CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION: INDIA AND HER ANCIENT CULTURE

Allegations

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

       Counter-Evidence - We know how the Himalayas were passable and how civilizations and cultures permeated across the mighty terrains. So, to put the highest currency on the importance of these as a marker that separated rather than integrated is flawed. The implication of presence of Himalayas was more as a climatic-geographical divide (source of two major rivers in two directions, clouds drifting northwards and westwards than a cultural divide, more as a source of two major rivers.

 2. The 'Indian' character which is many a times alleged to lead to fatalism and quietism, accepting fortune and misfortune alike without any complaint.

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

• The bountiful nature and total dependance on monsoons which provided much for sustenance with little in return. 
• However, Nature's terrible anger in form of floods, famines, plagues, could not be appeased by any human effort. 
• On the other hand, other ancient civilizations 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, the climate definitely had an effect on the characters of Indians - development of a love for ease and comfort, an addiction to the simple pleasures and luxuries so freely given by Nature - a tendency 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 a break-down to the present day, unlike those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece.

·      Until the advent of archaeologist, the peasants of Egypt or Iraq had no knowledge of culture of their forefathers. Similarly, the Greek counterparts had nay but the vaguest ideas about the glory of Periclean Athens. There had been an almost complete break with the past in each case.

·      When Europeans visited India, they found a culture fully conscious of its own antiquity – a culture which in fact exaggerated that antiquity and claimed to have stayed fundamentally unchanged.

Even today, people recall the names of shadowy chieftain who

 lived thousand years before Christ, and the orthodox Brahmins in his daily worship repeats hymns composed even earlier.

 

//Own//Literatures which transferred from generations to generations through oral dictations, writings, and preserved. 

 

Study of Indian 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 in the nature of speculations linking the Indians with the descendants of Noah and the vanished empires of the Bible. 

 

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. Another, 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 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.

//Their only focus stayed on trying to convert Indians into their folds, make themselves attractive to Indians for their religion and beliefs to find fertile ground for proliferation. 

No real attempt was made by Europeans until the last half of the 18th century to study India's ancient past; the foundations of Indology were laid independently, in another part of India, and by other hands.

 

                                                       Indology  

The study of Indian history, literature, philosophy, and culture.

FIRST PHASE –

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

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

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

o   Before coming to India he had recognized the relationship of European languages to Persian, and had rejected the dogmatic view of the 1 8th century, that all these tongues were derived from Hebrew. He instead suggested that Persian and the European languages were derived from a common ancestor which was not Hebrew.

·      Charles Wilkin ( 1749- 1836) – 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 tour Upanigads from a 17th-century Persian version—the translation of the whole manuscript, containing 50 Upani§ads, appearing in 1801.

 

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

·      In 1795 the government of the French Republic founded the Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes, and 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 Ch6zy, while from 1818 onwards the larger Germanuniversities set up professorships.

·      Sanskrit was first taught in England in 1805 at the training college of the East India Companyat Hertford. The earliest English chair was the Boden Professorship at Oxford, first filled in 1832, when it was conferred upon H. H. 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, on the basis of 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.

·      In 1821, the French Socie’te’ Asiatique was founded in Paris, followed two years later by the Royal Asiatic Society in London. From these beginnings the work of the editing and study of ancient Indian literature went on apace throughout the 19th century.

·      Probably the greatest achievement of Indological scholar- ship 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.

 

II Phase -  The attention of the Asiatic Society of Bengal had been turned from almost entirely literary and linguistic (working on written records) to the material remains of India's past from early in the 19th century, 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 - 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 Cunningham devoted every minute he could spare from his military duties to the study of the material remains of ancient India, until, 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 complete single-heartedness. Though he made no startling discoveries, and though 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.

Cunningham was assisted by several other pioneers, and though 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 excavation began in India due to to the personal interest of the Viceroy Lord Curzon, in 1901.

The Archaeological Survey was re- formed and enlarged, with archaeologist, John (later Sir John) Marshall, as Director General. For a country of the size of India the Archaeological Department was still lamentably small and poor, but Marshall was able to employ a number of 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 come to light ---  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 Panjab. 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 retrench- ment, and by the Second World War; but further important dis- coveries 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. India, Pakistan and Ceylon are poor countries, desperately in need of funds with which to raise the standard of living of their peoples; but with the resources available the archaeological departments of all three countries are working to their fullest capacity to reveal the past.

III 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 Drs. 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 the helper and friendly critic of the Asian. 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 feature of ancient Indian civilization: -

1.     Humanity

·      Though a cultural unit, but torn by internecine wars.

·      Rulers were cunning and scrupulous in the statecraft.

·      Famines, plagues, floods killed people

·      Religious sanction to inequality of birth

But, nowhere else in the world at that time relation of man-man, man-state, so fair and humane.

·      Fewest slaves in number.

·      Rights of slaves protected in Artha-shastra.

 //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 sword or massacre of non-combatants. Parallels of Assyria, flaying the captives alive  - doesn't exist in Indian past.

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

2.     People enjoyed life, both sensual and spiritual

Allegation – The Hindu-Buddhist scriptures were taken out of context by the 19^th century missionaries along with the evidences of casteism, family system, tales of famines, etc. to propagate the fallacy that “India is a land of lethargic gloom”.

                        Focus of Europeans on certain set of spiritual texts which propagated “life-negating”, sterile ideas

 

Counter evidences –

i.                   Secular literature, sculpture, painting, mathematics of the time.

ii.                Indians may have paid lip-service to the ideals of such 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 but was willing to accept the world as they found it.   

Ex – Dandin’s description of joys of a simple meal in a comparatively poor home.

      

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