The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c15.s1.45

c15.s1.45

The "whole view" of the data of Indian social and cultural dynamics ought to be exhibited. It is to be observed that ideologies, pious wishes and dreams alone do not constitute society and culture. Objective institutions, historical realities and actual events in inter-human relations have a right also to be heard. As for the ideologies, again, it is not enough to handle exclusively the alleged holy texts in the *Sacred Books of the East Series* and exhibit the conventional interpretations of them as popularized by traditional orientalists. In any case, it ought not to be reasonable to pounce upon some of the most mystical-looking pronouncements in these texts as the most characteristic for India and reject, overlook or ignore the thousand and one humane, rational and realistic passages that constitute the core of this literature. The whole view, so far as these ideologies are concerned, would consist in envisaging the literary documents, as has been very often observed in the preceding pages, of entire *chaturvarga* (the four desirables of man), namely, *dharma*, *artha*, *kāma* and *mokṣa*. This would require, further, a thoroughly critical attitude in regard to the dissertations of those scholars who deal exclusively with the ideational documents of Hindu philosophy, in order that the student of scientific social investigations may not fall a victim to whatever anybody in Eur-America or India may choose to call the "Hindu view of life," the *Eigenart des indischen Denkens*, and so forth. As soon as the socio-cultural data are presented in their entirety and comprehensiveness and the correct methodology (as, for instance, that of Sorokin's analytical sociology in the works of 1925-29 referred to above) applied to their elucidation and interpretation, the "new indology" for which the present author has been raising his cry since 1912-14 is bound to appear automatically, and Hindu sensatism would be taken as a first postulate of every philosophical, sociological and culture-historical inquiry.