Dr. V.K. Maheshwari, Ph.D

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

To love our neighbour as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.

John Locke

The topic of morality makes many people uncomfortable.  Many people believe morality is a private issue and that no one has a right to make a judgment about someone else’s moral decision. Morality covers the vast arena of human conduct that examines our interaction with other human beings. Morality touches every aspect of our life, every moment of our life.

Morality is nothing but a code of conduct arrived at by mutually consenting persons who consider such code of conduct, such morality, to be in their own best self-interest. All successful societies have based their specific code of conduct, their morality, on the innate human drive to always act in what each individual considers to be in his own best self-interest.

Some evolutionary psychologists have argued that human morality originated from evolutionary processes. An innate tendency to develop a sense of right and wrong helps an individual to survive and reproduce in a species with complex social interactions. Selected behaviors, seen in abstraction as moral codes, are seen to be common to all human cultures, and reflect, in their development, similarities to natural selection and these aspects of morality can be seen in as the basis of some religious doctrine. From this, some also argue that there may be a simple Darwinian explanation for the existence of religion: that, regardless of the truth of religious beliefs, religion tends to encourage behavior beneficial to the species, as a code of morality tends to encourage communality, and communality tends to assist survival.

Morality is the product of the evolutionary development of man and society. Morality is always relative and never absolute. Within the framework of our society, we chose our own, personal code of moral conduct. From a biological perspective, morality is a relative, synthetic concept, solely for the convenience of man, rather than a universal and absolute dictum.

We know this instinctive, automatic interaction with the environment as the survival instinct. This instinct must be present in all living things and is the basic emotion from which all other emotions evolved. Over eons of time, man has enhanced the survival instinct embedded in his genes, by developing complex emotions, such as love, hatred, hunger, despair, fear, joy and many other powerful feelings. Deeply embedded instincts and emotions govern all animal behavior, including human behavior. However, during the past two million years of hominoid development, man has developed a new mental faculty that sets him aside from other animals. This ability superimposes rational, logical thought processes on our primitive emotions.

Our rational mind applies a thin veneer of logical thought processes over the raw emotions that govern our interaction with our environment. Emotions control the preponderance of basic human needs and behavior patterns. Emotions determine when we are hungry, when we feel sexually aroused, when we are afraid, when we feel a sense of well-being.

The arena of morality is one of the primary spheres where human beings utilize their rational mind to manipulate other human beings. We may refer to another person as evil in order to prod him to mend his ways and to modify his behavior to our liking. We may also refer to another person as evil if we wish to prevent other persons from emulating him or associating with him.

Morality does not apply to individual human beings when they are alone. A shipwrecked survivor on an island need not concern himself with morality because it does not apply to him in his isolation. Morality is a societal phenomenon and, since man creates societies, all morality is a concept created by man. It follows, that morality is relative to our environment and does not apply to all persons at all times. Morality can only be relative and subjective; instead of objective, universal and absolute.

A wide variety of morality-systems exists among men, depending on where they live. Eskimos, Europeans, Atheists, Americans, Devil Worshippers, Iranians, Chinese. Brazilians, Indians. All of these societies have voluntarily adopted unique and different morality systems, and all of these systems contradict each other in many aspects.

Part of the function of parentage is the transmission of a moral code. For the child is more animal than human; it has humanity thrust upon it day by day as it receives the moral and mental heritage of the race. Biologically it is badly equipped for civilization, since its instincts provide only for traditional and basic situations, and include impulses more adapted to the jungle than to the town. Every vice was once a virtue, necessary in the struggle for existence; it became a vice only when it survived the conditions that made it indispensable; a vice, therefore, is not an advanced form of  behavior, but usually an atavistic throwback to ancient and superseded ways. It is one purpose of a moral code to adjust the unchanged or slowly changing impulses of human nature to the changing needs and circumstances of social life.

Greed Dishonesty Violence

Greed, acquisitiveness, dishonesty, cruelty and violence were for so many generations useful to animals and men that not all our laws, our education, our morals and our religions can quite stamp them out; some of them, doubtless, have a certain survival value even today. The animal gorges himself because he does not know when he may find food again; this uncertainty is the origin of greed. The Yakuts have been known to eat forty pounds of meat in one day; and similar stories, only less heroic, are told of the Eskimos and the natives of Australia.  Economic security is too recent an achievement of civilization to have eliminated this natural greed; it still appears in the insatiable acquisitiveness whereby the fretful modern man or woman stores up gold, or other goods, that may in emergency be turned into food. Greed for drink is not as widespread as greed for food, for most human aggregations have centred on some water supply. Nevertheless, the drinking of intoxicants is almost universal; not so much because men are greedy as because they are cold and wish to be warmed, or unhappy and wish to forget or simply because the water available to them is not fit to drink.

Dishonesty is not so ancient as greed, for hunger is older than property. The simplest “savages” seem to be the most honest.  ”Their word is sacred,” said Kolben of the Hottentots; they know “nothing of the corruptness and faithless arts of Europe.”  As international communications improved, this naive honesty disappeared; Europe has taught the gentle art to the Hottentots. In general, dishonesty rises with civilization, because under civilization the stakes of diplomacy are larger, there are more things to be stolen, and education makes men clever. When property develops among primitive men, lying and stealing come in its train.

Crimes of violence are as old as greed; the struggle for food, land and mates has in every generation fed the earth with blood, .and has offered a dark background for the fitful light of civilization. Primitive man was cruel because he had to be; life taught him that he must have an arm always ready to strike, and a heart apt for “natural killing.” The blackest page in anthropology is the story of primitive torture, and of the joy that many primitive men and women seem to have taken in the infliction of pain.  Much of this cruelty was associated with war; within the tribe manners were less ferocious, and primitive men treated one another and even their slaves with a quite civilized kindliness.  But since men had to kill vigorously in war, they learned to kill also in time of peace; for to many a primitive mind no argument is settled until one of the disputants is dead. Among many tribes murder, even of another member of the same clan, aroused far less horror than it used to do with us. The Fuegians punished a murderer merely by exiling him until his fellows had forgotten his crime. The Kaffirs considered a murderer unclean, and required that he should blacken his face with charcoal; but after a while, if he washed himself, rinsed his mouth, and dyed himself brown, he was received into society again. The savages of Futuna, like our own, looked upon a murderer as a hero.  In several tribes no woman would marry a man who had not killed someone, in fair fight or foul; hence the practice of head-hunting, which survives in the Philippines today. The Dyak who brought back most heads from such a man-hunt had the choice of all the girls in his village; these were eager for his favors, feeling that through him they might become the mothers of brave and potent men.

Homicide Suicide

Where food is dear life is cheap. Eskimo sons must kill their parents when these have become so old as to be helpless and useless; failure to kill them in such cases would be considered a breach of filial duty.  Even his own life seems cheap to primitive man, for he kills himself with a readiness rivalled only by the Japanese. If an offended person commits suicide, or mutilates himself, the offender must imitate him or become a pariah; so old is hara-kiri. Any reason may suffice for suicide: some Indian women of North America killed themselves because their men had assumed the privilege of scolding them; and a young Trobriand Islander committed suicide because his wife had smoked all his tobacco.

The socialization of the individual

To transmute greed into thrift, violence into argument, murder into litigation, and suicide into philosophy has been part of the task of civilization. It was a great advance when the strong consented to eat the weak by due process of law. No society can survive if it allows its members to behave toward one another in the same way in which it encourages them to behave as a group toward other groups; internal cooperation is the first law of external competition. The struggle for existence is not ended by mutual aid, it is incorporated, or transferred to the group. Other things equal, the ability to compete with rival groups will be proportionate to the ability of the individual members and families to combine with one another. Hence every society inculcates a moral code, and builds up in the heart of the individual, as its secret allies and aides, social dispositions that mitigate the natural war of life; it encourages by calling them virtues those qualities or habits in the individual which redound to the advantage of the group, and discourages contrary qualities by calling them vices. In this way the individual is in some outward measure socialized, and the animal becomes a citizen.

Hospitality Manners Tribal limits of morality

It was hardly more difficult to generate social sentiments in the soul of the “savage” than it is to raise them now in the heart of modern man. The struggle for life encouraged communalism, but the struggle for property intensifies individualism. Primitive man was perhaps readier than con-temporary man to cooperate with his fellows; social solidarity came more easily to him since he had more perils and interests in common with his group, and less possessions to separate him from the rest.  The natural man was violent and greedy; but he was also kindly and generous, ready to share even with strangers, and to make presents to his guests.” Every schoolboy knows that primitive hospitality, in many tribes, went to the extent of offering to the traveller the wife or daughter of the host.” To decline such an offer was a serious offense, not only to the host but to the woman; these are among the perils faced by missionaries. Often the later treatment of the guest was determined by the manner in which he had acquitted himself of these responsibilities.  Uncivilized man appears to have felt proprietary, but not sexual, jealousy; it did not disturb him that his wife had “known” men before marrying him, or now slept with his guest; but as her owner, rather than her lover, he would have been incensed to find her cohabiting with an- other man without his consent. Some African husbands lent their wives to strangers for a consideration.

The rules of courtesy were as complex in most simple peoples as in advanced nations. Each group had formal modes of salutation and farewell. Two individuals, on meeting, rubbed noses, or smelled each other, or gently bit each other; as we have seen, they never kissed. Some crude tribes were more polite than the modern average; the Dyak head-hunters, we are told, were “gentle and peaceful” in their home life, and the Indians of Central America considered the loud talking and brusque behavior of the white man as signs of poor breeding and a primitive culture.

Almost all groups agree in holding other groups to be inferior to them- selves. The American Indians looked upon themselves as the chosen people, specially created by the Great Spirit as an uplifting example for mankind. One Indian tribe called itself “The Only Men”; another called itself “Men of Men”; the Caribs said, “We alone are people.” The Eskimos believed that the Europeans had come to Greenland to learn manners and virtues. Consequently it seldom occurred to primitive man to extend to other tribes the moral restraints which he acknowledged in dealing with his own; he frankly conceived it to be the function of morals to give strength and coherence to his group against other groups. Commandments and taboos applied only to the people of his tribe; with others, except when they were his guests, he might go as far as he dared.

Primitive vs. modern morals Religion and morals

Moral progress in history lies not so much in the improvement of the moral code as in the enlargement of the area within which it is applied. The morals of modern man are not unquestionably superior to those of primitive man, though the two groups of codes may differ considerably in content, practice and profession; but modern morals are, in normal times, extended though with decreasing intensity to a greater number of people than before. As tribes were gathered up into those larger units called states, morality overflowed its tribal bounds; and as communication or a common danger united and assimilated states, morals seeped through frontiers, and some men began to apply their commandments to all Europeans, to all whites, at last to all men. Perhaps there have always been idealists who wished to love all men as their neighbours, and perhaps in every generation they have been futile voices crying in a wilderness of nationalism and war. But probably the number even the relative number of such men has increased. There are no morals in diplomacy, but there are morals in international trade, merely because such trade cannot go on without some degree of restraint, regulation, and confidence. Trade began in piracy; it culminates in morality.

Few societies have been content to rest their moral codes upon so frankly rational a basis as economic and political utility. For the individual is not endowed by nature with any disposition to subordinate his personal interests to those of the group, or to obey irksome regulations for which there are no visible means of enforcement. To provide, so to speak, an invisible watchman, to strengthen the social impulses against the individualistic by powerful hopes and fears, societies have not invented but made use of, religion. The ancient geographer Strabo expressed the most advanced views on this subject nineteen hundred years ago.

For in dealing with a crowd of women, at least, or with any promiscuous mob, a philosopher cannot influence them by reason or exhort them to reverence, piety and faith; nay, there is need of religious fear also, and this cannot be aroused without myths and marvels. For thunderbolt, aegis, trident, torches, snakes, thyrsuslances-arms of the gods are myths, and so is the entire ancient theology. But the founders of states gave their sanction to these things as bugbears wherewith to scare the simple-minded. Now since this is the nature of mythology, and since it has come to have its place in the social and civil scheme of life as well as in the history of actual facts, the ancients clung to their system of education for children and applied it up to the age of maturity; and by means of poetry they believed that they could satisfactorily discipline every period of life. But now, after a long time, the writing of history and the present-day philosophy have come to the front. Philosophy, however, is for the few, whereas poetry is more useful to the people at large.

Morals, then, are soon endowed with religious sanctions, because mystery and super-naturalism lend a weight which can never attach to things empirically known and genetically understood; men are more easily ruled by imagination than by science. But was this moral utility the source or origin of religion?

Morality concerns itself exclusively with interactions among human beings. The human concept of morality has been the subject of controversy and has provided fuel for many heated philosophical discourses during the entire range of human history. Morality provides the rules by which people love each other, fight with each other and interact with each other in every conceivable way. Many people have killed each other, fighting over the alleged superiority of their respective morality, without a clear understanding of what they were fighting for. What is morality? In order to address this question, we must develop a clear insight into the concept of morality.

Morality and laws are definitely not synonymous: A specific act may be moral, valued and lawful in one country, while the identical act may be punishable by death in another country. This disparity in moral values is evident in many conflicts arising from divergent religions. Salman Rushdie discovered this truth when he published the “Satanic Verses”.

A society of persons, in the sociological context, is the conglomeration of individual human beings who have come together for their mutual protection, welfare or communality of interests. All such individuals search for individual happiness in their own way, as is the nature of all individuals.

One person may wish to pursue a tranquil lifestyle; another person may be intent on accumulating wealth. In order to function smoothly, society must apply common denominators, common values that large numbers of people share, in order to achieve order, safety and predictability for all of its members. The emotional and physical well being of a society and its members depends on a common code of conduct, a common morality among all of its members.

It is not necessary for all members of a society to subscribe to the identical morality. However, it is important for all individuals to be aware of any differences in conduct that may exist among various groups. This consensus enables individuals to cope with, not only other individual members of their own society, but also with groups of non-conforming persons beyond their own society.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood. Jonathan Haidt

References

• BRIFFAULT, ROBERT: The Mothers. 3V. New York, 1927.
• don, 1917-24.
• LOWIE,R. H.: Are We Civilized? New York, 1929.
• MULLER-LYER,F.: Evolution of Modern Marriage. New York, 1930.
• RATZEL, F.: History of Mankind. 2v. London, 1896.
• SPENCER, HERBERT: Principles of Sociology. 3V. New York, 1910.
• SUMNER, W. G. and KELLER, A. G.: Science of Society. 3V. New Haven, 1928.
• THOMAS, W.I. : Source Book for Social Origins. Boston, 1909.
• THOMAS, W.I. : Source Book for Social Origins. Boston, 1909.
• WESTERMARCK, E.: Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. 2V. Lon-
• WHITE, E. M.: Woman in World History. Jenkins, London, n.d.
• WILL DURANT: Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster. New York 1954

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Krishna is the most colorful and lovable figure in Indian mythology. Krishna means the one who attracts, one who is like a magnet and one whose presence immediate creates love in thousands of people. Bringing out the significance behind the representation of Krishna in blue, it is a symbol that he is a love god, that he represents love and the depth of the inner soul. Explaining the essence of the most loved, blue, dancing god, Krishna’s flute signifies celebration, love, song and dance.

Krishna is utterly incomparable, he is unique.  Although Krishna happened in the ancient past he actually belongs to the future. Man has yet to grow to that height where he can be a contemporary of Krishna’s. He is still beyond man’s understanding; he continues to puzzle us. Only in some future time will, we be able to comprehend him and appreciate him. Krishna is the most significant person in all of history. It is not that other significant people did not happen in the past – and it would be wrong to say that significant people will not happen in the future; in fact,  numerous remarkable people have walked this earth – but Krishna’s significance is quite different. He is more significant for the future than for the past. The truth is, Krishna was born much ahead of his time. All great persons are born ahead of their time, and all insignificant people are born after their time. It is only mediocre people who are born in their time. All significant people come ahead of their time, but Krishna came too far ahead. Perhaps only in some future period will we be able to understand him; the past could not do so.

By and large, the chief characteristic of a religious person has been that he is sober, serious and sad-looking – like the one vanquished in the battle of life, like a renegade from life. In the long line of such sages it is Krishna alone who comes dancing, singing and laughing. Religions of the past were all life-denying and masochistic, extolling sorrow and suffering as great virtues. Krishna is the most relevant, the most significant person in the context of the future. With the exception of Krishna, all the remarkable people of the world, the salt of the earth like Mahavira, Buddha, and Christ, stood for some other world, for a life in some other world. They set distant things like the attainment of heaven and liberation as goals for man’s life on this earth. In their day, life on this earth was so miserable and painful it was nearly impossible to live. Man’s whole past was so full of want and hardship, of struggle and suffering, that it was hard to accept life happily. Therefore all the religions in the past denied and denounced life on this earth. In the whole galaxy of religious luminaries Krishna is the sole exception who fully accepts the whole of life on this earth. He does not believe in living here for the sake of another world and another life. He believes in living this very life, here on this very earth. Where moksha, the freedom of Buddha and Mahavira, lies somewhere beyond this world and this time , there and then – Krishna’s freedom is here and now.

If you set aside Krishna’s vision of religion, then every religion of the past presented a sad and sorrowful face. A laughing religion, a religion that accepts life in its totality is yet to be born.  Krishna is the sole great man in our whole history who reached the absolute height and depth of religion, and yet he is not at all serious and sad. Albert Schweitzer made a significant remark in criticism of the Indian religion. He said that the religion of this country is life negative. This remark is correct to a large extent, if Krishna is left out. But it is utterly wrong in the context of Krishna. If Schweitzer had tried to understand Krishna he would never have said so. But it was unfortunate that we did not allow Krishna to impudence our life in a broad way. He remains a lonely dancing island in the vast ocean of sorrow and misery that is our life. Or, we can say he is a small oasis of joyous dancing and celebration in the huge desert of sadness and negativity, of suppression and condemnation that we really are.

Philosophy, especially Indian philosophy, in general, is found to start with a note of pessimism. A sense of dissatisfaction at the existing state of affairs can be noted in almost all the systems of Indian philosophy. Indian thinkers were immensely disturbed at the sight of human pain and suffering and the presence of evil that made man’s life miserable on earth. They speculate over these issues and tried to find out the cause of these and, as a result, different philosophies developed. Buddha philosophy exemplifies this feature in the most conspicuous manner. Similarly it is said of Jesus that he never laughed. It was perhaps his sad look and the picture of his physical form on the cross that became the focal point of at traction for people, most of whom are themselves unhappy and miserable. In a deep sense Mahavira and Buddha are against life too. Every religion, up to now, has divided life into two parts, and while they accept one part they deny the other, Krishna alone accepts the whole of life. Acceptance of life in its totality has attained full fruition in Krishna. That is why India held him to be a perfect incarnation of God, while all other incarnations were assessed as imperfect and incomplete. Even Rama is described as an incomplete incarnation of God. But Krishna is the whole of God. And there is a reason for saying so. The reason is that Krishna has accepted and absorbed everything that life is. The religious man denies the body and accepts the soul. And what is worse, he creates a conflict, a dichotomy between the body and spirit. He denies this world, he accepts the other world, and thus creates a state of hostility between the two. Naturally our life is going to be sad and miserable if we deny the body, because all our life’s juice – its health and vitality, its sensitivities and beauty, all its music – has its source in the body. So a religion that denies and denounces the body is bound to be anemic and ill, it has to be lackluster. Such a religion is going to be as pale and lifeless as a dry leaf fallen from a tree. And the people who follow such a religion, who allow themselves to be influenced and conditioned by it, will be as anemic and prone to death as these leaves are. Krishna alone accepts the body in its totality. And he accepts it not in any selected dimension but in all its dimensions. And only a joyful and laughing humanity can accept Krishna. Krishna has a great future.

Religions believing in renunciation will have no relevance in the future. Science will eliminate all those hardships that make for life’s sufferings. Buddha says that life from birth to death is a suffering. Now pain can be banished. In the future, birth will cease to be painful both for the mother and for the child. Life will cease to be painful; disease can be removed. Even a cure for old age can be found, and the span of life considerably lengthened. The life span will be so long that dying will cease to be a problem; instead people will ask, ”Why live this long?” All these things are going to happen in the near future. Then Buddha’s maxim about life being an unending chain of suffering will be hard to understand. And then Krishna’s flute will become significant and his song and dance will become alive. Then life will become a celebration of happiness and joy. Then life will be a blossoming and a beauty. In the midst of this blossoming the image of a naked Mahavira will lose its relevance. In the midst of this celebration the philosophy of renunciation will lose its lustre. In the midst of this festivity that life will be, dancers and musicians will be on centre-stage. In the future world there will be less and less misery and more and more happiness. Now it was difficult to think that a man of religion carried a flute and played it. We could not imagine that a religious man wore a crown of peacock feathers and danced with young women. It was unthinkable that a religious man loved somebody and sang a song. A religious man, of our old concept, was one who had renounced life and fled the world. How could he sing and dance in a miserable world? He could only cry and weep. He could not play a flute; it was impossible to imagine that he danced. It was for this reason that Krishna could not be understood in the past; it was simply impossible to understand him. He looked so irrelevant, so inconsistent and absurd in the context of our whole past. But in the context of times to come, Krishna will be increasingly relevant and meaningful. And soon such a religion will come into being that will sing and dance and be happy. The religions of the past were all life-negative, defeatist, masochistic and escapist. The religion of the future will be life-affirming. It will accept and live the joys that life brings and will laugh and dance and celebrate in sheer gratitude.

The traditional religions taught that suppression is the  only way to God. We were asked to suppress everything – our sex, our anger, our greed, our attachments – and then alone would we find our soul, would we attain to God. This war of man against himself has continued long enough. And in the history of thousands of years of this war, barely a handful of people, whose names can be counted on one’s fingers, can be said to have found God. So in a sense we lost this war, because down the centuries billions of people died without finding their souls, without meeting God. Undoubtedly there must be some basic flaw, some fundamental mistake in the very foundation of these religions. It is as if a gardener has planted hundred thousand trees and out of them only one tree flowers – and yet we accept his scripture on gardening on the plea that at least one tree has blossomed. But we fail to take into consideration that this single tree might have been an exception to the rule, that it might have blossomed not because of the gardener, but in spite of him. The rest of the hundred thousand trees, those that remained stunted and barren, are enough proof the gardener was not worth his salt. If a Buddha, a Mahavira or a Christ attains to God in spite of these fragmentary and conflict-ridden religions, it is no testimony to the success of these religions as such. The success of religion, or let us say the success of the gardener, should be acclaimed only when all hundred thousand trees of his garden, with the exception of one or two, achieve flowering. Then the blame could be laid at the foot of the one tree for its failure to bloom. Then it could be said that this tree remained stunted and barren in spite of the gardener. With Sigmond Freud,  psycho-analysis, a new kind of awareness has dawned on man: that suppression is wrong, that suppression brings with it nothing but self-pity and anguish. If we fights with ourselves we can only ruin and destroy our self. If I make my left hand fight with my right hand, neither is going to win, but in the end the contest will certainly destroy me. While my two hands fight with themselves, I and I alone will be destroyed in the process. That is how, through denial and suppression of his natural instincts and emotions, man became suicidal and killed himself. Krishna alone seems to be relevant to the new awareness, to the new understanding that came to man. It is so because in the whole history of the old humanity Krishna alone is against repression. He accepts life in all its facets, in all its climates and colors. He alone does not choose he accepts life unconditionally. He does not shun love; being a man he does not run away from women. As one who has known and experienced God, he alone does not turn his face from war. He is full of love and compassion, and yet he has the courage to accept and fight a war. His heart is utterly non- violent, yet he plunges into the fire and fury of violence when it becomes unavoidable. He accepts the nectar, and yet he is not afraid of poison. In fact, one who knows the deathless should be free of the fear of death. And of what worth is that nectar which is afraid of death? One who knows the secret of non-violence should cease to fear violence.

