The Story of India Read online

  Mulling over the hotelier’s tale, while Sivaratri fireworks go off in the street like volleys of gunfire, another thought comes to me about the Mahabharata. It describes a past that may seem to be timeless, always there, tempting some to see India as a place of thought and inaction. But the reverse is true: the nation was born of struggle. The ancient commentators referred to the epic as sruti, which means ‘what actually happened’. That intuition is right. It tells of the ‘real’ world, of war and destruction, violence and betrayal, the vanity of ambition, the futility of anger and hatred. Its heroes have feet of clay, but ultimately good triumphs even in a time of cosmic destruction. The epic then is one of action, and behind all the accretions at its core is a realistic view of the tragedies of history: good men on either side suffer and die; time moves on and the cities of the epic are swept away by the Ganges. New capitals are built. The wounds of history heal in time. Over the next 3000 years Greeks and Kushans, Turks and Afghans, Mughals and British, Alexander, Tamburlaine and Babur, will all come and fall under India’s spell. And India’s greatest strength, one known only to the oldest civilizations, will be to adapt and change, to use the gifts of history and to accept its wounds, but somehow, magically, to be always India.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE POWER OF IDEAS

  DAYBREAK IN BENARES. The end of the night is heralded by the sound of birds on my window sill. A pale wash of light touches the crumbling façades of the maharajas’ palaces and the prancing tigers on the house of the Dom Raja, the keeper of the funeral pyres. Swathed in blankets against the chill air, knots of pilgrims file down to the water’s edge to strip off and plunge in. Gasping at the coldness and holding a handful of water with outstretched arms towards the first pink hint of the sun, they recite the ancient mantra: ‘Giver of life, remover of pain and sorrow, bestower of happiness, creator of the universe, may we receive your supreme, sin-destroying light; may you guide our minds towards good …’

  I have come here many times over the years, but familiarity has never dulled the sheer thrill of this scene. For all the ravages of modernity, the crumbling infrastructure and the pollution of Mother Ganges, Benares is still a beautiful city, one of the most evocative on Earth. It is a city of the imagination, which never fails to fulfil its promise of mystery and enchantment. All too often the technological brilliance of the global age of mass communication kills the past and breaks these older allegiances in just a few generations. But not here. In Benares are 2500 years of stories, of life lived in the city’s narrow lanes. The Banarsis have their shrines, their music, their customs and dialect, their funeral pyres, their thick, bitter curd cooling in the alleys in handmade earthenware bowls, their jugs of sour green bhang for the nights of Shiva the transgressor, the god of excess – invisible topographies ingrained in the minds of those lucky enough to be born inside the old city.

  The lodging house teeters on a steeply stepped bathing ghat. From the rooftop the magnificent frontage of the city stretches 3 miles on a great curve of the river, the sun rising downstream across wide sandbanks and jungle, where in heavy monsoons the flood can spread to the horizon. As the sun comes up over the trees, it gilds the water, where skiffs with long oars float along the glittering surface like water-flies on a path of gold. Below me, through the branches of the old pipal tree at our front door, a lady in a yellow sari sprinkles petals of jasmine on a lingam (the phallic stone of Shiva) at the foot of the trunk, and pours Ganges water on the vermilioned stones among its tangled roots. In the alley, boys are heading to Vedic school, the master of the wrestling school rakes his sandpit, and the pandits set up their tattered umbrellas and well-fingered almanacs to receive the day’s clients. This is a great Hindu city in a time of Hindu revival. But things were once very different.

