THE INTERNATIONALISM OF INDIA

Dr. SUNITI KUMAR CHATTERJI

The position of India as a self-contained unit or area in the geography of the world is unique, and it has been generally admitted. It is self-contained by being cut off from contiguous land tracts by mountain walls and deserts encircling it in the north, and by the sea surrounding it in the south. The peninsular part of India is a projection of the north Indian plains which form a detached and a sort of fenced-up part of the mainland of Asia. It occupies the central place in southern Asia, flanked by the lands of Iran and Arabia on the one side and by the continental areas of Burma, Indo-China (Cambodia and Viet-nam) and Malaya and the islands of Indonesia on the other. Equally central is its position in the southern half of the hemisphere embracing the Old World, Eurasia, Africa and Australia and the island region of Oceania. The entire mainland of Asia in all its vastness seems to converge into India, forming a sort of hinterland to India in the north. The ocean which laves the southern shores of India finds its terminus in the land of India, and this southern ocean has been quite fittingly named after India, as the Indian Ocean, forming the centre or apex of the triangular maritime region with the Antarctic area as base and the African and Australo-Indonesian tracts as its two sides.

In addition to her central position in the area of the three continents, Asia, Africa and Oceania, India has been richly endowed with natural resources which have always enabled her to supply the requirements of the people inhabiting the four continents of Asia, Europe and Africa and (latterly), Oceania, in articles of vital importance for their physical and cultural well-being, from time immemorial. Her agricultural and forest products, her minerals, her manufactures like iron and cotton, and her imports from neighbouring lands like spices from Indonesia and silk from China, formed a series of much-needed commodities in the different countries, particularly of the Western world, for alimentation and raiment, for arts and crafts, and for luxury and commerce. It is one of the essential facts of ancient and medieval history that for a long number of centuries the trend of history in the lands of the Near East, of Mediterranean Europe and of Western Europe, hinged on the control of the trade routes to India and of the Indian trade, first by land and then by both land and sea. This international importance or significance of India in world affairs is unique, and this has had its bearing on the history and culture of India also.

The isolation or self-contained character of India as well as her international attirage are thus both tile result of her geographical position. The geographical situation and the natural resources of India apart, the human factor in the history and culture of India has also made the country a focus to which peoples and civilisations have converged, as well as a nidus from which racial and cultural movements have irradiated outside from time immemorial. From most ancient times, diverse races with their languages and cultures came into India, settled down there, and became modified by both the climate and by miscegenation among themselves into a more or less homogenous type, in which culture and mentality have observed original diversity of race and speech. The Indian Man, of mixed origin, produced a composite culture which distinguished itself as one of the main types of civilisation in the world, with its own special character. This became a great force for the uplift of man, for the unfoldment of his intellectual and spiritual being, not only within India but also outside India. Most of the more important racial elements in the Old World contributed to the evolution of the typical Indian Man; and, thus, for this basic genetic reason, Indian humanity has some tie of kinship or other witl1 the humanity in a great part of Asia, Europe and Oceania. In the plane of culture and civilisation, the leaven supplied by Indianism to the peoples round about India, and the service rendered by Indianism to distant peoples, furnish additional and sometimes very strong bonds of unity.

India’s situation, Nature’s gifts to India, and the doings and achievements of Man in India–all these have brought about the most outstanding fact about India, viz., her Internationalism.

In the present paper an attempt will be made to give an outline of the working of the human factor in achieving this International Position of India.

It is rather strange to contemplate that no kind of man evolved from some anthropoid ape on the soil of India – so far as the anthropologists can see with the actual evidence now available. There is no autochthonous race for India. All her human habitants came from outside, some from the East, but mostly from the West, and found in India their karma-bhumi, the sphere of their work and achievement. Different races of men with their different languages and cultures came at different times and became permanent inhabitants of the country. Beginning from eolithic times, as many as seven different races in their nine branches and at least five separate language-groups and connected cultures, came to India.

It is not necessary to go into details of these racial movements, but an indication of the more important groups, and the part they played in the evolution of Indian culture, will be helpful in understanding the origin and spirit of this culture.

The first people to arrive on the Indian scene were a Negroid people from Africa, who came along the coast-lands of Arabia and Iran into India. These Negroids were in the stage of food-gatherers and not food-producers, and were in a most primitive state of culture. On the mainland of India they have become extinct or absorbed among subsequent peoples who followed them, and their language also is lost. Only in the Andamans a few hundred Negroids survive, descendants of a group which managed somehow to arrive in the islands, probably from South Burma, the nearest part of the mainland. The Negroids appear to have contributed very little to Indian civilisation – they did not get a chance to develop themselves for that.

