Historical Development of Indian Music: A Critical Study c6.2

c6.2

Indian music dates from dim antiquity, and it is still on its march. It will not come to an end so long as it retains its creative force and artistic merit. A history is conceived as the narration or tale of memorable events that preserves the memory and propagates the knowledge of glorious culture and civilization of man and his society. Now, the term ‘history’ connotes the idea of progress. It does not stop for a moment, but marches onwards towards the eternity, weaving the networks of subjective thoughts and objective actions of the human society. K.A. Nilkāṇṭha Śāstrī, and H.S. Ramanna say : ‘History is such a wide subject that it knows no beginning and no end. Each act or historical episode is the effect of some previous episode and probably leads on to another’. Further they say : ‘History, then, is in part a science. It is also, and in a much greater degree, an art. It consists not only in collecting facts about the facts, but in thinking and feeling about them. * * We must have a proper conception of the facts, of the conditions, of the motives, and of the characters. * * The past cannot be constructed by men whose knowledge of life has been gained only from documents. Mere accumulation of facts is insufficient. Using our imagination and our judgment, we have to interpret them. No, facts do not always speak for themselves. They have to be weighed and measured. They must be placed in their proper setting. There must be intelligent reflection upon the significance of the facts. There must be that insight into reality without which the past can have no vital meaning for living men'.¹ Such is also the opinion of Bury. To Croce, the average historian is a mere chronicler, for facts only become history when they have passed through the crucible of an individual mind. No historian can forecast the future, and so Croce rejects determinism as decisively as Toynbee. Prof. Renier emphasises the social role of history. Toynbee, like Spengler, envisages history as a record of civilizations rather than of centuries and continents. Spengler is a quasibiological determinist 'who holds that all civilizations are fated to die, and that the future will be as the past'.