But Krishna says that the world is a unity of opposites. Violence and non-violence always go together, hand-in-hand. There was never a time when violence did not happen, nor was there a time when non-violence did not exist. So those who choose only one of the opposites choose a fragment, and they can never be fulfilled. There was never a time when there was only light or when there was only darkness, nor will it ever be so. Those who choose a part and deny another are bound to be in tension, because in spite of denying it, the other part will always continue to be. And the irony is, the part we choose is dependent for its existence on the part we deny. Non-violence is dependent on violence; they are really dependent on each other. Light owes its existence to darkness. Good grows in the soil of what we call bad, and draws its sustenance from it. At the other pole of his existence the saint is ultimately connected with the sinner. All polarities are irrevocably bound up with each other: up with down, heaven with hell, good with bad. They are polarities of one and the same truth. Krishna says, ”Accept both the polarities, because both are there together. Go with them, because they are. Don’t choose!” It can be said that Krishna is the first person to talk of choicelessness. He says, ”Don’t choose at all. Choose and you err, choose and you are off track, choose and you are fragmented. Choice also means denial of the other half of truth, which also is. And it is not in our hands to wipe it away. There is nothing in our hands. What is, is. It was, when we did not exist. It will be when we will be no more.” But the moralistic mind, the mind that has so far been taken for the religious mind, has its difficulty. It lives in conflict; it divides everything into good and bad. A moralist takes great pleasure in condemning evil; then he feels great and good. His interest in goodness is negative; it comes from his condemnation of evil. The saint derives all his pleasure from his condemnation of sinners; otherwise he has no way to please himself. The whole joy of going to heaven depends on the suffering and misery of those who are sent to hell. If those in heaven come to know there is nothing like hell, all their joy will suddenly disappear; they will be as miserable as anything. The whole significance of the cosmos comes from its opposites. And one who observes it wholly will find that what we call bad is the extreme point of good and, similarly, good is the omega point of bad. Krishna is choiceless, he is total, he is integrated, and therefore he is whole and complete. We have not accepted any other incarnation except Krishna’s as whole and complete, and it is not without reason Krishna accepts the duality, the dialectics of life altogether and therefore transcends duality. Transcendence is only possible when you choicelessly accept both parts together, when you accept the whole. That is why Krishna has great significance for the future. And his significance will continue to grow with the passage of time. When the glow and the glamour of all other god men and messiahs has dimmed, when the suppressive religions of the world have been consigned to the wastebasket of history, Krishna’s flame will be heading towards its peak, moving towards the pinnacle of its brilliance. It will be so because, for the first time, man will be able to comprehend him, to understand him and to imbibe him. And it will be so because, for the first time, man will really deserve him and his blessings. It is really arduous to understand Krishna. It is easy to understand that a man should run away from the world if he wants to find peace, but it is really difficult to accept that one can find peace in the thick of the marketplace. It is understandable that a man can attain to purity of mind if he breaks away from his attachments, but it is really difficult to realize that one can remain unattached and innocent in the very midst of relationships and attachments, that one can remain calm and still live at the very center of the cyclone. For the first time in his long history man has attempted a great and bold experiment through Krishna. For the first time, through Krishna, man has tested, and tested fully his own strength and intelligence. It has been tested and found that man can remain, like a lotus in water, untouched and unattached while living in the throes of relationship. It has been discovered that man can hold to his love and compassion even on the battleground, that he can continue to love with his whole being while wielding a sword in his hand. It is this paradox that makes Krishna difficult to understand. Therefore, people who have loved and worshipped him have done so by dividing him into parts, and they have worshipped his different fragments, those of their liking. No one has accepted and worshipped the whole of Krishna, no one has embraced him in his entirety. There is perhaps no one like Krishna, no one who can accept and absorb in himself all the contradictions of life, all the seemingly great contradictions of life. Day and night, summer and winter, peace and war, love and violence, life and death – all walk hand in hand with him. That is why everyone who loves him has chosen a particular aspect of Krishna’s life that appealed to him and quietly dropped the rest After all, we can understand something on our own plane, on our own level. There is no way to understand something on a plane other than ours. So for their adoration of Krishna, different people have chosen different facets of his life. Gandhi found himself in such a dilemma .In fact, he was more in agreement with Arjuna than with Krishna. How can Gandhi accept it when Krishna goads Arjuna into war? He could be rid of Krishna if he was clearly bad, but his badness is not that clear, because Krishna accepts both good and bad. He is good, utterly good, and he is also utterly bad – and paradoxically, he is both together, and simultaneously. His goodness is crystal-clear, but his badness is also there. And it is difficult for Gandhi to accept him as bad.

Under the circumstances there was no other course for Gandhi but to say that the war of Mahabharat was a parable, a myth that it did not happen in reality. He cannot acknowledge the reality of the Mahabharat, because war is violence, war is evil to him. So he calls it an allegorical war between good and evil. Here Gandhi takes shelter behind the same dialectics Krishna emphatically rejects. Krishna says a dialectical division of life is utterly wrong, that life is one and indivisible. And Gandhi depicts the Mahabharat as a mythical war between good and evil where the Pandavas represent good and the Kaurawas represent evil, and Krishna urges Arjuna to fight on behalf of good. Gandhi has to find this way out. He says the whole thing is just allegorical, poetic. There is a gap of five thousand years between Krishna and Gandhi, and so it was easy for Gandhi to describe a five-thousand-year-old event as a myth. But the Jainas did not have this advantage, so they could not escape like Gandhi by calling the whole Mahabharat a metaphor. For them it had really happened. Jaina thinking is as old as the Vedas. Hindus and Jainas share the same antiquity. So the Jainas could not say like Gandhi – who was a Jaina in mind and a Hindu in body – that the war did not really take place or that Krishna did not lead it. They were contemporaries of Krishna, so they could not find any excuse. They sent Krishna straight to hell; they could not do otherwise. They wrote in their scriptures that Krishna has been put in hell for his responsibility for the terrible violence of the Mahabharat. But this is how his contemporaries thought. Krishna’s goodness was so outstanding and vast that even his contemporary Jainas were faced with this difficulty, so they had to invent another story about him. Krishna was a rare and unique man in his own right. It is true he was responsible for a war like the Mahabharat. It is also true he had danced with women, had disrobed them and climbed up a tree with their clothes. Such a good man behaving in such a bad way! So after dumping him into hell they felt disturbed: if such good people as Krishna are hurled into hell then goodness itself will become suspect. So the Jainas said that Krishna would be the first Jaina tirthankara in the next kalpa, in the next cycle of creation. They put him in hell, and at the same time gave him the position of their tirthankara in the coming kalpa. It was a way of balancing their treatment of Krishna, he was so paradoxical. They said that when the current kalpa, one cycle of creation, would end and the next begin, Krishna would be their first tirthankara. This is a compensation Krishna really had nothing to do with. Since they sent him to hell, the Jainas had to compensate. They compensated themselves psychologically. Gandhi has an advantage: he is far removed from Krishna in time, so he settles the question with great ease. He does not have to send Krishna to hell, nor to make him a tirthankara. He solves his problem by calling the Mahabharat a parable.

Gandhi calls the Geeta his mother, and yet he cannot absorb it, because his creed of non-violence conflicts with the grim inevitability of war as seen in the Geeta. This war, represents the inner war between good and evil that goes on inside a man. Poet Surdas sings superb hymns of praise to the Krishna of his childhood, Bal. Krishna. Surdas’ Krishna never grows up, because there is a danger with a grown-up Krishna which Surdas cannot take. There is not much trouble with a boy Krishna flirting with the young women of his village, but it will be too much if a grown-up Krishna does the same. Then it will be difficult to understand him. Those who love the Geeta will simply ignore the Bhagwad, because the Krishna of the Geeta is so different from the Krishna of the Bhagwad Similarly, those who love the Bhagwad will avoid getting involved with the Geeta. While the Krishna of the Geeta stands on a battlefield surrounded by violence and war, the Krishna of the Bhagwad is dancing, singing and celebrating. There is seemingly no meeting-point whatsoever between the two Krishna.

No one had the courage to accept the whole of Krishna. If Surdas sings hymns of praise to Krishna, he keeps himself confined to the time of his childhood. He leaves the rest of his life; he does not have the courage to take him wholly. That is how all the scriptures about Krishna are – fragmentary. As Surdas chooses his childhood, another poet, Keshavadas, opts for a different Krishna, the youthful Krishna. Keshava is not in the least interested in the child Krishna, he is in love with the youthful energy of Krishna, singing and dancing with his village girls. Keshava’s mind is youthful and vigorous and hedonistic he not that he understands Krishna’s dance, he chooses it because he has a sensuous mind, a dancing mind. He eulogizes the Krishna who disrobes young women and climbs up a tree with their clothes. Not that Keshava understands the deeper meaning of Krishna’s pranks, he does so because he derives vicarious pleasure from Krishna disrobing the women of his village. So he too, like Surdas, has chosen a fragment of Krishna, a truncated Krishna. That is why the Geeta talks of a Krishna who is utterly different from the Krishna of the Bhagwad. It is so because of the differing choices and preferences of his devotees and lovers. Krishna himself is choice less and whole, but we are not. And only a man who is himself choiceless and whole can accept and assimilate the whole of Krishna. Those of us who are fragmented and incomplete will first divide him into parts and then choose what we like. And when you choose a part, at the same time you deny the rest of him. But you will say that the remaining Krishna is a myth, an allegory Krishna is like a vast ocean on whose endless shore we have made small pools of water we call our own. But these pools don’t even cover a small fraction of the immensity that is Krishna. You cannot know the ocean from these petty pools. The pools represent Krishna’s lovers and their very limited understanding of him. Don’t take the pools for the ocean. An integrated Krishna, a whole Krishna can be of use to you, not the truncated one you have known so long. Not only Krishna, even an ordinary person is useful only if he is integrated and whole. Dissect him and you have only his dead limbs in your hands; the live man is no more. So those who divided Krishna into fragments did a great disservice to him and to themselves. They have only his dead limbs with them, while his whole live being is missing. The real Krishna is missing. There is only one way to have the whole of Krishna, and that is to understand him choicelessly. And understanding him so will be a blissful journey, because in the process you will be integrated with Krishna.

It seems impossible how a single life could contain so much – all of life. Krishna has assimilated all that is contradictory, utterly contradictory in life. He has absorbed all the contradictions of life. You cannot find a life more inconsistent than Krishna’s. There is a consistency running through the life of Jesus. So is Mahavira’s life consistent. There is a logic, a rhythm, a harmonic system in the life of Buddha. If you can know a part of Buddha you will know all of him. Ramakrishna has said, ”Know one sage and all sages are known.” But this rule does not apply to Krishna. Ramakrishna has said, ”Know a drop of sea water and all the sea is known.’ But you can’t say it about Krishna. The taste of sea water is the same all over – it is salty. But the waters of Krishna’s life are not all salty; at places they can be sugary. And, maybe, a single drop contains more than one flavor. Really, Krishna comprises all the flavors of life. In the same way, Krishna’s life represents all the arts of existence. Krishna is not an artist, because an artist is one who knows only one art, or a few. Krishna is art itself. That completes him from every side and in every way. That is why those who knew him had to take recourse in all kinds of exaggeration to describe him.

We find ourselves in real difficulty, when we come to say something about Krishna. Even exaggeration doesn’t say much about him. We can portray him only in superlatives. And our difficulty is greater when we find the superlative antonyms too, because he is cold and hot together. In fact, water is hot and cold together. The difficulty arises when we impose our interpretation on it: then we separate hot from cold. If we ask water itself whether it is hot or cold, it will simply say, ”To know me you only have to put your hand in me, because it is not a question of whether I am hot or cold, it is really a question of whether you are hot or cold.” If you are warm, the water will seem to be cold, and if you are cold the water will seem to be hot. Its hotness or coldness is relative to you. You can conduct an experiment. Warm one of your hands by exposing it to a fire, and cool your other hand on a piece of ice, and then put both hands together into a bucket of water. What will you find? Where your one hand will say the water is cold, the other will say the contrary. And it will be so difficult for you to decide if the water, the same water, is hot or cold. You come upon the same kind of difficulty when you try to understand Krishna. It depends on you, and not on Krishna, how you see him. If you ask a Radha, who is in deep love with him, she will say something which will be entirely her own vision of Krishna. Maybe she does not call him a complete god, or maybe she does, but whatever she says depends on her, not on Krishna. So it will be a relative judgment. If sometimes Radha comes across Krishna dancing with another woman she will find it hard to accept him as a god. Then Krishna’s water will feel cold to her. Maybe she does not feel any water at all. But when Krishna is dancing with Radha, he dances so totally with her that she feels he is wholly hers. Then she can say that he is God himself. Every Radha, when her lover is wholly with her, feels so in her bones. But the same person can look like a devil if she finds him flirting with another woman. These statements are relative; they cannot be absolute. For Arjuna and the Pandavas, Krishna is all-god, but the Kauravas will vehemently contest this claim. For them Krishna is worse than a devil. He is the person who is responsible for their defeat and destruction.

Krishna’s wholeness lies in the fact that he has no personality of his own, that he is not a person, an individual – he is existence itself. He is just existence; he is just emptiness. You can say he is like a mirror; he just mirrors everything that comes before him. He just mirrors. And when you see yourself mirrored in him, you think Krishna is like you. But the moment you move away from him, he is empty again. And whosoever comes to him, whosoever is reflected in his mirror thinks the same way and says Krishna is like him. For this very reason there are a thousand commentaries on the on him. Every one of the commentators saw himself reflected in him. There are not many commentaries on the Krishna, and there is a reason for this. There are still fewer on the teachings of Jesus, and they are not much different from each other. In fact, a thousand meanings can only be implanted on Krishna, not on Buddha. What Buddha says is definite and unequivocal; his statements are complete, clear cut and logical. There may be some differences in their meaning according to the minds of different commentators, but this difference cannot be great. The dispute over Mahavira was so small It only led to two factions among his followers. The dispute between the Shwetambaras and the Digambaras is confined to petty things like Mahavira lived naked or did not live naked. They don’t quarrel over the teachings of Mahavira, which are very clear. It would be difficult to create differing sects around the Jaina tirthankara. It is strange that it is as difficult to create sects around Krishna as it is around Mahavira. And it is so for very contrary reasons. If people try to create sects around Krishna, the number will run into the tens of thousands, and even then Krishna will remain inexhaustible. Therefore in the place of sects, around Krishna thousands of interpretations arose. In this respect too, Krishna is rare in that sects could not be built around him. Around Christ two to three major factions arose, but none around Krishna. But there are a thousand commentaries on him alone. And it is significant that no two commentaries tally: one commentary can be diametrically opposed to another, so much so they look like enemies. Krishna is not definite, conclusive. He does not have a system, a structure, a form, an outline. Krishna is formless, incorporeal. He is limitless. You cannot define him; he is simply indefinable. In this sense too, Krishna is complete and whole, because only the whole can be formless, indefinable. No interpretations,  interpret Krishna, they only interpret the interpreters. Krishna does not come in their way; everyone is welcome there. He is an empty mirror. You see your image, move away, and the mirror is as empty as ever. It has no fixed image of its own.

The wholeness of Krishna is utterly different. He is not one-dimensional, he is really multidimensional. He enters and pervades every walk of life, every dimension of life. If he is a thief he is a whole thief, and if he is a sage he is a whole sage. When he remembers something he remembers it totally, and when he forgets it he forgets it totally. That is why, when he left Mathura, he left it completely. Now the inhabitants of that place cry and wail for him and say that Krishna is very hard-hearted, which is not true. Or if he is hard-hearted, he is totally so. In fact, one who remembers totally also forgets totally. When a mirror mirrors you it does so fully, and when it is empty it is fully empty. When Krishna’s mirror moves to Dwarka, it now reflects Dwarka as fully as it reflected, Mathura when it was there. He is now totally at Dwarka, where he lives totally, loves totally and even fights totally. Krishna’s wholeness is multidimensional, which is rare indeed. It is arduous to be whole even in one dimension it is not that easy. So it would be wrong to say that to be multidimensional whole is arduous, it is simply impossible. But sometimes even the impossible happens, and when it happens it is a miracle. Krishna’s life is that miracle, an absolute miracle. We can find a comparison for every kind of person, but not for Krishna. it is utterly improbable to find a comparison for Krishna on this planet. As a man he symbolizes the impossible. It is natural that a person who is whole in every dimension will have disadvantages and advantages both.The significance of Krishna lies in his being multi-dimensional. Let us for a moment imagine a flower which from time to time becomes a marigold, a jasmine, a rose, a lotus and a celestial flower too – and every time we go to it we find it an altogether different flower.. Krishna is that imaginary flower: his being has vastness, but it lacks density. His vastness is simply endless, immense. So Krishna’s wholeness represents infinity. He is infinite.

A person who is whole in one dimension is going to be a total stranger in so far as other dimensions are concerned. Where Krishna can even steal skillfully, Mahavira will be a complete failure as a thief. If Mahavira tries his hand at it there is every chance of his landing in a prison. Krishna will succeed even as a thief. Where Krishna will shine on the battlefield as an accomplished warrior, Buddha will cut a sorry figure if he takes his stand there. We cannot imagine Christ playing a flute, but we can easily think of Krishna going to the gallows. Krishna will feel no difficulty on the cross. Intrinsically, he is as capable of facing crucifixion as of playing a flute. But it will be a hard task for Christ if he is handed a flute to play. We cannot think of Christ in the image of Krishna. Christians say Jesus never laughed. Playing a flute will be a far cry for one who never laughed.

Jesus is rebellious, a rebel, a revolutionary, so the cross is his most natural destination. A Jesus can predict he is going to be crucified, If he is not crucified it will look like failure. In his case crucifixion is inevitable. Krishna’s case is very different and difficult. In his case no prediction is possible; he is simply un predictable. Whether he will die on the gallows or amid adulation and worship, nobody can say. Nobody could predict the way he really died. He was lying restfully under a tree; it was really not an occasion for death. Someone, a hunter, saw him from a distance, thought a deer was lying there and hit him with his arrow. His death was so accidental, so out of place; it is rare in its own way. Everybody’s death has an element of predetermination about it; Krishna’s death seems to be totally undetermined. He dies in a manner as if his death has no utility whatsoever. His life was wholly non-utilitarian; so is his death. Krishna’s death does not make for an historical event; it is as ordinary as a flower blooming, withering and dying. Nobody knows when an evening gust of wind comes and hurls the flower to the ground. Krishna’s death is such a non-event. It is so because he is multi-dimensional.

Mahavira, Buddha and Jesus are historical persons, Krishna is not. This does not mean that Krishna did not happen. He very much happened, but he does not belong to any particular time and space, and it is in this sense that he is not historical. He is a mythical and legendary figure. He is an actor, a performer really. He can happen any time. And he is not attached to a character, to an idealized lifestyle. He will not ask for a particular Radha, any Radha will be okay for him. He will not insist on a particular age, a special period of time; any age will suit him. It is not necessary that he only play a flute, any musical instrument of any age will do for him. Krishna is whole in the sense that no matter how much you take away from him, he still remains complete and whole. He can happen over and over again.

In the very process of understanding him, you will begin to be whole and holy. Then you will attain to what is called yoga or unity. For Krishna, yoga has only one meaning; to be united, to be integrated, to be whole. The vision of yoga is total. Yoga means the total. That is why Krishna is called a mahayogi, one who has attained to the highest yoga. Choicelessness is yoga. These talks on an undivided and whole Krishna are going to be difficult for you, because intellect has its own categories, its own ways of thinking in fragments. Intellect has its own ways of measuring men, events and things. These measures are all petty and fragmentary. It does not make much difference whether one’s measure is new or old, modern or medieval, metric or otherwise. It does not make any difference whether the intellect is old or new, ancient or modern, classical or scientific. There is one characteristic common to all intellect: it divides things into good and bad, right and wrong. Intellect always divides and chooses. If you want to understand Krishna drop your judgment altogether, give up dividing and choosing. Only listen and understand without judging, without evaluating anything. Often we will come across the irrational, because Krishna cannot be confined to the rational; he is much more than that. In him, Krishna includes both the rational and the irrational, and goes beyond both. In him, Krishna also includes that which transcends understanding, which is beyond understanding. It is impossible to put Krishna into logical moulds and patterns, because he does not accept your logic, he does not recognize any divisions of life as you are used to doing. He steers clear of every kind of fragmentation without accepting or denying it. Although he touches all the pools of your beliefs and dogmas and superstitions, he himself remains untouched by them he always remains the vast ocean that he is. He is in good and he is in bad too. His peace is limitless, yet he takes his stand on a battle-ground with his favourite weapon, the Sudarshan chakra in his hand. His love is infinite, yet he will not hesitate to kill if it becomes necessary. He is an out and-out sannyasin, yet he does not run away from home and hearth. He loves God tremendously, yet he loves the world in the same measure. Neither can he abandon the world for God nor can he abandon God for the world. He is committed to the whole. He is whole. Krishna has yet to find a devotee who will be totally committed to him. Even Arjuna was not such a complete devotee; otherwise Krishna would not have had to work so hard with him.

It appears that throughout in Geeta Krishna appears to be egoistic .Actually  there are two ways to achieve egolessness. One way is through negation. One goes on negating his ego, negating himself, gradually eliminating himself until a moment comes when nothing remains to be eliminated. But the state of egolessness achieved like this is a negative one, because deep down one is still left with a very subtle form of ego .The other is the way of expansion. The seeker goes on expanding himself, his self, so much that all of existence is included in him. The egolessness that comes through this way is total, so total that nothing remains outside of  him. A seeker who follows the technique of negation attains to the soul, to the atman, which means that the last vestige of his ego remains in the form of ”I am.” Everything of his ego has disappeared, but the pure ”I” remains. Such a seeker will never attain to God, to the supreme. And the seeker who follows the way of expansion, who expands himself to the extent that he embraces the whole, knows God straightaway. He does not have to know the soul.

Krishna can play the flute and he can dance, and with the same ease he can fight his enemy in the battlefield with his chakra, his wheel-like weapon. And there is no contradiction between the two roles. Krishna is one person in so many diverse roles – and that is his grandeur, his glory. And this is the uniqueness of Krishna, his individuality. We call Krishna the complete incarnation of God. He is a complete symbolization of life; he represents life totally. Krishna has transcended the mind; he has gone beyond mind. And he has attained to that integrity of the soul, which is capable of being in every mind, in every kind of mind. The sex energy has found its most natural and beautiful expression in the life of Krishna. He accepted sex without any reservations, without any pretentions. Krishna takes life as festivity, as a play, and fun.  Except man, everything under the sun is a play, a carnival. Except man, the whole cosmos is celebrating. Every moment of it, is celebration. Krishna brings this celebration into the life of man. He says, let man be one with this cosmic celebration.

Krishna’s life is positive, it is not negative. He does not negate anything there is in life, not even the ego. He tells you to enlarge your ego so much that the whole is included in its embrace. And when nothing remains outside you as ”thou” then there is no way to say ”I am.” I can call myself ”I” only so long as there is a ”thou” separate from me. The moment ”thou” disappears ”I” also ceases to be real. So the egoless ”I” has to be vast, infinitely immense, It is in the context of this immensity of the ”I” that the rishi, the seer of the Upanishad exclaimed, ”Aham brahmasmi,” ”I am God, I am the supreme.” It does not mean to say that you are not God, it only means that since there is no ”thou” only ”I” remains. It is I who am passing through the tree as a breeze. It is I who am waving as waves in the ocean. I am the one who is born, and I am also the one who will die. I am the earth, and I am also the sky. There is nothing whatsoever other than me; therefore, there is now no way even for this ”I” to exist. If I am everything and everywhere, who am I going to tell that ”I am”? In relation to what? The whole of Krishna is co-extensive, co-expansive with the immense, the infinite; he is one with the whole. That is why he can say, ”I am the supreme, the Brahman.” There is nothing egoistic about it. It is just a linguistic way of saying it: ”I” is just a word here; there is no l-ness to it.

Krishna is the sole great man in our whole history who reached the absolute height and depth of religion, and yet he is not at all serious and sad, not in tears. By and large, the chief characteristic of a religious person has been that he is somber, serious and sad-looking like one vanquished in the battle of life, like a renegade from life. In the long line of such sages it is Krishna alone who comes dancing, singing and laughing. Religions of the past were all life-denying and masochistic, extolling sorrow and suffering as great virtues. If you set aside Krishna’s vision of religion, then every religion of the past presented a sad and sorrowful face. A laughing religion, a religion that accepts life in its totality is yet to be born. And it is good that the old religions are dead, along with them, that the old God, the God of our old concepts is dead too.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V. (P.G) College, Roorkee, India

The period under review covers the system of education in India during Muslim rule i.e. from about the 10th century A.D. to the middle of the 18th century, i.e. before the British rule.

Medieval period witnessed a radical transformation in the Indian subcontinent. The country was invaded by various foreign rulers and several traders from around the world came and settled in the country. The tradesmen and the invaders brought with them their own cultures and intermingled with the people of the each district of the state. Besides, religion, society and culture, Education in medieval India also experienced a new perspective. Later on when the Muslim rulers established permanent empire in India, they introduced a new system of education. Consequently the ancient system of education was greatly changed. In fact, the education during the Muslim period was much inferior than that of the Hindu period. No Muslim ruler except Akbar did commendable works in the field of education. Education in medieval India flourished mostly during the Mughal rule from the beginning of 1526 until the end of Mughal political presence in 1848

The foremost aim of education during the Muslim period was the extension of knowledge and the propagation of Islam. During this period education was imparted for the propagation of Islamic principles, laws and social conventions. Education was based on religion and its aim was to make persons religious minded. It further aimed as the achievement of material prosperity.

