Notebook for
The Story of India
Michael Wood
Citation (APA): Wood, M. (2018). The Story of India [Kindle Android version].
Introduction
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But it seems to me that nowhere on Earth can you find all human histories, from the Stone Age to the global village, still thriving, as you can in India.
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‘the people of Asia, the Mongols, the Turks and the Arabs get tongue-tied speaking our Indian languages, but we Indians can speak any language of the world as easily as a shepherd tends his sheep’.
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Indian society is made up of nearly 5000 castes and communities, each with its own rules, customs and stories.
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It is also the second largest Muslim country on Earth, and the subcontinent as a whole has half of all Muslims in the world.
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Historical economists conjecture that India’s GDP was the largest in the world until around 1500,
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Leading financial analysts now predict that on present trends India’s GDP will overtake that of the USA in the late 2030s.
One: Origins and Identity
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but this was the route taken by the first humans out of Africa perhaps 80,000 years ago:
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Even now, small pockets of aboriginal peoples still survive around its shores.
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British district gazetteers recorded their names: the Kadar, Paniyan and Korava, the Yanadi Irula, Gadaba and Chenchu. Older than the Dravidian speakers around them, they remain distinct, self-contained, outside the caste system of Hindu India.
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Professor Pitchappan, a geneticist from Madurai University. He has made an extraordinary discovery working among the Kallar tribal people here. He’s found traces of the ancestral mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes from the earliest genetic heritage of India. By chance, his team tested a man called Virumandi and discovered that he carries the M130 gene from the first wave of migrations of modern humans out of Africa. To their surprise, they subsequently discovered that Virumandi’s whole village has M130 – carried down by isolation, by the strictures of the caste system, and by endogamy: the Kallar practice of first cousin marriage, the oldest and most characteristic form of kin marriage in southern India.
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‘If Adam came from Africa, Eve came from India.’ Mother India indeed!
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Between 3000 and 4000 years ago a new wave of migrants came into India from central Asia. Some of them moved into the south in the last millennium BC. They brought their Vedic rituals and their worship of Agni, the god of fire, but over time, the gods and rituals of the indigenous peoples were assimilated, and this was the synthesis out of which today’s Indian religions emerged. They called themselves ‘Aryans’(the Sanskrit word for ‘noble ones’), a term much abused in modern times by Nazis and other racial fundamentalists.
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(here, unlike in mainstream Hinduism, women play a role),
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What is certain too is that the symbols of procreative power –the stone lingam and yoni (male and female principles) –that are found in the worship of Shiva come out of the deep past.
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Charcoal from one of the early levels gave a carbon date of the sixth millennium BC, and there were 30 feet more debris underneath it!
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as late as the 1970s there was no evidence of agriculture in India much before 3000 BC,
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similarities of Sanskrit to Latin and Greek.
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the languages are connected; and the time depth of the ‘family tree’of the Indo-European languages precludes the idea of India as the place of origin.
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The Rig-Veda comprises about a thousand hymns. They were sung by families of bardic priests in praise of gods and kings.
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In the text of a treaty from the kingdom of Mitanni in northern Syria, datable to around 1380 BC, the names of the rulers, to scholars’great surprise, could be read perfectly as Sanskrit.
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The Rig-Veda hymns describe a bronze-using world (iron first appears in India around 1200 BC); their authors seem unaware of great cities, such as Mohenjo-Daro, and know only of ruins whose people have fled, ‘driven away by Agni, the god of fire’. All this combines to suggest that the bulk of hymns were composed after the Indus civilization.
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It was from this region, the Rig-Veda says, that the Aryans spread eastwards into India
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As we have seen, the world portrayed by the Rig-Vedic poets bears no recognizable relation to that of the Indus civilization; it has no memory of vast cities, except as ruins.
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The big picture, then, is that
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the evidence of the Rig-Veda shows that the newcomers saw themselves as conquerors, modelled on Indra himself.
Two: The Power of Ideas
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ecumenical;
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Megasthenes says there was a huge number of ‘nations’, and many sects that often violently disagreed among themselves.
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In Kashmir even into the last century there was a special court of five Hindu pandits, hereditary officers from the deep past, maybe descended from Ashoka’s, who tried breaches of the Hindu scriptures.
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Megasthenes reports, attendants stretched out ropes to keep the crowd back and ‘to cross the rope was punishable by death’.
Three: The Growth of Civilization
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(The word ‘pepper’, incidentally, like ‘rice’, comes from the Tamil.)
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During the nineteenth century Baghdadi Jewish families, such as the Sassoons, built spice warehouses in ‘Jewtown’in old Cochin.
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The Apostle Thomas is supposed to have landed at the Periyar river around 50 AD with the aim of introducing Christianity to India, and a gleaming white Syrian Christian basilica stands on the spot today.
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Is that how an Indian ivory statuette of the goddess Lakshmi found its way to Pompeii, where it was buried in the eruption of AD 79?
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the wise maiden’s lamp of first-century Palestine still burns as the flame at puja time in India’s tropical south.
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The inner streets are named after the Tamil months, and were part of the pattern of the city from its earliest days.
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This Iron Age culture developed in the last centuries BC into an urban civilization with writing that was adopted after contact with the Mauryan Empire in the third century BC.
