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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
So long as a people seeks consolation for its present misery in the real or imaginary glory of the past, the doors of the future remain closed before it. Glorification of the past is a prominent characteristic of Indian Nationalism. Critical study of our own history is foreign to its ideology. Drunk with the cheap satisfaction that Indian culture, being "spiritual”, is superior to that of other people, we do not think that there is anything for us to learn from the history of foreign countries. Otherwise, it would be evident that "the special features” of Indian culture also marked the history of other peoples. In the critical history of other peoples we might find a picture of our own past and be impelled to discover in our own history similar causes that produced analogous phenomena in other countries. It is generally believed that renunciation of the world in quest of a spiritual life is the badge of superiority of Indian culture. When the same practice is found to have been rampant also in other countries, India must give up her claim to distinction at least on that score. The favourite theory of our past thus shaken, there must begin a critical study of history as the necessary condition for the conquest of the future.
“The (early Christian) ascetics were inspired by the savage enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal and God as a tyrant..." (Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). The
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