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CHAPTER 1
Writing a Book about India
In India everything is done differently from the rest of the world. This will never change.
— BABUR (CITED IN DALRYMPLE 1998, 173)
Everyone who wrote about India preferred the marvellous to the true.
— STRABO 15.1.28
Hindus differ from us [Muslims] in everything which other nations have in common.
— AL-BIRUNI (SACHAU 1910, 17)
India is the inner state of every man.
— BILL AITKEN 1992, 194
Drawing aside the Curtain
An outsider writing a book about India faces a formidable problem, which is even greater today than it was for Megasthenes. Centuries, indeed millennia, of familiarity, or should one rather say unfamiliarity, with India have erected a series of curtains through which it is difficult to peer clearly. As great a writer as Carlo Levi confessed that he found India 'impossible to describe'. Every age has had its own picture of India, always from the vantage point of an observer who finds what he observes essentially alien. Yet the otherness of India exerts a pull, a fascination, which naturally results in a particularly strong distortion of reality to fit what the observer thinks he sees, wishes to see, or believes he ought to see. In order to understand how Greeks such as Megasthenes saw India, it is necessary to peel back these curtains or at least to be aware of the distorting, pixillating effect each separate one has on our field of vision.
I draw back, or at least identify, the curtains one by one, starting with the most recent. I don't know what your mental picture of India is, but there are a few things I was aware of before visiting the country. As I grew up in the sixties India came into my consciousness when the Beatles went there, bringing back an aura of joss-sticks and sitar music that infested our teenage rooms. A never-forgotten experience was a Ravi Shankar concert in Coventry Cathedral (I came away with the great man's signature on a record sleeve), at which, after about a quarter of an hour, a friend leaned over to me and asked, 'Has he finished tuning up yet?' Growing maturity made me conscious of major political figures and events, and a general picture developed of a vast, crowded, untidy country, full of intellectuals and mystics, and bathed in startlingly brilliant colours.
This view of India can be traced as early as the 1930s. The central character of W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge sought enlightenment (and acquired the skills of hypnosis) in India. A modern-day saint and mystic, after visiting the Elephanta caves and seeing the colossal heads of Brahma, Vi??u and Siva, he 'suddenly became aware of an intense conviction that India had something to give me that I had to have'. He enters a period of study with a swami given to such pronouncements as 'By meditation on the formless one I found rest in the Absolute'.
Anita Desai's novel Return to Ithaca traces the experience of two lost Westerners trying to find meaning and their 'true selves' in India. Amrit Lal Vegad describes meeting a young French couple on an island in the Narmada: 'what magical thread had drawn the young Frenchman and his wife across the seven seas to this deserted island in the Narmada? The hunger for beauty? Solitary meditation? Or an intense desire to escape the rat race of the West and immerse themselves in the peace of the East?' Even Indians can fall for the clichés about 'escaping the West', as depicted in Upamanyu Chatterjee's novel English, August, where the disquiet of the protagonist caught up in the need for a career still allows him to satirise the Englishman for whom it is all too easy: 'John Avery ... had sensed a country through the books and films of other climes, and had been moved to take a passage, only to be a little bewildered, and perhaps feel a little foolish.' Even The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel presents an India which catalyses spiritual change in all the characters.
Other writers become simply impatient with India. Arthur Koestler in 1960 devoted a journey to investigating the most extreme forms of mystical battiness, and judged all Indian thought by that measure. A tone of contempt suffuses his book. 'The genuine mystic is entitled to state experiences and affirm convictions which contradict logic, science and common sense. But he is not entitled to borrow words which have a precise meaning in science and philosophy and roll them around in a game of Wonderland croquet with mobile hoops.' V. S. Naipaul seems to see nothing in India but human shit and tedious bureaucracy. Allen Ginsberg ignores the bureaucracy but substitutes photographs of mutilated limbs which for him apparently represent the essence of India. Undoubtedly more examples could be brought in to illustrate these and related reactions.
My studies of Alexander the Great increased my awareness of India, but only from the point of view of its would-be conqueror. This book is an attempt to see not just what Alexander saw, but also what his more studious companions had more time to see. Onesicritus, Megasthenes, Nearchus and the rest acquired a dubious reputation in antiquity as 'liars', as did their predecessors Herodotus and Ctesias, because no one in the Greek world could believe what they reported. This book aims to recover their observations and to test them against what we can know from an Indian point of view, as well as to identify the patterns in the curtains that prevented them too from seeing India clearly. They may, I hope, emerge as better reporters of what their informants told them than curmudgeons like Strabo took them for.
