LITERATURE-LIGHT AND DELIGHT
30. INDIAN SUPERIORITY!
Nations and people differ so much among themselves in ever so many respects. Every nation and society has some peculiar features of its own.These are quite natural and have grown over the centuries. A society may not consider them to be special or peculiar to them, unless comparison is made with others. Then, these peculiar features may be taken as signs of superiority. Naturally, every country or society feels it is superior to others in some respects . Differences are used to define superiority.
Some historical forces have distorted the picture. Jews' lands were occupied by Christians, Arabs and Palestinians and they were driven out. They dispersed all over Europe.(The word 'diaspora' refers primarily to them). But they were hated everywhere and were made to live in ghettos or marked areas. The locals felt superior. (Like the Hindus, Jews do not believe in conversion and cannot add to their number through conversions.)When Christianity became powerful in the Roman Empire, they claimed superiority over all the ancient religions whom they designated 'pagan' and persecuted . Under Reformation, (16th Century) the authority of the Pope was defied, Protestantism and other rebel groups rose, gained powerful support and in many countries Catholics were treated as inferior. This problem continues even today.Islam too added to the picture, though even among them some are considered superior to others.
Once European nations established colonies, the colonial powers naturally felt themselves superior. Spanish and Portuguese colonisers (Catholics) killed millions of native people in South America, looted their wealth, and wiped out their religion and culture almost entirely, all in the name of Christ.In North America, the mainly non-Catholic Anglicans did the same thing to the natives and confined them to reservations, after appropriating their land mainly by fraud and plain deceit. Christ was of course behind them too! Missionaries make it out that Christianity is a religion of love, but they have spread only by violence.The Belgian thinker Francois Perin wrote in 1996:
Europe's ancient civilization, chiefly developed on the shores of the Mediterranean, was not submerged by a religion of love, but indeed forcibly destroyed by a fanatical Church.
Anatole France said they were "the crimes of the whole military and commercial Christianity."
Chinweizu, an African writer has these words:
White hordes,......fortified in an aggressive spirit by an arrogant, messianic Christianity...motivated by the lure of enriching plunder......sallied forth from their Western European homelands to explore, assault, loot, occupy, rule and exploit the rest of the world.
Where did Christianity succeed without the sword, asked Vivekananda. Not surprisingly, history of Christianity is not taught in their schools!
In India, the English were brutal, but also more subtle. They came to trade,gained favours, intervened in local disputes and snatched power from the indigenous rulers in many devious ways, made them puppets , and swindled them. Will Durant, the world-renowned American Scholar wrote:
The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company, utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, overrunning with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and 'legal' plunder which has now gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy three years....
England has year by year been bleeding India to the point of death....The British ownership of India has been a calamity and a crime....year by year it is destroying one of the greatest and gentlest peoples of history. (Written in 1930)
In 1901, a British historian William Digby wrote:
Modern England has been made great by Indian wealth, wealth never proffered by its possessor, but always taken by the might and skill of the stronger......England struck down the ancient industries of India, and during a whole century has done naught that is worthy to constitute India a land of varied industries.
But their main method was to establish their superiority by the process of education and lure of office- indigenous eduction was replaced by English education, such people were offered govt jobs. They wrote our history, allowed the missionaries to convert in all possible ways. The result of two hundred years of English eduction in India is that most educated Indians have lost all sense of self respect, developed an inferiority complex about their own culture, languages and traditions, and become shameless and senseless imitators of their former rulers and their current successors in all possible ways. And they call it modernisation! It has grown to such an extent that in every Indian city or town, you will find the youth not even willing to wear the traditional Indian dress, and taking to Western outfits. (Muslims are an exception; in the South, even young Hindu girls sport the Muslim dress: salvar kameez!)
Strangely, this feeling of inferiority has grown after Independence, especially in the last 50 years. One index of it is the demand for English medium education even from the primary classes- even from the KG! Mother tongue is studied only because it is made compulsory; once that stage is past, almost no one studies it on their own!
I have been saying that Indian languages have historically lagged behind and cannot compete with English as medium for higher education. But Sanskrit was the language of high science, no less than high culture. To quote Will Durant again:
India was the motherland of our race and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages; she was the mother of our philosophy, mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is, in many ways, the mother of us all.
French Scholar Sylvain Levi said:
From Persia to the Chinese Sea, from the icy regions of Siberia to the islands of Java and Borneo, from Oceania to Socotra,India has propagated her beliefs, her tales and her civilization. She has left indelible imprints on one fourth of the human race in the course of a long succession of centuries.She has the right to reclaim in universal history the rank that ignorance has refused her for a long time and to hold her place among the great nations summarising and symbolising the spirit of Humanity.
