55 India Quotes

To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.

We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.

There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.

Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.

The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creator's hand.

The principal end both of my father and of myself in the conquest of India... has been the propagation of the holy Catholic faith.

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.

'India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.' [1]

'India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. ... India matters to me and I would like to matter to India.' [2]

'The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.' [9]

'In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.' [15]

'India is more than a sum of its contradictions, any truism about India can be contradicted with another truism. There is no fixed stereotype. But even thinking about India makes clear the immensity of the nation-building challenge.' - Shashi Tharoor at the recently concluded PANIIT 2006 in Bombay.

'India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is for ever, and India is forever being made.' [16]

I believe that the civilization India evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors, Rome went, Greece shared the same fate; the might of the Pharaohs was broken; Japan has become Westernized; of China nothing can be said; but India is still, somehow or other, sound at the foundation. The people of Europe learn their lessons from the writings of the men of Greece or Rome, which exist no longer in their former glory. In trying to learn from them, the Europeans imagine that they will avoid the mistakes of Greece and Rome. Such is their pitiable condition. In the midst of all this India remains immovable and that is her glory. It is a charge against India that her people are so uncivilized, ignorant and stolid, that it is not possible to induce them to adopt any changes. It is a charge really against our merit. What we have tested and found true on the anvil of experience, we dare not change. Many thrust their advice upon India, and she remains steady. This is her beauty: it is the sheet-anchor of our hope. Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati equivalent for civilization means 'good conduct'.

Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues and freebooters. All Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw.

They have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo - an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as 'India', just a geographical expression, just a construct of the British; no such thing as Hinduism, just a word used by Arabs to describe the assortment they encountered, just an invention of the communalists to impose a uniformity - that has been their stance. For this they have blackened the Hindu period of our history, and, as we shall see, strained to whitewash the Islamic period.

In the West, secularism implies pinpricking religious fraud and arrogance, but in India, secularists are the most eloquent defenders of myth and theocracy.

'I want to assure you, Prime Minister, that we in Fiji cherish the vital and valuable role, and the enormous contribution, which members of our Indian community have played, and are continuing to play in the development and progress of our country.'

'Does NRI (Non-Resident Indian) stand for Not Really Indian or Never Relinquished India? I believe a little of both!' [3]

'What is most important to me is Jawaharlal Nehru's idea of India, India as a pluralist society and polity, an idea which is central to India's survival, which has held now in the four decades after his death and which is all the more in need of defending.' [4]

'Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land, emerging from an ancient civilization, sustained by pluralist democracy.' [5]

'We all have multiple identities in India; we are all minorities in India. Our heterogeneity is definitional.' [6]

'No Indian nationalist leader ever needed to say: We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians.' [7]

'In building an Indian nation that takes account of the country's true Hindu heritage, we have to return to the pluralism of the national movement.' [8]

'The memories of the first Independence Day may have faded, but the power of that magical moment must never be forgotten.' [8]

'The idea of India is not based on language, not on geography, not on ethnicity and not on religion. The idea of India is of one land embracing many. You can be many things and one thing: you can be a good Keralite, a good Muslim and a good Indian all at once.' [10]

'Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream. We have given passports to their ideals.' [11]

'If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum.' [12]

'If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali -- a collection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each may not mix with the next, but they combine on your palate to produce a satisfying repast.' [12]

'The pluralism and the linguistic diversity of India is something of which we can truly be proud.' [13]

'Pluralist India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities.' [14]

'India imposes no procrustean exactions on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing.' [15]

'Ultimately, what matters in determining the validity of a nation is the will of its inhabitants to live and strive together.' [15]

'This is my story of the India I know, with its biases, selections, omissions, distortions, all mine.... Every Indian must for ever carry with him, in his head and heart, his own history of India.' [16]

'Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms.' [16]

'Like India herself, I am at home in hovels and palaces, Ganapathi, I trundle in bullock-carts and propel myself into space, I read the vedas and quote the laws of cricket. I move to the strains of a morning raga in perfect evening dress.' [16]

'The British had the gall to call Robert Clive 'Clive of India' as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him.' [16]

'How easily we Indians see the several sides to every question! That is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poor totalitarians. They say the new international organizations set up by the wonderfully optimistic (if oxymoronic) United Nations are full of highly successful Indian officials with quick, subtle minds and mellifluous tongues, for ever able to understand every global crisis from the point of view of each and every one of the contending parties. That is why they do so well, Ganapathi, in any situation that calls for an instinctive awareness of the subjectivity of truth, the relativity of judgement and the impossibility of action.' [16]

'Even though India has all the attributes of a great power,its most striking asset was actually its soft power.' - Shashi Tharoor at the recently concluded Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi.

'There is no one way to look at India. There are many Indias. Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the very nature of the country; it is a choice made inevitable by India's geography and reaffirmed by its history. We are all minorities in India.' - Shashi Tharoor at the recently concluded PANIIT 2006 in Bombay.

'The first challenge is that we cannot generalise about India. One of the few generalisations that can safely be made about India is that nothing can be taken for granted about the country.' - Shashi Tharoor at the recently concluded PANIIT 2006 in Bombay.

