The Story of India Read online

  Historical economists over the last twenty years or so have been attempting to calculate the history of the world economy based on a complex series of calculations and hypotheses, which by the time we get to AD 1500, begin to be more reliable. For the Kushan age it is largely a matter of guesswork based on such things as the widespread circulation of money, a population boom, and increased settlement, but the upshot is the first of a series of graphs of the rise of the world economy. Estimates for the population of India suggest that the subcontinent might have had 75 million in an entire world population of perhaps 250 million; so India perhaps had more than a quarter of the world’s people (the 2007 figure for the subcontinent is around a fifth of the world total). The estimated wealth of Kushan India in terms of gross domestic product (the total value of goods produced and services provided in one year) is nearly 30 per cent of the wealth of the world – more than Rome or Han China because of its dominant position in the Eurasian landmass at the centre of trade systems. In fact, India would retain this superiority until around 1500, when the European conquest of the New World gave the western European powers access to the natural resources of an entire continent and altered the balance of history away from the ancient civilizations of Asia.

  KANISHKA’S DEATH

  It goes without saying that neither the rule of Kanishka nor that of the Kushan dynasty approached the thousand years hoped for in the inscription found recently in Afghanistan. Kanishka died in the mid-second century AD, though his dynasty retained power for another seventy-five years in India, and longer in Afghanistan. There is no good evidence about what happened to him. Later legend tells fabulous tales of his death. He had conquered three-quarters of the world, it was said, but could not rest till he had taken the last quarter. Assembling a great army, he marched to the northern mountains, led by a vanguard of Hu barbarians on white elephants. But in the snowy heights swept by blizzards, even his magic speaking horse protested. Eventually, he turned back, to be assassinated by his own people. A strangely specific detail about his death appears in a Chinese tale that may just have an element of truth. When he was sick in bed, so the story goes, conspirators murdered him by suffocating him with a bed quilt or mattress.

  This last tale is set in Mathura, where archaeology suggests that the family shrine outside the town was at some point deliberately and vindictively smashed, Kanishka’s statue overthrown and decapitated. All the more strange, then, that if Kanishka was assassinated in Mathura, there is no whisper of these events in the Indian tradition. (Later Indian tradition, though, in the final version of the Mahabharata, preserves a hostile opinion of the Kushan-Tocharians, who, it says, did not obey the ancient Indian code of chivalry and were guilty of ‘terrible and cruel deeds’.) But there is one great corpus of legends that may cast light on this. In Mathura, where drama has flourished since ancient times, a series of plays is enacted every year telling the tale of Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, who appears in the Mahabharata as an indigenous chief of Mathura. This cycle of over thirty plays developed in its present form in the sixteenth century, with all the parts played by children: and in them the central theme is of the tyrant of Mathura, Krishna’s wicked uncle, who is eventually overthrown by his nephew. His name, Kans or Kansa, is still attached to many ancient Kushan mounds around the city. Could this, I wonder, be a folk memory of the great Kushan?

  If so, here’s a last twist. On the northern edge of Mathura, overlooking the river, is an ancient mound deep in debris, littered with fragments of Kushan Buddhist sculpture. A footpath leads up to a cluster of yellow-painted houses and a Hindu shrine of Gokarneshwar, an incarnation of Shiva. You enter through a gateway that leads into a little courtyard and a marble-floored chamber. The inner sanctum is lit by a strip light, and a fan in the ceiling gives a bit of relief in the 47-degree heat of Mathura before the monsoon. The image of the god is a giant statue of a king with great saucer-like eyes, sitting on a kind of throne, holding a wine bowl and grapes, and wearing a pointed Kushan cap. Backed with green floral tiles and holding a big brass trident, he stands in for Shiva now, with strings of wilting marigolds around his neck, his bulky shoulders covered with purple powder. But this was once a Kushan king. In the city of his demise, the ‘son of the gods’ Kanishka is perhaps worshipped still today.

