Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.s3.31

c6.s3.31

Although organisationally weak in a military-political sense, in most respects the political and social ideas of India (like its legal and administrative arrangements as well as sciences and technologies) had achieved maturity and balance at some time previous to its present day contacts with the European world. Its social and political structure at this period, though seemingly different from those that obtain in the European world, today, was able to provide of freedom, well-being and social security basically similar to those at present available in much of the European world. It also seems to have had somewhat similar ideas about ruler-ruled relationship, the resolution of disputes, legal punishments, sexual mores, protests against those in authority, etc. But while the whole led to more freedom and equality, these characteristics added to a basically decentralised political and military structure and contributed to this society becoming more prone to external attack.