C P Brown: India before British

4. INDIA TILL THE ADVENT OF THE BRITISH

Alberuny, an 11th century Muslim Historian says, “The Hindus differed in every thing which other nations have in common". Western observers often, have reported their sense of a vast cultural and psychological distance between India and the West .In the light of Western legacy from Judea and Greece there are so many differences between India and the West. India’s concepts of Creation, Universe, Nature, Life, Dharma, Karma, and Reincarnation are unique as opposed to Western concepts.

Indian society is, in fact, one of the most closely knit in world history. For an Indian, all action is ritual, all art is symbolic, all worship is an expression of life, and all life is a facet of the Eternal. Underlying these identities is the Indian’s sense of a Force that pervades the universe. Through the ritual and religion, and epics and the Prashiana Traya Indians have succeeded in an unimaginable synthesis of Society and Life.

Historic India is not just a Country; it is a Culture, one of the oldest and most consistent on Earth. The Culture consists predominantly of a religion and a mode of living called Sanatana Dharma, labelled Hinduism. The spirit of Hinduism first intrigued the West centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, and it has been a source of wonder and speculation for philosophers and poets ever since. Ancient Greeks and Romans admired the richness and the royal perquisites of two of the great Indian empires (the Mauryan of the third century B.C. and the Gupta of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.).

The structure of the caste based society, and the basic ideas of Hindu Philosophy have contributed to unparalleled accomplishments in all fields of human Endeavour and Values. Literature, Painting, Sculpture, Music, Temples, even Ornaments. Life and Living is a sacred ritual for the Hindu, a reverential offering of himself to the God. This resulted in welcoming people who were driven out from their homelands the Parsees and the Armenians, and even Jews, to name a few.

Such a cohesive society was however grossly maligned by the WEST. It was impossible for European tribes to coexist .The Celts of Britain were driven out, the Druids vanished, the undercurrent of anti-Semitism surfaces even today, the discrimination against the Gypsies is there to see, not to speak of the anti Black syndrome. The millions on millions of Incas, Maoris, Red Indians, Bushmen were wiped out forever. Holocaust, Apartheid, Slave trade, Vietnam War are gory symbols of the West.

The British were inherently incapable of a conception of co-existence, co-operation and co-prosperity. They had been therefore projecting that one tribe or other invaded India driving out people. Thus even when we understand the unique continuity of Indian culture over millennia the British wrote that it was not even indigenous to India.

Unfortunately the history written by the British was precisely to drive a wedge of differences, the inherent strengths, and paint denies a negative a picture. It needs a will to see our past more objectively and reject the untruths presented by them.

Hinduism has given the people of India extraordinarily satisfactory answers to questions that have concerned men since they began to think: What is Man, what is Nature, what is God? Why does man live? How should he best live with himself, with other men, with the mysteries of Nature and the Cosmos? These are questions that hardly occupy the daily thought of people in any country, but they are the questions whose answers help to form the culture of a country and elevate a whole society. India’s answers to questions about the universe and humanity have permitted millions of people to co exist in peace and to understand each other in a manner that is one of the world’s greatest wonders.

In Western history, a thousand years is a long time. The rise, decline and fall of the Roman Empire all took place within that span of time; ancient Greece rose and fell in less than half of it. But the beginnings of civilization in India are nearly as old as civilization itself. We developed the earliest of the world’s great civilizations flourishing on an extent of land far greater than that of Egypt or Sumer. The Harappan world itself covered a gigantic triangle with sides a thousand miles long.