Composite Culture in a Multicultural Society

Chapter 7

1. ‘Composite culture’ may have been understood in different senses. One articulation is available in the view offered by the renowned comparative philologist S.K. Chatterji: ‘Mother India is a repository of a composite culture of which the vehicle of expression is the Aryan language, but the contributions by the Nisadas, the Kiratas and the Dravidas are important as those of the Aryans’. ‘Composite’ here is understood in the sense of differentiable weights of inputs of different cultural elements. S.K. Chatterji, ‘Contributions of Different Language-Culture Groups’, in H. Bhattacharya (gen. ed.), The Cultural Heritage of India, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Ramkrishna Mission Institute of Culture, 1958), p. 90.

2. This is a free translation from ...