About This Work
In this celebrated series of lectures, Friedrich Max Müller—one of the foremost Orientalists of the Victorian era—addresses young candidates for the Indian Civil Service at Cambridge University. Rather than treating India as merely a distant land to be administered, Müller passionately argues that Sanskrit scholarship opens the door to understanding our own intellectual ancestry.
The lectures cover:
- Lecture I: Why India deserves a place in liberal education
- Lecture II: A defense of Hindu character against colonial slanders
- Lecture III: The human interest of Sanskrit literature
- Lecture IV: Answering objections to Indian studies
- Lecture V: The lessons of Vedic religion
- Lecture VI: The nature of Vedic deities
- Lecture VII: From Veda to Vedanta—the evolution of Indian philosophy