'I was not blinded by faith, but the encounter was indeed astonishing at several levels. In our private talk, Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself that he could not possibly have known....He waved his hand in the air and opened his palm. In it nestled a gold ring with nine embedded stones, a navratan. He slipped it on my finger, remarking, 'See how well it fits. Even a goldsmith would have needed to measure your finger.' [17]

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer of the type well-known in the East, now posing as a fakir, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

Indeed, over the years I have had many a good laugh at the pompous moralism and blatant dishonesty of India's so-called secularists. Their specialty is to justify double standards, e.g. why mentioning murdered Kashmiri Pandits is 'communal hate-mongering' while the endless litany about murdered Gujarati Muslims is 'secular consciousness-raising'. Sometimes they merely stonewall inconvenient information, such as when they tried to deny and suppress the historical data about the forcible replacement of a Rama temple in Ayodhya by a mosque: given the strength of the evidence, all they could do was to drown out any serious debate with screams and swearwords. But often they do bring out their specific talents at sophistry, such as when they argue that a Common Civil Code, a defining element of all secular states, is a Hindu communalist notion, while the preservation of the divinely-revealed Shari'a for the Muslims is secular. That's when they are at their best.

Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.

If the reader has also received the benefit of the Vedas, the access to which by means of the Upanishads is in my eyes the greatest privilege which this still young century may claim before all previous centuries, if then the reader, I say, has received his initiation in primeval Indian wisdom, and received it with an open heart, he will be prepared in the very best way for hearing what I have to tell him. It will not sound to him strange, as to many others, much less disagreeable; for I might, if it did not sound conceited, contend that every one of the detached statements which constitute the Upanishads, may be deduced as a necessary result from the fundamental thoughts which I have to enunciate, though those deductions themselves are by no means to be found there.

How entirely does the Oupnekhat breathe throughout the holy spirit of the Vedas! How is every one who by a diligent study of its Persian Latin has become familiar with that incomparable book, stirred by that spirit to the very depth of his soul! How does every line display its firm, definite, and throughout harmonious meaning! From every sentence deep, original, and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit. Indian air surrounds us, and original thoughts of kindred spirits. And oh, how thoroughly is the mind here washed clean of all early en grafted Jewish superstitions, and of all philosophy that cringes before those superstitions! In the whole world there is no study, except that of the originals, so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Oupnekhat. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death!

'[The Indian princes'] ceremonies are so irritating and ridiculous' (Ziegler, King Edward VIII, 116)

To John Kenneth Galbraith, who had been appointed American ambassador to India, 'I hear you are going to In-jea. A most interesting country. I had a very good time there in my early youth. You must do the pig-sticking in Rajasthan. And you will find the people most agreeable in their own way. They have been most uncommonly decent to my niece.' (Galbraith, Ambassador's Journal, 36)

If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India....For more than 30 centuries, the tree of vision, with all its thousand branches and their millions of twigs, has sprung from this torrid land, the burning womb of the Gods. It renews itself tirelessly showing no signs of decay.

The greatest human ideal is the great cause of bringing together the thoughts of Europe and Asia; the great soul of India will topple our world.

The vast and tranquil metaphysics of India is unfolded; her conception of the universe, her social organization, perfect in its day and still capable of adaptation to the demands of modern times; the solution which she offers for the feminist problem, for the problems of the family, of love, of marriage; and lastly, the magnificent revelation of her art. The whole vast soul of India proclaims from end to end of its crowded and well ordered edifice the same domination of a sovereign synthesis. There is no negation. All is harmonized. All the forces of life are grouped like a forest, whose thousand waving arms are led by Nataraja, the master of the Dance. Everything has its place, every being has its function, and all take part in the divine concert, their different voices, and their very dissonances, creating, in the phrase of Heraclitus, a most beautiful harmony. Whereas in the West, cold, hard logic isolates the unusual, shutting it off from the rest of life into a definite and distinct compartment of the spirit. India, ever mindful of the natural differences in souls and in philosophies, endeavors to blend them into each other, so as to recreate in its fullest perfection the complete unity. The matching of opposites produces the true rhythm of life.

Of course, this entire fabric of Indian life stands solidly on faith, that is to say, on a slender and emotional hypothesis. But amid all the beliefs of Europe, and of Asia, that of the Indian Brahmins seems to me infinitely the most alluring. And the reason why I love the Brahmin more than the other schools of Asiatic thought is because it seems to me to contain them all. Greater than all European philosophies, it is even capable of adjusting itself to the vast hypotheses of modern science. Our Christian religions have tried in vain, when there were no other choice open to them, to adapt themselves to the progress of science. But after having allowed myself to be swept away by the powerful rhythm of Brahmin thought, along the curve or life, with its movement of alternating ascent and return, I come back to my own century, and while finding therein the immense projections of a new cosmogony, offspring of the genius of Einstein, or deriving freely from the discoveries, I yet do not feel that I enter a strange land. I yet can hear resounding still the cosmic symphony of all those planets which forever succeed each other, are extinguished and once more illumined, with their living souls, their humanities, their gods - according to the laws of the eternal To Become, the Brahmin Samsara - I hear Siva dancing, dancing in the heart of the world, in my own heart.