Instead, in a series of monthly articles, I propose to try and make out the specificities of Indian civilisation: if the term has any validity at all, there must be something different about it from what would define, say, Chinese or Mesoamerican civilisations. It seemed to me that such a sweeping statement was untenable, but disproving it would take a book-size argument. In fact, I once heard a well-known historian (and a fine scholar - the two not necessarily going together) declare in a conference in Kerala that there was nothing very different about Indian history from, say, European history: the two shared “bloody warfare”, social exploitation, and so on. This produced a number of “textual” definitions, which do have their own value, but fall short when we move to the field of history: how far are the values or concepts spelt out in the texts reflected in actual events and social developments? ![]() Those Orientalists, followed by generations of more rigorous Indologists, did attempt to grasp it, initially mainly by reference to its chief or most ancient texts: the Vedas, the Upanishads, the two Epics or the Puranas, along with the whole Buddhist literature. Soon after European Orientalists, in the eighteenth century, began to study India, they realized they were dealing not with a nation in the European sense of the world, but with something on a bigger scale than even ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt - bigger in historical, geographical and demographic terms, also in terms of sheer cultural and religious diversity that nevertheless built up to one coherent whole: precisely what goes by the name of Indian civilisation. I will not attempt to define the word the general understanding of an advanced stage of human society with a complex state structure, scientific, technological, artistic and other cultural developments, will do for the moment. In this blinkered view nurtured by highly biased curricula and textbooks, there is indeed no room for a “civilisation”. And indeed, caste and gender are the two omnipresent prisms in India studies, whether ancient or modern. ![]() A surprised student raised her hand to ask how India could be understood if not through the prism of caste - a telling but painful admission of abysmal ignorance about her own country. At some point, she stated (as would any historian or archaeologist worth their salt) that there was so much more to understand about India and Indian society than caste. A couple of years ago, I attended in an Indian institute a class given by a visiting European anthropologist, who was also an old India hand.
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