ordered members of his order to send letters to him in Rome. Important matters were to be sent in a formal letter, while less important or more private concerns were included on a separate sheet known as hijuela. All such correspondence was to be written out in triplicate and sent to Rome by three different routes.⁸ ‘These reports were to be prepared with great thought and care, for they were to be used for the edification and guidance of the Society and for the inspiration of public interest in its far-flung enterprises.’⁹ An office was established in Rome that was responsible for communicating with the missionaries and for receiving the incoming letters, editing and translating them and then circulating them throughout Europe. In this way information on the peoples and cultures and ideas of India were first spread. With Goa being used as the administrative centre, all information, wherever it was gathered – China or Japan, say – became known as ‘Indian letters’. About this time, a Jesuit college was established at Coimbra in Portugal and this too became a repository and clearing house for Jesuit letters sent to Europe, and then passed on to Rome.¹⁰ There were five types of letter – the hijuelas already mentioned, hortatory letters, designed to stimulate interest in the East among the brothers back home, accounts for public distribution, which were more restrained in tone, personal accounts, and ‘allied documents’, in effect appendices, such as histories of specific tribes, or chronicles about specific matters or issues about which the missionaries thought that people back home would require further detailed knowledge.¹¹ Eventually, as the letters became stabilised, the Jesuits in Rome and Coimbra stopped translating them into all the different languages of Europe and instead published them in Latin, as Epistolae indicae.¹²

The writings of the Jesuits, unlike the secular authors, of whom there were several, were not concerned with trade. They do refer to military action, but in general they cover cultural matters, the ideas and practices, the institutions and customs of far-off peoples. For example, in so far as Malabar was concerned (the Malabar Coast was the western coast of India, below what is now Bombay or Mumbai), the Jesuits reported the death of a ruler, showing how the mourners gathered in a field, for the cremation, how they shaved their bodies completely, ‘saving only their eyelashes and eyebrows’ and, after cleaning their teeth, refrained from eating betel, meat or fish for thirteen days.¹³ Their accounts likewise show how the administration of justice varied according to the caste of the offender, and how trial by ordeal was not uncommon, some offenders being required to plunge the first two fingers of their right hand into boiling oil. ‘Should his fingers be burnt, the accused is tortured to force a confession of what he has done with the stolen goods. Whether he confesses or not, he is still executed. Should the accused’s fingers not be burnt, he is released and the accuser is either executed, fined or banished.’¹⁴ Bengalis were described as ‘sleek, handsome black men, more sharpwitted than the men of any other known race’.¹⁵ But they were also denounced for being ‘overly wary and treacherous’ and the reports noted that elsewhere in India it was an insult to call someone a Bengali. The accounts further report that the government of Bengal had been taken over by Muslims about three hundred years before the arrival of the Portuguese – substantially correct. And it was from Portuguese Jesuits that Europe first learned in some detail about the advent of the Mughals in India, and the struggle for supremacy between them and the Afghans.¹⁶

Most Jesuits realised that the key to understanding India lay in the mastery of native languages and in the exploration of the local literatures.¹⁷ In trying to root out Hinduism, certain sacred books were seized and sometimes translated and the translations sent to Europe. These included eighteen books of the Mahabharata. But in general the Jesuits learned little systematically about Hinduism, dismissing many of the legends as ‘fables’.¹⁸ The names of the Hindu gods Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma reached Europe, and the fact that they constituted the Tri-murti, a form of Trinity, but here too the Jesuits treated such beliefs as ‘hopeless superstitions’. The letters refer often to the pagodas of the Hindus, ‘very large houses, all of stone or marble’, which ‘contain images of bulls, cows, elephants, monkeys, and men’.¹⁹ Some of the Jesuits, plainly impressed by the size of these monuments, believed they had been built by Alexander the Great, or the Romans. The Jesuits recognised that the Hindus had three types of priest – Brahmans, Yogis and Gurus. They observed and described the threads which the former wore over their shoulders from the age of seven on, each thread honouring a different god, and how the three threads were knotted together in places ‘and thus they claim to have a Trinity like ours’. But in general the Jesuits had no respect for these ranks and were horrified that Hindu priests were able to marry.²⁰ They were fascinated by caste and by general marital practices, one observer noting that there were ‘many people married to cousins, sisters and sisters-in-law’. This observer went so far as to use the Indian practices as an argument with the pope, to encourage him to allow marriage in Europe between the third and fourth degrees of consanguinity. But the Jesuits never acquired either a respect or a sympathy for native scholarship or Indian high culture. This is one reason why the Oriental renaissance, when it occurred, had the impact it did.

China, although furthest removed from Europe, nevertheless showed some curious parallels in the realm of ideas. At the end of the sixteenth century, for example, she experienced her own ‘renaissance’, an upsurge in developments in the theatre, in the novel, and in philosophy. Many intellectuals belonged to a political and literary club, the ‘Society of Renewal’ (fushe). It was now, for example, that the influence of Zhan Buddhism began to grow and the concept of liang zhi, or ‘innate moral knowledge’. This, in a way, was a Chinese form of Platonism, which held that there is a principle of good inherent in the mind before any contamination by egoistic thoughts and desires ‘and which one must try to discover in oneself’. This school of ‘innate knowledge’ was highly controversial because its advocates denounced Confucius, arguing that he prevented thought, which was inherent in everyone.²¹ Another aspect of the Chinese renaissance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the growth of schools and libraries as China reacted to the discovery in the West of printing by movable type.²²

Other innovations at this time included the Lu xue jing yi (Essence of Music), by Zhu Zaiyu (1536–1611), who was the first person in the world to define the equally tempered scale.²³ Li Shizhen (1518–1598) produced Ben tsao gang mi, which described a thousand plants and a thousand animals with medicinal uses. He also mentioned, for the first time, a method of smallpox injection, much the same method as that which, in the West, later gave rise to the science of immunology. A primitive form of sociology was also introduced in China, by Wang Fuzhi. He conceived of societies as evolving by natural forces, and this was especially influential in the Chinese context because it killed off any hope – entertained by some – that there would be a return to a golden age, the time of the Han empire, when the old ways would be resurrected. Wang actually saw the distant past as ‘bestial’,²⁴ and insisted there was no going back, a particularly important (and unpopular) stance in China since it was branded as anti-Confucian.

