‘Of India the greater I say this,’ wrote Father Jordanus, speaking not only of the men but of the birds and beasts, ‘these animals (the elephants) are marvelous: for they exceed in size and bulk and strength, and also in understanding, all the animals of the world . . . He kneeleth, lieth, sitteth, goeth and cometh, merely at his master’s words . . . Of birds I say this: there be some white all over as snow, some red as scarlet of the grain; some green as grass: some parti-coloured: in such quantity and delectability as cannot be uttered. Parrots, or popinjay, after their kind, of every possible colour except black, for black ones are never found: but white all over, and green and red, and also of mixed colours. The birds of this India seem really like creatures of Paradise.’

‘Who can fitly describe the great riches the women carry on their persons,’ said another Italian traveller, Paes, in the early sixteenth century. ‘Collars of gold with so many diamonds and rubies and pearls and bracelets on their arms, girdles below and anklets on their feet. Then to see the grandeur of the nobles and the men of rank, I cannot describe it all, nor should I be believed, if I did so. I went along with my head so often turned from one side to the other that I was almost falling backwards off my horse, with my senses lost.’

Queen Elizabeth’s envoys to Emperor Akbar, the ‘Grand Moghul,’ speak of the capital of India, as being ‘much greater than London and very populous,’ and in the bazaars was ‘a great resort of merchandise from Persia, and out of India, and very much merchandise of silk and cloth and precious stones, both rubies, diamonds and pearls,’ and all along the road from Agra to Fatehpur Sikri (seventeen miles away) ‘was a market of victuals and other things, as full as though a man were still in town, and so many people as if a man were in a market.’

‘If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow—in some ways a very paradise on earth—I should point to India,’ wrote Max Mueller in his famous essay on India. ‘If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life and had found solutions to some of them, I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, in Europe, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life not for this life only, but a transfigured and eternal life—again I should point to India.’