There is nothing remarkable about the people in premodern South Asia having a clear and accurate conception of the spatial organization of their worl… - Sheldon Pollock

For one thing, Sanskrit literary culture was never affected by communicative incompetence, which began to enfeeble Latin from at least the ninth century. The process of vernacularization in India, in so many ways comparable to the European case, was nowhere a consequence of growing Sanskrit ignorance.

The Ṛg-Veda as an Aryan text 'free of any taint of Semitic contact'; the 'almost Nordic zeal' that lies in the Buddhist conception of the marga [way]; the 'Indo-Germanic religion-force' of yoga; the sense of race and the 'conscious desire for racial protection'; the 'volksnahe kingship' such is the meaning of the Indo-Aryan past for the National Socialist present, a present that, for Wüst, could not be understood without this past.

Moving beyond orientalism finally presupposes moving beyond the culture of domination and the politics of coercion that have nurtured orientalism in all its varieties, and been nurtured by it in turn.