Curtain number two, for a British writer, must be the complex of attitudes associated with British imperial rule in India, which ended in 1947 (four years before I was born). It can be quite startling now to read the comments of some nineteenth-century writers, including major intellectuals like Thomas Macaulay and James Mill, on India as they saw it: the country was not fit for self-government, and so on. Even great thinkers like Hegel and Marx were blind to the qualities of India, defining the country as a place without history, because of its immersion in an immemorial 'oriental' stasis. It is true that historical works in India are hard to find: the distinguished scholar F. E. Pargiter wrote, quoting his predecessor Arthur A. Macdonell, 'Ancient India has bequeathed to us no historical works. "History is the one weak spot in Indian literature. It is, in fact, non-existent".' Hegel went a step further and made a value judgment out of this fact. 'India has no history at all, at least no known history', he wrote; 'what we call its history is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society'. Even Louis Dumont, author of the classic Homo Hierarchicus, doubts whether there is a history of India, a country and people immutable and indifferent to time. Carlo Levi, more philosophically, saw India as a land of 'time without action': 'What I have seen, with its infinite brilliant and multiform faces, is nothing more than the tiniest fragment of a boundless, limitless reality. Time flows as slowly as the sacred rivers that coil back on themselves in these grasslands'.
Such expressions of bafflement are by no means always as hostile as Hegel's comment sounds. But many of them are. Edward Said has collected plenty of examples of such attitudes, to which he gave the unfortunate descriptor 'Orientalism', in a casual insult to many scholars who are proud to call themselves orientalists. Others found Indian art no better than the work of 'savages'; blinded by the classical ideal of Greek art, Sir George Birdwood wrote in 1910, à propos a Javanese statue of Buddha,
This senseless similitude, by its immemorial fixed pose, is nothing more than an uninspired brazen image, vacuously squinting down its nose to its thumbs, knees and toes. A boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as a symbol of passionate purity and serenity of soul.
The 'boiled suet pudding' school of criticism had repercussions not only among his own people but among Indians of a nationalist bent. Even a serious art historian like Percy Gardner could write, 'The art of Asoka is a mature art; in some respects more mature than the Greek art of the time, though of course far inferior to it, at least in our eyes.' This sort of thing, and the concomitant enthusiasm for Gandhara because of its patent influence from Greek artistic style, has enraged some Indian scholars, who throw out the baby with the bathwater and reject more than just the idea that any tradition other than Indian was involved in the development of Indian art. I have myself been told by a guide at Khajuraho that the temple as an architectural form was an exclusively Indian invention, going back several thousand years. (In fact the temples at Mamallipuram are generally agreed to be the earliest such structures in India, and they date from the ninth century CE. I would of course agree that they show no influence from the Greek temples of sixteen centuries before that date.) Hindu nationalism increasingly rejects not only Western scholarship on Hinduism, but that on all aspects of Indian history, to which it prefers a strange construct known as 'Non-Jonesian Indology'.
Such an approach denigrates the other main strand of nineteenth-century work on India, namely the extraordinary, dedicated and brilliant labours of those Western scholars (often amateurs) who recovered Indian history and created the disciplines of archaeology and philology in India. Nor should one forget the explorers, the botanists and naturalists, like Joseph Hooker, even if he did react to the flora of Ceylon with the reflection that 'all one longs for is the bracing air, and far more wholesome, though less attractive, beauties of an English country scene'. It is important to remember that these men were working – on the ground, in India – simultaneously with those who, in distant Europe, came out with easy platitudes about suet puddings.
In India, too, of course, there were plenty who saw the brown race that surrounded them as other, beyond the pale socially, intellectually and morally. Their attitudes have been explored in classic works of literature such as Forster's A Passage to India and Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown. A considerably more nuanced view is presented by Rudyard Kipling, who, at the end of a day's work on the Lahore Gazette, liked nothing better than to 'step down into the brown crowd' and disappear for an evening to immerse himself in the life that most Westerners never saw. The view that saw everything in India as 'heathen' exasperated him. Kipling's view of India is complex and multi-faceted; a recent book distinguishes two strands in his stories about India, those that show a real sympathy and empathy, and those that pander to the jingoistic tastes of his readership. With his evidently warm feelings for 'the flat, red India of palm-tree, palmyra-palm, and rice', Kipling held the view that an army of Indians, led by British public schoolboys, could easily defeat a southern European army: lucky for Alexander that the British public school had not been invented in his day. Not a few found that the classics not only 'helped them cope' but were actually useful in India: Lord Dufferin remarked that they contained 'all that is worth knowing if you ever have to govern India'. Kipling himself became a thoroughgoing jingo as he got older, but he had left India by that time. The masterpiece of the 'sympathetic' Kipling is Kim. I have found it illuminating to juxtapose Kipling and Megasthenes in approaching the latter's work, as will be seen. Kipling once told the Irish writer John Stewart Collis that the British 'did not travel to create empires but, like all islanders, to explore more of the world'. Alexander might have half-understood that view.
