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Indian Polity
I
HAVE spoken hitherto of the greatness of Indian
civilisation in the things most important to human culture, those activities
that raise man to his noblest potentialities as a mental, a spiritual,
religious, intellectual, ethical, aesthetic being, and in all these matters the cavillings of the critics break down before the height and largeness and
profundity revealed when we look at the whole and all its parts in the light of
a true understanding of the spirit and intention and a close discerning regard
on the actual achievement of the culture. There is revealed not only a great
civilization, but one of the half dozen greatest of which we have a still
existing record. But there are many who would admit the greatness of the
achievement of India in the things of the mind and the spirit, but would still
point out that she has failed in life, her culture has not resulted in a
strong, successful or progressive organisation of life such as Europe shows to
us, and that in the end at least the highest part of her mind turned away from
life to asceticism and an inactive and world-shunning pursuit by the individual
of his personal spiritual salvation. Or at most she has come only to a certain
point and then there has been an arrest and decadence.
This charge weighs with an especial
heaviness in the balance today because the modern man, even the modern cultured
man, is or tends to be to a degree quite unprecedented, politicon zoon, a
political, economic and social being valuing above all things the efficiency of
the outward existence and the things of the mind and spirit mainly, when not
exclusively, for their aid to humanityʼs vital and mechanical progress: he has
not that regard of the ancients which looked up towards the highest heights and
regarded an achievement in the things of the mind and the spirit with an
unquestioning admiration or a deep veneration for its own sake as the greatest
possible contribution to human culture and progress. And although this modern
tendency is exaggerated and ugly and degrading in its exaggeration, inimical
to
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humanityʼs spiritual evolution, it has this
much of truth behind it that while the first value of a culture is its power to
raise and enlarge the internal man, the mind, the soul, the spirit, its
soundness is not complete unless it has shaped also his external existence and
made of it a rhythm of advance towards high and great ideals. This is the true
sense of progress and there must be as part of it a sound political, economic
and social life, a power and efficiency enabling a people to survive, to grow
and to move securely towards a collective perfection, and a vital elasticity
and responsiveness that will give room for a constant advance in the outward
expression of the mind and the spirit. If a culture does not serve these ends,
then there is evidently a defect somewhere either in its essential conceptions
or its wholeness or in its application that will seriously detract from its
claims to a complete and integral value. The ideals that governed the spirit
and body of Indian society were of the highest kind, its social order secured
an inexpugnable basic stability, the strong life force that worked in it was
creative of an extraordinary energy, richness and interest, and the life
organised remarkable in its opulence, variety in unity, beauty, productiveness,
movement. All the records of Indian history, art and literature bear evidence
to a cultural life of this character and even in decline and dissolution there
survives some stamp of it to remind however faintly and distantly of the past
greatness. To what then does the charge brought against Indian culture as an
agent of the life power amount and what is its justification? In its
exaggerated form it is founded upon the characteristics of the decline and
dissolution, the features of the decadence read backward into the time of
greatness, and it amounts to this that India has always shown an incompetence
for any free or sound political organisation and has been constantly a divided
and for the most part of her long history a subject nation, that her economic
system whatever its bygone merits, if it had any, remained an inelastic and
static order that led in modern conditions to poverty and failure and her
society an unprogressive hierarchy, caste-ridden, full of semi-barbaric abuses,
only fit to be thrown on the scrap-heap among the broken rubbish of the past
and replaced by the freedom, soundness and perfec-
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tion or at least the progressive perfectibility
of the European social order. It is necessary to re-establish the real facts and their meaning and afterwards
it will be time to pass judgment on the political, the economic and the social
aspects of Indian culture.
The legend of Indian political
incompetence has arisen from a false view of the historical development and an
insufficient knowledge of the ancient past of the country. It has long been
currently supposed that she passed at once from the freer type of the primitive
Aryan or Vedic social and political organisation to a system socially marked by
the despotism of the Brahmin theocracy and politically by an absolute monarchy
of the oriental, by which is meant the Western Asiatic type, and has remained
fixed in these two things for ever after. That
summary reading of
Indian history has been destroyed by a more careful and enlightened
scholarship and the facts are of a quite different nature. It is true that
India never evolved either the scrambling and burdensome industrialism or the
parliamentary organisation of freedom and self-styled democracy characteristic
of the bourgeois or Vaishya period, the cycle of European progress. But the
time is passing when the uncritical praise of these things as the ideal state
and the last word of social and political progress was fashionable, their defects
are now visible and the greatness of an oriental civilisation need not be
judged by the standard of these western developments. Indian scholars have
attempted to read the modern ideas and types of democracy and even a
parliamentary system into the past of India, but this seems to me an ill-judged
endeavour. There was a strong democratic element, if we must use the western
terms, in Indian polity and even institutions that present a certain analogy to
the parliamentary form, but in reality these features were of Indiaʼs own kind
and not at all the same thing as modern parliaments and modem democracy. And so
considered they are a much more remarkable evidence of the political capacity
of the Indian people in their living adaptation to the ensemble of the social
mind and body of the nation than when we judge them by the very different
standard of western society and the peculiar needs of its cultural cycle.
The Indian system began with
a variation of the type generally associated with the early history of the
Aryan peoples;
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but
certain features have a more general character and belong to a still earlier
stage in the social development of the human race. It was a clan or tribal
system, kula, founded upon the equality of all the freemen of the clan
or race; this was not at first firmly founded upon the territorial basis, the
migratory tendency was still in evidence or recurred under pressure and the
land was known by the name of the people who occupied it, the Kuru country or
simply the Kurus, the Malava country or the Malavas. After the fixed settlement
within determined boundaries the system of the clan or tribe continued, but
found a basic unit or constituent atom in the settled village community. The
meeting of the people, viśaḥ, assembling for communal deliberation, for
sacrifice and worship or as the host for war, remained for a long time the
power-sign of the mass body and the agent of the active common life with the
king as the head and representative, but long depending even after his position
became hereditary on the assent of the people for his formal election or
confirmation. The religious institution of the sacrifice developed in time a
class of priests and inspired singers, men trained in the ritual or in
possession of the mystic knowledge which lay behind the symbols of the
sacrifice, the seed of the great Brahminic institution. These were not at first
hereditary, but exercised other professions and belonged in their ordinary life
to the general body of the people. This free and simple natural constitution of
the society seems to have been general at first throughout Aryan India.
The later development out of this
primitive form followed up to a certain point the ordinary line of evolution as
we see it in other communities, but at the same time threw up certain very
striking peculiarities that owing to the unique mentality of the race fixed
themselves, became prominent characteristics and gave a different stamp to the
political, economic and social factors of Indian civilisation. The hereditary
principle emerged at an early stage and increased constantly its power and hold
on the society until it became everywhere the basis of the whole organisation
of its activities. A hereditary kingship was established, a powerful princely
and warrior class appeared, the rest of the people were marked off as the caste
of traders, artisans and
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agriculturalists and a subject or menial caste was
added, perhaps sometimes as the result of conquest but more probably or more
commonly from economic necessity, of servants and labourers. The predominance
from early times of the religious and spiritual tendency in the mind of the
Indian people brought about at the top of the social system the growth of the Brahmin
order, priests, scholars, legists, repositories of the sacred lore of the
Vedas, a development paralleled elsewhere but here given an unequalled
permanence and definiteness and supreme importance. In other countries with a
less complex mentality this predominance might have resulted in a theocracy;
but the Brahmins in spite of their ever-increasing and finally predominant
authority did not and could not usurp in India the political power. As
sacrosanct priests and legists and spiritual preceptors of the monarch and the
people they exercised a very considerable influence, but the real or active
political power remained with the king, the Kshatriya aristocracy and the
commons. A peculiar figure for some time was the Rishi, the man of a higher spiritual experience and knowledge, born in any of the classes, but exercising an authority by his spiritual personality over all, revered and consulted by the king of whom he was sometimes the religious preceptor, and in the then fluid state of social evolution able alone to exercise an important role in evolving new basic ideas and effecting direct and immediate changes of the socio-religious ideas and customs of the people. It was a marked feature of the Indian mind that it sought to attach a spiritual meaning and a religious sanction to all, even to the most external social and political circumstances of its life imposing on all classes and functions an ideal, not except incidentally of rights and powers, but of duties, a rule of their action and an ideal way and temperament, character, spirit in the action, a Dharma with a spiritual significance. It was the work of the Rishi to put this stamp enduringly on the national mind, to prolong and perpetuate it, to discover and interpret the ideal law and its practical meaning, to cast the life of the people into the well-shaped ideals and significant forms of a civilisation founded on the spiritual and religious sense. And in later ages we find the Brahminic schools of legists attributing their codes, though in Page-326
themselves only formulations of existing rule
and custom, to the ancient Rishis. Whatever the developments of the Indian
socio-political body in later days, this original character still exercised
its influence, even when all tended at last to become traditionalised and
conventionalised instead of moving forward constantly in the steps of a free
and living practice. The political evolution of this early system varied in different parts of India. The ordinary development, as in most other countries, was in the direction of an increasing emphasis on the control of the king as the centre, head and unifying factor of a more and more complex system of rule and administration and this prevailed eventually and became the universal type. But for a long time it was combated and held in check by a contrary tendency that resulted in the appearance and the strong and enduring vitality of city or regional or confederated republics. The king became either a hereditary or elected executive head of the republic or an archon administering for a brief and fixed period or else he altogether disappeared from the polity of the state. This turn must have come about in many cases by a natural evolution of the power of the assemblies, but in others it seems to have been secured by some kind of revolution and there appear to have been vicissitudes, alternations between periods of monarchical and periods of republican government. Among a certain number of the Indian peoples the republican form finally asserted its hold and proved itself capable of a strong and settled organisation and a long duration lasting over many centuries. In some cases they were governed by a democratic assembly, in more by an oligarchical senate. It is unfortunate that we know little of the details of the constitution and nothing of the inner history of these Indian republics, but the evidence is clear of the high reputation they enjoyed throughout India for the excellence of their civil and the formidable efficiency of their military organisation. There is an interesting dictum of Buddha that so long as the republican institutions were maintained in their purity and vigour, a small state of this kind would remain invincible even by the arms of the powerful and ambitious Magadhan monarchy, and this opinion is amply confirmed by the political writers who consider the alliance of the republics the most solid and valuable
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political and military support a king could
have, and advise their reduction not so much by the force of arms, as that
would have a very precarious chance of success, but by Machiavellian means,
—
similar to those actually employed in Greece by Philip
of Macedon, — aimed at undermining their internal unity and the efficiency of
their constitution.
These republican states were already
long established and in vigorous functioning in the sixth century before
Christ, contemporary therefore with the brilliant but ephemeral and troubled
Greek city commonwealths, but this form of political liberty in India
long outlasted the period of Greek republican freedom. The ancient Indian mind,
not less fertile in political invention, must be considered superior to that of
the mercurial and restless Mediterranean people in the capacity for a firm organisation
and settled constitutional order. Some of these states appear to have enjoyed a
longer and a more settled history of vigorous freedom than republican Rome, for
they persisted even against the mighty empire of Chandragupta and Asoka and
were still in existence in the early centuries of the Christian era. But none
of them developed the aggressive spirit and the conquering and widely
organising capacity of the Roman republic; they were content to preserve their
own free inner life and their independence. India especially after the invasion
of Alexander felt the need of a movement of unification and the republics were
factors of division: strong for themselves, they could do nothing for the
organisation of the peninsula, too vast indeed for any system of confederation
of small states to be possible
—
and
indeed in the ancient world that endeavour nowhere succeeded, always it broke
down in the effort of expansion beyond certain narrow limits and could not
endure against the movement towards a more centralised government. In India as
elsewhere it was the monarchical state that grew and finally held the field
replacing all other forms of political organisation. The republican
organisation disappeared from her history and is known to us only by the
evidence of coins, scattered references and the testimony of Greek observers
and of the contemporary political writers and theorists who supported and
helped to confirm and develop the monarchical state throughout India.