  Although virtually unknown in the West, Kanishka’s legend is remembered across China, Mongolia, Tibet and Japan. Recently the king was even portrayed in one of the biggest Japanese mangas (adult comics), which sold 30 million copies, and has spread in cartoon versions and films to Europe and the USA. Here he is Ganishka, the grand emperor of the Kushans, head of a demonic empire, who can throw lightning bolts and who uses his familiars, his demon soldiers and his dark magic to conquer the entire world! Coming out of eastern Buddhist legends, it is a strange fate for the king who opened up the world and brought the art and ideas of East and West to Afghanistan and India; the king who sent embassies to Hadrian in Rome, and Buddhist missionaries to China.

  THE LEGACY OF THE KUSHANS

  Though their empire collapsed in the 3rd century CE under pressure from Sassanians, and then Huns, the Kushans left a rich and long lasting legacy in rulership and the arts. It is amazing that such a remarkable moment in history is so little known today. A transnational multi-racial empire that ruled from the Aral sea to the mouth of the Ganges may seem to go against all configurations of modern politics and all national boundaries: Yet it recalls deeper and more ancient cultural connections, a last phase perhaps of the ancient spread of the speakers of Indo-European languages, Old Iranian, Sanskritic, Bactrian – and Greek. A hybrid product of the Indo-Greek and Central Asian worlds, a progeny of the Hellenistic age dreamed by Alexander, the Kushans might also be seen as precursors of the Moghuls, with their winter capital in the Ganges plain and their summer retreat in the gardens of Kabul.

  Finally, and above all, the Kushan story tells us about the civilising possibilities of creative exchange and dialogue. In particular the commercial ethos of the Kushans and their multi-lingual ruling class spread Buddhism along the Silk Road to the East. Now nearly two thousand years on, the Chinese are remaking their spiritual and intellectual links with India, rediscovering the values that helped make their own civilisation. Between them China and India dominated the world’s economies for nearly 1500 years, and now the wheel is now coming full circle. It is perhaps only a little exaggeration to say that the Kushans, the great intermediaries, although largely forgotten today, in their way were harbingers of the modern world.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MEDIEVAL INDIA: AGE OF GOLD AND IRON

  SUNSET FROM THE Gogra bridge in Ayodhia, a small country town in the Ganges plain: the sky looks molten – vivid red-gold underneath a huge bank of deep blue monsoon clouds. The air has freshened up with reviving rain after a muggy day, and now the evening is simply glorious. The river is rising with the coming of the rains, waves whipped up by the wind and rushing over the shallows, spreading wide to the horizon like an inland sea. To the right is open countryside, the riverbank fringed with waving reed beds, and beyond that is what the locals call jangal – a wild landscape of lagoons and groves of trees through which are glimpses of a thatched village. To the left, across the bridge, are the painted domes and towers of the city: twenty or thirty mosques, tombs and temples lit up by the setting sun. On the bathing ghats pilgrims still throng, taking a last bath, squeezing out their clothes, saying sunset prayers, orange flags snapping around them in the breeze. The light dips, becoming peach-coloured; then, as the sun disappears, it fades into a soft blue. It’s a beautiful sight, conjuring feelings of pure elation. One can almost believe in fairy tales, or at least see why this place was chosen by medieval poets to be the earthly location for the golden age of the Ramrajya, the rule of Rama. Golden ages, though, are problematical things, for they never exist in reality; they are imagined pasts – literary creations made for a purpose, and capable of very different readings, both creative and destructive. They perhaps tell u
s less about the past than about the present – and about our imagined futures.

  Between about AD 400 and 1400 – in European terms, from the time of the fall of Rome to the Renaissance – Indian civilization enjoyed a series of brilliant flowerings in its regional cultures, but also went through great changes, in some places suffering violent rupture. The coming of Turkic and Afghan conquerors bearing the faith of Islam would set the north on a new path that would eventually lead India, the largest Muslim land on Earth, to be partitioned on religious grounds in the mid-twentieth century. The fact of this change is clear among the writers of those early times. At the end of the tenth century northern India (‘Hindustan’ to Muslim geographers) was seen as a land whose people were all ‘idolaters’, that is, followers of the native Indian religions – what we today would call Hindu, Buddhist and Jain – along with the many folk religions and cults. But in the Middle Ages northern India would become one of the greatest Muslim civilizations in the world, both in numbers and in creativity. (If we include Pakistan and Bangladesh, the subcontinent still has much the biggest Muslim population today.)

