Adaptation of Traditional Society to Modern Mass Society

ADAPTATION OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

TO MODERN MASS SOCIETY

B. VENKATAPPIAH
Formerly Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India

This article is confined to Indian, more specially Hindu, society. It tries to assess the process of change going on in this society from the point of view of new needs and old values.

Caste and Rural Structure

The Indian village is by no means the homogeneous entity it is sometimes imagined to be. It has classes as well as castes. It has the landed and the landless; the rentier, the tenant and the labourer; the cultivator and the artisan; the petty official, the landlord, and the money-lender; and so on.

Class, caste and occupation are usually inter-related and therefore caste plays a very important part in the social and economic structure of the village.

While the persistence, rigidity, and ubiquity of caste, make the institution peculiar to India, comparable divisions of society are, of course, not unknown in other countries, especially of the East. The divisions are hereditary, often specialise in some one occupation, and rarely marry outside the group. What distinguishes India is that all society can be so divided, that the divisions are numerous and that in origin at any rate, if not in present operation, they can be fitted into one integrated framework which is at once social, religious and traditional. It is these divisions or sub-castes which should be studied in the context of a transition from one set of social purposes and objectives to another.

According to one estimate, there are (or at one stage were) some 3,000 sub-castes in India. Each of them is an endogamous group with prohibitions not only against inter-marriage (strictly), but also against inter-dining (not so strictly), with members of other groups. These in a sense are the real castes, for their classification into the four main occupational groups of Brahmin (priest), Kshatriya (warrior), Vaisya (merchant) and Sudra (worker) is more a logical than sociological categorisation.

But underlying the relationship between all these groups and sub-groups, castes and sub-castes, is an integrating principle based on the religion and traditional values of the Hindus. Implicitly, if not explicitly, the social organisation is knitted together for the preservation of these objectives and values. The sanctions are social and religious, while the values and the culture are reinforced by song, dance, myth and legend carried to the doors of every individual family within each relevant division of the organisation.

Traditional Values

What are the traditional values which may be regarded as specifically Hindu? Any attempt to set them out briefly must, of course, involve a large amount of over-simplification. It would also raise the question whether the values are shared by a large number of people, illiterate and educated, rural and urban. It is very necessary to make one clarification at this stage. The values of the religion and philosophy of the Hindus are far from being confined to a small coterie, priestly, learned or other. Mass communication has operated through the centuries and throughout the country. Indeed, the illiterate farmer in the village, and the uneducated grandmother in the family, often know more about the saints and their deeds, the philosophers and their concept than the educated town-dweller or westernised businessman. Few who know India will dispute the statement that some of the most abstruse schools of philosophy such as advaita (non-dualism) are by no means unfamiliar ground to the Indian villager. Moreover, whether villager or townsman, the temperament of the Indian has throughout the awes responded readily to saintliness of character. This does not, of course, mean that the average Indian is either more spiritual or more ethical than the rest of the world. A man may be no more moral than his neighbour, and indeed may be worse; but when it comes to what moves him most, the answer might be: not a successful businessman, not a great commander, nor even a great politician, but one who has renounced for the sake of helping others. This may be no more than a feature of the temperament but it is an important feature and has to be taken in any assessment of the values held dear by Hindu society as a whole.

The emphasis is first of all on individual liberation (mukti). Man is part of the same process as brought forth the universe. Being part of the process he shares in some measure the nature of the creative force behind creation, just as, being part of the result of the process, he partakes of the nature of manifested creation. Far from being a stranger in a world he has not made, he is himself the maker, himself the world. His religion teaches him that progress involves not only a direction but a starting point. His starting point is himself. He is what he is today because of his past. But he is infinitely perfectible and perfection consists in that full development of his spiritual faculties which will make him in some ineffable way once more a part of the creative force of the universe. This is mukti which is both his goal and his destiny.

