T. S. Eliot’s Indian connection is often reduced to a few Sanskrit lines at the end of The Waste Land. But behind those famous words lies a much deeper story: a young American modernist who studied Sanskrit and Pali at Harvard, read the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita with some rigor, and then quietly threaded their language and ideas through the poems that would define twentieth-century English literature. Eliot did not drape his work in exotic décor. Instead, he used Indian terms, myths, and philosophical problems as tools to think with—folding them into an essentially Anglo-Christian imagination, sometimes faithfully, sometimes freely.
The most visible traces are verbal. In The Waste Land, the poem’s broken landscape suddenly opens onto the banks of the Ganges: “Ganga was sunken,” “Himavant” is named, and the thunder speaks in Sanskrit—“Datta, dayadhvam, damyata” (give, sympathise, control)—before the poem closes on the triple “Shantih shantih shantih.” Eliot even points his readers to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in his own notes. These are not throwaway exotic words: they arrive at the moment when the poem gropes for an ethic adequate to spiritual ruin. A similar moment appears in Four Quartets, in “The Dry Salvages,” when the poet suddenly wonders, almost conversationally, “if that is what Krishna meant,” alluding to the teaching of the Bhagavad-Gītā on action, detachment, and time. For a writer famous for his reticence, naming Krishna on the page is a surprisingly direct acknowledgement of Indian influence.
Those lines were backed by serious study. Before he became “T. S. Eliot, poet and critic,” he was a Harvard graduate student learning Sanskrit and Pali, attending courses on Indian philosophy, and working through the Upanishads and Buddhist texts in original languages and in German and English translations. Teachers like Charles Rockwell Lanman and James Haughton Woods helped give him access to primary sources rather than just second-hand summaries. That background explains both the specificity of the references and their placement: the Upanishadic thunder in The Waste Land isn’t a scrap picked up from a handbook, but part of a system of thought he had wrestled with in the classroom.
In practice, Eliot used Indian material in three main ways. First, as a vocabulary of remedy: the three imperatives of the thunder and the final shanti in The Waste Land function almost like a spiritual prescription—give, sympathize, control—in the face of cultural exhaustion. Second, as a way of thinking about action in time: the questions that drive Four Quartets—how to act rightly in a world of flux, how to hold together time and eternity—sit very close to the dilemmas staged in the Bhagavad-Gita, and Eliot’s casual reference to Krishna signals that he knows it. Third, as part of a larger experiment in religious synthesis. In the great poems and plays, Indian ideas sit alongside St Augustine, the Christian liturgy, and medieval mystics. Eliot juxtaposes rather than blends: the Upanishads and the Gospels are set in the same imaginative frame, allowed to resonate and grate without any pretence that they form a single tidy system.
Scholars and readers have disagreed on how to judge this inheritance. Admirers, especially in India, have seen in Eliot’s borrowings an early example of a genuinely global modernism, one willing to learn from non-European thought. Others have cautioned that he sometimes reshapes or reorders Upanishadic material to suit his own theological and poetic purposes, and that his ultimate loyalties remained firmly Anglican. Both views are partly right. Eliot’s Indian references are too informed to be dismissed as mere exoticism, yet too selectively deployed to be treated as straightforward transmission. What they reveal, instead, is a modernist writer for whom India was less a place than a repertoire of concepts and sounds—from “Ganga” to “shantih”—that could help him dramatize crisis, duty, renunciation, and the hope of peace. Far from a decorative footnote, India is woven into the inner argument of Eliot’s major poems, an interlocutor he never entirely leaves behind.
Arup K. Chatterjee 