Octavio Paz on Nehru:

“It was in the last years of his life. Despite his visible fatigue, I was always amazed at his elegance: immaculately dressed in white with a rose in his lapel. It was not difficult to guess that his two great passions were politics and women.”

“Nehru was a man of Western culture; neither in his words nor in his thought was there the slightest trace of any sympathy or affinity with the double religious tradition of India, the Hindu and Muslim. He was, however, remarkably interested in young artists.”

“All of his international policy in those dates, as one can see in the speeches of Krishna Menon (whom I think of as Nehru’s evil spirit), was directed towards creating an anti-Western front...did he ever realize his terrible miscalculation?”

“The revolt of 1857 was a doomed and chaotic attempt to return things to the way they had been before the British arrived. The Independence of 1947 was the triumph of British ideas and institutions...without the British”

On the Indian constitution: “In this sense, the Constitution of India was founder on a fiction: it is not a reality but a blueprint. Yet this fiction has withstood the successive separatist movements that have threatened it.”

“It is a fiction that possesses a historical and political reality of unexpected vitality, a project created by a minority that has shown itself capable of successfully confronting an ancient tradition of internecine wars. This fact merits reflection.”

On the US vs India (and Mexico):

“For modern India, as it is for Mexico, the national project, the future to be realized, implies a critique of the past. In the United States, the past of each of its ethnic groups is a private matter; the country itself has no past...”

“It was born with modernity; it is modernity. In contrast, modernization has been the core of the national project of the Indian elites. The similarity here to medico is notable: in both cases we are confronting a project hostile to our own traditions.”

On the contrast between Indian and Greco-Roman antiquity:

“The state was the central protagonist of Mediterranean antiquity... in India the historical agents were the religious reformers and their adepts...almost always allied with the power of a dynasty”

In one case, the supremacy of the political; in the other, of the religious.”

“At the fall of the Roman Enpire, the Church took its place. In this way Europe avoided a return to barbarity and maintained its ties with Greco-Roman antiquity. The barbarians became Christians; in turn, Christianity became identified surf the Byzantine State”

“Thus Christian monotheism radically changed the pagan societies without breaking completely the ancient civilization. In India nothing similar occurred.”

“First the church fathers and later the great medieval scholars were nourished by Greek philosophy... in contrast, Muslim theologians did not look on the Vedas or the Upanishads with the same veneration with which St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas studied Plato Ot Aristotle

On the religious reform of hinduism:

“The political movement was preceded by a reform of Hinduism in which the influence of English Christianity was decisive. The leader of this reformation, Ram Mohan Roy, attempted to restore Hinduism to its original purity.”

“Influenced by the ideas of the Unitarian church,he found proof in the sacred texts of Brahmanism thst the true Hindu religion,now reformed by superstition, was no less rigorous than that of the Christians...I am certain that he never realized he was the creator of a pious fraud”

“To defend Hinduism against the criticism of missionaries, the reformers Christianized it. Their secret religion was Christianity; without knowing or wanting to, they adopted its values”