Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha published in 1922, is a foundational work of modern literature that bridges Eastern philosophy with Western individualism. The story follows Siddhartha, a young Brahmin as he abandons his privileged life, rejects asceticism and material pleasure, and ultimately learns to find enlightenment from a ferryman and a mystical river.
While initially slow to gain popularity in the West, Siddhartha was released in the U.S. in 1951 and became a defining text for the counterculture movement of the sixties and seventies and a bible for the Woodstock generation, as a guide for self-discovery and a critique of materialism. It joins the ranks of other alternative, non conformist, classics, of that era: “The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead” (1964) by Timothy Leary, “The Way of Zen” (1957) by Alan Watts and “On the Road” (1957) by Jack Kerouac.
It is considered one of Hesse’s most important works, often paired with his other works, Demian and Steppenwolf, as a “portal” into exploring the inner psyche and Eastern thought. It elevated Hesse to a figure of “world literature” and contributed to his 1946 Nobel Prize. Today, it remains a staple in classrooms.
The Indian Connection
Hesse was born in Calw, in the Black Forest region of Germany. His childhood, had an Indian ambience, listening to the stories of his maternal grandfather, Hermann Gundert, who had long worked in India as a missionary of the Basel Mission. Gundert lived in the southern Indian province of Kerala, learned the Malayalam language and wrote fundamental works on it, especially the Malayalam and English Dictionary (1862) and A Grammar of the Malayalam Language (1868), which are still significant today.
Hermann Hesse’s mother was born in Kerala and spent her youth there, where her father worked . She later married Johannes Hesse, a Baltic German, and the couple also worked as missionaries in India before returning to Germany where Hermann Hesse was born.1
Travels to Asia
In April 1911, Hesse’s third son, Martin, was born but his relations with his first wife, Maria Bernoulli, were becoming difficult. Hesse learns that his Swiss artist friend Hans Sturzenegger is planning a trip to India; to visit his brother the merchant Robert Sturzenegger, who had taken over the family's company in Singapore in 1909. Hesse spontaneously decides to participate in this trip. boarding a passenger liner for Asia, a three-month steamship voyage to Colombo, Penang. Singapore, Sumatra, Borneo and Burma.
He sailed into Penang harbour on 27 September 1911, where he and his friend Hans Sturzenegger were received by Hans’ brother Robert Sturzenegger, accompanied by two others, Suhl and Tschudi. The visitors took a rickshaw, to a Malay tailor to be measured up for white suits, before arriving at the Eastern & Oriental Hotel. Hesse found George Town quaintly elegant, ‘a pseudo-classical style in public and commercial buildings; the Chinese houses ‘simple, light, nice.’
Hesse visited the beach, Penang Hill and the the Kek Lok Si temple which he described in his notebooks as ‘big and grotesque, new and inelegant, only the two temple pools were beautiful, one full of holy turtles, the other full of fish, like young carps, swimming in swarms of thousands. In the Ayer Itam countryside, he was pleasantly surprised when ‘in the middle of the verdant tropical wilderness, a tram suddenly appeared, with which we reached the city again at 3 o’clock’.
In Penang, Hesse interacted with the close-knit German-speaking mercantile community, described in Salma Khoo’s book More Than Merchants: a close-knit, influential group of traders who had transitioned from sojourners to settled residents establishing prominent trading offices along the harbor front, built luxurious suburban residences and contributed significantly to public life, engineering, and photography, with members like Ernst August Kaulfuss pioneering postcard publishing and the architect Henry Alfred Neubronner.
From Penang, he travelled overland to Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur. Johore and Singapore, before continuing by sea to Sumatra. He describes Ipoh, at the height of the Malayan tin-mining boom, as a “modern, bustling town” characterized by the industrial scars of tin mining. He noted the contrast between the vast, white open-cast mines and the surrounding tropical greenery. He observed the “clean, straight streets” of the new town, noting the European influence that he felt stifled the authentic local spirit he was searching for. His notes frequently mention the oppressive heat of the Kinta Valley, which he found exhausting.
In my hometown, Johore Bahru he visits the Sultan’s Palace, describing it as an example of the “Westernized” tastes of local royalty, featuring Victorian furniture and European aesthetics reflecting a sense of melancholy that the "Dream of the East" was being replaced by plantations and colonial bureaucracy.2
Contrary to the original intention, the trip does not take its normal course. Away from home, Hesse complained about bad hotels and worse food, beggars, street traders and the weather. Hesse suffered from relentless seasickness and was only able to complete the journey with constant doses of morphine.
A severe stomach ailment after his trip to the Indonesian islands rendered him immobile, and he had to give up his plans to go to southern India. In Singapore he boarded another vessel that took him back to Europe. Climatic adjustments, poor diet, low bacteriological resistance and unexpectedly high living costs, lead to forsaking the original plan to visit Southern India on their return journey, returning home instead after three months.
Disappointment & Depression
We come to the South and East full of longing, driven by a dark and grateful premonition of home, and we find here a paradise, the abundance and rich voluptuousness of all natural gifts. We find the pure, simple, childlike people of paradise.
But we ourselves are different; we are alien here and without any rights of citizenship; we lost our paradise long ago, and the new one that we wish to build is not to be found along the equator and on the warm seas of the East. It lies within us and in our own northern future.
- Hermann Hesse, Aus Indien
Hesse returned from the East to another bout of depression, He had in his early years been diagnosed with mental illness, and entered a psychiatric institution. Suffering repeated episodes of acute depression, recurrently suicidal, he had struggled throughout his life to achieve some kind of inner equilibrium.
He did not find that idealized version of India during his trip to Indonesia or Sri Lanka ( which in Hesse’s view were part of India ). He returned home none the richer for his experience, disillusioned and a profound sense of emptiness set in.
One reason was that the goal of the religions he had been half-heartedly exploring was the opposite of what he was looking for. Hesse wanted self-realisation, whereas Eastern mysticism aimed at the dissolution of the self. Hesse’s Siddhartha had more of Nietzsche in him than of Buddha, for his protagonist, as for Hesse himself, “It was not a question of renouncing the self but of finding it, a very Western line of thought.”3
It took a whole decade for his Asian experience to be reflected in Siddhartha. due to personal disasters, illness, and the First World War, writing the book living alone in Switzerland. However Hesse’s depiction is not so much the life of Indian monks as that of a modern Western man, who restlessly follows varying drives and longings. Hesse himself admits that Siddhartha is a “European” book.