Since the starting point is himself his religion depends on himself. The approach to progress must be pragmatic. If he is emotional, it will be the way of bhakti; if intellectual, the way of jnana, and if given to works, the way of karma. There is no need to go out and seek a formula of salvation; the sect or religion in which he is born is good enough; all that is necessary is that he practise his particular religion to the utmost.
Since all men will ultimately be liberated, all men are potentially equal. If they start now at different points and have different handicaps, that is the result of the past. It is the past that has determined their caste, their status and their individual equipment, spiritual, moral and intellectual. One must be practical and build upon this the best way one can. Sometimes the developed spirit break through all these and a saint manifests himself whatever the caste or the station. But that dose not nullify either the fact or the value of the hierarchy of caste.

Dharma or duty as it is loosely translated, has relation both to where one stands in the universe and to the direction in which one has to proceed. It takes into account the total environment of caste, parentage, inner qualities and so on. But it is nevertheless in the final analysis intensely individual. Granted the reality of a spiritual goal, what should one do in a given situation so as to proceed towards and not away from the goal? The milieu and the moment are no less internal than external to man. These being given, what he ought to do constitutes the dharma of the man.

The values which the Hindu must prize are partly those which go with his station in life, such as courage if a warrior, austerity if a Brahmin and so on. There are others which are universal. Among the most important of these are tolerance, detachment and loving-kindness. Since men are situated differently and are bound to progress differently there must be tolerance for all. One has to act, but the results of action are not important. One must be detached in one’s attitude towards results. Since all men are united in origin and united in destination, one must have an attitude of equal-mindedness (same buddhi) towards all. This applies not only to human beings but to all living things and indeed to all created things.

Some of the implications of these attitudes, however noble or pariseworthy in themselves, are not difficult to see. The tolerance can become mere passivity; the detachment, indifference, and the loving-kindness, sentimentality. Most important of all, the emphasis on individual development and liberation, coupled with the small group within which social loyalties are exercised, may result in the lack of a social purpose and a social philosophy, as distinguished from the merely religious and ethical. It would seem that at different stages in India’s long history something like this has indeed happened. Equality at the philosophical level has not meant social equality, much less the positive aim of readjusting economic inequalities. It is also a comparatively new thing for Indians to think interms of economic objectives as worthwhile goals in themselves, not only for individuals but for society as a whole. To work with one’s hands to produce, to organize production for the community, to take pride in increase in production, all these are values which are only slowly being adopted.

We have here then the picture of a society hierarchical in structure. Each part of the structure is fitted into the whole with what would seem an underlying purpose basically connected with the objectives and values of the Hindu religion. The sanctions which preserve the structure and its individual parts are primarily social and religious. It is this structure that has now to be geared to socio-economic values instead of purely religious ones. It is to be actuated by new objectives, hitherto foreign to it, such as individual liberty, economic welfare and social justice. There is no use slurring over the fact that these are indeed new values and objectives for which the historical development of the structure had not prepared it. At the same time, on the credit side, it has to be recognised that the philosophical concepts of the tradition are in no sense, and at no point, antagonistic to these values. Indeed, on their own plane they may be said to be complementary to the new socio-economic objectives of plentitude and equality.

Another point may be mentioned. Hindu philosophy and religion are uniquely consistent with the most modern trends in science. The Hindu need have no dichotomy of mind, one of blind faith and the other of rational thought. He is brought up to believe that the material and the spiritual grow out of one another and that he himself partakes of the nature of both. There is no specific formula which he is asked to adopt as part of his belief. There is spiritual reality around him even as there is physical reality. It is up to him to understand the laws of both and in conformity with those laws, strive for self-fulfilment. Since the moral laws of development and the physical laws of process are derived from the same reality, at no point of time can there be an irreconcilable inconsistency between the two. Nor, a universe so integrated, can one in being true to oneself the danger of being false to some one else.

