Education in Ancient India c13.s1.19

c13.s1.19

Intellect ceases to be assimilative :—Owing to its excessive reverence for the past, the Hindu intellect ceased to be assimilative from about 800 A. D. Hindu sculptors assimilated Greek methods and enriched Indian art. Early astronomers like Āryabhaṭa and Varāhamihira were keeping themselves in touch with the activities and achievements of the workers in the same field outside India. Varāhamihira (c. 500 A. D.) pays even a handsome compliment to Greek astronomers and observes "The Greeks are no doubt Mlechhas (impure), but they are well grounded in astronomy and are therefore worshipped and honoured like the Ṛishis."¹ A remarkable change for the worse took place in the Hindu attitude towards foreign scholarship within a couple of centuries or so after Varāhamihira's death. Implicit faith in the past and in the correctness of its canonised tradition made the Hindu scholar narrow, bigotted and conceited. Of the Hindu men of letters of the 11th century A. D., Alberuni observes, "They are haughty, foolish, vain, stolid and self-conceited. According to their belief, there is no country on the earth but theirs, no other race of men but theirs, and no created beings beside them that have any knowledge or science whatever. Their haughtiness is such that if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khūrāsān or Persia, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they travelled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not so narrow-minded as the present generation is¹. In proof of the last assertion Alberuni quotes the tribute of Varāhamihira to Greek astronomers, quoted above. Hindus in Alberuni’s time had very good reason to feel a very deep prejudice against Muslim scholarship; Alberuni’s picture may have been to some extent overdrawn. But the contemporary Hindu attitude towards the Śrutis, Smṛitis and Purāṇas and other works of the past, which has been discussed above, would show that Alberuni’s account of the mentality of the contemporary Hindu scholar is substantially true. Hindu education had ceased to remove prejudices, explode superstitions and broaden the mind, so as to keep it capable of receiving instructions from all quarters by the beginning of the 9th century A. D. Hindu colonising activity, necessitating travel abroad, had also come to an end by this time. Some Hindu doctors are no doubt known to have proceeded to Baghdad at the invitation of Khalifa Harun (786 A.D.—808 A.D.) to act as chief physicians in his hospitals²; we however do not know whether public opinion approved of their conduct, whether they returned home and were readmitted to Hindu society. Foreign travel for the purpose of education and the broadening of views became impossible when the sea voyage was prohibited. Whether it was undertaken in earlier days also for these objects is doubtful. There are no books in Sanskrit literature descriptive of geography, manners and climate of the countries adjacent to India. Nor do the Pauranic geographers seem to have been in touch with the traders and colonisers, who were familiar with Babylon, Arabia, Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, Burma and Borneo.