Education in medieval India was shaped with the founding of the institutions of learning. Muslim rulers promoted urban education by bestowing libraries and literary societies. They founded primary schools (maktabs) in which students learned reading, writing, and basic Islamic prayers, and secondary schools (madrasas) to teach advanced language skills In India. Several Madrasahs were set up by Sultans, nobles, and their influential ladies. The main objective of these Madrasahs was to train and educate scholar who would become eligible for the civil service as well as performing duties as judge

Iltutmish was the first to establish a madrasah at Delhi, naming it “Madrasah-e-Muizzi”, after the name of Muizzuddin Muhammad Ghori. Balban, the Chief Minister of Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud, founded “Madrasah Nasiriyya” after the name of his master. Minhajus Siraj, the author of “Tabaqat Nasiri”, was appointed its principal. Gradually many madrasahs came into being. In Muhammad Tughlag’s period there were 1000 madrasahs only in Delhi. Sultan Firoz Shah founded “Madrasah Firoz Shahi” on the southern side of the Hauz Khaz in Delhi. There were many Madrasahs in small and big, rural and urban areas. However, the important scholars were only in the madrasah of important centers.

The grants, which were given to ulama in the form of Madad-e-Ma’ash (financial support) lead to the foundation of many madrasahs. The education was given in Sufi centers also. This trend of education continued during the Khilji Dynasty. Though Alauddin himself was uneducated and it was proved as a threat to the future of his dynasty. However, Delhi continued to project as an important centre of knowledge, scholars and writers. Due to the influence of Hz. Nizamuddin, there was demand for religious and mystic teachers as well.

The minister of Alauddin Khilji, Shamsul Malik patronized the knowledge. During this period there was a tremendous progress in  theology, lexicography and exegetic writing during this period. The study of Greco-Arab medicine was also given special attention. The most important physician of this period was Badruddin Dimashqi and Juwaini.

There is a strong evidence to suggest that in medieval  India, the reputed theologians and scholars who earned name and fame by their scholarly  works were appointed teachers in Madarsas and Maktabs. The celebrated Minhas-i-Siraj  was one such example who was appointed the principal of Nasiriya college founded by Sultan Nasruddin Mahmud. These scholars aggrandized their wealth of knowledge and education through several ways. For instance, it was not uncommon for an ‘allama’ (scholar) or a  ‘muballigh’ (preacher)  who,  whether commissioned by a king or by his own conscience, came to deliver a lecture or a sermon.  Teachers were benefitted greatly  by such  lectures as they added to their already  vast bank of  knowledge.

Then there were ‘Mushairas’ or poetical symposiums which were frequently held and they, in their own way, contributed a good deal to the same cause.

Sultans and Emperors also provided opportunities to these scholars turned teachers to develop their education. Sultan Balban’s son prince Muhammad frequently organized philosophic discourses and  invited his scholar friends to participate  in them. These discourses, as in ancient India, helped greatly the learned men to further enhance their education. S.M Jaffar(1972) has quoted Balban telling his officers : ” Spare no pains to discover men of genius, learning and courage. You must cherish them by kindness and munificence that they may prove the soul of your councils and instruments of your authority. ” Such an environment led to the foundation of  literary societies which, in short time, became a valuable asset to the education. About the court of prince Muhammad, Barni writes, “The court of the young prince was frequented by the most learned, excellent and talented men of the age. ” Gradually, such societies honeycombed  the whole Sultanat of Delhi. Another such society was founded by Muhammad’s brother prince Kurra Bughra Khan, the second son of Balban. The example  set forth   by the Imperial House was followed by the nobility and the middle class muslims, with the result that within a brief spell of time numerous  such societies sprang up  in the Sultanat  of Delhi and  helped the cause of teacher  education so much that  travellers from distant  parts of the  world were  drawn  towards them for the cultivation of high standard of education.

Several books on theological  and secular topics  were written during  this period which also helped in the cause of teacher  education. For instance, on the initiative of  Sultan Sikandar Lodhi,  the learned physicians  of India and outside put their  heads together and compiled ‘Tibb-i-Sikandari’, a book named after the Sultan himself. ‘Waqiyat-i-Mushtaqi’ has the following passage on this book:

” Miyan Budh succeeded  to the late Khwas Khan and was confirmed to the dignity. He got together fine calligraphists  and learned men, and employed them in writing books on every science. He brought books from Khurasan and gave them to learned and good men. Writers were continuously engaged  in this work. He assembled the physicians of Hind and Khurasan,  and collecting books upon the science of medicine, he had a selection made. The book so compiled received the name of Tibb-i-Sikandari , and there is no work of greater  authority in India”.

This book, like several others, served as one of the basic sources of information for not only the experts and practitioners of  the respective fields but also for the teachers    of different subjects.

Libraries also served as a rich source of teacher education. The Imperial Library of Bijapur, a modicum of which still exists in Asari Mahal, had a rich collection of such books which could be highly interesting for the scholars of Arabic and Persian literature.

The rulers helped in the spread of education. They built educational institutions and universities. They endowed them with the funds. Big landlord also provided financial help for the spread of education. The rulers patronized the men of learning. The rules neither claim any authority over the educational institutions nor interfered with their management.

The whole educational system was saturated with the religious ideals which influenced the aim, the contents of study, and even the daily life of the pupils.” The pupils acquired knowledge as a religious obligation. Through education was primarily religion- oriented, it included the study of many intellectual activities like mathematics, astronomy, grammar, polity and politics. Art and literature were also encouraged.

In the Muslim period also the teacher was respected as during the Brahmanic or Budhist period. There was intimate relationship between the teacher and the pupil, although the practice of living with the teacher was not as common with the Muslim as it was in the case of Brahmanic and Budhist period. Teachers took to teaching for love of learning. They were held in high esteem. Learning was prized for its own sake and as a mark of the highest human development and teaching was never handicapped by examination requirements.

The social status of teacher was high and they are men of character, though their emoluments were small they commanded universal respect and confidence. A teacher was never confronted with any serious problem of discipline. Pupils were humble, submissive and obedient owing to the high honour and prestige of teachers in society.

A Muslim teacher‘s conducted, whether in public or in privacy, should correspond to his assertions. If the teacher‘s person does not reflect Islamic character, students may not be expected to be sincere to him in learning from him. This disturbance of relationship between the teacher and the taught may disturb the whole process of education, causing students to feel confused. )   Learned teachers: Teachers took to teaching for love of learning.

In Islamic scheme of education it holds a very crucial position It considers the teacher as guide (murshid), and the student as seeker (Taalib).  Both are to be sincere in their attitude towards each other. The relationship between the two is to be governed by certain Quran principles.

Since the number of students with the teacher was limited, he paid individual attention to each students .Punishments were quit severe. Truants and delinquents were caned on their palms and slapped on their faces. A strange mode of punishment was to make the children hold their ears by taking their hands from under their thighs while sitting on their tiptoes.

Sultan Sikandar Lodhi brought some changes in the system of education. Apart from religious educations, rational educations were also included. Under him the progress of philosophy took place. The students used to copy themselves since the books were rare. Learned men from Arabia, Persia and Central Asia were invited to take charge of education in India.

The tendency that started in the time of Sikandar Lodhi found its culmination in the reign of Akbar. He introduced reforms in the curriculum of primary schools and included the logic, arithmetic, moral, menstruation, geometry, astronomy, agriculture, physiognomy, and public administration, in the course of study. In studying Sanskrit, students ought to learn the Bayakaran, Niyai, Vedanta and Patanjal. Things continued the same way in Mughal period also.  This period had the good  fortune  of having an emperor like Akbar whose benevolent  munificence  helped a great number of scholars and teachers to  earn  renown.

The well known ‘Ibadat-Khana’ (literarily a house of worship but in fact a Debating Hall) at Fatehpur Sikri played a premier part in influencing the scholars and eminent teachers of that time. It was the meeting-place of the intellectuals of various nationailities and the centre of a set of brilliant scholars of the reign. In it the representatives of different schools of thought used to discuss minute points of  their religions. Its importance lay in the fact that it not only propagated unity of all religions, but indirectly served as a strong instrument through which the participating members enhanced their  learning.  Among others, such members included teachers also.

Several books of repute were also written during Akbar’s time which served the purpose of teacher education. Books like ‘Akbar Namah’ and ‘Ain-i-Akbari’ by Abul Fazl, ‘Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh’ by Abdul Qadir Badaoni, ‘Tabqat-i-Akbari’ by Nizam-ud-din Ahmad, ‘Munshial’ of Abul Fateh etc. are some of the most marvellous masterpieces of Persian literature produced in Muslim India during the reign of Akbar. A study of these books must have given rare insights into the world of liteature, political, social, cultural, economic and religious state of contemporary society to all the readers including teachers. Muslim scholars  further enhanced their knowledge by a large number of Sanskrit and Hindi books which were translated into Persian under the imperial patronage. ‘Ramayan’,  ‘Mahabharata’, ‘Atharva Veda’,   ‘Bhagvat Gita’, ‘Singhasana-Battisi’, ‘Rajtarangini’, and many other such books must have helped the teachers and scholars  to educate themselves about the life and times of the past of their country. Provision was also made for vocational, technical and professional education. Emperor Akbar took considerable interest in education as is evident from the passage of from the ‘Ain-in-Akbar’.

According to Krishnalal Ray(1984) the Imperial Library  of Akbar and his successors  flowed  richly  with the books on history, philosophy, science and religion. Any scholar who had access to this library must have had the rare opportunity of broadening his insights.

The system of education was then under the control of ulama who were in favor of Akbar’s curriculum. However, Hakim Fathullah Sirazi and his followers claimed a significant role in this system. Fathullah Sirazi was a philosopher, mathematician and scientist. His system was in later period developed by Mullah Nizamuddin. The curriculum of Mullah was known as “Dars Nizami”. The salient feature of the curriculum is to relate religious education with the Greek philosophy. For the practitioners of medicine, syllabus was different. They began their education with Arabic literature, grammar and philosophy, and then they start study “Canon fi al-Tibb” and “Kitab al-Shifa” of Ibn Sina. For the accountants and secretaries a separate curriculum was prepared at the end of Akbar’s reign.

Another Mugal prince Dara Shukoh had combined in himself the qualities of his two great ancestors Humayun and Akbar. The habit of passing more and more time in the Library to acquire knowledge was inherited by him from Humayun who had lost his life while descending from the stairs of the royal Library, while the interest in comparative religions, universal brotherhood, humanism and peace, came from the great emperor Akbar.

Credit goes to one tutor named Mulla Abdul Latif Saharanpuri, who inculcated in him the habit of reading and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

The prince witnessed change in his life after the initiation in the Qadiri order in 1640 A.D. and his close association with Mian Mir, Mulla Badakhashi and other saints. This was a remarkable phase of his life when he spent his major time in the royal Library busy in intensive studies in mysticism, the philosophy and the principles of the Qadiri order. This resulted in the publication of his major works on Sufism namely, the Safinat-ul-Auliya  (1640 A.D.), the Sakinat-ul-Auliya ( 1643A.D.) the Risala’i Haq Numa  (1647 A.D.), the Tariqat-ul-Haqiqat and the Hasanat-ul-Arifin (1653 A.D.). The first two books are biographical dictionaries of the Sufi saints and the last three contain his exposition of some of the Sufi fundamental doctrines.

Another phase is marked by Dara’s quest for understanding of the Hindu religious systems. For this he spent many years in the study of Sanskrit and employed a large number of Pundits from Banaras. His patronage of the language brought applaud from the contemporary scholars. Prominent among them were Jaganath Mishra, Pandit Kavindracharya and Banwali Das. Jaganath Mishra even wrote a book named Jagatsimha in praise of Dara.In his continuous search for the truth, his meeting with Baba Lal Das Bairagi proved quite enlightening. Dara had compiled a summary of these teachings in Makalama Baba Lal Wa Dara Shukoh, which consists of seven long conversations between the Baba and the Prince held in 1653 A.D. This text focuses particularly on certain similarities in the teachings of Hindu and Muslim mystics.

Similarly, he found some common elements in the Qadiri ashghal and the yogic meditational exercises of the Hindus which made him translate the Yoga Vasistha into Persian in 1650 A.D. he also translated the Bhagwatgita in the same year.Dara’s sustained researches in comparative religions came out in the form of an extremely remarkable book known as Majma-ul Bahrain, or the mingling of the two oceans.

He translated 50 Upanishads from Sanskrit to Persian. The text he prepared, the Sirr-i-Akbar, ‘the Great Secret’ was completed in 1657. He was of the firm opinion that the ‘Great Secret’ of the Upanishads is the monotheistic message, which is identical to that on which the Quran is based.

Education for girls was the exception rather than the rule. Muslim girls of affluent families studied at home Koranic exegesis, prophetic traditions, Islamic law (sharia), and related subjects. Often attached to mosques, Islamic schools were open to the poor but were gender segregated, often only for boys. Muslim girls of affluent families studied at home, if they received any education beyond learning to recite the Koran.

Although there was Pardah system during the Muslim period yet Islam did not oppose the education of women. These two contrary factors influence the education of women in two ways. The girls were entitled to receive education equal to that of the boys up to a definite age but thereafter their education was stopped. However, the girl to higher classes used to continue their studies at home.

One system which continued from ancient period till the medieval times was the ‘Monitorial System’. This system, as in the past, advocated the association of more intelligent and advanced students with their masters in the work of teaching. They were appointed as monitors for the assistance of teachers in conducting the class, maintaining order and giving lessons. They thus helped their teachers a good deal in their work and, in return, received good practical training in the art of teaching.

Islamic Education was devided mainly into two stages,Maktab( primary grade) and Madrasha (higher grade)-

Maktab (Arabic: (other transliterations include  Mekteb,  Mektep, Meqteb, Maqtab), also called kuttab (Arabic: ―school‖), is an Arabic word meaning elementary schools. Though it was primarily used for teaching children in reading, writing, grammar and Islamic subjects(such as Qur’an recitations), other practical and theoretical subjects were also often taught.

In the medieval Islamic world, an  elementary  school was known as a Maktab, which dates back to at least the 10th century. Like Madrasah (which referred to higher education), a Maktab was often attached to a Mosque. In the 10th century, the Sunni Islamicjurist Ibn Hajar al-Haytami discussed Maktab schools.

Primary education was imparted through  the ‘Maktab’ which were attached with mosque or were independent of the mosque ‘Khanquahs’ of the saints also at some places served as centres of education. Several   learned men also taught students at their residences: Almost every village had at least, one ‘Maktab’. There were several ‘Maktabs’ in town and cities. The ‘Maktabs’ were run under the guidance of the learned ‘Maulavis’. They were supposed to be very pious.

Most of the Maktabs were either patronized by rulers or had endowment. They dependent on the charity of the philanthropists

At the age of four years, four months and four days, ‘Maktab’ ceremony or ‘Bismillah’ was performed to indicate the beginning of the child. This was considered as an auspicious moment for initiation or starting education. Good wishes were offered to the child.  ‘Surah-i-Iqra’ a chapter from the holy Quran was recited on this occasion.

In Maktabs children were made to remember the tenets of Quran‘(Koran). Reading, writing and primary arithmetic were imparted to them. Besides they were given the education of Arabic script, Persian language and script. The stories of Prophets and Muslim Fakirs‘were also told to the children. Children were also impacted the knowledge of art of writing and conversation. The system of oral education was mostly prevalent in those days.

The famous Persian Islamic philosopher and teacher, Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the West), wrote that children can learn better if taught in classes instead of individual tuition from private  tutors, and he gave a number of reasons for why this is the case, citing the value of competition and emulationamong pupils as well as the usefulness of group  discussions and debates. Ibn Sina described the curriculum of a Maktab school in some detail, describing the curricula for two stages of education in a Maktab school

Ibn Sina refers to the secondary education stage of Maktab schooling as the period of specialization, when pupils should begin to acquire manual skills, regardless of their social status. He writes that children after the age of 14 should be given a choice to choose and specialize in subjects they have an interest in, whether it was reading, manual skills, literature, preaching, medicine,  geometry, trade and commerce,  craftsmanship, or any other subject or profession they would be interested in pursuing for a future career.

Madrasah literally means “a place where learning and studying are done”. The term ‘Madrasahs’ is derived from Arabic word ‘dars’ (a lecture) and means a place where lecture is given.  In the Arabic language, the word Madrasah simply means the same as  school does in the English language. Madrasah is the Arabic word for any type of educational institution, whether secular or religious (of any religion). From the time of Iltutmish to the reign of Sikandar Lodhi the curriculum of the madrasahs followed a set pattern. According to Barani, the main subjects taught at the Madrasah Firoz Shahi were tafsir, hadith and fiqh. In ma’qulat, Sharhi Shamsiah and Sharhi Shafia were included. Besides these subjects, grammar, literature, logic, mysticism and scholasticism were also taught.

The children were sent to Madarsas after completing the primary education. There were separate teachers for different subjects. The ‘Madrasahs’ imparted secondary and higher education There was difference in principles between the Madrasa and other mosques. When a particular room was set apart in a mosque for the teaching purposes it was called a Madrasah. It functioned as college of higher education where eminent scholars taught different subjects by using the lecture method supplemented by discussions. Management was usually private supported by state grants and endowments. The content of the curriculum was both religious and secular and covered a period from 10 to 12 years. Religious education comprised deep study of the Quran, Islamic law and Sufism. Literature, logic, history, geography, astronomy , astrology, arithmetic, agriculture and medicine were the secular subjects taught in madrasa.

“Read in the  name of thy Lord who createth man from a clot”.(verse I)

“Read, and thy Lord is most bounteous, who teacheth by the pen”.(verse II)

“Teacheth man that which he knew not.” “.(verse III)

-Quran

chapter -Alaq

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

The history of the most of the known civilisations shows that the further back we go into antiquity, the more unsatisfactory is found to be the general position of women. Hindu civilisation is unique in this respect, for here we find a surprising exception to the general rule. The further back we go, the more satisfactory is found to be the position of women in more spheres than one. And the field. of education is most noteworthy among them. Women in ancient India before 200 B.C. were very fortunate because they were treated on a par with men. The Vedic initiation and wearing of the sacred thread was for both girls and boys. Women were eligible to learn and recite the Vedas and other religious texts, just like the men perform sacrifices and yagnas, choose to remain unwed if they wished to pursue studies (in fact the Atharva Veda said that a maiden was not to marry until she had completed her students life) and above all they could choose their partners in life. Many women had attained knowledge in the Brahman, the Supreme Being and were called Brahmavadini. Similarly there were the Mantranids who specialized in the Mantras and Vedas (such as Kausalya, mother of Rama and many others like Atreyi) and the Panditas who were scholars (such as Draupadi, the wife of the Pandavas brothers in the Mahabharata). Theology, religion, philosophy and teaching were some of the favourite subjects of study for women. Some Vedic hymns are supposed to have been written by women. According to Panini, the famous Sanskrit grammarian of later times, there were boarding houses in the Vedic times, for women students. There were poetesses too in that period showing how conducive the ambience for learning and being creative was, for women. All this was in the period prior to 200 BC.

We can however understand this strange phenomenon when we remember that for a long time education in ancient India meant Vedic education, and that it had to be necessarily imparted to all who were expected to take part in Vedic sacrifices, irrespective of their sex.

Women eligible for Vedic Sacrifices : There is ample and convincing evidence to show that women were regarded as perfectly eligible for the privilege of studying the Vedic literature and performing the sacrifices enjoined in it down to about 200 B. C. This need not surprise us, for some of the hymns of the Rigveda are the compositions of poetesses. Even the orthodox tradition admits that the Rigvedic collection contains hymns composed by twenty different poetesses. Visv x avara, Sikata Nivavarl, Ghosha, Romasa, Lopamudra, Apala and UrvasI are the names of some of them. Man could perform the Vedic sacrifices only if he had his wife by his side;both had to undergo a special initiation  on the occasion and take equally active part in its procedure.  Down to the end of the Mauryan period, the housewife was expected to offer oblations in the household  fire unaided by the husband, normally in the evening and sometimes in the morning also. In the srattararohana ritual of the Agrahayaga ceremony, the wife used to recite a number of Vedic hymns 5 and the harvest sacrifices could be performed by women alone, ‘because such was the long standing custom’.  From the Ramayana we learn that Kausalya was by herself alone performing a sacrifice on the morning of her son’s proposed installation as an heir-apparent . The same was the case with Tara when her husband Bali was about to leave the palace to meet Sugriva in the fateful encounter.  It is interesting to note that both these ladies are expressly described by the epic as mantravid, i.e. well grounded in the Vedic literature. We need not then wonder if we find Sita also offering her Vedic prayer during the days of her captivity in Lanka.  Kunti, the mother of Pandavas, was well- versed in the Mantras of the Atharvaveda .

No one can recite Vedic prayers or offer Vedic sacrifices without having under- gone the Vedic initiation (Upanayana). It is, therefore, but natural that in the early period the Upanayana of girls should have been as common as that of boys. There is ample evidence to show that such was the case. The Atharvaveda  expressly refers to maidens undergoing the Brahmanharya discipline 8 and the Sutra works of the 5th century B. C. supply interesting details in its connection. Even Manu includes Upanayana among the sanskaras (rituals) obligatory for girls (II. 66). After about the beginning of the Christian era, girls  Upanayana went out of vogue, but Smriti writers of even the 8th century A. D. like Yama admit its prevalence in the earlier age.

There were no child marriages in the Vedic period ; as a rule however girls could not remain unmarried as long as boys as they had to be younger than their spouses. Majority of them used to get married at the age of 16 or 17, and only a few would prosecute their studies after that age. Girls of the former class were called Sadyovadhu and of the latter class Brahmvadinl. The education of the Sadyovadhus comprised the study of important Vedic hymns necessary for usual prayers and sacrifices. Music and dancing were also taught to them ; partiality of women to these arts is often referred to in the Vedic literature.  Brahmavadinls used to marry after their education was over ; some of them like Vedavati, a daughter of sage Kusadhvaja, would not marry at all .

The attainments of lady scholars, who remained unmarried for a longer time, were naturally wider and more varied. In the Vedic age, they used to acquire thorough mastery in the Vedic literature and even compose poems, some of which have been honoured by their inclusion in the sacred , canon. When the Vedic lore and sacrifices became complex, a new branch of study, called Mimansa, came to be developed in their connection. Though this was a subject, drier than mathematics, we find lady scholars taking keen interest in it. Kasakritsnin had composed a work on Mimansa called Kasakritsni after him ; lady students who used to specialise in it, were known as Kasakritsna. If lady specialists in a technical science like Mimansa were so numerous as to necessitate the coining of a new special term to denote them, we can reasonably conclude that the number of women who used to receive general literary and cultural education must have been fairly large. When in the course of time the study of philosophy became popular in the Upanishadic age, women began to take keen interest in that subject also, Such was the case with Yajnavalkya’s wife Maitrey ; she was more interested in studying deeper problems of philosophy than in wearing costly jewels and apparels.  In the philosophical tournament held during the sacrificial session performed under the auspices of king Janaka, it is interesting to note that the subtlest philosophical question was asked by the lady philosopher GargI Vachaknavi.  The question was so subtle and esoteric in character that Yajnavalkya refused to discuss it in public. The keen reasoning and subtle cross examination of Yajnavalkya by GargI shows that she was a dialectician and philosopher of a high order. Atrey of the Uttara-Rama-charit was another lady, who was studying Vedanta under Valmiki and Agastya.  Some lady scholars of the age like Sulabha, Vadava, Prathitey, Maitrey, and Gargi seem to have made real contribution to the advancement of knowledge, for they enjoy the rare privilege of being included among the galaxy of distinguished scholars, to whom a daily tribute of gratitude was to be given by a grateful posterity at the time of the daily prayer .

The eventual permission, which the Buddha accorded to the admission of women to his Church, gave an impetus to the spread of education and philosophy among the ladies of the aristocratic and commercial communities. Like Brahmavadinis, several ladies in Buddhist families also used to lead a life of celibacy, with the aim of understanding and following the eternal truths of religion and philosophy. Some of them even went outside India to countries like Ceylon and became famous there as teachers of the holy scriptures. Among the authoresses of the Theri-gatha who were believed to have attained salvation, 32 were unmarried women and 18 married ones. Amongst the former, Subha, Anopama and Sumedha belonged to very rich families, and are said to have been wooed by princes and rich merchants . When so large a percentage of girls was leading a life of celibacy in pursuit of religion and philosophy, it is but natural that the general average of intelligence and education among them must have been fairly high.