But even if one has succeeded in discovering the moral or spiritual laws of individual development (as in the principles of yoga), what about the corresponding laws which govern society? Individual dharma may be all right, but in a world of social groups may it not prove to be as national as a point in three-dimensional geometry? Is there no need in the modern world to pursue the complementary line of enquiry and discipline which concerns social dharma and institutional dharma as distinguished from individual dharma? And if the spiritual world is worthy of study because the physical world is implicit in it, is not the physical world as worthy of study because the spiritual world is implicit in it? Briefly the Hindu has yet to realise that the values of his philosophy are in tune with only a part of the infinite; and that the parts to which itis yet to be attuned are precisely the ones which the modern mind has most explored and to which modern development is most beholden, namely the relationship between man and the universe which has given rise to the physical sciences, and the relationship between man and men which has given rise to the social sciences.

Trends

No one can hope to discern the contours of the future without looking at the formations of the past. In India’s long history there have been rebels against priestly monopoly, reformers of religion and society, and re-interpreters of those values and loyalties which transcend sect, caste and occupation. The greatest of them all was Buddha; but he is only the most outstanding peak of a whole range of heights which never ceases through the centuries down to the present day. The rebels and reformers were at the same time saints or seers or the singers of the glory of God. Most of them attempted to reconcile caste with human brotherhood at the spiritual, emotional or philosophical levels. But there were signal exceptions like Basava (12th century), himself a Brahmin, who hoped to get immediate and practical results. He founded in the South an important sect which disowned the Brahmin. Basava tried to abolish caste through inter-marriage but found the forces arrayed against him much too strong. In the 14th century Ramananda (North India) sang:

“Jati panthi puchchai nahi koi
Hari ko bhaje to Hari ka hoi”

(Let no one ask a man’s caste or with whom he eats. If a man is devoted to Hari (God) he becomes Hari’s own.)

Kabir, the weaver also of the North, whose songs of the fifteenth century move men and women throughout India up to this day, said in one of his compositions:

“I have forgotten both caste and lineage...
I have given up both the Pandits and Mullahs…..
From neither have I received advantage...
My heart being pure, I have seen the Lord:
Kabir having searched and searched himself
hath found God within him.”

There may also be cited Sankaradeva whose work for the re-establishment of the worship of God and affection for all men, had a tremendous impact on Assam during the latter part of the 15th and the earlier half of the 16th centuries. Vemana, the Telugu poet of the South, whose poems have passed into proverbs, said in the 16th century:

“Food or caste or place of birth
Cannot alter human worth

Empty is a caste-dispute
All the castes have but one root.”

Also in the 16th century lived Eknath of Maharashtra whose practice of the equality of men is remembered today not only through his songs but in the many legends handed down about his life. Examples can be multiplied of this philosophical and individual rejection of caste by seers and teachers throughout the centuries. It will suffice to give one more quotation. This is from Narayana Guru of Kerala who died in 1928 and whose teachings and following today constitute one of the strongest ethical forces in that State:

“One of kind, one of faith, and one in God is man;
Of one womb, of one form, difference herein none.

The community of man thus viewed to a single caste belongs.”

The trend I have illustrated was not only indigenous but presented the reaction to something, viz., caste, which was internal to the structure itself. It is necessary to consider another of reactions namely those which originated in response to the impact of a strong foreign culture, the one which the British brought with them to India in the form of western thought and literature and political forms. Some four or five stages can I think, be discerned in the reaction of Hindu society to this tremendous impact. It might seem fanciful, but it was almost as if the awakening took place by degrees and that different centres of the dormant culture came to awareness one after another.

Chronologically the influence of the West was first felt in Bengal, for Calcutta was the capital of India and English education a significant scale was earlier organized there than elsewhere the country. To start with, there was complete absorption in the culture of the rulers. Educated Indians adopted and imitated that culture in all its aspects, spiritual, literary, and so forth. This soon gave way to a positive reaction against the foreign culture. The first awakening that took place was in what one might describe as the spiritual layer of the country’s consciousness. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Devendra Nath Tagore (the Poet’s father) and others exemplified this earliest phase of spiritual awakening of India’s self. Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and others continued and completed the process in later years.