As well as having its own renaissance of sorts, Ming China also had its own Inquisition. This grew out of the resumption of the official civil service competitions – the written examination – from 1646 onwards.²⁵ It happened because, in connection with these examinations, a vast number of private academies proliferated. And, since the dynasty kept a strict control over the curriculum for the examinations, they were able to control much of the thought of the people, and to curtail criticism. In the early eighteenth century this eventually led to more direct control and a device which, like its counterpart in the West, included an index of prohibited books: 10,231 titles were on the list at one point and more than 2,300 were actually destroyed. At the same time, action was taken against dissident authors – forced labour, exile, property confiscated, even execution in some cases.²⁶

As in England and France, the Chinese developed a taste in the early eighteenth century for encyclopaedias. One, printed in movable copper type, had no fewer than 10,000 chapters. In 1716 the famous dictionary, the Gang hsi zi dian, appeared – this was to serve as the basis for Western sinologists down to the twentieth century. Altogether, says Jacques Gernet, there was a canon of more than fifty ‘big publications’ in the eighteenth century, codifying Chinese learning and acting as a lively parallel to the enlightenment projects of Western Europe. The traffic in ideas wasn’t all one way of course, and the main influence of the Jesuits in China was in astronomy, cartography and mathematics. In 1702 the scholar Gangshi asked the Jesuit father Antoine Thomas to fix the length of the li as a function of the terrestrial meridian. This innovation was made after the mile but before the kilometre was settled in Europe in the same way.²⁷

As the eighteenth century wore on, China became the subject of great fascination for Europeans – at times it amounted almost to a mania. ‘Soon everyone was proclaiming the wisdom of Confucius, or extolling the virtues of a Chinese education, or painting in what they took to be the Chinese style, or building Chinese pagodas in gardens landscaped in the Chinese manner . . .’²⁸ In 1670 the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher had reported that China ‘is ruled by Doctors, à la mode of Plato’, while a second, Father Le Comte, in his book Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état de Chine, argued that China had practised the Christian virtues for more than two thousand years.²⁹ For his pains, he was condemned by the scholastics of the University of Paris, who said he had made Christianity ‘superfluous’. Leibniz thought that in most matters of ethics and politics China was ahead of Europe and went so far as to suggest that Chinese be taught as a universal language. Voltaire agreed.

Chinese forms of beauty swept through Europe, and ‘all royalty joined in’. There was a Chinese pavilion at Sans Souci, a porcelain palace at Dresden, a Chinese park in Weimar and a whole Chinese village, named Canton, was built at Drottningholm, the royal summer residence of the Swedish monarch. There was another Chinese village outside Cassel and pagodas at Kew and Nymphenburg. The duke of Cumberland kept a Chinese yacht on the Thames, complete with a dragon, and Watteau and Boucher painted in the Chinese style. Everyone drank tea from Chinese porcelain cups.³⁰

The Islamic world of course came closer to home for European travellers than the Far Eastern civilisations. The first thing to say about Islam is that the idea itself had proved extremely successful. By the eighteenth century, the Muslim faith stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the South China Sea and from the Ural river almost to the mouth of the Zambezi. It was the dominant faith in lands which totalled at least three times the area occupied by Christianity.

Isfahan, in Persia, had emerged as a worthy successor to Baghdad and Toledo, as the focus of an Islamic renaissance in art, letters and philosophy. At that stage Persian was the lingua franca of the Islamic world, rather than Arabic. Isfahan was the capital of the Safavi empire, where there flourished a school of painters of miniatures, led by Bihzard, of carpet weavers, and of highly individualised writers of memoirs. The brilliance of Isfahan also attracted many scholars, in particular falsafahs, even though philosophy was still a dubious enterprise in the eyes of the orthodox. There was a renewed interest in Aristotle, Plato and ‘pagan’ values. Among the philosophers was Mir Damad (d. 1631), who held that the world consisted entirely of light, and Suhravardi, a kind of Platonist who believed there was a ‘realm of images’ elsewhere. This ‘Persianate flowering’ also produced three great law-givers, new forms of literary biography, the idea of connoisseurship for both painting and calligraphy, and a new school of translation.³¹ The flowering has been compared with the Italian Renaissance in the sense that it was a ‘lyrical’ movement rather than a ‘positivist’ one.³²

Part of this ‘lyrical’, or Platonic, side to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Islam were Abulfazl’s innovations in Sufism. It is not strictly correct to call Sufism ‘Platonic’ or ‘Neoplatonic’, nor, according to some scholars, is it right to call it ‘mystical’. Nevertheless, this is how many people conceive of Sufism, as a very private form of Islam, an ascetic search for the path to God, deep inside oneself, and of which, it is held, we all have an inkling in our inherent nature (‘innate knowledge’, as the Chinese put it). Sufis wear a woollen habit (sufi means ‘wool’) and sometimes form themselves into tariqahs, schools with their own distinctive approach to the path to God. Sometimes this involves venerating saints, as Sufis who have achieved closeness to God and are now in Paradise. Besides Platonism, there are overlaps here with Buddhism.

