Shakti and Shâkta : essays and addresses on the Shâkta Tantrashâstra

SHAKTI AND SHAKTA

who, though learned in their futile way, had not received the illuminating advantages of a western training. In my own time an objection was (I am informed) taken by Indian Fellows of the Calcutta University to the appointment of the learned Pandit Chandrakanta Tarkaélangkara to a chair of Indian philosophy on the ground that he was a mere native Pandit. In this case English Fellows and the late Vice-Chancellor opposed this absurd and snobbish objection. When the authority of the English teachers was at its highest, what they taught was law, even though their judgments were in respect of Indian subjects of which they had but a scant and imperfect knowledge. If they said with, or in anticipation of, one Professor, that the Vedas were “the babbling of a child humanity ” and the Brahmanas “the drivel of madmen,” or with another that the thought of the Upanishads was so “low ” that it could not be correctly rendered in the high English language; that in “ treating of Indian philosophy a writer has to deal with thoughts of a lower order than the thoughts of the every day life of Europe;” that Smriti was mere priestly tyranny, the Puranas idle legends and the Tantras mere wickedness and debauchery; that Hindu philosophy was (to borrow another English Professor’s language concerning the Sankhya) ‘‘ with all its folly and fanaticism little better than a chaotic impertinence ;” and that Yoga was, according to the same man of learning, “the fanatical vagaries of theocracy ;” that Indian ritual was nothing but superstition, mummery, and idolatry, and (Indian) art inelegant, monstrous, and grotesque—all this was with readiness accepted as high learning and wisdom, with perhaps here and there an occasional faint, and even apologetic, demur. I recollect in this connection a rather halting, and shamefaced, protest by the late Rajendra Lala Mitra. I do not say that none of these or other adverse criticisms had any ground whatever. There has been imperfection, folly, superstition, wickedness, here as else-