There are claims that the roots of democratic institutions can be found in ancient India. Studies have shown that such institutions have existed not only in India but also in other parts of the world. No one society can claim it was the ‘mother’.… There were two mutually contradictory strains in Western thought about India and its past—one that idealised it and the other that denigrated it

SUMIT GUHA

The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) has recently released a book titled India: The Mother of Democracy and is encouraging universities in India to launch research programmes aimed at revealing the ancient roots of democratic institutions in India. The project is not new – it goes back to the earliest phases of Indian nationalism under colonial rule. That effort was, in its beginnings, an effort to rebut a standard British defence of their own rule in India. We, however, need to step back a few centuries to understand the origins of the defence and Indian critiques of it.

There were two mutually contradictory strains in Western thought about India and its past—one that idealised it and the other that denigrated it. Both strains have been traced in the erudite work of Donald F. Lach and his collaborators published in later 20th century in several volumes with the title Asia in the Making of Europe. Their scholarship reveals that the broad European public in the 16th and 17th centuries had hazy ideas of Asia but saw it as a land inhabited by strange people who practised magical arts and excelled in crafts.

Some Europeans also saw them as leading exemplary and virtuous lives. Others were not so sure of the last—they identified “Asia” with the Ottoman Empire whose armies nearly captured Vienna in 1683 and presented a constant menace to Europe.

Alongside this, the refusal of Indians, even Syrian Christians, to accept the truth of Latin Christianity as presented by the Portuguese baffled and angered the Roman Catholic Church. It resulted in a stream of denigration with occasional racial overtones. This polemic also filtered into European thought (Lach 1977: 556–566). This had less effect in Protestant lands such as England and Holland that were also engaged in resisting the Roman Church, and as apostates, in greater danger of interrogation and occasional incineration by the secular arm of the Holy Office (also known as the Inquisition).

Protestants, as well as sceptics like Voltaire, were therefore more open to accepting a comparative view of the virtues and weaknesses of different world civilisations. William Jones’ proof of the linguistic connection between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, in his “Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society “in 1786, spurred Indophilic ideas among the intelligentsia of Europe.

Even in the early 19th century, therefore, the Governor of Madras Thomas Munro could declare to the British Parliament that if civilisation were to be an item of trade between India and Britain, “I am convinced that this country will gain by the import cargo” (cited in Guha 2019: 125). American historian Thomas Trautmann (1997) has termed the idealisation of India “Indomania” and showed that it persisted strongly into the early 19th century.

Of course, reactions against such ideas were not new either. They had long been challenged by those eager to bring the light of the gospel to Asia. As early as 1544, the future Saint Francis Xavier denounced Brahmans as acknowledging the truth of the Christian revelation but deliberately concealing it. But apart from enclaves under the Portuguese theocratic sway, such polemics had no practical applications (Guha 2019: 124).

This changed in the mid-18th century when, following the conquest of Bengal and increasing influence elsewhere in Asia, British perception of the people they now ruled could shape administrative policy, including religious and educational policy. Thus, the East India Company generally discouraged Christian missionaries from entering its territories. Only in 1813 did Evangelical pressure force them to officially permit their entry….

https://www.theindiaforum.in/history/was-india-mother-democracy

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