Page 28 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

the mercy of the strong and the violent, war, secondly and by a
moral extension of this idea, for the protection of the weak and
the oppressed and for the maintenance of right and justice in the
world. For all these ideas, the social and practical, the moral and
the chivalrous enter into the Indian conception of the Kshatriya,
the man who is a warrior and ruler by function and a knight and
king in his nature. Although the more general and universal ideas
of the Gita are those which are the most important to us, we ought
not to leave out of consideration altogether the colouring and
trend they take from the peculiar Indian culture and social system
in the midst of which they arose. That system differed from the
modern in its conception. To the modern mind man is a thinker,
worker or producer and a fighter all in one, and the tendency of
the social system is to lump all these activities and to demand from
each individual his contribution to the intellectual, economical and
military life and needs of the community without paying any heed
to the demands of his individual nature and temperament. The an-
cient Indian civilisation laid peculiar stress on the individual nature,
tendency, temperament and sought to determine by it the ethical
type, function and place in the society. Nor did it consider man
primarily as a social being or the fullness of his social existence
as the highest ideal, but rather as a spiritual being in process of
formation and development and his social life, ethical law, play of
temperament and exercise of function as means and stages of
spiritual formation. Thought and knowledge, war and govern-
ment, production and distribution, labour and service were care-
fully differentiated functions of society, each assigned to those
who were naturally called to it and providing the right means by
which they could individually proceed towards their spiritual de-
velopment and self-perfection.
CWSA 19: 49-50

28 All India Magazine, October 2025