The Waste Land and the Indian Knowledge Systems

The Waste Land and the Indian Knowledge Systems

This blog is written as a task assigned by the head of the Department of English (MKBU), Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. 

The Guru in the Shadow

Tracing Eliot's Indian Footsteps

London, 1922. The city streets still smelled of cordite and grief. The war to end all wars had ended, yes, but what came after? A generation shellshocked, a culture fractured, a spiritual void so vast that the cathedrals of Europe could not fill it. Into this wreckage stepped T.S. Eliot, an American expatriate with a Harvard education and a Sanskrit vocabulary, carrying a poem that would become the obituary for Western civilization as it knew itself.

The Waste Land didn't just diagnose the disease. It prescribed a cure one that came not from the ruins of Carthage or the ashes of Troy, but from the banks of the Ganges and the silence of the Himalayas. Eliot's masterpiece is often read as a lament, a five-part dirge for a world that lost its way. But what if we've been reading it wrong? What if The Waste Land is not a complaint but a quest a search for Brahman, the ultimate reality that lies beyond the illusions of our shattered mirrors?

This is not some orientalist fantasy I'm spinning. The evidence is in the text itself, in the thunder's threefold command, in the chant of "Shantih" that closes the poem like a prayer. Eliot didn't just borrow from India. He surrendered to it. And to understand the revolution he started in modern poetry, we need to trace his footsteps back to the source.

The Thunder Speaks: Setting the Moral Compass

Let's start with the obvious: the ending. "What the Thunder Said" is not window dressing. It's the hinge on which the entire poem turns. M.E. Grenander and K.S. Narayana Rao, in their landmark essay on The Waste Land and the Upanishads, make this crystal clear. The thunder's utterance Da Da Da is lifted directly from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the oldest and most revered texts in Hindu philosophy.

In the Upanishad, Prajapati (the Lord of Creation) teaches his three kinds of children gods, humans, and demons by repeating the syllable Da. Each group interprets it differently: the gods hear "Control yourselves" (Damyata), humans hear "Give" (Datta), and demons hear "Be compassionate" (Dayadhvam). Why the difference? Because each group struggles with a particular vice. Gods are impulsive and pleasure-seeking, so they need discipline. Humans are greedy and acquisitive, so they need generosity. Demons are cruel and violent, so they need mercy.

Eliot flips the order in his poem Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata placing human virtue first. Why? Because The Waste Land is ultimately a human story, not a celestial one. The poem speaks to us, the living dead shuffling across London Bridge, not to angels or devils. And what does it tell us? That salvation begins with sacrifice.

Grenander and Rao dig deep into what Datta means in the Hindu context. It's not about tossing a coin to a beggar. It's about the "awful daring of a moment's surrender," the kind of self-giving that can never be taken back. They reference the Vedic story of Maharishi Dadhichi, who gave his spine yes, his actual backbone so the gods could forge a weapon to free the seven rivers locked up by demons. That's Datta. That's the gift Eliot is talking about: total, irrevocable, terrifying.

But here's where the Western critics get it wrong. Grover Smith, in his otherwise excellent study of Eliot's sources, reads this passage as a negative answer to the thunder's command. He thinks the speaker is confessing to a "craven surrender to a tyranny of the blood," a moment of lust rather than love. Grenander and Rao demolish this reading. They argue that the tone of the passage is far too solemn, too reverent, to be about a one-night stand. The speaker is not confessing a sin. He's mourning a failure the failure to give himself fully, either to another human being in love or to the divine in faith. The "age of prudence" that cannot retract the moment is not an accusation. It's a lament for the Prufrocks of the world who never dared at all.

This reframing is critical. If we read Datta as a failed attempt at human connection, then the entire poem shifts from despair to longing. The Waste Land is not barren because humanity sinned. It's barren because humanity held back.

The Twin Selves: Tiresias as the Watching Bird

If the thunder gives us the moral center of the poem, then Tiresias gives us the existential one. P.S. Sri, in his essay on Upanishadic perceptions in Eliot's work, identifies a core theme running through all of Eliot's major poetry: the perception of the dual self.

The Mundaka, Svetasvatara, and Maitri Upanishads all describe the human soul using the same metaphor: two birds perched on the same tree. One bird flits from branch to branch, eating the fruit some sweet, some bitter. The other bird simply watches from the highest branch, silent and still. The lower bird is the ego-self, caught up in desire and suffering, entangled in maya (the illusion of the material world). The higher bird is the eternal self, the Atman, which is identical to Brahman, the ultimate reality.

