The last one thousand years has seen a consistent and substantial shrinking of the Indian world. There are three large scale processes involved in this folding. The first is the exit of the peasantry and warrior castes from India’s margins to the Perso-Islamic world. The second is the de-Indicization of South East Asia, first with Islam replacing Hinduism/Buddhism as the main religion in much of maritime South East Asia, followed by the West becoming the main source of cultural and political influence. The third is the exit of highly educated Indians (overwhelmingly upper caste Hindus) to the West, either physically as migrants or intellectually in terms of mindspace.
The development of a sophisticated, reflective culture in India and its culmination in literary and spiritual terms as the various Indian epics and religions was enabled by the complex intermingling of nomadic and settled societies and the abundant surplus of riverine India’s highly fertile land. Consider this, the pre-industrial population of Uttar Pradesh (47 million in 1871), was more than the population of all of Western Europe combined. But the last 1000 years has seen India contribute very little to the rest of the world despite its natural and intellectual riches.
As modern day citizens of the Republic of India become increasingly self aware about their customs, language and history, their mind will turn to why India remained subdued for such a long time. Notwithstanding convenient pronouncements about India’s ‘ability’ to ‘absorb’ various influences, it remains a fact that there are no Sanskrit or Tamil high words in Arabic, and there is no influence of Indian architecture or art on Persian expression. American and British courts do not refer to Indian law or judgements. The names of Indian scientists do not populate science textbooks. It is all one way traffic.
To be successful and worthwhile, reflection on this has to turn away from simplistic pronouncements about the cruelty of India’s various invaders and betrayals by self centred insiders to allow for an interrogation of the structure of Indian civilization.
What factors allowed for the growth of rule of law and democracy in medieval England,but prevented the same in medieval India ? Such institutions did not look on the horizon even in Hindu kingdoms of Kerala and Assam. Given Fukuyama’s contention that the appearance of these institutions is linked ultimately to Indo-European culture (does this explain the relatively smooth acceptance of democracy in India versus the resistance it got everywhere else ?), it is important to understand how little England got there before us.
What made the native Indian elites at the time of the Delhi Sultanate and the later Mughal Sultanate acquiesce to Persian as the official language ? One of the first actions of the Maratha Empire was the anointment of Sanskrit and Marathi as official languages. So if Indic options were available, especially Sanskrit, why did the Rajputs, Brahmins and Vaishyas not push for its position as the Sultanate’s official language ? After all the Turkic Qing dynasty in China maintained Mandarin as the official language. It is befuddling to imagine that they did not foresee the consequences this would bring.
The conventional response to such questions has revolved around caste as a dehumanizing and denationalizing force. But we know that caste did not play
The awakened Indian lives in an odious, depressing world today. A new generation of elite and middle class appears to have virtually no interest in India beyond superficial cliches. A lifeline was thrown to Indian civilization by Gandhi and the Independence Movement.