THE MODERN REVIEW
No. 6
No. 174
EAST AND WEST IN GREATER INDIA
By Rabindranath Tagore
(Specially translated for the Modern Review)
Date of Original — 1909-10
The History of India,— of whom is it the History?
This history began with the day when the white-skinned Aryans, overcoming all obstacles, natural as well as human, made their entry into India. Sweeping aside the vast enveloping curtain of forest, which stretched across her from East to West, they brought on the scene sunny fields adorned with corn and fruit, and then toil and skill thus laid the foundation. And yet they could not say that this India was exclusively their India.
The non-Aryans became fused with the Aryans. Even in the first blush of the latter’s victorious supremacy, they used to take to themselves non-Aryan girls in marriage. And in the Buddhist age such intermingling became freer. And then, thereafter, the Brahminic Samaj set to work to repair its barriers and make its encircling walls impregnable, they found some parts of the country come to such a pass that brahmins of sufficiently pure stock could not be found to conduct the vedic ceremonies, and these either had to be imported, or new creations made by investiture with the sacred thread. The white skin, on the colour of which the difference between Brahmin and Sudra had originally been founded, had meanwhile tarnished into brown. The sudras, with their different manners and ideals, gods and rituals, had been taken into the social polity. And a larger Indian, or Hindu, Samaj had been evolved which not only was not one with the Aryan Samaj of the vedic times, but in many respects even antagonistic.
But was India able to draw the line of her history there? Did Providence allow her to make the assertion that the History of India was the history of the Hindus? No! For, while in Hindu India the Rajputs were busy fighting each other in the vanity of a suicidal competition of bravery, the Mussalmans swept in through the breaches created by their dissensions, and scattering themselves all over the country they also made it then own by living and dying on its soil.
If now we try to draw the line here crying “Stop! Enough! Let us make the History of India a history of Hindu and Muslim!” will the Great Architect, who is broadening out the history of humanity in ever-increasing circles, modify his plans simply to gratify our pride?
Whether India is to be yours or mine, whether it is to belong more to the Hindu, or to the Moslem, or whether some other race is to assert a greater supremacy than either,—that is not the problem with which Providence is exercised. It is not as if, at the bar of the judgment seat of the Almighty, different advocates are engaged in pleading the rival causes of Hindu, Moslem or Westerner, and that the party which wins the decree shall finally plant the standard of permanent posses-
