The Story of India Read online

  There are hundreds of tellings of the story in twenty main languages across southern Asia, some offering fascinating and radical variants, but the core story, the most widely accepted, goes like this …

  Rama is a prince of Kosala, residing in the city of Ayodhia in the Ganges plain. Unjustly exiled from his father’s kingdom, he lives in the forest with his faithful wife Sita and his brother Lakshman. This golden time is broken when Sita is abducted by Ravana, demon king of Lanka (‘island’ in Sanskrit). Ravana, the charismatic, tragic anti-hero is supremely intelligent; he can appear in any guise (the most famous has ten heads and twenty arms) and cannot be killed by gods, demons or spirits. Ravana begins to lay waste the Earth and destroy the deeds of the good Brahmins, the upholders of dharma (the universal moral law), so Rama is born a human to defeat him.

  Lanka is now identified with Sri Lanka, but this is not recorded as an early name of that island, and it is possible that the city of the demon king was originally envisioned by poets as much nearer to hand. More likely, though, it is a fairy-tale city, part of a geography that is not to be found on this Earth. The eleventh-century Muslim historian al-Biruni says that ‘according to the Indians, Lanka is thirty yojanas above the Earth, and no sailor who has ever sailed in the direction ascribed to it has ever seen anything that tallies with the legend’. As with Homer’s Odyssey or the Argonautica, over many centuries mythic geography shifts to accommodate the expansion of real geography, just as the Ramayana’s setting in time eventually had to be put back to a mythic age a million years ago. According to the Brahmins, the Mahabharata was ‘what happened’ in the heroic age, just before ‘real’ history; the Ramayana is ‘what is always’, which means it is disengaged from historical chronologies. It is in another aeon, a paradigm. This is not ‘history’ like the Iliad or the Mahabharata, and in such myths it is best, if at all possible, that mental maps stay magical.

  While living in idyllic exile in the forest, Rama offends the demonic world by rejecting and insulting the sister of the demon king. Captivated by Sita’s beauty, Ravana diverts Rama with a golden deer and, disguising himself as an old holy man, abducts her. To cut a long story short, the tale ends in a great expedition to Lanka, where in a tremendous battle Ravana is overthrown with the crucial help of the faithful monkey Hanuman. Sita is restored to Rama, and in some versions rules happily ever after in Ayodhia, though only after she is tested to see if her virtue was sullied by Ravana. But the dark strain of tragedy and jealousy in the epic emerges in an ambiguous and troubling epilogue, which may in part be a later addition (and which was initially not filmed in the Indian TV version). This final denouement has all the power of the greatest myths, where the tale finally imposes its own logic of destiny on the protagonists. Just as there was a long tradition in the Greek myth that Helen never went to Troy – her actions too problematic to leave unquestioned – so it is with Sita, the heavenly wife, ‘the jewel of woman hood, daughter of Earth’ (as Kamban, the great Tamil poet, calls her). Further whispers about her virtue lead to her banishment by Rama, and Sita brings up their children on her own in the ashram of the sage Valmiki (who will later write down the story). Then, in the final meeting with her doubting husband, the ground opens up and swallows Sita, who is taken back by Mother Earth, just as Medea is taken back by the gods in the Greek myth. In both great mythic traditions the storytellers couldn’t leave things with a happy ending; a warning, perhaps, that golden ages exist only in fairy tales.

  THE GUPTAS AND THE RAMA LEGEND

  But where and when was the legendary Ayodhia? And how and why did the story become, along with the Mahabharata, a national epic? Here in today’s Ayodhia the tale about the discovery of the site of the million-year-old lost city is part of the repertoire of the pundits, the pilgrim guides, who can be hired anywhere along the bathing ghats by the Gogra bridge, as noted for example by the Elizabethan visitor Ralph Fitch, among ‘certain Brahmins who record the names of all such Indians as wash themselves in the river running thereby’.