Abulfazl (1551–1602) wasn’t based at Isfahan, but at Akbar’s court in India and his book was called Akbar-Namah, the Book of Akbar.³³ The basic idea of Sufism, in Abulfazl’s interpretation of it, as related to the organisation of civilisation, is the encouragement of a ‘gentling’ of relations between men and women – conciliation in all things. This is very different from many people’s ideas of Islam (especially now, after 9/11) and, by the late eighteenth century, when a sizeable proportion of Muslims were crying out for reform of the faith, the corruption that had undoubtedly seeped into Sufism (which, again, recalls the corruption that infiltrated Buddhism in China in the Middle Ages) caused it to provoke a violent reaction. Muhammad bin Abd-al-Wahhab (d. 1791) took particular exception to Sufism, especially its veneration of the saints, which he felt smacked of idolatry and was, in effect, an abandonment of Muhammad. In orthodox law this was a capital offence and Wahhabi and his followers, who by then included Ibn Saud, a local ruler in Saudi Arabia, worked hard to establish a state based on their uncompromising principles. Then, to the horror of the Muslim world, they set about destroying many of the sacred sites, not just of Sufism but of mainstream Islam itself, because they too were tainted by idolatry. To cap it all, the Wahhabis massacred many of the pilgrims visiting those sites.

Eventually – and with difficulty – they were put down. But the Wahhabis would never go away completely. And in the short run their suppression raised a quite different issue, for they were overcome by a new kind of Ottoman army – one that used equipment and tactics that had been evolved in the West. This signalled a major change in thinking on the part of the Ottomans.³⁴ As we shall now see, Islam’s relations with the West, and with Western ideas, was very chequered.

Despite its retreat in Spain by 1492 and its near-victory at Vienna in 1683, the Muslim world for a long time remained wary, even uninterested in what was happening, intellectually speaking, in Western Europe.³⁵ Bernard Lewis, the well-known scholar of Islam, writes that ‘The great translation movement that centuries earlier had brought many Greek, Persian and Syriac works within the purview of Muslim and other Arabic readers, had come to an end, and the new scientific literature of Europe was almost totally unknown to them. Until the late eighteenth century, only one medical book was translated into a Middle Eastern language – a sixteenth-century treatise on syphilis, presented to Sultan Mehmed IV in Turkish in 1655.’ This translation was no accident, says Lewis. Syphilis, reputedly of American origin, had arrived in the Islamic world from Europe (and is still known in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages as ‘the Frankish disease’). Even when major conceptual breakthroughs were made in the Islamic world, they were not always recognised. For example, William Harvey’s Essay on the Motion of the Heart and Blood, published in 1628, was anticipated by the work of a thirteenth-century Syrian physician called Ibn al-Nafis. His treatise, which bravely argued against the traditional wisdom of Galen and Avicenna, set out the principle of circulation but it remained unknown and had no effect on the practice of medicine. In a letter written in 1560, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador from the Holy Roman Emperor to the sultan in Turkey, had this to say: ‘No nation has shown less reluctance to adopt the useful inventions of others; for example, they have appropriated for their own use large and small cannons and many other of our discoveries. They have, however, never been able to bring themselves to print books and set up public clocks. They hold that their scriptures, that is, their sacred books, would no longer be scriptures if printed; and if they established public clocks, they think that the authority of their muezzins and their ancient rites would suffer diminution.’³⁶

This can’t be quite right, or it gives an incomplete picture. True, there are several accounts of the Ottomans feeling ‘morally superior’ to Europeans, showing a ‘vanity’ toward the infidel, ‘glorifying in their ignorance’, apparently convinced that nothing could be learned from the West.³⁷ But, from the sixteenth century on, more recent scholarship shows that the Turks did follow developments in the West, especially in the fields of war, mining, geography and medicine. Istanbul had its own observatory as early as 1573, where the chief astronomer, Taqi al-Din, had fifteen assistants, though it was demolished seven years later. Taqi al-Din developed a new method of calculation to determine the latitudes and longitudes of the stars. His method was more precise than any yet devised and he also invented new astronomical instruments.³⁸ Ottoman ambassadors visited observatories in Paris in 1721, in Vienna in 1748, and Italian and French astronomical works were translated into Turkish in 1768 and 1772.³⁹

Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turkish historian of science, shows that the number of madrasas in the Ottoman lands grew from forty in the fourteenth century to ninety-seven in the fifteenth, and 189 in the sixteenth. Later still, the total grew to 665 in all the empire.⁴⁰ The Ottomans produced, in particular, many geographical books, and Kâtip Çelebi (1609–1657), the most famous of the Turkish bibliographers and translators of the era, provided for his readers a wide-ranging survey of European scientific and artistic institutions, giving the first indications (by implication) that the Ottomans were backward in the sciences.⁴¹ Çelebi’s book Kesfü z-zünun provided a critical survey of Renaissance academies, and he also translated Mercator.

A concerted attempt at the translation of European works was begun around 1720, on the orders of Grand Vizier Nevsehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasa, during the reign of Sultan Ahmet III, a period known in Ottoman history as the ‘Tulip Age’.⁴² This activity was reinforced by the embassies to Europe already referred to (there was one to St Petersburg, as well as to Paris and Vienna). Fatma Müge Göçek’s account of the embassy to Paris, in 1720–1721, shows that the Turks brought military gifts while the French reciprocated with technological objects.⁴³ At that time, says Göçek, the medical schools were in decline in Turkey and the Ottomans were having a problem controlling untrained practitioners.⁴⁴ The French were told that although there were twenty-four public libraries in Istanbul at the time, ‘books filled with “lies” [history, poetry, astronomy, philosophy]’ could not be endowed or bequeathed to these libraries.

The picture that has therefore emerged from more recent scholarship is that the Turkish conquest of Constantinople/Istanbul, though it drove many Greek/Byzantine scholars west, with or without manuscripts, did kick-start a revival of Islamic scholarship, with an interest in Western/Renaissance thought. For some reason, this interest declined in the seventeenth century, only to be renewed in the early years of the eighteenth.

