The main river of Indian culture has flowed in four streams - the Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, and the Jain. It had its source in the heights of the Indian consciousness.
But a river belonging to a country is not fed by its own waters alone. The Tibetan Bramhaputra is a tributary to the Indian Ganges. Contributions have similarly found their way to India's original culture. The Muhammadan, for example, has repeatedly come into India from outside, laden with his own stores of knowledge and feeling and his wonderful religious democracy, bringing freshet after freshet to swell the current. In our music, our architecture, our pictorial art, our literature, the Muhammadans have made their permanent and precious contribution. Those who have studied the lives and writings of our medieval saints, and all the great religious movements that sprang up in the time of the Muhammadan rule, know how deep is our debt to this foreign current that has so intimately mingled with our life.
And then has descended upon us the later flood of Western culture, which bids fair to break through all banks and bounds, merging all the other streams in its impetuous rush. If we can but make a separate course, through which this last may flow, we shall be saved from an irruption, whose cost may one day prove out of all proportion to its contribution, however large.
So, in our centre of Indian learning, we must provide for the coordinated study of all these different cultures - the Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Islamic, the Sikh, and the Zoroastrian. And side by side with them the European - for only then shall we be able to assimilate the last. A river flowing within banks is truly our own, but our relations with a flood are disastrously the opposite.
It is needless to add that, along with those languages in which lies stored our ancestral wealth of wisdom, we must make room for the study of all our great vernaculars which carry the living stream of the mind of modern India. Along with this study of our living languages, we must include our folk literature, in order truly to know the psychology of our people and the direction towards which our underground current of life is moving.
There are some who are insularly modern, who believe that the past is the bankrupt time, leaving no assets for us, but only a legacy of debts. They refuse to believe that the army that is marching forward can be fed from the rear. It is well to remind them that the great ages of renaissance in history were those when men suddenly discovered the seeds of thought in the granary of the past.
The unfortunate people, who have lost the harvest of their past, have lost their present age. They have missed their seeds for cultivation, and go a-begging for their bare livelihood. We must not imagine that we are one of these disinherited peoples of the world. The time has come for us to break open the treasure trove of our ancestors and use it for our commerce of life. Let us, with its help, make our future our own - never continue our existence as the eternal rag-picker at other people's dustbins.
But a river belonging to a country is not fed by its own waters alone. The Tibetan Bramhaputra is a tributary to the Indian Ganges. Contributions have similarly found their way to India's original culture. The Muhammadan, for example, has repeatedly come into India from outside, laden with his own stores of knowledge and feeling and his wonderful religious democracy, bringing freshet after freshet to swell the current. In our music, our architecture, our pictorial art, our literature, the Muhammadans have made their permanent and precious contribution. Those who have studied the lives and writings of our medieval saints, and all the great religious movements that sprang up in the time of the Muhammadan rule, know how deep is our debt to this foreign current that has so intimately mingled with our life.
And then has descended upon us the later flood of Western culture, which bids fair to break through all banks and bounds, merging all the other streams in its impetuous rush. If we can but make a separate course, through which this last may flow, we shall be saved from an irruption, whose cost may one day prove out of all proportion to its contribution, however large.
So, in our centre of Indian learning, we must provide for the coordinated study of all these different cultures - the Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Islamic, the Sikh, and the Zoroastrian. And side by side with them the European - for only then shall we be able to assimilate the last. A river flowing within banks is truly our own, but our relations with a flood are disastrously the opposite.
It is needless to add that, along with those languages in which lies stored our ancestral wealth of wisdom, we must make room for the study of all our great vernaculars which carry the living stream of the mind of modern India. Along with this study of our living languages, we must include our folk literature, in order truly to know the psychology of our people and the direction towards which our underground current of life is moving.
There are some who are insularly modern, who believe that the past is the bankrupt time, leaving no assets for us, but only a legacy of debts. They refuse to believe that the army that is marching forward can be fed from the rear. It is well to remind them that the great ages of renaissance in history were those when men suddenly discovered the seeds of thought in the granary of the past.
The unfortunate people, who have lost the harvest of their past, have lost their present age. They have missed their seeds for cultivation, and go a-begging for their bare livelihood. We must not imagine that we are one of these disinherited peoples of the world. The time has come for us to break open the treasure trove of our ancestors and use it for our commerce of life. Let us, with its help, make our future our own - never continue our existence as the eternal rag-picker at other people's dustbins.
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