06-18-2004, 04:55 AM
How conveniently he ignores the centralizing forces during the Mauryans and Gupta dynasty.
http://www.ercwilcom.net/indowindow/sad/ar...ld=15&article=7
The Formation of India:
Notes on the History of an Idea
<b>For India was not naturally a country from "times immemorial"; it evolved by cultural and social developments, and closer interaction among its inhabitants, in which geographical configuration helped, but was not necessarily decisive. </b>
In the next thousand years Sanskrit literature becomes rich in allusions to the geographical terrain of India, such as in the listing of the conquests by Samudragupta (c.350) or in Kalidasa's description of the cloud's journey in Meghaduta. The stress on India is underlined further by a curious lacuna in ancient Indian writing: there is so little curiosity about what lies outside the limits of the Indian world. On this Alberuni, the Khwarizmian Scientist was to comment unfavorably in his remarkable book on India (1035). "The Hindus", he said, in an oft-quoted sentence (as translated by Sachau), "be- lieve that there is no country like theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs". He did, however, add that "their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation" and quoted from Varahamihira (c.550) the assertion that "the Greeks, though impure, be honoured, since they were trained in sciences, and therein ex- celled others."
With Akbar (1556-1605), the great Mughal emperor, the perception of India as home to different traditions interacting and adjusting with each other, received a fresh reinforcement, notably under the dual impetus of pan- theism and a revived rationalism. The officially organised translations of Sanskrit works into Persian were followed by a detailed account of the society and culture of India (inclusive of its Muslim component) in Abu'l Fazl's official record of Akbar's empire, the A'in-i Akbari. Akbar's attitude towards this cultural heritage is not, however, one of uncritical sympathy. He could not accept the inequities that he felt were built into the traditions of Hindu- ism and Islam, notably in the treatment of women (child marriage, sati, unequal inheritance) and slaves (especially, slave trade). Moreover, the influence of tradition (taqlid) was too strong, and this he thoroughly disapproved of. He therefore even tried to frame a secular and scientific syllabus for education in both Persian and Sanskrit. Such groping towards a combination of patriotism with reform seems to anticipate strikingly the core of the 19th- century Renaissance that was to spread out from Bengal. Despite the later inevitable meanderings and partial disavowals, the Mughal Empire fostered a Persian and, in the 18th century, an Urdu literature in which the shared culture of India found recurring expression. One may remember that one product of that culture was Ram Mohun Roy, born and brought up in a family of former Nazimate bureaucrats. Ram Mohun Roy's very first book, the Tuhfatuâl Muwahhidin (Gift of Monotheists) (1803-4), in its rejection of image worship and its case for proximity between monotheistic Hindus and Muslims, clearly drew upon a tradition, to which Akbar, Abu'l Fazl and Dara Shukoh had already greatly contributed,
<b>If by now India achieved a transformation where its culture was multi religious or supra-religious, one could indeed consider it as analogous to the transformation of Christendom into Europe in the twilight of feudalism. This was an important prerequisite for the evolution of India into a modern nation.</b> A second pre-requisite was also possibly secured when the centralizing tendencies of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire repeatedly projected the sight of a politically unified India. As Tara Chand put it in his Influence of Islam on Indian Culture (1928), this helped "to create a political uniformity and a sense of larger allegiance". He might have added that the sense of political unity, actual or potential, was evidenced in clear terms by the writing of political histories of India as a country such as those of Nizamuddin Ahmad, in Akbar's reign (1592), followed by Firishta (1607) and Sujan Rai (1695). Written in Persian, they had no predecessors in any language.