Gradually, however, throughout the eighteenth century, the isolation of the Ottoman lands from Europe was reduced and there emerged a new category of visitor to Muslim countries. They comprised what we would now call experts, individuals offering specialist services to Islamic employers. This was true even of the Muslim countries further east, in Mughal India for example, where the Italian doctor Manucci was employed. This in time sparked a change in attitudes, which for many Muslims was shocking: one might learn from the previously despised infidel.⁴⁵ There was also more travel from east to west. In earlier centuries, only captives and a few diplomatic envoys had travelled in that way. After all, there were no holy places for Muslims to make pilgrimages to in Europe and in theory at least little to attract merchants interested in luxuries. (One exception was Evliya Celebi, who travelled in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century, and left a fascinating record.) In the eighteenth century that began to change. As Gulfishan Khan has recently shown, there were many Indians – Muslims and Hindus – who travelled to Europe.⁴⁶ Now, not only were special envoys sent out in increasing numbers, with instructions to observe, but attitudes to foreigners softened. A mathematical school was introduced for the Turkish military in 1734, initiated by a Frenchman, and a printing press was started in 1729, under the guidance of a Hungarian. Still, the improvements were patchy. Bernard Lewis describes a Turkish version of one of Columbus’ maps (now lost), prepared in 1513, which survives in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. It remained there, unconsulted and unknown, until it was discovered by a German scholar in 1929.⁴⁷

But travel from east to west did continue to increase. First the pasha of Egypt, then the sultan of Turkey, then the shah of Persia each dispatched students to Paris, London and other Western capitals. To begin with they were after military know-how, but this entailed learning French, English and other European languages and once they could do so, these envoys were free to read whatever came their way. Even here, however, they were in a sense handicapped. This was because Islam regarded Christianity as an earlier form of revelation, and it therefore made no sense to go backwards. Their chief interests in the West, therefore, lay in economics or in politics.⁴⁸

Islamic envoys in the western European countries were interested chiefly in two political ideas, the first being patriotism, coming from France and England in particular. This appealed especially to the younger Ottoman politicians, who realised that if an Ottoman patriotism could be fashioned, it might unite the very varied populations and tribes of the empire by means of a common love of territory, which would also mean a common allegiance to its ruler. The second idea was nationalism. This was more of a central and eastern European notion and referred mainly to ethnic and linguistic identities. The longer-term effects of this idea were far less successful, tending to divide and disrupt, rather than unify.⁴⁹

Outside politics, the topics which attracted most interest of the envoys were the status of women, science and music. ‘Islam permits both polygamy and concubinage. Muslim visitors to Europe speak with astonishment, often with horror, of the immodesty and forwardness of Western women, of the incredible freedom and absurd deference accorded to them, and of the lack of manly jealousy of European males confronted with the immorality and promiscuity in which their womenfolk indulge.’⁵⁰ This attitude stemmed from basic Islamic law, according to which there were three groups which did not enjoy full protection – unbelievers, slaves and women.⁵¹ Interest in mathematics and astronomy was growing in Muslim India in the late eighteenth century and Newton’s Principia Mathematica was translated into Persian in the second decade of the nineteenth century by a Muslim in Calcutta. Incubators were invented in Egypt and vaccination against smallpox introduced in Turkey.⁵²

There have been various theories for this ‘asymmetry’ of achievement in the Arab/Islamic world.⁵³ One argument relates it to the ‘exhaustion’ of precious metals in the Middle East, coinciding with the discovery by Europeans of gold and silver and other precious resources in the New World. One biological theory puts the Arabic failure down to the prevalence of cousin marriage in Islamic countries. Another biological theory blames the poor goat which, by stripping the bark off the trees and tearing up grass by the roots, condemned once-fertile lands to become deserts. Others have drawn attention to the relative abandonment of wheeled vehicles in the pre-modern Middle East, though this seems more to beg the question than answer it. ‘Familiar in antiquity, they became rare in medieval centuries, and remained so until they were reintroduced under European influence or rule.’⁵⁴

None of these explanations seems satisfactory. For one reason, by this time the Islamic world no longer equated to the Middle East – there were many Muslims in India and further east, and in Africa. As was mentioned earlier, Islam had been immensely successful in its spread around the world – judged in purely spiritual (rather than in material) terms, the faith that had originally been Arab had been exceedingly successful, second to none as an export. And so the wider answer, about the ‘asymmetry’, if there is one, surely lies in the great opening-up of the world, in the age of exploration, which provided Europeans with access to vast tracts of fresh land, in Africa, Australia and the Americas, with their associated flora, fauna and natural resources and, above all, their huge markets which allowed for trade, innovation and capital formation on an unprecedented scale. This is the simplest explanation, and the most convincing.

In France in the seventeenth century the king, Louis XIV, was told that the Portuguese settlements in India were not as secure as they might be and saw his chance. Without fuss, he added six young Jesuits – all scientists as well as prelates – to a mission he was sending to Siam.⁵⁵ The men were put ashore in the south of India, the first of the French (as opposed to Portuguese) ‘Indian missions’ which were to gain both fame and notoriety for the ordeals they endured and for their collection of Lettres édifiantes et curieuses which gave detailed accounts of their experiences. These Jesuits were far more sympathetic and accommodating to the Indians than their previous colleagues. This was shown expressly in the so-called ‘concessions’ which they allowed regarding Catholic worship – these became known as the rites malabars or cérémonies chinoises, a hybrid form of worship, which was denounced in Rome and eventually condemned in 1744. But if this tolerant approach didn’t satisfy the Vatican, it appealed to the abbé Bignon, the French king’s librarian and the man who reorganised the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris. He requested the missionaries to be alert for Indic manuscripts, which he was keen to obtain to form the backbone of an Oriental library. In 1733, in the Lettres édifiantes, the Jesuits announced their response: the discovery of one of the ‘big game’ of the hunt, a complete Veda, long thought to have been lost.⁵⁶ (It was in fact a complete Rig Veda in Grantha characters.¹⁷) Had the French Jesuits not taken the tolerant, accommodating approach that they did, it is unlikely they would have got close enough to local clerics and intellectuals to have been shown the Hindu scriptures in the first place, nor might they have realised what they had. Some years later, owing to Vatican intolerance, Jesuit relations with literate Indians deteriorated and shipments from the subcontinent were discontinued. By then, however, Europe had been exposed to Sanskrit and this turned into a major intellectual event.

