Fallacies regarding India.

1. Injustice to the Orient.

In Europe even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the barbers were surgeons. Even in the eighteenth century the magic touch of the king's hand was believed by the English people to have marvellous therapeutic effects. Patients suffering from scrofula and other diseases used to petition the Court in order to have the royal healing administered to them. Today in Europe and America millions of Christians still believe in immaculate conception and transubstantiation.

If a Hindu were to note down these and other facts of a like nature and exhibit them as specimens of modern Eur-America or mediaeval and ancient Europe would it be doing justice to the intellect of the Occidental world? But this is exactly what European and American scholars of the nineteenth century have done with regard to India and the Orient. The little that is known of the Orient in Europe and America today is, to say the least, based on a fundamentally wrong attitude of mind and an unscientific presentation of the subject-matter.

2. Secular Literature of the Hindus.

The most prevalent notion is that Hindu literature is at best the literature of topics dealing with the "other world," the soul, the Divinity,—the themes which constitute the stock-in-trade of pessimistic metaphysics. The historic truth, however, is that metaphysical subjectivism is the least part of Hindu thought, and pessimism the furthest removed from actual Indian life and institutions.

The Hindus have discussed every subject in the universe from the tamarind to the pole-star. Hindu literature and art are the literature and art of every human passion and activity from sex to salvation.

The Hindus have written on "pure" mathematics; their algebra and arithmetic were in advance of those of the Greeks. The Hindus have in fact laid down the foundations of the mathematical science known to the modern world. They anticipated Descartes (1596-1650) in the principle of solid geometry and Newton (1642-72) in that of differential calculus. The solutions of Lagrange and Euler (1707-83) in indeterminate equations of the second degree were given by the Hindus more than one thousand years before their time.

Hindu literature on anatomy and physiology as well as eugenics and embryology has been voluminous. The Hindus knew the exact osteology of the human body two thousand years before Vesalius (c. 1543) and had some rough ideas of the circulation of blood long before Harvey (1628). Internal administration of mercury, iron and other powerful metallic drugs was practised by the Hindu physicians at least one thousand years before Paracelsus (1540). And they have written extensive treatises on these subjects.

The Hindus have written on government, municipal institutions, taxation, census, jurisprudence, warfare, and the laws of nations. Their investigations bear comparison with those of Aristotle, Machiavelli and Jean Bodin. The Hindus have written on painting, literary criticism, dramaturgy, dancing, gesture, music, irrigation, navigation, and town-planning.

In Europe the six notes of the gamut were invented by Guido, monk of Arezzo in Fuscany (995-1050) and the seventh was added by Le Maire of Paris in the sixteenth century. But the Hindus wrote about the full musical scale at least as early as the fifth century and they devised also a sort of musical notation, signs and symbols, which may be regarded as the analogues of the mediaeval European neumes.

3. Humanity and Hindu Culture.

Hindu treatises on algebra, arithmetic, astronomy, pharmacy, chemistry, medicine, and surgery were not confined to India. They were translated into Chinese (and ultimately into Japanese) on the one side; and on the other, were translated into Arabic by the Moslems of Western Asia. In the Middle Ages the Moslems taught the Christians of Europe at Cordova in Spain, at Cairo in Egypt, at Damascus in Syria, and at Bagdad on the Tigris. The Europeans have thus learnt the Hindu decimal system of notation in mathematics, the use of some Hindu medicinal drugs, and Hindu metallurgy.

The musical theories of the Hindus were the same as those of the Europeans down to nearly the end of the Middle Ages, as both were based on melody. Harmony is a recent European growth (seventeenth century). Similarly the theories of painting also were the same both in India and Europe. Like the Hindus, the ancients and mediaevals in Europe did not have the "perspective" with which the modern world is familiar. Hindu books on painting have, besides, influenced the art and art-criticism of China during her "Augustan age". Europeans and Americans who are today admiring the Chinese masters are thereby indirectly paying homage to Hindu art-philosophy.

