There is a book written by Amayury de Reincourt is titled 'THE SOUL OF INDIA'. But any book with pretensions to authentic historical writing on India should not perhaps bear the title The Soul of India.
OUR ATTITUDE in the past may have been ahistorical but the methodology of the study of Indian history is now so well established that intelligent readers will demur in the face of intellectual eclecticism or mystical meandering of the sort that sympathetic westerners loved to indulge in the bygone days. But the above mentioned book has already a companion volume on China entitled THE SOUL of CHINA and what the author had in mind is not any intuitive or mystical apprehension but the quintessential elements in the history and civilization of these two ancient lands.
The approach is somewhat original and the books offer a whole range of perceptions which single it out from the run of the mill stuff of historical writing. To try to condense an entire series of developments of the sub-continent right from pre-history to contemporary times in about 400 pages must be reckoned a tall order but the writer achieves coherence and perspective by collating available g\historical evidence through the connecting threads of philosophy of history which is the common theme of the book on China and the one on India.The approach of the writer is still multi dimensional and his view is in panoramic scale. The book has for main parts, each part being devoted to a distinct chapter on Indian history- covering all stages from the early Vedic to the modern times in a chronological order. Part 1 is a thorough going account of early Vedic civilization, a conceptual framework worked out with a chain of ideas like the lack of historical sense in the Indian tradition, the prevalence of monism, archetypal patterns in mythology and the social and racial problems of Vedic feudalism. It has a chapter on the Upanishads which discusses the decay of Brahmanical culture and the assertion of a spirit analogous to that of the Reformation in Europe.
The theme of decadence of culture and the beginning of civilization forms the most important thread in the author's discussion on the advent of Buddha and Buddhism a whole series of co-related developments like the rise of the Magadhan empire or the hardening of the caste system. Part II and Part III of the book discuss the impact of India's civilization on the other civilizations of Asia and Europe and vice versa the most illuminating aspect being the one of the influence of Indian thought on 19th century Europe. These chapters not only discuss Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the depth of the supposed psychological affinities between the Indian and the German mind but quite significantly, relate the dialectical process of thought to the monistic trends in Hinduism.
Part IV is a summary of the remarkable sequence of events covering colonialism in India, its decline, the national movement under Mahatma Gandhi, the history of independent India right up to the early eighties of the present century. And what does the author want to bring to focus? The kind of philosophic interpretation of history aimed at is clearly outlined in the introduction and in the argument that the lack of a conscious effort to develop a coherent philosophy of history has made most western approaches to Indian history quite inadequate. The philosophy of history developed by the writer does not allow him to see the whole of Indian history as a kind of continuum and to regard the series of outstanding developments or epochal events not as points of intersection but rather as the completion of one historical cycle and the beginning of another.
Buddhism for instance is supposed to bring the creative phase of ancient Indian culture to an end. There, in this view, is juxtaposed the major premise of the author's interpretation of history stating the opposed claims of culture and civilization, the former representing a living whole of concerns, interests and human creativity and latter, a petrification of forms and values, displaying the elaborate mechanics of organization rather than creative excellence. The writer sees the advent of Buddha as terminating the historical process so that instead of seeing in the Buddhist philosophy a radical point of departure, one is led to discover in those events the arrest and culmination of the elan vital of living and its replacement by the mechanics of civilization. One can agree with the writer that caste was the final mechanization of Hindu life and was part of the same process which led to the codification of the numerous Sastras and Samhitas, which made Sanskrit a fixed language around fifth to fourth century B.C. But surely the historical origins of caste may predate the so-called civilization phase and need a closer examination. Further, the establishment of the caste structure was qualified by socio-economic factors which the author's analysis appears to do scant justice.
Similarly, the stated characteristics of the civilization phase like the establishment of the universal state (Magadha for instance), the rise of the middle class or revolt against the aristocracy and loss of the original insight or creativity are not sufficient to explain away the challengingly new direction implicit in the Buddhist philosophy as an ethical or logical system which undermined the Brahmanical culture.
