The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s3: Democratic Strands in Hindu Social Thought
The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s3
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Democratic Strands in Hindu Social Thought
c14.s3.1
It has been the custom to treat the social reform movements among the Hindus from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century as due to the impacts of Islam, monotheistic and democratic as this latter is. Sociologically, however, it is necessary to dive deeper into the phenomena. For one thing, it is patent to every student of the Hindu institutions and ideologies that both monotheism and democracy are coeval with the Hindu mind itself. Historically speaking, the concepts of the unity of Godhead and the equality of classes have never been absent in the Indian socio-religious and socio-economic tradition. The processes by which the non-Indians, non-Aryans, non-Brāhmaṇs, the Vrātyas, the Śūdras, the "wild tribes" and what not have got themselves Indianized, Aryanized, or Brāhmaṇized constitute the most solid realities of race-history and cultural development in every nook and corner of India and in every epoch of India's growth. In other words, it is not so much the *varṇāśrama* as the protests against the *varṇāśrama*, not so much the law and order, as the violations of law and order, not so much the alleged pure races or castes as the *varṇa-samkaras*, the "mixed colours", fusions of ethnic elements,—or rather the simultaneous operations of these two sets of forces that constitute the norm of Hindu cultural evolution. In the socialistic or democratic movements of Hindu India in the Moslem *milieu* we have but to read the continuations of the eternal society-making process, the millennium-old social metabolism, that has led to the vertical mobilization of groups from the lower to the higher strata. The very category, "expansion of Hindu culture," implies nothing but this democratization or rather impact of the masses upon the main stock of Hindu institutions and ideals.
c14.s3.2
Thus considered, the history of Hindu social evolution can furnish evidences of socialism and democracy, understood in a general sense, such as have been analyzed by the Italian sociologist Salvatore Cognetti de Martiis in his *Socialismo Antico* (1889).⁷ The study of "economic ideals" as distinguished from economic realities is the subject matter of this treatise. And India is exhibited from the standpoint of the ideas of "social utopia" which came to evolve in its literature and folk-tradition.
c14.s3.3
⁷ B. K. Sarkar: "Hindu Politics in Italian" in the *Indian Historical Quarterly*, September, 1925.
c14.s3.4
He does not consider the struggle between the old and the new aristocracies to be a special phenomenon of any particular race-history, say, that of the Phoenicians. It is in his judgment a universal fact of civilization in the old and the new worlds, in Egypt, Greece and Rome as much as in India, China and Peru. The protests against private property, and glorifications of equality, fraternity, justice, peace and happiness are to be encountered, for instance, in the literature of every country, says he.
c14.s3.5
Already even the Rig Vedic tradition of Yama (IX, 113, 8, X, 14, 13, X, 17, 1, X, 58,1) introduces us to conditions of bliss such as had existed in some golden age, after which therefore the social reformers of the day were aspiring. The Buddhist conception of equality and fraternity did not disappear with the so-called Buddhist ages. It reappeared in the Vaiṣṇava *milieu*. The *Viṣṇu Purāṇa* accords great importance to the Śūdras. The democratic spirit associated with Rāmānandism exercised a beneficial influence on the souls of the popular classes, leading to the energetic manifestation of the consciousness of self-importance. Viṣṇudās Kavi's *Svargārohaṇa* (Ascent to Heaven) dwells at length on the merits of the oppressed classes to the exclusion of the upper ten thousands who are exhibited in the worst colour. We are therefore in a position to assert that from the *Vrātya* Book of the *Atharva Veda* to the *Svargārohaṇa* of the Vaiṣṇava poet the Hindu democratic or egalitarian tradition has broadened down from precedent to precedent. And so far as the Moslem atmosphere is concerned, we should be prepared to admit that it did not kill the traditional Hindu spirit of expansion and social democracy as promoted by race-fusion.