Author: Michel Danino
Publication: Bharatiya Pragna
Date: September 2001
The theme chosen by this seminar
is a very apt one. Having suffered the burden of two centuries of British
occupation, India has, since Independence, tried to come to terms with
the impact of that exotic presence perhaps diametrically opposed to her
own temperament, culture and genius. If anything, this introspection has
only intensified in recent years, as Western culture (if it deserves this
noble name) aggressively spreads around the globe. But it stands to reason
that for an effective "decolonization" to take place-even in order to find
out whether and how far it is desirable-we should first take a hard look
at the effects of this colonization, what traces it has left on the Indian
mind and psyche, and how deep. That is what I have briefly attempted to
do in this paperbriefly, because it is a subject as vast and complex as
Indian life itself, and also because I am a mere student of India, not
a learned scholar like those present among us today.
Historical Background
But first, an aside. I have only
referred to the British occupation, not to the Muslim invasions, though
they stretched over a much longer span of time and collided violently with
Indian civilization. Yet, strangely, in spite of their ruthlessness, their
proud and sustained use of violence to coerce or convert, India's Muslim
rulers never attempted to take possession of the Indian mind: in faithful
obedience to Koranic injunctions, they simply tried to stamp it out. That
they did not succeed is another story.
The British, too, dreamed of stamping
it out, but not through sheer brute force. As we know, besides their primary
object of plunder, they viewed-or perhaps justified-their presence in India
as a "divinely ordained" civilizing mission. They spoke of Britain as "the
most enlightened and philanthropic nation in the world"[1] and of "the
justifiable pride which the cultivated members of a civilised community
feel in the beneficent exercise of dominion and in the performance by their
nation of the noble task of spreading the highest kind of civilisation."[2]
Such rhetoric was constantly poured out to the Britons at home so as to
give them a good conscience, while the constant atrocities perpetrated
on the Indian people were discreetly hidden from sight.
To achieve their aim, the British
rulers followed two lines: on the one hand, they encouraged an English
and Christianized education in accordance with the well-known Macaulay
doctrine, which projected Europe as an enlightened, democratic, progressive
heaven, and on the other hand, they pursued a systematic denigration of
Indian culture, scriptures, customs, traditions, crafts, cottage industries,
social institutions, educational system, taking full advantage of the stagnant
and often degenerate character of the Hindu society of the time. There
were, of course, notable exceptions among British individuals, from William
Jones to Sister Nivedita and Annie Besant but almost none to be found among
the ruling class. Let us recall how, in his famous 1835 Minute, Thomas
B. Macaulay asserted that Indian culture was based on "a literature ...
that inculcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects
... hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality ... fruitful of monstrous
superstitions." Hindus, he confidently declared, had nothing to show except
a "false history, false astronomy, false medicine in company with a false
religion."[3]
As it happened, Indians were-and
still largely are-innocent people who could simply not suspect the degree
of cunning with which their colonial masters set about their task. In the
middle of the 1857 uprising, the Governor - General Lord Canning wrote
to a British official:
As we must rule 150 millions of
people by a handful (more or less small) of Englishmen, let us do it in
the manner best calculated to leave them divided (as in religion and national
feeling they already are) and to inspire them with the greatest possible
awe of our power and with the least possible suspicion of our motives.[4]
Even a "liberal" governor such as
Elphinstone wrote in 1859, "Divide et impera ['divide and rule' in Latin]
was the old Roman motto and it should be ours."[5]
In this clash of two civilizations,
the European, younger, dynamic, hungry for space and riches, appeared far
better fitted than the Indian, half decrepit, almost completely dormant
after long centuries of internal strife and repeated onslaught. The contrast
was so huge that no one doubted the outcome-the rapid conquest of the Indian
mind and life. That was what Macaulay, again, summarized best when he proudly
wrote his father in 1836.