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But Indian monarchy previous to the Mahomedan
invasion was not, in spite of a certain sanctity and great authority conceded
to the regal position and the personality of the king as the representative of
the divine Power and the guardian of the Dharma, in any way a personal
despotism or an absolutist autocracy: it had no resemblance to the ancient
Persian monarchy or the monarchies of western and central Asia or the Roman
imperial government or later European autocracies: it was of an altogether
different type from the system of the Pathan or the Moghul emperors. The Indian
king exercised supreme administrative and judicial power, was in possession of
all the military forces of the kingdom and with his Council alone responsible
for peace and war and he had too a general supervision and control over the
good order and welfare of the life of the community, but his power was not
personal and it was besides hedged in by safeguards against abuse and
encroachment and limited by the liberties and powers of other public
authorities and interests who were, so to speak, lesser co-partners with him in
the exercise of sovereignty and administrative legislation and control. He was
in fact a limited or constitutional monarch, although the machinery by which
the constitution was maintained and the limitation effected differed from the
kind familiar in European history; and even the continuance of his rule was far
more dependent than that of mediaeval European kings on the continued will and
assent of the people.
A greater sovereign
than the king was the Dharma, the religious, ethical, social, political, juridic
and customary law organically governing the life of the people. This impersonal
authority was considered sacred and eternal in its spirit and the totality of
its body, always characteristically the same, the changes organically and
spontaneously brought about in its actual form by the evolution of the society
being constantly incorporated in it, regional, family and other customs forming
a sort of attendant and subordinate body capable of change only from within,
—
Page-329 ritative expression of opinion they could and did favour or oppose this or that tendency to change of principle or detail. The king was only the guardian, executor and servant of the Dharma, charged to see to its observance and to prevent offences, serious irregularities and breaches. He himself was bound the first to obey it and observe the rigorous rule it laid on his personal life and action and on the province, powers and duties of his regal authority and office. This subjection of the sovereign power to the Dharma was not an ideal theory inoperative in practice; for the rule of the socio-religious law actively conditioned the whole life of the people and was therefore a living reality, and it had in the political field very large practical consequences. It meant first that the king had not the power of direct legislation and was limited to the issue of administrative decrees that had to be in consonance with the religious, social, political, economic constitution of the community, — and even here there were other powers than that of the king who shared with him the right of promulgating and seeing to the execution of administrative decrees independently issued, — neither could he disregard in the general tenor and character and the effective result of his administration the express or tacit will of the people. The religious liberties of the commons were assured and could not normally be infringed by any secular authority; each religious community, each new or long-standing religion could shape its own way of life and institutions and had its own authorities or governing bodies exercising in their proper field an entire independence. There was no exclusive State religion and the monarch was not the religious head of the people. Asoka in this respect seems to have attempted an extension of the royal control or influence and similar velleities were occasionally shown on a minor scale by other powerful sovereigns. But Asokaʼs so-called edicts of this kind had a recommendatory rather than an imperative character, and the sovereign who wished to bring about a change in religious belief or institutions had always, in accordance with the Indian principle of communal freedom and the obligation of a respect for and a previous consultation of the wishes of those concerned, to secure the assent of the recognised
Page-330 authorities or to refer the matter to a consultative assembly for deliberation, as was done in the famous Buddhist councils, or to arrange a discussion between the exponents of the different religions and abide by the issue. The monarch might personally favour a particular sect or creed and his active preference might evidently have a considerable propagandist influence, but at the same time he was bound to respect and support in his public office all the recognised religions of the people with a certain measure of impartiality, a rule that explains the support extended by Buddhist and Brahmin emperors to both the rival religions. At times there were, mainly in the South, instances of petty or violent State persecutions, but these outbreaks were a violation of the Dharma due to momentary passion at a time of acute religious ferment and were always local and of a brief duration. Normally there was no place in the Indian political system for religious oppression and intolerance and a settled State policy of that kind was unthinkable. The social life of the people was similarly free from autocratic interference. Instances of royal legislation in this province are rare and here too, when it occurred, there had to be a consultation of the will of those concerned, as in the rearrangement or the reconstitution of the caste system by the Sena kings in Bengal after its disorganisation during a long period of Buddhist predominance. Change in the society was brought about not artificially from above but automatically from within and principally by the freedom allowed to families or particular communities to develop or alter automatically their own rule of life, ācāra.
In the sphere of
administration the power of the king was similarly hedged in by the standing
constitution of the Dharma. His right of taxation was limited in the most
important sources of revenue to a fixed percentage as a maximum and in other
directions often by the right of the bodies representing the various elements
of the community to a voice in the matter and always by the general rule that
his right to govern was subject to the satisfaction and good-will of the
people. This, as we shall see, was not merely a pious wish or opinion of the
Brahmin custodians of the Dharma. The king was in person the supreme court and
the
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highest control in the execution of the civil
and criminal law, but here too his role was that of the executor: he was bound
to administer the law faithfully as it stood through his judges or with the
aid of the Brahmin legists learned in these matters. He had the complete and
unfettered control in his Council only of foreign policy, military
administration and war and peace and of a great number of directive activities.
He was free to make efficient arrangements for all that part of the
administration that served to secure and promote the welfare of the community,
good order, public morals, and all such matters as could best be supervised or
regulated by the sovereign authority. He had a right of patronage and
punishment consistent with the law and was expected to exercise it with a
strict regard to an effect of general beneficence and promotion of the public
welfare.
There could therefore be
ordinarily little or no room in the ancient Indian system for autocratic freak
or monarchial violence and oppression, much less for the savage cruelty and
tyranny of so common an occurrence in the history of some other countries.
Nevertheless such happenings were possible by the sovereignʼs disregard of the
Dharma or by a misuse of his power of administrative decree; instances occurred
of the kind, — though the worst recorded is that of a tyrant belonging to a
foreign dynasty; in other cases any prolonged outbreak of autocratic caprice,
violence or injustice seems to have led before long to an effective protest or
revolt on the part of the people. The legists provided for the possibility of
oppression. In spite of the sanctity and prestige attaching to the sovereign it
was laid down that obedience ceased to be binding if the king ceased to be
faithful executor of the Dharma. Incompetence and violation of the obligation
to rule to the satisfaction of the people were in theory and effect sufficient
causes for his removal. Manu even lays it down that an unjust and oppressive
king should be killed by his own subjects like a mad dog, and this
justification by the highest authority of the right or even the duty of
insurrection and regicide in extreme cases is sufficient to show that
absolutism or the unconditional divine right of kings was no part of the
intention of the Indian political system. As a matter of fact the right was
actually exercised as we find both from history and literature.
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Another
more peaceful and more commonly exercised remedy was a threat of secession or
exodus which in most cases was sufficient to bring the delinquent ruler to
reason. It is interesting to find the threat of secession employed against an
unpopular monarch in the South as late as the seventeenth century, as well as a
declaration by a popular assembly denouncing any assistance given to the king
as an act of treason. A more common remedy was deposition by the council of
ministers or by the public assemblies. The kingship thus constituted proved to
be in effect moderate, efficient and beneficent, served well the purposes
assigned to it and secured an abiding hold on the affections of the people. The
monarchical institution was however only one, an approved and very important,
but not, as we see from the existence of the ancient republics, an
indispensable element of the Indian socio-political system, and we shall
understand nothing of the real principle of the system and its working if we
stop short with a view of the regal facade and fail to see what lay behind it.
It is there that we shall find the clue to the essential character of the whole
construction.
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THE true nature of the Indian polity can only be realised if we look at it not as a separate thing, a machinery independent of the rest of the mind and life of the people, but as a part of and in its relation to the organic totality of the social existence.
A people, a great human collectivity,
is in fact an organic living being with a collective or rather — for the word
collective is too mechanical to be true to the inner reality
— a common or
communal soul, mind and body.
The life of the society like the physical life of the individual human being
passes through a cycle of birth, growth, youth, ripeness and decline, and if
this last stage goes far enough without any arrest of its course towards
decadence, it may perish, — even so all the older peoples and nations except
India and China perished, — as a man dies of old age. But the collective being
has too the capacity of renewing itself, of a recovery and a new cycle. For in
each people there is a soul idea or life idea at work, less mortal than its
body, and if this idea is itself sufficiently powerful, large and force-giving
and the people sufficiently strong, vital and plastic in mind and temperament
to combine stability with a constant enlargement or new application of the
power of the soul idea or life idea in its being, it may pass through many such
cycles before it comes to a final exhaustion. Moreover, the idea is itself only
the principle of soul manifestation of the communal being and each communal soul
again a manifestation and vehicle of the greater eternal spirit that expresses
itself in Time and on earth is seeking, as it were, its own fullness in
humanity through the vicissitudes of the human cycles. A people then which
learns to live consciously not solely in its physical and outward life, not
even only in that and the power of the life idea or soul idea that governs the
changes of its development and is the key to its psychology and temperament,
but in the soul and spirit behind, may not at all exhaust itself, may not end
by disappearance or a dissolution or a fusion into others or have to give place
to a new race and people, but having itself
Page-334 fused into its life many original smaller societies and attained to its maximum natural growth pass without death through many renascences. And even if at any time it appears to be on the point of absolute exhaustion and dissolution, it may recover by the force of the spirit and begin another and perhaps a more glorious cycle. The history of India has been that of the life of such a people.
The master idea that has governed the
life, culture, social ideals of the Indian people has been the seeking of man
for his true spiritual self and the use of life —
subject to a necessary evolution first of his lower
physical, vital and mental nature
— as
a
frame
and means for that discovery and for manʼs ascent from the ignorant natural
into the spiritual existence. This dominant idea India has never quite
forgotten even under the stress and material exigencies and the externalities
of political and social construction. But the difficulty of making the social
life an expression of manʼs true self and some highest realisation of the
spirit within him is immensely greater than that which attends a spiritual self-expression
through the things of the mind, religion, thought, art, literature, and while
in these India reached extraordinary heights and largenesses, she could not in
the outward life go beyond certain very partial realisations and very imperfect
tentatives,
—
a general
spiritualising symbolism, an infiltration of the greater aspiration, a certain
cast given to the communal life, the creation of institutions favourable to the
spiritual idea. Politics, society, economics are the natural field of the two
first and grosser parts of human aim and conduct recognised in the Indian
system, interest and hedonistic desire: Dharma, the higher law, has nowhere
been brought more than partially into this outer side of life, and in politics
to a very minimum extent, for the effort at governing political action by
ethics is usually little more than a pretence. The coordination or true union
of the collective outward life with
mokṣa
the
liberated spiritual existence, has hardly even been
conceived
or attempted, much less anywhere succeeded in the past history of the yet
hardly adult human race. Accordingly, we find that the governance by the Dharma
of Indiaʼs social, economic and even, though here the attempt broke down
earlier than in other spheres, her political rule of life, system, turn of
existence, with the adumbration of a spiritual significance behind,
Page-335 — the full attainment of the spiritual life being left as a supreme aim to the effort of the individual, — was as far as her ancient system could advance. This much endeavour, however, she did make with persistence and patience and it gave a peculiar type to her social polity. It is perhaps for a future India, taking up and enlarging with a more complete aim, a more comprehensive experience, a more certain knowledge that shall reconcile life and the spirit, her ancient mission, to found the status and action of the collective being of man on the realisation of the deeper spiritual truth, the yet unrealised spiritual potentialities of our existence and so ensoul the life of her people as to make it the Lila of the greater Self in humanity, a conscious communal soul and body of Virat, the universal spirit. Another point must be noted which
creates a difference between the ancient polity of India and that of the
European peoples and makes the standards of the West as inapplicable here as in
the things of the mind and the inner culture. Human society has in its growth
to pass through three stages of evolution before it can arrive at the
completeness of its possibilities. The first is a condition in which the forms
and activities of the communal existence are those of the spontaneous play of
the powers and principles of its life. All its growth, all its formations,
customs, institutions are then a natural organic development,
—
the motive and constructive
power coming mostly from the subconscient
principle
of the life within it,
—
expressing,
but without deliberate intention, the communal psychology, temperament, vital
and physical need, and persisting or altering partly under the pressure of an
internal impulse, partly under that of the environment acting on the communal
mind and temper. In this stage the people is not yet intelligently
self-conscious in the way of the reason, is not yet a thinking collective
being, and it does not try to govern its whole communal existence by the
reasoning will, but lives according to its vital intuitions or their first
mental renderings. The early framework of Indian society and polity grew up in
such a period as in most ancient and mediaeval communities, but also in the
later age of a growing social self-consciousness they were not rejected but
only farther shaped, developed, systematised so as to be always, not a
construction of politicians, legislators and
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social and political thinkers,
but a strongly stable vital order natural to the mind, instincts and life
intuitions of the Indian
people.
A second stage of
the society is that in which the communal mind becomes more and more
intellectually self-conscious, first in its more cultured minds, then more
generally, first broadly, then more and more minutely and in all the parts of
its life. It learns to review and deal with its own life, communal ideas,
needs, institutions in the light of the developed intelligence and finally by
the power of the critical and constructive reason. This is a stage which is
full of great possibilities but attended too by serious characteristic dangers.
