History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c81.566

v6.c81.566

&c. An English translation of this part appeared in Indian Antiquary, vol. III. pp 21-25 and pp. 47-52. This paper, though it is a monument of learning and patient industry (for that period when very few Sanskrit books had been printed), gave rise to severe criticism owing to its fantastic and perverse conclusion about Kṛṣṇajanmāṣṭamī ritual being borrowed from Christian representations of Christ and his mother Mary. In I. A. vol. III p 300 Growse attacked it very severely. In spite of all criticisms the tenacious German scholar stuck to his guns and launched an attack against his critics, particularly against Dr. Rajendralal Mitra, in I. A. vol IX. pp 226-229. As hardly any Sanskrit scholar in these days would espouse the theory put forward by Weber, I do not think that I should waste much time over a refutation thereof Most European scholars, nurtured on the vaunted intellectual eminence of the ancient Greeks and on the intolerant attitude of christianity towards other faiths, when they became acquainted with things Indian and studied Sanskrit, were obsessed (though not very obviously expressed) by two notions, viz. much in India that resembled what prevailed in the West must have been borrowed from the West and further, that Indians, who had allowed themselves to be invaded by outsiders and governed by foreigners for centuries, must not have been good at anything. These two notions gave rise to many untenable theories such as the following: the Rāmāyaṇa was borrowed from Homer's Iliad, the art of writing was unknown to Pāṇini, the Brāhmī script was based on Phoenician or Aramaic script, that the Gītā was based on the Bible, that the very ancient Indian nakṣatra system was borrowed either from the Chinese, the Babylonians or Arabs Most of such theories were the result of little knowledge and the non-recognition of certain common sense rules and have now been consigned to the limbo of deserved oblivion. The common sense rule is that when a thing or a state of things has existed for centuries in a certain country or among a certain people, the burden of proving that it was borrowed by that country or people from outside is very heavy on those who assert such borrowing; mere similarities can never be held to amount to any evidence of borrowing at all; scholars should be very chary of confidently asserting borrowing and should put forward their conclusions very cautiously. It would not be irrelevant to point out the main circumstances on which Weber, often a champion of lost causes, relied for his theory.