4. Greater India.

In a sense the geography of Hindu culture is as wide as Asia itself. Hindu thought is even now governing the Bushido morality of the Japanese soldiers. It is at the back of the philosophical writings of the neo-Confucianists (of the Sung age) and of the mystical Taoists in China, as well as of the energetic Nichirenism of the people in Japan. It runs through the Sufistic teachings of the Persian poets, is responsible for the Buddhism of Siam and Indo-China, and regulates the everyday life of the Central-Asian, Mongolian and Siberian rustics. And the islands of the South Seas and the Indian Ocean from the Philippines on the East to Madagascar on the African coast bear on them indelible marks of Hindu colonial expansion, in vocabulary, literary tradition, sculpture, and architecture.

All this is a fairy tale today. But it was brought about by the most natural circumstances. For about fifteen hundred years from the close of the fourth century B.C. the Hindus maintained a Greater India of international commerce and culture. India had thus become the heart and brain of Asia.

5. Epochs of Hindu Culture.

It is often supposed that Hindu greatness was that of a people who belonged to some ante-diluvian age. It is even held in some quarters that the epoch of Hindu glory was synchronous with the primitive Vedic age or that it was exhausted in the so-called Buddhist period. The facts of history are quite otherwise. The Vedic age is by no means the greatest age of the Hindus; nor is there, strictly speaking, a "Buddhist period" of Indian history.

It is true that the Hindu ships brought muslin and indigo to the builders of the pyramids in Egypt, and jewels to Syria for the breastplate of the Hebrew high priest. It is also true that Hindu traders had settlements in the international quarters of the great city of Babylon, a New York of antiquity. But for all practical purposes the great achievements of the Hindus should be regarded as synchronous with those of the Greeks from Pythagoras (sixth century B.C.) to Aristotle (fourth century B.C.) of the Alexandrians, and of the Roman Empire (c. A.C. 100-600).

As for the subsequent ages, it need be remembered that the classical races of Europe were extinct and gave the torch of civilization to the "barbarian" Teutons; whereas the Hindus continued to live and expand maintaining and furthering their race-consciousness. Down to the Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented by Descartes, Leibnitz and Newton these new European races could not distance the Hindus in any branch of science or art, theoretical or applied. And down to the industrial revolution, i.e. the application of steam to manufacture and communication in the early years of the nineteenth century the Hindu political, military, economic and social institutions were on a par with those in Europe.

Liberty of the people was not then greater in the Western world than in India, women's rights were then not known in any part of the globe, mankind did not know anywhere the blessings of universal education, industry was everywhere limited to the cottage and the domestic system, the family was tied to the village, the civilization was throughout mainly agricultural and rural, and the Hindu Louis's, Fredericks and Peters were as good or as bad "enlightened despots" as were those of Europe.

6. Hindu Institutional Life.

It is alleged that the Hindus have ever been defective in organizing ability and the capacity for administering public bodies. Epoch by epoch, however, India has given birth to as many heroes, both men and women, in public service, international commerce, military tactics, and government, as has any race in the Occidental world. Warfare was never monopolized by the so-called Kshatriya or warrior caste in India, but as in Europe, gave scope to every class or grade of men to display their ability.

Hindu history is the history of as many institutions, councils, conferences, academies and congresses, as that of the Western races. The Hindus organized municipal commissions for civic life and built hospitals for the sick and wounded at least three hundred years before the Christian era. The Hindus had parishats, i.e. academies or clubs for philosophical and scientific investigation in every age of their history. They established universities for the advancement of learning and propagation of culture. And they instituted societies or associations for religious and moral purposes as well.

It is a vicious practice to try to understand Hindu characteristics or the "spirit" of Hindu civilization from the failures and demoralization of the Hindus in the nineteenth century. It is also unscientific to forget the superstitions of the European Middle Ages while making an estimate of independent Hindu culture down to the eighteenth century.