FW: Tribute to Indian Culture.- S. Talageri
govind shiyani
"Indian culture is the greatest and richest in the world. India (i.e. the Indian subcontinent) is the only place in the world which is rich in all the fields of culture: natural (topography, climate, flora and fauna), ethnic (races and languages), and civilizational (music, dance and drama; lore and literature; art, sculpture and handicrafts; architecture; costumes, ornaments and beauty culture; cuisine; games and physical systems; religion; philosophy; social and material sciences, etc.). Its greatness lies in both factors: the richness of its range and variety, as well as its contributions to the world, in every single field of culture.
To give just a glimpse: in climate, we have the hottest place in the world, Jacobabad (in present-day Pakistan), but also, as per the Encyclopaedia Britannica, we have, outside the Polar regions, “the largest area under permanent ice and snow”. We have dry arid regions in the west, which receive no rainfall at all, and at the same time the area, around Cherapunji in the east, with the highest rainfall in the world. And we have, in different parts of the land, a wide range of shades of climatic conditions between these extremes. The topography of India, from the most intriguing and diverse mountain system in the world, the Himalayas, in the north, through the plains, plateaus, mountains and valleys of the peninsula down to the Andaman-Nicobar and Lakshadweep island clusters in the south, also seems to leave no topographical feature unrepresented. India’s forests and vegetation also cover every range and variety from the coniferous and deciduous types to the monsoon and tropical types to the desert and scrubland types. And India has been one of the primary contributors to the world in every kind of plant and forest product. To name only some of the most prominent ones: rice, a variety of beans, a wide range of vegetables including eggplants and a number of different types of gourds, fruits like bananas, mangoes and a range of citrus fruits, oilseeds like sesame, important woods including teak, ebony and sandalwood, spices like black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger and turmeric, dyes like madder and indigo, important materials like cotton, jute, shellac and India-rubber, a wide range of medicinal herbs, etc., etc. Moreover, being strategically situated between, and sharing in, three different ecological areas, India shares countless other important plants and products with northern and western Asia on the one hand and Southeast Asia on the other. And, as a detailed study will show, it has indigenous equivalents, or potential equivalents, for a wide range of other non-Indian plants and products.
India’s fauna is the richest in the world. Robert Wolff, in the introduction to his book Animals of Asia, tells us that “India has more animal species than any other region of equal area in the world”. But the richness is not only in comparison with regions of equal area. For example, India is the only area in the world which has all seven families of carnivora native to it. The whole of Africa has five (no bears or procyonids), the whole of North and South America together have five (no hyaenas or viverrids), the whole of Europe has five (no hyaenas or procyonids), and, in Asia, the areas to the east and north have six (no hyaenas) and the areas to the west have six (no procyonids). Within the carnivora family of cats, India is the only area to have all six genera. The whole of Africa has four (no uncia or neofelis), North and South America together, and Europe, have four (no acinonyx, uncia or neofelis), and, in Asia, the areas to the east and north have five (no acinonyx) and the areas to the west have four (no uncia or neofelis).
In respect of snakes, India is the only area in the world to have all twelve of the recognized families, while the whole of Africa has eight, and both North and South America together have nine. Extra significant is that one of the twelve families (Uropeltidae or shield-tailed snakes) is found only in South India and Sri Lanka, so that India alone has twelve families, while the whole rest of the world put together has eleven. Of the three families of crocodilians, two (crocodiles and gavials) are found in India, one of them (gavials) exclusively in India. India is the richest area in the world in the variety of bovine species, second only to Africa in variety of antelope species, and second only to China in variety of deer species. The list is a long one. And India is not only a primary wildlife destination, it is also one of the important centres of domestication of animals. The most important of these being the domestic buffalo, the domesticated elephant, one of the two races of domestic cattle and the commercially most important bird in the world, the domestic fowl. The most ornamental bird in the world, the peacock, is also Indian.
