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ReemaSinha
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One of the opening passages in Manu Smriti unmistakably declares that the laws of its code must be changed from time to time reflecting changes in life and society. This adaptability has been one of the secrets of the survival of the Hindu civilization which today is an amalgam of civilization, Aryan, Dravidian, Muslim, and European. To pick up again the thread of our reflections the thought background of Hindu Civilization reached its highest point in the Upanishadic age. In one of his most illuminating and revealing papers, Tagore call the message of this age as the message of the forest. The UpanishadsI are also rightly called the ‘Aranyaks’, which means ‘the forests’. This message lost or nearly lost its dynamism for Indian long centuries ago.
After the Upanishadic Age the movement of Indian history was in reverse gear. It was really not progression but retrogression. We begain to lapse back into a mindless and thoughtless primitivism. India lost the secret of healthy growth and healthy evolution. Indian reservews of strength and richness. Marx, writing in 1854, called the Brithshers in Indian ‘uncoscious tools of history’. In other world, the Britishers, all unknown to themselves, challenged India to become true India, to realize the promise, the possibilities and the potentialities of the Upanishadic thought.
But the history of the West has itself fallen short of its own promises. Modern European civilization has mischanged its healthy dynamism for an restlessness, born to the pseudonergism of the blind forces of capitalism, colonialism and impearialism. Unplanned expansion and overloaded industrialism have resulted in making the machine, the master and controller. The roles have been reversed, with the resulted that modern Western civilization has begun to suffer from high blood pressure. A century ago Ruskin had sounded his warning against such a state of affairs. Tolstoy and Gandhi spoke in the same vein. Modern civilization was born out of the womb of ancient civilization, but it seems to have failed itself because it did not control and harness its own chain reactions which have turned modern civilization into a Freankenstein. Our ancient civilization sorely needs the rejuvenating disciplines of the mind created by modern civilization. But it also needs, while it becomes modern-minded, to recapture its ancient-souled vision of life.
Indian thought and Indian civilization emphasize not so much the particularism of things, as their universalism. Diversity is only a mode of unity. Modern civilization today faces the meance of its own modernity. Let the West give us the mind and the discipline of the modern civilization and let India in turn give to the West the ancient-soulded vision and wisdom of its thought. This two-ways traffic between ancient and modern civilizations alone can restore the equilibrium of the world, which is being shaken to its roots by the blind forces of soulless modernity.