As far as  the agencies for imparting female education during this period are concerned. We have already seen that for a long time family was the only educational institution, and even boys used to receive education only from their fathers, uncles or other elders. The same naturally was the case with girls. When however later Smritis like Yama  lay down that none but near relations should teach girl students, they are probably referring to a state of affairs current by about the beginning of the Christian era; for there is evidence to show that such was not the case in the earlier period. When a large number of women were receiving higher education and were making their own contributions to the march of knowledge, it is but natural to suppose that some of them must have followed the profession of teaching. And the presence of the terms Upadhyaya and Upadhyayanl in Sanskrit language supports this conjecture. The latter of these words is a courtesy title given to the wife of a teacher, who may or may not be educated. The former, however, denotes a lady, who was herself a teacher. That a special term should have been coined to denote lady teachers in order to distinguish them from wives of teachers would show that their number in society could not have been small. We must note in this connection that there was no Purdah custom in Hindu society down to the 12th century, and so there was no difficulty for women in taking to the teaching profession. Lady teachers may probably have confined themselves to the teaching of girl students, though some may have taught boys also. Panini refers to boarding houses for lady -students, chhatrisalas , and these probably were under the superintendence of Upadhyayas or lady teachers, who had made teaching their profession. Unfortunately we have no clear and sufficient evidence about the activities of lady teachers and the management of girls’ boardings.

The modern reader would be anxious to know whether co-education prevailed in the past. Our sources however throw but dim light on the subject* From the Malatimadhava of Bhavabhuti, written in the 8th century A. D., we learn that the nun Kamandaki was educated along with Bhurivasu and Devarata at a famous centre of education.  This would show that if not in Bhava- bhuti’s time, at least some centuries earlier, sometimes boys and girls were educated together while receiving liigher education. In the Utiara- Rama-charit also (of the same author) we find Atrey receiving her education along with Kusa and Lava (Act II). The stories of Kahoda and Sujata and Ruru and Pramadvara, narrated in Puranas, would also point to co-education. They would further show that at a time when girls were being married at an advanced age and receiving co-education, sometimes love- marriages used to take place as a consequence of it.

When however there were competent lady teachers, parents may have preferred to send their daughters to read under them; but when they were not available, they may have sent their wards to read under male teachers, and necessarily along with male students. In an age, which looked upon love marriages as nothing abnormal, co-education need not have frightened the parents. What percentage of girls received co-education is a question which we cannot answer in the present state of our knowledge. It could not however have been very large.

It is not easy to determine the extent of female education during this period. Vedic literature has preserved rituals to be performed by parents anxious for the birth of scholarly daughters; it would therefore follow that many parents must have been anxious that their daughters should become cultured and accomplished ladies. Education of girls could not have been neglected by the ordinary well-to-do father. Upanayana ritual was also obligatory for girls, and this must have ensured the imparting of a certain amount of Vedic and literary education to the girls of all the Aryan classes. We may therefore presume that as long as Upanayana ritual was performed in the case of girls, and the custom of child marriage had not taken root in society, girls of well-to-do families must be receiving fairly good education. Such continued to be the case down to c. 500 B. C.

By about 500 B. C. it had already become a mere formality, not followed by any serious course of Vedic education.  Female education received a great setback during this period primarily owing to the deterioration of the religious status of women. During the earlier period, Upanayana ceremony was as much obligatory for girls as it was for boys. We have already seen how this ensured a certain amount of higher education to every Aryan girl During the period we are reviewing,  Upanayana began to be gradually prohibited to girls.

The Manusmriti, which was composed at about 200 B. C., goes a step further and declares that girls’ Upanayana should be performed without the recitation of Vedic Mantras.  But immediately if the next verse it is stated that it is really the marriage ritual of girls which corresponds to the Upanayana ritual of boys . It is therefore clear that Upanayana of girls, even as a mere formality, was dying down by the beginning of the Christian era. Yajnavalkya (200 A. D.) therefore takes the logical step of prohibiting Upanayana altogether in the case of girls , and all later Smriti-writers follow his lead, though some of them like Yama admit that once upon a time girls used to have the privilege of Upanayana and Vedic studies. The discontinuance of Upanayana was disastrous to the religious status of women ; they were declared to be of the same status as that of the Shudras  and unfit to recite Vedic Mantras and perfom Vedic sacrifices. The wife’s association with the husband in the family sacrifices became a formal matter and there were some theologians like Aitisayana who were opposed even to this formal participation.

The causes of the prohibition of the Vedic education to women during this later period have nowhere been specifically stated; they can only be inferred. When Vedic literature came to be regarded as revealed, it was insisted that it should be very meticulously and accurately committed to memory. The Vedic course also became a lengthy one, requiring a long period of study, and could not be finished till about the age of 24. The marriages of girls, as a rule, were never postponed to this advanced age even during the Vedic period. Usually they took place at about the age of 16 or 17. Girls in well-to-do families therefore could get only about six or seven years for their Vedic studies ; they could not therefore carry them out with that exactitude and thoroughness which was insisted upon by the age. In poor families, the exigencies of the household work must have resulted in only very little time being available for Vedic studies after the Upanayana. Girls in such families were often unable to recite even the formulae in the marriage ritual prescribed for the bride ; they had to be recited by the priest or the bridegroom. Dilettante Vedic studies were regarded as not only useless, but also dangerous ; even the slightest mistake in the recitation of the Vedic hymns was regarded as very disastrous in its consequences. It was therefore probably felt that since women could not study the Vedic literature ip the proper manner, its study should be prohibited to them in order to avert spiritual disasters to the family arising out of the mistakes of amateurish Vedic girls- students. Spoken dialect had by this time become completely differentiated from the Vedic speech; women were unable to speak even ordinary Sanskrit and used to express themselves in Prakrits or vernaculars. They must have experienced greater difficulties in correctly pronouncing the Vedic hymns than men, who could speak classical Sanskrit correctly.

Leaders of society therefore felt that correct transmission of the Vedic literature necessitated the prohibition of its study to women. Their Upanayana was therefore also discontinued.

The mischief caused by the discontinuance of Upanayan was further enhanced by the lowering of the marriage-able age. In the Vedic period girls were married at about the age of 16 or 17 ; but by c. 500 B. C. the custom arose of marrying them soon after the attainment of puberty. Dharmasastra works of the period however permit the postponement of a girl’s marriage to the age of 16 or 17 in case a suitable match could not be arranged.  Manu, though in favour of a marriage at 12 in normal circumstances, was prepared to contemplate the possibility of a girl remaining unmarried to the end of her life, if no suitable bridegroom could be found.  Later writers, however, of this period like Yajniavalkya,  Samvarta and Yama,  most vehemently condemn the guardian Who fails to marry a girl before the attainment of the puberty. This condemnation had the natural effect ; from Alberuni we learn that in the 11th century Hindus used to marry at an early age, and that a Brahmana was never allowed to marry a girl above the age of 12.  Many marriages must have taken place much earlier, for the Smritis written at the end of this period begin to glorify the merits of a girl’s marriage at the age of 7, 8, or 9. When it was regarded as an ideal thing to celebrate a girl’s marriage at so young an age, female education could hardly prosper.

Between 200BC and 1200AD the damage in women’s position and therefore to their chances for getting educated, was becoming more and more evident, because the thinking relating to a women’s role was first changing, in ways which were adverse to women and their progress. They gradually began to lose the privileges for religious participations and for the education, and were treated like the sudras, of interior caste. A few girls in rich and aristocratic families did indeed study Sanskrit and Prakrit and household art, song of dance- it is said that there were poetesses in Prakrit and specialist in Vedanta and Sanskrit literature. Some women even started learning medicine. But these were the exceptions. For Manu’s code engulfed the thinking of the times, by which by a young girl, by a young women, or even by an aged one, nothing must be done independently, even in own house. Already, early marriages become customary. Manu further said: Let the husband employ his wife in the collection and expenditure of his wealth, In keeping everything clean, in the fulfillment of religious duties in the preparation of food and in looking after the household utensils. Perhaps the luckiest girls, as far as opportunities for education went, were temple dancers and the prostitutes, who could “stoop” to learn anything with no objections from any quarter!

Though in society as a whole female education received a great set-back during this period, it continued to receive attention in rich, cultured, aristocratic and royal families. 1 Girls in these families were given  fairly good literary education, though they were not allowed to study the Vedic literature. They could read and understand Sanskrit and Prakrit works and even detect mistakes accidentally committed by their male relations.  Special effort was made to give them a good grounding in domestic and culinary arts and fine arts like music, dancing, painting, garland-making and household decorations.  Tutors were appointed in rich families to train girls in these arts and accomplishments, as is shown by the employment of Ganadasa and Haradatta in the household of king Agnimitra. Most of this education was finished before the marriage ; but famous lady scholars of the age, probably continued their education and reading even after their wedlock.

Educated ladies in cultured families continued to make their own contributions to literature, as was done by the lady scholars of the earlier period. During this age, there flourished several poetesses in south India, who composed poetry in Prakrit. Among the authors from whom selections there are sevan poetesses, their names being Reva , Roha, , Madhavl , Anulakshml, ,Pahal, Vaddhavahl  and Sasiprabha.  Some of the Sanskrit anthologies also have preserved the memory of a few other poetesses, who seem to have composed poetry of a very high order. Sllabhattarika was famous for her easy and graceful style, noted for a harmonious combination of sense and sound.  Devi was a well known poetess of Gujarat, who continued to enchant her readers on the earth even after her departure to heaven. Vijayanka’s fame in Berar was second only to that of Kalidasa  . She seems to have attained a really high position among Sanskrit poets and poetesses, for the poet Rajasekhara compares her to Saraswatl. A drama, Named Kaumudlmahotsava has been recently discovered’ which is from the pen of a poetess, whose name seems to have been Vidya or Vijjaka. The plot dramatises the incidents of a political revolution at Patallputra, showing thereby that ladies were not uninterested in the incidents of political history. Subhadra, Slta, Manila, Indulekha, Bhavadevi and Vikatanitamba are some other poetesses quoted in later anthologies . It is a pity that we should have lost their works. Lady scholars of this age took interest in criticism also ; Rajasekhara’s wife was both a critic and poetess. The umpire in the controversy between Sankara and Mandanamisra was the accomplished wife of the latter; she must have been well grounded in Mimansa, Vedanta and literature. Some ladies were attracted by medical studies also ; the majority of these must be specialising in gynaecology. Some of the lady doctors had also written authoritative works on the medical science. Among the Hindu works on medicine translated into Arabic in the 8th century A.D. was a book on midwifery, written by a lady doctor, whose name appears as Rasa in the Arabic garb .

Achievements of lady scholars in cultured families were thus fairly high. Cultured families are, however, relatively few in society. They could afford to employ special teachers for their girls. Ordinary families, however, were not so well situated, and it is therefore doubtful whether the average woman was receiving any education after about the 6th or the 7th century A. D. Asahaya, a commentator on the Narada-smriti, ‘ who flourished in the 8th century A. D., justifies the theory of the dependence of women on the ground that their intelligence is not developed like that of men on account of the absence of proper education.  It is hazardous to make any statement about the percentage of literate women in society at the end of the 12th century A. D., but it could not have been higher than  ercent. Literacy among men at this time was probably about 30 percent.

In the era of Buddhism and Jainism (Roughly 300 BC to 800 AD) which emerged largely as reaction to the dominance of Brahminic thinking and rituals of the Vedic times, there seemed to be a free air for women. They could become Bhikkunis or Monks, even though they were considered subordinate in status to the male monks or Bhikkus. During this period, marriage for girls was not a rigid must and the birth of a girl baby was as welcome as a boy’s. Widowhood was not frowned upon. These factors had a great influence on women taking to education. Women were highly regarded in Jain society and many of them took to religious education and become monks.

We saw how in the earlier period the Buddhist movement gave an indirect impetus to female education and produced a number of nun-poetesses. During this period however we do not come across any nun scholars at all. Nunneries had gone out of vogue by the 4th century A. D.; Chinese pilgrims of the 5th and 7th century A. D. do not refer to them at all. It is interesting to note that in modern Ceylon and Burma also nunneries do not impart instructions to girls as monasteries do to boys. We have there- fore to conclude that female education, which was languishing during this period, could not get any impetus from Buddhism also.

Ancient Indian history knows  several  queens and princesses, who used to take active part in the administration of their kingdoms of the Andhra dynasty (c. 150 B. C.)  Prabhavatigupta of the Vakataka dynasty ( 390 A.D.) were governing extensive kingdoms during the minority of their sons. The queen of Masaga directed the defence of her capital against Alexander the Great after the death of her husband. Several queens of Kashmir have fought on the battlefield,  and some of them, like Sugandha and Didds have ruled as regnant queens. In the Chalukya dynasty several queens and ladies of the royal family like Mailadei, Akkadevi,. Kunkumadevi and Lakshmidevi are known to have taken active part in the administration of the empire as governors of towns and districts.  It is therefore quite obvious that steps must have been taken in royal families in ancient India to give proper training to princesses in order to make them fit to carry on the administration in the case of emergency, or even in normal times in order to help their husbands. The training was both administrative and military. Administrative training was of course given when they had become old enough to take part in the governance of the kingdom, but military training was imparted during their adolescence. They were trained fairly well in the use of arms ; they could also ride and swim. The son of queen Vijayamahadevi was called Gangadatta, because the mother used to, swim about in the Ganges, owing to a strong desire to do so during pregnancy.  In ordinary Kshatriya families also some military training seems to have been imported to the lady folk. Village women are often seen defending their hearths and homes, in times of danger, and even laying down their lives while doing so. Inscriptions have recorded the cases of governments of the day honouring village heroines with the gift of suitable ornaments.  The tradition of military training for ladies in high Kshatriya families continued down to the advent of the British rule. There still exists a commemorative tablet in Shikarpur Taluka immortalising the memory of a spirited lady, Hariyakka by name, who died fighting in 1446 A.D., while avenging the murder of her father.  Maratha and Rajput princesses could usually play the sword and wield the lance.

In ordinary families, literature and the fine arts were usually the favourite topics of female education. This education was of course not calculated to make women economically self-sufficient, but we must note that the theory that women ought to be economically independent is of quite a recent origin. In the case of emergency, however, the Hindu woman could eke out a humble subsistence for herself and her children by taking to spinning and weaving in her spare time. In Pali literature we find instances of wives imploring their dying husbands to keep composed by pointing out that they could maintain the family by their skill in spinning and weaving . The Artha-sastra of Kautilya lays down that the state superintendent of weaving should make special arrangement for sending cotton to and receiving the yarn from those women, who were crippled, or whose husbands were dead or had gone abroad, and who were thus compelled to seek work for their subsistence  . There is evidence to show that during the 9th century also widows, who were not provided for, used to have recourse to spinning for their maintenance. This humble but independent means of existence was available to the women in distress in India down to the middle of the last century, when the hand spinning and hand weaving industry was crushed out of existence by the mill competition.

Swami Vivekananda glorified Indian women of the past for their great achievements as leaders in various walks of life. He proudly states that “Women in statesmanship, managing territories, governing countries, even making war, have proved themselves equal to men, if not superior. In India I have no doubt of that. Whenever they have had the opportunity, they have proved that they have as much ability as men, with this advantage – that they seldom degenerate. They keep to the moral standard, which is innate in their nature. And thus as governors and rulers of their state, they prove-at least in India far superior to men. John Stuart Mill mentions this fact.”

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

Plato (BC 427-BC 347) Greek philosopher.

The primary aim of any system of education should be development of a whole some personality. The Vedic system of education stood on former grounds of lofty ideals because its primary aim was development of personality and character. Moral strength and moral excellence were developed to the fullest extent. Every student was required to observe celibacy in his specific path of life. Purity of conduct was regarded as of supreme importance. Only the unmarried could become students in a Gurukul. On entering student life, the student was made to wear a special girdle called a makhla‘. Its quality depended on the caste of the student. Brahmins wore a girdule of moonj grass, the kshatriyas of string gut-taanta and the vaishyas a girdle made of wool. The clothes worn by them were also accordingly of silk, wool etc. The students were not allowed to make use of fragrant, cosmetic or intoxicating things.

In most cases the boy went to a teacher for studentship. The maximum age of entrance into school was different for different castes. The period of schooling was long, at least 12 years for one Veda. The academic sessions started with a special ceremony ―upkarman‘ on the Guru Purnima (Full month of Shravana) and as solemnly closed on Rohini (Fullmoon month of pausha) with utsarjan‘. The whole session was punctuated with holidays especially on new moon full moon days of the month.

A ceremony called the upnayana ceremony was performed before the child was taken to his teacher. The word upnayana means to take close to, or to being in touch with.  This ceremony was performed at the ages of 8, 11 and 12 for the Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, respectively. The ceremony signalled the child’s transition from infancy to childhood and his initiation into educational life. In this context, the term upanayana‘ means putting the students in touch with his teacher. With the passage of time, the ceremony came to be conferred to the brahmins class only.

Education was free and universal.. It was free because no student was required to pay any fees. It was free also because no outside agency could interfere in the matters of education. There was perfect autonomy. No external authority no external beneficiary, no politics was permitted to enter the school or college system. A student had to pay nothing in return for education he received in a Gurukul or Ashram. The fee, if any, was to be paid, after attaining education from the earnings of the young man who got education, in the form of Guru Dakshina‘. During education the boarding and lodging was free for almost all these students. Access to good education depended not on wealth but on talent. The student was expected, if desired but never compelled to offer a field, cow, horse or even vegetables to his teacher according to his financial position in the society. Education could not be bought one could go up the Ladder as his abilities permitted.

In vedic age students used to lead a simple life and sober life. Nowadays the life style of our young generation has altogether changed they like to lead luxurious and majestic life, full of fashion and show. They have given up the principle of Simple Living and High Thinking‘and adopted its reverse principle i.e. High Living and Simple Thinking. The whole balance of the life is disturbed

The student was to hold his teacher in deep reverence and honour him like the king, parents and god. His outward behaviour must be in conformity with the rules of decorum and good manners, he ought to get up and salute his teacher in the proper way, he ought not to occupy a higher seat or wear a gaudier dress. Reviling and backbiting are severely condemned. It however did not follow that the student was to connive blindly at his teacher’s misconduct. Both the Buddha  and Apastamba,  who enjoin high reverence for the teacher, lay down that the student should draw his teacher’s attention in private to his failings, and dissuade him from wrong views if he happened to be inclined towards them ; the duty of obedience comes to an end if the teacher transgresses the limits of Dharma. 5 His commands were to be regarded as ultra virus, if they were likely to jeopardise the student’s life or were against the law of the land.

In Gurukulas, the student was expected to do personal service to the teacher ‘like a son, suppliant or slave.  He was to give him water and tooth stick, carry his seat and supply him bath water. If necessary, he was to cleanse his utensils and wash his clothes.” He was further to do all sundry work in his monastery or his teacher’s house, like cleansing the rooms etc., bringing fuel or guarding cattle. This custom existed in the Vedic age; and was widely prevalent in later times also. Tradition asserts that even great personages like $ri-Krishna had deemed it an honour to do all kind of menial work in their preceptor’s house during their student days. It was held that no progress in knowledge was possible without service in the teacher’s house.

There were, however, limitations to this duty to work. The teacher was prohibited from assigning any work that was likely to interfere with the studies of the student. The duty was further more nominal’ than real in the case of paying scholars. We have seen already that the duty to teach was imperative and a teacher could not refuse a student merely because he was poor. Poor students were admitted if they were willing to help the teacher in his house- hold or farm work ; this duty to work was effectively operative only in their case. Teachers used to hold special classes for them at night with a view to see that their education did not suffer on account of their day’s work on the farm or in the household..

The school in the Ancient Education System, lasted for 7 to 8 hours a day. In fair weather classes were held in the open under shady groves. In the rainy season schools ran in a set of apartment. Temple colleges of the past had been of great renown for having spacious buildings for classroom, hostels and residential quarters for teachers. Gurukuls  were generally situated on the river banks or on the lake. The whole atmosphere was quiet, calm and peaceful. It must be noted that schools and colleges were not kept for away from human habitation. Naturally it differed in different courses and we have detailed information only about the religious and literary education. The students taking these courses used to get up early in the morning before birds had begun to stir, i. e. at about 4-30 A. M. Then they used to attend to morning functions, take their bath and offer their prayers. Vedic students used to spend a good deal of the morning time in performing various morning rituals connected with fire sacrifices; this afforded them practical training in the rituals they were expected to perform in their after-life.

Other students contented themselves with their prayers (sandhya.) and spent the rest of the morning either in learning new lessons or in revising old ones. At about 11. A. M. this work would come to an end and students used to break off for their meals. Those staying with their teachers or in boarding houses used to get ready meals served out for them ; those who were poor used to go out to collect cooked food for their meals. After the noon meal there followed a period of rest of about an hour or so ; and teaching started at about 2 P. M. and went on till the evening. We sometimes get references to students spending their evening in collecting sacred fuel for sacrifices; but this must have been true of Vedic students of the early period only. Evening was probably spent in physical exercises. At sunset they offered usual prayers, attended to fire sacrifices, and then took their supper. Poor students, who had to work by day in the teacher’s house or elsewhere, used to spend a considerable part of the night in studies. We, should not forget that paper and printing were unknown and books were rare and costly ; so there was little of homework possible, except the revision and recapitulation of the lessons learnt in the teacher’s presence. Students of sculpture, architecture, painting, smithy and carpentry etc. spent most of the day in the teacher’s workshop, learning the details and the technique of the art and trade, and often accompanying and helping the teacher as apprentices in the professional work that he may have undertaken in the town or city.

The begging of the daily food has been enjoined on the student as a religious duty. This injunction occurs in sacred texts from the Vedic age downwards;  some texts lay it down that the student must beg his food both morning and evening.- it has been declared that no food is so holy for the student as the food he obtains by begging at midday. The student had to bear the responsibility of feeding both himself and his teacher, this was done through begging for alms, which was not considered bad. Since every domestic knew that his own son must be begging for alms in the same way at some other place. The reason behind the introduction of such a practice was that accepting alms induces humility. The student realized that both education and subsequent earning of livelihood were made possible for him only through society‘s service and its sympathy. For the poor students, Begging for alms was compulsory and unavoidable, but even among the prosperous, it was generally accepted practice.

The rule of begging was laid down for the student in order to teach him humility and make him realize that it was due to the sympathy and help of society that he was learning the heritage of the race, and being enabled to follow a profession that would secure him a living. This rule further removed the distinction between the rich and the poor and brought education within the reach of the poorest. It was also useful in reminding society of its duty and responsibility about the education of the rising generation. Civilisation will not progress if each gene- ration does not take proper steps to transmit its heritage to the next. Hindu thinkers therefore made it an incumbent duty for all householders to offer cooked food to the begging student; a householder refusing his request was threatened with serious spiritual sanctions.  In medieval universities of Europe, a very large number of students used to maintain themselves” by begging out of sheer necessity; in ancient India begging was elevated into a duty of the student life. It may however be pointed out that our educationalists have pointed out that a student can beg food just sufficient for his needs; if he collected more, he would be guilty of theft.  Similarly he could not have recourse to begging when his education was over.  Society was morally bound to support every poor student who was honestly struggling to educate himself; when however he was educated, he was expected to stand on his own legs.

There is clear evidence to show that Smritis themselves did not expect the rule of begging to be literally followed by all students, both rich and poor. They have laid down a penance, only if the student did not beg at least once in the week.  This shows that the rule of begging was a mere formality in the case of rich students and a reality only in the case of the poor ones. There are also other indications in Smritis to show that begging was not a reality in the case of all. It has been laid down by Sumantu  that students under 12 should take their food early in the morning ; begging should be resorted only after 12.

The view of Krishnajini is also the same. The Chinese pilgrim Yuan Chwang attributes the fame of Indian scholars for deep scholarship to the circumstance that students in India have not to worry about their food, clothing and medicines.” It will be thus seen that begging was elevated into a duty for the student, primarily for the purpose of bringing education within the reach of the poorest, and secondarily for removing the superiority complex from the mind of rich students ; he was the ideal student who lived by begging and not he who lived on his family’s support. The rule was not intended to be literally followed by all students every day.

The student had to observe strict regulations. Instruction was important, but was even more significant than teaching was discipline – discipline inculcated through strict obedience to laws and regulations of student life, discipline that was rooted in morality and religion A student was required to give up lust, anger, greed, vanity, conceit and over joy. It was ordered to him not to gamble, gossip, lie, backbite, hurt feelings of others, dance, sing, look or talk or touch the other sex and kill animals. It was demanded of every student whether rich of poor that he should lead a simple life in the Gurukul or in the Ashram.  It was felt that student’s life should be characterised by dignity, decorum and self-discipline and should be devoted to acquire grounding not only in learning but also in the culture and religion of the race. In order to infuse piety, it was therefore laid down that they should regularly offer the prescribed prayers and sacrifices both morning and evening. In order to inculcate good etiquette and manners, it was insisted that they should show proper courtesy and respect to their elders and teachers. The duties towards the latter have been described already. In order to develop character, emphasis was given on moral earnestness; lying, slandering and backbiting were never to be indulged in. They were to observe strict celibacy even in thought and speech.