Our English schools are flourishing
wonderfully.... It is my belief that if our plans of education are followed
up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in
Bengal thirty years hence.[6]
But if there is one thing that the
British could not understand about Indians, it is that they live more in
the heart than in the mind. And that heart the rulers could never touch
or influence, especially not with their shallow religion or science. As
for the mind, they did succeed in creating a fairly large "educated" class,
anglicized and partially Christianized, which always looked up to its European
model and ideal, and formed the actual foundation of the Empire in India.
Came Independence. If India did
achieve political independence-at a terrible cost and by amputating a few
limbs of her body-she hardly achieved independence in the field of thought.
Nor did she try: the country's socalled elite, whose mind had been shaped
and hypnotized by their colonial masters, always assumed that anything
Western was so superior that in order to reach all-round fulfillment, India
merely had to follow European thought, science, and political institutions.
Swami Vivekananda was the first to give this call: "O ye modern Hindus,
de-hypnotise yourselves!"[7]
The Symptoms
A hundred years later, at least,
we can see how gratuitous those assumptions were. Yet the colonial imprint
remains present at many levels. On a very basic one, it is almost amusing
to note that Pune is sometimes called "the Oxford of the East," while Ahmedabad
is "the Manchester of India' - and since Coimbatore is often dubbed "the
Manchester of South India," we have at least out Manchestered England herself!
The Nilgiris are flatteringly compared to Scotland (never mind that Kotagiri,
where I live, is called "the second Switzerland"), and I understand that
tourist guides refer to your own Alappuzha as "the Venice of the East."
Pondicherry, also to attract tourists, calls itself "India's Little France"
or "the French Riviera of the East." India's map seems dotted with European
places. And "east" of what, incidentally? This is something like India's
learned "Oriental" institutes-what "orient" do they refer to? Thailand
or Japan, perhaps?
'Rings become more troublesome when
Kalidasa is called "the Shakespeare of India," when Bankim Chatterji needs
to be compared to Walter Scott or Tagore to Shelley, and Kautilya becomes
India's very own Machiavelli. We begin to see how our compass is set due
west. Would the British call Shakespeare "England's Kalidasa," let alone
Manchester "the Coimbatore of Northwest England"?
But I think the most alarming signs
of the colonization of the Indian mind are found in the field of education.
Take the English nursery rhymes taught to many of our little children,
as if, before knowing anything about India, they needed to know about Humpty-Dumpty
or the sheep that went to London to see the Queen. When they grow older,
some of them will be learning Western psychology while remaining totally
ignorant of the far deeper psychology offered by Yoga, or they will study
medicine or physics or evolution without having the least idea of what
ancient India achieved-and often anticipated-in those fields. Which teacher,
for example, will tell his or her students that Darwinian evolution was
always at the back of the Indian mind, as the sequence of the Dashavatar
shows? Or that the speed of light is clearly given, to an amazing degree
of precision, in Sayana's commentary on the Rig-Veda ?[8] And can it be
a coincidence if a day of Brahma, equal to 4,320,000,000 years, happens
to be the age of the earth? Many such examples could be supplied in other
fields, from mathematics and astronomy and quantum physics to linguistics
and metallurgy and urbanization.[9] If teachers were not so ignorant, as
a rule, of their own culture, they would have no difficulty in showing
their students that the much vaunted "scientific temper" is nothing new
to India. Even in medicine, we know how Ayurveda and Siddha systems of
medicine have been neglected under the illusion that modern medicine is
the only way to provide "health for all."
Our educational policies systematically
discourage the teaching of Sanskrit, and one wonders again whether that
is in deference to Macaulay, who found that great language (though he confessed
he knew none of it!) to be "barren of useful knowledge." In the same vein,
the Indian epics, the Veda or the Upanishads stand no chance, and students
will almost never hear about them at school. Even Indian languages are
subtly or not so subtly given a lower status than English, with the result
that many deep scholars or writers who chose to express themselves in their
mother-tongues (I have of course N. V. Krishna Warrior in mind) remain
totally unknown beyond their States, while textbooks are crowded with second-rate
thinkers who happened to write in English.
