As to what’s wrong with William Dalrymple this becomes to me evident in his latest book (The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, Bloomsbury, 482 pp., £30, September) which ends thus: “Today.. many believe that India’s moment has come again, and that it is now returning to its traditional place at the centre of world affairs, bridging east and west and acting as a crossroads of civilisations…... The only questions are whether it is India, China or the United States which will dominate. …………For a thousand years, India’s ideas spread with its traders along the Golden Road and transformed the world, creating around itself an Indosphere, a cultural zone that spread over political borders–comparable to the Hellenised world fashioned by Alexander the Great…Within this area Indian culture and civilisation transformed everything they touched. This poses a question, unthinkable in 1947 at independence from Britain: could they do so again?”
Yet note that Ferdinand Mount praises it: “..you cannot come away from The Golden Road without a strong sense of the peculiar, enduring qualities of the Indian tradition: ……. Nor can we ignore the persistence of those qualities in the remarkable success stories of the Indian diaspora today: not just the billionaires and politicians and novelists—the Tatas, Ambanis and Mittals, the Sunaks, Patels and Varadkars, the Naipauls, Rushdies and Desais—but also ……the countless GPs and pharmacists, the convenience stores which are always open » One-Way Traffic Ferdinand Mount https://www.lrb.co.uk/the paper/v46/n17/ferdinand-mount/one-way-traffic
Dalrymple is well-known for his eulogy to Indian Muslim civilisation in The Last Emperor (Bloomsbury 2006). He has now turned to an earlier period, inspired by the Celtic bard Patrick Fermor, polyglot war hero.
But those who were so briefly very great are not good for historians: when not understanding change, they escape the present in mythologising the past : Fermor, who had helped liberate Greece from the Nazis lived in Homeric times & ignored the right-wing terror of Sixties Greece.
History writing should address how the past explains why we are here today. We face the current Indian state.
The Canadian government has said that India conducts assassinations of dissident Sikhs. US Federal prosecutors have alleged in the District Court in Manhattan that it does likewise in the United States. The Australian press has said that Adani, the Indian businessman close to strongman Modi, evicts Australian aborigine from their ancient lands so he may profit from environmentally destructive mining operations, & bullies local newspapers to shut them down. Modi evicts Greenpeace & Amnesty International. His regime imprisons activists on charges that might appear to be trumped up. India’s once-free press has largely vanished, as democracy has been subverted to run an authoritarian order, indeed, move rapidly towards fascism, in a manner that Indira Gandhi, so long reviled in the West, would never have contemplated.
Dalrymple makes much of a long standing Indian non-violent tradition. Yet we might remember that Tamil culture celebrates war "samarapongavan" or ready for battle being a term of praise, & there is certainly evidence that overseas naval forays to protect Southeastern trade were by no means peaceful. And we need no reminder that Rajput culture is a martial one. And as one pogrom follows another in India in what is anyway the most unsafe place in the world for women, we might strain to remind ourselves of our non-violence.
A mythologised & essentialised « Hinduism » may offer few clues to the present. For even as Hindutva parties seek to so re-make it, we might remind ourselves that India is in no sense « essentially » Hindu. So much so that it has even been argued that "Hinduism" itself does not exist. For there has historically been no Hindu community in the true sense. « Hindus » were so first described by nineteenth century nationalists seeking to emulate Europeans in inventing a nation, & British rulers organising the first Census of India seeking to classify & organise Indians.
What is undisputed is that the Brahmin, defined as being a male of Brahmin ancestry, & « twice-born » (by virtue of having received the sacred thread & memorised the whispered Gayatri Mantra), recites the Vedas from memory, as intercession with Heaven on behalf-- not of Hindus alone, for he has no more connection with a Kshatriya as “fellow-Hindu” than with a Muslim—but all humanity.
There are problems in looking at Indian history through the lens of « Hinduism ». Even the great classical Tamil Age of literature, culture & foreign trade & conquest of Sangam at its peak say 300 BC to 300 AD is in no sense « Hindu » in sentiment. We see this in even in the great Thirukural of Thiruvallavar (which some have dated to as late as 500AD). Because of the dominant Jain & Buddhist traditions of the time, it is at best nonspecific about any religious origin of ethical belief.
Moreover, in Southern India, both Christianity & Islam preceded what we understand today as « Hinduism ». St Thomas the Apostle who is believed to have brought the Gospel to India was martyred by local belief in AD 72 in the FIRST century of the Christian Era at Mylapore, & his bones & holy relics are believed to lie at San Thome; there is reference to an Indian bishop John at the Council of Nicaea (modern Turkey) in AD 325, & certainly an Eastern Church employing a Semitic that is Syriac language Rite, was well established in South India by the Sixth Century.
Islam was established peacefully in the South within the lifetime of the Prophet, by the third decade of the Sixth century AD, absorbed & promoted by the trading communities of Kerala & Tamil Nadu intermarrying with Arab traders. The great Hindu consolidation, beginning with Adi Sankara, started in the Ninth century, & was deepened by Ramanujacharya in the Twelfth & my own ancestor VedantaDesika in the Fourteenth. This means there was no distinctly « Hindu » period historically but at best one coterminous with the "Islamic".