Strength of mind and character is developed if we learn to deny to ourselves our natural desires and inclinations. Rules of discipline therefore lay down that articles like meat, sweetmeats, spices, ornaments and garlands, which have a natural attraction for the youth and tend to accentuate the sex impulse, should be tabooed to students. Even royal students, staying in a Gurukula were not allowed to have any private purse, lest they should secretly purchase prohibited articles.” Plain living and high thinking was to be the student’s ideal: they were to shave their heads clean or keep matted hair: no time was to be wasted in oiling, combing and dressing the hair. Students must take the bath once in the day, but pleasure baths were forbidden. Shoes, umbrellas and cots were not to be used as a general rule. Food and dress were to be simple but sufficient. The aim in prescribing these rules was to enable students to form a number of useful habits during the formative period of his life.

Punishment had practically no place in the school system. Pupils received very sympathetic, treatment from their teachers. Their personality was respected Teachers were required to use sweet and gentle speech in dealing with pupil.

Of the above rules, those relating to religious duties and moral behaviour, were particularly emphasised and strictly enforced; modifications however were permitted in the case of the rest, if demanded by special circumstances.

Thus the prohibition against the use of shoes and umbrellas was not rigorously enforced in ancient India as in ancient Sparta; the idea was that students should not be so soft as to require these articles when moving about on good roads in villages and towns  under normal circumstances. Students going to thorny forests in search of the sacred fuel (samidhas) or undertaking a long journey to distant places, were permitted the use of both the shoes and umbrellas. Similarly occasional exceptions were permitted in the case of the use of sweetmeats, when students were invited to some religious function or feast . The use of oils was permitted in some localities once a week probably after the shave . Cots also were probably permitted in swampy or snake-infested areas.

The rules of discipline were on the whole reasonable for the age. They were intended to infuse piety, teach manners, promote self-control, discipline the will and facilitate the formation of good habits. The complaint that they were too ascetic is not true; students were required only to control their passions and desires and not to kill them, as was recommended in the case of ascetics. Strict celibacy was insisted upon, but that was for the purpose of promoting concentration in studies and the development of the body. At the end of the course, students were enjoined to marry. At Sparta students’ food was both plain and scanty. In India it was only plain; the educationalists had realised that the body is developed and built up during the childhood and adolescence and have therefore permitted students to take as much food as was demanded by the needs of their developing constitution. In the light of these facts the observation of a recent writer that the student life in ancient India was very severe because it required a stay at a stranger’s place, demanded a beggar’s or a menial’s life and denied all pleasures of life  will appear to be considerably wide of the mark.

Ancient education a student centered education. No single method of instruction was adopted, though recitation by the pupil followed by explanation by the teacher, was generally followed. There was no classroom teaching. However monitorial system was prevalent and senior pupils were appointed to teach Juniors. Travel was regarded as necessary to give finishing touch to education.  The methods of teaching generally practiced during vedic period were mainly Maukhik (oral and other method was based on Chintan (thinking or reflection) In the oral method the students were to memorize the mantras (Vedic Hymns) and Richayas (Verses of Rigveda) in order that there might not be changed wrongly and they might remain preserved in their original forms. Under the oral methods these prosodies were thoroughly taught on which Richayas happened to be based. Special emphasis was laid on the various lines of a particular verse, their pronunciation and meanings. In this oral method correct pronunciations was specially emphasized. For this instruction in grammar and pronunciation was compulsory for all.

Thinking method was another part of the teaching method. Through this an attempt was made to preserve the veda mantras (vedic hymns) and Richayas (vedic verses) Manan was higher method of teaching than a thinking. Thorugh Manan the meanings of vedic mantras the meanings of vedic mantras were developed and preserved in ones own mind. This method was used to encourage the highly intelligent students by guiding them to make research, similarly in ancient days, Manan (Reflection) was a method specially adopted for highly intelligent students. Besides question – Answer, Debate and Discussion, Story telling was also adopted according to need.  As all the books written in Sanskrit, therefore the medium of instruction was Sanskrit.

Society did not regard the student life as a proper period for enjoying the pleasures of life. Its standards of plain living also were naturally much different from those of the modern age, dominated by the novel, the drama and the cinema.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V. (P.G) College, Roorkee, India

“He who is possessed of supreme knowledge by concentration of mind, must have his senses under control, like spirited steeds controlled by a charioteer” says the Katha Upanishad.

From the Vedic age downwards the central conception of education of the Indians has been that it is a source of illumination giving us a correct lead in the various spheres of life. Knowledge says one thinker, is the third eye of man, which gives him insight into all affairs and teaches him how to act.

The education system which was evolved first in ancient India is known as the Vedic system of education. In other words, the ancient system of education was based on the Vedas and therefore it was given the name of Vedic Educational System.

The education system of Vedic period has unique characteristics and .To achieve their aim not only did Brahmans develop a system of education which, survived even in the events of the crumbling of empires and the changes of society, but they, also through all those thousands of years, kept a glow of torch of higher learning.

Education in ancient India was free from any external control like that of the state and government or any party politics. It was the kings duties to see that learned Pundits, pursued their studies and performed their duty of imparting knowledge without interference from any source what so ever

The importance which in modern times is attached to the Institution or the Alma Mater was in ancient days attached to the teacher in India. This was but natural, for organised educational institutions came rather late into existence in this country, as was also the case in the West. The person who takes charge of immature children and makes them worthy and useful citizens in society was naturally held in high reverence. It was the function of the teacher to lead the student from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge. The lamp of learning is concealed under a cover, says one thinker ; the teacher removes it and lets out the light. The Guru in the ancient times realized that the development of personality is the sole aim of education. Human personality was regarded as the supreme work of God. The qualities of self-esteem, self confidence, self restraint and self respect were the personality traits that the educator tried to incukate in his pupils through example.  The student therefore must be very grateful to him and show him the highest possible reverence. He is to be revered even more than parents; to the latter, we owe our physical birth, to the former our intellectual regeneration. From the Vedic age downwards the teacher has been all along designated as the spiritual and intellectual father of the student.  Without his help and guidance, no education is possible. He is in fact indispensable. This is graphically illustrated by the story of Ekalavya, who when refused admission to his school by Drona, prepared an image of the teacher under whom he longed to learn, and successfully finished his studies in archery, under the inspiration that he received from the inanimate representation of his animate preceptor. Buddhists and  Jains also attached equally great importance to the teacher. This importance attached to the teacher need not surprise us, for it is now admitted on all hands that neither buildings nor equipment exercise such influence on students as is exercised by cultured and competent teachers, who instruct as well as inspire.

The great importance that was attached to the teacher in the ancient system of education and the high reverence that was shown to him in society are not difficult to understand. Since the earliest times the Vedic learning is being transmitted orally in India from one generation to another.

This continued to be the castigating when the art of writing came into general vogue. The Mahabharata condemns to hell a person who commits the Vedas to writing. Great importance was attached to the proper accent and pronunciation in the Vedic recitation, and these could be properly learnt only from the lips of a properly qualified teacher. The continuous transmission of the store of the Vedic knowledge, which society regarded as priceless, was possible only through the instrumentality of the teacher and his importance therefore could not be exaggerated. With the rise of the mystical systems of philosophy in the age of the upanishads, the reverence for the Guru became still more intensified ; for spiritual salvation depended almost entirely upon his proper guidance.  ’This deification of the philosophical Guru was not without its reaction in favor of the ordinary teacher who taught disinterestedly without stipulating for any fees. We should further remember that books being dear and rare, the student had generally to rely upon his teacher alone to a much greater degree than is the case now-” in the case of professions, even when books exist in plenty, a good deal more has to be learnt from the teacher. So a competent and sympathetic teacher, who would unreservedly place at the disposal of his pupil the essence of all his experience, could hardly be over- venerated by the artisan apprentice working under him. The glorification of the teacher must have produced great psychological influence on students, for childhood is the heyday of personal influence.

Since the teacher was held in high veneration, he was naturally expected to possess several qualifications. The student was to look upon the  teacher as the ideal person and regulate his own conduct by the example of his teacher. The latter there- fore was expected to be a pious person of very high character. He was to be patient and treat his students impartially. Above all he was to be well grounded in his own branch of knowledge; he was to continue his reading throughout his life.  Profound scholarship however was not sufficient for the teacher. He must have a fluent delivery, readiness of wit, presence of mind, a great stock of interesting anecdotes and must be able to expound the most difficult texts without any difficulty or delay.  In a word, he should be not only a scholar but also an adept in teaching ; then only he would be a great teacher, as pointed out by Kalidasa. The teacher must further be able to inspire as well as to instruct ; his piety, character, scholarship and cultured life should be able to- exercise a subtle and permanent influence over the young students sitting at his feet for their lessons.

Though the teacher was held in high reverence, it does not appear that any institutions like Teachers’ Training Colleges of the modern times existed in the past. One of the hopes expressed at the convocation (Samavartana) was that the graduate may have the good luck of attracting students from all quarters.  It is therefore clear that no further training was deemed necessary for the graduate in order to qualify him for the teaching profession. The reasons for this are not far to seek. Students received individual attention and lessons from their teachers. During their educational course Vedic students could note how precisely teachers used to pronounce and intonate the Vedic Mantras when teaching them to their students. As far as the study of other branches like grammar, logic, rhetoric, philosophy etc. was concerned, no special training was necessary for fostering and developing the powers of exposition and elucidation of students specialising in them. In the modern system of education students can get their degrees by listening to their teachers in the class-rooms and answering the question papers in the examination halls. Such was not the case in ancient India. Several times during his course the student was called upon to pass through the fiery ordeal of learned debates (sastrartha) when he was called upon to defend his own position and attack that of the opponent in heated discussions. Powers of debate and discussion were thus remarkably developed by the time the student finished his education. Advanced students were also given opportunities of teaching the beginners in most of the educational institutions.  The graduate therefore had a fairly good teaching experience to his credit by the time he left his alma mater. The absence of training collegestherefore did not materially tell upon the efficiency of the teachers at least as far as higher education was concerned. The teaching profession had a very high code in antient India.

There was often competition for getting more students ; but if one teacher was found to be less well grounded than his rival in his subject, he was expected to close down his school and become a disciple of his rival in order to get full knowledge.  The teacher was to begin the education of the student as soon as he was satisfied that the latter was sincere and possessed the necessary caliber ; he was not to postpone instructions unnecessarily.  For example on being defeated in debate with Maudgalya, Maitreya at once closed his school and became the pupil of his vanquisher in order to become better grounded in his subject. The debate between Sankara and Mandana Misra was also held on the usual condition that the vanquished should become the disciple of the vanquisher.

Usually teachers were allowed to watch the conduct and calibre of the new entrants for about six months or a year; but after that period they were bound to start instructions. If they did not do so, they were saddled with all the sins of the students they were keeping in suspense.

The duty to teach was imperative; all students possessed of the necessary calibre and qualifications were to be taught, irrespective of the consideration as to whether they would be able to pay any honorarium or not. We have seen already that no regular fees were charged by ancient Indian teachers and institutions. The poorest of the poor could demand and get education from the teacher by merely agreeing to do household work in the teacher’s house. Further, the teacher was required to teach everything he knew to his disciple ; he could withhold nothing under the apprehension that his pupil may one day outshine him in the profession.- how generous and large hearted teachers usually were in this connection can be judged from the conduct and exclamation of Alara Kalama, when the future Buddha had finished his education under him :

“Happy friend are we in that we look upon such a venerable one, such a fellow ascetic as you. The doctrine which  know, you too know, and the doctrine which you know, I too know. As I am, so you are, as you are so am ‘I. Pray, sir, let us be joint wardens of this company”.

The relationship between the teacher and the pupil  was regarded as filial in character both by Hindu and Buddhist thinkers; the teacher therefore had to discharge several duties in addition to imparting intellectual education and helping spiritual progress. He was the spiritual father of the pupil and was held as morally responsible for the drawbacks of his pupils.  His extra-academic duties’ were varied and numerous. He was always to keep a guard over the conduct of his pupil. He must let him know what to cultivate and what to avoid ; about what he should be earnest and what he may neglect, he must instruct him as to sleep and as to keeping himself in health, and as to what food he may take and what he may reject. He should advise him as to the people whose company he should keep and as to the villages (and localities) he may frequent.” If he was poor, he was to help him in getting’ some financial help from people of influence and substance in the locality.  He was to arrange for his food and clothing: the teachers of Sanskrit Pathashals in eastern India used to do this till quite recently. If the student was ill, the teacher was to nurse and serve him as a father would do to his son.

We have no data to enable us to get a precise idea of the normal income of the teacher in the early period. In ancient days in India as in the West, there was no Education Department prescribing a scale of salaries, which was more or less followed in private institutions also. Educational institutions them- selves came into existence only at about the 5th century A. D. We have already seen how the educational theory and practice prohibited the teacher from charging any fixed scale of fees from his students. The teacher in ancient India therefore had, as a general rule, no fixed income. We have seen already that usually he was also a priest. His income therefore consisted partly of offerings obtained by him ‘on the occasions of rituals and sacrifices and partly of voluntary gifts given by his students either during or after their course. There was to be no stipulation for these presents ; so they varied with the financial capacity of the guardians. At Taxila we learn that the ‘world-renowned’ teachers- used to have 500 students reading under them, and that the rich ones among the latter used to offer a fee of a thousand coins.  This however does not enable us to get any accurate idea of the teacher’s income. The number of students, 500, is conventional  and not real and we do not know whether the fee of 1000 coins offered was for one year or for the whole course, and whether it included the expenses of boarding and lodging also, which were normally offered by the Taxila teacher. We therefore can form no definite idea of the income of the teacher during the early period.

We however get more definite data about the teacher’s income from the time educational institutions were evolved. Teachers at Buddhist Universities of Nalanda and Vikramasila were monks and so required no salaries ; the administration had to spend for each monk-teacher just the amount necessary for the maintenance of only four students.

In south Indian colleges the annual salary of teachers varied according to their qualifications and subjects from 160 to 200 maunds of rice. This income was about two and half times the income of the village accountant or the carpenter, and was equal to about four times the amount necessary for meeting the normal food expenses of a family of five persons. We would not be wrong in supposing that as a general rule m ancient India the Sanskrit teacher imparting higher education received a similar income. He was thus neither suffering from abject poverty not rolling in superfluous wealth. Society enabled him to lead a life of moderate comforts according to the ideal of plain living and high thinking. We can now understand why learned teachers were exempted from taxation. The income of the primary teacher was naturally less than that of the Sanskrit teacher. In Bengal at the advent of the British rule, the income of the primary teacher was just equal to that of the . The total cost of one good meal for’ one year was about 8 maunds of rice. The salaries above mentioned were given in the college at Eunayirnrn; in other institutions they were sometimes different. Sometimes inscriptions disclose that the Veda teachers used to get only 30 maunds of rice per annum ; in such cases they were probably part-time teachers and were expected to supplement their income from the proceeds of the priestly profession.

Public educational institutions, where teachers used to teach students admitted by the managing body, were not many in ancient India. The relations between the teacher and the student were therefore direct and not through any institution. The student usually went to such a teacher as attracted his attention by his reputation for character and scholarship ; the teacher selected such students as appeared to him sincere, zealous and well-behaved. The student usually lived either under the roof of the teacher or under his direct supervision. The teacher not only did not demand any fee but also helped the poor students in getting food or clothing. He nursed him if he was ill. The student naturally lived as a member of the household of the teacher and helped him in doing the household work if necessary. The teacher on the other hand would not expect this work if the student was a paying boarder and would limit it to the minimum in the case of poor students.  Under such circumstances the relations between the teacher and the student were naturally very cordial and intimate; they were united, to quote the words of the Buddha, ‘by mutual reverence, confidence arid -communion of life’.- Students usually did not desert one teacher for another merely out of freakishness.

Teachers would often entertain genuine affection for their students and would sometimes select some of them as their sons-in-law. Later authorities have laid it down that a student cannot marry his teacher’s daughter, because she stood in the relation of a sister to him; Kacha refused to marry Devayani on that account. This rule seems to have been framed to prevent complications likely to arise in practice when young students used to live and board with their teachers. But earlier practice seems to have been different, in Jatakas we come across several cases of teachers marrying their daughters to their most promising students ; the custom was so deep rooted in certain teachers’ families that students had often no option in the matter, even if they were not in favor of the match.

The cordial relations that existed between the teacher and the student continued also in their after-life. Even when the student had returned home after his education, he was to call on his teacher frequently, bringing him some present, it may be even a tooth-stick.’  Teachers also used to return these visits. The teacher’s visit was not without its benefit to the student ; he used to utilise the occasion to ascertain how far the ex-student was keeping up his reading and studies.

Never in the history of education you will find such a close contact between the teacher and the taught. The teacher was the spiritual father, he was is to nurse, when the pupil fell sick, he was to feed, clothe and teach his student as he fed, clothed and taught his son. The student also regarded the teachers as he regarded his parents, king & god. Both were united by communion of life. In fact they communed together

The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence. Rabindranath Tagore

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Almost everyone, at some time or other, has experienced a desire to know more about himself. “Who am I?” “Why do I exist?” and “‘what is my relationship to this objective world that I face every day? Yes, “Know thyself” is still the key to wisdom, as it ,was in the days of Socrates; and this self knowledge as developed in Hindu psychology is the way to freedom, truth, and harmonious living.

It is only within the last eighty years that the people of the West have come to realize the importance of psychology and see that it is not merely a philosophical or speculative study but also an indispensable factor in adjustment in everyday life. Hindus, on the contrary, have been aware of this for centuries. For hundreds of years they have been using psychology not only as a method for the enfoldment of religious truth, the basis of their deep philosophy, but also as an aid in the field of medicine and the key to health, poise, and harmonious living.

Generally speaking, it is the more utilitarian aspects of psychology that have had a popular appeal in the West, especially in America-for various reasons. In the field of medicine, for instance, more and more attention is being given to the study of the effect of the mind upon the nervous system, especially in cases of so-called “functional” ailments. Physicians now say that the harmful effects of unbalanced mental or emotional states upon physical well-being cannot be overestimated, and they are emphasizing the need of mental and emotional control as essential to good health. Medicines, drugs, and even surgery have been known to fail in cases where the patient did not have control of his mind or lacked emotional stability.

Again, a knowledge of psychology is proving to be very useful in the business world.. Those with commercial interests, especially in the field of advertising, have made a careful study of the power of suggestion in order to increase their sales. Enormous sums of money are being spent to influence buyers, not only in display but also in the use of radio, and every conceivable device is employed to interest the public in the products that are being advertised. In many businesses, courses in psychology are given to the sales clerks so that they may be more successful in dealing with customers. For instance, they are taught to give more attention to a man who is shopping, as he is likely to buy what he wants in the first store to which he goes, while a woman prefers to “shop around” and compare values. Thus it is evident that influencing the minds of others has come to be of great importance even in the business world. Then there are people who want charm, beauty, or a magnetic personality. Some desire to be successful practically, to gain control over others, or to develop strong willpower.

All these and similar wants have created a large market for books on psychology of a pleasant popular variety, some of which are of little value. They reflect the need of more and more help for the people in mastering their problems, how- ever, and they also show that the public is beginning to appreciate the understanding of the mind as a guide to practical living.

Finally, there are those who want to understand psychology for its own sake. Almost everyone, at some time or other, has experienced a desire to know more about him. “Who am I?” “Why do I exist?” and “‘what is my relationship to this objective world that I face every day? These are only a few of the questions that cannot fail to present themselves to an inquiring and intelligent mind. Yes, “Know thyself” is still the key to wisdom, as it ,was in the days of Socrates; and this self knowledge as developed in Hindu psychology is the way to freedom, truth, and harmonious living.

The study of psychology is essentially a study of the mind, its functioning, its reactions to the objective world, and the methods by, which it obtains knowledge. For convenience we can define the mind as “that, which classifies, judges, and coordinates the impressions and sensations gathered from the outside world that which knows and knows that it knows.

This of course, brings us face to face with several problems. For instance, ,who is the knower and ,what is the nature of knowledge? How’ do I know that I know, and how, can I be sure that my knowledge is correct? Does the mind have a “separate existence apart from physical brain matter, or is it only a bundle of sensations-the product of the sense organs and the “nervous system? We shall deal ‘with each of these questions in the course of this study, beginning with cognition or know ledge.

I t has been shown by the great physicist and botanist, Sir J. C. Bose of Calcutta, India, that even plants and the simplest organisms “,have certain sensations and reactions that, of course, become more pronounced in the higher forms of life. The lower animals are provided with sense organs through which they gather a specialized and peculiar knowledge of external things. Dogs, for instance, depend a great deal upon their keen sense of smell; even a serpent knows something of the world about him through his reaction to sound, although he does not have the usual outer organs for hearing. In studying reptiles, the ,western psychologists have found that while “some (lizards) apparently have auditory sensitivity; others (snakes) apparently do not.” Animals have an instinctive knowledge that is very accurate, though limited in scope as compared ‘with cognition and awareness in man.

There ,was a school of thinkers in India called Charvakas who, like the behaviourists and other psychologists of similar type in the West, declared that thought processes, cognition,  are merely the products of nerve reaction, that the so-called “mind” is only a bundle of successive sensations dependent upon the nervous system and physical brain matter. Consciousness has no independent existence. According to Watson:

It [consciousness] is a plain assumption just as unprovable, just as unapproachable, as the old concept of the Soul. And to the behaviourist the new terms are essentially identical, so far as concerns their metaphysical implications. .. . They do not tell us what consciousness is, but merely begin to put things into it by” assumption; and then when they come to analyze consciousness, naturally they find in it just what they put into it. So Watson and others assume that the existence of the entity depends on the possibility of objective observation. The behaviourists seem to forget that they cannot observe objectively their own thinking processes, yet they believe that they can evaluate the psychological concepts of Wundt, James, and others. They also assume that they have something with which “to observe behaviour.” As Watson says:

Why don’t we make what we can observe the real field of psychology? Let us limit ourselves to things that can be observed, and formulate laws concerning only those things. Now what can we observe? Well, we can observe behaviour and what the organism does and says.4 The interest of the behaviourists is to observe behaviour “in terms of stimulus and response.” If we examine these statements closely, we will see that these psychologists are confusing consciousness with sensations, and the senses (the instruments for obtaining knowledge) with thought and emotion. A simple illustration will explain this. Electricity acts through wires and a bulb to produce light, but the electricity is neither the wires nor the bulb; the light is the result of its action. Electricity cannot be seen or described except in terms of its effect. We can only proveits existence through the use of an external medium.

Similarly, the mind acts in ordinary persons through the brain and nervous system, and it can only be understood and interpreted by the ‘way it uses the powers at its disposal. Again, if the mind were only the product of nerve stimuli it could be observed objectively. But the observation of the mind and thought current of an individual is not objectively possible and cannot be done successfully without subjective insight. How do you know what your friends are thinking? How can anyone know exactly what is, going on in the mind of another? A man may appear to be listening to a sermon, but in reality his mind is busily occupied elsewhere-at home, at the bank, or thinking of some private worry. Yet, to an objective observer, he seems to be giving attention to the speaker. He alone knows what is really going on in his mind.

Another fact that the physiological, behaviourist, and mechanical psychologists seem to have overlooked is the absolute necessity for permanence and integration in the mind of the observer, so that he may be able to classify and co-ordinate the impressions and experiences gained through his objective study. If his mind is only a bundle of successive sensations, how can he possibly hold the memory of more than one sensation at a time? Again, how can one sensation, which he himself is at the moment, be the observer of another sensation which is the object of his study? In other words, if I am nothing but a collection of sensations, how can that he become the observer of “you” who are nothing but another conglomeration of sensations? How can I correlate this information if “I” can be conscious of only one thing, followed immediately by something else? Obviously, there must be some permanent factor that holds together these impressions and differentiates between them. This brings us to the conclusion that It must be the mind that perceives, experiences, and consequently becomes a knower of the objective world.

We should also remember that the successive sensations cannot give us a total picture of a thing unless there is a back- ground as the receptacle of these sensations. For instance, the moving pictures cannot become perceptible unless there is a permanent background on which the constant moving” pictures are impressed. Besides, the behaviourists, “with their conception of sensation as the mind itself, cannot explain the fact of memory. They do not tell us how and where the different sensations are preserved in the form of memory. We are forced to accept that there is a permanent receptacle of the residuals of experiences which is the mind. And we do not only have the cognition of the objective and perceived world; we also have the cognition of the internal awareness. Pleasurable and painful mental conditions are also cognized by us. These pleasurable and painful past and present mental states and also the apprehensions and anxieties of the future are cognized by human beings.

