In an era where Artificial Intelligence has accelerated the decline of serious humanities scholarship, this essay reflects on the intellectual depth of the Modern Indian Renaissance. It recounts the first encounter between two giants of Indian history writing: Jadunath Sarkar and the young K.A. Nilakanta Sastri.
WE ARE PASSING through an era of the wilful embrace of dumbness promoted as artificial intelligence. As it stands, it is an ongoing success story of applied science backed by a powerful global machinery whose chief components include relentless advertising and unhinged capitalism.
Its impressive accomplishments in the realm of technology notwithstanding, the biggest casualty of AI is the near-total destruction of the humanities; especially subjects like philosophy, classical learning, language, literature and history. Until the end of the First World War, mastery over these subjects was the very definition of a learned, cultured and refined person. In fact, when one surveys the syllabi of classical subjects in prestigious universities just a century ago, it is clear that we are living in a rather impoverished age.
Today, education in each of these subjects and their branches have been outsourced to AI. The explosion of content related to these topics on social media platforms, derived solely from “prompts” given to AI tools, have made it easy for people to pose as scholars and intellectuals. To understand the long-term peril that this phenomenon portends, these farsighted observations from the late Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987) should suffice:
Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy? … We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part… When the liberal…teaching became dominant, as is the case with most victorious causes, good arguments became less necessary; the original good arguments, which were difficult, were replaced by plausible simplifications — or by nothing.
Allan Bloom, like his more renowned friend, Saul Bellow, was among the last classicists that the golden age of American academia birthed. His note regarding plausible simplifications might very well be at the heart of the plethora of “explanations” and “analyses” that AI produces.
What was true of this age of American and European academia was equally — if not more — true of India. In our parlance, it was known as the Modern Indian Renaissance. A serious and purposeful study of this era will yield at least ten mammoth and enlightening volumes.
THE MODERN INDIAN RENAISSANCE began in Bengal because it was where India first lost her freedom. This renaissance began with a profound quest to find the answer one question: exactly how did a spiritual civilisation that lorded over the world for three millennia get usurped by a piddly band of traders hailing from a barely-civilised island-nation of shopkeepers?
For an entire century, this quest produced a fructuous harvest of titans hailing from all fields, and each field had multiple exemplars. J.C. Bose and C.V. Raman in Science, M. Hiriyanna and Surendranath Dasgupta in Philosophy, Radhakumud Mookerjee and Jadunath Sarkar in History and Swami Vivekananda and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya in Culture.
For the purposes of this essay, we can consider Jadunath Sarkar who commanded history like a seasoned military general. It is heartening to see that his life and legacy have been revived on a rather fabulous scale in recent times.
Jadunath was a polymath in the classical sense but devoted himself to history. Like all stalwarts of his era, he sought to explore and rejuvenate the Atman of Bharatavarsha using history as his medium. The countless byproducts of his historical detective work are mirrors to the volksgeist of that India.
One such byproduct involves his maiden interaction with K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, another towering scholar of South Indian History.
In the December 1915 issue of Modern Review, Jadunath published a contemplative essay titled Confessions of a History Teacher. In it, he made a passionate criticism of “the absence of advanced historical works in our vernaculars.” It was also a censure of English as the medium of instruction, which served only to destroy the confidence of students.
Ramananda Chatterjee, the editor of Modern Review, wrote that he “will be glad to receive comments and suggestions on the above article from gentlemen engaged in teaching History in other colleges and provinces of India.”
Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from a 23-year-old history lecturer from Tirunelveli, about 2,000 Kms from Calcutta. It argued in favour of teaching history in English.
…so long as it is thought that history is… the cheapest to impart…[it] is bound to fall very short of the ideal… I cannot testify to better success with a vernacular medium, at least in my college and in this district… English serves me better as a medium of expression than Tamil – in handling historical subjects. Perhaps the vernacular is not so well off in this part of the country as it should be.
The author of the letter was Kallidaikurichi Aiyah Nilakanta Sastri, who was twenty-two years younger than Jadunath Sarkar. Almost immediately, it generated a caustic rebuke from another titan: the iconic Tamil poet, Subramania Bharati. In his regular column in Swadesamitran, Bharati minced no words:
I must pity Sri Nilakanta Iyer. The wonder of persons who cannot speak their own language straight, teaching the sciences may be seen only in our country… The Japanese, the Chinese, the Norwegians, the Italians, the Dutch…used to think of us as people of inferior intelligence in the sciences and in the languages. Only now, some of us are making clear to the outside world that Indians are not savages or tailless apes; that we have our own languages…and poets. Therefore, we cannot but laugh when a few of us pronounce that the Tamils are inferior to the other sections of Indians.
Four years after he wrote that letter, Nilakanta Sastri found himself working as an assistant to Jadunath Sarkar in the history department of Banaras Hindu University. Their association was short-lived because Jadunath quit the BHU within a year owing to irreconcilable differences with the university. But the strong impression that he had made on Sastri proved more durable. He offered unreserved tributes to Jadunath in the Jadunath Sarkar Commemoration Volume.
Our short association at Banaras…proved to be the beginning of an enduring friendship which to my great good fortune has lasted… to this day. I saw enough of the great man to profit by a study of his methods of work and by his advice which was… ungrudgingly given whenever I went to him with any… problem... To a promising junior scholar he is ever encouraging and generously helpful, but once he suspects sham, he quietly turns his back...
Over the next three decades, Jadunath Sarkar and Nilakanta Sastri regularly met on various occasions and retained warm, mutual respect till the end of Sarkar’s life.
From that profound climate under colonial rule to “independent” India, the downfall of our educational heritage has been speedy and lethal. For the last seventy-odd years, education and scholarship remains in the thrall of every imaginable vice — shortcuts, sloth, plagiarism, ideological subversion, wild interpretations, erasure of standards and now, AI.
Jadunath Sarkar hailed from the Bengal Presidency, Nilakanta Sastri, from the Madras Presidency. Over the decades, the political ideologies of both states have vigorously promoted a secessionist discourse. The upcoming state elections out there give out rather ominous indicators of their futures and that of India as a sovereign republic.
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