CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION: INDIA AND HER ANCIENT CULTURE

Allegations

1. The Himalayas were a significant cultural divide - overrated.

       Counter-Evidence - We already know how the Himalayas were passable and how civilisations and cultures permeated the mighty terrains. So, to view the importance of the Himalayas as a marker that separated rather than integrated is flawed. The implication of the Himalayas as a climatic-geographical divide (source of two major rivers in two directions, causing clouds to drift northwards and westwards) is much more than a cultural divide.

 2. The 'Indian' character allegedly leads to fatalism and quietism, and accepts fortune and misfortune alike without any complaint.

      Counter-Evidence - The scale of natural phenomena in India may have helped shape the character of her people - 

• India received the bounties of nature with total dependence on monsoons, which provided much for sustenance with little in return. Nature's terrible anger, on the other hand, manifested itself in the form of floods, famines and plagues, which no human effort could appease. 
• On the other hand, other ancient civilisations such as those of the Greeks, Romans and Chinese had to contend with winters, which encouraged sturdiness and resourcefulness. 

Though there is a certain element of quietism (calm acceptance of things happening around/ subverting effort in favour of the bounty received) in the Indian attitude to life (never approved by the moralists), however, achievements like immense irrigation works, temple architecture, army campaigns, etc., do not suggest devitalized people. 

So, whatever effect the climate had on the characters of Indians was towards developing love for ease and comfort, an addiction to the simple pleasures and luxuries so freely given by Nature, to which the impulse to self-denial and asceticism on the one hand, and occasional strenuous effort on the other were natural reactions. 

 

The Discovery of Ancient India

India and China have, in fact, the oldest continuous cultural traditions in the world.

The ancient civilization of India and its traditions have been preserved without any breakdown to the present day, unlike those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece.

·      Until the advent of archaeology, the peasants of Egypt or Iraq didn’t know of the culture of their forefathers. Similarly, the Greek counterparts had any but the vaguest ideas about the glory of Periclean Athens. There had been an almost complete break with the past in each case.

·    But when Europeans visited India, they found a culture fully conscious of its own antiquity – a culture which, in fact, exaggerated the antiquity and claimed to have stayed fundamentally unchanged. For example, even today, people recall the names of shadowy chieftains who lived a thousand years before Christ. The orthodox Brahmin in his daily worship repeats hymns composed even earlier.

 

//Own// We have instances of literature being transferred and preserved from generation to generation through oral dictations and writings. 

 

Study of the ancient past of India

Until the last half of the18th century, Europeans didn’t make any real attempt to study India’s ancient past.

1. Her early history was known only from brief passages in the works of Greek and Latin authors.

2. A few devoted missionaries in the Peninsula gained a deep understanding of contemporary Indian life and a brilliant mastery of the vernaculars. But their studies of India's past were speculative in nature, attempting to link the Indians with the descendants of Noah and the vanished empires of the Bible. 

3. Meanwhile, a few Jesuits succeeded in mastering Sanskrit, the classical language of India.

·       One of them, Father Hanxleden, who worked in Kerala from 1699 to 1732, compiled the first Sanskrit grammar in a European tongue, which remained in manuscript but was used by his successors.

·       Father Coeurdoux, in 1797, was probably the first student to recognize the kinship of Sanskrit and the languages of Europe, and suggested that the brahmans of India were descended from one of the sons of Japhet, whose brothers migrated to the West. 

The Jesuits never made attempts at a real understanding of India’s past.

The missionaries made no real attempt to understand the historical background of the Culture of the people among whom they worked. They accepted that culture at its face value, as very ancient and unchanging.

//They focused on attempting to convert Indians into their fold, make their religion and beliefs attractive to Indians, so India remains a fertile ground for proliferation. 

The foundations of Indology were laid independently, in another part of India, and by other hands.

 

Indology

It is the study of Indian history, literature, philosophy, and culture.

FIRST PHASE – Started with Sir William Jones (1746-94).

·       came to Calcutta as a judge of the Supreme Court, under the governor-generalship of Warren Hastings, who himself had deep sympathy with both Muslim and Hindu culture.

·       Jones was a linguistic genius – he knew all the more important languages of Europe as well as Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and a smattering of Chinese with the aid of the very inadequate material which was available at the time.

·       Before coming to India, he had recognized the relationship of European languages to Persian. He rejected the idea that all these tongues were derived from Hebrew, a dogmatic view prevalent in the 18^th century. Instead, he suggested that Persian and the European languages were derived from a common ancestor, which was not Hebrew.

