Growth of the Indian Religious Tradition: the Spectacle of Reassertion by Subjugated Cultures

Extract

It seems that whenever there is a struggle between cultures, the culture of the victorious people becomes the culture of the people as a whole in the beginning, but later on the culture of the subjugated people asserts itself and many of its essential elements have to be integrated in the elite culture. We can see this process at work in the making of the Indian civilization. In the beginning the culture of the newly triumphant Aryan hordes naturally became the dominant culture of the Indian sub-continent. But later on the culture of the subjugated non-Aryans asserted itself, and during the second Brahmanical revival it found full-blooded expression in the Mahabharata, the Rāmāyana and the Puranas. As we shall see in this paper, even though the Aryans were conscious of the non-Aryan influence and resisted it, their attempts could not prevent copious inflow of non-Aryan culture.