Meanwhile the second phase of the reaction had already begun. Indians were no longer content to imitate the literary forms of England and write verses and novels in a foreign language. The languages of the people, each of which had a rich heritage behind it, began to assert themselves. The second phase of the reaction was literary. Rabindranath Tagore was a good example of this phase. It must be remembered that he wrote in Bengali and the songs, many of them still untranslated, are sung by villagers in all parts of Bengal.

The third phase was social. Social reform became the slogan of the day. Questions such as caste, untouchability, remarriage of widows, pre-puberty marriage of girls, and so forth assumed great importance. Educated Indians began to say that they should first reform their own society before entertaining political aspirations for responsible Government. “Should social reform or political reform come first?” was a favourite topic for debate in schools and colleges and the answer usually was “social reform.”

The fourth phase of the reaction was definitely political. Tilak, Gandhi and those who followed were typical of this phase. Without independence, it was asserted, nothing could be achieved not even social reform. Indians must be their own masters, and from the self-respect this created everything else would follow. Yet here again, as particularly under Gandhi, the political struggle took a uniquely indigenous form, that is to say, a shape that was deliberately moulded after the thoughts and aspirations of Hindus in particular and Indians generally. Intolerance for the foreign rule was to be combined with tolerance for the foreigner. There was to be neither hatred nor anger against him. Gandhi also insisted on ahimsa and non-violence though this was perhaps a Buddhist or Jain idea rather than a specifically Hindu one. The Gita teaches the pursuit of duty without desire for the fruits of action. And in the Hindu context this pursuit might well be violent as in the instance of Arjuna himself. It was Jainism and Buddhism that emphasised non-violence as an absolute virtue. Thereafter the ideal did get interwoven, though the strands still show here and there, into the texture of Hindu thought and belief. Thus it was that Gandhi, deriving inspiration from his own culture and support from Christianity and Tolstoy, put ahimsa in the forefront of his political struggle.

The fifth phase commenced some years ago. From the spiritual, the literary, the social and the political, the stage now reached may be described as the awakening of the economic consciousness of the country. War, Independence and Planning, all these have combined to bring it about. More wealth is postulated as the aim, but along with it and not less important, better and more equitable distribution of wealth. There is thus for the first time, in India, a recognition of the social and economic objectives of what might be very broadly described as a Welfare state. It is no longer mukti or individual salvation which will suffice. The basis if no longer the individual, but the group and society. The explicit objective is economic good, and no longer–or at any rate not necessarily–spiritual good.

Transition

This last phase of all, the phase of economic development and equalitarianism, is also the most difficult. It poses issues which India has evaded throughout its long development. It raises problems of production and distribution which, for the time being at any rate, are more clamant in India’s villages than in its cities and towns. The production of more wealth is easy enough when it takes the form of a textile mill or a steel mill or even constructing a big irrigation dam or a hydro-electric project. If sufficient initial help is forthcoming from abroad, in machinery mainly, and skills secondarily, can take all this and much more in its stride. Undoubtedly will be many and by no means insignificant difficulties; but they will by and large add up to something which, though not resolved, is yet familiar, namely, the problem of readjustment of labour to urban conditions. Arising from this will be the major issue of decentralisation of industry: the question of taking industry to where the worker is situated–the small town and the village–rather than the worker to where the industry is situated. One is hardly entitled to assume that such decentralisation can happen on any large scale, for limits are set by technical feasibility and the economics of scarce capital. Nevertheless, it is a vital issue and needs study and investigation with specific reference to Indian conditions. But the main problem, the one which concerns the bulk of the population, will still remain, namely, how the underfed and the underprivileged–the small cultivator in his millions and the small industrialist in his hundreds of thousands–can be given the know-how, the resources and the incentive to produce more. The know-how perhaps presents the least difficulty. National Extension, Community Development, Small Industries service institutes, all these have been fairly successful in organizing and passing on the know-how, though it is true that a great deal has yet to be done. In particular, it will be education itself, i.e., the conversion of the illiterate into the educated–not the unskilled into the skilled–that is the big task still to be completed. Along with this lack of education, then, must be taken the other main impedi­ments, which are lack of incentive and lack of resources.

