India and Evolution

The term evolution comes from the Latin word evolvere, which means to develop or to unfold. It is equivalent to the Sanskrit word vikas, which means more than growth. It describes a series of related changes in a system of some kind. It is a process in which hidden or latent characteristics of a thing reveal themselves. It is an order of change, which unfolds the variety of aspects belonging to the nature of the changing objects. Out of various theories of origin of society—like divine origin theory, the force theory, the social contract theory, the patriarchal and matriarchal [Page 1275]theories—the evolution theory offers what we think a generally correct explanation. According to it, the society is the result of a gradual evolution, in that it is a continuous development from unorganized to organized, from simple to complex. Various factors helped in this process. For example, kinship and family were the earliest bonds uniting man with man.

It is generally assumed that the ancient Hindus in India lost themselves so much in speculating over the abstract metaphysical problems of the ultimate nature of worldly things that they never exerted any serious thinking in connection with the more practical and worldly problems, like those of social organization and evolution of society. In fact, they had given serious attention to the problems connected with social organizations, and a system or scheme of social relations has evolved for securing the best possible organization of human life and conduct that they could think of.

A society with all forms of social organization and institutions emerges out of human needs. The human needs define human interests, purposes, and aspirations; and the actual planning or devising different forms of social organization takes place in adjustments of human behavior, individual and social, with these purposes and aspirations. The Indian conception of life and its conduct is also organized in view of these considerations. The fundamental meaning of life and existence as understood by the Hindus permeates through all the forms of social organization, which are intended to regulate and direct the conduct of individual's life. Therefore, our first task will be to narrate and understand Hindu's fundamental conceptions regarding human existence as a whole, its purposes, its aspirations, and its mission.

According to the Hindu, this life alone would have no meaning; it has meaning only as a link—even if the last—in a chain of births in the past and in the future; it is a stage of transition from past births toward future birth(s), unless Moksha, or final liberation, is obtained within the span of this life. The soul of a man is, for the Hindu, immortal; the bodies in which he lives during the stages of transition may change. This fundamental idea persists through the whole of the Hindu life from earliest written literature Vedas to today. Indian social thought is shaped in the system-forming endeavor to metaphysics of transcendence since the Vedas more than 40 centuries ago. Whatever might have been the specific socioeconomic conditions in which the creative genius of the Vedic period flourished, approximately 3000 BC to 5000 BC, its influence on the evolution of the Indian society has never waned. In the Vedic literature, including the Upanishads, spontaneity, poetic imagination, and sense of gravity of the fact of existence surpassed intellectualism. Perhaps that is why India, not withstanding her sociopolitical-economic changes, retains its weary mood eternally, a mood running more after the other-worldly and inane than after the empirical and the concrete.

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