The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s1.2

c7.s1.2

In a sense the geography of creative India is as wide as Asia itself. It is the result of *l'aptitude colonisatrice, la faculté pour l'homme de sortir de ses frontières pour aller séjourner*, the colonizing aptitude, the capacity of man to move out of his frontiers in order to live abroad, as Emile Lasbax would say.¹ This indeed constitutes the celebrated *Aitareya Brāhmaṇa* (VII, 15) cult of *charaiveti* (march on). The cultural expansion of India outside the Indian frontiers both by land and sea, i.e., the establishment of "Greater India"² was accomplished by two processes of "social metabolism." First, there was the intellectual conquest of non-Indian regions by Indian *vidyās* and *kalās*, arts and sciences, involving the Indianization or Hinduizing of the most diverse races of men from one end of Asia to the other. In the second place, non-Indian races (the Barbars, Greeks, Scythians, Parthians, Yuechis, Huns, Turks, Tartars and others) with or without affinity to the races indigenous to India were during certain periods politically the masters of certain Indian regions and races.³ The political boundaries of Indian states were therefore often to be found in extra-Indian territories (Afghanistan, Central Asia, Tibet). In the first instance, the establishment of Greater India implied nothing but the infiltration of Hindu ideas, ideals, institutions and *mores* among politically sovereign races, tribes or nations. And in the second instance, we have but Indian illustrations of "captive Greece capturing Rome"; for the foreign races, although politically ruling, became more or less assimilated to the Indian modes of life and thought and served but to promote the Greater India movement of the Hindu cultural agencies.