There are three recognized races in the world (Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid), and India is the only area in the world which has all three native to it: the Andaman islanders are the only true Negroids outside Africa. Sometimes, a fourth race, Australoid, is postulated (otherwise included among Caucasoids), and we have it among the Veddas of Sri Lanka. As to languages, six of the nineteen language families in the world are found in India, three of them only in India: Dravidian, Andamanese and Burushaski. The numerically and politically most important family of languages in the world, Indo-European, originated (as I have argued in my books) in India.
18.5. Cultural nationalism:
intellectual
As a civilization, India is the oldest continuous civilization still in existence. As A.L. Basham puts it in his The Wonder That Was India: “The ancient civilization of India differs from those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, in that its traditions have been preserved without a break down to the present day. Until the advent of the archaeologist, the peasant of Egypt or Iraq had no knowledge of the culture of his forefathers, and it is doubtful whether his Greek counterpart had any but the vaguest ideas about the glory of Periclean Athens. In each case there had been an almost complete break with the past. On the other hand… to this day legends known to the humblest Indian recall the names of shadowy chieftains who lived nearly a thousand years before Christ, and the orthodox Brahman in his daily worship repeats hymns composed even earlier. India and China have, in fact, the oldest continuous cultural traditions in the world.”
India has been one of the most important centres of civilization in the world in practically every age. We need not refer here to Indian traditions of fabled kingdoms going back into the extremely remote past. Even in the perception of the world in general, and scholarly perception at present, India was always a fabled wonderland. In (at least) the third and second millenniums B.C., the Indus-Sarasvati sites represented a relatively egalitarian and peaceful, highly organized, standardized and developed civilization, with many features unparalleled elsewhere. It covered a far larger area and remained constant and relatively unchanging for a far longer period (nearly a millennium) than any other civilization. In the first millennium B.C., the Arthashastra depicts an extremely organized civilization which appears almost modern in many respects, and India was idealized and mythicized by writers from China to Greece. In the first millennium A.D., we had the golden period of Indian civilization during the reign of the Guptas, at which point of time, according to A.L. Basham, “India was perhaps the happiest and most civilized region of the world”. And in the second millennium A.D., India was the desired land of dreams, in the quest for which half the world had the misfortune of being “discovered” by Europe.
And this civilization has made primary contributions to the world in every single field of culture. To begin with, religion: India is one of the two centres of origin of the major world religions, the other being West Asia. Buddhism was at one time the dominant religion not only in East and Southeast Asia, but also in Central Asia and parts of West Asia. It is increasingly being accepted as having been one of the major influences on the initial formative stages of Christianity. With Hinduism, it was the source of many religious trends (asceticism, monasticism etc.) in the past, and even today, Hindu-Buddhist philosophies are acquiring an ever-increasing following among thinkers and intellectuals all over the world. Hindu religio-philosophical concepts and terms (guru, nirvana, karma, etc.) have become basic components of the international spiritual lexicon.
Science and the scientific temperament are among the defining points of a civilized society, and India’s contributions to the development of science in the world have been more fundamental than that of any other civilization then or since. India, to begin with, invented the zero-based decimal system, without which no significant scientific development and advancement beyond certain rudimentary levels would ever have been possible in human society. This contribution is so very important, and so well illustrates the level of scientific thought-processes in India, that it needs to be elaborated in some detail here.
To begin with, the first logical stage in the development of a numeral system in any primitive society would be the very concept of numbers (one, two, three, etc.). The second logical stage would be the representation of these numbers in pictorial form, e.g. three pictures or symbolic figures of cows and two of sheep would represent three cows and two sheep. The third logical stage would be the shifting of the concept of numbers from concrete objects to abstract ideas, e.g. by the use of a simple symbol, usually a vertical line, to represent the number one. Seven vertical lines followed by the picture or symbol of a cow would represent seven cows. As the need for using bigger and bigger numbers arose, attempts would be made to create groups, as in the common method of keeping the score by drawing up to four vertical lines to represent numbers up to four, and then a fifth line vertically across the four to represent a full hand. The fourth logical stage would be the development of a base number, usually ten, on the basis of the number of fingers on the two hands used for counting.
