INDIAN CULTURE -sublime and ridiculous aspects

I am not laying special stress on the close association of the origin and growth of our culture with slavery just to disparage what is called our old and traditional culture. I am second to none in praising where praise is due. I join the world in paying my tribute to Sophocles and Euripides, Bhasa and Kalidasa, Shakespeare and Milton, Pushkin and Gogol, who are the cream of traditional culture. I am fully alive to the sheer mass and majesty of pyramid, the beauty and grandeur of a Gothic church, the sculptural wealth and charm of an Indian temple, the simplicity and dignity of a mosque, or the dream-like quality and elegance of the Taj. But at the same time I am not oblivious to the brutal fact that all these structures were raised on the blood and sweat of millions of my fellow-men who were subjected to abject poverty and cruel slavery. In Athens, at its Zenith – in the age of Pericles – the proportion of free men to slaves was roughly 1 : 3. In Sparta, for every free Spartan there were at least five Helots, who may be described as semi-slaves or serfs. Aegina, the island across the Bay of Megara and Corinth, had (according to a calculation made by Aristotle in 350 B.C.) a population of half a million, of whom 470,000 were slaves ! All these shocking details of slavery pertain to ancient Greece which is acclaimed, and rightly too, as the original home of Western culture.
In India, despite the testimony of Megasthenes to the contrary, there were slaves. “It is but a historical truism,” says Dr. U.N.Ghoshal, “that slavery has been a recognized institution in our land throughout the ancient, not to speak of the mediaeval period of our history”, and proceeds to quote from the Rig Veda, from the Upanishads, from the Jatakas, from the Arthsastra and other old books hundreds of references to slaves and slave-owning. It is possible, even probable, that the number of bond slaves in India was much less than in Greece. If so, the reason for it is not that the Indian society was juster and more humane than the Greek. It has, in fact, perpetrated the worst crime of man against man by classifying a sizeable section of the population as untouchable. If it did not at the same time condemn millions to bond slavery, it was solely due to the fact that cheap labour was provided by the lower castes. The caste system, which is after all a thinly veiled, but by no means less unjust and cruel form of slavery, reduced to a minimum the need for bond slaves.
Not only in Greece and India but in other nations too where culture first flowered, be it Sumeria, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Judea, Rome, Persia, or China, it did so only on the basis of slavery in some form or other. However much we may deplore this fact, it must be conceded that in a predominantly agricultural society there could be no other basis for the development of culture. Culture is essentially a product of leisure and plenty, of intellectual and creative pursuits; and an agricultural economy can provide leisure and plenty only for a few. Hence all traditional cultures had to have slavery as their material basis.
This age-long basis of culture has come to be altered with the advent of the industrial revolution and the consequent change in economic technique. Of course, the golden age has not dawned wit the industrial revolution; nor has slavery disappeared from the face of the earth. On the contrary, in the place of bond slavery, the industrial revolution has introduced a more insidious form of slavery; I mean the wage slavery. It has produced the ever-recurring fear of unemployment. It has also tended, especially in its initial stages, to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. In its first strides it has indeed caused greater misery to the common man than ever before. It is because every technical advance in the production of wealth would not by itself lessen the sum of human misery or increase the prospects of plenty and peace. This was proved abundantly by the food-producing economy which replaced about 6,000 years ago the earlier one of food-gathering. The former is decidedly superior to the latter and certainly more productive. And yet “it introduced”, in the words of Bertrand Russell, “slavery and serfdom, human sacrifice, absolute monarchy and large wars, Instead of raising the standard of life, except for a tiny governing minority, it merely increased the population. On the whole, it probably increased the sum of human misery.” Likewise, if the second major technical advance in production which man has achieved through the industrial revolution has in some respects caused more misery than happiness, it is because the habits of the earlier age are too deeply ingrained to be easily shaken off.
On account of the stupid, selfish, and perverse use to which the new economic technique is being put, there is now in most parts of the world greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands, greater concentration of power together with greater capacity for evil, greater danger of global wars and the total annihilation of man. While I concede all this, I would like to point out that “science, as a dominant factor in determining the beliefs of educated men, as existed for about 300 years; as a source of economic technique for 150 years” only. In this all too brief period- you may compare it with 6,000 years of a purely agricultural economy - it has wiped out many superstitions, lighted up the dark corners of the minds of millions of common people; has given them slowly, but steadily, more and more voice in the shaping of their own destiny; and, above all, it has created hope in them of a new age in which plenty and leisure would not be the exclusive privilege of the fortunate few; and arts and culture and the graces of a life of the mind would not be gifts vouchsafed to a tiny minority. If that new age is still only shimmering on the distant horizon, tantalizing us as a hope still to be realized, as a dream yet to take concrete shape, it is mainly because of our stupidity, selfishness, and perversity; it is because our social and political organizations are not able to meet the challenge of our technological advance.
While valuing our traditional culture as a great heritage of which we can be proud, I stand for the modern culture of the common man based on freedom and equality, on education and enlightenment, on scientific truth as against religious faith; in short, the culture of the emerging Great Commoner. I am against any attempt to go back to a supposedly golden age. The golden age is never behind us : it is always ahead of us. We cannot reach it by walking backwards; but by proceeding forward with hope, with confidence, with the torch of reason in our hand, and love of our fellow-beings in our heart. If we take care of our future, traditional culture will take care of itself. Those parts of it that have vitality will certainly survive, for they already constitute a part of our being, while the rest are bound to disappear in spite of any attempts on our part to breathe new life into them. Talk of reviving a culture betrays an ignorance of its very nature. As Eliot has aptly pointed out, “culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake : the artist must concentrate upon his canvas, the poet upon his typewriter, the civil servant upon the just settlement of particular problems as they present themselves upon his desk, each according to the situation in which he finds himself.” Such being the nature of culture, we should. I submit, talk less of preserving our traditional culture or of consciously evolving a new one, and concentrate more on living; living in tune with our better natures, in harmony with our social environment, and in appreciation of the glorious gift of all the poetry and beauty which the azure sky, the verdant earth, the soaring hills, and the sparkling seas richly provide us. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the chances of a culture flowering were not greater when we had fewer societies for the advancement of culture and much less talk of culture. Culture may or may not be a new word; but certainly the particular meaning with which we are using it nowadays is new It was not bandied about in that sense either in the Athens of Pericles or in the domains of Vikramaditya, and yet where else did it flourish more?
And finally, my submission is that whether we are conscious of it or not, a new culture is shaping itself amidst us in response to the new environment of this technological age and in consonance with the new urges of modern man. Even now in India, where the technological revolution is in its initial stages, it is fostering a new outlook, a new philosophy, a new approach to life. It is transforming the caste structure; it is cutting at the root of the age-old theory of karma which seeks to justify every social inequality and iniquity on the basis of supposed sins committed in a mythical past birth or births. It is making the common man stand up and demand, not as a matter of generosity, but as his birthright, political freedom, economic opportunity, and social justice. It is making a man even out of an untouchable who for ages has been treated as worse than subhuman, and, what is infinitely worse, made to believe that a just God had condemned him to that wretched status. Out of all this ferment, a new culture will, I am sure, emerge triumphantly, unless it is submerged in a tidal wave of reaction and revivalism. This new culture when it emerges will make us feel ashamed of the present caste distinctions, and economic inequalities, the present poverty and squalor of a large majority, and the present ignorance and superstitions of the masses. A new dawn is ahead of us; it will mark the beginnings of a new and glorious age. (1955)