What I object to is the artificial arrangement by which foreign
education tends to occupy all the space of our national mind, and thus
kills, or hampers, the great opportunity for the creation of a new
thought-power by a new combination of truths. It is this which makes
me urge that all the elements in our own culture have to be
strengthened, not to resist the Western culture, but truly to accept
and assimilate it; to use it for our sustenance, not as our burden; to
get mastery over this culture, and not to live on its outskirts as the
hewers of texts and drawers of book-learning.
The main river in Indian culture has flowed in four streams,—the
Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, and the Jain. It has its source in
the heights of the Indian consciousness. But a river, belonging to a
country, is not fed by its own waters alone. The Tibetan Brahmaputra
is a tributary to the Indian Ganges. Contributions have similarly
found their way to India's original culture. The Muhammadan, for
example, has repeatedly come into India from outside, laden with his
own stores of knowledge and feeling and his wonderful religious
democracy, bringing freshet after freshet to swell the current. To our
music, our architecture, our pictorial art, our literature, the
Muhammadans have made their permanent and precious contribution. Those
who have studied the lives and writings of our medieval saints, and
all the great religious movements that sprang up in the time of the
Muhammadan rule, know how deep is our debt to this foreign current
that has so intimately mingled with our life.
So, in our centre of Indian learning, we must provide for the
co-ordinate study of all these different cultures,—the Vedic, the
Puranic, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Islamic, the Sikh and the
Zoroastrian. The Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan will also have to be
added; for, in the past, India did not remain isolated within her own
boundaries. Therefore, in order to learn what she was, in her relation
to the whole continent of Asia, these cultures too must be studied.
Side by side with them must finally be placed the Western culture. For
only then shall we be able to assimilate this last contribution to our
common stock. A river flowing within banks is truly our own, and it
can contain its due tributaries; but our relations with a flood can
only prove disastrous.
There are some who are exclusively modern, who believe that the past
is the bankrupt time, leaving no assets for us, but only a legacy of
debts. They refuse to believe that the army which is marching forward
can be fed from the rear. It is well to remind such persons that the
great ages of renaissance in history were those when man suddenly
discovered the seeds of thought in the granary of the past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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