Greater India

Text extracted from opening pages of book: Greater India Society Bulletin No, 1. GREATER INDIA By KALIDAS NAG, M. * D. UTT. ( PARIS) November 1926 niMtiiiiitinii GREATER INDIA A STUDY L\ INDIAN INTERNATIONALISM ATTITUDE TOWARDS HlSTORY India enjoys the precarious privilege of possessing no systematic history well defined by Time and Space. She has passed, like every other country, through all the phases of historical evolution sociological and religious, intellectual and political; yet with a peculiar obstinacy India has hitherto refused to develop a hierarchy of orthodox historians arid a consistent tradition of national history. No doubt she has acknowledged from very ancient times the value of chronicles ( Itihasa-Purana) as an intellectual discipline, yet such compositions have remained, down to the appearance of the Muhammadan historians, as subsidiary to her proverbially rich contributions to Religion and Ethics. To Western scholars, trained in methods of precision applied to the intensive study of national histories, the apparent apathy towards the preservation of what they call national glories seems not only to be a little discon certing but even derogatory to the prestige of the Indians as an intellectual people. Diagnosis of this peculiar malady led to the development of diverse theories: lack of political cohesion and comprehension of national solidarity, oriental fatalism and obsession of hereafterism all seemed to have combined to weaken the Hindu faculty of precision and thereby sap the foundation of historical science in India. The present degradation of India was considered to be the cumulative effect of these national perversities and well wishers of India, bothoutside and inside, * have sought to cure it by reconstructing her history on a national basis. Without discounting the value of possessing a systematic national history or disputing India's poverty in that depart ment of literature, one may still plead that the judgment 2 GREATER INDIA passed on the Indian people from that stand point is neverthe less superficial and unjust A people that could evolve at least forty centuries ago, the earliest collection of human lyrics in the form of the Vedic Hymns, may be credited with a certain amount of creative imagination. A people that could present to the world about 2,500 years ago a scientific treatise on grammar like that of Panini may aspire to a certain amount of analytical power and capacity for system-building. A people that could perpetuate through millenniums, the traditions of its religious, social and intellec tual life not through writing but by a phenomenal memory, may claim to possess some sort of instinct for precision and preservation. So it still remains a problem why such people did not develop a tradition of national history in the special sense of our days. This is a paradox which has not been explained by condescending theorists of the historical school. It may not be an improbable hypothesis that the Hindus somehow felt history, with its interminable details of wars and treaties, of triumphs and dissolutions, as a poor por traiture of the real national life and a very unsatisfactory and imperfect reflection of its creative activities. They bold ly challenged the validity of the world of phenomena and tried to discover the world of permanence immutable beyond all phenomena. Revulsion from things transient and temporalproduced almost an obsession of the Absolute and the Eternal. Thus India neglected History and developed Philosophy; or rather, she considered the quest of the spirit for the Eternal Verity as the real history of Humanity. cf* Nag: The Humanisation of History, Modern Eeview, Feb. 1923). Thus whilst her next door neighbour China was ( quietly) laying the foundation of early science and inventions; while Babylonia was developing the earliest astronomy and legal code; , while Egypt was composing her Book of the Dead and was trying to triumph over Death by her titanic arch