  The story of India brings us now to the fifth century BC, the time when Greek civilization was the powerhouse of the eastern Mediterranean. At that time the Persians ruled the greatest empire on Earth. Darius the Great had conquered the lands from the Aegean to the Indus, and brought the early Indian kingdoms in the Punjab and the Ganges and Jumna valleys into contact with the dazzling imperial kingship of their distant linguistic and cultural cousins. Benares, the place where the Buddha preached his first sermon, was then simply the capital of one small northern Indian kingdom. This was a time when Hinduism as we know it today, with the cults and gods we see in every corner of the city, didn’t exist. Although the pandits tell the visitor myths of the city’s primordial antiquity (and in India myth has an uncanny way of creating its own reality), the archaeologists tell us that the first urban settlement on the site of Benares began only in the sixth century BC, at what is now known as Rajghat (the king’s riverbank), the crossing point of the great historical route that later became the Grand Trunk Road, which today is carried over the river by the Curzon railway bridge. There were brick buildings, perhaps fortified with brick defences, and a clay embankment against the river floods. But the place rapidly expanded in the fifth century to become a centre for long-distance trade and textile production, as it has been ever since. We have no real evidence for its size, but the city of Kausambi, from the same era, has been excavated and had massive revetted, burnt-brick defences, with a 6-mile circuit, all of which suggests a booming population with powerful authorities able to deploy large-scale communal labour. It was this new urban civilization that was the setting for the next stage of the story of India.

  THE AXIS AGE

  The achievements of the great civilizations encompass the whole range of human creativity, from the practical and the artistic to the intellectual and spiritual. And nowhere has this been truer than in India. The pursuit of knowledge has had an almost religious value in Indian civilization, and still does today, even in India’s headlong rush into modernity. The formative time happened in the few generations either side of 500 BC. This has become known as the Axis age because so many of the great thinkers of the Old World lived at this same moment: the Buddha and Mahavira in India; Confucius, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu in China; the Old Testament prophets; the Greek philosophers; even, it has been suggested, Zoroaster. This idea has recently met with criticism. That Lao Tzu ever existed is a moot point, while Zoroaster clearly is to be dated many centuries earlier among the herders of central Asia. And whether it is valid at all to suggest a relationship between these great developments in the history of ideas has been questioned. Nevertheless, the insight, I think, is useful and broadly true, in the sense that in the Middle Iron Age the old, ritualistic ideas of religion inherited by the ancient civilizations from the Bronze Age were all essentially expressions of the ideology of the rulers. As such, they were subject to profound questioning in urban societies, where the old social order was changing and new mercantile classes were on the rise. Obviously, this was true in several places across Eurasia, certainly in the mixed cultures of the Levant, and in Iron Age Greece where the ‘orientalizing revolution’ from the Near East transformed Hellenic culture.

  Here in the Ganges plain, in the fifth century BC, new cities were developing and trade routes were opening up across the world. Perhaps this was accelerated by the existence of the Persian Empire, whose official language shared a common root with Sanskrit. (In fact, all through the history of India the close relation of the Indian and Persian languages is a factor in the exchange of ideas between the subcontinent, central Asia and the Iranian plateau.) At this time there were many thinkers in different fields – astronomy, geometry, grammar, linguistics and phonetics (indeed, in the third century BC writing would be reintroduced to India for the first time since the unknown writing system of Indus cities). But this was also a time of speculation about the nature of the human condition itself.

  RETHINKING THE WORLD

  Since the time of the Rig-Veda, and no doubt long before, Indians had meditated on the nature of the universe and the place of human beings within it. This fundamental obsession was compounded in the fifth century BC by a growing questioning of the moral and social order prom
ulgated by the Brahmin priests in a rigid caste system. What was the meaning of life and what part did humanity play in the chain of being? On whose authority existed the power systems that controlled peoples’ lives even beyond birth and death? The Vedic belief in the cycle of life, with its belief in karma and rebirth, had the effect of fixing the poor in poverty, and the rich above them, the pattern being repeated through their children and their children’s children. India is still battling with this legacy today. Subject to horrendous discrimination and violence even now, the untouchables and lower castes have only recently found a voice in India’s post-Independence democracy, although the debate began many centuries earlier.