If you take a look at the teaching
of history, the situation is even worse. Almost all Indian history taught
today in our schools and universities has been written by Western scholars,
or by "native historians who [have] taken over the views of the colonial
masters,"[10] in the words of Prof. Klostermaier of Canada's University
of Manitoba. All of India's historical tradition, all ancient records are
simply brushed aside as so much fancy so as to satisfy the Western dictum
that "Indians have no sense of history." Indian tradition never said anything
about mysterious Aryans invading the subcontinent from the Northwest, but
since nineteenth-century European scholars decided so, our children still
today have to learn by rote this invention now rejected by most archaeologists;
South Indian tradition said nothing about the Dravidians coming from the
North, driven southward by the naughty Aryans, but again that shall be
stuffed into young brains. No Indian scholar or grammar or tradition ever
claimed that Sanskrit and Tamil languages were great rivals belonging to
wholly separate families, but this shall be taught at school in deference
to Western linguists or to our own "Dravidian" activists. The real facts
of the destruction wreaked in India by Muslim invaders and also by some
Christian missionaries must be kept outside textbooks and curricula, since
they contradict the "tolerant" and "liberating" image that Islam and Christianity
have been projecting for themselves.[11] Even the freedom movement is not
spared: as the great historian R. C. Majumdar[12] and others have shown,
no serious, objective criticism of Mahatma Gandhi or the Indian National
Congress is allowed, and the role of other important leaders is systematically
belittled or erased.
Nothing illustrates the bankruptcy
of our education better than the manner in which, just a year ago, State
education ministers raised an uproar at an attempt to discuss the introduction
of the merest smattering of Indian culture into the syllabus, and at the
singing of the Saraswati Vandana.* The message they actually conveyed was
that no Indian element was tolerable in education, while they are perfectly
satisfied with an education that, at the start of the century, Sri Aurobindo
called "soulless and mercenary,"[13] and which has now degenerated further
into a stultifying, mechanical routine that kills our children's natural
intelligence and talent. They find nothing wrong with maiming young brains
and hearts, but will be up in arms if we speak of teaching India's heritage.
Ananda Coomaraswamy, the famous
art critic, gave the following warning early this century:
It is hard to realize how completely
the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of
English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create
a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots-a sort of intellectual
pariah who does not belong to the East or the West, the past or the future.
The greatest danger for India is the loss of her spiritual integrity. Of
all Indian problems the educational is the most difficult and most tragic."[14]
Swami Vivekananda had earlier said
much the same thing in his own forthright style:
The child is taken to school, and
the first thing he learns is that his father is a fool, the second thing
that his grandfather is a lunatic, the third thing that all his teachers
are hypocrites, the fourth, that all the sacred books are lies! By the
time he is sixteen he is a mass of negation, lifeless and boneless. And
the result is that fifty years of such education has not produced one original
man in the three presidencies.... We have learnt only weakness.[15]
The child becomes a recording machine
stuffed with a jarring assortment of meaningless bits and snippets. The
only product of this denationalizing education has been the creation of
a modem, Westernized "elite" with little or no contact with the deeper
sources of Indian culture, and with nothing of India's ancient view of
the world except a few platitudes to be flaunted at cocktail parties. Browsing
through any English-language daily or magazine is enough to see how Indian
intellectuals revel in the sonorous clang of hollow cliches which, the
world over, have taken the place of any real thinking. If Western intellectuals
come up with some new "ism," you are sure to find it echoed all over the
Indian press in a matter of weeks; it was amusing to see how, some two
years ago, the visit to India of a French philosopher and champion of "deconstructionism"
sent the cream of our intellectuals raving wild for weeks, while they remained
crassly ignorant of far deeper thinkers next door. Or if Western painters
or sculptors come up with some newfangled cult of ugliness, their Indian
counterparts will not lag far behind. If Western countries plan grand celebrations
for the "millennium" (not a third millennium of darkness, one hopes), we
in India follow suit-though we appear to have forgotten to celebrate the
fifty-second century of our Kali era earlier this year. And let "politically
correct" Western nations make a new religion of "human rights" (with intensive
bombing campaigns to enforce them if necessary), and you will hear a number
of Indians clamouring for them parrotlike. The list is endless, in every
field of life, and if India had been living in her mind alone, one would
have to conclude that India has ceased to exist-or will do so after one
or two more generations of this senseless de-Indianizing. In Sri Aurobindo's
words:
... Ancient India's culture, attacked
by European modernism, overpowered in the material field, betrayed by the
indifference of her children, may perish for ever along with the soul of
the nation that holds it in its keeping.[16]
Maladies of the Mind
The root of the problem is of course
that we have ceased to think by ourselves. We are spoon-fed and often force-fed
almost every one of our thoughts, or what masquerades as thought. Independent
reflection is discouraged at every step, especially at school.