  Our guide is a small, bird-like man sitting by the riverbank under a great old tree, a big yellow Vaishnavite mark on his forehead. In front of him is a cloth bag with his list of clients, and an old lithographed book of sacred texts. The tale of the founding myth of the city is first told in a text of the fourteenth century, and much the same tale is still the oral tradition, as our guide reveals:

  Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a great king called Vikramaditya. One day Vikramaditya came hunting along the Sarayu river. Then his horse suddenly pulled to a halt, hearing strange voices, and would go no further. The king picked his way through the jungle on the hill there and found ruins of an ancient city. He cleared the ruins and then a rishi (a holy man or renouncer) appeared before him, who told him this was none other than Ayodhia, the sacred city of Lord Rama, which had existed in the Treta Yuga. Then the rishi disappeared. So it was Vikramaditya who announced the discovery of Ayodhia, and he ordered its restoration for our time – to rebuild the city and bring back the rule of Rama.

  Vikramaditya is a great figure in the medieval legends of India, such as the still popular cycle of tales called Vikram and the Ghost. The name was attached to many historical figures, but two ancient kings in particular used the name. The most famous of these was a ruler of the Gupta age in the fifth century AD, Skandagupta, who fought battles against the invading Huns and assumed the title Vikramaditya (sun of valour) after his victory. There is, though, an intriguing subplot to Skandagupta’s ‘restoring’of the town. At that time Chinese pilgrims described it as a thriving place, with twenty Buddhist monasteries and 5000 monks. However, it was not then called Ayodhia, but Saketa, the name by which it had been known to the ancient Greeks. So in the fifth century the earthly manifestation of the mythic Ayodhia, ‘city invincible’ was Saketa, until then a Buddhist centre.

  The fifth century, the peak of the Gupta age, was a time of conscious revival of the old glories of India harking back to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The old Brahminical religion had suffered eclipse when Buddhism was the chief religion of India and under ecumenical rulers, such as the Kushans, who sponsored all religions. Now, in the changing world of the fourth and fifth centuries under the Guptas, began the evolution of the old, sacrificial Brahminical religion into what can be recognized as the precursor of modern Hinduism. Kings were most admired as battle winners, and a new doctrine arose that the king was ‘a god in human form’. On Ashoka’s great pillar at Allahabad a new inscription was cut, describing Samudragupta, son of Chandragupta I, as a divine king: ‘a god dwelling on Earth, being a mortal only in the sense that he celebrates the rites of the observances of mankind.’ And along with deification of the king came the theory of God’s avatars on Earth, not as mythical creatures, but as historical human beings. Of these avatars the most popular was Rama. The beautiful gold coins of the Guptas underline this identification by showing their kings with crowned helmet and bow, the iconography of Rama ever since.

  In this climate of politicized myth-making, the way was paved for recognition of the old town of Saketa as the epic Ayodhia. The first inscriptional evidence for Saketa as the city of legend comes from the year 436. Later Chinese sources say that it was Skandagupta who moved the Gupta court to the region of Ayodhia (in Kosala), and according to Paramartha’s life of the Buddhist monk Vasubhandu, it was specifically to Saketa itself, which was then still a famous Buddhist centre. Epigraphical evidence from the town also shows that Saketa began to be called Ayodhia during the Gupta age. Curiously, though, excavation in the old city of Ayodhia has not yet revealed any significant Gupta remains, even on the claimed birthplace site under the mosque destroyed in 1992. Maybe, like the Tudors in Britain using the myths of Arthur, the Round Table and Camelot, the Guptas were interested in the epic as part of their imperial ideology, just as the poets of Augustus in the Roman Empire used foundation myths of Troy. They perhaps refurbished the city, while still keeping their main capitals at Patna and Ujain.

&
nbsp; Strangely enough, very little is known about the Guptas themselves. They were a local clan, perhaps coming from somewhere in the plain between the Ganges and the Gogra in the region of Benares and Ghazipur. Their age, the fifth century AD, was a time of invasions, especially by the dreaded Huns, and the attractions of an imperial epic were obvious to the kings of the Ganges plain, who saw themselves as the saviours of India, in the mould of the mythic kings of Ayodhia. From then on the story of Rama would be indissolubly associated with the rule of the native kings of India, and used as an example whenever their kingdoms were threatened by outsiders, demonic or otherwise: Turks, Afghans, Mongols and Mughals, and even – as in the nineteenth-century Rama plays at Benares – the British.