 

Charles Wilkin ( 1749- 1836) – The only Englishman involved in EIC administration of Bengal who had managed to learn Sanskrit.

With the aid of Wilkins and friendly Bengali pandits, Jones began to learn the language.

1784 - The Asiatic Society of Bengal was founded, on Jones' initiative, and with Jones himself as president. In the journal of this society, Asiatic Researches, the first real steps in revealing India's past were taken.

Translations: November 1784 - First direct translation of a Sanskrit work into English, Wilkins's Bhagavad Gita completed.

·       1787 - Translation of the Hitopadesa by Wilkins

·       1769 - Jones translated Kalidasa's Sakuntala

·       1792 – Jones translations of the Gita Govinda (1792), and the law book of Manu (published posthumously in 1794 under the title ‘Institutes of Hindoo Law’).

Several less important translations appeared in successive issues of Asiatic Researches. Jones and Wilkins were truly the fathers of Indology.

They were followed in Calcutta by Henry Colebrooke ( 1765-1837) and Horace Hayman Wilson (1789-1860). To the works of these pioneers must be added that of the Frenchman Anquetil-Duperron, a Persian scholar who, in 1786, published a translation of four Upanishads from a 17th-century Persian version—the translation of the whole manuscript, containing 50 Upanishads, appearing in 1801.

 

As a result of these translations, interest in Sanskrit literature began to grow in Europe.

·       In 1795, the government of the French Republic founded the Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes. In Paris, Alexander Hamilton (1762-1824), one of the earliest members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, held prisoner on parole in France at the end of the Peace of Amiens in 1805, became the first person to teach Sanskrit in Europe.

·       It was from Hamilton that Friedrich Schlegel, the first German Sanskritist, learnt the language. The first university chair of Sanskrit was founded at the College de France in 1814, and held by Leonard de Chezy, while from 1818 onwards the larger German universities set up professorships.

·       Sanskrit was first taught in England in 1805 at the training college of the East India Company at Hertford. The earliest English chair was the Boden Professorship at Oxford, first filled in 1832, when it was conferred upon HH Wilson, who had been an important member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Chairs were afterwards founded at London, Cambridge and Edinburgh, and at several other universities of Europe and America.

·       In 1816, Franz Bopp (1791-1867), a Bavarian, based on the hints of Sir William Jones, succeeded in very tentatively reconstructing the common ancestor of Sanskrit and the classical languages of Europe, and comparative philology became an independent science. Philology is the study of the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages.

·       In 1821, the French Socie’te’ Asiatique was founded in Paris, followed two years later by the Royal Asiatic Society in London.

This is how the work of editing and study of ancient Indian literature went on apace throughout the 19th century.

·       Probably the greatest achievement of Indological scholarship in 19th-century Europe was the enormous Sanskrit-German dictionary generally known as the St. Petersburg Lexicon, produced by the German scholars Otto Bohtlingk and Rudolf Roth, and published in parts by the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences from 1852 to 1875. England's greatest contributions to Sanskrit studies were the splendid edition of the Rig Veda, and the great series of authoritative annotated translations, Sacred Books of the East. Both these works were edited by the great German Sanskritist Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900), who spent most of his working life as Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford.

Significance:

1.      Interest in Sanskrit literature began to grow in Europe as a result of these translations.

2.     Comparative philology became an independent science.

 

SECOND PHASE -  The first work of the Asiatic Society of Bengal had been almost entirely literary and linguistic, and most of the 19^th century Indologists were primarily scholars in the classical tradition, working on written records. Early in the 19th century, however, Bengal Society began to turn some of its attention to the material remains of India's past, as the East India Company's surveyors brought back to Calcutta many reports of

·       temples, caves and shrines,

·       early coins and

·       copies of inscriptions in long-dead scripts.

By working backwards from the current scripts, the older ones were gradually deciphered until, in 1837, when James Prinsep, an official of the Calcutta Mint and Secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, interpreted, for the first time, the earliest Brahmi script and was able to read the edicts of the great emperor Asoka.

Alexander Cunningham, a young officer of the Royal Engineers, the father of Indian archaeology, from his arrival in India in 1831, devoted every minute he could spare from his military duties to the study of the material remains of ancient India. In 1862, the Indian government established the post of Archaeological Surveyor, to which he was appointed. Until his retirement in 1885, he devoted himself to the unravelling of India’s past with single-heartedness. Though he made no startling discoveries, and his technique was, by modern archaeological standards, crude and primitive, there is no doubt that, after Sir William Jones, Indology owes more to General Sir Alexander Cunningham than to any other worker in the field.

