CHAPTER ONE

THE BACKGROUND

The Land

The influence of Geography in determining the character and culture of a people, or, in short, what has been called since Graebner “Anthropo-geography” (the relation between culture and environment), and in our days as Human Geography, is a science which neither the ethnologist nor the literary critic can afford to neglect.¹ The cold dark winters of the polar regions are said to be inimical to the spirit of activity, vigilance and criticism. The gloom of geographical uniformity combined with a harsh climate imposes a spirit of resignation and acquiescence that saps initiative and lames resource. Even comparatively minor differences of landscape as between two contiguous districts of the same country, say Tuscany and Umbria, are manifest in the different artistic outlook of the painters who come from these two districts. It has been also observed, for instance, that monotheism is characteristic of religions which have originated in the desert, and polytheism of cults where Nature is diversified and luxuriant. Similarly, it has been argued, that the vast Himālayan Range, the broad plains that seem to have no horizon watered by rivers which in their mighty expanse seem to have no shores setting limits to them, the tropical forests with their various living creatures, were instrumental in the evolution of Vedic poetry and the sense of wonder and the sense of the Infinite these poems reveal and these natural causes inspired. Man was faced with a uniform sense of the Infinite on all sides; it seemed to overwhelm him, and there was no other alternative

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¹ Cf. GRAEBNER, Methode der Ethnologie, Heidelberg, 1911; W. Schmidt, The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology (translation from the German), New York, 1939; E. HUNTINGTON, Main-springs of Civilization, New York, 1959.