  HINDU KINGSHIP

  We are on the road from Ghazipur to Benares, travelling up the Ganges plain, which we seem to have crossed and recrossed many times during this year, through the heat and the rains. We are just coming into Bhitra, a little town where a crucial discovery was made in the 1890s, of which I am keen to know more. At that time a rare copper alloy seal was handed in to the British district magistrate by an old landed family, who seem to have kept it as an heirloom. The seal gave the sequence of Gupta kings, each of whom was named with his royal mother. The discovery was as crucial to early medieval Indian history as the recent Kanishka inscription is to the Kushans (see here), for it gave scholars the key to the Gupta kings. It is very tempting to think that this area was their home place, and if their family root was indeed near here, had the seal come down through an important family lineage from ancient times? A phone call to Lucknow Museum draws a blank: the find place was not recorded, nor was the name of the family. I am tempted to stop to try to discover more, but we must move on. As Bhitra recedes in the rear-view mirror, I can only reflect that the riches of Indian history are a subject that needs several lifetimes to unravel. For the historian the Hindu cycle of rebirths is a sine qua non!

  But even for one lifetime, the search for the Guptas is perplexing. For most of the great dynasties of Indian history we can see monuments around us: the Sultanate and the British in Delhi, the Mughals in Agra, even Ashoka’s pillars and rock edicts. The Guptas, contemporaries of the later Roman Empire (c. AD 300–550), claim to have ruled from the Bay of Bengal to the Indus. From their time there is a superlative but disparate series of creations: play texts and poems revealing the sophistication of courtly society; remarkable scientific findings; sculpture of wonderful quality (the sandstone Buddha of Sarnath surely has few rivals in the arts of the world). In the National Museum in Delhi there are terracottas so expressive that they might be from fin de siècle Paris – maquettes from the studio of Auguste Rodin, say – and in the coin gallery there is an astonishingly vivacious and technically brilliant series of gold coins. And what of the ethereal, crumbling beauty of the paintings in the Buddhist caves at Ajanta, some of which may be from this period? Or the 6-ton, forge-welded iron pillar plundered from its wooded hill at Vidisha and now in the grounds of the Qutab Minar complex in Delhi? Not to mention the world’s first sex manual (something the Western world did not achieve until the 1960s). But where is the material dimension of Gupta power? Nowhere except in a few small temples can one stand and say ‘Here is the Guptas’ legacy’. No palaces, no public buildings, no grand shrines, only caves and ruined stupas. Virtually nothing is known about their day-to-day life, about the administration of their empire, about the execution of justice, about national and international commerce. Their kings’ personalities are a mystery, but for a few high-flown eulogies. Their apparent greatness, then, presents us with a conundrum.

  A GOLDEN AGE?

  The idea of the Gupta golden age arose, curiously enough, not among Indians, but among the British. Vincent Smith was a civil servant and a brilliant historian, but fundamentally unsym-pathetic to many aspects of Indian civilization. His was a colonial viewpoint that helped shape British views of India. For Smith the Indians were never so happy as when held in good order under firm but benevolent authoritarian empires, such as that of the Mauryans, the Guptas, the Mughals – and the British. (And, after all, weren’t the British – albeit distantly – Aryans too?) The Guptas, then, were the kind of imperialists the British empire-builders could admire as models.

  The empire began with Chandragupta I (reigned 320–35), a member of a local landed family, who fought his way to power in the region. He married a princess of the Licchavi, an important clan in the northern Bihar-Patna region, with lands stretching up to Nepal. The alliance was so important to him that his son Samudragupta called himself ‘son of the daughter of the Licchavi’. So where the Kushans celebrated the father’s line, for the Guptas it was the uterine descent that made them. Like the Kushans, their accession was the start of a new era, beginning with Chandragupta’s coronation in 320. With that, the time was renewed.

  Chandragupta showed himself to be the restorer of ancient Vedic kingship by renewing the great Vedic horse sacrifice (see here), the roots of which are traced back to central Asia, and this act was commemorated on his gold coins. Decades later his grandson praised him as the great renewer of the horse sacrifice ‘which had been forgotten for a long time’. So the Guptas were consciously trying to renew the old Vedic institutions of kingship, as a native dynasty that traced its descent, male and female, to the old clans of the Ganges plain.

