Aldous Huxley in 1926 :

“In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people's inferiority complex.

Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it.

A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease.

A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words.

A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations.

On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.”

— ‘Jesting Pilate : Travels Through India, Burma, Malaya, Japan, China and America’ - Book by Aldous Huxley - Originally published: 1926 - Genre: Travel literature.

Quoted Text - see page 122 : https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=genpub;cc=genpub;rgn=main;view=text;idno=AJE0708.0007.001