For what profoundly separated Jones and Mill, and the Oriental renaissance from British Indophobia, was the power of the idea of ancient wisdom in th… - Thomas Trautmann

It is worth saying again: Indophobia did not spring up naturally from the soil of Britain, it was deliberately built. India was very different from Britain, to be sure, but Britons did not believe they were "every way different" from the Indians until Grant taught them to think so.

The Boden Professorship had been privately endowed for the purpose of promoting the spread of Christianity by the translation of the Bible into Sanskrit. It was awarded to Monier-Williams by vote of convocation following a period of heavy lobbying, in which Max Muller's broad religious views and foreign birth worked against him even though he was much the better Sanskritist. It was a bitter defeat for him...

The evidentiary base of the racial theory of Indian civilization was never very firm, and subsequent developments have only served to weaken it further. Its great appeal for Europeans had been that it attributed the civilizing of India to peoples related to themselves. But, by the 1920s, it became plain that mounds of old brick being excavated in the Indus valley were the remains of an urban civilization that was older than the chronological horizon of the Veda. The discovery of the Indus Civilization should have put paid to the racial theory of Indian civilization... That the racial theory of Indian civilization still lingers is a miracle of faith.