The ancient history of India is full of descriptions of the gigantic energies and their multifarious workings, the boundless spirit, the combination of indomitable action and reaction of the various forces, and, above all, the profound thoughtfulness of a godly race.
If the word history is understood to mean merely narratives of kings and emperors, and pictures of society -- tyrannised over from time to time by the evil passions, haughtiness, avarice, etc., of the rulers of the time, portraying the acts resulting from their good or evil propensities, and how these reacted upon the society of that time -- such a history India perhaps does not possess.
But every line of that mass of the religious literature of India, her ocean of poetry, her philosophies and various scientific works reveal to us -- a thousand times more clearly than the narratives of the life-incidents and genealogies of particular kings and emperors can ever do -- the exact position and every step made in advance by that vast body of men who, even before the dawn of civilisation, impelled by hunger and thirst, lust and greed, etc., attracted by the charm of beauty, endowed with a great and indomitable mental power, and moved by various sentiments, arrived through various ways and means at that stage of eminence.
Although the heaps of those triumphal flags which they gathered in their innumerable victories over nature with which they had been waging war for ages, have, of late, been torn and tattered by the violent winds of adverse circumstances and become worn out through age, yet they still proclaim the glory of Ancient India.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Introductory article in Bengali
written for Udbodhan (Jan 1899)
If the word history is understood to mean merely narratives of kings and emperors, and pictures of society -- tyrannised over from time to time by the evil passions, haughtiness, avarice, etc., of the rulers of the time, portraying the acts resulting from their good or evil propensities, and how these reacted upon the society of that time -- such a history India perhaps does not possess.
But every line of that mass of the religious literature of India, her ocean of poetry, her philosophies and various scientific works reveal to us -- a thousand times more clearly than the narratives of the life-incidents and genealogies of particular kings and emperors can ever do -- the exact position and every step made in advance by that vast body of men who, even before the dawn of civilisation, impelled by hunger and thirst, lust and greed, etc., attracted by the charm of beauty, endowed with a great and indomitable mental power, and moved by various sentiments, arrived through various ways and means at that stage of eminence.
Although the heaps of those triumphal flags which they gathered in their innumerable victories over nature with which they had been waging war for ages, have, of late, been torn and tattered by the violent winds of adverse circumstances and become worn out through age, yet they still proclaim the glory of Ancient India.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Introductory article in Bengali
written for Udbodhan (Jan 1899)
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