ABSTRACT
THE darkness enveloping the past of India is partly due to our ignorance, and archaeology will gradually dispel it to some extent. But it is also due to the nature of the Indian world. In that amalgam of diverse races and tongues, the most heterogeneous traditions arose and endured, and were never brought into unity. History is impossible except for united peoples. In India history is reduced to unconnected genealogies. Each caste, each sect or racial stock, each literature has or may have its independent tradition, the lucidity of which depends on the degree of culture to which it has risen. The highest culture belongs to the priestly caste, but that caste, which has for its heritage the understanding and religious exploitation of the Vedas, devotes itself to speculation on abstract technicalities, and only very reluctantly reflects all the confusion of the life around it. Political power lies with another caste, the nobles; but history is usually subservient to the political power, preserving the memory of its great achievements in order to glorify it. It is only by chance that the other elements of the population have their history, and it is the history which one would expect from a minority cast back on itself and making itself the centre of the world.
