Sind through the centuries : proceedings of an international
seminar held in Karachi in spring 1975 by the Department of
Culture, government of Sind

Karachi ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1981.

ISBN 0 19 577250 4

The Soul of Sind by A. K. Brohi (pages 19-21)

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India, according to the ancient historians, had hardly any ascertainable
history before the advent of the Moslem Conquerers.  Elphinston, writing in
1832, observed that 'In Indian history no date of public event can be 
fixed before the invasion of Alexander, and no connected relation of the 
national transaction can be attempted until after the Muhammedan conquests.'
Total absence of writing, perhaps, had something to do with the emergence
of a speciliazed class of scholars -- Brahmans -- and the resulting denial
to the non-Brahman of his right to have access to the sources whence 
religion and culture themselves spring into prominence.

...

With Moslem conquerors, however, it was otherwise: they were essentially
the people who had been endowed with a historical imagination and outlook,
and they knew that for man reading and writing was a religious duty. ...
Thus these Moslem conquerers, who were already steeped in the traditions
of reading and writing, on their arrival in the Indus Valley, began to
observe for themselves what had happened in this part of the world and
became the first chroniclers of events that had marked the evolution of
emergence of India as we know it.

The practice of burning dead bodies on the funeral pyre, which was the
leading feature of the Indian religious practices of pre-Islamic faiths,
was itself symptomatic of the lack of interest which the people belonging
to this subcontinent showed in preserving the earthly remains of their
precursors.  A recent historian has found in this practice of the Hindus
the explanation of the avowedly unhistorical attitude of the Indian to
Man's life on earth: he belongs so much to the world of the Absolute, of 
the Eternal Brahama [sic], who is located as it were, outside the general
current and affairs of the history, that he is not interested in history.
One of the greatest symbols of a culture's attitude towards time and
space, says Amatury de Riencourt, in his recent study Soul of China,
'lies in its disposal of the dead.  The Indians unwilling to fight the
inevitable corruption brought by years and centuries, burned their dead
as if to obliterate for ever their duration in time'.

The 'Soul of India' has had by and large for its aspiration, the ideal
of self-realization through mystical introspection but the goal that
Islam placed before its votaries, was 'God-Realization' by means of
men's action-in-history; the motivation for man's making history according
to Islam is transhistoric and metacosmic but, in effect, the labour of
man on earth is primarily directed to the end that he is to adorn it, to
beautify it, to make of it a veritable paradise for his progeny to live in.
The Moslem spirit came therefore to bring about a revolution of all
pre-existing values.  ...

...

.. The Sind region has witnessed, as no other part of the subcontinent
has witnessed, the early impact of the light of Islam on what admittedly
were unhistorical peoples of India, ..

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-- Milind Saraph