  These changes were tremendous historical events that are still profoundly influencing the history of India. The next stage of our journey, then, takes us into those times when some key lineaments of modern Indian civilization were laid out: the rise of great kingdoms across India, in Bengal and Orissa, the Chandalas in Khajuraho, the Cholans in the south, all of which, though speaking different languages, saw themselves as belonging to an Indian ‘great tradition’, sharing the same complex of religions that since the nineteenth century has been called Hinduism. In the northwest, Muslim kingdoms were created, forerunners of the modern state of Pakistan. This was a time that saw the gradual decline and disappearance of Buddhism, except in the Himalayan regions and Bengal. Out of these great tides of history, with their waves of creation and destruction, an even more diverse India would grow. The story begins at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, in the fifth century AD, and it led me first of all to one of India’s most famous cities: a name to conjure with in Indian history, and what one recent Indian writer has called ‘India’s Ground Zero’.

  INSIDE AYODHIA, THE CITY OF RAMA

  Early morning and the heat is already rising. The Hotel Ram lies on the edge of the sacred zone of Ayodhia. It’s scruffy but friendly: in the dining room there’s a tasty vegetarian breakfast of puri and vegetables with purple pickled onions – no meat, eggs or alcohol are permitted in God’s city. Upstairs skinny builders in loincloths and headbands are already banging away, mixing pink cement in bedrooms opposite mine. In the foyer a large TV sits alongside a big poster of Rama as the just king – a handsome, square-jawed young warrior, with bare chest, limpid, movie star eyes, helmet and bow. Next to him is Sita, his wife, the ideal woman, his brother Lakshman, and Hanuman, the half-human, half-monkey beloved across India, who in the legend saves Rama in his climactic battle with the demon king. In the modern revival of Hindu nationalism that began in the 1920s and has peaked in the last twenty years, Rama has come to be seen, in northern India at least, as the supreme godhead himself, and Ayodhia is held to have been his birthplace.

  Turn right out of the front door, and you are immediately in the heart of things. In a street, already heavy with sun, you walk past the corner chai shop, where a resident cow hovers to share customers’ leftovers, and in a few yards you come to the police lines. Beyond them the sacred centre of the city stretches down to the river in a mile of fabulously crumbling lanes and alleys, a labyrinth of 300 temples, hostels, mosques and Sufi shrines. Two minutes away from what passes for calm, I find myself swept up in a scene of fantastic vitality, which goes on day and night, and it is fascinating just to wander, hang about or sip chai as an unending stream of pilgrims floods past, millions of them every year, all drawn by the tale of Rama.

  As you walk, you notice everywhere on the stucco façades of mansions and shrines great plaster fish, their scales painted bright blue – the badge of the Muslim nawabs of Ayodhia, or Awad (as it was known). In 1722 the rulers here, who were Shi’ites, became effectively independent of the great Mughal in Delhi. Curiously enough, it was under them that most Hindu temples here were built in the century-long heyday of Awadhi culture, whose twilight is portrayed in Satyajit Ray’s great film The Chess Players (1977). The town’s greatest Hindu temple, dedicated to Hanuman, was paid for by a Muslim nawab. Since then, Ayodhia has had its ups and downs: sectarian fighting flared in 1855, first between followers of Shiva and Vishnu, then between Muslims and Hindus, but for much of the last 300 years Ayodhia was as good an exemplar of religions living together as could be hoped for in the often troubled sectarian world of northern India. But since 1992 the city’s name has become associated with horrors that have threatened the whole Indian body politic. In that year, inflamed by a flagrantly sectarian campaign by their politicians, Hindu fundamentalists descended on Ayodhia in their thousands and demolished a Mughal mosque that they claimed had been built on the exact site of the birthplace of Rama himself. In the bitter aftermath, riot and murder occurred across northern India, and many of the Muslim population of Ayodhia were killed or forced to flee for their lives. That night the prime minister, Narasimha Rao, spoke to the nation on television:

