The Advantages and Disadvantages of an
Individualistic Philosophy
There is, in the Upanishads, a
continual emphasis on the fitness of the body and clarity of the mind, on the
discipline of both body and mind, before effective progress can be made. The
acquisition of knowledge, or any achievement, requires restraint,
self-suffering, self-sacrifice. This idea of some kind of penance, tapasya,
is inherent in Indian thought, both among the thinkers at the top and the
unread masses below. It is present to-day as it was present some thousands of
years ago, and it is necessary to appreciate it in order to understand the
psychology under-lying the mass movements which have convulsed India under
Gandhiji's leadership. It is obvious that the ideas of the authors of the
Upanishads, the rarefied mental atmosphere in which they moved, were con-fined
to a small body of the elect who were capable of under-standing them. They were
entirely beyond the comprehension of the vast mass of the people. A
creative minority is always small in numbers but, if it is in tune with the
majority, and is always trying to pull the latter up and make it advance, so
that the gap between the two is lessened, a stable and progressive culture
results. Without that creative minority a civilization must inevit-ably decay.
But it may also decay if the bond between a creative minority and the majority
is broken and there is a loss of social unity in society as a whole, and
ultimately that minority itself loses its creativeness and becomes barren and
sterile; or else it gives place to another creative or vital force which
society throws up" It is difficult for me, as for most others, to
visualize the period of the Upanishads and to analyse the various forces that
were at play. I imagine, however, that in spite of the vast mental and cultural
difference between the small thinking minority and the unthinking masses, there
was a bond between them or, at any rate, there was no obvious gulf. The graded
society in which they lived had its mental gradation also and these were
accepted and provided for. This led to some kind of social harmony and
conflicts were avoided. Even the new thought of the Upanishads was interpreted
for popular purposes so as to fit in with popular prejudices and superstitions,
thereby losing much of its essential meaning. The graded social structure was
not touched; it was preserved. The conception of monism became transformed into
one of monotheism for religious purposes, and even lower forms of belief and
worship were not only tolerated but encouraged, as suited to a particular stage
of development.
Thus the ideology of the Upanishads
did not permeate to any marked extent to the masses and the intellectual
separation between the creative minority and the majority became more marked.
In course of time this led to new movements—a power-ful wave of materialistic
philosophy, agnosticism, atheism. Out of this again grew Buddhism and Jainism,
and the famous Sans-krit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, wherein yet
another attempt was made to bring about a synthesis between rival creeds and
ways of thought. The creative energy of the people, or of the creative minority,
is very evident during these periods, and again there appears to be a bond
between that minority and the majority. On the whole they pull together.
In this way period succeeds period
with bursts of creative effort in the fields of thought and action, in
literature and the drama, in sculpture and architecture, and in cultural,
missionary and colonial
enterprises far from India's borders. In between, there are periods of
disharmony and conflict, due both to inner causes and intrusions from outside.
Yet they are ultimately overcome and a fresh period of creative energy
supervenes. The last great period of such activity in a variety of directions
was the classical epoch which began in the fourth century after Christ. By
about 1000 A.C., or earlier, signs of inner decay in India are very
evi-dent. although the old artistic impulse continued to function and produce
fine work. The coming of new races with a different background brought a new
driving foi;ce to India's tired mind and spirit, and out of that impact arose
new problems and new attempts at solution.
It seems that the intense individualism of the Indo-Aryans
led, in the long run, to both the good and the evil that their culture
produced. It led to the production of very superior types, not in one
particular limited period of history, but again and again, age after age. It
gave a certain idealist and ethical background to the whole culturfe, which
persisted and still persists, though it may not influence practice much. With
the help of this background and by sheer force of example at the top, they help
together the social fabric and repeatedly rehabilitated it when it threatened
to go to pieccs. They produced an astonishing flowering of civilization and
culture which, though largely confined to the upper circles, inevitably spread
to some extent to the masses. By their extreme tolerance of other beliefs and
other ways than their own, they avoided the conflicts that have so often torn
society asunder, and managed to maintain, as a rule, some kind of equilibrium.
