The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s6.1

c14.s6.1

Writings on the history of Bengali literature as on that of other Indian literature have been vitiated by a fundamental fallacy. In the story of a thousand years' literary development, for instance, people have managed to watch only the struggle for supremacy among the various orders of gods and socio-religious systems.²⁴ According to the methodology of literary historiography and art-criticism prevalent in and about Bengal or for that matter All-India, *Aeneid*, the great national epic of the Romans, would have no significance except what may be gathered from the ultimate triumph of Venus over Juno in the life-history of Aeneas. The method is not uninteresting, but when art-appreciation is obsessed by such a religio-theological "interpretation" the result is likely to be misleading, as in the case of Max Weber's *Religionssoziologie*.