Its first advantages are those which go always with the increase of a clear and
understanding and finally an exact and scientific knowledge and the culminating
stage is the strict and armoured efficiency which the critical and
constructive, the scientific reason used to the fullest degree offers as its
reward and consequence. Another and greater outcome of this stage of social
evolution is the emergence of high and luminous ideals which promise to raise
man beyond the limits of the vital being, beyond his first social, economic and
political needs and desires and out of their customary moulds and inspire an
impulse of bold experiment with the communal life which opens a field of
possibility for the realisation of a more and more ideal society. This application
of the scientific mind to life with the strict, well-finished, armoured
efficiency which is its normal highest result, this pursuit of great
consciously proposed social and political ideals and the progress which is the
index of the ground covered in the endeavour, have been, with whatever limits
and drawbacks, the distinguishing advantages of the political and social effort
of Europe. On the other hand the tendency of the reason when it pretends to deal with the materials of life as its absolute governor, is to look too far away from the reality of the society as a living growth and to treat it as a mechanism which can be manipulated at will and constructed like so much dead wood or iron according to the arbitrary dictates of the intelligence. The sophisticating, labouring, constructing, efficient, mechanising reason loses hold of the simple principles of a peopleʼs vitality; it cuts it away
Page-337 from the secret roots of its life. The result is an exaggerated dependence on system and institution, on legislation and administration and the deadly tendency to develop, in place of a living people, a mechanical State. An instrument of the communal life tries to take the place of the life itself and there is created a powerful but mechanical and artificial organisation; but, as the price of this exterior gain, there is lost the truth of life of an organically self-developing communal soul in the body of a free and living people. It is this error of the scientific reason stifling the work of the vital and the spiritual intuition under the dead weight of its mechanical method which is the weakness of Europe and has deceived her aspiration and prevented her from arriving at the true realisation of her own higher ideals. It is only by reaching a third stage of the evolution of the collective social as of the individual human being that the ideals first seized and cherished by the thought of man can discover their own real source and character and their true means and conditions of effectuation or the perfect society be anything more than a vision on a shining cloud constantly run after in a circle and constantly deceiving the hope and escaping the embrace. That will be when man in the collectivity begins to live more deeply and to govern his collective life neither primarily by the needs, instincts, intuitions welling up out of the vital self, nor secondarily by the constructions of the reasoning mind, but first, foremost and always by the power of unity, sympathy, spontaneous liberty, supple and living order of his discovered greater self and spirit in which the individual and the communal existence have their law of freedom, perfection and oneness. That is a rule that has not yet anywhere found its right conditions for even beginning its effort, for it can only come when manʼs attempt to reach and abide by the law of the spiritual existence is no longer an exceptional aim for individuals or else degraded in its more general aspiration to the form of a popular religion, but is recognised and followed out as the imperative need of his being and its true and right attainment the necessity of the next step in the evolution of the race. The small early Indian communities developed like others through the first stage of a vigorous and spontaneous vitality,
Page-338
finding
naturally and freely its own norm and line, casting up form of life and social
and political institution out of the vital intuition and temperament of the
communal being. As they fused with each other into an increasing cultural and
social unity and formed larger and larger political bodies, they developed a
common spirit and a common basis and general structure allowing of a great
freedom of variation in minor line and figure. There was no need of a rigid
uniformity; the common spirit and life impulse were enough to impose on this
plasticity a law of general oneness. And even when there grew up the great
kingdoms and empires, still the characteristic institutions of the smaller
kingdoms, republics, peoples were as much as possible incorporated rather than
destroyed or thrown aside in the new cast of the socio-political structure.
Whatever could not survive in the natural evolution of the people or was no
longer needed, fell away of itself and passed into desuetude; whatever could
last by modifying itself to new circumstance and environment was allowed to
survive; whatever was in intimate consonance with the psychical and the vital
law of being and temperament of the Indian people became universalised and took
its place in the enduring figure of the society and polity.
This spontaneous principle of life was
respected by the age of growing intellectual culture. The Indian thinkers on
society, economics and politics, Dharma Shastra and Artha Shastra, made it
their business not to construct ideals and systems of society and government in
the abstract intelligence, but to understand and regulate by the practical
reason the institutions and ways of communal living already developed by the
communal mind and life and to develop, fix and harmonise without destroying the
original elements, and whatever new element or idea was needed was added or
introduced as a super-structure or a modifying but not a revolutionary and
destructive principle. It was in this way that the transition from the earlier
stages to the fully developed monarchical polity was managed; it proceeded by
an incorporation of the existing institutions under the supreme control of the
king or the emperor. The character and status of many of them was modified by
the super-imposition of the monarchical or imperial system, but, as far as
possible, they Page-339 did not pass out of existence. As a result we do not find in India the element of intellectually idealistic political progress or revolutionary experiment which has been so marked a feature of ancient and of modem Europe. A profound respect for the creations of the past as the natural expression of the Indian mind and life, the sound manifestation of its Dharma or right law of being, was the strongest element in the mental attitude and this preservative instinct was not disturbed but rather yet more firmly settled and fixed by the great millennium of high intellectual culture. A slow evolution of custom and institution conservative of the principle of settled order, of social and political precedent, of established framework and structure was the one way of progress possible or admissible. On the other hand, Indian polity never arrived at that unwholesome substitution of the mechanical for the natural order of the life of the people which has been the disease of European civilisation now culminating in the monstrous artificial organisation of the bureaucratic and industrial State. The advantages of the idealising intellect were absent, but so also were the disadvantages of the mechanising rational intelligence.
The Indian mind has always been
profoundly intuitive in habit even when it was the most occupied with the
development of the reasoning intelligence, and its political and social thought
has therefore been always an attempt to combine the intuitions of life and the
intuitions of the spirit with the light of the reason acting as an intermediary
and an ordering and regulating factor. It has tried to base itself strongly on
the established and persistent actualities of life and to depend for its
idealism not on the intellect but on the illuminations, inspirations, higher
experiences of the spirit, and it has used the reason as a critical power
testing and assuring the steps and aiding but not replacing the life and the
spirit —
always the true and sound constructors. The spiritual mind of India
regarded life as a manifestation of the Self: the community was the body of the
creator Brahma, the people was a life body of Brahman in the samaṣṭi, the
collectivity, it was the collective Narayana, as the individual was Brahman in
the vyaṣṭi, the separate Jiva, the individual Narayana; the king was the
living representative of the Divine and the other
Page-340
orders of the community the natural powers of
the collective self, prakṛtayaḥ. The agreed conventions, institutes,
customs, constitution of the body social and politic in all its parts had
therefore not only a binding authority but a certain sacrosanct character.
The right order of human life as of
the universe is preserved according to the ancient Indian idea by each
individual being following faithfully his svadharma, the true law and
norm of his nature and the nature of his kind and by the group being, the
organic collective life, doing likewise. The family, clan, caste, class,
social, religious, industrial or other community, nation, people are all
organic group beings that evolve their own Dharma and to follow it is the
condition of their preservation, healthy continuity, sound action. There is
also the Dharma of the position, the function, the particular relation with
others, as there is too the Dharma imposed by the condition, environment, age, yugadharma,
the universal religious or ethical Dharma, and all these acting on the
natural Dharma, the action according to the svabhāva,
create the body of
the Law. The ancient theory supposed that in an entirely right and sound
condition of man, individual and collective, — a condition typified by the
legendary Golden Age, Satya Yuga, Age of Truth, —
there is no need of any political government or State
or artificial construction of society, because all then live freely according
to the truth of their enlightened self and God-inhabited being and therefore
spontaneously according to the inner divine Dharma. The self-determining
individual and self-determining community living according to the right and
free law of his and its being is therefore the ideal. But in the actual condition
of humanity, its ignorant and devious nature subject to perversions and
violations of the true individual and the true social Dharma, there has to be
super-imposed on the natural life of society a State, a sovereign power, a king
or governing body, whose business is not to interfere unduly with the life of
the society, which must be allowed to function for the most part according to
its natural law and custom and spontaneous development, but to superintend and
assist its right process and see that the Dharma is observed and in vigour and,
negatively, to punish and repress and, as far as may be, prevent offences
against the Dharma. A more advanced stage
Page-341
of corruption of the Dharma is marked by the
necessity of the appearance of the legislator and the formal government of the
whole of life by external or written law and code and rule; but to determine it —
apart from external
administrative detail — was not the function of the political sovereign, who was
only its administrator, but of the socio-religious creator, the Rishi, or the
Brahminic recorder and interpreter. And the Law itself written or unwritten was
always not a thing to be new created or fabricated by a political and
legislative authority; but a thing already existent and only to be interpreted
and stated as it was or as it grew naturally out of pre-existing law and
principle in the communal life and consciousness. The last and worst state of
the society growing out of this increasing artificiality and convention must be
a period of anarchy and conflict and dissolution of the
Dharma, —
Kali Yuga, —
which
must precede through a redgrey evening of cataclysm and struggle a recovery and
a new self-expression of the spirit in the human being. The main function of the political sovereign, the king and council and the other ruling members of the body politic, was therefore to serve and assist the maintenance of the sound law of life of the society: the sovereign was the guardian and administrator of the Dharma. The function of society itself included the right satisfaction of the vital, economic and other needs of the human being and of his hedonistic claim to pleasure and enjoyment, but according to their right law and measure of satisfaction and subject and subordinated to the ethical and social and religious Dharma. All the members and groups of the socio-political body had their Dharma determined for them by their nature, their position, their relation to the whole body and must be assured and maintained in the free and right exercise of it, must be left to their own natural and self-determined functioning within their own bounds, but at the same time restrained from any transgression, encroachment or deviation from their right working and true limits. That was the office of the supreme political authority, the sovereign in his Council aided by the public assemblies. It was not the business of the state authority to interfere with or encroach upon the free functioning of the caste, religious community, guild, village, township or the orga-
Page-342
nic custom of the region or province or to
abrogate their rights, for these were inherent because necessary to the sound
exercise of the social Dharma. All that it was called upon to do was to
co-ordinate to exercise a general and supreme control, to defend the life of
the community against external attack or internal disruption to repress crime
and disorder, to assist promote and regulate in its larger lines the economic
and industrial welfare, to see to the provision of facilities, and to use for
these purposes the powers that passed beyond the scope of the others. Thus in
effect the Indian polity was the system of a very complex communal freedom and
self-determination each group unit of the community having its own natural
existence and administering its own proper life and business, set off from
the rest by a natural demarcation of its field and limits, but connected with
the whole by well-understood relations, each a co-partner with the others in
the powers and duties of the communal existence, executing its own laws and
rules, administering within its own proper limits, joining with the others in
the discussion and the regulation of matters of a mutual or common interest and
represented in some way and to the degree of its importance in the general
assemblies of the kingdom or empire. The State, sovereign or supreme political
authority, was an instrument of co-ordination and of a general control and
efficiency and exercised a supreme but not an absolute authority; for in all its
rights and powers it was limited by the Law and by the will of the people and
in all its internal functions only a co-partner with the other members of the
socio-political body.
Page-343 life were only a part of the Dharma and a part not at all separate but inextricably united with all the rest, the religious, the ethical, the higher cultural aim of the social existence. The ethical law coloured the political and economic and was imposed on every action of the king and his ministers, the council and assemblies, the individual, the constituent groups of the society; ethical and cultural considerations counted in the use of the vote and the qualifications for minister, official and councillor; a high character and training was expected from all who held authority in the affairs of the Aryan people. The religious spirit and the reminders of religion were the head and the background of the whole life of king and people. The life of the society was regarded not so much as an aim in itself in spite of the necessary specialisation of parts of its system, but in all its parts and the whole as a great framework and training ground for the education of the human mind and soul and its development through the natural to the spiritual existence.