By allowing, within the larger framework, considerable freedom to people to
live the life of their choice, they showed the wisdom of an old and experienced
race. All these were very remarkable achievements. But that very individualism
led them to attach little importance to the social aspect of man, of man's duty
to society. For each person life was divided and fixed up, a bundle of duties
and responsibilities within his narrow sphere in the graded hierarchy. He had
no duty to, or conception of, society as a whole, and no attempt was made to
make him feel his solidarity with it. This idea is perhaps largely a modern
development and cannot be found in any ancient society. It is unreasonable,
therefore, to expect it in ancient India. Still, the emphasis on individualism,
on exclusiveness, on graded castes is much more evident in India. In later ages
it was to grow into a very prison for the mind of our people—not only for the
lower castes, who suffered most from it, but for the higher ones also. Throughout
our history it was a weakening factor, and one might perhaps say that along
with the growth of rigidity in the caste system, grew rigidity of mind and the
creative energy of the race faded away. Another curious fact seems to stand
out. The extreme toler-ance of every kind of belief and practice, every
superstition and folly, had its injurious side also, for this perpetuated many
an evil custom and prevented people from getting rid of the tradi-tional
burdens that prevented growth. The growing priesthood exploited this situation
to their own advantage and built up their powerful vested interests on the
foundation of the super-stitions of the masses. That priesthood was probably
never quite so powerful as in some branches of the Christian Church, for there
were always spiritual leaders who condemned its practices, and there was a
variety of beliefs to choose from, but it was strong enough to hold and exploit
the masses.
So this mixture of free thought and orthodoxy lived side by
side, and out of them scholasticism grew, and a puritanical ritualism. The
appeal was always made to the ancient authorities, but little attempt was made
to interpret their truths in terms of changing conditions. The creative and
spiritual forces weakened, and only the shell of what used to be so full of
life and meaning remained. Aurobindo Ghose has written: 'If an ancient Indian
of the time of the Upanishad, of the Buddha, or the later classical age were to
be set down in modern I n d i a . . . h e would see his race clinging to forms
and shells and rags of the past and missing ninetenths of its nobler meaning..
.he would be amazed by the extent of the mental poverty, the immobility, the
static repetition, the cessation of science, the long sterility of art, the
comparative feebleness of the creative intuition.'
Materialism
One of our major misfortunes is that we have lost so much of
the world's ancient literature—in Greece, in India, and else-where. Probably
this was inevitable as these books were origi-nally written on plam-leaves or
on bhurjapatra, the thin layers of the bark of the birch tree which peel
off" so easily, and later on paper. There were only a few copies of a work
in existence and if they were lost or destroyed, that work disappeared, and it
can only be traced by references to it, or quotations from it, in other books.
Even so, about fifty or sixty thousand manus-cripts in Sanskrit or its
variations have already been traced and listed and fresh discoveries are being
constantly made. Many old Indian books have so far not been found in India at
all but their translations in Chinese or Tibetan have been discovered. Probably
an organized search for old manuscripts in the libraries of religious
institutions, monasteries and private persons would yield rich results. That,
and the critical examination of these manuscripts and, where considered
desirable, their publication and translation, are among the many things we have
to do in India when we succeed in breaking through our shackles and can
function for ourselves. Such study is bound to throw light on many phases of
Indian history and especially on the social background behind historic events
and changing ideas. The fact that in spite of repeated losses and destruction,
and without any organized attempt to discover them, over fifty thousand
manus-cripts have been brought out, shows how extra-ordinarily abun-dant must
have been the literary, dramatic, philosophical and other productions of old
times. Many of the manuscripts dis-covered still await thorough examination. Among
the books that have been lost is the entire literature on materialism which
followed the period of the early Upani-shads. The only references to this, now
found, are in criticisms of it and in elaborate attempts to disprove the
materialist theories. There can be no doubt, however, that the materialist
philosophy was professed in India for centuries and had, at the time, a
powerful influence on the people. In the famous Arthashastra, Kautilya's
book on political and economic organization, written in the fourth century B.C.,
it is mentioned as one of the major philosophies of India.
