The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c15.s2.28

c15.s2.28

There are, no doubt, some floating ideas which are common to almost all these treatises and seem to have been the stock-in-trade of every writer on *nīti* or *artha*. The *verbatim* reproductions or occasional modifications and adaptations of the same texts are not difficult to explain. Uniformity was a fact of societal existence. It was promoted in a variety of ways. In the first place, social mobility, both horizontal and vertical, was the basic reality of Indian as of European interhuman relations. The language of the learned world, again, was the same throughout India. Education was imparted orally, and ideas were transmitted for generations from mouth to mouth. Besides, the incessant political changes of the times also promoted a uniformity of culture. Dynastic revolutions, territorial expansions and contractions, transfers of royal seats from place to place, emergence of new areas into political importance, constant transformations of the "old order yielding place to new"—all these tended to produce a remarkable elasticity and flexibility of the Indian mind. It was ever ready therefore to receive new impressions as created by social metabolism due to *rapprochement* and intercourse among peoples.