Development of Indian Culture: Veda to Gandhi

- Prof. M. Sivaramakrishna, 
Former Head
Department of English Osmania University

It was perhaps in 1997 that I came across Critique of Hinduism and Other Religions by Tarkteerdha Lakshmana Shastry Joshi. Earlier, I found references in many books, especially the ones by Professor Daya Krishna. I read the book with keen interest: initially, it appeared (to me) a bit tough. But, I persisted in reading it and enjoyed the intellectual rigor, the argumentative acumen and. above all, the openness to “winds blowing from outside”. But at that stage of my acquaintance, I felt a bit restive. The Marxist leaning seemed to me somewhat anomalous with the author’s background of Sanskrit.

But then what amazed me was what I faintly guessed: here is one who blended the sharpness of a traditional shastraskara’s analytical powers, incisive intellect with the dominant streams of contemporary ideologies; Vedic culture, Indian logic, Independence Movement, Western Philosophers, Marxism, Radical Humanism of M.N. Roy. This was a remarkable samanvaya. And of course. receptive as well as creatively resistant to all these was his own innate, unique individuality of perception.
It is therefore, with eager alertness that I had the pleasure of seeing DEVELOPMENT OF INDIAN CULTURE: VEDA TO GANDHI. Thanks to my respected friend Ravela Somayya - himself a voracious reader and connoisseur of things intellectual, of varied colors - I could lay my hands on this magnificent volume. The following are some (random) reflections in the form of a review.

It is, to begin with, the rarest of recent books: it is marked by openness to contemporary thought in various cultures but without getting overawed by them. Joshiji resists the universalizing tendency of the West-without wholly repudiating their specific validity. The present volume has another feature: it represents a landmark in Joshiji’s own “evolution”. He says:

Readers will notice a change in my outlook. ... The influence of the Marxist formula of class war and the theories of historical materialism is quite apparent in the Critique. It recognizes the Marxian diagram of materialistic determinism and the theory that in every historical epoch the prevailing economic system determines the intellectual history of the epoch. I have revised my view in the present essay.
Spelling out the significance of this change he clarifies:

I have brought to the fore the significance of the spiritual forces of man. I have focused on the power of eternal values that have the ability to exercise their supremacy over materialistic tendencies. This essay underscores the principle that in spite of several changes in modes of production, there have survived all along a set of values and principles that have not diminished in their spirit nor have they lost their power to impel people on the right course. Obviously, this is a holistic approach. Something which is marked by an extremely refreshing outlook in several ways. Before I try to identify them, it is necessary to have a look at the overall structure of the book.

It is a very compact map of Indian culture: in six chapters Joshiji gives the reader a comprehensive picture of (a) Cultural Development During the Vedic Times; (b) The Rise of Intuitive Reason in Vedic Thought; (c) The Family and Social Organization of Vedic People; (d) The Cultural Wealth in the Itihasa-Puranas and the Epics; (e) The Triumph of the Buddhist and Jaina Doctrines and, finally (f) Cultural Movements in Modern India. Time-wise, the chapters cover the development from 1500 BC to the modern period.
This is a vast canvas and easily invites comparisons with Basham and other writers. But the uniqueness of Joshiji’s book is reflected in its many features. First and foremost, one notices the semantic accuracy of the frames of reference Joshiji uses for the various aspects of the subject. The basic word culture has, for instance, a complex of connotations ranging from Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, Clifford Geertz to the postmodernists, (which includes anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and of course, biologists). Joshiji steers clear of derivative mediocrity on the one hand and abstruse abstraction on the other. Strictly but flexibly following the Indic logical systems, he neither uses overextension nor under extension in defining key terms.

“Man has developed,” Joshiji says, “his mode of living through individual and collective effort. He refines himself and the external world in order to seek the well-being of himself and his community. Culture thus means refinement of human life and of the external world sought in order to attain perfection and fulfillment in life.” This comprehensive definition is not allowed to remain vague. Joshiji provides accurate connotations of the “concepts” that constitute the definition. Nature, fulfillment, refinement. . . all are exactly “evoked.”

Besides this, the second feature which makes the book free from the run of the mill analyses is that Joshiji does not ignore the paradoxes inherent in histories of cultural development. For instance, one romanticizes or brutalizes certain elements of the past. Joshiji’s attitude towards the past is singularly free from nostalgia or indifference. A signal example is the way in which he identifies “the different kinds of menacing drawbacks” which make Indian culture go “down the slope.” “A dismal lack of will to generate adequate supplies of necessities for livelihood and the lack of drive to create long term economic prosperity for all.” Similarly, there is “lack of a coherent will to fight against alien invasions”; moreover, “the rules of the varna system” strangle the freedom “to work freely in the fields of intellectual or economic activity.” Finally, and above all, “the most important drawback of Indian culture is the pessimistic outlook or indifference towards life in this world; the belief in the variety and nothingness of life in this world.”

This brings me to the third feature of the study which is its freedom from the ambience of postmodernism. To put it somewhat simplistically, the present climate is nourishing an attitude of endless relativism about values that govern culture. The most illuminating discussion in this regard is to be found in Chapter III where in Joshiji explores the trivarga, the three-tiered system of values, dharma, artha and kama (with the addition of moksha later on). “The ethics which does not recognize the needs of sense-organs gives rise to a code of conduct which is at once unrealistic, fictitious and impractical. It furthers falsehood, hypocrisy and results in disappearance of the sense of balance and discrimination. The doctrine of trivarga or Purushartha by comparison proves to be of much greater significance due to its chaste and practical ideology.” Finally what I found to be of great fascination are the chapters on “Itihasa-Puranas” and “The Cultural Movements in Modern India.” For two reasons: they offer convincing correctives to notions of Itihasa-Puranas as at best myths and at worst exotic fabrications of no substantial relevance in studying India’s culture. The new historicism does not take easily to hagiography. In this regard Joshiji’s assessment is singularly free from decontextualized analyses that are so rampant in current scholarship. I found similarly the discussion on language grammar and aesthetics highly illuminating.

In short, this is an enduring perennially significant study which breathes the spirit of samanvaya: a creative, dialectical synthesis. This is almost predictable, and the editor of the formidable Marathi Encyclopedia in 20 volumes has, in this book, given us a virtual encyclopedia of the development of Indian Culture to date. Everything that one wants to know seems to me to be there in the volume.

Solznytsen, the Russian novelist observed: “Dwell on the past you lose one eye; forget the past you lose both eyes.” The venerable author neither dwells on nor forgets: he makes the past come alive in the present and shows the present as inherent in the past-.as a continuing center of vibrant consciousness that Indian culture is. With both eyes luminously focused.