The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s9.10

c7.s9.10

To the student of Indian history the attempt to see a beginning or an end at 916 or for that matter in the tenth century should be as unwarrantable as that at 647 or in the middle of the seventh century. In the first place, disruptions, dynastic partitions, the system of pentarchies, heptarchies or centarchies, *Kleinstaaterei*, *émiettement* etc. ought to be treated as but certain normal phases of societal "metabolism" in the whirligig of politics. For vast continents like Europe, China, or India consolidations, concentrations, unifications or the like ought, inductively speaking, to be appraised more as the exceptions than as the rule. The eagerness to extol unification, imperial expansion, administration, centralization, whenever such phenomena happen to be encountered over extensive areas in India, is scientifically considered, rather senseless. European historians of modern and recent times, used as they are to appreciating unity in their little fatherlands have unscientifically projected the conditions of their petty states into the atmosphere of the Indian subcontinent, expecting or rather demanding unification of unwieldy areas as the test of political aptitudes or cultural efficiency. To those researchers who are not misled by such fallacies Bengal, Gujarat, Orissa, and so forth, nay, even parts of these areas should appear to be no insignificant territorial units. The maintenance of Hindu sovereignty over areas like these is no index to decay, degeneration or downfall. The words, "disruption," *Kleinstaaterei*, or *émiettement* should not be used at all,—or at any rate, in a derogatory sense,—even if India in the same manner as Europe should happen to be the theatre of several dozen independent states, arrayed as they might conceivably be in all sorts of *ententes cordiales*, armed neutralities or other relations known to the Kauṭalyan doctrine of *maṇḍala* ("geopolitical" complex of international relations).³³