CHAPTER VIII - THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA—SCIENCE AND LETTERS

Summary

During what may appropriately be marked out as this Duff-Bentinck period, the Hindoo mind began to awake from its long sleep under the dominance, first of its own Brahmanism broken only for a time by the Buddhist revolt, and then of the Arab-Muhammadan tyranny, to which it had early lent the culture of the caliphs of Bagdad down to that of Akbar at Agra. The nineteenth century in India is the beginning of a renaissance in a sense which promises to be as real for Southern and Eastern Asia as that of the fifteenth was for Europe. In philology and philosophy, in astronomy and medicine, the Vedic Hindoos were the teachers of Pythagoras and Plato, of Aristotle and Hippocrates, as well as of the Arabs who, like Ibn Sina, called Avicenna in the dark ages of Europe, preserved the teaching of both Hindoos and Greeks for the coming revival of letters in the West. What was the relation of the Hindoo Aryans to the Accadian or Chaldean and the first Semitic or Egyptian civilizations, is still a problem for the solution of which scholars are painfully collecting the materials. Even in faith, just as Rammohun Roy went back on the Vedas and Keshub Chunder Sen, his present representative at the head of the Brumho Somaj, professes still to find there the body of natural religion, so the Rev. Dr. K. M. Banerjea, the first convert baptized by Duff, appeals to his countrymen to give up their idolatry and caste, by “The Aryan Witness, or the Testimony of Aryan Scriptures in corroboration of Biblical History and the Rudiments of Christian Doctrine.”