Egyptian civilization was at this stage of development in its numeral system, which invented specific symbols for one, ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, etc. So, instead of representing the number 542 with 542 vertical lines, the Egyptians represented it with five repetitions of the symbol for hundred, four of the symbol for ten, and two of the symbol for one. This still had the drawback of requiring symbols to be repeated as many as nine times; and the Greeks, who borrowed the Egyptian system, went off at a tangent, off the logical track, in their attempt to remedy this. They invented halfway symbols: additional symbols for five, fifty, five hundred, etc. The Romans, who borrowed the Greek system, went even further off the logical track: they tried to avoid even four repetitions by employing a minus principle. Thus, four, nine, forty and ninety were not IIII, VIIII, XXXX and LXXXX, but IV, IX, XL and XC. Going off at another tangent, the Ionian Greeks, the Arabs, the Hebrews, and others, assigned numerical values to the letters of their alphabet. The numbers one to nine were represented by the first nine alphabets, the numbers ten to ninety by the next nine, and so on, creating a more concise but highly illogical numeral system of limited utility.
The fifth logical stage would be the avoidance of repetition of the base symbols by means of specific symbols to represent each number of repetitions. Chinese civilization was at this stage of development in its numeral system, which had base symbols for one, ten, hundred, thousand and ten thousand, as well as symbols for the numbers from two to nine. Thus, the Chinese represented 542 with the symbols for five, hundred, four, ten, and two, in that order. The sixth and last logical stage would be a numeral system with a rigid place system and a symbol for zero. Indian civilization reached this last and highest logical stage in its numeral system, with symbols for the numbers from one to nine and a symbol for zero, and a rigid place system, which made it possible to represent any and every number with only ten symbols. Incidentally, the Mesopotamians and the Mayas of Central America had also hit upon their own versions of zero. But, as they had gone off the logical track in the earlier stages, their systems remained grossly unwieldy and illogical. The Mesopotamian system had an unwieldy base of sixty, but symbols only for one, ten and zero; and even a symbol to incorporate a minus principle, as in the Roman system. And the Maya system had a base of twenty, but symbols only for one, five and zero; and, to accommodate the calendar, the second base was 360 instead of 400. India’s contribution of the zero-based decimal system (and, incidentally, also of most of the basic principles in the different branches of Mathematics) represents a fundamental revolutionary landmark in the history of world science on a par with the invention of fire or the invention of the wheel. But this invention was no accident. The scientific temperament in India was so developed that it such a fundamental development should inevitably have taken place only in India. As Alain Daniélou puts it in his Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales (p.99): “The Hindu theory is not like other systems, limited to experimental data: it does not consider arbitrarily as natural certain modes or certain chords, but it takes as its starting point the general laws common to all the aspects of the world’s creation...” Curt Sachs, on the same subject (in his monumental work The Rise of Music in the Ancient World ¾ East and West, p.171), refers to the “naïve belief of historically untrained minds that patterns usual in the person’s own time and country are ‘natural’…”, and contrasts it with classification in India which “starts from actual facts, but is thorough in its accomplishment regardless of practice”.
It was this scientific temperament which led the ancient Indians to go deep into the study of any and every subject, and to produce detailed texts on everything, whether on religious laws, rituals and customs (the vast Vedic literature: Samhitas, Brahmanas, Kalpasutras, Dharmasutras, etc.), philosophy (the Upanishads, and the sutras, commentaries, and other texts of the six Darshanas and the Buddhist, Jain and heterodox philosophies, etc.), linguistics (Panini, Yaska, and numerous Vedic and post-Vedic texts on Grammar, Phonetics, Etymology, etc.), medicine (the Samhitas of Charaka, Sushruta, Vagbhata, etc.), administration and statecraft (Kautilya’s Arthashastra, etc.), the performing arts (Bharata’s Natyashastra, etc.), and every other possible art, craft, technology and science, right down to the art of making love (Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra). No subject was beyond the detailed investigations of the ancient Indians. And basic texts, on any subject, themselves the culminations of long and rich traditions, were followed by detailed commentaries, and by commentaries on the commentaries. And there were well-established and regulated systems and forums all over the country for objective debates on controversial points or subjects. With all this, it is not surprising that Indian civilization should have been the source of origin of so many things.