‘Only after 1771 does the world become truly round; half the intellectual map is no longer blank.’ These are the words of Raymond Schwab, the French scholar, in his book The Oriental Renaissance, a title he took from Edgar Quinet who, in 1841, described the arrival of many Sanskrit manuscripts in Europe in the eighteenth century and compared them with the impact of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.⁵⁷ I have adopted Quinet and Schwab’s title for this chapter, and in what follows have relied heavily on their work. What Schwab meant was that the arrival of the Hindu manuscripts, together with the deciphering, at much the same time, of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was an event more or less comparable with the arrival of the ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts, many in Arabic translation, that had transformed European life in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (see above, Chapter 17). Schwab himself felt that the discovery of the Sanskrit language and its literature was ‘one of the great events of the mind’.⁵⁸

This transformation began almost certainly in 1771 when Abraham Anquetil-Duperron, ‘an obscure luminary’, published his translation of the Zend Avesta in France. This, says Schwab, was ‘the first time anyone had succeeded in breaking into one of the walled languages of Asia’.⁵⁹ Anquetil was described by Edward Said as a French scholar and ‘ecumenist of beliefs (Jansenist, Catholic, and Brahmin)’. He transcribed and translated the Zend Avesta while in Surat, ‘freeing,’ in Schwab’s words, ‘the old humanism from the Mediterranean basin.’⁶⁰ He was the first Western scholar to visit India expressly for the purpose of studying their scriptures. At first he called Sanskrit Sahanscrit, Samcretam or Samscroutam.¹⁸

The real start of the Oriental renaissance, however, properly began with the arrival in Calcutta of William Jones and the establishment of the Bengal Asiatic Society on 15 January 1784. This society was established by a group of highly talented English civil servants, employed by the East India Company, who, besides their official day-to-day duties helping to administer the subcontinent, also pursued broader interests, which included language studies, the recovery and translation of the Indian classics, astronomy and the natural sciences. Four men stood out. These were, first, Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the governor of Bengal, and a highly controversial politician, who was later impeached for corruption (and, after a trial that lasted, on and off, for seven years, acquitted), but throughout it all energetically encouraged the activities of the society.⁶¹ It was Hastings who ensured that learned Brahmans gathered at Fort William to supply the most authentic texts, which illustrated Indic law, literature and language. The others in the group were William Jones, a judge, Henry Colebrooke (the ‘Master of Sanskrit’) and Charles Wilkins. Between them, these men accomplished three things. They located, recovered, and translated the main Indian Hindu and Buddhist classics, they kick-started the investigation of Indian history, and Jones, in a brilliant flash of insight, uncovered the great similarities between Sanskrit on the one hand and Greek and Latin on the other, in the process reshaping history in a manner we shall explore throughout the rest of this chapter.

These men were all brilliant linguists, Jones especially. The son of a professor of mathematics, he was, on top of everything else, an accomplished poet. He published poems in Greek at the age of fifteen, while at sixteen – having learned Persian from ‘a Syrian living in London’ – he translated Hafiz into English.⁶² He later said that he had studied twenty-eight languages and had a thorough knowledge of thirteen.

Apart from Jones’ breakthrough, the next most eye-catching was Jean François Champollion’s, in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. In 1822 Champollion wrote his famous Letter to M. Dacier, which provided the key to the hieroglyphic script, making use of the trilingual Rosetta Stone, brought back from Egypt, as its key. ‘On the morning of September 14, 1822, Champollion ran across the rue Mazarine on which he lived, into the library of the Institut des Inscriptions, where he knew he would find his brother, [Jean Jacques] Champollion-Figeac, at work. He cried out to him, “I’ve got it”, went home, and fell unconscious. Coming out of a five-day coma, he immediately picked up the sequence of a waking dream that was almost as old as he was, and asked for his notes. On the 21st he dictated a letter to his brother, dated the next day, which he read to the Académie des Inscriptions on the 27th.’⁶³

The process of decipherment has since become well known. The fact that there were three languages on the Rosetta Stone was both an opportunity and a hindrance. One language, Greek, was known. Of the other two, one was ideogrammatic, the figuration of ideas, and the other alphabetic, the representation of spoken sounds.⁶⁴ The ideographs were broken when it was realised that a certain small number of unknown characters, often repeated, must be vowels and that cartouches were reserved for the names of kings, with the father following the son (‘A, son of B’). Champollion realised that the unknown alphabetic script was a translation of the Greek, and the hieroglyphics a form of shorthand of the same message.

When the Bengal Asiatic Society was instituted, in 1784, Warren Hastings was offered the presidency, but declined, and so it was offered to Jones. He had been in India barely eighteen months. His great discovery, the relationship of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, was first aired in his third anniversary address to the Asiatic Society. Each year for eleven years he commemorated the founding of the society with a major address, several of which were important statements on Eastern culture. But his third address, ‘On the Hindus’, delivered on 2 February 1786, was by far the most momentous. He said: ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.’⁶⁵

