I’ve received countless letters from Indian expats and residents. Most of them have been similar in temperament to yours in that they highlight the ancient glories of India as a way of pointing towards the future.
That may be so, but in a former life I was an asset manager and one key principle we learned was ‘past performance is no guarantee of future results.’
Just look at America! What began as an auspicious experiment in Enlightenment Political Theory, progressed , after our Civil War and Progressive Era to the Vanguard of the West is now sinking under the combined weight of greed and anti-intellectualism run amok. We, like you, cannot rest on our laurels. When we do, we betray our fundamental principles.
But, I should really, rather respond to your specific arguments, or historical anecdotes, such as they are:
a.) Sanskrit, while an amazing language and one that has facilitated a great many intellectual awakenings in the East and West, is not the Indo-European mother tongue. As you and I both know, the Aryans who invaded Hindustan around 2,000BCE brought with them a proto-Sanskrit closely related to Avestan and the Anatolian ancestral tongues.
b.) I was unaware of the university at Takshila, but this doesn’t surprise me. India has a very long and distinguished history of learning.
c.) Aryuveda: yes, indeed. India has given much to the world and the West ignores its gifts mostly due to ignorance and arrogance.
d.) Columbus and the wealth of the Indies: this is indisputable, if largely forgotten in the West as well. Columbus believed the earth was a globe–another idea I believe that has its genesis in a fusion of Greek and Indian knowledge–and sailed West in the (false) belief that he would reach India.
e.) Higher Math, Algebra and Zero: Zero, as a concept came from India and it was a concept the West resisted for centuries. The higher math examples you offer I can’t speak to, as I am no mathematician or historian of math, except I can say, with certainty, that algebra did not come from India. Algebra was a Perso-Arab development that came from the region between the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers in what is present-day Uzbekistan: Kwarazm.
But that’s really not what’s important. What’s key here is that India, as you document, has given the world many great things. This is not, nor was it ever, in dispute by me. My purpose, in arguing the way I did in “Reflections on India” was not to take away form what India had given the world, but to ask: how does India plan to follow up on its previous accomplishments. Also, I wrote it as a tonic to much of the hype here in the West about how India is the next ‘big thing.’ And all the nonsense about ‘how easy it is to do business in India.’
While what I wrote was addressed to my India friends in particular, it was meant as a wake-up call to Western businessmen and women about the difficulties they will face doing business in India. There is a lot of myth-making about India here in the West, especially by people like Tom Friedman. It needs to be countered. If India and the United States are going to have a global partnership of sorts, as looks increasingly likely, well, then we need to understand each other better, not just our strengths, but our weaknesses, as well.
Would you not agree?
I'm damn sure about it.
