Ours is a moment of doomsday prophets. Ideas are no longer getting importance in our civilization today; we believe in action which would bring direct advantage to our day-to-day lives. Thought is being relegated to the background at a time when we are so busy that before long we would begin to realize that even in the materialistic world there is need for a philosophy to sustain a civilization which must have a goal to achieve to fulfill its ends. It is to sustain that intellectual life that we need to look at the civilization and culture of India.
It is time to realize that until India wakes up to rediscover her spiritual heritage, she will continue to produce “Brown Sahibs” and remain under the yoke of the ghosts of Macaulay. Arthur Schopenhauer, the great German philosopher, was so impressed by the philosophy of the Upanishads that he called them “the production of highest human wisdom” and predicted that “knowledge of the Upanishads would become the cherished faith of the West”. It is due to religious prejudice that early Indologists were reluctant to give the Vedas a higher antiquity than the earlier position of the Old Testament. Due to their lack of knowledge, they relegated all the Vedic texts to the realm of mythology. It is they who were responsible for rejecting the idea that Sanskrit was the mother of at least the Indo-European languages, as initially propounded by Franz Bopp. The British, borrowing from their own traditions to understand Indian tradition through texts, made the error of overemphasizing the elements of discreteness of Indian social entities and neglecting the linkage between them which bound these entities into one organic whole.
In 1808, Charles Grant described the opening of Christian missionary schools and translations of the Bible into Indian languages as “principal efforts made under the patronage of the British government in India to impart to the natives a knowledge of Christianity.” However, they showed little interest in Vedic scriptures. In England, the Conservatives, though they accepted that to overthrow Indian tradition would be a difficult task, were interested in improving the way of life, but were cautious of fear of an uprising. The Liberal Party, however, felt the need for gradual introduction of Western standards and values in India. The Rationalists believed that human ignorance could be abolished by reason and since the West was the champion of reason, the East would profit by its association. William Carey, pioneer of the modern missionary enterprise in India and of Western scholarship in Oriental studies, composed a number of philosophical works consisting of grammars and dictionaries in Marathi, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Telugu and Bengali dialects with a view to expose them as useless.
He, along with a few others, experimented with Church Sanskrit. William Archer, in his book India and the Future, wrote: “The plain truth concerning the mass of (Indian) population ~ and the poorer classes alone ~ is that they are not civilized people.” Buchanan, a missionary attached to the East India Company, witnessed the annual Rath Yatra in Puri and called it “the horrors of Juggernaut”. Perhaps by seeing the face of Lord Jagannath, the British hallucinated and found in it a projection of their own international destiny of bloodshed and carnage. J N Farquhar, a Scottish clergyman who preached in our country (1891-1923) stated in his book The Crown of Hinduism that although Hinduism may have some good points, true salvation can “only be achieved through Christ, who is the crown of Hinduism.” In fact, all missionaries opposed the government’s efforts to take a neutral stand towards Indian culture and worked with more zeal for conversion of the natives. William Jones was the first Britisher to learn Sanskrit and study the Vedas.
He wrote: “I’m in love with Gopia, charmed with Crishen (Krishna), an enthusiastic admirer of Raama and a devout adorer of Brihma (Brahma), Bishen ( Vishnu), Mahisher (Maheshwara); not to mention that Judishteir, Argentina, Corno (Karna) and the other warriors of the M’ hab’ harat appear greater in my eyes than Agamemnon, Ajax and Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad.” However, a great Sanskrit scholar of his time, HH Wilson (1786-1860) held the view that Christianity should replace Vedic culture. In his Education Minute, Macaulay maintained that he could not find an Orientalist who could deny that “a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” He wanted a competent scholar who could interpret the Vedic scriptures in such a manner that the newly educated Indian youth see how barbaric their native traditions were.
Macaulay found such a scholar in Max Mueller who was first commissioned by the East India Company to translate the Rig Veda into English. Ironically, the man who had Bhavans named after him with veneration all over India probably did the most damage to uproot Vedic culture. However, he could not restrain himself from appreciating the Indian mind in his lecture for the undergraduate students of Cambridge: “If he were to ask himself from what literature we were in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greek and Romans, and one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life not for the life only, but a transfigured and eternal life ~ again I should point to India.”
This sort of praise for the Indian mind reappears in WB Yeats’s adoration of Tagore’s Gitanjali: “We are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image.” But the fact remains that the West has never accepted our philosophy and literature as a part of the world’s literary heritage. One recalls that when Tagore won the Nobel Prize in 1913, several Western intellectuals upgraded love of Tagore as a very unwelcome admiration of something that was not really a part of Western literary culture. The fact of the matter is that Indian culture has certainly much to offer to the world. There have been scholars who continued to write competently on the great Indian tradition. Charles Wilkins’ translations of the Bhagavadagita appeared in 1785 and Sir William Jones’s English version of Shakuntala in 1789.
Interest in the history of Indian culture was first taken into consideration by Sir Monier Williams with his Indian Wisdom, Religion Thought and Life in India and Modern India and Indians. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, in his Sanskriti, Shilpa , Itihas maintains that culture is the flower of the tree of civilization. He might have referred to the idea of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee contained in his article Vedic Literature. The much eulogized Vedic hymns are addressed to gods and goddesses mostly personification of the forces of nature. The Rigveda then is a polytheistic hymnody, a doxology of many divinities, male and female. But they are not devotional songs or songs expressing the singer’s love of God. They are prayers for material prosperity, long life, plenty of cattle and destruction of enemies. Upanishads are at once great poetry and great philosophy.
It is important that a series of lectures, seminars and workshops be organized in our institutions of culture to have a better comprehension of their themes. We should be thankful to the endeavor of the premier cultural institution in our country in disseminating the components of the great Indian tradition to those who at all care for the subject. The Ramkrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission are the twin organizations which form the core of a worldwide spiritual movement known as the Ramakrishna Movement or the Vedanta Movement ~ aiming at the harmony of religion, of the East and the West and the ancient and the modern, as also at the all-round development of human faculties, social equalities, peace and, above all, spiritual fulfillment for all of humanity
(The writer, a former Associate Professor, Department of English, Gurudas College, Kolkata, is presently with Rabindra Bharati University)