The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c9.s7.11

c9.s7.11

The propaganda of the Vedic Risis was laid on an extensive scale. The "societal planning" of those sacrificers and colonizers comprised conscious attempts to enrich themselves with the original inhabitants. Efforts to meet them half-way are to be seen in many of the institutions and ideas of Vedic literature from epoch to epoch and region to region. Sociologico-anthropologically the entire mass of Vedic literature may be treated as a huge and age-long series of attempts to Aryanize the Śūdra (and the non-Aryan) and Brāhmanize the Vrātya (or non-Brāhmaṇa Aryan). It is wrong to treat the Vedic texts as documents exclusively of Aryan life and thought, whether in culture or in race. The impact of Non-Aryans, "lower-classes," Śūdras and Vrātyas on Aryans, the attempts of the latter to meet the former half-way, the *rapprochements* of the Aryans and non-Aryans, the culture-contacts, race-fusions, professional "interpendence" and so forth,—all these have gone to the making of Vedic literary stuff. To ignore or overlook these non-Aryan and non-higher elements in the structure of Vedic literature is to misinterpret the urges of life operating on the personality of the men and women in question.