Yet it is not my point that English
education in India has been an unmitigated evil. It was a necessary, probably
an unavoidable evil. India had to be shaken from her lethargy, to open
up to the world and face its challenges, and that was the fastest way to
compel her to do so. There is also no doubt that this opening to dynamic
currents of thought from the West contributed in no small measure to the
quest for independence, as has often been pointed out. Sometimes indeed,
one poison is needed to cure another. But to continue taking poison after
the cure is over is inexcusable. India's failure to boldly formulate and
implement a truly Indian education after Independence ranks as her most
tragic, most ruinous error. The blame for it must be laid at the door of
the country's first education ministers, and even more so its first prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, himself an undiscriminating product of English
education who was always prompt to pour scorn on India's culture and traditions
and to make a cult of modernity.
But subjection to Western influence
does more than simply impoverish the Indian mind or wean it away from Indian
culture. It also introduces serious distortions into its thinking processes.
With their clear and bold thought, Western thinkers since the eighteenth
century no doubt did much to pull Europe out of the dark ages brought about
by Christianity. But they had to take shortcuts in the process: they needed
sharp intellectual weapons and had no time to develop the qualities of
pluralism, universality, integrality native to the Indian mind and nurtured
over thousands of years. Their thought was essentially divisive and exclusive:
God was on one side and the creation on another, an abyss separated matter
from spirit, one was either a believer or an atheist, either a Christian
or a Pagan, either ancient or modem, determinist or indeterminist, empiricist
or rationalist, rightist or leftist. Whether one was an adept of idealism,
realism, positivism, existentialism or any of the thousand isms the Western
intellect cannot live without, Truth was parcelled out into small, hardened,
watertight bits, each no wider than one line of thought or one philosophical
system, each neatly labelled and set in contrast or opposition with the
other.
The result of this Western obsession
with divisiveness has been disastrous in India's context. Her inhabitants
had never called themselves "Aryans" or "Dravidians" in the racial sense,
yet they became thus segregated; they had never known they were "Hindus,"
yet they had to be happy with this new designation; they had never called
their view of the world a "religion" (a word with no equivalent in Sanskrit),
but it had to become one, promptly labelled "Hinduism." Nor was one label
sufficient: India always recognized and respected the infinite multiplicity
of approaches to the Truth (what is commonly, but incorrectly, called "tolerance"),
but under the Western spotlight those approaches became so many "sects"
almost rivalling each other (perhaps like Catholics and Protestants!).
Hinduism was thus cut up into convenient bits-Vedism, Brahmanism, Vaishnavism,
Shaivism, Shaktism, Tantrism, etc.-of which Indians themselves had been
largely unaware, or at any rate not in this rigid, cut-and-dried fashion.
As for Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, which had been regarded in India
as simply new paths, they were arbitrarily stuck with a label of "separate
religions." Similarly, thousands of fluid communities were duly catalogued
and crystallized by the British rulers as so many permanent and rigid castes.*
Unfortunately, this itemizing and
labelling of their heritage became a undisputed truth in the subconscious
mind of Indians: they passively accepted being dissected and defined by
their colonial masters, and they learned to look at themselves through
Western eyes. The Indian mind had become too feeble to take the trouble
of assimilating the few positive elements of Western thought and rejecting
the many negative ones: it swallowed but could not digest. Even some of
the early attempts to lay new foundations the Brahmo Samaj and many other
"reformist" movements in particular-were, despite their usefulness as a
ferment, conceived apologetically in response to Europe's standards and
judgement. If, for instance, they were told that Hindus were "polytheistic
idolaters," rather than show the fallacy of such a label, they would bend
over backward to build their new creeds on monotheism of a Judeo-Christian
type. Just recently we had a revealing echo of such an attitude when our
own President, on a recent visit to your State, felt obliged to speculate
that Adi Shankaracharya's Monism must have been influenced by Islam's monotheism.