Page-344 3
THE socio-political evolution of Indian civilisation, as
far as one can judge from the available records, passed through four historical
stages, first the simple Aryan community, then a long period of transition in
which the national life was proceeding through a considerable variety of
experimental formations in political structure and synthesis, thirdly, the
definite formation of the monarchical state co-ordinating all the complex
elements of the communal life of the people into regional and imperial unities,
and last the era of decline in which there was an internal arrest and stagnation
and an imposition of new cultures and systems from western Asia and Europe. The
distinguishing character of the first three periods is a remarkable solidity and
stability in all the formations and a sound and vital and powerful evolution of
the life of the people rendered slow and leisurely by this fundamental
conservative stability of the system but all the more sure in its building and
living and complete in its structure. And even in the decline this solidity
opposes a strong resistance to the process of demolition. The structure breaks
up at the top under foreign pressure, but preserves for a long time its basis,
keeps, wherever it can maintain itself against invasion, much of its
characteristic system and is even towards the end capable of attempts at revival
of its form and its spirit. And now too, though the whole political system has
disappeared and its last surviving elements have been ground out of existence,
the peculiar social mind and temperament which created it remains even in the
present social stagnation, weakness, perversion and disintegration and may yet
in spite of immediate tendencies and appearances, once it is free to work again
at its own will and after its own manner, proceed not along the western line of
evolution, but to a new creation out of its own spirit which may perhaps lead at
the call of the demand now vaguely beginning to appear in the advanced thought
of the race towards the inception of the third stage of communal living and a
spiritual basis of human society. In any case the long stability of its
constructions and the
Page-345
greatness of the life they sheltered is
certainly no, sign of incapacity, but rather of a remarkable political
instinct and capacity in the cultural mind of India.
The one principle permanent at the base of construction throughout all
the building and extension and rebuilding of the Indian polity was the
principle of an organically self-determining communal life, — self-determining
not only in the mass and by means of the machinery of the vote and a
representative body erected on the surface, representative only of the
political mind of a part of the nation, which is all that the modem system has
been able to manage, but in every pulse of its life and in each separate member
of its existence. A free synthetic communal order was its character, and the
condition of liberty it aimed at was not so much an individual as a communal
freedom. In the beginning the problem was simple enough as only two kinds of
communal unit had to be considered, the village and the clan, tribe or small
regional people. The free organic life of the first was founded on the system of
the self-governing village community and it
was done with such
sufficiency and solidity that it lasted down almost to our own days resisting
all the wear and tear of time and the inroad of other systems and was only
recently steamrollered out of existence by the ruthless and lifeless machinery
of the British bureaucratic system. The whole people living in its villages
mostly on agriculture formed in the total a single religious, social, military
and political body governing itself in its assembly, samiti, under the
leadership of the king, as yet without any clear separation of functions or
class division of labour.
It was the inadequacy of this system for
all but the simplest form of agricultural and pastoral life and all but the
small people living within a very limited area that compelled the problem of
the evolution of a more complex communal system and a modified and more
intricate application of the fundamental Indian principle. The agricultural and
pastoral life common at first to all the members of the Aryan community, kṛṣṭayaḥ
remained always the large basis, but it developed an increasingly rich
superstructure of commerce and industry and numerous arts and crafts and a
smaller superstructure of specialised military and political and religious and
learned occupations and functions.
Page-346
The village community remained throughout the
stable unit, the firm grain or indestructible atom of the social body, but
there grew up a group life of tens and hundreds of villages, each under its
head and needing its administrative organisation, and these, as the clan grew
into a large people by conquest or coalition with others, became constituents
of a kingdom or a confederated republican nation, and these again the circles, mandala,
of larger kingdoms and finally of one or more great empires. The test of
the Indian genius for socio-political construction lay in the successful
application of its principle of a communal self-determined freedom and order
to suit this growing development and new order of circumstances.
The Indian mind evolved, to meet this
necessity, the stable socio-religious system of the four orders. Outwardly this
might seem to be only a more rigid form of the familiar social system developed
naturally in most human peoples at one time or another, a priesthood, a
military and political aristocracy, a class of artisans and free
agriculturalists and traders and a proletariate of serfs or labourers. The
resemblance however is only in the externals and the spirit of the system of Chaturvarna
was different in India. In the later Vedic and the epic times the fourfold
order was at once and inextricably the religious, social, political and
economic framework of the society and within that framework each order had
its natural portion and in none of the fundamental activities was the share or
position of any of them exclussive. This characteristic is vital to an
understanding of the ancient system, but has been obscured by false notions
formed from a misunderstanding or an exaggeration of later phenomena and of
conditions mostly belonging to the decline. The Brahmins, for example, had not
a monopoly either of sacred learning or of the highest spiritual knowledge and
opportunities. At first we see a kind of competition between the Brahmins and
the Kshatriyas for the spiritual lead and the latter for a long time held their
own against the pretensions of the learned and sacerdotal order. The Brahmins,
however, as legists, teachers, priests, men who could give their whole time and
energy to philosophy, scholarship, the study of the sacred writings, prevailed
in the end and secured a settled and imposing predominance. The priestly and
learned
Page-347
class became the religious authorities, the
custodians of the sacred books and the tradition, the interpreters of the law
and Shastra, the recognised teachers in all the departments of knowledge, the
ordinary religious preceptors or Gurus of the other classes and supplied the
bulk, though never the totality of the philosophers, thinkers, literary men,
scholars. The study of the Vedas and Upanishads passed mainly into their hands,
although always open to the three higher orders; it was denied in theory to the
Shudras. As a matter of fact, however, a series of religious movements kept up
even in the later days the essential element of the old freedom, brought the
highest spiritual knowledge and opportunity to all doors and, as in the
beginning we find the Vedic and Vedantic Rishis born from all classes, we find
too up to the end the Yogins, saints, spiritual thinkers, innovators and
restorers, religious poets and singers, the fountain-heads of a living
spirituality and knowledge as distinguished from traditional authority and
lore, derived from all the strata of the community down to the lowest Shudras and
even the despised and oppressed outcastes.
The four orders grew into a fixed social
hierarchy, but, leaving aside the status of the outcastes, each had attached to
it a spiritual life and utility, a certain social dignity, an education, a
principle of social and ethical honour and a place and duty and right in the
communal body. The system served again an automatic means of securing a fixed
division of labour and a settled economic status, the hereditary principle at
first prevailing, although here even the theory was more rigid than the
practice, but none was denied the right or opportunity of amassing wealth and
making some figure in society, administration and politics by means of
influence or status in his own order. For, finally, the social hierarchy was
not at the same time a political hierarchy: all the four orders had their part
in the common political rights of the citizen and in the assemblies and
administrative bodies their place and their share of influence. It may be noted
too that in law and theory at least women in ancient India, contrary to the
sentiment of other ancient peoples, were not denied civic rights, although in
practice this equality was rendered nugatory for all but a few by their social
subordination to the male
Page-348
and their domestic preoccupation; instances
have yet survived in the existing records of women figuring, not only as queens
and administrators and even in the battlefield, a common enough incident in
Indian history, but as elected representatives on civic bodies.
The whole Indian system was founded upon
a close participation of all the orders in the common life, each predominating
in its own field, the Brahmin in religion, learning and letters, the Kshatriya
in war, king-craft and interstate political action, the Vaishya in
wealth-getting and productive economical function, but none, not even the
Shudra, excluded from his share in the civic life and an effective place and
voice in politics, administration, justice. As a consequence the old Indian polity
at no time developed, or at least it did not maintain for long, those
exclusive forms of class rule that have so long and powerfully marked the
political history of other countries. A priestly theocracy, like that of Tibet,
or the rule of a landed and military aristocracy that prevailed for centuries
in France and England and other European countries or a mercantile oligarchy,
as in Carthage and Venice, were forms of government foreign to the Indian
spirit. A certain political predominance of the great Kshatriya families at a
time of general war and strife and mobile expansion, when the clans and tribes
were developing into nations and kingdoms and were still striving with each
other for hegemony and overlordship, seems to be indicated in the traditions preserved
in the Mahabharata and recurred in a cruder form in the return to the clan,
nation in mediaeval Rajputana; but in ancient India this was a passing phase
and the predominance did not exclude the political and civic influence of men
of the other orders or interfere with or exercise any oppressive control over
the free life of the various communal units. The democratic republics of the
intermediate times were in all probability polities which endeavoured to
preserve in its fullness the old principle of the active participation of the
whole body of the people in the assemblies and not democracies of the Greek
type; the oligarchical republics were clan governments or were ruled by more
limited senates drawn from the dignified elements of the society and this
afterwards developed into councils or assemblies repre-
Page-349
senting all the four orders as in the later
royal councils and urban bodies. In any case the system finally evolved was a
mixed polity in which none of the orders had an undue predominance. Accordingly
we do not find in India either that struggle between the patrician and plebeian
elements of the community, the oligarchic and the democratic idea, ending in
the establishment of an absolute monarchical rule, which characterises the troubled
history of Greece and Rome or that cycle of successive forms evolving by a
strife of classes, — first a ruling aristocracy, then replacing it by
encroachment or revolution the dominance of the moneyed and professional
classes, the regime of the bourgeois industrialising the society and governing
and exploiting it in the name of the commons or masses and, finally, the
present turn towards a rule of the proletariate of Labour,
—
which we see in later Europe.
The Indian mind and temperament less exclusively intellectual and vital, more
intuitively synthetic and flexible than that of the occidental peoples arrived,
not certainly at any ideal system of society and politics, but at least at a
wise and stable synthesis — not a dangerously unstable equilibrium, not a
compromise or balance
—
of
all the natural powers and orders, an organic and vital co-ordination
respectful of the free functioning of all the organs of the communal body and
therefore ensured, although not against the decadence that overtakes all human
systems, at any rate against any organic disturbance or disorder. The summit of the political structure was
occupied by three governing bodies, the King in his ministerial Council, the
metropolitan assembly and the general assembly of the kingdom. The members of
the Council and the ministers were drawn from all orders. The Council included
a fixed number of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra representatives. The
Vaishyas had indeed numerically a great preponderance, but this was a just
proportion as it corresponded to their numerical preponderance in the body of
the people: for in the early Aryan society the Vaishya order comprised not only
the merchants and small traders but the craftsmen and artisans and the
agriculturists and formed therefore the bulk of the commons, viśaḥ, and
the Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Shudras, however considerable the position and
influence of the two higher orders, were later social growths and
Page-350
were
comparatively very inferior in number. It was only after,
the confusion
created by the Buddhist upheaval and the Brahminic reconstitution of the
society in the age of cultural decadence that the mass of the cultivators and
artisans and small traders sank in the greater part of India to the condition
of Shudras with a small Brahmin mass at the top and in between a slight
sprinkling of Kshatriyas and of Vaishyas. The Council, representing thus the
whole community, was the supreme executive and administrative body and its
assent and participation necessary to all the action and decrees of the
sovereign in all more important matters of government, finance, policy,
throughout the whole range of the communal interests. It was the King, the
ministers, and the Council who aided by a system of boards of administration
superintended and controlled all the various departments of the State action.
The power of the King undoubtedly tended to grow with time and he was often
tempted to act according to his own independent will and initiative; but still,
as long as the system was in its vigour, he could not with impunity defy or
ignore the opinion and will of the ministers and Council. Even, it seems, so
powerful and strong-willed a sovereign as the great emperor Asoka was
eventually defeated in his conflict with his Council and was forced practically
to abdicate his power. The ministers in Council could and did often proceed to
the deposition of a recalcitrant or an incompetent monarch and replace him by
another of his family or by a new dynasty and it was in this way that there
came about several of the historic changes, as for example the dynastic
revolution from the Mauryas to the Sungas and again the initiation of the Kanwa
line of emperors. As a matter of constitutional theory and ordinary practice
all the action of the king was in reality that of the king in his Council with
the aid of his ministers and all his personal action was only valid as
depending on their assent and in so far as it was a just and faithful discharge
of the functions assigned to him by the Dharma. And as the Council was, as it
were, a quintessential power body or action centre taking up into itself in a
manageable compass, concentrating and representing in its constitution the four
orders, the main elements of the social organism, the king too could only be the
active head of this power and not, as in an auto-
Page-351
cratic regime, himself the State or the owner
of the country and the irresponsible personal ruler of a nation of obedient
subjects. The obedience owed by the people was due to the Law, the Dharma, and
to the edicts of the King in Council only as an administrative means for the
service and maintenance of the Dharma. At the same time a small body like the Council subject to the immediate and constant influence of the sovereign and his ministers might, if it had been the sole governing body, have degenerated into an instrument of autocratic rule. But there were two other powerful bodies in the State which represented on a larger scale the social organism, were a nearer and closer expression of its mind, life and will independent of the immediate regal influence and exercising large and constant powers of administration and administrative legislation and capable at all times of acting as a check on the royal power, since in case of their displeasure they could either get rid of an unpopular or oppressive king or render his administration impossible until he made submission to the will of the people. These were the great metropolitan and general assemblies sitting separately for the exercise each of its separate powers and together for matters concerning the whole people.1 The Paura or metropolitan civic assembly sat constantly in the capital town of the kingdom or empire — and under the imperial system there seem also to have been similar lesser bodies in the chief towns of the provinces, survivals of the assemblies that governed them when they were themselves capitals of independent kingdoms — and was constituted of representatives of the city guilds and the various caste bodies belonging to all the orders of the society or at least to the three lower orders. The guilds and caste bodies were themselves organic self-governing constituents of the community both in the country and the city and the supreme assembly of the citizens was not an artificial but an organic representation of the collective totality of the whole organism as it existed within the limits of the metropolis. It governed all the life of the city, acting directly or through subordinate
1 The facts about these bodies — I have selected only those that are significant for my purpose — are taken from the luminous and scrupulously documented contribution of Mr. Jayaswal to the subject.