It is difficult for us today to grasp the full impact of this insight. In linking Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, and in arguing that the Eastern tongue was, if anything, older than and superior to the Western languages, Jones was striking a blow against the very foundations of Western culture and the (at least tacit) assumption that it was more advanced than cultures elsewhere. A major ‘reorientation’ in thought and attitude was needed. And it was more than merely historical. Anquetil’s translation of the Zend Avesta was the first time an Asian text had been conceived in a way that completely ignored both the Christian and classical traditions. This is why Schwab said the world only became truly round now: the history of the East was at last on a par with that of the West, no longer subordinate to it, no longer necessarily a part of that history. ‘The universality of the Christian God had been ended and a new universalism put in its place.’ In his study of the French Société Asiatique, Felix Lacôte said in an article entitled ‘L’Indianisme’ that ‘Europeans doubted that ancient India was worth the trouble of knowing. This was a tenacious prejudice against which Warren Hastings still had to struggle in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.’⁶⁶ Nevertheless, by 1832 things had been turned upside down and the German romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel took a different line. He said that his own century had produced more knowledge of India than ‘the twenty-one centuries since Alexander the Great’.⁶⁷ (Schlegel was, like Jones, a linguistic prodigy. He spoke Arabic and Hebrew by the time he was fifteen and, at the age of seventeen, when he was still a pupil of Herder, he lectured on mythology.⁶⁸) In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Max Müller, a German Orientalist who became the first professor of comparative philology at Oxford, said this: ‘If I were asked what I considered the most important discovery of the nineteenth century with respect to the ancient history of mankind, I should answer by the following short line: Sanskrit Dyaus Pitar = Greek Zeùs Πατηρ = Latin Juppiter = Old Norse Tyr.’⁶⁹

Sanskrit was the key. But it was not the only breakthrough. Schwab identifies five major discoveries of this era, all of which produced a comprehensive reorientation in thought. These were the deciphering of Sanskrit in 1785, of Pahlavi in 1793, the cuneiforms in 1803, hieroglyphics in 1822 and Avestan in 1832 – ‘these were all openings in the long-sealed wall of languages’. One immediate effect of these events was that the study of the Far East was demystified for the first time, moving beyond the conjectural. The Laudian chair of Arabic had been established at Oxford since c. 1640 but Indic and Chinese studies now began in earnest.⁷⁰

In 1822, the English sent back from Asia to London the sacred books of Tibet and Nepal that were coming to light. The most important of these was the Buddhist canon – one hundred volumes in Tibetan, eighty in Sanskrit – which were discovered and sent west by the English ethnologist Brian Hodgson. It was as a result of the translations of these texts that Western scholars became aware of the similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, as discussed above in Chapter 8. In Germany the philosopher of history Johann Gottfried von Herder was deeply affected by Anquetil’s translation of the Zend Avesta and was moved to render certain verses of Wilkins’ English text of the Bhagavad Gita (translated in 1784) into German. But for Herder his main transformation came when he read a German translation of Jones’ English version of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala (1789). Schwab sets out the significance of this as follows: ‘It is well known how Herder, in rekindling for a deciphered India the enthusiastic interest that had been felt for an imagined India, spread among the Romantics the idea of placing the cradle of the divine infancy of the human race in India.’⁷¹ Likewise the German translations of the Bhagavad Gita and Gita Govinda, published in the first decade of the nineteenth century, had a tremendous influence on Friedrich Schleiermacher, F. W. Schelling, August Schlegel, J. C. Schiller, Novalis and, eventually, on Johann Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer.

But it was the Shakuntala that ‘remained the great miracle’. As well as seducing Herder, it gripped Goethe, who didn’t much care for the polytheism of Hinduism but nonetheless penned the lines: ‘Nenn’ ich Sakontala dich, und so ist alles gesagt’ (‘When I mention Shakuntala, everything is said’). Shakuntala was one of the influences that prompted Schlegel to learn Sanskrit. Jones became as famous for his translation of Shakuntala as for his identification of the similarities between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek. Goethe called him ‘the incomparable Jones’. ‘Shakuntala was the first link with the authentic India and the basis on which Herder constructed an Indic fatherland for the human race in its infancy.’⁷² Heine modelled several of his verses on Shakuntala. In France, in 1830, the appearance of Antoine-Léonard de Chézy’s translation of Kalidasa’s classic ‘was one of the literary events that formed the texture of the nineteenth century, not just by its direct influence but by introducing unexpected competition into world literature.’⁷³ Chézy’s translation included Goethe’s famous verses as an epigraph, in which the German poet confessed that Shakuntala was ‘among the stars that made his nights brighter than his days’. Lamartine saw in Chézy’s translation ‘the threefold genius of Homer, Theocritus and Tasso combined in a single poem’.⁷⁴ By 1858 Shakuntala was so well-known in France, and so well-regarded, that it became a ballet at the Opéra de Paris, with music by Ernst Reyer and a scenario by Théophile Gautier.

The effect of the Bhagavad Gita was no less profound. Its poetry, its wisdom, its sheer complexity and richness brought about a major change in attitudes to India, the East and its capabilities. ‘It was a great surprise,’ wrote the French scholar Jean-Denis Lanjuinas, ‘to find among these fragments of an extremely ancient epic poem from India, along with the system of metempsychosis, a brilliant theory on the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, all the sublime doctrines of the Stoics . . . a completely spiritual pantheism, and finally the vision of all-in-God.’⁷⁵ Others found precursors of Spinoza and Berkeley in India, and Lanjuinas himself went on to argue that the Hitopadesha (instructions in politics, friendship and worldly wisdom, dating back to the third century BC) contained one of the great moral treatises of all times, on a par with the scriptures and the Church Fathers. These verdicts were confirmed by Friedrich Schlegel who, in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (‘on the Language and Wisdom of the Indies’), discussed the metaphysical traditions of India on an equal footing with Greek and Latin ideas. This was far more important then than we may feel now, because, against a background of deism and doubt, such an approach allowed that the Indians – the inhabitants of the far-off East – had as thorough a knowledge and belief in the true God as did Europeans. This was quite at variance with what the church taught. Jones had speculated that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had a common origin, but there were those who suspected that Sanskrit, which doesn’t mean ‘holy writing’ but ‘perfected’, from samskrta, was actually the original tongue spoken after the world had been created by God. What was the relation between Brahman and Abraham?