After the Negroids there came from the West, from Syria and Palestine, the Proto-Australoids, who formed a very early branch of the Mediterrnean race. They were of medium height, dark, snub-nosed and long-headed. In India their language was modified into the Proto-Austric speech, which was the source of the Kal or Munda languages of India (like Santali, Mundari, Ho, Korku, Savara, Gadaba), and the Man–Khmer languages of Assam, Burma and Indo-China (Khasi in Assam, Mon or Talaing, Paloung and Wa in Burma and Khmer or Cambodian, Stieng Bahnar, etc., of Indo-China), Nikobarese and the languages of the island areas–Indonesian (Malay, Javanese, etc.). Melanesian and Polynesian. The Proto-Australoid (or Austric, to specify their developed form in India) people spread over the whole of India, and they are found to form the basic element in the population of the country, being prominent everywhere among the lower classes. They were particularly numerous in the great riverine plains of North India. The bases of the agricultural and village culture of India go back to these Austrics, with the cultivation of rice and of certain vegetables, and of cotton, and with weaving and the domestication of certain animals (like the fowl and, possibly also, the elephant). Their mythology and traditions, and their notions regarding man and the world of the Spirit as well as future life, in their modified forms supplied a good many elements in the development of the composite Hindu or Brahmanical religion and philosophy and spiritual thought and culture, which developed in Northern India from 1000 B. C. onwards, through the fusion of the Austrics with the Dravidians, and the Aryans and the Indo-Mongoloids. These Austric-speaking pre-Aryans of India merged in the Indian plains into a new Hindu people, after accepting the language of the Aryan invaders and mixing, in both blood and culture with the Dravidians who came into India possibly after the Austrics. The village life of India goes back to the Austric people. Those Austrics who lived in the hills and jungles of Central and Eastern India, or fled there after the Dravidians and the Aryans came and became masters of the plains have kept some elements of their native culture intact, and have preserved their language also. But, over the greater part of the country they became just one of the component elements in the formation of the Hindu masses, particularly in Northern India.

Dravidian - speakers followed the Proto - Australoids or Austrics. These also came from the West, and they comprised several branches of the same Mediterranean people–a very early off-shoot of which had come into India as Proto-Australoids. The Dravidian-speakers were thus the kinsmen of the pre-Hellenic people of Greece and of Asia Minor, and from their original homeland they brought to India quite an advanced civilisation, which was not a mere village culture like that of the Austrics. The remains of an astonishing city civilisation which has been and is being unearthed in South Punjab and Sind, at places like Harappa and Mohen-jo-Daro, give us a glimpse into a highly-developed culture centering round towns, with regular streets of brick-built houses sometimes more than one storey high, and furnished with baths and underground masonry drains, which go back to times before 2500 B. C. It is believed that a Dravidian-speaking people of East Mediterranean affinities created this civilisation in India. These were a city-dwelling people, who were known as Dasas or Dasyus to the Aryans, when they came into India as invaders after 1500 B. C. from Iran. These Dravidian-speakers were settled in large blocs in the Deccan and South India, and also in Western India. In the South we have solid areas of the great Dravidian languages, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam, unbroken by Aryan enclaves, and only in the Northern Deccan we have Dravidian solidarity shattered by the Aryan speech among the less-advanced Gonds, while in Western India the Aryan speech has made complete conquest, with the exception of a group of Dravidian-speakers still surviving in Baluchistan as the Brahuis. The Dravidians also occupied the Gangetic plains right up to Eastern Bengal, judging from the occurrence of Dravidian words in place-names all through the Ganges Valley, and from the evidence of the strong Dravidian influence in the formation of the modern North Indian Aryan languages like Hindi and Bengali. The Dravidians were a more advanced people in material culture than the Aryans, who were the next group to arrive into India from the West. They had regular cities with real houses (nagara), and they had an architecture and art of their own. Their religious notions and practices are believed to have survived largely in the later form of Hinduism, known as Puranic Hinduism (as opposed to the religion of the Vedic age, which was specifically Aryan, and not so much mixed with or modified by non-Aryan cults and ideologies). The great divinities of later Hinduism like Siva and Uma. Vishnu and Sri, are, in some of their basic or salient characteristics, Dravidian and not Aryan. The Hindu ritual of worship by means of water and the produce of the earth (flowers, leaves, grain, etc.) – the puja, as opposed to the homa or animal sacrifice and burnt offering through the fire – and the characteristic Hindu ideas of yoga mysticism and discipline, also of very likely Dravidian origin. Some of the vital things in the composite Hindu culture of the subsequent post-Aryan periods were contributions, from the Dravidian world.

