Abstract
IT is not without interest to note that Dr. J. H. Hutton's tentative correlation of race and culture in his Indian Census Report for 1931 not only receives commendatory reference but also is closely followed in method in the presidential address on “Sramanism” delivered by Rai Bahadur Ramaprasad Chanda to the Anthropological Section at the recent Bombay meeting of the Indian Science Congress. Analysing the concepts of Sramanism, which underlie the doctrine of renunciation, the animating principle of the mendicant and ascetic orders, the president showed that in early times the Vedic religion stressed the rites of the householder and had no place for the Sramanas, the forest dwellers and religious mendicants. Hence he deduced that the Sramanas are to be derived from the pre-Vedic, pre-Aryan peoples and their practitioners of magic, tracing the practice of asceticism back to the initiatory period of seclusion and abstinence of the shaman. This interesting conclusion, which traces one of the most important elements in modern Hinduism to a non-Aryan origin, is supplemented by further considerations bearing on certain of Dr. Hutton's ethnological arguments which have been subjected to critical comment. Ramaprasad Chanda suggests that the ingrained love of life disclosed by the religions of Saktism and Vaisnavism among the Bengalis, comparable to that found among the Aryans, is a racial psychological trait to be associated with the brachycephalic Bengali castes, the Indo-Alpines, of whom Dr. Hutton has suggested that they had acquired an Aryan language before they entered India. Hence, it is suggested, the strength of the Durga-Kali cult in Bengal, which only in recent times has begun to give place to the renunciation of sramana.
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Race and Culture in India. Nature 133, 680 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133680b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133680b0