To answer that question, let me begin with a quotation. It comes from an American stage magician, Claude Alexander, and was published in 1924:

Writing his tract on Hindu magic at the height of his popularity in 1924, Alexander identified India as the land of ancient occult knowledge. He felt that the Vedas were the original sources of esoteric teachings. He argued that by practising oriental magic one could master clairvoyance and telepathic power. In making such claims, he was just a later addition to the long list of Western Orientalists and occultists who had already perceived India as the land of ancient sages, the home of age-old spiritual wisdom. Alexander's works were preceded by Friedrich Schlegel's Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 1808), Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia (1879), Friedrich Max Müller's The Sacred Books of the East (1879), and of course H.P. Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine (1888), among others.

This understanding of India as the storehouse of spiritual wisdom is a modern phenomenon – and yet the matter is not straightforward or easy. Are we dealing with nothing but a stereotypical Romantic view typical of modern Western society, or is there more at stake? In fact, the question cannot be answered by a simple “yes” or “no.” To get a clearer picture, we have to understand how this image of India as a land of spiritual knowledge developed. I will focus on two major points: firstly, why India's image as a spiritual and enchanted land is a picture of the imagination, and secondly, how India became a site of contestation between two different streams of thought. I will pay particular attention to the case of the Theosophical Society and its romanticisation of India.