Renascence (Renaissance in French, Renascimento in Italian) as an English word comes from the Latin root renascor meaning to be born again, to begin to grow again.(renatus= reborn). Metonymically in Latin it can mean: to rise again, to be restored or to reappear. Figuratively, again in Latin, it can mean: to be renewed, to come alive, or to revive, even to recur.

In the English language both spellings are now used-- Renascence and Renaissance. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the English word Renaissance was first used in AD 1845, and that Mathew Arnold changed the spelling to Renascence. In French too the word was, according to Toynbee, first used by E.J. Delechuze (1781-1863), to describe "the impact made by a dead Hellenic civilisation on Western Christendom at a particular time and place, namely Northern and Central Italy in the late medieval period". (Toynbee A Study of History, Abridged 2 vol edn, Vol. 11. P. 267).

As a technical term it refers to the transitional movement in Europe from late medieval to early modern; in literature and the arts it refers to the revival of European art and letters in the fifteenth century. In architecture it signifies the transition from Gothic to neo-classical.

But it can be applied to other cultural revivals - e.g. the Indian Renaissance of the 18th century or the Islamic Renaissance in the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad (1275-1517). Since the present writer is convinced that the 18th century Indian Renaissance was incomplete, and has to be completed in the future, the basic orientation in this paper will be on the normative dimensions and aspects of any cultural renaissance.

I. Past-Future Dialectic

Toynbee, for example, refers to two other Renaissances in Europe, the Carolingian Renaissance of the 8th and 9th centuries, and the Italian Renaissance or Resorgimento of the 19th century. Both these renaissances have two things in common, and in looking at these common elements, we begin to get an idea of what is normative for a renaissance. The first thing about the two renaissances of Europe separated by a millennia of history (within which lies the main European renaissance of the 15th century) is their consciousness of reviving the ancient glory of the once great Roman Empire in a contemporary context. But this looking back with pride to the past is accompanied by a second element: a looking forward to the future with bright hope. These two elements -- a dialectic of moving between pride about a past golden age and a confident optimistic, vibrantly hopeful outlook towards the future, seem to be two essential elements of a Renaissance which we can pin down from the beginning.

But is the simultaneous occurrence of these two factors merely an accident of history or an automatic cycle phenomenon? Is Shelley right in the last chorus of his Hellas:

The Word's great age begin anew,
The golden years return,
The Earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream ......

Toynbee, who quotes Shelley with obvious disapproval, feels that such a fatalistic attitude is the real enemy of a Renaissance. If Europeans were to assume today, that, because the rise and fall of civilisations is an automatic, cyclical, necessary and fate-controlled process from which there is no escape, that assumption would lead to the death of European civilisation. For Toynbee 16 civilisations have risen and fallen. Nine others are now at the point of death. Western civilisation is the 26th which has not died, nor is at the point of death. And therefore, says this great European:

"Though sixteen civilisations may have perished already to our knowledge, and nine others may be now at the point of death, we the twenty-sixth are not compelled to submit the riddle of our fate to the blind arbitrament of statistics. The divine spark of creative power is still alive in us, and, if we have the grace to kindle it into flame, then the stars in their courses cannot defeat our efforts to attain the goal of human endeavour".

We will come back to Toynbee several times in this paper, but let us not here as a primary normative requirement of a Renaissance: the creative dialectic between pride in a glorious past, and brightly hopeful desire to move into and create a glorious future. Let us also note that these are deep feelings or human emotions, originating in the ruling class, into which the proletariat is then co-opted, often without fully understanding.

II. The External Stimulus

Every renaissance has, it seems, an external stimulus, usually the experience of being over-run by alien peoples, or at least the fear of the enemy at the doors. Toynbee is, of course, very eloquent at this point. The "contact between civilisations in space" can have either disastrous consequences for one or both, or can prove stimulating to either. In his survey of encounters between mutually contemporary civilisation, Toynbee devotes major space to the contacts of the Modern West with Russia with Orthodox Christendom, with the Hindu world, with the Islamic world, with the Jews, with the Far Eastern and with Native American cultures, and finds certain common features in all these encounters.