And all this happened without war, violence and bloodshed. Hu Shih, a scholar and former Chinese Ambassador to the US once said:
India conquered and dominated China culturally for 2000 years without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.....Never before had China seen a religion so rich in imagery, so beautiful and captivating in ritualism, and so bold in cosmological and metaphysical speculations. Like a poor beggar suddenly halting before a magnificent storehouse of precious stones of dazzling brilliancy and splendour, China was overwhelmed, baffled, and overjoyed. She begged and borrowed freely from this munificent giver.
Yet, our educational system continues to adopt the same methods imposed on us by colonial powers with even greater force! Our youngsters are led to believe that India was always poor, that its poverty was due to its religion and philosophy and that she is in need of Westernising! We not only do not know our past, but are effectively screened from knowing it by an educational system which is de-Indianised. Our history books (written by govt.sponsored leftists) portray the Hindus and their civilisation in as bad a light as possible. Especially strong is their attempt to portray the Muslim rule in glorious terms. But the fact is, all world's historians know, are otherwise. Will Durant, the celebrated author of the world-famous monumental multi-volume study, "The Story of Civilization" clearly states:
The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the BLOODIEST story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.But our languages are excellent literary medium, and the vehicles of our own culture and history. Imagine the state when one is not able to understand any literary work in Classical Tamil in the original, when it is his mother tongue and has been learned for 10 or 12 years! Sanskrit and Tamil are the worst hit because they are India's most ancient and richest and real classical languages (though other languages may claim and get that label for political reasons.)
Imperial powers may feel superior because they colonised us. But we have quietly asserted our own superiority in some ways, though it is not obvious.
The Muslims conquered every country where they went and forced Islam on them.They do not allow minorities at all; minorities have no rights. They ruled India too for 800 years, but they have not been able to make India Muslim! They could only divide India! India is the only country in history which has withstood the Muslim onslaught for so long! Naturally, there must be something in us which made it possible! That is one mark of our superiority!.
When European (German and French) scholars took up the study of Sanskrit and for the first time got acquainted with our ancient literature, they were stunned and dazzled by its range, depth and sublimity. Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher,wrote about the Upanishads:
From every sentence, deep, original, and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit....In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads.It is destined sooner or later to become the faith of the people......The study of the Upanishads has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.
The American Transcendentalist philosopher Emerson wrote on the Gita:
I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.....It (Vedic thought) is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics which visit in turn each noble poetic mind.
Emerson's follower, Henry David Thoreau said:
In the morning, I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny.
World renowned American author Mark Twain wrote in his book "Following the Equator" in 1897:
So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked,.....Land of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of human speech, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of tradition. The land that all men desire to see and having seen once even by a glimpse would not give that glimpse for the shows of the rest of the globe combined.
Our ancient literature is surely a sign of our superiority. No other country or people in the world have a such rich treasure of literary wealth so well preserved. But we must study them! What is the use of owning an ocean if we cannot swim? Because of economic necessity, we have to take up secular education; that should not be neglected.But that will only make us an economic animal, a bread-earning machine. We must also become MEN! . Only culture will make us so. That comes only from the mainsprings of our civilisation. We have to renew our contact with the genius of India and recover it.
Even if we are not able to go the original sources direct, the works of Sri Aurobindo provide an illuminating exposition of authentic Indian thought in the most elegant and sublime English prose and poetry ever written. I mention Sri Aurobindo because he studied in England, had mastered Greek and Latin, became fluent in French and German, and knew Italian, besides being a master of English and Sanskrit. His writings have a rare charm and power not experienced elsewhere.No Indian and few Englishmen have written like him. It is not easy reading, but exceedingly rewarding.
Sucessful assimilation depends on mastery;but we have not mastered European conditions and knowledge, rather we have been seized, subjected and enslaved by them. Successful rejection is possible only if we have intelligent possession of what we want to keep.
India can never cease to be India or Hinduism to be Hinduism, if we really think for ourselves. It is only if we allow Europe to think for us that India is in danger of becoming an ill-executed and foolish copy of Europe.
-Sri Aurobindo.(Essays Divine and Human, 1994; p.41 and 44.) Originally written in 1912.
Note:
1. The quotations cited in this piece are all taken from: Michel Danino:"Indian Culture and India's Future" , D.K Printworld, New Delhi 110015,2011.
This is a wonderful book, no Indian should miss.
2. The following books of Sri Aurobindo are essential reading:
- The Renaissance in India.
- Essays on the Gita.
- Secret of the Veda
- Hymns to the Mystic Fire
- Isha Upanishad
- Kena and Other Upanishads
- The Life Divine
- Synthesis of Yoga.
- Essays Divine And Human
- The Future Poetry
- Savitri
(Please read the original and not any translation.)
The following books will also be helpful.
- Is India Civilised? by Sir John Woodroffe
- The Lost River by Michel Danino
- Invasion That Never Was by Michel Danino
- The Politics of History by N.S.Rajaram
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