The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s9.t6.62

c14.s9.t6.62

As a writer on positive morality and secular happiness and as one endowed with hardheaded mastery over the realities of flesh and blood nobody is a greater man than Mitra-Miśra in the entire range of Hindu culture. The seventeenth century is a great period of Hindu creativeness in the field of life's joys and worldly endeavours. In the *Rājanītiprakāśa* we understand not only that the best of Hindu tradition was being maintained through the *Purāṇas* but also that Mitra-Miśra himself knew what to select and what to propagate in the interests of his own generation. In this selective work he has really functioned as a creator, an original thinker, a man who knows that he has to re-make the personality of his contemporaries,—to reconstruct the Hindu states,—and to "whip the country into shape." Mitra-Miśra deserves the same recognition in the annals of Hindu life and thought as Rāmdās the *guru* of Śivāji (1627-1680). It is strange that such a work as the *Rājanītiprakāśa* should have remained virtually unused in indology although it undoubtedly is one of the masterpieces of Hindu intellectual activity, albeit, be it observed once more, it is but a *nibandha* or digest.