The next people to come into the Indian scene were the Aryans. They were a branch of the primitive Indo-European people, whose original homeland was in the dry uplands of the Eurasian plain to the south of the Ural mountains, where they had developed and characterised their language and their semi-nomad culture by 3000 B. C. Here they did not advance much in material civilisation. Their greatest contribution was that they were the first to tame the horse and to put him to the service of man. They had also sheep and swine, and the goat and the cow they obtained from the southern peoples like the Semites and the Sumerians. They had a noble language, the expression of the mind of a very gifted people, at once reasonable and practical, and imaginative; and their social life was characterised by some ideas which we would now call advanced and enlightened, particularly in the position they gave to their women in a society which was basically patriarchal. These Indo-Europeans from after 2500 B. C. began to leave their original homeland and migrated in bands to various lands to the West and South. The tribes of the Indo-Europeans who went West mingled with local peoples and became transformed into the Celtic and Italic, Germanic and Balto-Slav and other peoples. In Greece they were transformed into the Hellenes, the composite people which came into existence by 1000 B. C. through a fusion of the original Aegean people of Greece and the incoming Indo-Europeans. Another group, much more mixed with the local peoples and cut off from the mother-stock earlier than the rest, became the Kanisian people, forming the ruling aristocracy over the Hittites of Asia Minor by the beginning of the second millennium B. C. The Aryans (or Indo-Iranians) were another branch of the Indo-Europeans, whom we find gradually establishing themselves in eastern Asia Minor and Northern Mesopotamia from the closing centuries of the third millennium B. C., coming there in small bands as horse-dealers and adventurers, and taking part in local affairs and succeeding in establishing themselves as ruling aristocracies among some of the local peoples. These Aryans, who in their original race, which has been labelled Nordic by anthropologists, were tall and fair, blue-eyed and golden-haired, straight-nosed and long-headed, had absorbed peoples of other races who took up their language by contact with them, notably a short-headed people known to the anthropologists as the Alpines. Those Aryans who remained in Mesopotamia and Asia Minor were inevitably absorbed among the local peoples. But some of their tribes pushed into Iran, then into India, and thus saved their language and separate cultural existence. From Iran they came to India, and, with their arrival and the establishment of their language in India, the distinctive composite culture of India took its start.

The Aryans’ contact with the non-Aryan peoples was at first hostile. But when they permanently settled down, a mutual influencing and fusion were inevitable. The Aryan language spread all over Northern India, from Afghanistan to Bihar by 600 B. C. In Eastern Panjab and Western United Provinces of the present day, from before 1000 B. C., the fusion of peoples, cultures and religions started, and Austric, Dravidian and Aryan combined to create a new people, the Hindu people of ancient India, and a new culture, the old Brahmanical or Hindu culture (with its two new religious offshoots, Buddhism and Jainism). It would appear that leaders in thought and leaders in action among this commingled people, like Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa (of mixed Aryan and non-Aryan origin) and Krishna Vasudeva Varshneya, contemporaries of the Mahabharata heroes (c. X century B. C.), gave a conscious lead in the formation of this composite culture. This new people and culture took up the language of the Aryans, which itself came to be profoundly modified by the Austric and Dravidian speeches; and in all spheres there was a conscious harmonising of the diverse elements supplied by these different races or “language-culture” groups. When this kind of fusion was being fostered, there was no scope for racialism, for nationalistic jingoism and its perpetuation by an over-conscious historical sense or consciousness. That is why we have not had much use for history in ancient India, a history which would preserve memories of old linguistic and cultural conflicts, particularly in the formative period of our culture.

While this fusion of Austric, Dravidian and Aryan was taking place, another racial element came from the North-east, the Indo-Mongoloid, speaking dialects belonging to the Sino-Tibetan family. These people, known to the Aryan-speakers as Kiraatas (the Austrics similarly were known to the Aryans as Nishadas and latter as Bhillas and Kollas, and the Dravidians first as Dasas and Dasyus and later on as Dravidas), were branches of the great “language-culture” group to which belong the Chinese, the Siamese, the Burmese and the Tibetans. They entered India by Assam and Bengal from the East, and by 1000 B. C. they had established themselves as far as the southern slopes of the Himalayas, besides Assam and Bengal. They touched the fringe of Indian civilization, accepting the composite Hindu or Brahmanical (i.e., .the Nishada-Dravida Arya) civilisation, and they influenced it in Nepal, Bihar, Bengal and Assam; but this influence did not penetrate far. It is believed by some that Buddha himself was of mixed Kiraata or Indo-Mongoloid origin, like most of the people of Nepal, North Bihar, North and East Bengal and Assam at the present day.

