4 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Thus “the East gave (impe)* tus to the West.” [1] It is in the valley of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Yangtse Kang and the Indus that we first witness the misty dawn of civilization, the beginning of knowledge and progress.” To have caught the light from the East and reflected it with manifold lustre on the West is the only work of Greece and Rome.” [2]
Looked at from this angle the dragon of “Dark Ages” seems to be a fictitious creation of the historian. Were there any such Dark ages in Europe ? If so, when was there light ? History does not disclose it. Whatever light or civilization there was, was confined to the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean
[being constantly fed by the Orient] barring which the entire continent of Europe was in barbarism till very late : the Curve of European Civilization (leaving aside the sources on which it drew) is constantly rising and what the historian calls Dark ages mark a point of civilization higher than the one reached by preceding centuries. The fiction of the ‘Dark ages’ arose from the fallacy of the thinking of whole of Europe in terms of Rome, but nothing is more false than to think of the whole in terms of a part.
To be true to facts the question of the ‘Dark Ages’ has to be raised (by the) historian of the Orient. It is he who has to answer why this great (fall) after a high crest, why this sudden darkness after the (dawn):
It is lamentable to see that the earliest and most promising civilizations ran into a blind alley and were arrested all of a sudden when progress was most expected of them. Some of these early civilizations died out leaving us their records on bricks and tablets. Others are lingering on in their way and are in the process of rejuvenation.
The civilization of India is one of the oldest but like all of them has come to a dead stop : but it has lived to revive and we may hope never to die again. The contact of the west has shaken the “fixity” and restored her old dynamic power.
- Portions in brackets shown by asterisk are eaten by termites. Words supplied—ed.
1 Brooks Adams, Law of Civilization and decay, p.
2 R. C. Dutt.