Review and Notices India

Abstract

\Vritten in the characteristic Pannikar style, this book provides a competent historian's view of the foundations of modern India. Panikkar lays special emphasis on the fundamental social revolution which has been at work in India since freedom and although he poses at the end of his book the problem of how durable the changes now taking place in India could be, from the account given by him, one feels almost certain of the victory of the forces of change ·against the forces of stagnation. His view of what India stands for today is summed up in one profound sentence : "The birth of a new civilization, an attempted synthesis of the East and the 'Vest, a co-mingling of the two producing a new way of life with a distinct individuality, this is what India today stands for. While retaining its Indian character and strengthening its spiritual foundations, New India has sought to assimilate the social purposes, the political conceptions and the economic organisation of the West.u The danger that Panikkar sees to this is from "the traditional forces dawning the raiments of progress assuming control and changing the direction of growth." The whole Panikkar thesis is challengeable because it is build on the familiar Western conception of a struggle between the modernising and the traditional elites in India. These conceptions may well meet with the view in the light of some hard facts by both Indian and Western scholars. How far is the modernist elite of India capable of modernising it in merely Western terms is the question. Modernisation is not Westernisation though in most references today there is a tendency to identify the two terms. It is possible, that the task of modernisation in India will be· undertaken by an entirely different kind of elite which is neither the \Vesternised nor the traditional elite. In fact, the difference between the traditional and the Westernised elite may well have been exaggerated. The -change-over from the traditional to the modern elite was effected without much of a change in the status hierarchy of Indian society. In that sense, the revolu-