booklady’s Reviews > Our Oriental Heritage > Status Update

Nowhere else has the lust for philosophy been so strong as in India. It is, with the Hindus, not an ornament or a recreation, but a major interest and practice of life itself; and sages receive in India the honor bestowed in the West upon men of wealth or action. What other nation has ever thought of celebrating festivals with gladiatorial debates between the leaders of rival philosophical schools?

In Vedic times the land belonged to the people, but from the days of Chandragupta Maurya it became the habit of the kings to claim royal ownership of all the soil, and to let it out to the tiller for an annual rental and tax. ... The Hindus seem to have been the first people to mine gold. ... Before the European invasion the smelting of iron in small charcoal furnaces was one of the major industries of India.

The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. ... For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.

In 1924 the world of scholarship was again aroused by news from India: Sir John Marshall announced that his Indian aides, R. D. Banerji in particular, had discovered at Mohenjo-daro, on the western bank of the lower Indus, remains of what seemed to be an older civilization than any yet known to historians.