Science and Learning in Young India.
Science and Learning in Young India.European and American observers who are watching the barometer of the world's progress cannot fail to notice that in India to-day at least two branches of learning bid fair to achieve permanent conquests. Of these the more popular one seems to be archaeology or the study of antiquities1 generally. The next in chronological order but by no means second in importance is positive science.2 Not only mathematics, physics and chemistry, but biology and the allied sciences also—all of the highest grade—have come to stay.
1. Criterion of Intellectual Advance.
Let us explain this stock-taking in precise terms. It is not merely that these two groups of science are being studied by the young men with keener and keener interest, nor even that the professors and publicists with cultural predilections are trying to keep in touch with the latest articles in the scientific journals of the world. The really noteworthy feature in the present state of Indian intellect is twofold.
First, Young India has begun consciously to contribute to the conquest of new realms in each of these sciences by original investigations of the first rate. Its claims as an active partner and, helpful member of the republic of world-culture are thus being automatically established. Secondly, and what is possibly of greater significance so far as India's national evolution is concerned, these pioneering investigations are not confined to one or two giants or to a few high-brow demi-gods, as might have been the case, say, about a decade ago, but are broad-based on the independent and small but persistent activity of a daily increasing number of seekers of truth. It is this new democracy of Indian cooperative research that is arresting the special attention of the European and American learned societies as a potent young Asian force harnessed in the interest of science-progress.
Judged by this twofold test, our intellectual inventory would exhibit a lamentable poverty of contemporary India in the field of philosophy. No doubt there are quite a few translations and paraphrases, in English and in mother-tongues, of the Upanishads, the Darshanas, the Gîtâ, and so forth. But at best these commentarial publications have chiefly an antiquarian or palaeontological importance. In regard to the most learned of these treatises the highest that might be said is, that dealing as they do with cultural fossilis, they are of no more value in modern life than are the critical editions of, or scholarly writings on, European metaphysicians like Seneca, Plotinus or St. Augustine by the professors of Western universities. We could hardly mention one great Hindu or Mussalman name in the last three generations of scholarship that is associated in a creative way with any of the schools and problems of psychology, theory of knowledge, or methodology. It is not too much to say that today the entire Indian intellect is absolutely bankrupt in the world of higher philosophical speculation, although the exploitation of ancient mysticism for current politics is a palpably noticeable feature of the times.
In historical fields the brain of India is as barren as in the philosophical. The world has a right to demand that Indian scholars should be competent enough to attack the problems of Latin-American, Russian, Italian, or Japanese history with as great enthusiasm as Western students employ in the study of Oriental lore. Indians must get used to discussing Europe and America with as much confidence as Europeans and Americans in lecturing and writing on Asia. Not until such an all-grasping world-view, a bold man-to-man individualistic understanding of things, a self-conscious attitude in regard to the events of the human world, an humanistic approach to the problems of race-development is ingrained in the mentality can one expect to see a real historical school grow up in Young India's intellectual milieu.
Even in regard to the problems of indology it were good to admit frankly that although India is cooperating with the West in producing first class archaeology, of real history there is virtually nothing.
History begins where archaeology ends. The beginnings of a school of history were being laid in India by Madhava Govind Ranade in his Rise of the Maratha Power and by Romesh Chunder Dutt in his Ancient Hindu Civilization, inevitably defective though their attempts were owing to the wrong archaeology of their days. But the methodology of "nationalistic interpretation" initiated by them, which in the last analysis is the life-blood of every system of scientific history strictly so called, remains yet to be seriously taken up by Young India. Opportunities for historical studies were never more inviting than now, for we are at the present moment in a position to make use of a comparatively accurate archaeology and hence a more correct anatomy of Indian society through the ages
It is only when Indian scholarship proceeds to galvanize the dry bones of excavated data with the vital physiology of philosophical "prejudices" (no matter of what sort) that compilers of Cambridge Modern History and their admirers in Europe and America will be moved to announce the historians of Asia as some of the first class intellectuals of the world and shake hands with them on a basis of equality. It must never be forgotten that history is a science altogether different from archaeology. In order to be lifted up to history archaeology must have to be impregnated with a bias, an interpretation, a standpoint, a philosophy, a "criticism of life."
The third science which does not appear to have made a permanent home in Indian brains is the science of constitution, municipal government, legal categories, and international relations. In India as elsewhere there is a need for demagogic platitudes being scattered broadcast from the pulpit and the press, in one word, for "propaganda". No sane critic who looks forward to the nationalization of political ideals can challenge the utility of such harangues and popular expositions. But still one might expect that there should be in India at least a dozen thinkers and writers whose views on administration, justice or statesmanship might command the respect of European and American theorists. In India political science is yet to come.