18.6. Cultural nationalism: health, beauty,
pleasure
As an illustration of India’s role on the world stage, consider the performing arts, i.e. music, dance and drama. A.C. Scott writes (The Theatre in Asia, p.1): “It will be seen that stage practice in Asia owes a great deal to India as an ancestral source. Indian influence on dance and theatre which are one and the same in Asia was like some great subterranean river following a spreading course and forming new streams on the way”. Curt Sachs tells us (The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, p.192) that Indian music “had a decisive part in forming the musical style of the East, of China, Korea and Japan, and… what today is called Indochina and the Malay Archipelago. There was a westward exportation, too… Indian influence on Islamic music… the system of melodic and rhythmic patterns, characteristic of the Persian, Turkish, and Arabian world, had existed in India as the ragas and talas more than a thousand years before it appeared in the sources of the Mohammedan Orient.” Elsewhere, he goes into more specific details about this fundamental Indian influence on the music and dance of China and Japan (pp.139, 145), Bali (p.139), Siam (p.152), Burma (p.153), and Indonesia (pp. 130-132).
Alain Daniélou tells us (Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales, p.99) that the Indian “theory of musical modes… seems to have been the source from which all systems of modal music originated”. He goes so far as to suggest that “Greek music, like Egyptian music, most probably had its roots in Hindu music” (pp.159-160). India first recognized the division of the octave into seven notes, twelve semi-tones, and twenty-two microtones (the world has still to progress towards, and Indian music as it is practiced today has even regressed from, the microtones). India was the land of origin of a wide range of musical concepts and musical instruments, not only in respect of the musical systems of Asia, but even beyond. According to the Guinness Book of Facts and Feats, bagpipes (so characteristic of Scottish music), and hourglass drums (the talking drums or message drums of Africa), originated in India. The present classification of musical instruments into four classes (idiophonic, membranophonic, aerophonic and chordophonic) originated in India.
It was not only in respect of music, or of religion and sciences, that Indian influence on Asia, and thereby on the rest of the world, was “like some great subterranean river following a spreading course and forming new streams on the way”. This was the case in practically every field of culture. Indian sculpture and architecture spread eastwards and influenced the development of classical sculpture and architecture in the East and Southeast: the biggest temple complex in the world, the Hindu temple complex of Angkor Vat in Cambodia, is the most eloquent example.
Indian lore and literature spread eastwards and westwards, leading to the development of new genres of literature. The traditional lore and literature of Southeast Asia are suffused with the spirit, themes and vocabulary of Sanskrit epic literature, while (apart from the scientific and technical literature on every subject). Indian literary techniques and themes, like animal fables and the tale-within-a-tale technique, among others, spread out westwards, and inspired the writing of classics like The Arabian Nights and the Greek Aesop’s Fables. Indian board games, like chess and ludo (pachisi), among others, likewise, spread out east and west. The former became the national game of Asia (with local varieties, all of them with local names derived from the Sanskrit chaturang, in every country from Arabia to Korea and Vietnam), before acquiring its present international status.
Physical culture of every kind, from systems of physical exercises and martial arts, to comprehensive systems of health like Ayurveda (including, apart from its varieties of oral medicines, also the panchakarma techniques, theories of dietetics, etc.) and Hathayoga (including, besides asanas, a range of breathing techniques, concentration and meditation techniques, a wide range of internal and external cleansing techniques, etc.), also spread east and west, giving rise to similar techniques elsewhere. Greek medicine is acknowledged by many scholars to owe much to Indian medicine, and the renowned martial arts of the East acknowledge their Indian origin. Indian cuisine is generally acknowledged to be one of the great cuisines of the world, and the greatest when it comes to vegetarian cuisine, and is gaining popularity worldwide. Food culture all over the world would have been poor indeed without India’s material contributions to the four tastes: sweet (sugar), sour (lemons, tamarinds, kokam and amchur), pungent (black pepper and ginger), and bitter (bitter gourds), as well as a wide variety of other spices and flavourings.