Eventually, through cycles of craving and suffering, the lower bird realizes that all its struggles are meaningless. It looks up, recognizes the higher bird, and becomes one with it. This is liberation. This is enlightenment.

Eliot's poetry is haunted by this duality. Prufrock is split between "I" and "you," acting and observing, paralyzed by self-consciousness. Gerontion squats in his "decayed house," watching the world spin in a "wilderness of mirrors" while he waits for death. The Hollow Men shuffle in circles, unable to look up. These are all variations of the lower bird, trapped in illusion, unable to see the watcher above.

And then there's Tiresias.

Eliot's note on The Waste Land is explicit: "What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem." Tiresias is not just another character. He is the consciousness that contains all the others. He is the one-eyed merchant and the drowned Phoenician sailor. He is the typist and the carbuncular clerk. He is all the women in the poem because "the two sexes meet in Tiresias."

Sri argues that Tiresias functions like the higher bird in the Upanishadic metaphor. He is the observer, watching his own past lives unfold before him like a film reel. The characters in the poem are not separate people. They are Tiresias remembering himself in different incarnations, enacting the same patterns of desire and suffering again and again. This is samsara, the cycle of birth and rebirth. And Tiresias, blind but clairvoyant, sees it all. He "foresuffered all," enacted it all on the same divan or bed.

The genius of this reading is that it makes the poem's fragmentation not a bug but a feature. The shifting voices, the jumbled timeline, the abrupt scene changes these are not signs of chaos. They are signs of consciousness trying to grasp the totality of its own existence. Tiresias is struggling to break free from maya, to see through the appearances to the reality beneath. He perceives that the world is "unreal" London, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, all of them are just shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, or in this case, projections on the screen of his mind.

Shantih: The Peace That Cannot Be Spoken

And what about that final word? Shantih, shantih, shantih. Eliot's note tells us it's a formal ending to an Upanishad, "the Peace which passeth understanding." But K. Narayana Chandran, in a sharp little essay published in American Literature, argues that we've all been missing the irony.

Chandran points out that Shantih is never chanted alone in Hindu ritual. It must be preceded by Om, the primordial syllable, the sound of the universe, the symbol of Brahman itself. The Chandogya Upanishad is explicit: Om is the essence of all essences, the Word from which all other words flow. It represents the unity and order of the cosmos. Without Om, Shantih is just a wish, not a blessing. It's a prayer without power.

And Eliot knew this. He studied Sanskrit under Charles Rockwell Lanman at Harvard. He read the Upanishads in the original. He could not have missed the significance of Om. So why did he leave it out?

Chandran's answer is devastating: because there is no Om in the Waste Land. There is no unity, no order, no cosmic harmony. The poem's world is fragmented, chaotic, broken beyond repair. To chant Om in such a place would be a lie. So Eliot gives us only Shantih the hope of peace, not the reality of it. It's a peace that "passeth understanding" in the most literal sense: it is beyond reach, beyond comprehension, beyond the capacity of the broken voices in the poem to achieve.

The Harvard Roots: How Eliot Became a Student of the East

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before Eliot could strip Om from Shantih, before he could speak through Tiresias or channel the thunder, he had to learn the language. And that education began not in London or Paris, but in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University's Oriental Study Center.

Rajani Sharma's essay, published in The Criterion, gives us the biographical scaffolding we need. Eliot arrived at Harvard in 1906, a young man from St. Louis with literary ambitions and a restless intellect. By the time he left in 1914, he had earned a master's degree in philosophy, studied under some of the greatest minds of the era, and steeped himself in Sanskrit, Pali, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

His mentors were formidable. Irving Babbitt, a fierce advocate of Humanism, taught him that the chaos of modernity could only be tamed by returning to classical discipline and restraint ideas rooted in his study of Buddhist Pali texts. George Santayana, the poet-philosopher, showed him that religion and poetry could coexist, that beauty and metaphysics were not enemies. And then there were the language teachers: Charles Rockwell Lanman and James Haughton Woods, who opened the door to the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita.