Page-352
lesser assemblies and administrative boards or
committees of five, ten or more members, and, both by regulations and decrees
which the guilds were bound to obey and by direct administration, controlled
and supervised the commercial, industrial, financial and municipal affairs of
the civic community. But in addition it was a power that had to be consulted
and could take action in the wider affairs of the kingdom, sometimes separately
and sometimes in co-operation with the general assembly, and its constant
presence and functioning at the capital made it a force that had always to be
reckoned with by the King and his ministers and their Council. In a case of
conflict with the royal ministers or governors even the distant civic
parliaments in the provinces could make their displeasure felt if offended in
matters of their position or privileges or discontented with the Kingʼs
administrators and could compel the withdrawal of the offending officer.
The general assembly was similarly an
organic representation of the mind and will of the whole country outside the
metropolis; for it was composed of the deputies, elective heads or chief men
of the townships and villages. A certain plutocratic element seems to have
entered into its composition, as it was principally recruited from the
wealthier men of the represented communities, and it was therefore something of
the nature of an assembly
of the commons not of an
entirely democratic type,
—
although
unlike all but the most recent modem parliaments it included Shudras as well as
Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, — but still a sufficiently faithful expression of the
life and mind of the people. It was not however a supreme parliament: for it
had ordinarily no fundamental legislative powers, any more than had the King
and Council or the metropolitan assembly, but only of decree and regulation.
Its business was to serve as a direct instrument of the will of the people in
the co-ordination of the various activities of the life of the nation, to see
to the right direction of these and to the securing of the general order and
welfare of the commerce, industry, agriculture, social and political life of
the nation, to pass decrees and regulations to that purpose and secure
privileges and facilities from the king and his Council, to give or withhold
the assent of the people to the actions of the sovereign and, if need be, to oppose
him actively and prevent misgovernment
or end it by
Page-353
the means open to the peopleʼs representatives.
The joint session of the metropolitan and general assemblies was consulted in
matters of succession, could depose the sovereign, alter the succession at his
death, transfer the throne outside the reigning family, act sometimes as a
supreme court of law in cases having a political tincture, cases of treason or
of miscarriage of justice. The royal resolutions on any matter of State policy
were promulgated to these assemblies and their assent had to be taken in all
matters involving special taxation, war, sacrifice, large schemes of irrigation
etc., and all questions of vital interest to the country. The two bodies seem
to have sat constantly, for matters came up daily from them to the sovereign:
their acts were registered by the king and had automatically the effect of law.
It is clear indeed from a total review of their rights and activities that they
were partners in the sovereignty and its powers were inherent in
them and even those could be exercised by them on extraordinary occasions which
were not normally within their purview. It is significant that Asoka in his
attempt to alter the Dharma of the community, proceeded not merely by his royal
decree but by discussion with the Assembly. The ancient description seems
therefore to have been thoroughly justified which
characterised the two bodies as executors of
the kingdomʼs activities and at need the instruments of opposition to the Kingʼs government. It is not clear when these great institutions went out of existence, whether before the Mahomedan invasion or as a result of the foreign conquest. Any collapse of the system at the top leaving a gu1f between the royal government, which would grow more autocratic by its isolation and in sole control of the larger national affairs, and the other constituents of the socio-political body each carrying on its own internal affairs, as was to the end the case with the village communities, but not in any living relation with the higher State matters, would obviously be, in an organisation of complex communal freedom where co-ordination of the life was imperatively needed, a great cause of weakness. In any case the invasion from Central Asia, bringing in a tradition of personal and autocratic rule unfamiliar with these restraints would immediately destroy such bodies, or their rem-
Page-354
nants or survivals wherever they still existed,
and this happened throughout the whole of Northern India. The Indian political
system was still maintained for many centuries in the South, but the public
assemblies which went on existing there do not seem to have been of the same
constitution as the ancient political bodies, but were rather some of the other
communal organisations and assemblies of which these were a co-ordination and
supreme instrument of control. These inferior assemblies included bodies
originally of a political character, once the supreme governing institutions of
the clan nation, kula, and the republic, gana. Under the new
dispensation they remained in existence, but lost their supreme powers and
could only administer with a subordinate and restricted authority the affairs
of their constituent communities. The kula or clan family persisted,
even after it had lost its political character, as a socio-religious
institution, especially among the Kshatriyas, and preserved the tradition of
its social and religious law, kula-dharma, and in some cases its
communal assembly, kula-saṅgha. The public assemblies that we find even
in quite recent times filling the role of the old general assembly in Southern
India, more than one coexisting and acting separately or in unison, appear to
have been variations on this type of body. In Rajputana also the clan family, kula,
recovered its political character and action, but in another form and
without the ancient institutions and finer cultural temper, although they
preserved in a high degree the Kshatriya Dharma of courage, chivalry, magnanimity
and honour.
A stronger permanent element in the
Indian communal system, one that grew up in the frame of the four orders — in the end even replacing
it — and acquired an
extraordinary vitality,
persistence and predominant importance was the historic
and still tenacious though decadent institution of caste,
jāti.
Originally this
rose from subdivisions of the four orders that grew up in each order under the
stress of various forces. The subdivision of the Brahmin castes was mainly due
to religious, socio-religious and ceremonial causes, but there were also
regional and local divisions: the Kshatriyas remained for the most part one
united order, though divided into Kulas. On the other hand the Vaishya and
Shudra orders split up into innumerable castes under the
Page-355
necessity of a subdivision of economic
functions on the basis of the hereditary principle. Apart from the increasingly
rigid application of the hereditary principle, this settled subdivision of
function could well enough have been secured, as in other countries, by a guild
system and in towns we do find a vigorous and efficient guild system in
existence. But the guild system afterwards fell into desuetude and the more
general institution of caste became the one basis of economic function
everywhere. The caste in town and village was a separate communal unit, at once
religious, social and economic, and decided its religious, social and other
questions, carried on its caste affairs and exercised jurisdiction over its
members in a perfect freedom from all outside interference: only on fundamental
questions of the Dharma the Brahmins were referred to for an authoritative
interpretation or decision as custodians of the Shastra. As with the kula, each
caste had its caste law and rule of living and conduct,
jāti-dharma,
and its caste
communal assembly, jāti-saṅgha.
As the Indian polity in all its institutions was
founded on a communal and not on an individual basis, the caste also counted in
the political and administrative functioning of the kingdom. The guilds equally
were self-functioning mercantile and industrial communal units, assembled for
the discussion and administration of their affairs and had besides their united
assemblies which seem at one time to have been the governing urban bodies.
These guild governments, if they may so be called
— for they
were more than municipalities,
— disappeared afterwards into
the more general
urban body which represented an organic unity of both the guilds and the caste
assemblies of all the orders. The castes as such were not directly represented
in the general assembly of the kingdom, but they had their place in the
administration of local affairs.
The village community and the
township were the most tangibly stable basis of the whole system; but these, it
must be noted, were not solely territorial units or a convenient mechanism for
electoral, administrative or other useful social and political purposes, but
always true communal unities with an organic life of their own that functioned in
its own power and not merely as a subordinate part of the machinery of the
State. The
village
Page-356
community has been described as a little
village republic and the description is hardly an exaggeration: for each
village was within its own limits autonomous and self-sufficient, governed by
its own elected Panchayats and elected or hereditary officers, satisfying its
own needs, providing for its own education, police, tribunals, all its economic
necessities and functions, managing itself its own life as an independent and
self-governing unit. The villages carried on also their affairs with each other
by combinations of various kinds and there were too groups of villages under
elected or hereditary heads and forming therefore, though in a less closely
organised fashion, a natural body. But the townships in India were also in a
hardly less striking way autonomous and self-governing bodies, ruled by their
own assembly and committees with an elective system and the use of the vote,
managing their own affairs in their own right and sending like the villages
their representative men to the general assembly of the kingdom. The
administration of these urban governments included all works contributing to
the material or other welfare of the citizens, police, judicial cases, public
works and the charge of sacred and public places, registration, the collection
of municipal taxes and all matters relating to trade, industry and commerce. If
the village community can be described as a little village republic, the constitution
of the township can equally be described as a larger urban republic. It is
significant that the Naigama and Paura assemblies,
—
the guild governments and the metropolitan bodies,
—
had the privilege of striking coins of their own, a power otherwise exercised
only by the monarchical heads of States and the republics.
Another kind of community must be
noted, those which had no political existence, but were yet each in its own
kind a self-governing body; for they illustrate the strong tendency of Indian
life to throw itself in all its manifestations into a closely communal form of
existence. One example is the joint family, prevalent everywhere in India and
only now breaking down under the pressure of modern conditions, of which the two
fundamental principles were first a communal holding of the property by the
agnates and their families and, as far as possible, an undivided communal life
under the management of the head of the family
Page-357
and, secondly, the claim of each male to an
equal portion in the share of his father, a portion due to him in case of
separation and division of the estate. This communal unity with the persistent
separate right of the individual is an example of the synthetic turn of the
Indian mind and life, its recognition of fundamental tendencies and its attempt
to harmonise them even if they seemed in their norm of practice to be
contradictory to each other. It is the same synthetic turn as that which in all
parts of the Indian socio-political system tended to fuse together in different
ways the theocratic, the monarchic and aristocratic, the plutocratic and the
democratic tendencies in a whole which bore the characteristics of none of them
nor was yet an accommodation of them or amalgamation whether by a system of
checks and balances or by an intellectually constructed synthesis, but rather a
natural outward form of the inborn tendencies and character of the complex
social mind and temperament.
At the other end, forming the
ascetic and purely spiritual extreme of the Indian life-mind, we find the,
religious community and, again, this too takes a communal shape. The original
Vedic society had no place for any Church or religious community or
ecclesiastical order, for in its system the body of the people formed a single
socio-religious whole with no separation into religious and secular, layman and
cleric, and in spite of later developments the Hindu religion has held, in the
whole or at least as the basis, to this principle. On the other hand an increasing
ascetic tendency that came in time to distinguish the religious from the
mundane life and tended to create the separate religious community, was
confirmed by the rise of the creeds and disciplines of the Buddhists and the
Jains. The Buddhist monastic order was the first development of the complete
figure of the organised religious community. Here we find that Buddha simply
applied the known principles of the Indian society and polity to the ascetic
life. The order he created was intended to be a dharma-saṅgha, and each
monastery a religious commune living the life of a united communal body which
existed as the expression and was based in all the rules, features, structure
of its life on the maintenance of the Dharma as it was understood by the Buddhists.
This was, as we can at once see, precisely the Page-358
principle and theory of the whole Hindu
society, but given here the higher intensity possible to the spiritual life and
a purely religious body. It managed its affairs too like the Indian social and
political communal unities. An assembly of the order discussed debatable
questions of the Dharma and its application and proceeded by vote as in the
meeting-halls of the republics, but it was subject still to a limiting control
intended to avoid the possible evils of a too purely democratic method. The
monastic system once thus firmly established was taken over from Buddhism by
the orthodox religion, but without its elaborate organisation. These religious
communities tended, wherever they could prevail against the older Brahminic
system, as in the order created by Shankaracharya, to become a sort of
ecclesiastical head to the lay body of the community, but they arrogated to
themselves no political position and the struggle between Church and State is absent
from the political history of India.