In respect of clothes and ornaments, again, India’s contributions are of primary importance: cotton, the most important fabric in the world, originated in India, along with numerous important techniques, of weaving, dyeing and printing, basic to the textile industry. The use of diamonds originated in India: till the eighteenth century, India was the only source of diamonds, and the ornament and jewellery industry in India was a world pioneer in many ways. Beauty culture, the art of shringara, as described in great detail in the ancient texts, had developed very highly in ancient India, and India was the source of a great many kinds of clothing, ornaments, herbal cosmetics and applications, aromatic oils and beauty techniques.
Our claim that Indian culture can be considered the greatest and richest culture in the world, is not made only on the basis of past glories,-- although, as a civilization with the only continuous tradition, the past is not a dead past but is an intrinsic part of our present identity. Nor only on the basis of past contributions to the world,-- considerable, and even unmatchable, as they are. Indian culture is the greatest and richest culture in the world on the strength of its glorious present as well.
18.7. Cultural nationalism: the widest
range
India is a complete cultural world in itself. Firstly, it represents every stage of development in culture from the most sophisticated, right from ancient times, to the most primitive, even in modern times or as late as the twentieth century. Secondly, the richness and variety of its cultural wealth, in every respect, is so great that it need never look beyond its own cultural frontiers for inspiration, innovation and development in any field of culture.
To illustrate the first point, of the widest range between extremes, consider the mathematical systems. Ancient India conceived and analyzed the mathematical concepts of zero and infinity, achieved a fundamental revolution by devising a numeral system which can represent any conceivable number with only ten symbols, and coined names for numbers of incredibly high denominations. (A Buddhist work, Lalitavistara, gives the names for base-numbers up to 10 raised to the 421th power, i.e. one followed by 421 zeroes.) And, at the same time, we have the Andamanese languages, which have not developed the concept of numbers beyond two. They have names only for “one” and “two”, which is in effect “one” and “more than one”, which is no numeral system at all, and represents the absolutely most primitive stage in any language in the world.
Likewise, in music, our Indian classical music has, since thousands of years, developed a detailed theory of music, and used the richest range of notes (twenty-two microtones as compared to the twelve notes of western classical music), scales (every possible combination of the basic notes), modes and rhythms (the most unimaginably wide range of melodies and rhythms, from the simplest to the most complicated and intricate, with e.g. rhythms having 11, 13, 17, 19 etc. beats per cycle, unimaginable outside India), and musical instruments (with the most intricate playing techniques in the world). And, at the same time, the absolutely most primitive form of singing in the world is found among the Veddas of Sri Lanka. Along with certain remote Patagonian tribes, they are the only people in the world who “not only do not possess any musical instrument, but do not even clap their hands or stamp the ground” (Curt Sachs: The History of Musical Instruments, p.26).
This is the case in almost every field of culture. On the one hand, India has the richest traditional cuisine in the world, one of the most highly developed traditions of architecture in all its aspects, and an incredibly wide range of costumes and ornaments, all of hoary antiquity. On the other hand, we have tribes who are hunter-gatherers and subsist only on wild berries, who live in caves, or who live almost in the nude.
As for the second point, of completeness, a glance at two representative fields of civilizational culture, religion and music, will suffice to make it clear. The range of Indian religion, both in respect of philosophy and doctrines, as well as customs and rituals, is quite a complete one. Every shade of thought and idea (theistic, atheistic and agnostic), from the most materialistic to the most spiritual, from the most rationalistic to the most irrational, from the most humane to the most barbaric, and from the most puritanical or orthodox to the most profane or heterodox, has been explored by the different schools of philosophy, different sects and different individual writers. Every kind and level of ritual and custom from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the simplest to the most elaborate, and from the most humane to the most ruthless, is found in one or the other part of India.