A composite culture, in which room was found for the ideologies of so many diverse types, such as the culture of India was from its very inception, could not but be tolerant in its attitude. And a great toleration–nay more than that, a reasoned acceptance–of all ideologies, particularly in relation to the world of the Spirit, characterises Indian culture more than anything else. A respect for the other man’s position or point of view is something which comes most naturally to an Indian person. Indian culture embraced a great philosophy and a great art as its plastic expression, besides Indian literature as the manifestation of the Indian mind; and all these had a message for humanity outside also. India passively received aggressors from outside, from whom India took what they had to give, and India was able to absorb most of them. She also actively gave to the outside world of her best–not only in her arts and letters and science, but also in the more abiding and more precious gifted of the Spirit – her own attitude, her social philosophy, her solution for the sorrows of mankind, her realisation of the Ultimate Truth behind life. The ideologies of Brahmanism, Buddhism and Jainism formed the venues through which India served mankind in the past and is serving it even now according to her best light. She gave some elements to the mystic philosophy of Islam (Sufism), and she herself received back this Sufi spiritual culture after it became characterised in the Islamic lands of the West. Whatever Science she had, particularly in Mathematics, in Chemistry, in Medicine, she gave to the West; and she is once again seeking to enrich our human heritage in this domain also.

An Indian person who is conscious of his cultural origins and racial affinities, and is a modern man in spirit and outlook, cannot but feel being a member of the Most International Nation in the world. Thus, with us Indians, our Aryan languages of the present day, Hindi and Bengali, Marathi and Panjabi, and the rest, and particularly our Sanskrit, form our greatest spiritual and intellectual link with Europe and America. Racially we cannot talk of the Indo-European or Aryan “race” as embracing all the peoples of Europe and India, but as speakers of Indo-European languages we have special ties or bonds with the English, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the French, the Italians, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Russians and other Slav peoples, the Letts and Lithuanians, the Albanians, the Greeks and the Armenians. The Austric element in our racial make-up, and our Indian, Austric languages–these connect us closely with the basic peoples of Burma and Siam, of South China and Indo-China, of Malaya and Indonesia, and even with distant Melanesia and Polynesia. The Kiraata or Indo-Mongoloid elements, mixed or pure completely absorbed or still in the process of fusion in Northern India and Eastern India, enable us to claim the Chinese, the Siamese, the Burmese, the Tibetans, and probably even the Ural-Altaic peoples as our cousins, near or distant, if not exactly our very brothers. The basic Dravidian element in our population both in North India and South India reminds us of our uterine connexion with the highly-civilised ancient peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor areas and also with Iran. The powerful Aryan leaven in our culture is stirring a new sense of kinship and fellow-feeling in the minds of the people of Iran and of Afghanistan (or Ariana) as much as it does in that of the cultivated European person who feels he must pay his homage to the speech of the Rigveda as the elder sister of Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Irish, Old Slav, Old Armenian and the rest. Indian Islam, with its twelve centuries of history in India and its long roll of saints and thinkers and its contact with Hindu thought is now something which is our very own and at the same time it is in its basic conceptions and practices a great bond of union with the Islamic world outside, particularly with the Arab world where Islam and the national culture are practically one. Our long connexion with the Turks–one of our greatest Indian rulers and one of the greatest men in history, Akbar, was half-Turki and half-Irani in blood–makes us feel friendly with the Turanian world. Our Buddhism forms an additional common platform between ourselves and Tibet and China, Korea and Japan, Viet-nam and Cambodia, and Siam and Burma, besides Ceylon. Brahmanic and Buddhistic ideas and our Sanskrit as the great culture language of ancient Indonesia and Indo-China, similarly show our historic connexion, through allegiance to a common culture and philosophy and mentality, with both Indonesia and Indo-China.

From the beginning of the XIX century when we first became conscious of our role in history and our service in the past to Man outside India, our leaders have realised this great fact of the Internationalism of India, whether in the past or at the present time or for the future. Rammoban Roy, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Keshab Chandra Sen, Mohendas Karamchand Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore–each has preached it in his own special sphere or spheres whether religion or philosophy or politics or literature or phlianthropy or endeavour to bring God consciousness to mankind. The best minds of India are taking their stand on this pivot – the Internationalism of India, and on the message of India being for all humanity. We have a scholar, philosopher like Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan bringing this message once again to the West. We have ample evidence of a response from the lands of the West, of an admission that India has been voicing, in her own way the desire of the nations for Spiritual Harmony; and, within the Indian State, a sense of realisation of this same spirit of Universality and Internationalism that is the very basis of Indian culture actuates, fortunately for both India and the world at large, the statesman who is now at the helm of the Indian administration and whose great personality we are honouring to-day, Pandit Sri Jawaharlal Nehru.

–Reprinted from Nehru Abhinandan Granth

–A Birthday Book. (1949)

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