The sheer richness of Sanskrit also went against the Enlightenment belief that languages had begun in poverty and gradually grown more elaborate.⁷⁶ This brought about a growing realisation that Vico had been right, and that the structure of languages could reveal a great deal about the antiquity of man. In turn, this launched the great age of philology, as it was then called, in the nineteenth century, as grammar was studied as well as vocabulary, to reveal groups of languages – for example, the separation of the Germanic languages from Greek, Latin and Balto Slavic.⁷⁷ Here the work of Schlegel and Franz Bopp influenced Wilhelm von Humboldt, the minister who helped establish the first chairs in Sanskrit in Germany in 1818.⁷⁸ Humboldt in particular was interested in what language could teach us about the psychology of different peoples. Many religious souls at the time remained convinced that the earliest (and most perfect) language had to be Hebrew, or something very like it, because it was the language of the Chosen People. Bopp turned his back on these preconceptions and showed how complex Sanskrit was even thousands of years ago, in the process throwing doubt on the very idea that Hebrew was the original tongue. It was in this way that language was recognised as having a natural history rather than a sacred history, that language studies were, in effect, susceptible of scientific inquiry.⁷⁹

Schelling took the ideas of Jones one step further. In his 1799 lecture on the Philosophie der Mythologie he proposed that, just as there must have been a ‘mother tongue’, so there must have been one mythology in the world shared by all peoples. He thought that it was the task of German scholars trained in languages to create, for modern Europe, ‘a fusion of the mythological traditions of all humanity . . . All the legends of India and Greece, of the Scandinavians and the Persians “had to be” accepted as components of a new universal religion that would regenerate a world distracted by rationalism.’⁸⁰ In much the same vein, Hippolyte Taine took the view that the concordance between Buddhism and Christianity was ‘the greatest event in history’, because it revealed the root myths of the world.⁸¹ India was so big, so alive and its religions so sophisticated that it was no longer enough simply to curse pagans, to dismiss them and to hope that they might be one day converted. Christianity had to assimilate a heterodoxy millennia-old and still very much alive.⁸²

One final, fundamental way in which the discovery deeply affected people was in the notion of ‘becoming’. If religions were at different stages of development, and yet all linked in some mysterious way – only glimpsed at so far – did this mean that God, instead of just being, could himself be said to be ‘becoming’, as the rest of life on earth was understood in the classic Graeco-Christian tradition? This was clearly a major question. The most important aspect of all these varied views was that deism was given a new lease of life. God came to be seen, not in an anthropomorphic sense, but as an abstract metaphysical entity. There was, once again, a very real, very large difference between God and man.⁸³

The growing understanding that the languages of mankind were related in a systematic way, occurring as it did at much the same time as the new classifications in biology, devised by Linnaeus, together with the advances in Huttonian geology (see below, Chapter 31), played an important part in reinforcing early ideas about what would become known as evolution. But the Oriental renaissance also played a vital role in a quite different development, one that dominates life even today. This was its links to the origins of the romantic movement.

The most obvious and most virile link was between Indic studies and German romanticism. Indic studies proved popular in Germany for broadly nationalistic reasons. Put bluntly, it seemed to German scholars that the Aryan/Indian/Persian tradition linked in with the original barbarian invasions of the Roman empire from the east and, together with the myths of the Scandinavians, provided an alternative (more northerly) tradition to the Greek and Latin Mediterranean classicism that had dominated European life and thought for the previous 2,500 years (see chapter 10). Furthermore, the similarities between Buddhism and Christianity, the Hindu ideas of a world soul, all this seemed to the Germans as a primitive form of revelation, in fact the original form, out of which Judaism and Christianity might have grown, but which meant that God’s real purpose was hidden somewhere in the Eastern religions, that the first religion in the world, before the churches, was somehow to be found in the ancient writings of India. Such a view implies that there was a single God for all mankind, and that there was a world mythology, the understanding of which would be fundamental. In Herder’s terms, this ancestral mythology was ‘the childhood dreams of our species’.⁸⁴

A further factor which influenced romanticism was that the original Indian scriptures were written in poetry. The idea became popular, therefore, that poetry was ‘the mother tongue’, that verse was the original way in which wisdom was transmitted from God to mankind (‘Man is an animal that sings’). Poetry, it was thought, was the original language of Eden, and it was through the ancient poetry of India that the Edenic world could be rediscovered. In this way the philologists and poets combined to produce what Schwab called ‘the revenge of plurality on unity’.⁸⁵ At the very moment that the scientists were seeking to bring the world under control, seeing it operate according to fewer and fewer rules, at a time when theories of progress looked forward to a narrowing of experience, as societies were all expected to develop in one and the same direction, the philologists and poets went the other way and sought the regeneration of society through new religion. Their view was that there was a primitive unity to the human race, but it had, over time, developed different religions that were equally valid, its legends and myths and practices equally authoritative, equally suited to the environments and countries in which they held sway. According to this argument, there had been an original monotheism, which had become dispersed into polytheism, meaning that the content of revelation was not, in principle, different from that in mythology. ‘All the legends of India and Greece, of the Scandinavians and the Persians “had to be” accepted as components of a new universal religion that would regenerate a world distracted by rationalism.’⁸⁶

The range of poets, writers and philosophers who came under the influence of these views spanned the Atlantic. Emerson and Thoreau were steeped in Buddhism. One of Emerson’s first poems was called ‘Brahma’, and was inspired by the Bhagavad Gita. His Journals contain many references to Zoroaster, Confucius, the Hindus and the Vedas. On 1 October 1848 he wrote: ‘I owed . . . a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Geeta. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.’⁸⁷ Thoreau left Emerson his collection of Oriental books. Whitman confessed he had read Hindu poetry in preparation for his own. Goethe learned Persian and wrote in the preface to the West-Ostliche Divan: ‘Here I want to penetrate to the first origin of human races, when they still received celestial mandates from god in terrestrial languages.’⁸⁸ Heine studied Sanskrit under Schlegel at Bonn and under Bopp in Berlin.⁸⁹ As he wrote: ‘Our lyrics are aimed at singing the Orient.’ Schlegel believed that the Aryans, the original inhabitants of India, were ‘attracted’ to the North – i.e., were the ancestors of the Germans and Scandinavians. Both Schlegel and Ferdinand Eckstein, another German Orientalist, believed that the Indic, Persian and Hellenic epics rested on the same fables which formed the basis of the Nibelungenlied, the great medieval German epic of revenge, which Wagner was to rely on for his musical drama The Ring.⁹⁰ Eckstein sought ‘an anterior Christianity . . . in the antiquities of paganism’.⁹¹ ‘For Schleiermacher, as for the entire circle around Novalis, the source of all religion “can be found”, according to Ricarda Huch, “in the unconscious or in the Orient, from whence all religions came”.’⁹²