But probably the weakest item in the present state of Indian intellect, especially of that of the Bengali intelligentszia is a weak-kneed cowardice before facts and figures of the economic world. One cannot deny that during the last decade a very high degree of differentiation and specialization has been attempted by the universities in the teaching of economics. The advanced students no longer have their horizon circumscribed by Adam Smith, Mill and Marshall. But the fact remains that currency, finance, railway, land-tenure, prices, and statistics are still unreal terms or abstract entities in the consciousness of Young India.
2. Extra-Indian Data.
Some of the weaknesses in politics and economics could be successfully combated if a batch of Indian publicists and professors got a chance to live in the different intellectual centres of the world with a view to carrying on researches in regard to the agricultural banks of Japan, the tariff problem of the United States, the French and Italian schemes of colonization, the international loans of Turkey and China, local government in England, the Hague tribunals, the foreign trade of Argentina, the war finance of the late German Empire, the industries of the new Russia, and the economics of reparations and indemnities. Such investigations will have to be undertaken for a good few years by each student in collaboration with the prominent financiers, political philosophers, social democrats, statisticians, and international jurists of the various lands. Before acquiring proficiency in the handling of such non-Indian or extra-Indian questions it would be well nigh impossible for us to build up an authoritative body of economic and political doctrines in India.
Indeed for philosophy and history also the same steps should be recommended as for politics and economics. Indian scholars and authors have need to meet the leading savants of the world on terms of familiar intercourse in order that they may watch from month to month how and why a particular problem of epistemology or animal behaviour or soul-psychology acquires prominence in philosophical discussions, and observe how the interpretation of one's country's immediate past has been changing with decades according to the shibboleths of science, sect, or social denomination that happen to be in the ascendant for the time being. Only with such intimate experience of the inner workings of the philosophical and historical mind is it possible for Young India to be endowed with the organon that is needed for its cultural reconstruction.
For Indian intellectuals the urgent desideratum of the hour is a purely objective methodology. The instrument of a thoroughly realistic and unsentimental approach to the facts and phenomena of the psychical and social world has to be made quite popular in India. In order to achieve this viewpoint the preliminary procedure should be to acquire altogether new angles of vision, and this would be feasible only if a good few of the scholars got interested in studies and investigations that have absolutely no Indian bearing. In other words, we have to proceed to the historical, philosophical, economic and political studies exactly in the spirit in which the archaeologists or rather the students of positive science have been attacking their problems.
3. Three Sciences Demanding Cultivation.
It is well known, however, that as in Europe and America, in India also philosophy, history, politics and economics are four of the most popular subjects among university students. One must mention in this connection a new branch of studies that has of late been acquiring a slow but sure foothold on the Indian mind. viz. that relating to the fine arts, especially to paintings and sculptures. The study, however, is still in its non-age; original investigations have not passed the antiquarian grade as yet. It is also regrettable that the science of aesthetic studies has not advanced in India in the same proportion as the creative experiments in the art-world. But notwithstanding much dilettantism and superficial generalization in regard to western "ideals" of art, signs of a genuine art-awakening are too patent to be overlooked, at any rate in Bengal.
It is appropriate to point out that philology, anthropology and sociology are the three sciences that have long been awaiting a wide recognition among Indian scholars. It might almost be said that until a year or two ago these sciences were hardly even listed in the courses of instruction offered by the universities.
A few post-graduate students especially of Bombay have had some education in philology at Berlin and Paris. But in these instances the knowledge is confined to the Indo-Aryan languages. They have as a rule learned to compare the grammars of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit (and Persian), French and German. But the chief requisite for a science of language is the comparative study of several non-Aryan languages together with that of the Aryan groups. Two such languages are Chinese and Arabic.
A school of philology worth the name cannot evolve in India unless the Sanskritist (and Persianist) possesses command also over Arabic and Chinese, or the Arabist can handle with ease the Chinese and Sanskrit (and Persian) languages. Sanskrit, Arabic, and Chinese, this trio must have to be treated as an inseparable group by the rising linguists of India.