This is intellectual bankruptcy at its highest pitch.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once put
it,
The mistake of the West is that
it measures other civilizations by the degree to which they approximate
to Western civilization. If they do not approximate it, they are hopeless,
dumb, reactionary.[17]
Educated Indians virtually admitted
they were "hopeless, dumb, reactionary," and could only stop being so by
receiving salvation from Europe: they pinned their hopes on its democracy
and secularism, ignoring all warnings that those European concepts would
wreak havoc once mechanically transposed to India. Worse, they rivalled
with one another in denigrating their heritage. If even today a Western
journalist or professor utters the words of "caste" or "sati" or "Hindu
fundamentalism" (and I would like to ask him what the "fundamentals" of
Hinduism are), you will hear a number of Indian intellectuals beating their
chests in unison-even as they keep their eyes tightly shut to the most
fatal aberrations of Western society. Some ninety years ago already, Sri
Aurobindo observed:
They will not allow things or ideas
contrary to European notions to be anything but superstitious, barbarous,
harmful and benighted, they will not suffer what is praised and practised
in Europe to be anything but rational and enlightened .... [18]
As a result, many "modem" Indians
(I have had myself occasion to hear some of them), and even a number of
Swamis, especially those with Western following, will proudly assert that
they are "not Hindus." (That fashion was probably started last century
by Keshab Chandra Sen.) What they usually mean by that is that they are
"tolerant" of everything and anything (especially of Western anythings),
and therefore far too broad-minded to be Hindus. They forget that Hinduism
in its true form, Sanatana dharma, is as wide as the universe and can include
any path-provided that path is, like itself, and unlike Semitic religions,
respectful of other paths, because it knows it is only one small parcel
of the whole Truth beyond all paths.
Ram Swarup, a profound Indian thinker
who passed away recently, was not afraid of swimming against this self-deprecating
tide nurtured by our intelligentsia and media:
A permanent stigma seems to have
stuck to the terms Hindu and Hinduism. These have now become terms of abuse
in the mouth of the very elite which the Hindu millions have raised to
the pinnacle of power and prestige with their blood, sweat and tears."[19]
Such is the painful but logical
outcome of two centuries of colonization of the Indian mind.
Looking Ahead
The deeper meaning of this transitory
dark phase has been expressed thus by Sri Aurobindo:
The spirit and ideals of India had
come to be confined in a mould which, however beautiful, was too narrow
and slender to bear the mighty burden of our future. When that happens,
the mould has to be broken and even the ideal lost for a while, in order
to be recovered free of constraint and limitation."[20]
There is no doubt that India's old
mould is being broken. The question is what is going to take its place.
There are increasing and hopeful signs of an aspiration to a reawakening
and a liberation from this intellectual and cultural degeneration. But
for this aspiration to be fulfilled, I am convinced that we shall have
to go deeper than the intellect, and tap anew the inexhaustible source
of strength that has sustained India over ages. Take care of India's soul
and the rest will take care of itself, as Swami Vivekananda said.[21] Only
then will we recover our native suppleness and independence of mind, and
learn to question West and India alike, past and present alike. Only then
will we regain our discernment, viveka, our only possible beacon in the
growing gloom.
