SOURCE: “Toward a Perspective for the Indian Element in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha,” in German Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2, March, 1976, pp. 191–200.

In the following essay, Brown discusses various theories about the Indian elements in Siddhartha.

First contact with Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha indicates quite clearly that things Indian abound in the novel. Titles, names, settings, and cultural background are all Indian. For an author who grew up in a household having close ties to India and who was the enthusiastic inheritor of the eighteenth and nineteenth century German interest in India, such a preoccupation with the subcontinent and its culture in a novel is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that an author who was deeply concerned with religious questions but unable to accept wholly any orthodox form of Christianity would be open to non-Christian, e.g., Indian religions, in his quest for a belief. Hesse's trip of 1911 to Malaya, Sumatra...