The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s3.1

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.