Permit me to quote Sri Aurobindo
once more:
We must begin by accepting nothing
on trust from any source whatsoever, by questioning everything and forming
our own conclusions. We need not fear that we shall by that process cease
to be Indians or fall into the danger of abandoning Hinduism. India can
never cease to be India or Hinduism to be Hinduism, if we really think
for ourselves. It is only if we allow Europe to think for us that India
is in danger of becoming an ill-executed and foolish copy of Europe. [22]
To recover her true genius in a
new body is the task now facing India. She needs it not only for herself
but for the world, as the West is fast being sucked into its own emptiness,
except for a few lucid thinkers desperately searching for a deeper meaning
to our human madness. "Europe is destructive, suicidal,"[23] said Andre
Malraux to Nehru in 1936, whom he would meet several times until the 1960s,
trying in vain to persuade him of the relevance of India's spirituality
in today's world. Malraux also reflected:
... To the West, whether Christian
or atheist, the fundamental obvious fact is death, whatever meaning it
gives to it, whereas India's fundamental obvious fact is the infinity of
life in the infinity of time: "Who could kill immortality?" [24]
This deeper view of the universe,
and of ourselves as an integral part of it, this bridge between matter
and spirit is what the world needs today. And that is not philosophy, it
is a practical question: India alone could show, as she did in her ancient
history from the Indus Valley civilization to the Maurya times and after,
how material and spiritual developments can be harmonized and indeed need
each other if society is to last. Because the West ultimately believes
only in death, it is destroying man as well as the earth; because India
ultimately sought only the secret of life, it could restore the divinity
of the earth and of all creatures, man included. Last century already,
the French historian Michelet marvelled:
Whereas, in our Occident, the most
dry and sterile minds brag in front of Nature, the Indian genius, the most
rich and fecund of all, knows neither small nor big and has generously
embraced universal fraternity, even the identity of all souls![25]
This Indian genius has now begun
to percolate back to the West, where it inspires new approaches, deeper
thoughts, though not yet the transforming shakti. Perhaps the tide of colonialism
will be reversed, after all. And without bloodshed.
Perhaps Rabindranath Tagore's hope
of April 1941, three months before his death, will be fulfilled:
The spirit of violence which perhaps
lay dormant in the psychology of the West, has at last roused itself and
desecrates the Spirit of Man ... *
I had at one time believed that
the springs of civilization would issue out of the heart of Europe. But
today when I am about to quit the world that faith has, gone bankrupt altogether....
Today I live in the hope that the
Saviour is coming-that he will be born in our midst in this poverty-shamed
hovel which is India. I shall wait to hear the divine message of civilization
which he will bring with him.... Perhaps that dawn will come from this
horizon, from the East where the sun rises.[26]
This paper was presented at a seminar
on "Decolonization and its Cultural Problems" organized by N. V. Krishna
Warrior Smaraka Trust at Tripunithura (Kerala) on 9-10 October 1999.
=====
References
Sri Aurobindo's
India's Rebirth (3rd ed., 2000;
also in Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Oriya, Tamil and Gujarati translations)
is co-published and distributed by: MIRA ADITI, 62 'Sriranga', 2nd Main,
1st Cross, T. K. Layout, Saraswatipuram, Mysore - 570 009, India miraditi@vsnl.com
* In the words of Tavleen Singh
(by no means a "Hindutva" journalist): "A country which has education ministers
who jeer at a hymn which says of learning (as Saraswati) that she is the
goddess before whom even Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh bow probably deserves
to be illiterate." (India Today, November 9, 1998) * Dr. Meenakshi Jain,
a respected sociologist, wrote: "It is not generally known that the India
of rigid social stratification and hierarchical ranking was largely a British
creation.... [The British] destroyed the flexibility that was so vital
for the proper functioning of the system. The census operations raised
caste consciousness to a feverish pitch, incited caste animosities and
led to an all-round hardening of the system.... Britishers of all pursuits,
missionaries, administrators and orientalists, were quick to grasp the
pivotal role [of the Brahmins] in the Indian social arrangement [, in which]
Brahmins were the principal integrating force. This made them the natural
target of those seeking to fragment, indeed atomise, Indian society. This
was as true of the British conquerors as it was of Muslim rulers in the
preceding centuries.... Clearly it is time to sit up and see reality as
it is before we complete the task the British began - the atomisation of
Indian society and the annihilation of Indian civilisation." (Indian Express,
18 & 26 September 1990)
[1] Rev. John Wilson, India Three
Thousand Years Ago, quoted by Devendra Swarup in "Genesis of the Aryan
Race Theory and Its Application to Indian History," The Aryan Problem,
eds. S. B. Deo and S. Kamath (Pune: Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Samiti,
1993), p. 33-35.