We have then to rely
on the critics and persons interested in disparaging this philosophy, and they
try to pour ridicule on it and show how absurd it all is. That is an
unfortunate way for us to find out what it was. Yet their very eagerness to
discredit it shows how important it was in their eyes. Possibly much of the
literature of materialism in India was destroyed by the priests and other
believers in the orthodox religion during subsequent periods.
The materialists
attacked authority and all vested interests in thought, religion and theology.
They denounced the Vedas and priestcraft and traditional beliefs, and
proclaimed that belief must be free and must not depend on pre-suppositions or
merely on the authority of the past. They inveighed against all forms of magic
and superstition. Their general spirit was comparable in many ways to the
modern materialistic approach; it wanted to rid itself of the chains and burden
of the past, of speculation about matters which could not be perceived, of
worship of imaginary gods. Only that could be presumed to exist which could be
directly perceived, every other inference or presump-tion was equally likely to
be true or false. Hence matter in its various forms and this world could only
be considered as really existing. There was no other world, no heaven or hell,
no soul separate from the body. Mind and intelligence and everything else have
developed from the basic elements. Natural phenomena did not concern themselves
with human values and were indiffer-ent to what we consider good or bad. Moral
rules were mere conventions made by men.
We recognize all
this; it seems curiously of our day and not of more than two thousand years
ago. How did these thoughts arise, these doubts and conflicts, this rebellion
of the mind of man against traditional authority? We do not know enough of
social and political conditions then, but it seems clear that it was an age of
political conflict and social turmoil, leading to a disinte-gration of faith
and to keen intellectual inquiry and a search for some way out, satisfying to
the mind. It was out of this mental turmoil and social maladjustment that new
paths grew and new systems of philosophy took shape. Systematic philosophy, not
the intuitional approach of the Upanishads, but based on close reasoning and
argument, begins to appear in many garbs, Jain, Buddhist, and what might be
called Hindu, for want of a better word. The Epics also belong to this period
and the Bhagavad Gita. It is difficult to build up an accurate chronology of
this age, as thought and theory overlapped and acted and reacted on each other.
Buddha came in the sixth century B.C. Some of these developments
preceded him, others followed, or often there was a parallel growth.
About the time of the rise of Buddhism, the Persian Empire
reached the Indus. This approach of a great Power right to the borders of India
proper must have influenced people's thoughts. In the fourth century B.C. Alexander's
brief raid into north-west India took place. It was unimportant in itself, but
it was the precursor of far-reaching changes in India. Almost immediately after
Alexander's death, Chandragupta built up the great Maurya Empire. That was,
historically speaking, the first strong, wide-spread and centralized state in
India. Tradition mentions many such rulers and overlords of India and one of
the epics deals with the struggle for the suzerainty of India, meaning thereby
probably northern India. But, in all probability, ancient India, like ancient
Greece, was a collection of small states. There were many tribal republics,
some of them covering large areas; there were also petty kingdoms; and there
were, as in Greece, city states with powerful guilds of merchants. In Buddha's
time there were a number of these tribal republics and four principal kingdoms
in Central and Northern India (including Gandhara or part of Afghanistan).
Whatever the form of organization, the tradition of city or village autonomy
was very strong, and even when an overlordship was acknowledged there was no
interference with the internal working of the state. There was a kind of primitive
democracy, though, as in Greece, it was probably confined to the upper classes. Ancient India and Greece, so
different in many ways, have so much in common that I am led to
believe that their background of life was very similar. The Peloponnesian war,
ending in the breakdown of Athenian democracy might in some ways be com-pared
to the Mahabharata war,* the great war of ancient India. The failure of
Hellenism and of the free city state led to a feel-ing of doubt and despair, to
a pursuit of mysteries and revela-tions, a lowering of the earlier ideals of
the race. The emphasis shifted from this world to the next. Later, new schools
of philo-sophy— the Stoic and the Epicurean—developed.It is dangerous and misleading to make historical comparisons
on slender, and sometimes contradictory, data. Yet one is tempted to do so. The
period in India after the Mahabharata war, with its seemingly chaotic mental
atmosphere, reminds one of the post-Hellenic period of Greece. There was a
vulgarization of ideals and then a groping for new philosophies. Politically
and economically similar internal changes might have been taking place, such as
the weakening of the tribal republic and city state and the tendency to
centralize state power. But this comparison does not take us very far. Greece
never really recovered from these shocks, although Greek civilization
flourished for some additional centuries in the Mediterranean and influenced
Rome and Europe. In India there was a remarkable recovery and the thousand
years from the Epic Period and the Buddha onwards were full of creative energy.