The contacts are mainly "middle class," and the western middle class is the bearer of so-called "modernity" to the middle class of other cultures, who become "an artificial substitute for a home-grown middle class“ a manufactured intelligentsia. (2) The difference between the home-grown middle class and its manufactured artificial substitutes in non-western societies is that the home-grown variety is at home in its own culture, whereas the manufactured varieties are not. The latter are exotic, -- "products and symptoms, not of natural growth, but of their own societies' disconfiture in collisions with an alien Modern west. They were symbols, not of strength but of weakness." (3) Therefore these non-western imitation middle classes have a love-hate relationship to the original (odi et amo), which was itself a symptom, "the measure of its fore-boding of its inability to emulate western middle class achievement". Toynbee cites as an example our own "Sikh Khalsa that had been called into being by a decision to fight the Mughal ascendancy with its own weapons".

(2) It was usually after the over-running of one civilisation has ebbed and flowed, or advanced and receded, that the major influences on each other begin to take place. But the first reaction is to take on some of the more aggressive characteristics of the aggressor in order to repel him as happened to our Sikhs and Marattas in reaction to the Mughal invasion. This can take the form of military aggressiveness, or alternatively, spiritual, intellectual and ideological aggression, and more often, a combination of the two. But the best learning from each other takes place after the initial aggression and counter aggression have somewhat abated.

(3) There is also the possibility of a pacific and isolationist response to aggression. This was the early Chinese and Japanese response to the Western aggression of the Portuguese. Tibetans and Burmese have tried the same with much more persistence success in such pacific- isolationist resistance is rare, and even in these rare instances, rather pathetic in their very success.

(4) It is also fascinating to observe that sometimes the aggression may defeat itself by its own internecine conflicts. The Portugese, the France, the Dutch and the British fought each other in their bid to dominate India, and each suffered from this conflict. Even today, there is not only the conflict between America and Western Europe on the one hand, but even more important, between Western Marxism and Western liberalism on the other. The victims of aggression often seek to cash in on these internal squabbles of the aggressor.

With all these nuances, it is correct to say that the second most important requirement for a renaissance is a creative encounter with an alien culture, civilisation and values. The victim culture may reject many elements of the aggressor culture. Gandhi himself rejected the acquisitiveness, the aggressiveness, the love of affluence and comfort, and the gratificationist approach to life and life-fulfillment, which elements were central to western culture. But neither were the Indian people willing to follow Gandhi, nor could Gandhi prevent the massive over-running of our culture by western culture. In fact was not Gandhi himself a product more of the encounter of cultures than of the Indian culture by itself? What about Raja Ram Mohan Roy or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee?

At this stage we need only to affirm the need for an external stimulus in the Renaissance of any culture. Detailed study can help us isolate certain necessary features for a creative encounter of cultures, but this paper cannot attempt such analysis.

III. The Cultural Element - Art, Language and Literature

Toynbee, in his Study of History (Abridged Vol 2: chapter 10, XXXIV, "A survey of Renaissances", lists the following major renaissances in history:

(a) Late Medieval Italian Renaissance of Hellenism (15th century)
(b) The Carolingian Renaissance (9th century)
(c) The Revival of Confucian Philosophy in Far Eastern Society, with the re-establishment of the T'ang dynasty in AD 622.
(d) Asshurbanipal's renascent universal state of Assyria -(7th century BC)
(e) Constantine Posphyrogenitus' revival of Byzantium -
(f) Yung Lo
(g) K'ang Hsi
(h) Ch'ien Lung

In many of these revivals of ancient culture, a common element was the revival of a language and literature as well as new schools of the visual arts. (669-626 B.C.)

Asshurbanipal's two clay tablet libraries of Sumerian and Akkadian classical literature were destroyed in the sack of Nineveh in 612 B.C. We do not know enough therefore of its contents. The renaissance itself was short-lived and probably ended with the death of the scholarly Emperor Asshurbanipalm(Asura-vanipala) in 626 B.C. There is evidence, however, that his library and the literary scholars he attracted around himself and his library played a major role in the revival of the short-lived Assyrian universal empire.

Constantine Posphyrogenitus (regnat AD 912-59) who wrote a book on imperial administration was likewise a scholar whose rule ushered in a literary renaissance in Byzantium in the 10th century A.D.(5) His collection of ancient literary works was a source of inspiration.

Yung Lo (15 century AD), the Second Emperor of the Minz Dynasty in China, assembled a library of 22877 books, which again was a major factor in the Ming Renaissance in China.