Schopenhauer’s encounter with the East transformed him. His view of Buddhism was that ‘Never has myth come closer to the truth, nor will it.’⁹³ He was convinced that ‘our religions are not taking nor will they take root in India; the primitive wisdom of the human race will not allow itself to be diverted from its course by some escapade that occurred in Galilee.’⁹⁴ Christianity, but not Judaism, Schopenhauer said, ‘is Indian in spirit, and therefore more than probably of Indian origin, although only indirectly, through Egypt’.⁹⁵ Not entirely logically, he then proceeded to examine what he saw as the Indo-Iranian origins of Christianity: ‘Although Christianity, in essential respects, taught only what all Asia knew long before, and even better, yet for Europe it was a new and great revelation.’ And he went on: ‘The New Testament . . . must have some sort of Hindu origin; its ethics, which translate morals into asceticism, its pessimism, and its avatar all attest to such an origin . . . Christian doctrine, born of Hindu wisdom, had completely covered the old trunk of a grosser Judaism completely uncongenial to it.’⁹⁶

Lamartine confessed that Indian philosophy moved him most of all. ‘[It] eclipses all others for me: it is the oceans, we are only clouds . . . I read, reread, and read again . . . I cried out, I closed my eyes, I was overwhelmed with admiration . . .’⁹⁷ He had plans – never realised – for a great sequence of poems, ‘an epic of the soul’, which he described as Hindoustanique.⁹⁸ ‘From it [India] one inhales a breath at once holy, tender, and sad, which seems to me to have recently passed from an Eden closed to mankind.’⁹⁹ For Lamartine, the discovery of India and its literature was not merely ‘a new wing to be added to old libraries; it was a new land to be hailed in the cheers of shipwrecked men’.¹⁰⁰ For that other great French writer, Victor Hugo, the Orient both attracted and repelled. In September 1870, when he launched his address ‘To the Germans’, in which he tried to convince them to spare Paris, during the siege, he made a comparison that many others had made, and which, indeed, Germany liked to make about itself. ‘Germany is to the West what India is to the East, a sort of great forebear. Let us venerate her.’¹⁰¹ His poetry contained many references to Ellora, the Ganges, Brahmans, an ‘immense wheel’, and magical birds based on Farid al-Din’s Mantiq ut-Tair (The Conference of the Birds).¹⁰² Gustave Flaubert wrote of ‘an immense Indian forest where life throbs in every atom’,¹⁰³ while Verlaine spent his vacations ‘plunged into Hindu mythology’.¹⁰⁴

In 1865, the French (self-appointed) count, Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, a notorious racial theorist, published Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale (1865), the central tenet of which was that all European thought originated in Asia. Gobineau even travelled to Persia in 1855 while he was working on the book, to verify his thesis.¹⁰⁵ He did not agree with others that the northern European languages were descended from India but he did think that its peoples were. For him the Aryans were the nobility of mankind and he considered the word ‘Aryan’ related to the German Ehre (which means ‘honour’, ‘uprightness’). In the final part of On the Inequality of Human Races, which he called ‘The capacity of the native German races’, he argued that the Germanic Aryan is sacred, the race of the lords of the earth, while in the conclusion he announced that ‘The Germanic race has been furnished with all the energy of the Aryan variety . . . After it the white species had nothing powerful and active to offer.’¹⁰⁶

At the end of his life, Wagner ‘rushed into Gobineau’s arms’.¹⁰⁷ He met the man and wrote an introduction to his collected works. Wagner found the Frenchman’s philosophy and ‘science’ congenial to his own aim of displacing French-Italian opera as the centre of the canon and to fashion instead ‘a music of the future’ that promoted a radically different tradition – German epic, German paganism, ‘the unalterable source of purity’.¹⁰⁸ ‘As Wagner recounts in My Life, it was while working on the orchestration of Die Walküre in 1855 that the event occurred which could not fail to fulfil his destiny: “Burnouf’s Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism interested me most among my books, and I found material in it for a dramatic poem, which has stayed in my mind ever since . . . to the mind of the Buddha the past life (in a former incarnation) of every being who appears before him stands revealed as plainly as the present”.’¹⁰⁹ Wagner’s diaries are punctuated with references to the Buddha and Buddhist concepts. ‘Everything is strange to me, and I often cast a nostalgic glance toward the country of Nirvana. But for me Nirvana again becomes, very quickly, Tristan.’¹¹⁰ Elements of the Ramayana occur in Parsifal, and at one stage the composer planned a drama to be taken from the book Stimmen vom Ganges (Voices of the Ganges).¹¹¹

The Oriental renaissance, then, was many things. It threw new light on religion, on history, on time, on myth, on the relations between the peoples of the world. In the middle of the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution, it breathed new life into poetry and the poetic and aesthetic approach to human affairs. In the short run it was one of the forces that helped create the romantic revolution, the subject of the next chapter. But in the long run the discovery of the common origins of Sanskrit and Greek and Latin would form part of the modern scientific synthesis, linking genetics, archaeology and linguistics, which has taught us a great deal about the peopling of our world, surely one of the greatest and most important aspects of our history. This represents a significant mind-shift that, too often, is ignored against the backdrop of the other developments in the eighteenth century.