The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s9.t9: The Fundamental Defect in Rāmachandrapant's Positivism
The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s9.t9
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The Fundamental Defect in Rāmachandrapant's Positivism
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It is worth while to pause a moment here. Rāmachandrapant is evidently aware that the "dangerousness" of these *Topīkārs* lies in their "strength" in "navy, guns and ammunition." Had he cared to go into details in his treatise he would most probably have admitted that in these "industrial" and "military" techniques, at any rate, the *Topīkārs* were relatively stronger than and hence to that extent superior to the Marathas and perhaps other Indians. During the early years of the eighteenth century, then, the consciousness of *Topīkār* superiority in certain items of positivism was not absent among the thinking sections of the Indian people.
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But it is worth while, again, to observe that the author of the Marathi *Rājanīti* does not discuss as to how the inferiority of the Marathas and perhaps of other Indians in navy, guns and ammunition might be removed. He has not cared to suggest that the Marathas and the other Indians should attempt mastering the new arts, sciences and industries with which the superiority of the *Topīkārs* in navy, guns and ammunition was associated. One might expect Rāmachandrapant to declare to his countrymen the need for visiting the lands of the *Topīkārs* in quest of the new learning,—the new *vidyās* and *kalās*,—in order that the *Brahmāstra* (the divine weapons) of the modern times might be mastered by hook or by crook. The *argumentum ex silentio* does not prove anything definite. But it is necessary to point out that no reference to the necessity of learning or stealing the new arts and sciences, the new tools and appliances, the methods and machines of the new factories is to be found in this work. And naturally, therefore, the importance of studying these industrial inventions and military tactics at first hand by coming into contact with the pioneers in their own workshops at home does not occur to Rāmachandrapant. On the contrary, he is satisfied with the naïve, puerile, nay, old-womanish methodology of avoiding the *Topīkārs* altogether, of neither troubling them nor being troubled by them, i.e., of having no social or cultural intercourse of any sort. This is a capital short-coming in Rāmachandrapant’s philosophy or statesmanship.
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It is impossible to overlook this fundamental defect in the mentality of Rāmachandrapant as perhaps of other Indians of his age. The same shortcoming is to be observed in the character of still greater and more influential and powerful men among his contemporaries and predecessors, for instance, Akbar the Great, Śivāji the Great and Aurangzeb, men who guided the destinies of the Indian people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In regard to the cultural growth of the world both Hindus and Moslems were equally ignorant and defective in outlook and statesmanship. Both demonstrated the poverty or rather the bankruptcy of their intelligence by remaining blind to the greatest reality of their age, namely, that some of the Western countries had already established their claims to be utilized as the *gurus* of the Hindu and Moslem scholars, artisans, and soldiers. Indian statesmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries must have already felt that in certain branches of material and military life they could not do without the assistance, nay, guidance of the few Westerners who happened to be present in India as travellers or merchants. But none of them appear to have felt that the time had come for them to organize scientific missions to the lands of these men equipped with the new qualifications. The fact that Indian *paṇḍits* and *mollahs* would have to learn at the feet of the European Brahmans and Maulavis beyond the seas in the *chatuṣpāṭhis* and *maktabs* of Europe was not realized by the greatest Hindus and Mussalmans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although they were already conscious on account of daily experience that the men beyond the seas had in certain spheres of life already proven their worth in a significant manner.
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The Mussalmans were as defective and therefore as guilty in this respect as the Hindus. It should not be reasonable to attribute this defect, guilt or sin to Hinduism as a religion or as a system of caste-ridden social groups. The Moslems who observe neither the religious rites of the Hindus nor the *mores* and customs of the Hindu castes do not equally appear to have recognized the utility, nay, the necessity of sending their would-be statesmen and generals to the Western countries for training in the new arts and sciences. The *Meiji* (enlightenment) era that commenced in Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century along with the first objective demonstration of Western superiority ought to have commenced in India in the middle of the seventeenth century, the epoch, say, of Aurangzeb and Śivāji, or perhaps in the middle of the sixteenth century, the age of Akbar and the Vijayanagara Empire.
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Had the recognition of the necessity of studying or stealing the new arts and sciences from the countries of the inventors and discoverers of those arts and sciences dawned upon the Hindu Varāhamihiras and Mussalman Alberunis of the sixteenth, seventeenth or even the eighteenth century India might have had another history in the nineteenth. The "industrial revolution" which commenced changing the face of Europe between, say, 1750 and 1850, might have made its appearance among the Hindus and Mussalmans also almost simultaneously. The political, social and philosophical aspects of this technocratic—*cum*—scientific transformation would then have manifested themselves in the Indian *milieu* nearly during the same decades as in the European. The calamitous chronological distance⁸ that we find between India and the more advanced regions of Eur-America today might not at all appear as a fact of history.
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⁸ For the "equations" of culture-history and the chronological distances in development between races or regions see the present author's *Creative India* (Lahore 1937), pp. 433-438.