The German Romantics
India has a special place in German romantic thought, though I can offer no more than a few pointers here. Romantic poets and philosophers devoured the first Western translations of Indian texts, Anquetil du Perron's Upani?ads and others, making of them what they could to develop a philosophy of their own. Their work represented a sharp break from that of late classicism. Goethe (1749–1832) regarded the gods as 'Indian monstrosities', though he did touch on Indian themes a couple of times, notably in 'Der Gott und die Bajadere'. C. M. Wieland gave an Indian setting to his novel Agathodaimon, in which the protagonists encounter the great sage Apollonius of Tyana and arrive at an opinion shared by many scholars before and since, that Apollonius' alleged companion Damis had made up most of what he wrote about India. 'So dumpf und idiotisch Damis war, so wäre doch zu wünschen, wir hätten sein Buch noch gerade so von Wort zu Wort wie ers geschrieben'.
The first great enthusiast for India was J. G. Herder (1755–1803), who thought that India represented 'the childhood of the human race'; Friedrich Schlegel thought ancient India was a 'Golden Age'. Herder's enthusiasm for Sakuntala (translated by Georg Forster in 1789) was shared by Schiller, who thought it better than the Greek drama. Herder was fascinated by ideas of metempsychosis and wrote three 'Dialogues' on the subject; he also studied the visual arts with enthusiasm. Schlegel's brother August Wilhelm was one of the great scholars of the age, and in the 1820s and 1830s his Indische Bibliothek brought texts and information about India to any German reader who might be interested. Later in the century two more scholars made an impact on Indian studies. Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) was not only a scholar but a poet; though best known as a source of some marvellous settings by Gustav Mahler, his Weisheit der Brahmanen is an attempt to convey a philosophy, loosely based on Indian ideas, in German verse. Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858) may be best remembered as the object of the passion of young Karoline von Günderode (1780–1806), who failed to draw him away from his ageing wife and expressed her sympathy with the Indian practice of sati (widow-burning), and her love for Creuzer, in a moving poem, 'Die malabarischen Witwen', and subsequently by taking her own life in the Rhineland town of Bingen.
The culmination of German interest in India is Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who was much influenced by the idea of Brahman as an immanent deity; his theory of the Will has much in common with Brahmanism. All these studies no doubt fed directly into the later Western idea of the mystic East.
Traders
Before the imperial rulers came the great commercial exploiters, who could see nothing in India but goods to make them wealthy. The East India Company laid the foundations of the British Raj; before them, the Portuguese led by Vasco da Gama in 1497 conducted a voyage of discovery described by João de Barros as a mission to 'conquistar e conservar', but which also had the purpose of cutting out the Arabs from the India trade, and of converting the natives to Christianity, a religion to which they were understood to be already close. On arrival in Calicut the men took a Vasihnava temple, which is accurately described, for a Christian church. Luís de Camões's epic poem Os Lusíadas, about Gama's voyage, begins and ends with Alexander:
You in such manner through the world shall spread, That Alexander shall in you repose, Without envying the Maeonian lyre.
The Portuguese king Dom Manuel liked to be told that in this 'conquest' of India he had excelled Alexander.
India as a source of wealth was a constant cynosure in the early modern period, as it had been in the Roman empire, when Pliny complained that the spice trade served no purpose except to encourage luxurious tastes in formerly hardy Romans. Putting pepper on your food was a direct index of moral decline. Horace Walpole took a similar line to Pliny, describing England as 'a sink of Indian wealth'. Most of the traders did not write much about it, so their contribution to intellectual formations is limited; but they contribute to the sense of otherness, of India as a source of amazing wealth. Now, one of the first words that springs to mind in regard to India's population is the opposite, 'poverty'.
If traders did not write about India, there were others who did; a great range of early modern writers is collected in the survey by Pompa Banerjee, from 1500–1723. Many of them were diplomats dealing not only with the Abbasid court in Persia but with the Mughals in India. They include such famous names as Pietro della Valle, Thomas Coryat, Peter Mundy, Thomas Herbert and many others, most of them interested especially in religious matters.
Muslim Visitors
Whoever comes from Iran to India imagines That in India gold is scattered like stars in the evening sky.
— ASHRAF MAZANDARANI, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Greek Experience of India"
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