Indian society has been a changeless one. Romila Thapar elucidates how with the prevailing caste system, “each man… had its own role in the large and more complex network of the social structure.” (Thapar 30) Man’s ultimate destiny lay in the transcendence of the soul to spiritual salvation so that the requirements of the social life were only of transitory value. The Indians maintained that their culture had an essentially spiritual quality and was therefore superior to the materialism of the west. But what irked the wealthy European most, was that India was “on the back of this great animal poverty and backwardness,” (How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories 11) and the wealthy Indian’s apathy for it. The Indian economy had been broad-based before the advent of the English. But the imposition of English laws and English goods drove Indian crafts out of business so that they all returned to the village and agriculture.
College of Commerce, Patna
