Auld Lang Syne. Second Series: My Indian Friends

In an age when the British Empire ruled India and few Europeans troubled to know its people as anything more than subjects, Friedrich Max Müller wrote this book about his friends. Remarkably, he never visited India. Yet through letters, translations, and decades of intellectual exchange, Müller formed deep bonds with some of the finest minds of nineteenth-century India: scholars, philosophers, reformers who corresponded with him across oceans and shared their world with a curious German professor in Oxford. This book is Müller looking back on those friendships with genuine affection, tracing his childhood fascination with Sanskrit through decades of collaboration, introducing readers to figures like Dvârkanâth Tagore and the circle of Bengal's cultural renaissance. It is not dry scholarship but something rarer: a Victorian intellectual's love letter to a civilization he knew only through books and correspondence. The book endures as a complicated, human document of cross-cultural friendship before such things were common, revealing both the possibilities and the limits of knowing a distant land through its people.