Some pre-requisites of nationhood had thus seemingly been achieved by the time that the British conquests began: in 1357, the year of Plassey, India was not only a geographical expression, it was also seen as a cultural entity and a political unit. It is, however, important to realise that, notable as these advances were in the long process of the formation of India, these did not yet make India a nation. Different as various definitions of the term "nation" are, they emphasize that consciousness of identity must be widely spread. Stalin once described the national question essentially as a "peasant question", which implied a mass diffusion of the sense of belonging to one's country, pervasive over other loyalties. Then there was the further condition set by John Stuart Mill of the existence of a feeling widely shared that the country must be governed by those belonging to it. What perception existed of India as a country, a cultural and political unit, until the 19th century was one largely confined to the upper strata, the townsmen, traders, scholars and the like. It did not, moreover, override a series of parochial identities. With his great insight Ram Mohun Roy noted in a letter in 1830 that India could not yet be called a nation, because its people were "divided among castes" From the outside too, Karl Marx in 1853 identified castes as "those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power"
http://www.ercwilcom.net/indowindow/sad/ar...ld=15&article=7
The Formation of India:
Notes on the History of an Idea
<b>For India was not naturally a country from "times immemorial"; it evolved by cultural and social developments, and closer interaction among its inhabitants, in which geographical configuration helped, but was not necessarily decisive. </b>
In the next thousand years Sanskrit literature becomes rich in allusions to the geographical terrain of India, such as in the listing of the conquests by Samudragupta (c.350) or in Kalidasa's description of the cloud's journey in Meghaduta. The stress on India is underlined further by a curious lacuna in ancient Indian writing: there is so little curiosity about what lies outside the limits of the Indian world. On this Alberuni, the Khwarizmian Scientist was to comment unfavorably in his remarkable book on India (1035). "The Hindus", he said, in an oft-quoted sentence (as translated by Sachau), "be- lieve that there is no country like theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs". He did, however, add that "their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation" and quoted from Varahamihira (c.550) the assertion that "the Greeks, though impure, be honoured, since they were trained in sciences, and therein ex- celled others."
With Akbar (1556-1605), the great Mughal emperor, the perception of India as home to different traditions interacting and adjusting with each other, received a fresh reinforcement, notably under the dual impetus of pan- theism and a revived rationalism. The officially organised translations of Sanskrit works into Persian were followed by a detailed account of the society and culture of India (inclusive of its Muslim component) in Abu'l Fazl's official record of Akbar's empire, the A'in-i Akbari. Akbar's attitude towards this cultural heritage is not, however, one of uncritical sympathy. He could not accept the inequities that he felt were built into the traditions of Hindu- ism and Islam, notably in the treatment of women (child marriage, sati, unequal inheritance) and slaves (especially, slave trade). Moreover, the influence of tradition (taqlid) was too strong, and this he thoroughly disapproved of. He therefore even tried to frame a secular and scientific syllabus for education in both Persian and Sanskrit. Such groping towards a combination of patriotism with reform seems to anticipate strikingly the core of the 19th- century Renaissance that was to spread out from Bengal. Despite the later inevitable meanderings and partial disavowals, the Mughal Empire fostered a Persian and, in the 18th century, an Urdu literature in which the shared culture of India found recurring expression. One may remember that one product of that culture was Ram Mohun Roy, born and brought up in a family of former Nazimate bureaucrats. Ram Mohun Roy's very first book, the Tuhfatuâl Muwahhidin (Gift of Monotheists) (1803-4), in its rejection of image worship and its case for proximity between monotheistic Hindus and Muslims, clearly drew upon a tradition, to which Akbar, Abu'l Fazl and Dara Shukoh had already greatly contributed,
<b>If by now India achieved a transformation where its culture was multi religious or supra-religious, one could indeed consider it as analogous to the transformation of Christendom into Europe in the twilight of feudalism. This was an important prerequisite for the evolution of India into a modern nation.</b> A second pre-requisite was also possibly secured when the centralizing tendencies of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire repeatedly projected the sight of a politically unified India. As Tara Chand put it in his Influence of Islam on Indian Culture (1928), this helped "to create a political uniformity and a sense of larger allegiance". He might have added that the sense of political unity, actual or potential, was evidenced in clear terms by the writing of political histories of India as a country such as those of Nizamuddin Ahmad, in Akbar's reign (1592), followed by Firishta (1607) and Sujan Rai (1695). Written in Persian, they had no predecessors in any language.
Some pre-requisites of nationhood had thus seemingly been achieved by the time that the British conquests began: in 1357, the year of Plassey, India was not only a geographical expression, it was also seen as a cultural entity and a political unit. It is, however, important to realise that, notable as these advances were in the long process of the formation of India, these did not yet make India a nation. Different as various definitions of the term "nation" are, they emphasize that consciousness of identity must be widely spread. Stalin once described the national question essentially as a "peasant question", which implied a mass diffusion of the sense of belonging to one's country, pervasive over other loyalties. Then there was the further condition set by John Stuart Mill of the existence of a feeling widely shared that the country must be governed by those belonging to it. What perception existed of India as a country, a cultural and political unit, until the 19th century was one largely confined to the upper strata, the townsmen, traders, scholars and the like. It did not, moreover, override a series of parochial identities. With his great insight Ram Mohun Roy noted in a letter in 1830 that India could not yet be called a nation, because its people were "divided among castes" From the outside too, Karl Marx in 1853 identified castes as "those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power"