It is clear therefore that the whole
life of ancient India retained even in the time of the great kingdoms and
empires its first principle and essential working and its social polity
remained fundamentally a complex system of self-determined and self-governing
communal bodies. The evolution of an organised State authority supervening on
this system was necessitated in India as elsewhere partly by the demand of the
practical reason for a more stringent and scientifically efficient
co-ordination than was possible except in small areas to the looser natural coordination of life, and more imperatively by the need of a systematised
military aggression and defence and international action concentrated in the hands
of a single central authority. An extension of the free republican State might
have sufficed to meet the former demand, for it had the potentiality and the
necessary institutions, but the method of the monarchical State with its more
constricted and easily tangible centrality presented a more ready and
manageable device and a more facile and apparently efficient machinery. And for
the external task, involving almost from the commencement the supremely
difficult age-long problem of the political unification of India, then a
continent rather than a
country, the republican
system, more suited to strength in defence
than for aggression, proved in
spite of its efficient military orga-
Page-359
nisation to be inadequate. It was, therefore,
in India as elsewhere, the strong form of the monarchical State that prevailed
finally and swallowed up the others. At the same time the fidelity of the
Indian mind to its fundamental institutions and ideals preserved the basis of
communal self-government natural to the temperament of the people, prevented
the monarchical State from developing into an autocracy or exceeding its proper
functions and stood successfully in the way of its mechanising the life of the
society. It is only in the long decline that we find the free institutions that
stood between the royal government and the self-determining communal life of
the people either tending to disappear or else to lose much of their ancient
power and vigour and the evils of personal government, of a bureaucracy of
scribes and officials and of a too preponderant centralised authority
commencing to manifest in some sensible measure. As long as the ancient
traditions of
the Indian polity
remained and in proportion as they continued to be vital and effective, these
evils remained either sporadic and occasional or could not assume any serious
proportions. It was the combination of foreign invasion and conquest with the
slow decline and final decadence of the ancient Indian culture that brought
about the collapse of considerable parts of the old structure and the
degradation and disintegration, with no sufficient means for revival or new
creation, of the socio-political life of the people.
At the height of its evolution and in
the great days of Indian civilisation we find an admirable political system
efficient in the highest degree and very perfectly combining communal self-government with stability and order. The State carried on its work
administrative, judicial, financial and protective without destroying or
encroaching on the rights and free activities of the people and its constituent
bodies in the same departments. The royal courts in capital and country were
the supreme judicial authority co-ordinating the administration of justice
throughout the kingdom, but they did not unduly interfere with the judicial
powers entrusted to their own courts by the village and urban communes and,
even, the regal system associated with itself the guild, caste and family
courts, working as an ample means of arbitration and only insisted on its own
exclusive control of the
Page-360
more
serious criminal offences. A similar respect was shown to the administrative
and financial powers of the village and urban communes. The Kingʼs governors
and officials in town and country existed side by side with the civic governors
and officials and the communal heads and officers appointed by the people and
its assemblies. The State did not interfere with the religious liberty or the
established economic and social life of the nation; it confined itself to the
maintenance of social order and the provision of a needed supervision, support,
co-ordination and facilities for the rich and powerful functioning of all the
national activities. It understood too always and magnificently fulfilled its
opportunities as a source of splendid and munificent stimulation to the
architecture, art, culture, scholarship, literature already created by the
communal mind of India. In the person of the monarch it was the dignified and
powerful head and in the system of his administration the supreme instrument —
neither an arbitrary autocracy
or bureaucracy, nor a machine oppressing or replacing life
—
of a great and stable
civilisation and a free and living people.
Page-361 4
A
RIGHT knowledge of the
facts and a right understanding of the character and principle of the Indian
socio-political system disposes at once of the contention of occidental critics
that the Indian mind, even if remarkable in metaphysics, religion, art and
literature was inapt for the organisation of life, inferior in the works of the
practical intelligence and, especially, that it was sterile in political
experiment and its record empty of sound political construction, thinking and
action. On the contrary, Indian civilisation evolved an admirable political
system, built solidly and with an enduring soundness, combined with a remarkable
skill the monarchical, democratic and other principles and tendencies to which
the mind of man has leaned in its efforts of civic construction and escaped at
the same time the excess of the mechanising turn which is the defect of the
modem European State. I shall consider afterwards the objections that can be
made to it from the evolutionary standpoint of the West and its idea of
progress.
But there is another side of
politics on which it may be said that the Indian political mind has registered
nothing but failure. The organisation it developed may have been admirable for
stability and effective administration and the securing of communal order and
liberties and the well-being of the people under ancient conditions, but even
if its many peoples were each of them separately self-governed, well governed
and prosperous and the country at large assured in the steady functioning of a
highly developed civilisation and culture, yet that organisation failed to
serve for the national and political unification of India and failed in the end
to secure it against foreign invasion, the disruption of its institutions and
an age long servitude. The political system of a society has to be judged, no
doubt first and foremost by the stability, prosperity, internal freedom and
order it ensures to the people, but also it must be judged by the security it
erects against other States, its unity and power of defence and aggression
against external rivals and enemies. It is not perhaps altogether Page-362 to the credit of humanity that it should be so and a nation or people that is inferior in this kind of political strength, as were the ancient Greeks and mediaeval Italians, may be spiritually and culturally far superior to its conquerors and may well have contributed more to a true human progress than successful military States, aggressive communities, predatory empires. But the life of man is still predominatingly vital and moved therefore by the tendencies of expansion, possession, aggression, mutual struggle for absorption and dominant survival which are the first law of life, and a collective mind and consciousness that gives a constant proof of incapacity for aggression and defence and does not organise the centralised and efficient unity necessary to its own safety, is clearly one that in the political field falls far short of the first order. India has never been nationally and politically one. India was for close on a thousand years swept by barbaric invasions and for almost another thousand years in servitude to successive foreign masters. It is clear therefore that judgment of political incapacity must be passed against the Indian people.
Here again the first necessity
is to get rid of exaggerations, to form a clear idea of the actual facts and
their significance and understand the tendencies and principles involved in the
problem, that admittedly throughout the long history of India escaped a right
solution. And first, if the greatness of a people and a civilisation is to be
reckoned by its military aggressiveness, its scale
of
foreign conquest, its success in warfare against other nations
and
the triumph of its organised acquisitive and predatory instincts, its
irresistible push towards annexation and exploitation, it must be confessed
that India ranks perhaps the lowest in the list of the worldʼs great peoples.
At no time does India seem to have been moved towards an aggressive military
and political expansion beyond her own borders; no epic of world dominion, no
great tale of far-borne invasion or expanding colonial empire has ever been
written in the tale of Indian achievement. The sole great endeavour of
expansion, of conquest, of invasion she attempted was the
expansion of her culture, the invasion and conquest of the eastern world by the
Buddhistic idea and the penetration of her spirituality, art and
thought-forces. And this was an invasion of peace and not of war, for to spread
a spiritual Page-363
civilisation by force and physical conquest,
the, vaunt or the excuse of modern imperialism, would have been uncongenial to
the ancient cast of her mind and temperament and the idea underlying her
Dharma. A series of colonising expeditions carried indeed Indian blood and
Indian culture to the islands of the archipelago, but the ships that set out
from both the eastern and western coast were not fleets of invaders missioned
to annex those outlying countries to an Indian empire but of exiles or
adventurers carrying with them to yet uncultured peoples Indian religion,
architecture, art, poetry, thought, life, manners. The idea of empire and even
of world-empire was not absent from the Indian mind, but its world was the Indian
world and the object the founding of the imperial unity of its peoples.
This idea the sense of this
necessity, a constant urge towards its realisation is evident throughout the
whole course of Indian history from earlier Vedic times through the heroic
period represented by the traditions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata and the
effort of the imperial Mauryas and Guptas up to the Moghul unification and the
last ambition of the Peshwas, until there came the final failure and the
levelling of all the conflicting forces under a foreign yoke, a uniform
subjection in place of the free unity of a free people. The question then is
whether the tardiness, the difficulty, the fluctuating movements of the process
and the collapse of the long effort were due to a fundamental incapacity in the
civilisation or in the political consciousness and ability of the people or to
other forces. A great deal has been said and written about the inability of
Indians to unite, the want of a common patriotism — now only being created, it
is said, by the influence of Western culture — and the divisions imposed by
religion and caste. Admitting even in their full degree the force of these
strictures, — all of them are not altogether true or rightly stated or vitally
applicable to the matter, — they are only symptoms and we have still to seek
for the deeper causes.
The reply made for the defence is
usually that India is practically a continent almost as large as Europe
containing a great number of peoples and the difficulties of the problem have
been as great or at least almost as considerable. And if then it is no proof of
the insufficiency of Western civilisation or of the poli-
Page-364
tical incapacity
of the European peoples that the idea of European unity should still remain an
ineffective phantasm on, the ideal plane and to this day impossible to realise
in practice, it is not just to apply a different system of values to the much
more clear ideal of unity or at least of unification, the persistent attempt at
its realisation and the frequent near approach to success that marked the
history of the Indian peoples. There is some force in the contention, but it is
not in the form entirely apposite, for the analogy is far from perfect and the
conditions were not quite of the same order. The peoples of Europe are nations
very sharply divided from each other in their collective personality, and their
spiritual unity in the Christian religion or even their cultural unity in a
common European civilisation, never so real and complete as the ancient
spiritual and cultural unity of India, was also not the very centre of their
life, not its basis or firm ground of existence, not its supporting earth but
only its general air or circumambient atmosphere. Their base of existence lay in
the political and economic life which was strongly separate in each country, and
it was the very strength of the political consciousness in the western mind that
kept Europe a mass of divided and constantly warring nations. It is only the
increasing community of political movements and the now total economic
interdependence of the whole of Europe that has at last created not any unity,
but a nascent and still ineffective League of Nations struggling vainly to
apply the mentality born of an agelong separatism to the common interests of
the European peoples. But in India at a very early time the spiritual and
cultural unity was made complete and became the very stuff of the life of all
this great surge of humanity between the Himalayas and the two seas. The
peoples of ancient India were never so much distinct nations
sharply divided from each other by a separate political and economic life as
sub-peoples of a great spiritual and cultural nation itself, firmly separated,
physically, from other countries by the seas and the mountains and from other
nations by its strong sense of difference, its peculiar common religion and
culture. The creation of a political unity, however vast the area and however
many the practical difficulties, ought therefore to have been effected more
easily than could possibly be the unity of
Page-365
Europe. The cause of the failure must be sought
deeper down and we shall find that it lay in a dissidence between the manner in
which the problem was or ought to have been envisaged and the actual turn given
to the endeavour and in the latter a contradiction of the peculiar mentality of
the people.
The whole basis of the Indian mind is its
spiritual and inward turn, its propensity to seek the things of the spirit and
the inner being first and foremost and to look at all else as secondary,
dependent, to be handled and determined in the light of the higher knowledge
and as an expression, a preliminary or field or aid or at least a pendent to
the deeper spiritual aim, — a tendency therefore to create whatever it had to
create first on the inner plane and afterwards in its other aspects. This
mentality and this consequent tendency to create from within outwards being
given, it was inevitable that the unity India first created for herself should
be the spiritual and cultural oneness. It could not be, to begin with, a
political unification effected by an external rule centralised, imposed or
constructed, as was done in Rome or ancient Persia, by a conquering kingdom or
the genius of a military and organising people. It cannot, I think, justly be
said that this was a mistake or a proof of the unpractical turn of the Indian
mind and that the single political body should have been created first and
afterwards the spiritual unity could have securely grown up in the vast body of
an Indian national empire. The problem that presented itself at the beginning
was that of a huge area containing more than a hundred kingdoms, clans,
peoples, tribes, races, in this respect another Greece, but a Greece on an
enormous scale, almost as large as modem Europe. As in Greece a cultural
Hellenic unity was necessary to create a fundamental feeling of oneness, here
too and much more imperatively a conscious spiritual and cultural unity of all
these peoples was the first, the indispensable condition without which no
enduring unity could be possible. The instinct of the Indian mind and of its
great Rishis and founders of its culture was sound in this matter. And even if
we suppose that an outward imperial unity like that of the Roman world could
have been founded among the peoples of early India by military and political
means, we must not forget that the Roman unity did not endure, that even the
Page-366
unity of ancient Italy founded by the Roman
conquest and organisation did not endure, and it is not likely that a similar
attempt in the vast reaches of India without a previous spiritual and cultural
basis would have been of an enduring character. It cannot be said either, even
if the emphasis on spiritual and cultural unity be pronounced to have been too
engrossing or excessive and the insistence of political and external unity too
feeble, that the effect of this precedence has been merely disastrous and
without any advantage. It is due to this original peculiarity, to this
indelible spiritual stamp, to this underlying oneness amidst all diversities
that if India is not yet a single organised political nation, she still
survives and is still India.
After all, the spiritual and
cultural is the only enduring unity and it is by a persistent mind and spirit
much more than by an enduring physical body and outward organisation that the
soul of a people survives. This is a truth the positive western mind may be
unwilling to understand or concede, and yet its proofs are written across the
whole story of the ages. The ancient nations, contemporaries of India, and many
younger born than she are dead and only their monuments left behind them.
