India Quotes

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

mathematics

God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west ... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.

environment

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.

Cornwallis arrived in India fresh from his defeat by George Washington at Yorktown. He was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America.

British Raj

So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign intruders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed.

The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the eighteenth-century British of the Indian idea of cleaning hair with materials other than soap.

British Raj

All over India, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, attitudes were changing among the British. Men who showed too great an enthusiasm for Hinduism, for Indian practices or even for their Indian wives and Anglo-Indian children, were finding that the climate was growing distinctly chilly.

British Raj

The old British Residency, now the Osmania University College for Women, was a vast Palladian villa, in plan not unlike its exact contemporary, the White House in Washington. It was one of the most perfect buildings ever erected by the East India Company, and lay in a massive fortified garden just over the River Musi from the old city.

British Raj

On the streets of the indigenous quarter one can see how these fine people spend their primitive lives. For all their fineness, they give the impression that the climate prevents them from thinking backward or forward by more than a quarter of an hour. They live in great filth and considerable stench down on the ground, do little, and need little. Simple economic cycle of life. Far too penned up to allow any distinct existence for the individual. Half-naked, they reveal their fine and yet powerful bodies and their fine, patient faces. Nowhere shouting like the Levantines in Port Said. No brutality, no market crying existence, but quiet, acquiescent drifting along, albeit not lacking in a certain lightheartedness. Once you take a proper look at these people, you can hardly take pleasure in the Europeans anymore, because they are more effete and more brutal and look so much cruder and greedier—and therein unfortunately lies their practical superiority, their ability to take on grand things and carry them out. Wouldn't we too, in this climate, become like the Indians?

racist