The social value of this scientific trivium can hardly be over-estimated. The Hindu-Moslem unity of which we hear so much these days can be founded only on such a synthetic ground-work of conscious cultural rapprochement. Sanskrit-knowing Hindus must now have to learn Arabic, and Arabic-knowing Mussalmans must have to be proficient in Sanskrit. And since Chinese is partly also the language of Islam in the Far East no proper appraisal of Moslem civilization is possible to a student who is unfamiliar with that language.
Why should not the Hindu University of Benares start this new movement in Indo-Islamic expansion? A faculty might be created there under distinguished Indian experts such as would devote themselves to the study of a subject like, say, "Moslem Achievements in Mediaeval Culture." No more secure basis for a new Islamic renaissance could be suggested. The investigation will involve a knowledge as much of Greek and Latin as of the other three languages, and of course, of French and German for access to modern researches on the subject.
A solid nucleus for Indo-Islamic philology is likely to emerge if an initial investigation be carried on for a period of about five years by three Mussalman and three Hindu scholars under the leadership of a philologist, say, like A. Suhrawardy of Calcutta. The investigators should have to be provided with opportunities for travel in Northern Africa, Spain, Western Asia, and China. Educational benefactors might be interested in raising some three lacs of rupees which may be needed for maintaining the researchers in their studies, lectures, and travels.
Thanks to the activities of the folklorists and collectors of legends and mss. associated with the Sâhitya Parishats and Sammelans (literary academies and conferences) much useful work on anthropological topics has been done in India during the last quarter of a century. One or two publications by Indian ethnologists have also been able to draw the attention of western experts to the merits of their work. But on the whole the scientific study of anthropology cannot be said to have begun in India. Nay, this branch of learning was officially unrecognized by the universities until a year or two ago. But time has come when the undergraduates should be taught to regard the investigations into the life and institutions of the Africans, American-Indians and the aboriginal tribes of India, Australia and the Polynesian Islands as an integral part of "general culture." For, the impact of anthropological researches on the approach to the problems of the human psyche, morals, religion, criminology, social behaviour, and interracial justice, in one word, on the entire science of civilization has been nothing short of revolutionary.
Everybody is aware of the tremendous influence that the social forces of the last seventeen years have exerted on university curriculum and administration in India. But we have still to remark that sociology is a science that remains yet to take its place as an independent course of instruction along with the other arts and sciences. The very fact that in India today there are at least one hundred propagandas from the Andhra library movement and Malabar women's association to temperance-conference and depressed classes mission, each with its regular congresses, publicity journals and lecturers, should challenge the authorities of higher learning to create opportunities for the scientific study not only of Indian institutions and mores but of all facts and theories bearing on social progress, social inheritance, social control, and social service.
4. The Ideas of 1905.
At this stage of intellectual risorgimiento the demand is urgently. felt for demolishing once for all the popular fallacy of the nineteenth century which has been surviving too long into the twentieth, regarding the alleged difference in the "ideals" of civilization or of human life between the East and the West. So far, moreover, as the pressing problems of contemporary life are concerned, the discussion is absolutely worthless, pedantic and reactionistic, because the peoples of Asia, backward and "inferior" as they happen to be today, have no choice before them but accept all the new vidyâs and kalâs, sciences, arts, mechanisms and institutions of Eur-America, from the steam-engine to radioactivity and from the Wealth of Nations to Bolshevism. Anything that has been found useful in the West for certain periods in recent times—notwithstanding the limitations and abuses inherent in everything mundane that could not possibly be foreseen by human intelligence—will be found to be equally helpful in the East. The only problem before the East, therefore, is to try by all means to catch up to the West, at the Japanese rate of advance, in every field of human endeavour and establish once more the foundations of equality and reciprocal respect which governed the relations between Asia and Europe in ancient and mediaeval times.
It is necessary also to sound a note of warning. Partly through the onrush of industrial enterprise (which however has not come a moment too early, nor has been manifesting itself in too large, proportions), and partly through the well-advertised recognition of Indian achievements in one line or another (which, by the bye, has not by any means been showered upon too many of our intellectuals and publicists) a section of Young India is tending to count human values in terms of money and fame. Nothing is likely to affect India's cultural advance more perniciously than this tendency of the social mind, should it happen to be diffused wide or deep for any length of time. Let us, therefore, not misinterpret the meaning of our contemporary history. There can be no question that the little progress that Young India has attained thus far is at bottom wholly the outcome of the spirit of self-sacrifice and creative idealism associated with the "ideas of 1905". And it is only this spiritual shakti that can carry India forward to the consummation of that world-mission which modern mankind has long been demanding of her and which she has taken upon herself at last to fulfil.