Greece and Egypt exist only on the map and in name, for it is not the soul of Hellas
or the deeper nation-soul that built Memphis which we now find at Athens or at
Cairo. Rome imposed a political and a purely outward cultural unity on the
Mediterranean peoples, but their living spiritual and cultural oneness she
could not create, and therefore the East broke away from the West, Africa kept
no impress of the Roman interlude, and even the western nations still called
Latin could offer no living resistance to barbarian invaders and had to be
reborn by the infusion of a foreign vitality to become modem Italy, Spain and
France. But India still lives and keeps the continuity of her inner mind and
soul and spirit with the India of the ages. Invasion and foreign rule, the
Greek, the Parthian and the Hun, the robust vigour of Islam, the levelling
steam-roller heaviness of the British occupation and the British system, the
enormous pressure of the Occident have not been able to drive or crush the
ancient soul out of the body her Vedic Rishis made for her. At every step,
under every calamity and attack and domination, she has been able to resist
Page-367
and survive either with an active or a passive
resistance. And this she was able to do in her great days by her spiritual
solidarity and power of assimilation and reaction, expelling all that would not
be absorbed, absorbing all that could not be expelled, and even after the
beginning of the decline she was still able to survive by the same force,
abated but not slayable, retreating and maintaining for a time her ancient
political system in the South, throwing up, under the pressure of Islam, Rajput
and Sikh and Mahratta to defend her ancient self and its idea, persisting
passively where she could not resist actively, condemning to decay each empire
that could not answer her riddle or make terms with her, awaiting always the day
of her revival. And even now it is a similar phenomenon that we see in process
before our eyes. And what shall we say then of the surpassing vitality of the
civilisation that could accomplish this miracle and of the wisdom of those who
built its foundation not on things external but on the spirit and the inner
mind and made a spiritual and cultural oneness the root and stock
of her existence and not solely its fragile flower, the eternal basis and not
the perishable superstructure?
But spiritual unity is a large and
flexible thing and does not insist like the political and external on
centralisation and uniformity; rather it lives diffused in the system and
permits readily a great diversity and freedom of life. Here we touch on the
secret of the difficulty in the problem of unifying ancient India. It could not
be done by the ordinary means of a centralised uniform imperial State crushing
out all that made for free divergence, local autonomies, established communal
liberties, and each time that an attempt was made in this direction, it has
failed after however long a term of apparent success, and we might even say
that the guardians of Indiaʼs destiny wisely compelled it to fail that her
inner spirit might not perish and her soul barter for an engine of temporary
security the deep sources of its life. The ancient mind of India had the
intuition of its need; its idea of empire was a uniting rule that respected
every existing regional and communal liberty, that unnecessarily crushed out no
living autonomy, that effected a synthesis of her life and not a mechanical
oneness. Afterwards the conditions under which such a solution might securely
have evolved and found its true means and
Page-368
form
and basis, disappeared and there was instead an attempt to establish a single
administrative empire. That endeavour, dictated by the pressure of an immediate
and external necessity, failed to achieve a complete success in spite of its
greatness and splendour. It could not do so because it followed a trend that
was not eventually compatible with the true turn of the Indian spirit. It has
been seen that the underlying principle of the Indian politico-social system
was a synthesis of communal autonomies, the autonomy of the village, of the
town and capital city, of the caste, guild, family, kula, religious
community, regional unit. The state or kingdom or confederated republic was a
means of holding together and synthetising in a free and living organic system
these autonomies. The imperial problem was to synthetise again these states,
peoples, nations, effecting their unity but respecting their autonomy, into a
larger free and living organism. A system had to be found that would maintain
peace and oneness among its members, secure safety against external attack and
totalise the free play and evolution, in its unity and diversity, in the
uncoerced and active life of all its constituent communal and regional units,
of the soul and body of Indian civilisation and culture, the functioning on a
grand and total scale of the Dharma.
This was the sense in which the
earlier mind of India understood the problem. The administrative empire of
later times accepted it only partially, but its trend was, very slowly and
almost subconsciously, what the centralising tendency must always be, if not
actively to destroy, still to wear down and weaken the vigour of the
subordinated autonomies. The consequence was that whenever the central
authority was weak, the persistent principle of regional autonomy essential to
the life of India reasserted itself to the detriment of the artificial unity
established and not, as it should have done, for the harmonious intensification
and freer but still united functioning of the total life. The imperial monarchy
tended also to wear down the vigour of the free assemblies, and the result was
that the communal units instead of being elements of a united strength became
isolated and dividing factors. The village community preserved something of its
vigour, but had no living connection with
the
Page-369
supreme authority and, losing the larger
national sense, was willing to accept any indigenous or foreign rule that
respected its own self-sufficient narrow life. The religious communities came
to be imbued with the same spirit. The castes, multiplying themselves without
any true necessity or true relation to the spiritual or the economic need of
the country, became mere sacrosanct conventional divisions, a power for
isolation and not, as they originally were, factors of a harmonious functioning
of the total life-synthesis. It is not true that the caste divisions were in
ancient India an obstacle to the united life of the people or that they were
even in later times an active power for political strife and disunion, —
except indeed at the end, in
the final decline, and especially during the later history of the Mahratta
confederation; but they did become a passive force of social division and of a
stagnant compartmentalism obstructive to the reconstitution of a free and
actively united life.
The evils that attended the system did
not all manifest themselves with any power before the Mahomedan invasions,
but they must have been already there in their beginning and they increased rapidly
under the conditions created by the Pathan and the Moghul empires. These later
imperial systems, however brilliant and powerful, suffered still more than
their predecessors from the evils of centralisation owing to their autocratic
character and were constantly breaking down from the same tendency of the
regional life of India to assert itself against an artificial unitarian regime,
while because they had no true, living and free relation with the life of the
people, they proved unable to create the common patriotism which would have
effectively secured them against the foreign invader. And in the end there has
come a mechanical western rule that has crushed out all the still existing
communal or regional autonomies and substituted the dead unity of a machine.
But again in the reaction against it we see the
same
ancient tendencies reviving, the tendency towards a reconstitution of the
regional life of the Indian peoples, the demand for a provincial autonomy
founded on true subdivisions of race and language, a harking back of the Indian
mind to the ideal of the lost village community as a living unit necessary to
the natural life of the national body and not yet reborn but dimly
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beginning to dawn on the more advanced minds, a
truer idea of the communal basis proper to Indian life and the renovation and
reconstruction of Indian society and politics on a spiritual foundation.
The failure to achieve Indian unity
of which the invasions and the final subjection to the foreigner were the consequence,
arose therefore at once from the magnitude and from the peculiarity of the
task, because the easy method of a centralised empire could not truly succeed
in India, while yet it seemed the only device possible and was attempted again
and again with a partial success that seemed for the time and a long time to
justify it, but always with an eventual failure. I have suggested that the
early mind of India better understood the essential character of the problem.
The Vedic Rishis and their successors made it their chief work to found a
spiritual basis of Indian life and to effect the spiritual and cultural unity
of the many races and peoples of the peninsula. But they were not blind to the
necessity of a political unification. Observing the constant tendency of the
clan life of the Aryan peoples to consolidate under confederacies and
hegemonies of varying proportions, vairājya, sāmrājya, they saw that to
follow this line to its full conclusion was the right way and evolved therefore
the ideal of the cakravartin, a uniting imperial rule, uniting without
destroying the autonomy of Indiaʼs many kingdoms and peoples, from sea to sea.
This ideal they supported, like everything else in Indian life, with a
spiritual and religious sanction, set up as its outward symbol the Aswamedha
and Rajasuya sacrifices, and made it the Dharma of a powerful King, his royal
and religious duty, to attempt the fulfilment of the ideal. He was not allowed
by the Dharma to destroy the liberties of the peoples who came under his sway nor
to dethrone or annihilate their royal houses or replace their archons by his
officials and governors. His function was to establish a suzerain power
possessed of sufficient military strength to preserve internal peace and to
combine at need the full forces of the country. And to this elementary function
came to be added the ideal of the fulfilment and maintenance under a strong
uniting hand of the Indian Dharma, the right functioning of the spiritual,
religious, ethical and social culture of India.
Page-371
The full flowering of the ideal is seen in the
great epics. The Mahabharata is the record of a legendary or, it may be, a
historic attempt to establish such an empire, a dharmarājya or kingdom
of the Dharma. There the ideal is pictured as so imperative and widely
acknowledged that even the turbulent Shishupala is represented as motiving his
submission and attendance at the Rajasuya sacrifice on the ground that
Yudhishthira was carrying out an action demanded by the Dharma. And in the
Ramayana we have an idealised picture of such a Dharmarajya, a settled
universal empire. Here too it is not an autocratic despotism but a universal
monarchy supported by a free assembly of the city and provinces and of all the
classes that is held up as the ideal, an enlargement of the monarchical state
synthetising the communal autonomies of the Indian system and maintaining the
law and constitution of the Dharma. The ideal of conquest held up is not a
destructive and predatory invasion annihilating the organic freedom and the
political and social institutions and exploiting the economic resources of the
conquered peoples, but a sacrificial progression bringing with it a trial of
military strength of which the result was easily accepted because defeat
entailed neither humiliation nor servitude and suffering but merely a
strengthening adhesion to a suzerain power concerned only with establishing the
visible unity of the nation and the Dharma. The ideal of the ancient Rishis is
clear and their political utility and necessity of a unification of the divided
and warring peoples of the land, but they saw also that it ought not to be
secured at the expense of the free life of the regional peoples or of the
communal liberties and not therefore by a centralised monarchy or a rigidly
unitarian imperial State. A hegemony or confederacy under an imperial head
would be the nearest western analogy to the conception they sought to impose on
the minds of the people.
There is no historical evidence that this
ideal was ever successfully carried into execution, although the epic tradition
speaks of several such empires preceding the Dharmarajya of Yudhishthira. At
the time of Buddha and later when Chandragupta and Chanakya were building the
first historic Indian empire, the country was still covered with free kingdoms
and republics and there was no united empire to meet the great raid Page-372
of Alexander. It is evident
that if any hegemony had previously
existed, it had failed to discover a means or
system of enduring permanence. This might however have evolved if time had been
given, but a serious change had meanwhile taken place which made it urgently
necessary to find an immediate solution. The historic weakness of the Indian
peninsula has always been until modem times its vulnerability through the
north-western passes. This weakness did not exist so long as ancient India
extended northward far beyond the Indus and the powerful kingdoms of Gandhara
and Vahlika presented a firm bulwark against foreign invasion. But they had now
gone down before the organised Persian empire and from this time forward the
trans-Indus countries, ceasing to be part of India, ceased also to be its protection and became instead the secure base for every successive invader. The
inroad of Alexander brought home the magnitude of the danger to the political
mind of India and from this time we see poets, writers, political thinkers
constantly upholding the imperial ideal or thinking out the means of its
realisation. The immediate practical result was the rise of the empire founded
with remarkable swiftness by the statesmanship of Chanakya and constantly
maintained or restored through eight or nine centuries, in spite of periods of
weakness and incipient disintegration, successively by the Maurya, Sunga,
Kanwa, Andhra and Gupta dynasties. The history of this empire, its remarkable
organisation, administration, public works, opulence, magnificent culture and
the vigour, the brilliance, the splendid fruitfulness of the life of the
peninsula under its shelter emerges only from scattered insufficient records,
but even so it ranks among the greatest constructed and maintained by the
genius of the earthʼs great peoples. India has no reason, from this point of
view, to be anything but proud of her ancient achievement in empire-building or
to submit to the hasty verdict that denies to her antique civilisation a strong
practical genius or high political virtue.