  In the fifth century BC seekers after truth in the cities of the Ganges plain were as varied and numerous as their contemporaries in the pre-Socratic societies of Greece and the Ionian islands. There were sceptics, rationalists, atheists and determinists. There were those who rejected any idea of an afterlife, and those who proposed that the world is composed of atoms, as did their contemporary, Heraclitus of Ephesus, who believed ‘all is change’. There were others who thought all change was illusory and held that the universe is bound together by immutable laws. But there were also those who denied the gods altogether and rejected the Brahminical order.

  Among the most important and long-lasting seekers after truth were the Jains, who have had a profound influence on Indian thought and society for more than 2000 years. They have always drawn support from the trading communities, especially in Gujarat in western India, one of the main centres of the Bronze Age Indus civilization. Their chief leader Mahavira, ‘the great soul’, was an historical character, a contemporary of the Buddha, who in Jain tradition came at the end of a long line of gurus. Although the religion emerged in the fifth century BC, it probably had much more ancient roots. Some Jain ideas, especially the principle of ahimsa (non-harm or non-violence) to all living things, even insects, sound very archaic indeed. (Could they even be prehistoric?)The sect survives today, and the notion of ahimsa is one of the great ideas of Indian culture, percolating right down to Mahatma Gandhi and the freedom movement.

  However, the most influential of these early groups, not only in India but the world, were those who followed a teacher whom we know as the Buddha. He was a prince from a land-owning family, whose clan were rulers in the Nepali terai, the steamy borderland between India and the foothills of the Himalayas. His ideas spread beyond India to China, Korea, Japan and the whole of eastern Asia, also to Afghanistan and central Asia, the wisdom of India seducing East and West. This phase of India’s history, then, is a fascinating story of great empires and giant figures, but it is above all about the power of ideas.

  BUDDHISM: AN END TO SUFFERING

  It is 2 a.m. From Gaya Station we make our way to the Hotel Classic, where we are offered puri and vegetables with hot sweet tea, welcome after the long hours on a delayed train down from Benares. The morning papers are full of the bombings that have taken place in Benares, both at the station and the Hanuman temple. It is a reminder that no society in history has been immune to violence; and for all its great tradition of non-violence, India is no exception. Indeed, India’s history has been uniquely violent, and one might think that it is precisely because of this that India has meditated so long and hard about the causes of violence and the need to restrain it. Violence has continued to be a part of the subcontinent’s experience since Independence, as evidenced by the wars with Pakistan, the Bangladesh conflict and the war in Kashmir. All are part of the continuing aftermath of the 1947 Partition which took place on the grounds of religion. These events continue to give fuel to the sectarians, hence the demolition of a mosque in Ayodhia in 1992, one of the most charged events in Indian history since Partition, which has spawned further conflict, such as that in 2001 in Gujarat. The world of the Buddha was very different from ours. But like a therapist, the Buddha is diagnosing the condition of the human mind, and that, I daresay, has not changed. We underestimate the people of the past at our peril.

  Outside the station approaches, Buddhist pilgrims are heading in rickshaws on the short trip to Bodhgaya, the place where the Buddha found enlightenment. The journey takes us through green fields alongside the Phalgu river, dried up at this time of year: it is a yellow expanse of windblown sand, edged by jungle and backed by distant wooded hills. The Buddha walked across it from the little homestead where he is supposed to have broken his fasting and austerities to take porridge from a woman whose name the tradition remembers as Sujata. This was to be the last step before his moment of destiny.