  Fellow countrymen, I am speaking to you this evening under the grave threat that has been posed to the institution, principles and ideals on which the constitution of our republic has been built. … What has happened today in Ayodhia is a matter of great shame and concern for all Indians. … This is a betrayal of the nation, and a confrontation with all that is sacred to all Indians as the legacy we have all inherited … I appeal to all of you to maintain calm, peace and harmony at this grave moment of crisis. We have faced many such situations in the past and have overcome them. We shall do this again …

  In the narrow lane outside Hanuman’s shrine the pilgrim stalls are heaped with pictures and cassettes, and the bookshops are piled high with copies of the Ramayana (the famous Gita Press edition has sold an incredible 65 million copies). Long fundamental to the popular culture of northern India, the Rama legend has become a giant presence in the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in the last hundred years, and especially since the 1980s. Originally a hero of early epic, so scholars tell us, Rama is believed by devotees to be an avatar or incarnation of Vishnu, who comes down to Earth ‘at times whenever injustice thrives’. (Another famous incarnation is Krishna, but on pilgrim stalls up and down the Ganges plain one will also see images of the Buddha, and even Jesus and the Shi’ite imam Hussein portrayed among the avatars).

  In the north Rama’s name has been used as a synonym for God since the Middle Ages. But he is also the ideal man and ideal king, an exemplar for human action. And the incredible popularity of the tale was underlined by a blockbuster TV series in the late 1980s, which in the popular eye has increasingly become the received version. In Ayodhia its seventy-eight episodes blare from every bookshop and pilgrim stand. For many, though, the astonishing success of the series was offset by a deep unease at the use to which it has been put – as the focus of a communal rendering of Indian national history, supplanting in the popular imagination the myriad other tellings, often contradictory, unorthodox or subversive, but still part of the great Ramayana tradition. But in the electronic age the tale is still changing, still shaping views of the Indian past. And the town of Ayodhia is the theatre where myth has been translated into modern metaphor.

  THE LEGEND OF RAMA

  ‘The soil of Ayodhia has been sacred for nearly 1 million years,’ the head of the temple tells me. Burly, white-bearded, his forehead marked in damp sandal paste with the yellow sign of the Vaishnavaites, like an inverted tuning fork, he has been a driving figure in the campaign to erect a temple to Rama on the site of the demolished mosque. He is sitting cross-legged in a cramped, oven-hot study heaped with pamphlets and books. Around the walls are religious images depicting the legend: gods and goddesses with jewelled crowns and kohl
-rimmed eyes; Sita in a crimson sari. In the sweltering, pre-monsoon summer heat sweat beads trickle down my forehead and my shirt is soaked as the mahant continues:

  We consider Ayodhia was built by the first human being, Manu, but as a human artefact, it is merely a resemblance of the eternal city of the gods. Hence its name, which means ‘unconquerable’. You see, Indian time is without beginning and end, and goes beyond counting. To call one thing present and another thing past is against the idea that all is permeated by the One. What we call one moment is in fact indestructible time … We can only see the divine setting of Ayodhia with an Indian eye. The knowledge of Europe is of no avail to reach the depth of ancient India.

  The mere historian feels a little powerless in the face of such certainty. But the point is that the tale told by the traditional Brahmins and pilgrim guides here takes place in another aeon. Our era, the Kali Yuga, began a mere 5000 years ago, after the great war described in the Mahabharata. The time of the Ramayana, the Treta Yuga, is much further back, nearly a million years ago. A different view of the tale’s beginnings, though, might suggest its origins in myth and folk tale. Three figures in Indian religion and myth have the name Rama, which (like Krishna) means ‘the black or dark-skinned one’. One of these is ‘the bearer of the plough’. Now Sita means ‘the furrow’ and is the name of a goddess of agriculture in some ancient Sutras; in one text, the Harivamsa, she is the goddess of farmers. Perhaps these clues point to an aboriginal or pre-Aryan origin to the tale? Whatever, the tale as we have it almost certainly arose in the last centuries BC, out of oral stories and bardic tales. Its setting is quite narrow: a small area of the kingdom of Kosala, between the Ganges and the Jumna; and, for what it is worth, the sites associated with the tale have all yielded pottery of post 600 BC, later than the Mahabharata sites (see here).