At
the same time this empire suffered by the inevitable haste, violence and
artificiality of its first construction to meet a pressing need, because that
prevented it from being the deliberate, natural and steady evolution in the old
solid Indian manner
of the
Page-373
truth of her deepest ideal. The attempt to
establish a centralised imperial monarchy brought with it not a free synthesis
but a breaking down of regional autonomies. Although according to the Indian
principle their institutes and customs were respected and at first even their
political institutions not wholly annulled, at any rate in many cases, but
brought within the imperial system, these could not really flourish under the
shadow of the imperial centralisation. The free peoples of the ancient Indian
world began to disappear, their broken materials serving afterwards to create
the now existing Indian races. And I think it can be concluded on the whole
that although for a long time the great popular assemblies continued to remain
in vigour, their function in the end tended to become more mechanical and their
vitality to decline and suffer. The urban republics too tended to become more
and more mere municipalities of the organised kingdom or empire. The habits of
mind created by the imperial centralisation and the weakening or disappearance
of the more dignified free popular institutions of the past created a sort of
spiritual gap, on one side of which were the administered content with any
government that gave them security and did not interfere too much with their
religion, life and customs and on the other the imperial administration beneficent
and splendid, no doubt, but no longer that living head of a free and living
people contemplated by the earlier and the true political mind of India. These
results became prominent and were final only with the decline, but they were
there in seed and rendered almost inevitable by the adoption of a mechanical
method of unification. The advantages gained were those of a stronger and more
coherent military action and a more regularised and uniform administration, but
these could not compensate in the end for the impairment of the free organic
diversified life which was the true expression of the mind and temperament of
the people.
A worse result was a certain fall from
the high ideal of the Dharma. In the struggle of kingdom with kingdom for
supremacy, a habit of Machiavellian statecraft replaced the nobler ethical
ideals of the past, aggressive ambition was left without any sufficient
spiritual or moral check and there was a coarsening of the national mind in the
ethics of politics and government
Page-374
already
evidenced in the draconic penal legislation of the Maurya times and in Asokaʼs
sanguinary conquest of Orissa. The deterioration, held in abeyance by a
religious spirit and high intelligence, did not come to a head till more than a
thousand years afterwards and we only see it in its full force in the worst
period of the decline when unrestrained mutual aggression, the unbridled egoism
of princes and leaders, a total lack of political principle and capacity for
effective union, the want of a common patriotism and the traditional
indifference of the common people to a change of rulers gave the whole of the
vast peninsula into the grasp of a handful of merchants from across the seas.
But however tardy the worst results in their coming and however redeemed and
held in check at first by the political greatness of the empire and a splendid
intellectual and artistic culture and by frequent spiritual revivals, India had
already lost by the time of the later Guptas the chance of a natural and
perfect flowering of her true mind and inmost spirit in the political life of
her peoples.
Meanwhile the empire served well enough,
although not perfectly, the end for which it was created, the saving of Indian
soil and Indian civilisation from that immense flood of barbarian unrest which
threatened all the ancient stabilised cultures and finally proved too strong
for the highly developed Graeco-Roman civilisation and the vast and powerful
Roman empire. That unrest throwing great masses of Teutons, Slavs, Huns and
Scythians to west and east and south battered at the gates of India for many
centuries, effected certain inroads, but, when it sank, left the great edifice
of Indian civilisation standing and still firm, great and secure. The
irruptions took place whenever the empire grew weak and this seems to have
happened whenever the country was left for some time secure. The empire was
weakened by the suspension of the need which created it, for then the regional
spirit re-awoke in separatist movements disintegrating its unity or breaking
down its large extension over all the North. A fresh peril brought about the
renewal of its strength under anew dynasty, but the phenomenon continued to
repeat itself until, the peril ceasing for a considerable time, the empire called
into
existence to meet it passed
away
not to revive. It left behind it a
certain number of
great kingdoms in the East, South and Centre Page-375
and a
more confused mass of peoples in the north-west, the weak point at which the
Mussulmans broke in and in a brief period rebuilt in the North, but in another,
a Central Asiatic type, the ancient empire.
These earlier foreign invasions
and their effects have to be seen in their true proportions, which are often
disturbed by the exaggerated theories of oriental scholars. The invasion of
Alexander was an eastward impulsion of Hellenism that had a work to do in
Western and Central Asia, but no future in India. Immediately ejected by Chandragupta,
it left no traces. The entrance of the Graeco-Bactrians which took place
during the weakness of the later Mauryas and was annulled by the reviving
strength of the empire, was that of a Hellenised people already profoundly
influenced by Indian culture. The later Parthian, Hun and Scythian invasions
were of a more serious character and for a time seemed dangerous to the
integrity of India. In the end however they affected powerfully only the
Punjab, although they threw their waves farther south along the western coast
and dynasties of a foreign extraction may have been established for a time far
down towards the South. To what degree the racial character of these parts was
affected, is far from certain. Oriental scholars and ethnologists have imagined
that the Punjab was Scythianised, that the Rajputs are of the same stock and
that even farther south the race was changed by the intrusion. These
speculations are founded upon scanty or no evidence and are contradicted by
other theories, and it is highly doubtful whether the barbarian invaders could
have come in such numbers as to produce so considerable a consequence. It is
farther rendered improbable by the fact that in one or two or three generations
the invaders were entirely Indianised, assumed completely the Indian religion,
manners, customs, culture and melted into the mass of the Indian peoples. No
such phenomenon took place as
in
the countries of the Roman Empire, of barbarian tribes imposing on a superior
civilisation their laws, political system, barbaric customs, alien rule. This
is the common significant fact of these irruptions and it must have been due to
one or all of three factors. The invaders may have been armies rather than
peoples; the occupation was not a continuous external rule which had time
Page-376
to stiffen in its foreign character, for each
was followed by a revival of the strength of the Indian empire and its return
upon the conquered provinces; and finally the powerfully vital and absorbing
character of Indian culture was too strong to allow of any mental-resistance to
assimilation in the intruders. At any rate if these irruptions were of a very
considerable character, Indian civilisation must be considered to have proved
itself much more sound, more vital and more solid than the younger Graeco-Roman which went down before the Teuton and the Arab or survived only
underneath and in a debased form heavily barbarised, broken and unrecognisable.
And the Indian empire too must be pronounced to have proved after all more
efficacious than was the Roman with all its vaunt of solidity and greatness,
for it succeeded, even if pierced in the West, in preserving the security of
the great mass of the peninsula.
It is a later downfall, the Mussulman
conquest failing in the hands of the Arabs but successfully re-attempted after
a long interval, and all that followed it which serves to justify the doubt
thrown on the capacity of the Indian peoples. But first let us put aside
certain misconceptions which cloud the real issue. This conquest took place at
a time when the vitality of ancient Indian life and culture after two thousand
years of activity and creation was already exhausted for a time or very near
exhaustion and needed a breathing space to rejuvenate itself by transference from
the Sanskrit to the popular tongues and the newly forming regional peoples. The
conquest was effected rapidly enough in the North, although not entirely
complete there for several centuries, but the South long preserved its freedom
as of old against the earlier indigenous empire and there was not so long a
distance of time between the extinction of the kingdom of Vijayanagara and the
rise of the Mahrattas. The Rajputs maintained their independence until the time
of Akbar and his successors and it was in the end partly with the aid of Rajput
princes acting as their generals and ministers that the Moghuls completed their
sway over the East and the South. And this was again possible because — a fact
too often forgotten —
the Mussulman
domination ceased very rapidly to be a foreign rule. The vast mass of the
Mussulmans in the country were and are Indians by race, only
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a very small admixture of Pathan, Turkish and
Moghul blood took place, and even the foreign kings and nobles became almost
immediately wholly Indian in mind, life and interest. If the race had really
like certain European countries remained for many centuries passive,
acquiescent and impotent under an alien sway, that would indeed have been a
proof of a great inherent weakness; but the British is the first really
continuous foreign rule that has dominated India. The ancient civilisation
underwent indeed an eclipse and decline under the weight of a Central Asiatic
religion and culture with which it failed to coalesce, but it survived its pressure,
put its impact on it in many directions and remained to our own day alive even
in decadence and capable of recovery, thus giving a proof of strength and
soundness rare in the history of human cultures. And in the political field it
never ceased to throw up great rulers, statesmen, soldiers, administrators. Its
political genius was not in the decadence sufficient, not coherent enough or
swift in vision and action, to withstand the Pathan, Moghul and European, but
it was strong to survive
and
await every opportunity of revival, made a bid for empire
under Rana Sanga,
created the great kingdom of Vijayanagara, held its own for centuries against
Islam in the hills of Rajputana, and in its worst days still built and
maintained against the whole power of the ablest of the Moghuls the kingdom of
Shivaji, formed the Mahratta confederacy and the Sikh Khalsa, undermined the
great Moghul structure and again made a last attempt at empire. On the brink of
the final and almost fatal collapse in the midst of unspeakable darkness,
disunion and confusion it could still produce Ranjit Singh and Nana Fadnavis
and Madhoji Scindia and oppose the inevitable march of Englandʼs destiny. These
facts do not diminish the weight of the charge that can be made of an
incapacity to see and solve the central problem and answer the one persistent
question of Fate, but considered as the phenomena of a decadence they make a
sufficiently remarkable record not easily paralleled under similar
circumstances and certainly put a different complexion on the total question
than the crude statement that India has been always subject and politically
incapable.
The real problem introduced by the
Mussulman conquest
Page-378
was not
that of subjection to a foreign rule and the ability to recover freedom, but
the struggle between two civilisations, one ancient and indigenous, the other
mediaeval and brought in from outside. That which rendered the problem
insoluble was the attachment of each to a powerful religion, the one militant
and aggressive, the other spiritually tolerant indeed and flexible, but
obstinately faithful in its discipline to its own principle and standing. on
the defence behind a barrier of social forms. There were two conceivable
solutions, the rise of a greater spiritual principle and formation which could
reconcile the two or a political patriotism surmounting the religious struggle
and uniting the two communities. The first was impossible in that age. Akbar
attempted it on the Mussulman side, but his religion was an intellectual and
political rather than a spiritual creation and had never any chance of assent
from the strongly religious mind of the two communities. Nanak at tempted it
from the Hindu side, but his religion, universal in principle, became a sect in
practice. Akbar attempted also to create a common political patriotism, but
this endeavour too was foredoomed to failure. An autocratic empire built on the
Central Asian principle could not create the desired spirit by calling in the
administrative ability of the two communities in the person of great men and
princes and nobles to a common service in the creation of a united imperial
India: the living assent of the people was needed and that remained passive for
want of awakening political ideals and institutions. The Moghul empire was a
great and magnificent construction and an immense amount of political genius
and talent was employed in its creation and maintenance. It was as splendid,
powerful and beneficent and, it may be added, in spite of Aurangzebʼs fanaical
zeal, infinitely more liberal and tolerant in religion than any mediaeval or
contemporary European kingdom or empire and India under its rule stood high
in military and political strength, economic opulence and the brilliance of its
art and culture. But it failed like the empires before it, more disastrously
even, and in the same way, crumbling not by external attack but by internal
disintegration. A military and administrative centralised empire could not
effect Indiaʼs living political unity. And although a new life seemed
Page-379
about to rise in the regional peoples, the
chance was cut short by the intrusion of the European nations and their seizure
of the opportunity created by the failure of the Peshwas and the desperate
confusion of the succeeding anarchy and decadence.
Two remarkable creations embodied in
the period of disintegration the last effort of the Indian political mind to
form the foundations of a new life under the old conditions, but neither proved
to be of a kind that could solve the problem. The Mahratta revival inspired by
Ramdasʼ conception of the Maharashtra Dharma and cast into shape by Shivaji was
an attempt to restore what could still be understood or remembered of the
ancient form and spirit, but it failed; as all attempts to revive the past must
fail, in spite of the spiritual impetus and the democratic forces that assisted
its inception. The Peshwas for all their genius lacked the vision of the founder
and could only establish a military and political confederacy. And their
endeavour to found an empire could not succeed because it was inspired by a
regional patriotism that failed to enlarge itself beyond its own limits and
awaken to the living ideal of a united India. The Sikh Khalsa on the other hand
was an astonishingly original and novel creation and its face was turned not to
the past but the future. Apart and singular in its theocratic head and
democratic soul and structure, its profound spiritual beginning, its first
attempt to combine the deepest elements of Islam and Vedanta, it was a
premature drive towards an entrance into the third or spiritual stage of human
society, but it could not create between the spirit and the external life the
transmitting medium of a rich creative thought and culture. And thus hampered
and deficient it began and ended within narrow local limits, achieved intensity
but no power of expansion. The conditions were not then in existence that could
have made possible a successful endeavour.
Afterwards came the night and a
temporary end of all political initiative and creation. The lifeless attempt of
the last generation to imitate and reproduce with a servile fidelity the ideals
and forms of the West has been no true indication of the political mind and
genius of the Indian people. But again amid all the mist of confusion there is
still the possibility of a new twilight, not of an evening but a morning
yuga-sandhyā.
India of the ages
Page-380
is not dead nor has
she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for
herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an
anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the
cycle of the occidentʼs success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable
Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme
source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a
vaster form of her Dharma.
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