[2] Sidgwick, quoted by Sri Aurobindo
in Bande Mataram of 19 June 1907: see India's Rebirth (Mysore: Mira Aditi,
2000), p. 24.
[3] In British Paramountcy and Indian
Renaissance, vol. 10 in The History and Culture of the Indian People (Bombay:
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1991), p. 8384.
[4] Quoted by P. Hardy in The Muslims
of British India, p. 72.
[5] In British Paramountcy and Indian
Renaissance, p. 321.
[6] Quoted by N. S. Rajaram in The
Politics of History (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1995) p. 105.
[7] Swami Vivekananda, Lectures
from Colombo to Almora (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1992), p. 105.
[8] See for example P. V. Vartak,
Scientific Knowledge in the Vedas (Delhi: Nag Publisher, 1995); Subhash
Kak, "Sayana's Astronomy" (Indian Journal of History of Science, vol. 33,
1998, p. 31-36).
[9] See for example A Concise History
of Science in India, eds. D. M. Bose, S. N. Sen & B. V. Subbarayappa
(New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 1989); History of Technology
in India, ed. A. K. Bag (New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 1997);
History of Science and Technology in Ancient India, by Debiprased Chattopadhyaya
(Calcutta : Firma KLM, 3 vols., 1986, 1991, 1996); Computing Science in
Ancient India, eds. T. R. N. Rao & Subhash Kak (Louisiana: Center for
Advanced Computer Studies, 1998).
[10] Klaus Klostermaier, "Questioning
the Aryan Invasion Theory and Revising Ancient Indian History," in Iskcon
Communications Journal 1999.
[11] See for example Arun Shourie,
Eminent Historians (New Delhi: ASA, 1998) and Missionaries in India (New
Delhi: ASA, 1994); Sita Ram Goel, History of Hindu-Christian Encounters
(New Delhi: Voice of India, 1997) and Hindu Temples-What Happened to Them
(New Delhi: Voice of India, 2 vols., 1998, 1993).
[12] See R. C. Majumdar, History
of the Freedom Movement in India (Calcutta: Firmal KLM, 3 volumes, 1988),
in particular Appendix to vol. 1 and Preface to vol. 3. See also N. S.
Rajaram, Gandhi, Khilafat and the National Movement (Bangalore Sahitya
Sindhu Prakashana, 1999).
[13] Sri Aurobindo, "The National
Value of Art," in Karmayogin, 20 November 1909, in India's Rebirth, p.
65.
[14] Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance
of Shiva (New 'Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997), p. 170.
[15] Swami Vivekananda on India
and her Problems (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1985), p. 38-39.
[16] Sri Aurobindo, India's Rebirth,
p. 139 (emphasis mine).
[17] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, interviewed
in Time of 24 July 1989.
[18] Sri Aurobindo, India's Rebirth,
p. 90.
[19] Ram Swarup, quoted in Hinduism
Today, October 1998, p. 16.
[20] Sri Aurobindo, India's Rebirth,
p. 61.
[21] Adapted from Swami Vivekananda,
in Ram Swarup, "His Vision and Mission," The Observer, 28 August. 1993.
[22] Sri Aurobindo, India's Rebirth,
p. 88.
[23] In Malraux & India (New
Delhi: Embassy of France. in India, 1996), p. 46.
[24] Andre Malraux, Antimemoires,
(Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 339.
[25] Michelet, La Bible de 1'Humanite
in æuvres (Paris: Larousse, 1930), vol. 5, p. 119.
[26] Tagore, Crisis in Civilization
(Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1988), p. 22-23.
