The Hindu Evolutionary Heritage and Hindu Criticism of Darwinism

Abstract

The name of Darwin was invoked frequently by Indian writers in the nineteenth century and later, even if they were thinking of popular ideas associated with him, rather than of his works. Already in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in Calcutta (now Kolkata), the main seat of the British presence in India, some Hindu intellectuals were looking for ways of interpreting their traditions which were compatible with European science, and indeed more compatible with it than the Christian ideas brought by the missionaries who provided much of the education in British India. The long periods of time envisaged by Hindu chronology, the various cosmogonic narratives in which the world evolves from a unitary being or cosmic egg, and the idea of rebirth which made humankind part of a community of many species, all found some corroboration in Darwinian evolution, and even led to claims that the essential points of Western science had been anticipated long ago in India. On the other hand, the primacy of consciousness in many Hindu cosmogonies, the position of “man” (puruṣa) as a primal constituent, or even the sole origin, of the universe, and the view of cosmic change as a series of recurring patterns, were challenged by Darwinian ideas. Thinkers such as Keshub Chunder Sen and Swami Vivekananda took up the challenge by claiming that the Hindu view was superior, having a spiritual dimension which Darwinism lacked. Thus the Hindu response to Darwinism joined forces with the idea that the material superiority of the West is matched or surpassed by the spiritual superiority of the East.

Here may be recalled an old and proverbial summary of the progress of ideas—scientific and other—that people first say: “It is not true”; and next: “It is not new”; and then often later: “We knew it all before.” The last is indeed the commonest of these sayings in India; but in Europe we generally begin with the other two.

(Geddes 1920: 98)