DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

8 LONG SURVIVALS [1.3
survival as backward groups also furnishes the real problem for
explanation in the light of historical development. India is a country
of long survivals. People of the atomic age rub elbows with those of the
chalcolithic. The vast majority of countryside gods are still daubed with a
red pigment that is a palpable substitute for long-vanished blood sacrifices
— which also survive in a few cases, although the very idea of blood
sacrifices would now come as a shock to many devotees. One finds rites
practised which clearly go back to the stone age, though the votaries
— often people with a modern education — are not conscious of the
incredibly long continuity. Such practices may have no foundation
in brahmin scriptures, but other portions of Sanskrit ritual works show
equally primitive sacraments adopted at almost all periods, down to the
last century. Formulae from the Rgveda are still recited, after three
millennia, at orthodox Hindu marriage and funeral ceremonies for
the higher castes; but the same rites often show features that have no
vedic justification whatever, practised with the same earnestness as the
documented vedic portion, without incongruity or contradiction being felt
by the participant.
Concentration upon the study of religion, superstition, ritual can
lead us very far away from history ; to neglect their study altogether
throws away valuable features of the superstructure that indicate real
changes in the basis. The survivals mean that no conflict was felt in that
particular case, or that primitive instruments of production have
endured in spite of imposing, complicated, often tortuous developments
of the superstructure. There was rarely the bitter, violent conflict
between the most primitive and most developed elements of society
in India that one finds in the devastating interaction of Spanish
conquistadores (with their fire-arms and small-pox) with tribal cultures
in South America ; or of traders who carried syphilis, tuberculosis, measles,
alcohol to the previously healthy population of many south sea islands.
No Indian conquest had the pernicious effect of Roman legions and
moneylenders upon transalpine Gauls, or of medieval Christian missionaries
upon Germanic tribal priests.
1.3. The present approach implies a definite theory of history