The question may now be put: how are these three lacks being met, viz., lack of education, lack of incentive and lack of resources, all of which stand directly in the way of increased production? On the answer to this question, more than on anything else, will depend the effectiveness of India’s transition from a traditional to a modern mass society. But the question, of course, cannot stop there. We shall further have to ask whether in the process of meeting these requirements:

(1) the weak and the underprivileged are being helped;
(2) bridges are being built across the old divisions of caste and sub-caste; and
(3) traditional values such as tolerance, non-injury and reve­rence for the other-worldly are not losing their importance.

The problem is by no means simple. For one thing, it is not posed in the manner stated above by many of those who are most concerned with its different aspects, namely, the politician and the legislator, the planner and the administrator, the educationist and the social worker. Nevertheless, one can observe trends and, however faint these may be for the moment, one can try and pick up from among them such as seem significant for the future. One may start with almost any of the aspects mentioned above. Caste for example, evokes different responses from different sets of people. There are those who in effect exploit caste to gain temporary ends. Others ignore it or pretend it does not exist. Still others believe it will vanish under the impact of economic forces. Lastly, there are those who realise both the strength and ubiquity of caste divisions and seek to establish newer loyalties across, instead of along them.

An obvious example of exploitation of the existing divisions is what happens during elections. The candidate may not always have willed it to be so, but it is common knowledge that in most elections the voting tends to take place along the lines of caste. In other words, caste, as one of the strongest existing loyalties, is something which no electioneering agent is likely to lose sight of.

There are those who ignore caste or believe that it will succumb to economic forces. They minimise the problem. It is true that the forces of economic development, including urbanisation, are on the whole hostile to caste. Broken up into individual elements, the loyalties of caste are principally sectarian, territorial and occupational. The hold of sectarian religion is getting less in the towns but not necessarily, nor on any appreciable scale, in the villages. Territorial loyalty counts for less in the villages and much less in towns than in the past. But there is a vicious circle. Caste restricts the mobility of the society; lack of mobility keeps people at home in their of occupations; and those who remain at home tend to have a stronger territorial loyalty than others. The same remarks apply to occupational loyalty. In all these respects, therefore the old loyalties of caste and sub-caste are only slowly weakening and it is by no means clear that they will disappear with the mere efflux of time and economic change.

Those who ignore caste, instead of recognising it and dealing with it, are doing a disservice. This applies to those who believe not only that the village can in due course be made into a homogeneous entity but that it is one here and now. They read into the village community a social cohesion and a common purpose which ought to be created, but which quite often are not there today. The fallacy involved in this attitude is dangerous because it may lead the administration to impose schemes of welfare on the village in the expectation that its leadership has the same interests at heart as the small farmer, the landless labourer and the Harijan. Where this is not the case, a well-meaning scheme may lead to greater exploitation along the lines of caste by those who are more powerful in the village. The result will be an accentuation, not a reconciling of differences.

There is no alternative but to make positive, purposeful and persistent efforts to build bridges; to create new loyalties or invoke traditional loyalties which transcend these divisions. Such efforts are in fact being made; many of them are humble and obscure; some are well known, while still others have to be brought to light from between the covers of official records and publications. A few of them may be cited. The illustrations are also concerned with the three lacks I have mentioned before, viz., education, incentive to produce and resources for production.