At the end of the 19th century, the activities of the Archaeological Survey almost ceased, owing to niggardly government grants. By 1900, many ancient buildings had been surveyed, and many inscriptions read and translated.

 20th century – Large-scale archaeological excavations began in with the coming of Viceroy Lord Curzon in 1901, who took a personal interest.

The Archaeological Survey was reformed and enlarged, with archaeologist John (later Sir John) Marshall as Director General. The Archaeological Department was still lamentably small and poor due to the country’s vast size. But Marshall was able to employ expert assistants and had funds for excavation on a scale more extensive than anything previously attempted.

For the first time, traces of the ancient cities of India began to emerge. Archaeology, as distinct from the surveying and conservation of ancient monuments, had begun in real earnest.

·       The greatest triumph of the Archaeological Survey of India under Sir John Marshall's directorship was undoubtedly the discovery of the Indus civilization. The first relics of India's oldest cities were noticed by Cunningham, who found strange, unidentified seals in the neighbourhood of Harappa in the Punjab. In 1922, an Indian officer of the Archaeological Survey, R. D. Banerjee, found further seals at Mohenjo Daro in Sind and recognized that they were the remains of a pre- Aryan civilization of great antiquity. Under Sir John Marshall's direction, the sites were systematically excavated from 1924 until his retirement in 1931. Digging was interrupted by financial retrenchment and the Second World War. But further important discoveries were made at Harappa during the brief directorship of Sir R. E. Mortimer Wheeler just after the war, though the sites are still by no means fully cleared. Much has yet to be done. Many mounds as yet unexcavated may throw floods of light on the dark places of India's past: unpublished manuscripts of great importance may yet lie mouldering in out-of-the-way libraries

THIRD PHASE – Taken over by natives of India.

·      Started in the last century, much valuable work was done by natives of India, especially by such Sanskritists and epigraphists as Dr Bhau Daji, Bhagavanlal Indrajt, Rajendralal Mitra, and the great Sir R. G. Bhandarkar. Now the chief initiative in Indology comes from the Indians themselves. Indian scholars have already completed the first critical edition of the gigantic Mahabharata and have started work on the enormous Poona Sanskrit Dictionary, which, when complete, will probably be the greatest work of lexicography the world has ever seen. Since 1947, the Archaeological Department has been entirely under Indian direction, and today the Western Indologist cannot hope to be more than a helper and friendly critic of the Asians. In times like these, however, when Asia is reacting against a century and a half of European domination, and a new culture, which will contain elements of East and West in firm synthesis, is in the process of birth, the European student still has a useful role to play in Indology.

 

The Glory of Ancient India

Most striking features of ancient Indian civilization are: -

1.     Humanity

·       It was a cultural unit, but remained torn by internecine wars.

·       Rulers were cunning and scrupulous in statecraft.

·       Famines, plagues and floods killed people.

·       Religious sanction was given to inequality of birth.

But, nowhere else in the world at that time, the relationship between man-man and man-state was so fair and humane.

·       It had the fewest slaves in number.

·       The Rights of slaves were protected in Arthashastra.

 //When was it actually written? Who wrote it? Was it a book imposed after the Mauryan empire ended to fix a narrative? Need to find proof of legitimacy of its existence.

·       Noble ideals of fair play in battle by Manu.

·       Compared to others, very few tales of cities put to the sword or massacre of non-combatants exist. Parallels of Assyria, like flaying the captives alive, don’t exist in the Indian past.

·       Mild instances of sporadic cruelty and oppression compared to others.

2.     People enjoyed life, both sensual and spiritual.

Allegation – By taking the Hindu-Buddhist scriptures out of context alongwith the evidence of casteism, family system, tales of famines, etc., the 19^th century missionaries propagated the fallacy that “India is a land of lethargic gloom”. 

Counter evidences –  

·       Secular literature, sculpture, painting, mathematics, etc., of the time.

·       Indians may have paid lip service to the ideals of such “life-negating” ascetics, but they never deprived themselves of enjoyment, festivities or accepted the life to be a vale of tears from which to escape at all costs. They were willing to accept the world as they found it.   

Ex – Dandin’s description of the joys of a simple meal in a comparatively poor home is more typical of ancient Indian everyday life.       

So, there was a general higher level of kindliness and gentleness in mutual relationships than anywhere else.