CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION: INDIA AND HER ANCIENT CULTURE

Allegations

1. The Himalayas were a significant cultural divide.

       Counter-Evidence - The book has reduced the importance of the Himalayas in the context of India to the extent that the implication was rarely more than that it bore two major rivers of the great India. We learn about this over the whole study of books including those of NCERTs. We know how the Himalayas were passable. We know how civilizations and cultures permeated across the mighty terrains. Yet, we succeed in putting the highest currency on the importance of these as a marker that separated rather than integrated. So, the implication of presence of Himalayas was more as a climatic-geographical divide (source of two major rivers in two directions, clouds drifting northwards and westwards than a cultural divide, more as a source of two major rivers.

 2. The 'Indian' character which is many a times alleged to tend to fatalism and quietism, accepting fortune and misfortune alike without any complaint.

      Counter-Evidence - The scale of natural phenomenon in India may have helped form the character of her people - 

• The bountiful nature and total dependance on monsoons - which  demanded little of man in return for sustenance.
• However, Nature's terrible anger in form of floods, famines, plagues, could not be appeased by any human effort. 
• On the other hand, other ancient civilizations such as those of the Greeks, Romans and Chinese, had to contend with winters, which encouraged sturdiness and resource. 

Though there is a certain element of quietism in the Indian attitude to life (never approved by the moralists), however, achievements like immense irrigation works, temple architecture, army campaigns, etc. do not suggest devitalized people. 

So, the contribution of climate to Indian character is development of a love of ease and comfort, an addiction to the simple pleasures and luxuries so freely given by Nature - a tendency to which the impulse to self-denial and asceticism on the one hand, and occasional strenuous effort on the other were natural reactions. 

 

The Discovery of Ancient India

India and China have, in fact, the oldest continuous cultural traditions in the world.

The ancient civilization of India and its traditions have been preserved without a break-down to the present day, unlike those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece.

·      The peasants of Egypt or Iraq had no knowledge of culture of their forefathers. Similarly, the Greek counterparts had nay but the vaguest ideas about the glory of Periclean Athens. There had been an almost complete break with the past in each case.

·      When Europeans visited India, they found a culture fully conscious of its own antiquity – a culture which in fact exaggerated that antiquity and claimed to have stayed fundamentally unchanged.

Even today, people recall the names of shadowy chieftain who

 lived thousand years before Christ, and the orthodox Brahmins in his daily worship repeats hymns composed even earlier.

 

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The Glory of Ancient India

Most striking feature of ancient Indian civilization: -

1.     Humanity

·      Though a cultural unit, but torn by internecine wars.

·      Rulers were cunning and scrupulous in the statecraft.

·      Famines, plagues, floods killed people

·      Religious sanction to inequality of birth

      But, no where else in the world at that time

·      Relations of man-man, man-state so fair and humane.

·      Fewest slaves in number.

·      Rights of slaves protected in Artha-shastra.

·      Noble ideals of fair play in battle by Manu.

·      Compared to others, very few tales of cities put to sword or massacre of non-combatants. Parallels of Assyria, flaying the captives alive don’t exist in Indian past.

·      Mild instances of sporadic cruelty and oppression compared to others.

 

2.     People enjoyed life, both sensual and spiritual

Allegation – The Hindu-Buddhist scriptures were taken out of context by the 19^th century missionaries along with the evidences of casteism, family system, tales of famines, etc. to propagate the fallacy that “India is a land of lethargic gloom”.

                        Focus of Europeans on certain set of spiritual texts which propagated “life-negating”, sterile ideas

 

Counter evidences –

i.                   Secular literature, sculpture, painting, mathematics of the time.

ii.                Indians may have paid lip-service to the ideals of such ascetics but they never deprived themselves of enjoyment, festivities or accepted the life to be a vale of tears. From which to escape at all costs but was willing to accept the world as they found it.   

Ex – Dandin’s description of joys of a simple meal in a comparatively poor home.

      

There was a general higher level of kindliness and gentleness in mutual relationships than anywhere else.