In regard to education; I will confine my illustration to one of many pioneers in different parts of India who during the last fifty years, and more especially after Independence, have rendered signal service in this field. I refer to an educationist* of Maharashtra, who before his death a few years ago succeeded in giving schools to the rural area on a scale which neither Government nor school boards had achieved in the past. What is more important, he was able to get Harijan and high-caste boys to live, work and study together. At a very early stage in the experiment, he abandoned the idea of having separate hostels for Harijan boys. Ignoring the divisions of caste, sub-caste and, outcaste, he postulated poverty as the line of demarcation and said that every poor student in the countryside would be the beneficiary of his scheme. He also insisted on the contribution of voluntary labour by his students and maximum self-help on the part of each particular area. In this way he built schools and hostels which for both number and usefulness are today among the most significant institutions in western India. In these institutions, which include about 200 primary schools and a dozen or more boarding houses, the experiment is being successfully tried of students habitually and purposefully ignoring the divisions of caste and recognising the uniting factors of poverty and self-help. This remarkable man was rooted in the soil, had an essentially religious outlook, and renounced wealth in the best Indian tradition. Examples can also be cited from other parts of the country of the attempt to organize education as a unifying force. These attempts are usually not all-India. They are indigenous to the area or the State and have done much to spread literacy in the language of each particular region. And it must be remembered that for each of the big States of India as they exist today, its own language and literature are great unifying forces which cut across the barriers of rank, caste and occupation.

Incentive for production explains much of the agrarian legislation which after Independence has taken place in India. Feudal tenures have been abolished, rents have been regulated, ceilings are being placed on what a landlord may own and ‘land to the tiller’ has been the formula generally adopted by State Governments. What is laid down in the statute is not necessarily what takes place in the field. Allowing for evasion and non. fulfilment the fact still remains that it has been possible to bring about a radical re-adjustment of agrarian rights without recourse to violence.

Another development, and one directly in keeping with India’s traditional values, is the mission undertaken by Vinoba Bhave to receive gifts of land (‘bhoodan’) for distribution to the landless and, if all the land of the village was gifted (‘grarndan’), to place it under the management of the village council for the benefit of all. The whole world is watching this experiment which, from the point of view here set out, constitutes one of the most significant endeavours in India for bridging the differences of caste and class and community. It has not yet touched the town and the city. The saint’s appeal is to persons. In the villages of India today one still deals with persons. In cities and towns the individual is merged in the impersonal masses. There is big business, not the individual trader; big banks and not money-lenders; and large ownership of capital, not just a handful of landlords. Also people are much more hardened against the traditional values of life. This perhaps explains why Vinoba Bhave, in his attempt to employ an essentially religious technique for bringing about social and economic justice, has hitherto avoided the cities of wealth and citadels of power and confined his mission to the village. Another observation may be made. The re-distribution of lands, however motivated, is in the end a concrete administrative process. It requires supporting legislation, administrative staff and legal documents in which intentions are reduced to enforceable form as in any other administrative measure, whether such measure emanates from a saint or a secretariat. Will India be able to show that the saint and the Secretariat can work together? The question is still open.

My next illustration is in fact taken from Government. It concerns the policy of State-partnership in co-operatives for the purpose of meeting the last of the requirements I have mentioned, namely resources or captial. Lacking these, the village co-operative, whether credit or marketing, is powerless against the competition of landlord, money-lender and trader. Yet it must be rendered strong in order that the small producer’s interests are looked after and production as an aim is promoted. Lacking initial momentum the weak society falls to ground; there has to be a force which will help it to get into orbit after breaking through a whole field of gravitation. In India the experiment is being tried of supplying this initial force through State-partnership. The partnership is reversible; also it does not imply State interference. Since the society starts strong, it is in a position to render service at the very commencement; people will test it for a little while and then increasingly come in and buy shares; this will in due course enable the society to buy off Government’s shares. This has not only been the theory but the practice as well. And so far as one can judge, it appears to work. But the points I am concerned to make are these. India has not chosen the path of liquidating the money-lender and the landlord in order that their hold may disappear or competition cease. That would have been wholly repugnant to temperament and tradition. Nor has it thought it right, on the one side, that the State should run these institutions itself or on the other, thus the weak should be left to their own devices. My illustration, then, concerns a joint attempt of the State and the people, especially the weaker sections, to institutionalise services of great importance for production; and to do so in a manner which conforms both to the values of tradition and the principles of sound organization.