Lanman deserves special mention. His Sanskrit Reader (1884) was a landmark in American scholarship, and his essay "Hindu Law and Custom as to Gifts" published in the Kittredge Anniversary Papers in 1913, the same year Eliot was his student provides a direct link to The Waste Land. Lanman's essay opens with the exact passage from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad that Eliot would use in "What the Thunder Said." It explains the symbolism of Prajapati's teaching, the meaning of the syllable Da, and the ritual of pouring water to seal a gift a gesture that symbolizes irrevocability. "Just as the water, once poured out, can never be regathered and taken back, so the gift, once given, will never be taken back."

Sound familiar? "The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract." Eliot did not stumble onto this idea. He studied it in Lanman's class.

Sharma argues that Eliot's engagement with Indian thought was not superficial or exotic. It was organic to his worldview. He saw in Hinduism and Buddhism a seriousness about moral life, a willingness to confront suffering and impermanence, that he found lacking in the complacent Christianity of the early twentieth century. As Sharma puts it, "Eliot envisioned and in turn advocated that spiritualism was the only way to release modern humanity from the desert of spiritual miasma." And he knew that Western traditions alone could not provide the cure.

This is where Sharma's reading gets really interesting. She zeroes in on a passage in "A Game of Chess" that most critics either ignore or misread: the conversation between the woman and her friend about Lil and Albert. Lil has taken pills to abort a pregnancy. Her friend scolds her: "What you get married for if you don't want children?"

On the surface, this is just sordid realism working-class London gossip. But Sharma argues that it's a direct critique of Western modernity's abandonment of sacred structures. In Hinduism, marriage is not a contract or a romantic arrangement. It is a samskara, a sacred ritual that binds husband and wife in a cosmic order. And the bearing of children is not a choice or a burden. It is another samskara, a duty to the ancestors, a way of ensuring that the wheel of life continues.

By taking the pills, Lil violates both samskaras. She treats marriage as a convenience and childbirth as an inconvenience. She is the embodiment of the Waste Land's sterility not because she is poor or uneducated, but because she has lost any sense of life as sacred. Sharma connects this to the Indian concept of Sanyam restraint, discipline, the control of desire. If people want to limit procreation, the Hindu answer is not pills or abortion. It is self-control, the cultivation of a higher will.

This reading transforms the entire scene. It's no longer just about class or gender or the horrors of backstreet medicine. It's about the collapse of a moral framework, the replacement of the sacred with the mechanical. And the only solution Eliot can offer is the one the thunder will speak later: Damyata. Control yourself.

The Upanishadic Mirror: Nanda's Vision of Maya and the Fisher King

If Sharma gives us the biographical and moral context, Manoj Kr Nanda gives us the metaphysical one. His essay, published in the International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts, reads The Waste Land as a direct parallel to the structure and themes of the Upanishads.

Nanda argues that the poem is not just influenced by Indian philosophy it is built on it. The five sections of the poem mirror the five elements of Hindu cosmology (earth, water, fire, air, ether). The journey through the poem is the journey toward moksha liberation from suffering. And the central symbol of the poem, the Fisher King, is an avatar of the seeker in the Upanishads, wounded and waiting for the knowledge that will heal him.

Let's unpack that. The Fisher King, in medieval legend, is a wounded ruler whose land has become barren because of his injury. The land and the king are one; his sickness is the land's sickness. Only the Grail Knight, by asking the right question, can heal him. But what is the "right question"? Nanda suggests that it's the same question the Upanishads pose: Who am I? What is the true nature of the self?

The Fisher King, in this reading, is not just a mythological figure. He is every human being caught in the illusion of maya, mistaking the material world for reality, suffering because he cannot see his true nature as Atman, identical to Brahman. His wound is ignorance. His barren land is the world of appearances, the world of Tiresias's "unreal city."

And the water that can heal him? It's not literal rain. It's spiritual knowledge, the flow of divine grace. Nanda points to the Dhammapada, a Buddhist text Eliot also studied, which describes the seeds of the Bodhi tree (enlightenment) being "irrigated well with the waters of compassion and richly manured by meditation." Water, in this symbolic register, is the teaching, the dharma, the truth that dissolves illusion.

This is why the drought in The Waste Land is so devastating. It's not just a physical drought. It's the absence of wisdom, the silence of the teachers, the drying up of the spiritual sources. Nanda writes: "Ganga was sunken and the limp leaves / Waited for rain, while the black clouds / Gathered far distant, over Himavant." Ganga is not the Thames. It is the sacred river of India, the embodiment of purity and grace. Himavant is not the Alps. It is the Himalaya, the throne of Shiva, the home of the gods. Eliot uses these Sanskrit names deliberately. He is telling us where to look for the cure.

