For almost seven years now, about a dozen of us have been
meeting bi-weekly to reflect and analyze our own personalities in the large
mosaic of India’s traditions and culture.
It is a difficult exercise since the elements of it require us to
objectively analyze our own conduct. But
at the same time, it has its own value since we don’t observe others but probe
our own conduct in the process of analysis.
We become our own subject of study.
Both men and women participated in the group. The ages ranged from mid-thirties to
seventies.
Our goal is to create an educational document communicable
to our children and the future youth on behalf of us. Being immigrants in the US, we feel that the
parents would be the major resource for cultural education, so we undertake the
exercise. We have studied India’s
culture from the available sources from the early times up to 1800AD. I take the opportunity to summarize the
chronology and the salient features in the evolution as we observed.
(1) Community
settlements in India began about seventy thousand years ago and multiple influx
of people has happened. Archaeological
evidence of population migration is sketchy.
(2) India has been a land of fertility and good
climate. Various techniques of
agriculture were invented and applied by people. Domestication of many crops
happened in the land. India remained as
the food basket for the world during the known history up to 1700AD.
(3) Self-sufficiency in food enabled people to engage in
creative arts and philosophical reflections.
No early written document has been discovered except the seals in the
Indus period. We conjecture popularity
of massive oral literature in native languages in different regions. Dramatic productions and wooden engineering
structures were apparently quite common.
(4) Agricultural productivity brought in an empirical cause
and effect relationship, alluding to the notion of a cosmic cause to drive the
universe. We hold the opinion that all
native philosophy developed empirically through years of observations and
collective analysis. While the
philosophical speculations brewed in people, the documentation came later.
(5) Poetic renderings of empirical findings and beliefs
became the Vedas. There was a rift
between the literary poets and the dynamic farmers. It possibly took millennia for the two groups
to merge and create a unified social structure based on aptitude of different
groups of people.
(6) The new social structure was effective in streamlining
trade and commerce. The excess produce
helped bring wealth to the country.
India’s prosperity continued to ascend until 1700AD while it has been
estimated to be contributing 25% of the gross GDP of the world.
(7) The prosperity and stability brought in new thoughts and
further progress in analytic literature.
Scientific analysis of language, speech, music, drama and economics was
achieved. Observational astronomy and
mathematics developed independently.
Massive literary explosion created masterpieces in world literature. Discovery of iron technology and metallurgy
paved way for rock carving, scripting and sculpting.
(8) Analytic
reasoning that each individual life is free led to explosive spurt in
creativity developing new creations in the art, painting, music, dance, poetry
and the sciences. India became a land of
opulence. Trade and commerce flourished. Indian goods became popular worldwide.
(9) Prosperity
created complacency and idleness.
Internal rivalry developed among different regions and divisive
tendencies were triggered through Islamic invasions. Gradually India was occupied piece by piece from
the north. The new rulers mobilized
people in large scale construction projects but gradually weakened the economy
through massive taxation.
(10) Some rebellions erupted but died down. The British took
advantage of the weakness in the country and occupied as the new rulers. We
will explore the British period in our next seminar.
The following is a summary of our own findings through our
studies:
(a) Indian culture
in indigenous, empirical and distinctive.
Self-sufficiency in food and ease in agricultural production helped
create a culture of caring of the planet and of each other.
(b) The stated
wisdom that “World is one family” was empirically deduced through farming and
food production.
(c) Indian
civilization is just the human path of development where human beings are
provided with natural abundance thus having time to reflect and explore
individual creativity with freedom of expression. India has been lucky
geographically to have this privilege.
(d) Philosophically
India champions personal freedom and mutual existence.
We have a number of unsolved issues that we would try to
address as we wrap up the series. The
important among them is the class hierarchy that got built into the
society. Class hierarchy did produce
economic disparity and strong social divisions.
The latter was exploited by the invaders and the situation did
aggravate. The middlemen developed to maintain the society in an economic model
have institutionalized themselves with the help of the royal and official
patronage.
The second point that we don't understand is the massive
degradation in a short period of time after 1700AD. Starvation, disease and famines have
occurred. The question is if India can
reconstitute an operational model where her population can be well protected in
food and sustenance such that she can flourish with new contributions like that
happened in the first fifteen hundred years of the present era.
Our next seminar on the British-Sikh period 1800AD-1947 AD
is scheduled for Saturday, November 2, 2019, at Bemis Hall in Lincoln, MA. All are invited to join.