Such experiences could not be interpreted as mere successive sensations or nerve reactions. There must be something which is in the background of this cognition of the mental states themselves. We all are aware of inner emotions. The emotions may be either a reaction to external perception or they may be inner urges. We perceive our own feelings of love, affection, hatred, envy, fear, anxiety, and worry. If there is no separate existence of mind apart from mere succession of sensations, then the perception of our inner emotions would not be possible. We cannot perceive previously experienced facts and their inner emotional reactions if we do not have something to preserve them in the form of memories. In fact, memory itself becomes impossible if there is no receptacle of successive sensations. In order to understand these facts we can refer to’ the  previous example of moving pictures. It is the experience of every thinking man that he is aware of his own emotions. It will not be out of place to note also that we all have a kind of consciousness of our persistent awareness of ourselves. As  philosopher Descartes says: “I think, so I exist.” One cannot explain the different states and processes of mind without the acceptance of a permanent mind.

Having established the necessity for the existence of the mind  which is independent of mere sensations, we shall consider the ways in which it functions with regard to perception of the objective world. How does the knower gain knowledge? who is the knower? What is the relationship of the mind to external things?

According to western psychologists, the sense organs receive stimuli that are passed on by the nervous system to the brain sense. Even the psychologists who accept the theory of independent existence of the mind regard it as passive, while the objective world is conceived as dynamic, impressing itself upon the mind through the nervous system. However, they do not tell us how continuous and successive sensations, received from the same object, are unified in the mind that is passive. The Charles River flows in a continuous stream; yet this successive flow of water, which is the Charles River, gives the appearance of unity and oneness because of its bed. Similarly, regardless of how quick the successive sensations is Antahkarana , or internal instrument, according to Brahmasutra, Vedanta Aphorism may be, it would not be possible to get a complete picture of a thing without a permanent entity of mind.

Gestalt psychologists in their interpretation of the total mind are nearing an understanding of it. They conceive that the entire object is impressed on the whole mind. Some of the “action” psychologists, and a few others, try to eliminate this problem of unification of sensations in a passive mind by conceding that the mind becomes’ active when stimulated by impressions, but the majority seems to think that the mind is perfectly passive. Difficulties arise here because successive and individual sensations could not possibly become integrated in a passive mind, either by themselves or by the mind as a passive receptacle. James, Munsterberg, and others of actionist psychology, do not eliminate the difficulty in their psychomotor ideas, as they say that stimuli are transposed into responses. Mind seems to be entirely dependent on the stimuli even though they measure the mind by its ability in action. Gestalt and action psychologists’ also seem to fail to endow mind with independence of sense stimuli, and so they limit the scope of the mind. Even those psychologists who concede that the mind may become active when external sensations are received fail to explain how these fragmentary impressions can become unified. Some psychologist say that the mind cannot really know an object but can know’ only the sensations of that object.. In that case, we could not know anything of the objective world except the sensations thereof.

This would also mean that our knowledge would be inaccurate, as we have to depend upon sensations which constantly vary according to the nature and conditions of the perceiving person, who is also an aggregate of successive and changeable sensations. We often observe that a particular sensation of an object is interpreted by different observers in different ways according to the predisposition of the observing minds. Besides, the perceiving mind also will change, as it is supposed to be in a flux.

According to Indian psychologists, it is the mind that reaches out to the objective world through the sense organs and nervous system, drawing its sensations and impressions through them and unifying the experiences gathered into coherent information or knowledge. The word “mind” corresponds to the Vedantic word Antahkarana (inner instrument) which has four functions:

(1) manas, the oscillating or indecisive faculty of mind;

(2) buddhi, the decisive state

(3) ahamkara, the state which ascertains that “I know”;

(4) chitta, the store- house of mental states which makes remembrance and reference possible.. We can call this the “mind-stuff.

According to the Hindu system of thought (Vedanta), antahkarana stands between the Self and the object and receives the object of perception, assuming its form as a whole. Gestalt psychology of the West has a similar conception, although there is some difference. Antahkarana is the inner instrument through which the subject knows the object by identification. It is not the Self. Self is consciousness and not the product of the relationship between subject and object. It is the underlying, self-illumining principle. Self, or Atma, is called Sakshi, the unchangeable Reality. It remains only as the witness. Mind, or antahkarana, gets its power by association with the Self, or Atma, which is the same as Brahman, or the Absolute. It has become seemingly individualized by virtually limiting itself by ignorance.  We do not propose to discuss further the metaphysical side of the problem. It has been mentioned to complete the Hindu idea of perception and its different aspects.

The Sankhya system of thought in India offers a great deal of material on the different functioning of the “mind-stuff.

There is a difference between the Greek conception of the soul and its functions and the Hindu conception of Atma and its functions. Greek psychologists, including Aristotle, conceive activity in the soul itself, although there are differences among various Greek thinkers as to the nature of the activity. But Atma of the Hindus is the unchangeable. Reality, the Great witness, Consciousness Itself, Sakshi Chaitanya.

Hindu psychologists conceive the internal implement for perception as the indriya (sense), which is independent of the outer sense organs and nervous system, although it operates through them. The indriya is not the mind, though the mind ,uses it as an implement.  A definite difference between the two is shown in the following:

Know that the Soul, who sits within, is the master of the chariot, and the body the chariot. Consider the intellect (buddhi] as the charioteer, and the mind [manas] the reins. The senses [indriyas] are the horses and their roads are the sense objects.  The indriya is not passive; it is dynamic. It functions actively to reach out to the objective world and stimulate the nervous system and sense organs.  The conception of indriya is utterly foreign to Western psychologists, and there will be considerable doubt among them concerning its existence.

However, as “we study perception we shall see that the Hindus have good reason to conceive the mind as actively seeking sensation, and that the existence of indriya is logical. Almost all the psychologists of the East and West accept perception as the most direct method of obtaining knowledge. I see you; therefore, I believe that you exist. If I also touch you I am convinced that you are there. But suppose you are passing me on the street and I do not see you. I may be looking in your direction; my eyes are still functioning and your image is reflected upon the retina; yet I do not know that you are there. Why? If my mind,were passive, I could not avoid seeing you. The stimulation to my mind from the optic nerve would have informed me, but obviously some part of the mind was  not reacting to the stimuli. The mind was not reaching out to the external world and stimulating the indriya to observe; consequently, I could pass you ,without knowing that you ,were there. This also explains ‘so-called “absent-mindedness,” ,where the internal instruments of perception, the indriya and the mind, were not concerning themselves ,with the objective ,world and I became forgetful of external matters. The indriya ,was preoccupied or busily engaged with something else.

Although serpents have no external organs of hearing, they have some internal means to cognize the sound. The Indian conception of indriya explains this peculiar perceptive quality of serpents. Plants also seem to have no external organs; yet, as Sir J. C. Bose demonstrated, they have certain types of sensation. This proves that they have some internal instrument of sensation.

Extrasensory perceptions cannot be explained if we do not accept this inner sense of the mind.

It is enough to say here that the so-called extrasensory perceptions take place without the least contact between the sense organs and the object perceived. Here the indnya is gathering experiences by projecting itself independently of the nervous system and the sense organs. The knowledge thus obtained, without direct contact with the object, can be tested to determine its validity as true knowledge. Visions (not hallucinations) and similar experiences are well-known examples of perception of this type. In dreams, or in certain extraordinary states, some persons have had perceptions that were proved to be prophetic.

All this indicates the indriya’s independence of the sense organs and nervous system. There is another aspect of perception that needs to ‘be considered. This is the power of the mind to interpret the sensations of external objects or sense stimuli. According to western psychology, when an object is perceived, its image is reflected by light waves upon the retina of the eye in an inverted form, and from this image the mind draws its conclusions about the object. It not only determines size\ color, proportion, and the various properties of the object, but also sees it in its relation to other things of like or opposite nature. The eye alone could not do all this. It is the mind that correlates and unifies this information. The question will arise: How do we know that the knowledge received corresponds to the reality of the object? On a dark night a trunk of a tree may appear to be a robber, a friend, or a ghost, depending upon the mental state of the person who sees it. It is the internal instrument of perception that differentiates between these impressions, classifying them as true or falser and choosing the one that seems to be most accurate. By comparison with former experiences the mind recognizes” that the dark object in question is neither a man nor a ghost but it only the trunk of a tree. Similarly, the mind discriminates between the evidence produced by the senses to obtain knowledge of the external world the universe, and of other minds.

Although direct perception is generally conceded as the most convincing proof of knowledge, there are other methods also that may be accepted as valid, especially in cases where direct and immediate perception would be impossible. For instance, we accept knowledge upon authority. How do we know that there is war in the world? We cannot perceive it directly. We are obliged to rely upon the testimony of others, upon newspapers, and the information gathered by people who are witnessing it in order to know that a conflict is raging. It would be folly to say that there can-not be a war because we cannot experience it directly. When the sources of information can be checked as reliable and trustworthy, whether it is a question of an event of history or the conclusions reached may be accepted as true even though they have been proved or experienced by others.

Another method of obtaining knowledge is by inference. It has been observed that when a fire burns it produces  smoke. Consequently, if we see smoke we infer that there must be a fire somewhere that is causing it. If volumes of smoke are pouring out of a building, we do not wait to see flames before notifying the fire department. We know by inference that a fire is there and that it will destroy the building if it is not put out.

Inference and authority are not the same, although some people try to classify them together. Authority can stand alone, independent of inference. Just as the sources of authoritative knowledge must be scrutinized for reliability, so also does the proof of inferential knowledge depend upon the validity of its conclusions and the major and minor terms. Great care should be taken in establishing these; otherwise, the inferential knowledge will be misleading or actually false. For that matter, direct perceptions have to be scrutinized also, as the subjective element in every factor in perception contributes a great deal. In fact, perceptions vary according to the interpretations that are given in the light of the notions of the mind. Western philosophers, as well as Indian philosophers, mostly agree in recognizing the contributions of the mind. Professor , in The A. S. Eddington, Philosophy of Physical Science, logically and factually tries to prove that even scientific knowledge, which is supposed to be authentic, seems to be relative, because he, too, believes that there is a subjective element even in scientific perceptions. We can again cite the celebrated illustration of Vedantic epistemology. On a dark night,when a man looks at a trunk of a tree, he often conceives it as a thief, or a friend, or a policeman, according to the preconceived notions that he has. Scrutiny is therefore needed in all these forms of cognition and knowledge.

Induction and deduction are the methods of inference, and they are used by modern scientists. In the deductive method ‘” a general statement is taken and from that is deduced a particular truth. The inductive method is just the opposite; scientific facts are used to aim at a general conclusion. Almost all scientists directly or indirectly use inferential methods as a means of cognition.

Indian Vedantic epistemology and psychology also accept comparison, postulation, and no perception as the means of new knowledge. We are not discussing these points, as they are not vitally related to the science of psychology. They are studied in epistemology. If The question to which we referred in the earlier pages regarding the validity of knowledge needs a little mention here. As this is also vitally connected with epistemology, we should not elaborately discuss the true criterion of knowledge or cognition. No philosopher or psychologist can help questioning the validity of knowledge. Consequently, a few propositions of the Indian schools of thought should be briefly stated. Some thinkers, such as the pragmatists of America, regard knowledge as a fact of true cognition when it has practical value; the standards of real knowledge depend on its practical application in life. We can accept a hypothesis and work out certain schemes which may have practical value. Yet the hypothesis may not be true, as it will be contradicted by the later discovery and perception. For instance, the astronomical theory of solar rotation was later contradicted by the discovery of earthly rotation; yet, for many practical purposes, the astronomical calculation of the previous generations were useful.

There are some among Indians, as well as among western realistic thinkers, who hold that cognition is true ,when it corresponds to real fact. This needs clarification regarding the very conception of real. When we are living on a certain plane of existence things may seem to be real, yet when we are transported to other planes of existence those very things may be unreal. When a person with jaundice looks at certain objects they appear to be yellow. So long as the jaundiced condition remains, the perceptions will be colored by it. Racial discrimination and differentiation are often based on opinions and prejudices of those who are on the same plane of existence or who have similar ideas and interests. Although the opinions and prejudices may not actually be based on facts, they are regarded as “real” and consequently the same patterns of understanding and behavior are followed by other persons. When a man dreams, the dream experiences are also real so long as the dream state remains.

There is also another viewpoint among both Indian and Western thinkers that knowledge or cognition must be coherent to the other experiences. It must be in harmony with other states of life and experiences. This view can also be questioned according to the arguments against the previous viewpoint, namely, the correspondence theory of knowledge. The Vedantic test of knowledge is that it must never be contradicted at any time, and knowledge or true cognition must consist in its no contradiction and newness.

Hallucinations, dreams, and the ordinary perceptions of the awakened state have certain cognitive value, yet hallucinations and dreams vanish when our awakened cognitive state becomes operative. Similarly, when a man rises to the super conscious state (samadhi), or the fourth state of consciousness the awakened experiences, that is to say, our ordinary sense perceptions and other such experiences, are contradicted. This does not mean that Indian philosophy regards the awakened cognition as hallucinations. It only means that the awakened cognition are of relative types,  as Professor Eddington describes in The Philosophy of Physical Science. The only ultimate, uncontradicted, and unitary knowledge is the knowledge one has at the time of spiritual realization (samadhi). This whole evaluation of the different types of cognition comes within the scope of epistemology proper. I requires, no doubt, considerable discussion.

In psychology proper one should under- stand the criterion of true cognition. The mental functioning in the form of cognition have considerable influence over the body. The mental states and processes, whether or not they are in the form of cognition, emotion, or volition, have tremendous influence on the mind itself and also on the body.

Reference-Hindu psychology by Swami Akhilananda

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal, A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

The topic of sexual morality makes many people uncomfortable.  Many people believe that sexual morality is a private issue and that no one has a right to make a judgment about someone else’s moral decision.

Morality is nothing but a code of conduct arrived at by mutually consenting persons who consider such code of conduct, such morality, to be in their own best self-interest. All successful societies have based their specific code of conduct, their morality, on the innate human drive to always act in what each individual considers to be in his own best self-interest. Moral codes differ over time and between places, and there are many cases of things being considered moral by one society and immoral by another. Moral or ethical behaviour is generally taken to mean behaviour that conforms to some code of conduct which is held to be authoritative in matters of right and wrong. The set of principles that define what is right and wrong being called ‘morality’ or ‘ethics’

All living organisms, including bacteria, fish and human beings have developed from inanimate matter through the process of evolution. Evolution, and life itself, is due to the ability of a complex chemical compound to sense a threat to its continued existence and to react upon such impulse with an attempt to negate any incipient threat. We know this instinctive, automatic interaction with the environment as the survival instinct.

This instinct must be present in all living things and is the basic emotion from which all other emotions evolved. Over eons of time, man has enhanced the survival instinct embedded in his genes, by developing complex emotions, such as love, hatred, hunger, despair, fear, joy and many other powerful feelings. The nerve centers dealing with these ancient emotions are physically located in the deepest layers of the human brain, particularly in our brain stem, our so-called reptilian brain.

Deeply embedded instincts and emotions govern all animal behaviour, including human behaviour. However, during the past two million years of hominoid development, man has developed a new mental faculty that sets him aside from other animals. This ability superimposes rational, logical thought processes on our primitive emotions.

Our rational mind applies a thin veneer of logical thought processes over the raw emotions that govern our interaction with our environment. Emotions control the preponderance of basic human needs and behaviour patterns. Emotions determine when we are hungry, when we feel sexually aroused, when we are afraid, when we feel a sense of well-being.

The evolution of our newly developed rational mind greatly facilitated interaction among human beings. Our instincts and our emotions still initiate the human sex drive but our rational mind imposes beneficial restrictions as to the circumstances under which the sex drive can be satisfied.

Unlike dogs, humans do not meet their emotional sex drive by copulating at street corners. Instead, humans go through a rational mating process that enhances the survival of the offspring that often results from sexual activity. Thus, rationality greatly enhances the survival and perpetuation of rational, intellectual beings.

Our rational mind has similarly enhanced many other human interactions, such as our ability to influence or to manipulate other human beings: We have learned how to cause other people to do what we would like them to do. All of human existence is a constant process of manipulating or influencing other persons with different degrees of subtlety. The degree of subtleness usually depends on the respective intelligence of the manipulator and the manipulated person.

The arena of morality is one of the primary spheres where human beings utilize their rational mind to manipulate other human beings. We may refer to another person as evil in order to prod him to mend his ways and to modify his behaviour to our liking. We may also refer to another person as evil if we wish to prevent other persons from emulating him or associating with him.

Sex is judged morally like any other action: It is only immoral if it breaks some well-established moral rule.  The natural end of human sexuality is to generate children who should be brought up properly. Thus, only sexual relations between a married man and woman that can lead to procreation are moral.

Sex is only moral if the partners are in love, since sex without love reduces a humanly significant activity to a merely mechanical performance, which leads to the negative consequences of dehumanization and psychological disintegration. Some argue that it is possible to love several people simultaneously.

The greatest task of morals is always sexual regulation; In human sexual behaviour, promiscuity refers to the practice of having many sexual partners in the absence of any commitment and promiscuous is a term applied to a person who has had sex with relatively many partners

What  behaviour is considered socially acceptable and what behaviour is “promiscuous” varies much among different cultures, and within a culture, and different standards are often applied to people of different gender and civil status. In many cultures, while male promiscuity previously had glamorous connotations that acted as an affirmation of masculinity, female promiscuity was seen as a sign of emotional instability and loose morals in women. The reproductive instinct creates problems not only within marriage, but before and after it, and threatens at any moment to disturb social order with its persistence, its intensity, its scorn of law, and its perversions. The first problem concerns premarital relations ( which refers to consensual sexual intercourse between two persons not married to each other.)  shall they be restricted, or free? Even among animals sex is not quite unrestrained; the rejection of the male by the female except in periods of rut reduces sex to a much more modest role in the animal world than it occupies in our own lecherous species. As Beaumarchais put it, man differs from the animal in eating without being hungry, drinking without being thirsty, and making love at all seasons.

Among primitive peoples we find some analogue, or converse, of animal restrictions, in the tabu placed upon relations with a woman in her menstrual period. With this general exception premarital intercourse is left for the most part free in the simplest societies. Among the North American

Indians the young men and women mated freely; and these relations were not held an impediment to marriage. Among the Papuans of New Guinea sex life began at an extremely early age, and premarital promiscuity was the rule.  Similar premarital liberties obtained among the Soyots of Siberia, the Igorots of the Philippines, the natives of Upper Burma, the Kaffirs and Bushmen of Africa, the tribes of the Niger and the Uganda, of New Georgia, the Murray Islands, the Andaman Islands, Tahiti, Polynesia, Assam, etc.

Under such conditions we must not expect to find much prostitution in primitive society. The “oldest profession” is comparatively young; it arises only with civilization, with the appearance of property and the disappearance of premarital freedom. Here and there we find girls selling themselves for a while to raise a dowry, or to provide funds for the temples,  but this occurs only where the local moral code approves of it as a pious sacrifice to help thrifty parents or hungry gods.

Chastity is sexual behaviour of a man or woman is often used interchangeably with sexual abstinence, especially before marriage .Chastity is a correspondingly late development. Similarly Virginity is the state of a person who has never engaged in sexual intercourse.[1][2]There are cultural and religious traditions which place special value and significance on this state, especially in the case of unmarried females, associated with notions of personal purity, honour and worth.

Like chastity, the concept of virginity has traditionally involved sexual abstinence before marriage, and then to engage in sexual acts only with the marriage partner. The concept of virginity usually involves moral or religious issues and can have consequences in terms of social status and in interpersonal relationships. Although virginity has social implications and had significant legal implications in some societies in the past, it has no legal consequences in most societies today.

What the primitive maiden dreaded was not the loss of virginity, but a reputation for sterility; premarital pregnancy was, more often than not, an aid rather than a handicap in finding a husband, for it settled all doubts of sterility, and promised profitable children. The simpler tribes, before the coming of property, seem to have held virginity in contempt, as indicating unpopularity.

The Kamchadal bridegroom who found his bride to be a virgin was much put out, and “roundly abused her mother for the negligent way in which she had brought up her daughter.”  In many places virginity was considered a barrier to marriage, because it laid upon the husband the unpleasant task of violating the tabu that forbade him to shed the blood of any member of his tribe. Sometimes girls offered themselves to a stranger in order to break this tabu against their marriage. In Tibet mothers anxiously sought men who would deflower their daughters; in Malabar the girls themselves begged the services of passers-by to the same end, “for while they were virgins they could not find a husband.” In some tribes the bride was obliged to give herself to the wedding guests before going in to her husband; in others the bridegroom hired a man to end the virginity of his bride; among certain Philippine tribes a special official was appointed, at a high salary, to perform this function for prospective husbands.

What was it that changed virginity from a fault into a virtue, and made it an element in the moral codes of all the higher civilizations? Doubtless it was the institution of property. Premarital chastity came as an extension, to the daughters, of the proprietary feeling with which the patriarchal male looked upon his wife. The valuation of virginity rose when, ‘ under marriage by purchase, the virgin bride was found to bring a higher price than her weak sister; the virgin gave promise, by her past, of that marital fidelity which now seemed so precious to men beset by worry lest they should leave their property to surreptitious children.

The men never thought of applying the same restrictions to themselves; no society in history has ever insisted on the premarital chastity of the male; no language has ever had a word for a virgin man.  The aura of virginity was kept exclusively for daughters, and pressed upon them in a thousands ways. The Tuaregs punished the irregularity of a daughter or a sister with death; the Negroes of Nubia, Abyssinia, Somaliland, etc., practised upon their daughters the cruel art of infibulations i.e., the attachment of a ring or lock to the genitals to prevent copulation; in Burma and Siam a similar practice survived to our own day.  Forms of seclusion arose by which girls were kept from providing or receiving temptation. In New Britain the richer parents confined their daughters, through five dangerous years, in huts guarded by virtuous old crones; the girls were never allowed to come out, and only their relatives could see them. Some tribes in Borneo kept their unmarried girls in solitary confinement.  From these primitive customs to the purdah of the Moslems and the Hindus is but a step, and indicates again how nearly “civilization” touches “savagery.”

Modesty came with virginity and the patriarchate. There are many tribes which to this day show no shame in exposing the body;  ” indeed, some are ashamed to wear clothing. All Africa rocked with laughter when Livingstone begged his black hosts to put on some clothing before the arrival of his wife. The Queen of the Balonda was quite naked when she held court for Livingstone.” A small minority of tribes practise sex relations publicly, without any thought of shame.  At first modesty is the feeling of the woman that she is tabu in her periods. When marriage by purchase takes form, and virginity in the daughter brings a profit to her father, seclusion and the compulsion to virginity beget in the girl a sense of obligation to chastity. Again, modesty is the feeling of the wife who, under purchase marriage, feels a financial obligation to her husband to refrain from such external sexual relations as cannot bring him any recompense. Clothing appears at this point, if motives of adornment and protection have not already engendered it; in many tribes women wore clothing only after marriage,” as a sign of their exclusive possession by a husband, and as a deterrent to gallantry; primitive man did not agree with the author of Penguin Isle that clothing encouraged lechery. Chastity, however, bears no necessary relation to clothing; some travelers report that morals in Africa vary inversely as the amount of dress.” It is clear that what men are ashamed of depends entirely upon the local tabus and customs of their group. Until recently a Chinese woman was ashamed to show her foot, an Arab woman her face, a Tuareg woman her mouth; but the women of ancient Egypt, of nineteenth-century India and of twentieth-century Bali (before prurient tourists came) never thought of shame at the exposure of their breasts.

We must not conclude that morals are worthless because they differ according to time and place, and that it would be wise to show our historic learning by at once discarding the moral customs of our group. A little anthropology is a dangerous thing. It is substantially true that as Anatole France ironically expressed the matter “morality is the sum of the prejudices of a community” ;” and that, as Anacharsis put it among the Greeks, if one were to bring together all customs considered sacred by some group, and were then to take away all customs considered immoral by some group, nothing would remain. But this does not prove the worthlessness of morals; it only shows in what varied ways social order has been preserved. Social order is none the less necessary; the game must still have rules in order to be played; men must know what to expect of one another in the ordinary circumstances of life. Hence the unanimity with which the members of a society practise its moral code is quite as important as the contents of that code. Our heroic rejection of the customs and morals of our tribe, upon our adolescent discovery of their relativity, betrays the immaturity of our minds; given another decade and we begin to under- stand that there may be more wisdom in the moral code of the group the formulated experience of generations of the race than can be explained in a college course. Sooner or later the disturbing realization comes to us that even that which we cannot understand may be true. The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years. We are warranted in concluding that morals are relative, and indispensable.