Even in the 15th century Italian Renaissance of Europe, the work of the Popes in assembling libraries and organizing scholars played a major role, though Pope Nicholas‘ (1441-1455) library had only 9000 volumes. The Carolingian Renaissance was certainly inspired by the revival of learning inspired by Theodore of Tarsus, the Venerable Bede, (673-735 AD) and Alcuin of York (735-804 AD). The smothering of learning by the Barbarians from the north practically extinguished the lamp lit by Charlemagne.

From our Indian view point, it is useful for us to consider what happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when the foundations of modern India were being laid. The debate in the British parliament gives an admirable survey of the two options before the colonial masters.

One option is typified by William Carey, the Cobber turned scholar-missionary. His belief, which he implemented with relentless effort and unparalleled skill, was that India could be revived only by making our Sanskrit classics available to the Indian people in their own modern tongues. The college of Fost William, which later become Presidency college of Calcutta University, was established for promoting such learning. Its curriculum of study then included Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, in addition to English; but also Bengali, Marathi, Hindusthani, Telugu, Tamil and Kanarese; and also the Greek, Latin and English classics, as well as modern languages of Europe. Dr. Gilchrist was Professor of Hindusthani; Licut. J. Baillie taught Arabic; Mr. H.B. Edmonstone was Professor of Persian. William Carey was the teacher of Bengali and Sanskrit. On the side he collected butterflies and other biological specimens of Indian flora and fauna, and translated not only the Christian Bible but also the Hindu epics and the Gita into Indian languages. Carey spoke idiomatic Sanskrit fluently. He edited and published The Ramayana of Valmeeki, in the original Sanskrit, with a prose translation and explanatory notes in 1806-1810, which opened the Hindu epics and other literature to the English speaking and to other European nations- leading to many literary and philosophical works and translations.

Here our interest is in Carey's attitude to what was necessary for the renaissance of India.His magnusm opus: A Universal Dictionary of the Oriental Languages, derived from the Sanskrit, of which that language is to be the groundwork, appeared in 1811. He edited the Sanskrit text of Hitopadesa, Dasakumaracarita and Bhartrhari's works. He also translated the Bible, into Bengali, Oriya, Maghadi, Assamese, Khasi and Manipoori. His Sanskrit translation of the Bible appeared in 1811-1818, as did the Hindusthani version. He also produced translations in Marathi, Punjabi, and in all the Rajasthani dialects (Udaypuri, Jaipuri, Ujjaini, Bikaneri, and so on). He initiated the first non-English newspaper the Samachar Darpan (1818). Carey started the movement against sathi and against the abandoning of female babies to drown in the Sea at Sagar, and also against slavery. He was the foundeer of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India. He introduced printing and paper manufacture in India.

To summarise William Carey's option then, we could list

(a) Promote learning in general, particularly languages and sciences;
(b) provide access to Indian classical literature and arts
(c) make possible the knowledge of non-Indian civilisations and cultures also.
(d) help Indians know their own religions heritage, as well as other religions.

Opposed to this was another British view-- that of Alexander Duff, which, according to the present writer, has prevailed in Indian higher education, and stands in the way of a genuine Indian Renaissance. Alexander Duff was also a British (Scottish) missionary, and in fact the successor of Carey. He came to India in 1830, then 24 years of age. He laid the foundations of our national educational system --the British Indian Education Charter of 1853 and the 1854 Educational Despatch of Lord Halifax. Duff came to the view, shared by many western educated Indians, that our national heritage is an obstacle to our progress in modern science and technology. He conceived western liberal education as a "mine" that would 'undermine' the resistance of India's superstitions culture. The debate in the British Parliament was on which of these two options should prevail the British policy in India. The 1835 decision, to develop Higher Education through English, was in public recognized as the advice of Thomas Babington Macaulay, but that advice came originally from Alexander Duff.

Sardar Panikkar says:

"Macaulay believed that, once the Indian people became familiar with Western knowledge, Hindu Society would dissolve itself..... In the modernization of India, this system of education played a decisive part. But what it failed to achieve was either the undermining of the Hindu religion or dissolution of Hindu society"

Even now we are tardy in realizing, with Panikkar, how deeply our nation has been deformed and distorted by this system of education about which we sometimes foolishly think that it was a failure. The educational system has not merely destroyed much of the creativity of the nation; it has created an elite which is so deeply enslaved by a particular way of thinking that it cannot even recognize its own bondage. We still think that a scientific secular temper will save us. We still think of western norms as standard. And even in looking for a Renaissance, we look for light from the West.