>The harbor of Pegu is decently sized. Indian dervishes live there, and precious rocks are mined nearby. The Chinese section of the harbor is very great in size. They sell porcelain there at a cheap price. Wives will sleep with their husbands during day and at night they go to visit strangers to sleep with them. They will even pay the stranger money for the service, and will bring the stranger sweet food and wine, they fed and ply them with drinks as they love foreign merchants as they are white while people of their own country are very dark. If a man’s wife becomes pregnant from a foreign merchant, her husband will pay him money. They look at the child once it is born, and if the child is white the merchant is paid three hundred tenek, but if the child is dark then the merchant is paid nothing, while what he drank and ate is considered to be a gift in their customs.
Afanasy Nikitin — A Journey Beyond the Three Seas (1466–1472)

>Indian are ‘indolent’ and ‘vile’ by their very nature
French account (1500s)

>Indians have “stupidity and low cunning,” inherently backward
Jemima Kindersley (1760s)

>Hindu customs are "abominable and revolting," Hindus are cannibals, their habits are "disgusting" and their food "revolting."
Abbe J.A. Dubois (early 1800s)

>Hindus are “a people exceedingly depraved.” Sanskrit medicine, astronomy, history, and geography are laughable nonsense. Indians are “cowardly, unfeeling and mendacious”
Charles Grant & James Mill (early 1800s)

>the Bengalese are "notoriously licentious" and hill men are "servile, deceptive and cunning, utterly without honour or principle"
Rev. Hobart Caunter (1834)

>Hindus are “inert” and filled with “low cunning,” “superstition” and “fulsome sycophancy.” Their language is “a heap of allegories". Hindu beliefs are “absurd” and “monstrous,” and the entire group is lacking compassion compared to the British
John Bacon (1840)