Since old and basic customs represent a natural selection of group ways after centuries of trial and error, we must expect to find some social utility, or survival value, in virginity and modesty, despite their historical relativity, their association with marriage by purchase, and their contributions to neurosis. Modesty was a strategic retreat which enabled the girl, where she had any choice, to select her mate more deliberately, or compel him to show finer qualities before winning her; and the very obstructions it raised against desire generated those sentiments of romantic love which heightened her value in his eyes. The inculcation of virginity destroyed the naturalness and ease of primitive sexual life; but, by discouraging early sex development and premature motherhood, it lessened the gap which tends to widen disruptively as civilization develops between economic and sexual maturity. Probably it served in this way to strengthen the individual physically and mentally, to lengthen adolescence and training, and so to lift the level of the race.

Adultery is extramarital sex that is considered objectionable on social, religious, moral or legal grounds. Though what sexual activities constitute adultery varies, as well as the social, religious and legal consequences, the concept exists in many cultures.

Historically, many cultures have considered adultery a very serious matter. Adultery often incurred severe punishment, usually for the woman and sometimes for the man, with penalties.

As the institution of property developed, adultery graduated from a venial into a mortal sin. Half of the primitive peoples known to us attach no great importance to it. The rise of property not only led to the exaction of complete fidelity from the woman, but generated in the male a proprietary attitude towards her; even when he lent her to a guest it was because she belonged to him in body and soul. Suttee was the completion of this conception; the woman must go down into the master’s grave along with his other belongings. Under the patriarchate adultery was classed with theft;  it was, so to speak, an infringement of patent. Punishment for it varied through all degrees of severity from the indifference of the simpler tribes to the disembowelment of adulteresses among certain California Indians.  After centuries of punishment the new virtue of wifely fidelity was firmly established, and had generated an appropriate conscience in the feminine heart. Many Indian tribes surprised their conquerors by the un- approachable virtue of their squaws; and certain male travelers have hoped that the women of Europe and America might someday equal in marital faithfulness the wives of the Zulus and the Papuans.

It was easier for the Papuans, since among them, as among most primitive peoples, there were few impediments to the divorce of the woman by the man. Unions seldom lasted more than a few years among the American Indians. “A large proportion of the old and middle-aged men,” says Schoolcraft, “have had many different wives, and their children, scattered around the country, are unknown to them.”  They “laugh at Europeans for having only one wife, and that for life; they consider that the Good Spirit formed them to be happy, and not to continue together unless their tempers and dispositions were congenial.”" The Cherokees changed wives three or four times a year; the conservative Samoans kept them as long as three years. With the coming of a settled agricultural life, unions became more permanent. Under the patriarchal system the man found it uneconomical to divorce a wife, for this meant, in effect, to lose a profitable slave.” As the family became the productive unit of society, tilling the soil together, it prospered other things equal according to its size and cohesion; it was found to some advantage that the union of the mates should continue until the last child was reared. By that time no energy remained for a new romance, and the lives of the parents had been forged into one by common work and trials. Only with the passage to urban industry, and the consequent reduction of the family in size and economic importance, has divorce become widespread again.

In general, throughout history, men have wanted many children, and therefore have called motherhood sacred; while women, who know more about reproduction, have secretly rebelled against this heavy assignment, and have used an endless variety of means to reduce the burdens of maternity. Primitive men do not usually care to restrict population; under normal conditions children are profitable, and the male regrets only that they cannot all be sons. It is the woman who invents abortion, infanticide and contraception for even the last occurs, sporadically, among primitive peoples.” It is astonishing to find how similar are the motives of the “savage” to the “civilized” woman in preventing birth: to escape the burden of rearing offspring, to preserve a youthful figure, to avert the disgrace of extramarital motherhood, to avoid death, etc. The simplest means of reducing maternity was the refusal of the man by the woman during the period of nursing, which might be prolonged for many years. Sometimes, as among the Cheyenne Indians, the women developed the custom of refusing to bear a second child until the first was ten years old. In New Britain the women had no children till two or four years after marriage.

The Guaycurus of Brazil were constantly diminishing because the women would bear no children till the age of thirty. Among the Papuans abortion was frequent; “children are burdensome,” said the women; “we are weary of them; we go dead.” Some Maori tribes used herbs or induced artificial malposition of the uterus, to prevent conception.

When abortion failed, infanticide remained. Most nature peoples per- mitted the killing of the newborn child if it was deformed, or diseased, or a bastard, or if its mother had died in giving it birth. As if any reason would be good in the task of limiting population to the available means of subsistence, many tribes killed infants whom they considered to have been born under unlucky circumstances: so the Bondei natives strangled all children who entered the world headfirst; the Kamchadals killed babes born in stormy weather; Madagascar tribes exposed, drowned, or buried alive children who made their debut in March or April, or on a Wednesday or a Friday, or in the last week of the month. If a woman gave birth to twins it was, in some tribes, held proof of adultery, since no man could be the father of two children at the same time; and therefore one or both of the children suffered death. The practice of infanticide was particularly prevalent among nomads, who found children a problem on their long marches. The Bangerang tribe of Victoria killed half their children at birth; the Lenguas of the Paraguayan Chaco allowed only one child per family per seven years to survive; the Abipones achieved a French economy in population by rearing a boy and a girl in each household, killing off other offspring as fast as they appeared. Where famine conditions existed or threatened, most tribes strangled the newborn, and some tribes ate them. Usually it was the girl that was most subject to infanticide; occasionally she was tortured to death with a view to inducing the soul to appear, in its next incarnation, in the form of a boy.” Infanticide was practised without cruelty and without remorse; for in the first moments after delivery, apparently, the mother felt no instinctive love for the child.

Oijce the child had been permitted to live a few days, it was safe against infanticide; soon parental love was evoked by its helpless simplicity, and in most cases it was treated more affectionately by its primitive parents than the average child of the higher races. For lack of milk or soft food the mother nursed the child from two to four years, sometimes for twelve;  one traveler describes a boy who had learned to smoke before he was weaned;” and often a youngster running about with other children would interrupt his play or his work to go and be nursed by his mother.” The Negro mother at work carried her infant on her back, and sometimes fed it by slinging her breasts over her shoulder.  Primitive discipline was indulgent but not ruinous; at an early age the child was left to face for itself the consequences of its stupidity, its insolence, or its pugnacity; and learning went on apace. Filial, as well as parental, love was highly developed in natural society.

Dangers and disease were frequent in primitive childhood, and mortality was high. Youth was brief, for at an early age marital and martial responsibility began, and soon the individual was lost in the heavy tasks of replenishing and defending the group. The women were consumed in caring for children, the men in providing for them. When the youngest child had been reared the parents were worn out; as little space remained for individual life at the end as at the beginning. Individualism, like liberty, is a luxury of civilization. Only with the dawn of history were a sufficient number of men and women freed from the burdens of hunger, reproduction and war to create the intangible values of leisure, culture and art.

This wide divergence of moral codes has led to a view that all morality is relative, that there is no universal (‘normative’) ideal standard which can be used to judge what is better or worse. The morally good is whatever a culture or group decides it is.

It is not necessary for all members of a society to subscribe to the identical morality. However, it is important for all individuals to be aware of any differences in conduct that may exist among various groups. This consensus enables individuals to cope with, not only other individual members of their own society, but also with groups of non-conforming persons beyond their own society.

“We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side; one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach.” Bertrand Russell

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

It as a rule of history that the power of custom varies inversely as the multiplicity of laws, much as the power of instinct varies inversely as the multiplicity of thoughts. Since no society can exist without order, and no order without regulation. Some rules are necessary for the game of life; they may differ in different groups, but within the group they must be essentially the same. These rules may be  A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms, or criteria, often taking the form of a custom. Certain types of rules or customs may become law and regulatory legislation may be introduced to formalize or enforce the convention . In a social context, a convention may retain the character of an “unwritten law” of custom .In physical sciences, numerical values are called conventional if they do not represent a measured property of nature, but originate in a convention. A convention is a selection from among two or more alternatives, where the rule or alternative is agreed upon among participants. Often the word refers to unwritten customs shared throughout a community.

This way the conventions are forms of behaviour found expedient by a people; customs are conventions accepted by successive generations, after natural selection through trial and error and elimination; morals are such customs as the group considers vital to its welfare and development. The first task of those customs that constitute the moral code of a group is to regulate the relations of the sexes, for these are a perennial source of discord, violence, and possible degeneration. The basic form of this sexual regulation is marriage, which may be defined as the association of mates for the care of offspring. It is a variable and fluctuating institution, which has passed through almost every conceivable form and experiment in the course of its history, from the primitive care of offspring without the association of mates to the modern association of mates without the care of offspring.

In primitive societies, where there is no written law, these vital customs or morals regulate every sphere of human existence, and give stability and continuity to the social order. Through the slow magic of time such customs, by long repetition, become a second nature in the individual; if he violates them he feels a certain fear, discomfort or shame; this is the origin of that conscience, or moral sense, which Darwin chose as the most impressive distinction between animals and men.  In its higher development conscience is social consciousness the feeling of the individual that he belongs to a group, and owes it some measure of loyalty and consideration. Morality is the cooperation of the part with the whole, and of each group with some larger whole.

Etymologically ,the word “marriage” derives from Middle English mariage, which first appears in 1250–1300 CE. This in turn is derived from Old French marier (to marry) and ultimately Latinmarītāre meaning to provide with a husband or wife and marītāri meaning to get married. The adjective marīt-us -a, -um meaning matrimonial or nuptial could also be used in the masculine form as a noun for “husband” and in the feminine form for “wife.”^[5] The related word “matrimony” derives from the Old French word matremoine which appears around 1300 CE and ultimately derives from Latin mātrimōnium which combines the two concepts mater meaning “mother” and the suffix -monium signifying “action, state, or condition.”

Anthropologists have proposed several competing definitions of marriage “definitions of marriage have careened from one extreme to another and everywhere in between” “a more or less durable connection between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring.” a relation of one or more men to one or more women that is recognized by custom or law”.

The definition of marriage varies according to different cultures, but it is principally an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually sexual, are acknowledged. When defined broadly, marriage is considered a cultural universal.

Our animal forefathers invented it. Some birds seem to live as reproducing mates in a divorceless monogamy. Among gorillas and orangutans the association of the parents continues to the end of the breeding season, and has many human features. Any approach to loose behaviour on the part of the female is severely punished by the male. The orangs of Borneo, says De Crespigny, “live in families: the male, the female, and a young one”; and Dr. Savage reports of the gorillas that “it is not unusual to see the ‘old folks’ sitting under a tree regaling themselves with fruit and friendly chat, while their children are leaping around them and swinging from branch to branch in boisterous merriment.”  Marriage is older than man.

Societies without marriage are rare, but the sedulous inquirer can find enough of them to form a respectable transition from the promiscuity of the lower mammals to the marriages of primitive men. In Futuna and Hawaii the majority of the people did not marry at all; 4 the Lubus mated freely and indiscriminately, and had no conception of marriage; certain tribes of Borneo lived in marriageless association, freer than the birds; and among some peoples of primitive Russia “the men utilized the women without distinction, so that no woman had her appointed husband.” African pygmies have been described as having no marriage institutions, but as following “their animal instincts wholly without restraint.”  This primitive “nationalization of women,” corresponding to primitive communism in land and food, passed away at so early a stage that few traces of it remain Some memory of it, however, lingered on in divers forms: in the feeling of many nature peoples that monogamy which they would define as the monopoly of a woman by one man is unnatural and immoral;  in periodic festivals of license (still surviving faintly in our Mardi Gras), when sexual restraints were temporarily abandoned; in the demand that a woman should give herself as at the Temple of Mylitta in Babylon to any man that solicited her, before she would be allowed to marry; in the custom of wife-lending, so essential to many primitive codes of hospitality;, or right of the first night, by which, in early feudal Europe, the lord of the manor, perhaps representing the ancient rights of the tribe, occasionally deflowered the bride before the bridegroom was allowed to consummate the marriage.”

A variety of tentative unions gradually took the place of indiscriminate relations. Among the Orang Sakai of Malacca a girl remained for a time with each man of the tribe, passing from one to another until she had made the rounds; then she began again.  Among the Yakuts of Siberia, the Botocudos of South Africa, the lower classes of Tibet, and many other peoples, marriage was quite experimental, and could be ended at the will of either party, with no reasons given or required. Among the Bushmen “any disagreement sufficed to end a union, and new connections could immediately be found for both.” Among the Damaras, according to Sir Francis Galton, “the spouse was changed almost weekly, and I seldom knew without inquiry who the pro tempore husband of each lady was at any particular time.” Among the Baila “women are bandied about from man to man, and of their own accord leave one husband for another. Young women scarcely out of their teens often have had four or five husbands, all still living.”  The original word for marriage, in Hawaii, meant to try. Among the Tahitians, a century ago, unions were free and dissoluble at will, so long as there were no children; if a child came the parents might destroy it without social reproach, or the couple might rear the child and enter into a more permanent relation; the man pledged his support to the woman in return for the burden of parental care that she now assumed.

Marco Polo writes of a Central Asiatic tribe, inhabiting Peyn (now Keriya) in the thirteenth century: “If a married man goes to a distance from home to be absent twenty days, his wife has a right, if she is so inclined, to take another husband; and the men, on the same principle, marry wherever they happen to reside.”  So old are the latest innovations in marriage and morals.

Letourneau said of marriage that “every possible experiment compatible with the duration of savage or barbarian societies has been tried, or is still practised, amongst various races, without the least thought of the moral ideas generally prevailing in Europe.”" In addition to experiments in permanence there were experiments in relationship. In a few cases we find “group marriage,” by which a number of men belonging to one group married collectively a number of women belonging to another group.  In Tibet, for example, it was the custom for a group of brothers to marry a group of sisters, and for the two groups to practise sexual communism between them, each of the men cohabiting with each of the women.  Caesar reported a similar custom in ancient Britain. 18 Survivals of it appear in the “levirate,” a custom existing among the early Jews and other ancient peoples, by which a man was obligated to marry his brother’s widow; 10 this was the rule that so irked Onan.

What was it that led men to replace the semi-promiscuity of primitive society with individual marriage? Since, in a great majority of nature peoples, there are few, if any, restraints on premarital relations, it is obvious that physical desire does not give rise to the institution of marriage. For marriage, with its restrictions and psychological irritations, could not possibly compete with sexual communism as a mode of satisfying the erotic propensities of men. Nor could the individual establishment offer at the outset any mode of rearing children that would be obviously superior to their rearing by the mother, her family, and the clan. Sonic powerful economic motives must have favored the evolution of marriage. In all probability (for again we must remind ourselves how little we really know of origins) these motives were connected with the rising institution of property.

Individual marriage came through the desire of the male to have cheap slaves, and to avoid bequeathing his property to other men’s children. Polygamy, or the marriage of one person to several mates, appears here and there in the form of polyandry the marriage of one woman to several men as among the Todas and some tribes of Tibet;” the custom may still be found where males outnumber females considerably. But this custom soon falls prey to the conquering male, and polygamy has come to mean for us, usually, what would more strictly be called polygyny the possession of several wives by one man. Medieval theologians thought that Mohammed had invented polygamy, but it antedated Islam by some years, being the prevailing mode of marriage in the primitive world.  Many causes conspired to make it general. In early society, because of hunting and war, the life of the male is more violent and dangerous, and the death rate of men is higher, than that of women. The consequent excess of women compels a choice between polygamy and the barren celibacy of a minority of women; but such celibacy is intolerable to peoples who require a high birth rate to make up for a high death rate, and who therefore scorn the mateless and childless woman. Again, men like variety; as the Negroes of Angola expressed it, they were “not able to eat always of the same dish.” Also, men like youth in their mates, and women age rapidly in primitive communities. The women themselves often favoured polygamy; it permitted them to nurse their children longer, and therefore to reduce the frequency of motherhood without interfering with the erotic and philo-progenitive inclinations of the male. Sometimes the first wife,burdened with toil, helped her husband to secure an additional wife, so that her burden might be shared, and additional children might raise the productive power and the wealth of the family.  Children were economic assets, and men invested in wives in order to draw children from them like interest. In the patriarchal system wives and children were in effect the slaves of the man; the more a man had of them, the richer he was. The poor man practised monogamy, but he looked upon it as a shameful condition, from which some day he would rise to the respected position of a polygamous male.”

Doubtless polygamy was well adapted to the marital needs of a primitive society in which women outnumbered men. It had a eugenic value superior to that of contemporary monogamy; for whereas in modern society the most able and prudent men marry latest and have least children, under polygamy the most able men, presumably, secured the best? mates and had most children. Hence polygamy has survived among practically all nature peoples, even among the majority of civilized mankind; only in our day has it begun to die in the Orient. Certain conditions, however, militated against it. The decrease in danger and violence, consequent upon a settled agricultural life, brought the sexes towards an approximate numerical equality; and under these circumstances open polygamy, even in primitive societies, became the privilege of the prosperous minority .  The mass of the people practised a monogamy tempered with adultery, while another minority, of willing or regretful celibates, balanced the polygamy of the rich. Jealousy in the male, and possessiveness in the female, entered into the situation more effectively as the sexes approximated in number; for where the strong could not have a multiplicity of wives except by taking the actual or potential wives of other men,and by (in some cases) offending their own, polygamy became a difficult matter, which only the cleverest could manage. As property accumulated, and men were loath to scatter it in small bequests, it became desirable to differentiate wives into “chief wife” and concubines, so that only the children of the former should share the legacy; this remained the status of marriage in Asia until our own generation. Gradually the chief wife became the only wife, the concubines became kept women in secret and apart, or they disappeared; and as Christianity entered upon the scene, monogamy, in Europe, took the place of polygamy as the lawful and outward form of sexual association. But monogamy, like letters and the state, is artificial, and belongs to the history, not to the origins, of civilization.

Whatever form the union might take, marriage was obligatory among nearly all primitive peoples. The unmarried male had no standing in the community, or was considered only half a man. 83 Exogamy, too, was compulsory: that is to say, a man was expected to secure his wife from another clan than his own. Whether this custom arose because the primitive mind suspected the evil effects of close inbreeding, or because such intergroup marriages created or cemented useful political alliances, promoted social organization, and lessened the danger of war, or because the capture of a wife from another tribe had become a fashionable mark of male maturity, or because familiarity breeds contempt and distance lends enchantment to the view we do not know. In any case the restriction was well-nigh universal in early society; and though it was successfully violated by the Pharaohs, the Ptolemies and the Incas, who all favoured the marriage of brother and sister, it survived into Roman and modern law and consciously or unconsciously moulds our behaviour to this day.

How did the male secure his wife from another tribe? Where the matriarchal organization was strong he was often required to go and live with the clan of the girl whom he sought. As the patriarchal system developed, the suitor was allowed, after a term of service to the father, to take his bride back to his own clan; so Jacob served Laban for Leah and Rachel. Sometimes the suitor shortened the matter with plain, blunt force. It was an advantage as well as a distinction to have stolen a wife; not only would she be a cheap slave, but new slaves could be begotten of her, and these children would chain her to her slavery. Such marriage by capture, though not the rule, occurred sporadically in the primitive world. Among the North American Indians the women were included in the spoils of war, and this happened so frequently that in some tribes the husbands and their wives spoke mutually unintelligible languages. The Slavs of Russia and Serbia practised occasional marriage by capture until the last century. (Briffault thinks that marriage by capture was a transition from matrilocal to patriarchal marriage: the male, refusing to go and live with the tribe or family of his wife, forced her to come to his.”  Lippert believed that exogamy arose as a peaceable substitute for capture; theft again graduated into trade.) Vestiges of it remain in the custom of simulating the capture of the bride by the groom in certain wedding ceremonies.” All in all it was a logical aspect of the almost incessant war of the tribes, and a logical starting-point for that eternal war of the sexes whose only truces are brief nocturnes and dreamless sleep.

As wealth grew it became more convenient to offer the father a substantial present or a sum of money for his daughter, rather than serve for her in an alien clan, or risk the violence and feuds that might come of marriage by capture. Consequently marriage by purchase and parental arrangement was the rule in early societies.  Transition forms occur; the Melanesians sometimes stole their wives, but made the theft legal by a later payment to her family. Among some natives of New Guinea the man abducted the girl, and then, while he and she were in hiding, commissioned his friends to bargain with her father over a purchase price. The ease with which moral indignation in these matters might be financially appeased is illuminating. A Maori mother, wailing loudly, bitterly cursed the youth who had eloped with her daughter, until he presented her with a blanket.

“That was all I wanted,” she said; “I only wanted to get a blanket, and therefore made this noise.”  Usually the bride cost more than a blanket: among the Hottentots her price was an ox or a cow; among the Croo three cows and a sheep; among the Kaffirs six to thirty head of cattle, depending upon the rank of the girl’s family; and among the Togos sixteen dollars cash and six dollars in goods.

Marriage by purchase prevails throughout primitive Africa, and is still a normal institution in China and Japan; it flourished in ancient India and Judea, and in pre-Columbian Central America and Peru; instances of it occur in Europe today.” It is a natural development of patriarchal institutions; the father owns the daughter, and may dispose of her, within broad limits, as he sees fit. The Orinoco Indians expressed the matter by saying that the suitor should pay the father for rearing the girl for his use.” Sometimes the girl was exhibited to potential suitors in a bride-show; so among the Somalis the bride, richly caparisoned, was led about on horseback or on foot, in an atmosphere heavily perfumed to stir the suitors to a handsome price.  There is no record of women objecting to marriage by purchase; on the contrary, they took keen pride in the sums paid for them, and scorned the woman who gave herself in marriage without a price;  they believed that in a “love-match” the villainous male was getting too much for nothing.  On the other hand, it was usual for the father to acknowledge the bride- groom’s payment with a return gift which, as time went on, approximated more and more in value to the sum offered for the bride.  Rich fathers, anxious to smooth the way for their daughters, gradually enlarged these gifts until the institution of the dowry took form; and the purchase of the husband by the father replaced, or accompanied, the purchase of the wife by the suitor.

In all these forms and varieties of marriage there is hardly a trace of romantic love. We find a few cases of love-marriages among the Papuans of New Guinea; among other primitive peoples we come upon instances of love (in the sense of mutual devotion rather than mutual need), but usually these attachments have nothing to do with marriage. In simple days men married for cheap labour, profitable parentage, and regular meals. “In Yariba,” says Lander, “marriage is celebrated by the natives as unconcernedly as possible; a man thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn affection is altogether out of the question.”  Since premarital relations are abundant in primitive society, passion is not dammed up by denial, and seldom affects the choice of a wife. For the same reason the absence of delay between desire and fulfilment no time is given for that brooding introversion of frustrated, and therefore idealizing, passion which is usually the source of youthful romantic love. Such love is reserved for developed civilizations, in which morals have raised barriers against desire, and the growth of wealth has enabled some men to afford, and some women to provide, the luxuries and delicacies of romance; primitive peoples are too poor to be romantic. One rarely finds love poetry in their songs. When the missionaries ‘translated the Bible into the language of the Algonquins they could discover no native equivalent for the word love. The Hotten-tots are described as “cold and indifferent to one another” in marriage. On the Gold Coast “not even the appearance of affection exists between husband and wife”; and it is the same in primitive Australia. “I asked Baba,” said Caillie, speaking of a Senegal Negro, “why he did not some- times make merry with his wives. He replied that if he did he should not be able to manage them.” An Australian native, asked why he wished to marry, answered honestly that he wanted a wife to secure food, water and wood for him, and to carry his belongings on the march. The kiss, which seems so indispensable to America, is quite unknown to primitive peoples, or known only to be scorned.

In general the “savage” takes his sex philosophically, with hardly more of metaphysical or theological misgiving than the animal; he does not brood over it, or fly into a passion with it; it is as much a matter of course with him as his food. He makes no pretense to idealistic motives. Marriage is never a sacrament with him, and seldom an affair of lavish ceremony; it is frankly a commercial transaction. It never occurs to him to be ashamed that he subordinates emotional to practical considerations in choosing his mate; he would rather be ashamed of the opposite, and would demand of us, if he were as immodest as we are, some explanation of our custom of binding a man and a woman together almost for life because sexual desire has chained them for a moment with its lightning. The primitive male looked upon marriage in terms not of sexual license but of economic cooperation. He expected the woman and the woman expected herself to be not so much gracious and beautiful (though he appreciated these qualities in her) as useful and industrious; she was to be an economic asset rather than a total loss; otherwise the matter-of-fact “savage” would never have thought of marriage at all. Marriage was a profitable partnership, not a private debauch; it was a way whereby a man and a woman, working together, might be more prosperous than if each worked alone. Wherever, in the history of civilization, woman has ceased to be an economic asset in marriage, marriage has decayed; and sometimes civilization has decayed with it.