  The next king, Samudragupta (died 380), was (if we can believe his press) one of the greatest conquerors in Indian history. To Ashoka’s Allahabad pillar he added a fulsome account of his deeds, including a long list of kings and realms conquered: fourteen border kings, eighteen jungle rajas and even thirteen southern kings. After that he proclaimed himself a chakravartin (universal ruler), and a new tone appears in Indian kingship: ‘He was a mortal only in celebrating the rites of the observances of mankind, but otherwise a god dwelling on Earth.’

  His son, Chandragupta II (reigned 380–413), extended the empire to its furthest extent, its greatest glory and cultural excellence. By then the empire stretched from the Khyber to Bengal. A poetic eulogy to him is carved on the Delhi Iron Pillar: touched with a smouldering evanescence, ‘his face as beautiful as the moon … he has gone now to heaven but left behind his glory in the world, in the way that the earth still glows hot after a raging forest fire. He smashed the King of Bengal and crossed the seven mouths of the Indus to rout his enemies, so the southern ocean is still perfumed by the breeze of his bravery …’

  The great kings of the line end with Skandagupta in c.467, though scions of the dynasty still ruled until the middle of the sixth century.

  As regards real historical narrative, that would have been the lot were it not for a vivid picture of the Gupta realm written by a foreign visitor. Around 401, the same year that the iron pillar inscription was carved, a Chinese monk called Fa Xien travelled down the Karakorum into the Punjab to visit the sacred places of Buddhism. He was an eye-witness to the Gupta world at the end of the reign of Chandragupta II. At that time Buddhism was still thriving, he tells us: ‘Everywhere in all the countries of India the kings had been firm believers in that law.’ Intriguingly, he tells how the Gupta kings (who were not Buddhists, but followers of Vishnu) by long tradition visited Buddhist monasteries ‘to make offerings to the monks with uncovered heads, and gave food with their own hands, sitting with them on the floor: for the laws and ways according to which kings rendered charity in the days when the Buddha was alive have been handed down to the present day’.

  South of Mathura the Chinese visitor travelled between the Ganges and Jumna, in the ‘beautiful and fruitful’ landscape that impressed foreigners, from Megasthenes to Ralph Fitch, for 2000 years. Then comes this passage:

  All south from here is known as the Middle Land or Kingdom. In it the cold and heat are finely tempered, and there is neither hoar frost nor snow. The people are numerous and happy; they have not to register their households, nor to be ruled by magistrates; only those who cultivated the royal land have to pay a tax on the gain fro
m it. If they want to go [leave their land], they can go; if they want to stay on, they stay. The king governs without decapitation or corporal punishments. Criminals are simply fined lightly or heavily according to the circumstances of the case … The king’s bodyguards and staff all have salaries. Throughout the country the people do not kill any living creature, nor drink intoxicating liquor, nor eat onions, nor garlic … the only exception is the chandalas. That is the name for those who are held to be polluted, and who live apart from the rest of the population …

  One must take such a eulogy with a pinch of salt; some of the details seem improbable – the non-drinking of alcohol for one – and it is curious that Fa Xien does not mention the ruling king. But much information is true: that untouchables had to strike a wooden stick before entering towns, as he describes, is known from other sources; likewise the use of cowrie shells along with coins as currency, and the prohibitions on certain foods. His account of the administration strikingly recalls what we know of the Mauryans.

  Fa Xien later reinforces these observations on his journey further south to Patna: ‘The cities and towns of this country [Maghada],’ he says, ‘are the greatest of all in India. The inhabitants are rich and prosperous, and vie with one another in the practice of benevolence and righteousness.’ Particularly eye-catching is his description of how the citizens of Gupta Patna (whether Buddhist, Jain or Brahmin) shared each other’s festivals and revered each other’s teachers. As discussed in Chapter 2, despite the many conflicts over religion in Indian history, this kind of pluralism has long existed, and still continues in Patna and in many other places. Fa Xien, then, opens a window on a well-organized kingdom that could not have been guessed at from the scanty and fragmentary material survivals, and behind it an Indian ruler who claimed to be a ‘universal king’.