Now Dalrymple tells us that this great « Indic » civilisation & tradition of learning was destroyed by Turkic conquest:
“ Persianised Turks from Ghazni in what is now central Afghanistan attacked Lahore in 1021, then Agra in 1080. …. Ghuri is remembered as one of the worst temple-breakers in Indian history, and within a century Persian chronicles would label him a ‘Ghazi’–a religiously inspired holy warrior……. …These conquests were often marked by violence and the destruction of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sites…. the great monastery of Odantapura. In 1202, … attacked ... After slaughtering its inhabitants, they found vast heaps of manuscripts within one of the monastic towers. ‘Great plunder fell into the hands of the victors,’ recorded one chronicler. ‘The inhabitants of the place were Brahmanas with shaven heads. They were put to death. Large numbers of books were found there, and when the Mohammadans saw them, they called for some person to explain their contents. But all of the men had been killed, and there was no one left who could read them. It was discovered that the whole fort and city was actually a place of learning.’ .. ..the loss of the collected manuscripts and books of these great institutions of learning ranks as a civilisational catastrophe on a par with the burning of the Library of Alexandria. » .
No doubt; or for that matter the Great Abbasid Library at Baghdad when manuscripts & translations from Sanskrit & Greek accumulated over four & an half centuries were destroyed by the Mongol general Hulagu.
Yet the very question might be asked of India as of medieval Arab or Chinese civilisation: why did it simply STOP? Why was there no modernisation in any sense that we might understand? Why did early mathematical & scientific discoveries not progress to applications in technology & industrialisation?
We might remind ourselves that this is the outcome of a political failure, which is in turn is the outcome of a failed social change. A central aspect of modernisation is that states centralise & make alliances to conduct themselves in an hostile world. An inadequate appreciation of reality had robbed the Moghul Emperor at the time of Nadir Shah’s invasion of that ability, & false priorities taken over his agenda, directing even his analysis of intelligence: he failed to correctly assess Nadir Shah & appreciate that his own vassal Subedar of the Deccan the NizamulMulk would betray him. We can see the same failure to observe the world outside sufficiently, & mobilise in response in progressive Othman & Persian or Khedive indebtedness, & in Imperial China's long inability to appreciate the threat posed by the West.
For the antonym, the ability to observe & organise politically ---- has been conclusively traced in the West to the destruction of traditional monarchical-religious power as well as the feudal order & all subsistence farming including ownership of the commons, that thereafter awaited only the primitive accumulation of the transfer of wealth from those societies, which, as Irfan Habib has demonstrated in great detail, had failed to undertake any corresponding internal modernisation.
Backward social formations of late Moghul society ensured that the former jagirdars eagerly embraced taluqdari, replacing tribute to Padshah with tribute to King-Emperor, their sense of self unable to comprehend that the surplus was now largely transferred overseas & they were now a subordinate people. This accounts for the rapid political & economic subordination of Northern & Eastern India in the course of just seven decades of the eighteenth century.
The Emperor Aurangzeb had been able to punitively enforce a farman against Henry Every & others for acts of piracy in 1695 against the Ganj-i-Sawai, that included the payment of compensation & ultimately led to the subsequent arrest of New York resident Captain Kidd for the plunder of a Khoja merchant ship operated by Armenians, & his execution in 1701, his sovereignty stretching overseas. Yet in seven decades his eventual successor the Emperor Shah Alam, surrendered the East India Company the Dewani of Bengal, Bihar & Orissa.
And this failure to observe & analyse might account for the lack of historical knowledge, of the development of earlier observation to modern science. Knowledge-systems of proto-science & medicine such as those of the empirical observations of Ayurveda stopped at some point & failed to consider new evidence or whether the very structure of analysis was in error.
Amnesia about the past was not simply the outcome of foreign invasion, it also arose from the lack of historical method. Ashok & the Mauryas were discovered by British philologists archaeologists & historians. The history of Sanskrit & its relation to Indo European languages & the Central Asian origin of the Steppe people as well as the Harappan civilisation that antedated that & its relations with Mesopotamia & Egypt, were British discoveries based on the work of Jesuits as well as German philologists. By mythologising (the self mythologising of Pakistan as exclusively Muslim society is the mirror) does not India return to that state?
We can see arrogance ignorance & hubris directing the Indian Right in immoderate demands upon China that precipitated the clash of 1962. Pandit Pant & his supporters in the Congress, Jana Sangh & Swatantra overestimated Indian strength & understimated Chinese & counted on prompt US assistance.
Such a failure to be informed, to understand & therefore appreciate reality has directed likewise the Modi government’s misadventures. First with Nepal, leading to the ill-judged blockade, and then the quasi colonial relationship with Bangladesh that was bound to prompt general hostility that Indian rulers dismissed as entirely « Islamicist ». That India’s leading foreign policy think tank today decides that a popular Bangladesh uprising against a corrupt & autocratic Shaikh Hasina is but a CIA plot! – shows how little the Indian ruling class has evolved --- in the last millennium.
To replace Western exceptionalism with Indian, or Chinese for that matter, is to patronise, not seek to understand. It will ill-serve the Indian people at this difficult time.
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