Innumerable great names in philosophy, literature, drama, mathematics, and the
arts stand out. In the early centuries of the Christian era a remarkable burst
of energy resulted in the organization of colonial enterprises which took the
Indian people and their culture to distant islands in the eastern seas. The
Epics. History, Tradition, and Myth The two great epics of ancient India —
the Ramayana and the Mahabharata—probably took shape in the
course of several hundred years, and even subsequently additions were made to
them. They deal with the early days of the Indo-Aryans, their conquests and
civil wars, when they were expanding and con-solidating themselves, but they
were composed and compiled later. I do not know of any books anywhere which
have exercis-ed such a continuous and pervasive influence on the mass mind as
these two. Dating back to a remote antiquity, they are still a living force in
the life of the Indian people. Not in the original * The epic dealing with this war is also called the Mahabharata( The story of the
innumerable translations and adaptations of the 'Panchatantra' into Asiatic and
European languages is a long, intricate, and fascinating one. The first known
translation was from Sanskrit into Pahlavi in the middle of the sixth century A.C. at the
instance of Khusrau Anushirwan, Emperor of Persia. Soon after (c. 570 A.C.)
a Syrian translation appeared, and later on an Arabic one. In the eleventh
century new translations appeared in Syrian, Arabic, and Persian, the last
named becoming famous as the story of 'Kalia Daman.' It was through these
translations that the 'Panchatantra' readied Europe. There was a Greek
translation from the Syrian at the end of the eleventh century, and a little
later a Hebrew translation. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a number
of transla-tions and adaptations appeared in Latin, Italian, Spanish, German,
Swedish, Danish, Dutch Icelandic, French, English, Hungarian, Turkish, and a
number of Slav languages. Thus the stories of the 'Panchatantra' merged into
Asiatic and European literatures. ). Sanskrit, except for a few
intellectuals, but in translations and adaptations, and in those innumerable
ways in which tradition and legend spread and become a part of the texture of a
people's life. They represent the typical Indian method of catering all
together for various degrees of cultural development, from the highest
intellectual to the simple unread and untaught villager. They make us
understand somewhat the secret of the old Indians in holding together a
variegated society divided up in many ways and graded in castes, in harmonizing
their discords, and giving them a common background of heroic tradition and
ethical living. Deliberately they tried to build up a unity of outlook among
the people, which was to survive and overshadow all diversity.Among the earliest
memories of my childhood are the stories from these epics told to me by my
mother or the older ladies of the house, just as a child in Europe or America
might listen to fairy tales or stories of adventure. There was for me both
adven-ture and the fairy element in them. And then I used to be taken every
year to the popular open-air performances where the Ramayana story was enacted
and vast crowds came to see it and join in the processions. It was all very
crude, but that did not matter, for everyone knew the story by heart and it was
carnival time.In this way Indian
mythology and old tradition crept into my mind and got mixed up with all manner
of other creatures of the imagination. I do not think I ever attached very much
importance to these stories as factually true, and I even criti-cized the
magical and supernatural element in them. But they were just as imaginatively
true for me as were the stories from the Arabian Nights or the Panchatantra,
that storehouse of animal tales from which Western Asia and Europe have
drawn so much.* As I grew up other pictures crowded into my mind: fairy
stories, both Indian and European, tales from Greek mythology, the story of
Joan of Arc, Alice in Wonderland, and many stories of Akbar and Birbal,
Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur and his Knights, T
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