India’s Cultural Evolution – What do we find?

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.