The only common thread is the complete absence of intolerant imperialistic tendencies: if such ever arose in the history of Hinduism, they died out just as quickly. Therefore, also, Hindu India, before the rise of modern liberalism in the west, was the only safe haven in the civilized world for the followers of religions and sects persecuted elsewhere: Jews, Zoroastrians, Syrian Christians, and in modern times, Armenian Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Bahais and Ahmadiyas. (That this sometimes proved costly in the long run because of the failure to distinguish between religions and imperialist ideologies, is a different matter.)
In music, between the extremes of complexity and simplicity, India has also explored the scope for variety most thoroughly. Curt Sachs writes (The Rise Of Music in the Ancient World, p.157): “The roots of music are more exposed in India than anywhere else. The Vedda in Ceylon possess the earliest stage of singing that we know, and the subsequent strata of primitive music are represented by the numberless tribes that in valleys and jungles took shelter from the raids of northern invaders. So far as this primitive music is concerned, the records are complete or at least could easily be completed if special attention were paid to the music of the ‘tribes’… hundreds of tribal styles…”
Then there is the folk music, the range and variety of which is mind-boggling. Every single part of India is rich in its own individual range of styles of folk music. The folk music of even any one state of India (say Maharashtra, Rajasthan or Karnataka, for example, or even Sind, Baluchistan, Sri Lanka or Bhutan for that matter) would merit a lifetime of study. And, right on top, we have the great tradition of Indian classical music, which we have already referred to. Although the oldest living form of classical music in the world, and although it has evolved and developed over the centuries, losing and gaining in the process, Curt Sachs points out (The Rise Of Music in the Ancient World, p.157) that “there is no reason to believe that India’s ancient music differed essentially from her modern music”. Many western musicologists (Alain Daniélou, M.E. Cousins, Donald Lentz, etc.) have spoken about the superiority of Indian classical music over western classical music, but even without going that far, it is at least certain that Indian Classical music is one of the two main classical traditions in the world. And apart from classical music, we have the other great tradition, of Vedic chanting and singing in its many varieties, best preserved in South India, and different varieties of Sanskrit songs, preserved in temples and abbeys all over India.
In all these varieties of music (classical, folk, popular and tribal), we have the most unparalleled range of musical instruments in the world. They are unique in their range from the most primitive and simple to the most sophisticated and complicated in respect of techniques of making, artistic appearance, techniques of playing, and qualities of sound, in every type: idiophonic, membranophonic, aerophonic and chordophonic; monophonic, pressurephonic, polyphonic and multiphonic.
All this music and all these musical instruments were preserved down the ages by temple traditions, courts, courtesans, great masters and professional castes, musical institutions, and tribal, caste and community traditions. The twentieth century saw a consolidation of all this rich musical wealth due, on the one hand, to the invention of recording devices, and, on the other, to the enthusiasm natural in a modern India in the atmosphere of an independence movement. New generations of musicians and scholars, and government bodies like Films Division, Akashwani and Doordarshan, did a herculean job in studying, recording and popularizing all forms of Indian music. New trends in classical music (eg. the Gharana system, new semi-classical forms, including Marathi Natya Sangeet, etc.), new innovations (eg. the “Vadyavrind” orchestration of Indian melodic music, etc.), and new genres of popular music (e.g. new forms of devotional music, of popular music like the Bhavgeet genre in Marathi music, and film music) added to India’s incomparable musical wealth.
This was about music. The same is the case in respect of India’s cultural wealth in every other field. The same sources: ancient texts, temple traditions, courts, courtesans, great masters and professional castes, institutions, and tribal, caste and community traditions, have combined to preserve lore and literature, dance forms, arts and crafts, architectural forms, cuisine, games and physical systems, etc. etc. A detailed study will confirm that Indian culture is among the greatest and richest in the world in any and every individual field of culture, and the greatest and richest in the world in the sum total of culture.
18.8. Cultural nationalism: Hindu
civilization under siege
Today, this greatest and richest culture in the world, which survived all kinds of challenges in the past, is being slowly and systematically wiped out or turned into a caricature of itself. And, if systematic steps are not taken on a war footing, it will soon be a faint and fading memory of the past. And not only will that be the end of Hindu society as we know it, but it will be a great tragedy for world culture as well.
By Shrikant Talageri from India's Only Communalist..