REFERANCES

BRIFFAULT, ROBERT: The Mothers. 3V. New York, 1927.

DARWIN, CHARLES: Descent of Man. New York, A. L. Burt, no date.

ELLIS, HAVELOCK: Studies in the Psychology of Sex. 6v. Philadelphia, 1910-

HAYES, E. C.: Introduction to the Study of Sociology. New York, 1918.

LETOURNEAU, C. F.: Evolution of Marriage and the Family. New York, 1891

LIPPERT, JULIUS: Evolution of Culture. New York, 1931.

LowiE,R. H.: Are We Civilized? New York, 1929.

LUBBOCK, SIR JOHN: The Origin of Civilization. London, 1912.

MULLER-LYER,F.: Evolution of Modern Marriage. New York, 1930.

MULLER-LYER,F.: History of Social Development. New York, 1921.

MULLER-LYER,F.: History of Social Development. New York, 1921.

MULLKR-LYER,F.: The Family. New York, 1931.

POLO, MARCO: Travels, ed. Manuel Komroff. New York, 1926.

RATZEL, F.: History of Mankind. 2v. London, 1896.

SPENCER, HERBERT: Principles of Sociology. 3V. New York, 1910.

SPENCER, HERBERT: Principles of Sociology. 3V. New York, 1910.

SUMNER, W. G. and KELLER, A. G.: Science of Society. 3V. New Haven, 1928.

THOMAS, W.I. : Source Book for Social Origins. Boston, 1909.WESTERMARCK, E.: History of Human Marriage. 2V. London, 1921.

WILL DURANT. : Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster. New York, 1954

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

“Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.”― Albert Einstein(On the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s 70th birthday.)

Picture the ugliest, slightest, weakest man in Asia, with face and flesh of bronze, close-cropped gray head, high cheek-bones, kindly little brown eyes, a large and almost toothless mouth, larger cars, an enormous nose, thin arms and legs, clad in a loin cloth, standing before an English judge in India, on trial for preaching “non-cooperation” to his countrymen. Or picture him seated on a small carpet in a bare room at his Satyagrahashram, School of Truth-Seekers at Ahmedabad: his bony legs crossed under him in yogi fashion, soles upward, his hands busy at a spinning-wheel, his face lined with responsibility, his mind active with ready answers to every questioner of freedom. From 1920 to 1935 this naked weaver was both the spiritual and the political leader of 320,000,000 Indians. When he appeared in public, crowds gathered round him to touch his clothing or to kiss his feet.

Four hours a day he spun the coarse khaddar, hoping by his example to persuade his countrymen to use this simple homespun instead of buying the product of those British looms that had ruined the textile industry of India. His only possessions were three rough cloths two as his ward- robe and one as his bed. Once a rich lawyer, he had given all his property to the poor, and his wife, after some matronly hesitation, had followed his example. He slept on the bare floor, or on the earth. He lived on nuts, plantains, lemons, oranges, dates, rice, and goat’s milk;” often for months together he took nothing but milk and fruit; once in his life he tasted meat; occasionally he ate nothing for weeks. “I can as well do without my eyes as without fasts. What the eyes are for the outer world, fasts are for the inner.”  As the blood thins, he felt, the mind clears, irrelevancies fall away, and fundamental things sometimes the very Soul of the World rise out of Maya like Everest through the clouds.

At the same time that he fasted to see divinity he kept one toe on the earth, and advised his followers to take an enema daily when they fasted, lest they be poisoned with the acid products of the body’s self- consumption just as they might be finding God.  When the Moslems and the Hindus killed one another in theological enthusiasm, and paid no heed to his pleas for peace, he went without food for three weeks to move them. He became so weak and frail through fasts and privations that when he addressed the great audiences that gathered to hear him, he spoke to them from an uplifted chair. He carried his asceticism into the field of sex, and wished, like Tolstoi, to limit all physical intercourse to deliberate reproduction. He too, in his youth, had indulged the flesh too much, and the news of his father’s death had surprised him in the arms of love. Now he returned with passionate remorse to the Erahmacharia that had been preached to him in his boyhood absolute abstention from all sensual desire. He persuaded his wife to live with him only as sister with brother; and “from that time,” he tells us, “all dissension ceased.”" When he realized that India’s basic need was birth-control, he adopted not the methods of the West, but the theories of Malthus and Tolstoi. Is it right for us, who know the situation, to bring forth children? We only multiply slaves and weaklings if we continue the process of procreation whilst we feel and remain helpless. . . . Not till India has become a free nation . . . have we the right to bring forth progeny. … I have not a shadow of doubt that married people, if they wish well to the country and want to see India become a nation of strong and handsome, well-formed men and women, would practice self-restraint and cease to procreate for the time being.”

Added to these elements in his character were qualities strangely like those that, we are told, distinguished the Founder of Christianity. He did not mouth the name of Christ, but he acted as if he accepted every word of the Sermon on the Mount. Not since St. Francis of Assisi has any life known to history been so marked by gentleness, disinterestedness, simplicity, and forgiveness of enemies. It was to the credit of his opponents, but still more to his own, that his undiscourageable courtesy to them won a fine courtesy from them in return; the Government sent him to jail with profuse apologies. He never showed rancor or resentment. Thrice he was attacked by mobs, and beaten almost to death; not once did he retaliate; and when one of his assailants was arrested he refused to enter a charge. Shortly after the worst of all riots between Moslems and Hindus, when the Moplah Mohammedans butchered hundreds of unarmed Hindus and offered their prepuces as a covenant to Allah, these same Moslems were stricken with famine; Gandhi collected funds for them from all India, and, with no regard for the best precedents, forwarded every anna,without deduction for “overhead,” to the starving enemy.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869. Gandhi was the youngest child of his father’s fourth wife. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, who was the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in Gujarat in western India under British suzerainty, did not have much in the way of a formal education. He was, however, an able administrator who knew how to steer his way between the capricious princes, their long-suffering subjects, and the headstrong British political officers in power.Gandhi’s mother, Putlibai, was completely absorbed in religion, did not care much for finery and jewelry, divided her time between her home and the temple, fasted frequently, and wore herself out in days and nights of nursing whenever there was sickness in the family His family be- longed to the Vaisya caste, and to the Jain sect, and practised the ahimsa principle of never injuring a living thing. His father was a capable administrator but an heretical financier; he lost place after place through honesty, gave nearly all his wealth to charity, and left the rest to his family.”

At eight he was engaged, and at twelve he was married, to Kasturbai, who remained loyal to him through all his adventures, riches, poverty, imprisonments, and Brahmacharia. The educational facilities at Porbandar were rudimentary; in the primary school that Mohandas attended, the children wrote the alphabet in the dust with their fingers. Though he occasionally won prizes and scholarships at the local schools, his record was on the whole mediocre. One of the terminal reports rated him as “good at English, fair in Arithmetic and weak in Geography; conduct very good, bad handwriting. He shone neither in the classroom nor on the playing field. He loved to go out on long solitary walks when he was not nursing his by now ailing father or helping his mother with her household chores.

He had learned, in his words, “to carry out the orders of the elders, not to scan them.” With such extreme passivity, it is not surprising that he should have gone through a phase of adolescent rebellion, marked by secret atheism, petty thefts, furtive smoking, and—most shocking of all for a boy born in a Vaishnava family—meat eating. His adolescence was probably no stormier than that of most children of his age and class. What was extraordinary was the way his youthful transgressions ended.

“Never again” was his promise to himself after each escapade. And he kept his promise In 1887 Mohandas scraped through the matriculation examination of the University of Bombay and joined Samaldas College in  Bhaunagar. As he had suddenly to switch from his native language—Gujarati—to English, he found it rather difficult to follow the lectures. In order to keep up the family tradition of holding high office in one of the states in Gujarat, he would have to qualify as a barrister. This meant a visit to England. His youthful imagination conceived England as “a land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization. One of his brothers raised the necessary money, and his mother’s doubts were allayed when he took a vow that, while away from home, he would not touch wine, women, or meat. Mohandas sailed in September 1888. Ten days after his arrival, he joined the inner Temple one of the four London law colleges.

In his first year there he read eighty books on Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount “went straight to my heart on the first reading.” He took the counsel to return good for evil, and to love even one’s enemies, as the highest expression of all human idealism; and he resolved rather to fail with these than to succeed without them. Gandhi took his studies seriously and tried to brush up on his English and Latin by taking the London University matriculation examination. But, during the three years he spent in England, his main preoccupation was with personal and moral issues rather than with academic ambitions.  As he struggled painfully to adapt himself to Western food, dress, and etiquette, he felt awkward. His vegetarianism became a continual source of embarrassment to him; his friends warned him that it would wreck his studies as well as his health. The zeal he developed for vegetarianism helped to draw the pitifully shy youth out of his shell and gave him a new poise. He became a member of the executive committee of the London Vegetarian Society, attending its conferences and contributing articles to its journal.

Painful surprises were in store for Gandhi when he returned to India in July 1891. His mother had died in his absence, and he discovered to his dismay that the barrister’s degree was not a guarantee of a lucrative career. The legal profession was already beginning to be overcrowded, and Gandhi was much too diffident to elbow his way into it.  He practised law for a time in Bombay, refusing to prosecute for debt, and always reserving the right to abandon a case which he had come to think unjust. One case led him to South Africa; there he found his fellow-Hindus so maltreated that he forgot to return to India, but gave himself completely, without remuneration, to the cause of removing the disabilities of his countrymen in Africa. For twenty years he fought this issue out until the Government yielded. Only then did he return home.

Africa was to present to Gandhi challenges and opportunities that he could hardly have conceived. In a Durban court, he was asked by the European magistrate to take off his turban; he refused and left the courtroom. A few days later, while travelling to Pretoria, he was unceremoniously thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and left shivering and brooding at Pietermaritzburg Station; in the further course of the journey he was beaten up by the white driver of a stagecoach because he would not travel on the footboard to make room for a European passenger; and finally he was barred from hotels reserved “for Europeans only.” These humiliations were the daily lot Indtraders and labourers in Natal . While in Pretoria, Gandhi studied the conditions in which his countrymen lived and tried to educate them on their rights and duties, but he had no intention of staying on in South Africa. Indeed, in June 1894, as his year’s contract drew to a close, he was back in Durban, ready to sail for India. At a farewell party given in his honour he happened to glance through the Natal Mercury and learned that the Natal Legislative Assembly was considering a bill to deprive Indians of the right to vote. “This is the first nail in our coffin,” Gandhi told his hosts. They professed their inability to oppose the bill, and indeed their ignorance of the politics of the colony, and begged him to take up the fight on their behalf.

He drafted petitions to the Natal legislature and the British government and had them signed by hundreds of his compatriots. He could not prevent the passage of the bill but succeeded in drawing the attention of the public and the press in Natal, India, and England to the Natal Indians’ grievances. He flooded the government, the legislature, and the press with closely reasoned statements of Indian grievances. Finally, he exposed to the view of the outside world the skeleton in the imperial cupboard, the discrimination practiced against the Indian subjects of Queen Victoria in one of her own colonies in Africa. It was a measure of his success as a publicist that such important newspapers as The Times of London and the Statesman and Englishman of Calcutta editorially commented on the Natal Indians’ grievances.

Gandhi was not the man to nurse a grudge. On the outbreak of the South African (Boer) War in 1899, he argued that the Indians, who claimed the full rights of citizenship in the British crown colony of Natal, were in duty bound to defend it. He raised an ambulance corps of 1,100 volunteers, out of whom 300 were free Indians and the rest indentured labourers. It was a motley crowd: barristers and accountants, artisans and labourers.

The British victory in the war brought little relief to the Indians in South Africa. In 1906 theTransvaal government published a particularly humiliating ordinance for the registration of its Indian population. The Indians held a mass protest meeting at Johannesburg in September 1906 and, under Gandhi’s leadership, took a pledge to defy the ordinance if it became law in the teeth of their opposition, and to suffer all the penalties resulting from their defiance. Thus was born satyagraha (“devotion to truth”), a new technique for redressing wrongs through inviting, rather than inflicting, suffering, for resisting the adversary without rancour and fighting him without violence.

The struggle in South Africa lasted for more than seven years. It had its ups and downs, but under Gandhi’s leadership, the small Indian minority kept up its resistance against heavy odds. In the final phase of the movement in 1913, hundreds of Indians, including women, went to jail, and thousands of Indian workers who had struck work in the mines bravely faced imprisonment, flogging, and even shooting. It was a terrible ordeal for the Indians, but it was also the worst possible advertisement for the South African government, which, under pressure from the governments of Britain and India, accepted a compromise negotiated by Gandhi.

Traveling through India he realized for the first time the complete destitution of his people. He was horrified by the skeletons whom he saw toiling in the fields, and the lowly Outcastes who did the menial work of the towns. It seemed to him that the discriminations against his countrymen abroad were merely one consequence of their poverty and subjection at home. Nevertheless he supported England loyally in the War; he even advocated the enlistment of Hindus who did not accept the principle of non-violence. He did not, at that time, agree with those who called for independence; he believed that British misgovernment in India was an exception, and that British government in general was good; that British government in India was bad just because it violated all the principles of British government at home; and that if the English people could be made to understand the case of the Hindus, it would soon accept them in full brotherhood into a commonwealth of free dominions.  He trusted that when the War was over, and Britain counted India’s sacrifice for the Empire in men and wealth, it would no longer hesitate to give her liberty.

But at the close of the War the agitation for Home Rule was met by the Rowland Acts, which put an end to freedom of speech and press; by the establishment of the impotent legislature of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms; and finally by the slaughter at Amritsar. Gandhi was shocked into decisive action. He returned to the Viceroy the decorations which he had received at various times from British governments; and he issued to India a call for active civil disobedience against the Government of India. The people responded not with peaceful resistance, as he had asked, but with bloodshed and violence; in Bombay, for example, they killed fifty-three unsympathetic Parsees. 81 Gandhi, vowed to ahimsa, sent out a second message, in which he called upon the people to postpone the campaign of civil disobedience, on the ground that it was degenerating into mob rule. Seldom in history had a man shown more courage in acting on principle, scorning expediency and popularity. The nation was astonished at his decision; it had supposed itself near to success, and it did not agree with Gandhi that the means might be as important as the end. The reputation of the Mahatma sank to the lowest ebb.

It was just at this point (in March, 1922) that the Government determined upon his arrest. He made no resistance, declined to engage a lawyer, and offered no defence. When the Prosecutor charged him with being responsible, through his publications, for the violence that had marked the outbreak of 1921, Gandhi replied in terms that lifted him at once to nobility.

I wish to endorse all the blame that the learned Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulder in connection with the incidents in Bombay, Madras, and Chauri Chaura. Thinking over these deeply, and sleeping over them night after night, it is impossible for me to dissociate myself from these diabolical crimes. . . . The learned Advocate-General is quite right when he says that as a man of responsibility, a man having received a fair share of education, . . . I should have known the consequences of every one of my acts. I knew that I was playing with fire, I ran the risk, and if I was set free I would still do the same. I felt this morning that I would have failed in my duty if I did not say what I say here just now.

I wanted to avoid violence. I want to avoid violence. Non- violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done an irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it, and I am therefore here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act. I am here, therefore, to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. “

The Judge expressed his profound regret that he had to send to jail one whom millions of his countrymen considered “a great patriot and a great leader”; he admitted that even those who differed from Gandhi looked upon him “as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life.” He sentenced him to prison for six years.

Gandhi was put under solitary confinement, but he did not complain. “I do not see any of the other prisoners,” he wrote, “though I really do not see how my society could do them any harm.” But “I feel happy. My nature likes loneliness. I love quietness. And now I have opportunity to engage in studies that I had to neglect in the outside world.”  He instructed himself sedulously in the writings of Bacon, Carlyle, Ruskin, Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoi, and solaced long hours with Ben Jonson and Walter Scott. He read and re-read the Bhagavad-Gita. He studied Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu so that he might be able not only to write for scholars but to speak to the multitude. He drew up a detailed schedule of studies for the six years of his imprisonment, and pursued it faithfully till accident intervened. “I used to sit down to my books with the delight of a young man of twenty-four, and forgetting my four-and-fifty years and my poor health.”

Appendicitis secured his release, and Occidental medicine, which he had often denounced, secured his recovery. A vast crowd gathered at the prison gates to greet him on his exit, and many kissed his coarse garment as he passed. But he shunned politics and the public eye, pled his weakness and illness, and retired to his school at Ahmedabad, where he lived for many years in quiet isolation with his students. From that re- treat, however, he sent forth weekly, through his mouthpiece Young India, editorials expounding his philosophy of revolution and life. He begged his followers to shun violence, not only because it would be suicidal, since India had no guns, but because it would only replace one despotism with another. “History,” he told them, “teaches one that those who have, no doubt with honest motives, ousted the greedy by using brute force against them, have in their turn become a prey to the disease of the conquered. . . . My interest in India’s freedom will cease if she adopts violent means. For their fruit will be not freedom, but slavery.”

As part of his nonviolent non-cooperation campaign for home rule, Gandhi stressed the importance of economic independence for India. He particularly advocated the manufacture of khaddar, or homespun cloth, in order to replace imported textiles from Britain. Gandhi’s eloquence and embrace of an ascetic lifestyle based on prayer, fasting and meditation earned him the reverence of his followers, who called him Mahatma (Sanskrit for “the great-souled one”). Invested with all the authority of the Indian National Congress (INC or Congress Party), Gandhi turned the independence movement into a massive organization, leading boycotts of British manufacturers and institutions representing British influence in India, including legislatures and schools.

The second element in his creed was the resolute rejection of modern industry, and a Rousseauian call for a return to the simple life of agriculture and domestic industry in the village. The confinement of men and women in factories, making with machines owned by others fractions of articles whose finished form they will never see, seemed to Gandhi a roundabout way of burying humanity under a pyramid of shoddy goods. Most machine products, he thought, are unnecessary; the labor saved in using them is consumed in making and repairing them; or if labor is really saved it is of no benefit to labor, but only to capital; labor is thrown by its own productivity into a panic of “technological unemployment.” So he renewed the Swadeshi movement announced in 1905 by Tilak; self-production was to be added to Swaraj, self-rule. Gandhi made the use of the charka, or spinning-wheel, a test of loyal adherence to the Nationalist movement; he asked that every Hindu, even the richest, should wear homespun, and boycott the alien and mechanical textiles of Britain, so that the homes of India might hum once more, through the dull winter, with the sound of the spinning-wheel.

The response was not universal; it is difficult to stop history in its course. But India tried. Hindu students everywhere dressed in khaddar; highborn ladies abandoned their Japanese silk sans for coarse cloths woven by themselves; prostitutes in brothels and convicts in prison began to spin; and in many cities great Feasts of the Vanities were arranged, as in Savonarola’s day, at which wealthy Hindus and merchants brought from their homes and warehouses all their imported cloth, and flung it into the fire. In one day at Bombay. alone, 150,000 pieces were consumed by the flames.

The movement away from industry failed, but it gave India for a decade a symbol of revolt, and helped to polarize her mute millions into a new unity of political consciousness. India doubted the means, but honoured the purpose; and though it questioned Gandhi the statesman, it took to its heart Gandhi the saint, and for a moment became one in reverencing him. It was as Tagore said of him:

He stopped at the thresholds of the huts of the thousands of dispossessed, dressed like one of their own. He spoke to them in their own language. Here was living truth at last, and not only quotations from books. For this reason the Mahatma, the name given to him by the people of India, is his real name. Who else has felt like him that all Indians are his own flesh and blood? . . . When love came to the door of India that door was opened wide. … At Gandhi’s call India blossomed forth to new greatness, just as once before, in earlier times, when Buddha proclaimed the truth of fellow-feeling and compassion among all living creatures.  It was Gandhi’s task to unify India; and he accomplished it. Other tasks await other men.

In 1934, Gandhi announced his retirement from politics in, as well as his resignation from the Congress Party, in order to concentrate his efforts on working within rural communities. Drawn back into the political fray by the outbreak of second world war , Gandhi again took control of the INC, demanding a British withdrawal from India in return for Indian cooperation with the war effort. Instead, British forces imprisoned the entire Congress leadership, bringing Anglo-Indian relations to a new low point.

A new chapter in Indo-British relations opened with the victory of the Labour Party in 1945. During the next two years, there were prolonged triangular negotiations between leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League under M.A. Jinnah and the British government culminating in the Mountbatten Plan of June 3, 1947, and the formation of the two new dominions of India and Pakistan in mid-August 1947.

It was one of the greatest disappointments of Gandhi’s life that Indian freedom was realized without Indian unity. Muslim separatism had received a great boost while Gandhi and his colleagues were in jail, and in 1946–47, as the final constitutional arrangements were being negotiated, the outbreak of communal riots between Hindus and Muslims unhappily created a climate in which Gandhi’s appeals to reason and justice, tolerance and trust had little chance. ). Later that year, Britain granted India its independence but split the country into two dominions: India and Pakistan. Gandhi strongly opposed Partition, but he agreed to it in hopes that after independence Hindus and Muslims could achieve peace internally. Amid the massive riots that followed Partition, Gandhi urged Hindus and Muslims to live peacefully together.

In January 1948, Gandhi carried out yet another fast, this time to bring about peace in the city of Delhi. On January 30, 12 days after that fast ended, When partition of the subcontinent was accepted—against his advice—he threw himself heart and soul into the task of healing the scars of the communal conflict, toured the riot-torn areas in Bengal and Bihar, admonished the bigots, consoled the victims, and tried to rehabilitate the refugees. When persuasion failed, he went on a fast. He won at least two spectacular triumphs; in September 1947 his fasting stopped the rioting in Calcutta, and in January 1948, he shamed the city of Delhi into a communal truce. A few days later, on January 30, while he was on his way to his evening prayer meeting in Delhi, he was shot down by Nathuram Godse, a young Hindu fanatic. Godse approached Gandhi on 30 January 1948 during the evening prayer at 5:17 pm. When Godse bowed, one of the girls flanking and supporting Gandhi, Abha Chattopadhyay, said to Godse, “Brother, Bapu is already late” and tried to put him off, but he pushed her aside and shot Gandhi in the chest three times at point-blank range with a Beretta M 1934 semi-automatic pistol chambered in .380 ACP bearing the serial number 606824. Gandhi died a couple of hours later. Godse himself shouted “police” and surrendered himself.

During the subsequent trial, and in various witness accounts and books written thence, the reasons cited for carrying out the assassination were –

Godse felt that it was Gandhi’s fast (announced in the second week of January) which had forced the cabinet to reverse its earlier recent decision not to give the cash balance of Rs. 55 crores to Pakistan on 13 January 1948. (The Government of India had already given Pakistan the first instalment of Rs. 20 crores as per their agreement to give Pakistan Rs. 75 crores in the division of balance money upon partition. However, in January 1948, the cabinet of Indian government decided to withhold the second instalment after self-styled liberators from Pakistan invaded Kashmir with covert support from the Pakistani army^[. Godse, Apte and their friends felt that this was appeasing Pakistani Muslims at the expense of Hindus in India. This decision of Gandhi and Nehru had also caused Vallabhbhai Patel to submit his resignation. Interestingly, Gandhi’s fast was for the restoration of Hindu-Muslim peace and continued for three days after the cabinet announced its decision to give the money to Pakistan. It is possible that Godse may not have known of this, however this cannot be said for certain.

Godse felt that the sad situation and suffering caused during and due to the partition could have been avoided if the Indian government had lodged strong protests against the treatment meted out to the Minorities (Hindus and Sikhs) in Pakistan. However, being “under the thumb of Gandhi” they resorted to more feeble ways. He also felt that Gandhi had not protested against these atrocities being suffered in Pakistan and instead resorted to fasts. In his court deposition, Godse said, “I thought to myself and foresaw I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred … if I were to kill Gandhiji. But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces.”

In Godse’s own words during his final deposition in the court during the trial, ‘”…it was not so much the Gandhian Ahimsa teachings that were opposed to by me and my group, but Gandhiji, while advocating his views, always showed or evinced a bias for Muslims, prejudicial and detrimental to the Hindu Community and its interests. I have fully described my Point of view hereafter in detail and have quoted numerous instances, which unmistakably establish how Gandhiji became responsible for a number of calamities which the Hindu Community had to suffer and undergo”

The next day, roughly 1 million people followed the procession as Gandhi’s body was carried in state through the streets of the city and cremated on the banks of the holy Jumna River.

Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.

Mahatma Gandhi