Like every other old people, the Indians, living on their vast and diverse land, are certainly influenced by the  variegated past, but a closer look will reveal progressive trends. Some of the past traditions are giving ground to preferable humanistic values. For instance, India no longer recognizes the caste system among the Hindus which divides people into hereditary groups of unequal rights. Untouchability is a penal offence. State policies are based, on the whole, on secularism, which befits the culture of a people of many faiths living together for centuries. So long as intolerance is shunned, the more the merrier. Such has been India’s dominant attitude. This does not mean, however, that there has never been a national question. It is, moreover, one of the social and political problems facing contemporary India. But the trend is more towards a synthesis involving a corrective of its own inherent contradictions yielding perhaps to a new balance. There are certain residual values, some bad habits acceptance of good and bad elements from the West. It is this heterogeneity and the recent fractious behaviour that cause some writers to pose the following question: “Whither India?”

Hinduism

Hinduism, thus formed, is the oldest organized religion in the world.[10] Some writers[11] assert that calling Hinduism, the 3000-year old living faith of 80% of the world’s largest democracy, a religion is a “philological error” and that the term ‘Hindu’ is a corrupt form if Sindhu used for the Indus River with a topographical connotation, in this sense not being a name for a religion as Christianity of Islam is. It is a spiritual fraternity, a view of life accepted essentially as an otherworldly progression with a code of conduct called Dharmashastra and dedicated to four essential ends involving duties, wealth, pleasures and freedom. Although few of the beliefs of the earliest Hindus are accepted in their original forms today, this fourfold order of life later became the basis of Indian culture.[12]

Some writers trace the historical basis of secularism in India to the Vedic times.[13] This evolution was not the same as secularization in the Western world, which indicates the emancipation of various spheres of society, social groups, the individual’s consciousness, human activity and behaviour, social relations and institutions from the influence of religion. The fall in the influence of the church  in Western Europe came particularly clearly to the fore during the Renaissance, the Reformation and the in the years leading up to the bourgeois revolutions. For instance, the French Revolution of !789, not only served to accelerate the transfer of the landed property in the hands of the church, but also helped, to some extent, the principles of freedom of conscience to take root, separated the church and the state, and partially removed education from the jurisdiction of the church. The separation of church and state was implemented by the latter on the basis of non-intervention in internal church affairs, removal of acts concerning civic status from the control of the church, and refusal on the part of the state from obliging citizens to profess a particular religion.

Hindu society, on the other hand, was instituted as “ a loose constellation of values and beliefs articulated in a social order characterized by a distinctive structural identity”.[14] Although the seminal constituents of this religion may be found in a few texts, the intellectual notions are reflected in a wide range of folk cults in different sectors of the social set-up. The unifying compulsion may be observed not in a doctrinal identity, but in that social structure, or a large number of units called jatis. While each of the latter rested upon rules of conduct and all were related to each other through a king of hierarchical organization (varna), the Rig-Veda proclaims that” the Reality is one, the wise call by many names” (Ekam sat, vipra bahudha vadanti). Hinduism is not based on a particular book and has no organized church. It may be asserted therefore that people belonging to this faith have been comparatively free to subscribe to their own way of thinking based on personal experience and reason. The Hindu rulers in the ancient Indian state allowed religious and philosophical schools to profess and propagate their views freely, and also ensured freedom to government employees.

There were revolts against Hinduism, which was dominated, in its earlier phases, by unalterable caste distinctions, animal sacrifice, and other primitive practices. These conventions offended a great many people who sought for reforms, Jainism[15] being the first organized effort to effect a change. It held out the first clear warning against superstition such as attaching sanctifying power to pilgrimages, bathing in sacred rivers or believing in tribal deities. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius would fully agree with the formulation that non-violence, love of truth, purity of thought and deed, and renunciatation of materialistic obsessions would make freedom a reality. With the coming of Buddhism, Jainism gradually lost its hold over eastern India.

Founded by Lord Siddhartha Gautama (c.563-c.483 B.C), son of a rich Hindu raja, Buddhism became a system of morality and philosophy based on the belief that life was too full of suffering to be worth living.[16] During the period of Confucius in China, Jeremiah in Judea, and the pre-Socratic Philosophers in Greece, Prince Gautama was born in India, who was gradually deified as the  Buddha or the “Enlightened One”. He broke away from the rigours of caste which had become characteristics of the India society. When he referred to the pervasiveness of pain, he was perhaps diagnosing angst which the Existentialists of the 1950s would also find to be universal. His affirmation of the authenticity of the earth, of “being-in-the world”,[17] to use a Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) phrase, would not put him in the category of an irredeemable pessimist. “Many those who revile me, afflict me, beat me, cut me in pieces with their swords, or take my life-may they all obtain the joy of complete enlightment”.[18] He established a monastic order, to which he welcomed the lowest castes. Buddha aiming at social equality, his creed first obtained a dominant position in India under the patronage of Emperor Asoka (c. 269-232 B.C), the grandson of Chandragupta. It was the mighty dynasty of the Mauryas that absorbed the Asiatic part of the empire left by Alexander the Great of Macedonia (356-323 B.C.). The first empire in Indian history was established almost immediately after Alexander’s withdrawal. Chandragupta, the founder of the empire, with his minister Kautilya,[19] established international contacts. Asoka, who further unified the greater part of India, adopted Buddha’s humanist gospel.[20] He declared that a truly religious person would have regard for all faiths. Just as Protestant criticism had created a reformed St. Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits, the influence of Jainism and Buddhism stimulated Hinduism towards a process of self-cleansing.

Thus, during the next few centuries, one sees in northern India the formation of an “Indian” people based on the intermixture of the Austric, Mogoloid, Dravidian and Aryan , taking up the language of the last-mentioned as its speech. The modern (new) Indo-Aryan languages may be traced to the same genetic origin. The Aryan languages may be classified into the northern (or Himalayan), north-western, southern, eastern, east-central, and central groups. It includes Iranian, the modern standard from of which came to India with the Turkic and Iranian conquerors after A.D. 1000. The Dardic tongues in the central group embrace three branches, one being Kashmiri. Most scholars consider the Kashmiri language to be basically a Dardi-Aryan dialect influenced by Sanskrit.

After Asoka’s death, the Mauryan Empire gradually broke up, encouraging fresh invasions from the north-west. The foreign Saka (or Sakha, a group of Turkic-speaking peoples from around the region of Lake Baikal in the north)[21] invasion, not only gave India its classical Sanskrit style, but also established the five important principalities of Sindh, Tazila, Maharashtra, Malwa and Mathura. Patronizing astronomy, the Sakes made Ujjain the Greenwich of that age. The Kushans, the Scythians, the Huns and the Jats came down in waves. Buddhism also having suffered a setback after the fall of the Mauryan Empire, it was no longer the predominant religion of the land. The Guptas, the patrons of Hinduism, did not persecute the Buddhists, however.

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