  The young man had been a prince of an old kshatriya (warrior caste) land-owning clan, the Sakyamunis, who came from the foothills on the edge of Nepal. But he was a prince who renounced that life and all its privileges. His reasons for going were said to be four. He saw the reality of the human condition in the spectacle of disease, illness, suffering and death after witnessing an old man, a blind man, a dying man and then a corpse. (These are sights you can still see any day on the streets of India.) The prince left his home and all the pleasures of his rank to seek an answer: an end to suffering He turned his back on the most human intimacies, his loving wife and their helpless child, in order to discover his humanity. A paradox? The Buddha’s life is full of paradoxes. Since his time there have sprung up so many myths about him, so many miraculous tales, that it is hard to get back to the man himself and what he actually preached. But that depends on the context. He was arguing with other sects, especially the Brahmins. He was contesting their ritualized vision of the universe and their predetermined conception of human society. His ideas formed a reaction, then, a questioning of the old order. He was a protestor.

  So when he lived matters, but, unfortunately, it is not even certain what century that was. Tradition says that he died around a date equivalent to 486 BC in the Western calendar, but recently there has been a growing feeling that the date should be brought down to the fourth century, making him almost a contemporary of Alexander the Great. The controversy centres on the nature of the society in the Ganges plain as depicted in Buddhist texts, all of which were written down much later than his time. These texts assume a backdrop of urban societies, not villages but cities, where the mercantile classes in particular found his message of trust and ‘right conduct’ congenial. On his travels the Buddha is described as visiting bustling cities, many of which – if they existed at all – must have been new in the fifth century. Another perplexing fact is the apparent silence on Buddhism for more than two centuries after his death, until the accession of the emperor Ashoka in c.270 BC. Did Buddhism stand still, remaining an insignificant cult until it was picked up by the emperor and turned into something like an ‘official’ ideology? This has led many scholars to argue a fourth century BC date, though it may well be that Buddhism stayed a small cult until it was taken up by the emperor (a distant parallel might be Constantine’s adoption of Christianity).

  As for the cities, some of those excavated, such as Kausambi with its huge perimeter defences, were certainly in existence by the sixth century. So there is still much to be said for the traditional dating. Crucial supporting evidence is the traditional chronology recorded in Pali chronicles in Sri Lanka from the fourth to the sixth centuries AD, which are based on historical material going back to the time of the emperor Chandragupta Maurya (c.320–293 BC), two generations before Ashoka. These converge with remarkable precision on the traditional date. So while the eighty years traditionally allotted to the Buddha’s life is a suspiciously round figure (did he really spend forty-five years wandering around rural Bihar and northern India?), a fifth-century date for his death, and even a death date of 485/6, is still possible.

  ON THE ROAD TO ENLIGHTENMENT

  So Prince Siddhartha (as he was) left his family to live the life of an Indian ascetic, mortifying his body. You still meet such people on the road – these days even with their mobile phones – gathering at the annual melas (festivals), starving themselves, practising auste
rities, holding an arm in the air, standing on one leg and keeping a vow of silence. The aim is to break through the fetters of human existence as the young Buddha hoped to do. A wry saying, later attributed to him, rings true to life. It is expressed in what may be his characteristic voice – vivid, self-deprecating and bluntly realistic: ‘My legs became as spindly as sticks, my buttocks became as knobbly as a cow’s hoof, my ribs looked like a collapsed shed. And it did me absolutely no good at all!’

  So he finally came to Bodhgaya. The place stands on low twin hills in a wood by the wide, sandy bed of the Phalgu river. It is one place where archaeology has specifically corroborated the traditional stories. Excavators here found traces of human settlement dating from the Chalcolithic period (third to second millennium BC) until the twelfth century AD, a very long-lasting indigenous culture offering a rare view of precisely what was there when the Buddha came, unmediated by the weight of later tradition. The place is now a scruffy field outside the walled enclosure of the Mahabodhi temple. There, unkempt and disregarded, are the footings of ruins going back over three millennia. If the tradition is true, the Buddha attained enlightenment in a place already frequented by renouncers, by Jains and Brahmins and by long-haired fire worshippers, whose culture went back long before the coming of the Aryan Vedic religion. Here he came to the moment of transformation. That night, despairing of the self-punishing techniques of the sadhus, he sat under a pipal tree and resolved not to leave until he had achieved enlightenment.