Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times c55.5

c55.5

§ 373. The constitutional progress made by the Hindu has probably not been equalled, much less surpassed by any polity of antiquity. The great privilege of the Hindu at the same time is that he is not yet a fossil ; he is still living with a determination which a great historian (Duncker) has characterised as a tenacity which bends but does not break. The Golden Age of his polity lies not in the Past but in the Future. His modern history begins with the 17th century when Vaishṇavism preached the equality of all men, when the Śūdra, the helot of the ancient Hindu, preached shoulder to shoulder with the Brahmin (who welcomed and encouraged it), when the God of the Hindu was for the first time worshipped with hymns composed by a Muhammadan², when Rāmadāsa declared that man is free and he cannot be subjected by force¹, and when the Brahmin accepted the leadership of the S'ūdra in attempting to found a State.