The dance of Siva; fourteen Indian essays

Each race contributes something essential to the world's civilization in the course of its own self-expression and self- realization. The character built up in solving its own problems, in the experience of its own misfortunes, is itself a gift which each offers to the world. The essential contribution of India, then, is simply her Indianness ; her great humiliation would be to substitute or to have substituted for this own character (sva- bhava) a cosmopolitan veneer, for then indeed she must come before the world empty-handed. If now we ask what is most distinctive in this essential contri- bution, we must first make it clear that there cannot be anything absolutely unique in the experience of any race. Its peculiarities will be chiefly a matter of selection and emphasis, certainly not a difference in specific humanity. If we regard the world as a family of nations, then we shall best understand the position of India by recognizing in her the elder, ..