Summary

HEGEL ARGUED IN The Philosophy of History that political revolutions did not matter to Hindus because they did not change one's lot in life, which was governed by the caste system. One is apparently born into the level of society at which one belongs based on past performance. Better performance will only result in a higher ranking in a future lifetime, so no matter how well you run in this race, you still finish in same spot in which you were placed. More recently, Pankaj Mishra perhaps better sums up what Hegel was trying to get at in the South Asian worldview (if there is a single one). He quotes Mahatma Gandhi, who, unimpressed with Gibbon's account of the decline of the Roman Empire, lauded the authors of Mahabharata for giving historical facts a back seat to philosophical wisdom, for “that which is permanent and therefore necessary eludes the historian of events,” because “truth transcends history.” Such access to truth is precisely what the Indo-Germans attempted to achieve. Feeling that one has a purchase on some kind of truth is necessary; however, truth eludes our attempts to make it pragmatic, quantifiable, objective. The Indo-Germans looked back at their own histories in attempts to re-write those histories. Theirs were struggles for authenticity, struggles to create a cultural identity unified by ethnicity, language, and belief. Yet, as Dorothy M. Figueira has explained, figures such as Friedrich Schlegel eventually rejected forms of Sheldon Pollock's “internal colonialism.”