The thunder that finally speaks is not a natural phenomenon. It is the voice of Prajapati, the voice of the universe, breaking through the silence. And its message Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata is the path out of the Waste Land. Give, sympathize, control. These are not moral platitudes. They are practices, disciplines, ways of breaking the cycle of samsara and realizing the self.

Nanda also addresses the fragmented structure of the poem, which has puzzled and frustrated readers since 1922. But he argues that the fragmentation is the point. The Upanishads teach that the material world is fragmented, plural, constantly shifting this is maya, the dance of appearances. The mind caught in maya cannot perceive unity. It sees only parts, only surfaces, only mirrors reflecting mirrors. The fragmentation of The Waste Land is a formal enactment of this condition. Eliot is not trying to give us a coherent narrative. He is showing us what consciousness looks like when it is trapped in illusion.

Synthesis: The Debt Modernism Owes to Ancient India

So what do we do with all this? How do we reconcile Eliot the Harvard-trained Sanskritist with Eliot the Anglo-Catholic convert? How do we square the Indian wisdom in The Waste Land with the Christian symbols that also saturate it?

The answer is that we stop trying to separate them. Eliot himself said, in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, "Long ago I studied the ancient Indian languages, and while I was chiefly interested at that time in philosophy, I read a little poetry too, and I know that my poetry shows the influence of Indian thought and sensibility." He did not say "borrows from" or "alludes to." He said shows the influence of. It's in the DNA.

Modernism, as a movement, is often described as a break with tradition, a rejection of the past in favor of the new. But that's only half the story. What Eliot and his contemporaries actually did was expand the tradition. They looked beyond the canonical Western sources Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and asked: what if the tradition is bigger than Europe? What if the wisdom we need to understand the modern crisis has been sitting in the Ganges Valley for three thousand years?

The Waste Land is the answer to that question. It is a poem that places the Buddha and St. Augustine side by side, not as competitors but as co-witnesses to the same truth. It is a poem that uses the thunder of the Upanishads to judge the spiritual bankruptcy of London and Vienna. It is a poem that ends with a Sanskrit benediction because English has no word adequate to the task.

The Final Word: Shantih

Let me end where Eliot ended, with that threefold chant. Shantih, shantih, shantih. We've established that it's ironic, that it's incomplete, that it's a hope rather than a fulfillment. But it's also something more.

It's an invitation.

Eliot gives us the fragments. He gives us the thunder's command, the Fisher King's wound, Tiresias's memories, the sunken Ganga, the distant Himavant. He gives us enough clues to begin the journey, but he does not give us the destination. That is our work. The reader's work. The work of every generation that picks up the poem and tries to make sense of it.

The Waste Land is not a museum piece. It is a living text, a set of instructions for navigating spiritual crisis. And the instructions are drawn from the oldest manual we have: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada. These texts teach that suffering is real, that illusion is powerful, but that liberation is possible. That the lower bird can become the higher bird. That the Fisher King can be healed. That peace, however distant, is worth seeking.

Did Eliot steal from the East? No. He surrendered to it. And in doing so, he gave us a poem that refuses to be contained by any single tradition. The Waste Land is Western and Eastern, Christian and Hindu, modern and ancient. It is a crossroads. And the guru in the shadow is still there, waiting to teach anyone willing to listen.

Works Cited

Chandran, K. Narayana. "'Shantih' in The Waste Land." American Literature, vol. 61, no. 4, 1989, pp. 681-683. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2927003.

Grenander, M.E., and K.S. Narayana Rao. "The Waste Land and the Upanishads: What Does the Thunder Say?" Indian Literature, vol. 14, no. 1, 1971, pp. 85-98. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23330564

Nanda, Manoj Kr. "The Upanishadic Elements in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land." International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts, vol. 12, no. 9, 2024, pp. c932-c935. www.ijcrt.org.

Sharma, Rajani. "T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: A Perspective on Indian Thoughts." The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 5, no. 2, 2014, pp. 370-377. www.the-criterion.com.

Sri, P.S. "Upanishadic Perceptions in T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Drama." Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 62, no. 2, 2008, pp. 34-49. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20479528.