18 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
wonder of the world . . . . . . . . . But the secret of her greatness lay to her monopoly of the treasures of the east, in the shouting of the Chaldeans in their ships and smartly orientals who frequented her lazars. It moved the envy of the nations. Paharaoh Necho (612-596 B. C.) vainly sacrificed his subjects in order to reopen the canal which Seti I had made from the Nile to the Red Sea : and he despatched his Phoenician fleet round Africa in the hope of discovering a new world for commerce. And a long ago, the rivalry of the Spaniards and the Portuguese for the treasures of India . . . . . . . . was anticipated and equalled by the rivalry of Babylonians and Egyptians . . . . . . . . when the world was as yet one and twenty centuries younger.” [1] This commercial intercourse told very decidedly on the literature of India. Sea played an immense role and ‘ Mokar’ the monster fish was constantly alluded to. The Vedic dieties fall in the back ground and the Hindu mind of the times soared high in inventing fantastic cosmogonies as is to be found in the Vishnu Purana where it is said that “the Supreme Being placed the Earth on the summit of the ocean, where it floats like a mighty vessel and from its expansive surface does not sink beneath the waters.” The entire literature smacks of commercialism and is essentially different in nature from the early Vedic literature so much so that Prof. Max Muller in his “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature” says, “there is throughout the Brahmanas, such a complete misunderstanding of the original intention of the Vedic hymns that we can hardly understand how such an estrangement could have taken place unless there had been at some time or other a sudden and violent breaks in the chain of tradition”. This “estrangement” can be accounted by foreign influence which follows the footsteps of commerce.” The focus of this foreign influence upon India was therefore in the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries” and certainly not “later than the time of Buddha, for this great teacher found all India believing in metempsychosis, which is not a Vedic doctrine” and must therefore be an exotic. [2] It must not however be supposed that the maritime activity of the Hindoos dates from the period : nay sea-farming had become a matter of habit with
1 J. Kennedy J. R. A. S. 1898, p. 270-1.
- Rev. Joshep Edkins J . R. A. S. 1886, p. 6.