The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s9.t9.5

c14.s9.t9.5

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.