ZBORNIK - Matica srpska

Bharat Gupt
UDC 233-242:821.14'02-2.09+821.1/.2-2.09
INDO-EUROPEAN BELIEFS IN CLASSICAL
GREEK AND INDIAN DRAMA
It has been customary to think of the Greek achievement in science
and arts as the intellectual base on which the later edifice of
western European learning has been raised. Less attention has been
paid to those aspects of Greek way of life which did not directly
contribute to the European culture of two millennia after Christ, that
is the ways which either ceased to be followed with the advent of
Christianity, or which were lost into the folk traditions and were no
longer noticed by official historians. The Greeks have been thus
proclaimed as progenitors of western philosophy, of rational and naturalistic
investigation and of scientific logic. Their literature has
been the model for all later writing In the West. However, while
this approach succeeds in providing an ancestry to the thought of
Europe, at the same time it eclipses the totality of the Greek experience,
by not paying adequate attention to its Oriental constituent
which was as much a reality.
The Greeks, as early as the Pelasgians, have been regarded as a
people of Indo-European stock, the parent race of which is attributed
to belong to somewhere in Central Asia. The evidence for
this belief has no archaeological foundation but is primarily linguistic.
And even if It is presumed that there was a parent or ur language
for the large number of languages classified as Indo-European,
there is no reason to believe that there was a single race to
which this language belonged. We are therefore forced to presume
that speakers of the so called Indo-European languages which shared
many linguistic structures, must have also shared many other
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