La Renaissance orientale

Yes. La Renaissance orientale is particularly interesting for your interests because it is really a history of the moment when India became intellectually available to Europe—not merely as an exotic place, but as a possible source for understanding religion, philosophy, language, poetry, and the origins of humanity.

Schwab’s central claim is striking: Europe experienced a kind of second Renaissance, comparable in cultural impact to the Renaissance’s recovery of Greek and Roman antiquity, when Sanskrit texts began arriving in Europe.

The part I think you would find most fascinating

1. The discovery of Sanskrit changed Europe’s idea of human antiquity.

Before this, European ideas of ancient civilization were largely organized around Hebrew/Biblical, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquity. India suddenly presented Europeans with an ancient textual civilization outside the Judeo-Christian world.

Schwab emphasizes the shock of encountering Sanskrit literature and philosophy that seemed to push human antiquity much farther back than Europeans had imagined.

That is very close to the question you’ve been pursuing with Eliade, Rumi, the Upanishads, Patanjali, Kabir, and comparative religion: what happens when one civilization encounters another civilization’s account of ultimate reality?

2. Anquetil-Duperron and the

Oupnek’hat

One of the great characters is Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron.

He acquired the Persian translation of the Upanishads associated with Dara Shikoh and produced the Latin Oupnek’hat around 1801–1802. That work became a major channel through which European intellectuals encountered the Upanishadic tradition.

This is especially relevant to your reading of the Upanishads and Indian mystical vocabulary, because there is a fascinating linguistic chain:

Sanskrit Upanishads → Persian translation → Latin translation → European philosophers

So European readers weren’t necessarily encountering “India” directly. They were often encountering India after several layers of linguistic and intellectual transformation.

Schwab is extraordinarily interested in that transmission process.

3. The

Sacountalâ

phenomenon

Another wonderful episode is the European discovery of Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā.

The Sanskrit drama became something of a sensation in European literary circles. Schwab follows how Sanskrit literature entered European Romanticism—not merely academic Orientalism.

This is important because Schwab’s “Renaissance” isn’t simply:

European scholars discover Sanskrit grammar.

It is:

European poets, philosophers, religious thinkers and intellectuals begin imagining humanity differently because India exists.

That is a much bigger story.

4. Sanskrit → Indo-European language → a new history of humanity

This may be the most intellectually consequential thread.

Schwab follows people such as William Jones, Friedrich Schlegel, Franz Bopp, Eugène Burnouf, Colebrooke and Max Müller, and the emergence of comparative philology.

The discovery of systematic relationships among Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and European languages radically altered European thinking about linguistic and human history.

In other words, Sanskrit wasn’t just another ancient language.

It became evidence that apparently separate civilizations had a deep historical relationship.

That eventually produced the concept of the Indo-European language family.

5. India enters European philosophy

This is where Schwab becomes much more interesting than a simple history of Orientalism.

He follows the movement into Romanticism and philosophy—people such as Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schelling and others—and asks what happened when Indian ideas entered European intellectual life.

The table of contents itself gives you a sense of the sweep: Sanskrit, the Vedas, Upanishads, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Râmâyana, Mahabharata, Manou, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Romanticism, philosophy and religion all appear in the book’s conceptual landscape.

So you could read Schwab almost as:

“How did India change European consciousness?”

rather than simply:

“How did Europeans study India?”

6. And Schwab has a wonderfully large cast of characters

This is probably one reason the book has remained important.

He moves among:

• Anquetil-Duperron

• William Jones

• Charles Wilkins

• Colebrooke

• Friedrich Schlegel

• Eugène Burnouf

• Silvestre de Sacy

• Chézy

• Bopp

• Lassen

• Max Müller

• Goethe

• Schopenhauer

• Michelet

• Lamartine

• Victor Hugo

• and many others.

The result is almost an intellectual genealogy showing how a Sanskrit manuscript discovered in India eventually affects European poetry, philosophy, linguistics and religious thought.

And there is an important caveat

Schwab wrote in 1950, and his conception of the “Oriental Renaissance” is itself part of the history he is describing. Modern scholarship is more cautious about the older European tendency to imagine a single timeless “India” or “Orient.”

One reviewer has also noted that Schwab was a man of letters rather than a specialist in Oriental Studies, while another scholarly assessment calls the book a landmark account of the East-West intellectual encounter.

That actually makes it more interesting for you: you can read Schwab on two levels—both as a history of European discovery of India and as a fascinating artifact of twentieth-century thinking about that discovery.

The connection to Eliade

I would put it this way:

Eliade asks:

What is the structure of the sacred across human cultures?

Schwab asks:

What happened to European thought when Europe suddenly encountered enormous ancient traditions outside its own classical and biblical inheritance?

And Coomaraswamy sits interestingly between them: he tries to articulate Indian traditional thought itself rather than merely narrating Europe’s discovery of it.

So if you’re reading Eliade → Coomaraswamy → Upanishads → Rumi → Kabir, Schwab supplies the intellectual history of how much of this “Eastern” material actually entered the Western intellectual bloodstream in the first place.

The French original is also worth considering rather than automatically choosing the English translation: the original is available in a recent 2024 edition from Les Belles Lettres, with bibliography and index.  And there is an interesting scholarly warning that the older English translation sometimes mishandles Schwab’s difficult, poetic French and Indian/Anglo-Indian terminology.

If you want, I can next  take the table of contents of La Renaissance orientale and identify the 10–15 chapters/passages that would be most valuable specifically for your Eliade–Coomaraswamy–Rumi–Kabir line of inquiry.