A History of Sanskrit Literature c14.s1.2

c14.s1.2

The causes of this phenomenon must lie in peculiarities of Indian psychology aided by environment and the course of events, and it is idle to hope to give any explanation which will be entirely satisfying. We may remember that India produced no oratory, despite the distinct power often displayed both in the epics and in Classical Kāvya of the rhetorical presentment of a case by opposing disputants. Oratory doubtless, as history proves, has flourished best where there has been political freedom; Athens is as celebrated for oratory as Sparta was deficient in it, and Rome produced its best orators when there still was a Republic in which certain classes at least had effective political rights. It may be that India failed to produce historians because the great political events which affected her during the period up to A. D. 1200 did not call forth popular action in the sense in which the repulse of the Persian attacks on Greece evoked the history of Herodotos.¹ The national feeling, which is at least a powerful aid to the writing of history, was not evoked in India in the same manner as it was when democratic states formed the most serious element of resistance to the Persian attack at a time when more oligarchic governments were apparently far less deeply moved by any sentiment of nationalism.²