One other aspect remains to be noticed. Built on the basin of State-partnership there is a large number of producers’ co-operatives today–such as sugar factories owned by the cane-growers or lift irrigation societies run by the riparian farmers–which infusing a new type of loyalty, the loyalty of production, across the older stratification of caste. The producers are of many castes; but they combine in order to increase their production or to process their produce for market; they have no problem, as in a credit society, of apportioning scarce resources (often along the lines of caste or other extraneous loyalties); their status is purely that of producers; it is as producers that they put forth a common effort and it is as producers that they derive a common benefit. This again is a very significant way in which the newer co-operatives, with assistance from the State, are helping to build bridges across the old divisions and are doing so in the very context of modernising the methods of production, processing and preparation for the market.

Conclusion

How can India, without losing anything of value in her ancient traditions, adapt herself to the modern context of efficient production, economic welfare and social justice? The transition is taking place. It is largely uncharted. I am conscious that in pointing to a current here and a current there I have given no answer to the question itself. It seems permissible to doubt whether a definitive answer can in fact be given. If there is no chart of the transition, there can be no blue print of the future. But there is one thing which, in accordance with one’s own predilections, it may be possible to indicate and that is the spirit in which India, if true to her traditions, ought to conduct the transition. I quote from the Rural Credit Survey Report.

“...Assuming this larger purpose to have the twofold aspect of achieving wealth and securing its equitable distribution, programme...becomes inseparable, in its under-lying concepts, not only from the end which is economic good but from means to be employed in the attainment of the end. Those means, to be significant for India, have to connform to the values of the Indian tradition. One feature of that tradition may be recalled. At widely different times and in widely different parts of the country there have arisen religious leaders in India whose aim was spiritual good and whose endeavour it was to place within the reach of all the means of achieving such good. Each such effort was non-violently conceived and non-violently conducted; it had the appeal and motive force of a mission; and, not infrequently, its organization bore signs of careful forethought and attention. Essentially the same means, employed in the pursuit of economic good, have perhaps this difference, that they hold greater promise of attaining the object postulated. For one thing, there is nothing yet in human history to disprove–just as there is nothing in it yet to demonstrate–that economic welfare in its highest sense cannot be achieved, even where it is most lacking, by the planned, deliberate and organized effort of a Government, relentless as to purpose but not ruthless as to means, provided the effort is not only emotionally impelled but is scientifically guided. In this latter aspect a whole apparatus of technique, knowledge and research comparatively recent and painstakingly accumulated, is available to Governments, if only they will make use of it, through the development of the social sciences of economics and sociology and of the science no less than art of public administration. It is irrelevant whether economic good is or is not a lesser objective than spiritual good. The fact remains that economic good is the highest practicable objective so far as Governments are concerned. In India, the process of increasing and more equitably distributing the economic good must, on purely rational grounds, be conceived in terms of rural India. The larger thesis … is that what India most needs today is a comprehensive and determined programme of rural regeneration which has the ethical impulse and emotional momentum of its highest traditions; which has, moreover, the calculated design of a project that is scientifically conceived and scientifically organized; and which, above all, attempts to render to rural India, in the economic realm, those opportunities for growth and fulfilment which, without distinction between man and man, but with especial compassion for the weak and the disadvantaged, more than one religious leader at more than one period of the country’s history attempted to render to the masses of India in the realm of the spirit.”

* Bhaurao Patil; See his biography by Dr. A. V. Mathew; “Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil”, Rayat Shikshan Saustha, Satara, 1957,