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Why project an alien [racial] discourse onto the distant Indian past?

— Thomas Trautmann

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More quotes by Thomas Trautmann

The [Dasyu/Dasa] image of the 'dark-skinned savage' is only imposed on the Vedic evidence with a considerable amount of text-torturing.

James Mill's highly influential History of British India (1817), most particularly the long essay "Of the Hindus," comprising ten chapters, is the single most important source of British Indophobia and hostility to Orientalism.

Thomas R (2008)

British Indomania did not die of natural causes; it was killed off. The Indophobia that became the norm in early-nineteenth-century Britain was constructed by Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism, and its chief architects were Charles Grant and James Mill.

Thomas R (2008)

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.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Trautmann (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.