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In 21 BC, during the reign of Augustus, a Pandyan embassy went from Madurai all the way by sea to Rome.
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Tamil literature is as rich as any in western Europe –only Greek and Latin are older.
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India’s oldest living classical language:
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It may have been Vima who inaugurated a new era in AD 78, which survives as the Shaka era
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Kanishka
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Jambudvipa [‘rose apple continent’, that is the inhabited world].’
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The lid shows the Buddha on a lotus pedestal, worshipped by Brahma, the creator god of the Hindus, and Indra, the old sky god of the Rig-Veda.
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with their flat rooftops and timber balakhana screens (source of our word ‘balcony’),
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In the indigenous Indian tradition of medicine, Ayurveda, the physician Caraka (or Charaka), one of its two traditional ‘founders’(whose works are still passed down in lineages by oral teaching), is said to have been the guru of Kanishka, and is the subject of many legendary tales as far away as China.
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For example, the tradition in Indian religious art of many-armed, many-headed gods seems to have started in Mathura, defining forever the representation of the Brahminical deities.
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particular artistic innovations are so useful that they transform ways of seeing: and this meeting of Greek, Indian and central Asian styles on Indian soil in the second century AD proved so successful that regional cultures across the subcontinent swiftly adapted it to their own uses,
Four: Medieval India: Age of Gold and Iron
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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.
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no meat, eggs or alcohol are permitted in God’s city.
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Curiously enough, it was under them that most Hindu temples here were built in the century-long heyday of Awadhi culture,
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And the town of Ayodhia is the theatre where myth has been translated into modern metaphor.
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yellow sign of the Vaishnavaites, like an inverted tuning fork,
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But the point is that the tale told by the traditional Brahmins and pilgrim guides here takes place in another aeon.
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A different view of the tale’s
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Three figures in Indian religion and myth have the name Rama,
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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?
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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,
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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.
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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.
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Elizabethan visitor Ralph Fitch, among ‘certain Brahmins who record the names of all such Indians as wash themselves in the river running thereby’.
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Saketa, the name by which it had been known to the ancient Greeks.
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The old Brahminical religion had suffered eclipse when Buddhism was the chief religion of India
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For the historian the Hindu cycle of rebirths is a sine qua non!
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(tragedy seems to be unknown as a genre in Indian drama –perhaps the law of karma would preclude it?).
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science of pleasure was one of the principal sciences, along with dharma (virtue) and artha (prosperity), one of the three aims of human life.
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in present-day India, which has a growing Aids problem, these ancient writings are now being used as educational texts for prostitutes.
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One concomitant, for example, was the conversion of huge numbers of Indians to Islam. This phenomenon is not yet satisfactorily explained by historians; no doubt it was partly through coercion, but in part too a reaction to the hierarchical and oppressive nature of Brahminical religion in many places towards the lower castes, and, a response to the democratic bent of Islam. But this great historical movement began with violence.
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Dara Shikoh’s Persian translation of the Bhagavadgita,
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(the phallic stone of Shiva)
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Manaat, the last of the pagan idols that had existed in Mecca before the days of the Prophet,
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But al-Biruni, who learnt Sanskrit and consulted with Hindu holy men, asserted that the fundamental religious beliefs of the Indians were the same as those of Islam, and that idol worship was only a superficial issue, an aid to the poor and simple.
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The architect of the expansion was Arulmoli, subsequently known as Rajaraja (king of kings), who came to the throne in 985.
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Rajaraja’s sister Kundavi.
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(And could it perhaps be –given the insistently personal nature of the foundation –that the shrine was planned also to mark the eventual burial place of the king’s ashes?)
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Upstairs, in the upper ambulatory gallery, unfinished at the king’s death in 1014, is a great sequence of sculpted panels of the 108 poses of the dance, the Bharat Natyam, in the exact sequence of the ancient text book, the Natya Shastra.
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Carnatic wars (1746–63).
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Although India was never united as a state, it is likely that through these centuries the subcontinent was the richest and most populous part of the world.
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There is a Muslim Rama story told by the Mopylas, the old boat-building caste of Kerala: a tale of ‘Sultan Ram’set firmly in tropical southern India in a Muslim milieu. There is even a Tamil ‘Life of the Prophet’modelled on the Tamil Ramayana.
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Nothing is denied to him when his historicity is denied.
Five: The Rule Of Reason: The Great Mughuls
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Humayun’s wife Haminda Banu Begum had, up until then, given birth only to daughters, and it was said that she swapped babies with the rana of Umarcot’s wife, who gave birth at the same time. Akbar, therefore, was really born a Hindu!
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Akbar’s policy of religious tolerance and favour owed much to these Iranians.
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Sufi ibn Arabi’s ideas about the ‘unity of being’. The doctrine claimed no rational basis, but was a strong challenge to orthodoxy in its proposal that all that is not part of divine reality is an illusion.
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sacred confluence of the Ganges and Jumna, the place of creation in Hindu myth.
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his idea that Muslims and Hindus should be made equal before the law – an idea that has not quite yet been achieved even in independent India.
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In his nearly fifty-year reign Akbar established India as one of the great powers.
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This pre-British economy of India has often been portrayed as a golden age, when late Mughal India was a great manufacturing nation as well as an agricultural one.
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But new studies suggest that the gross domestic product of India, possibly the largest in the world during the Middle Ages, declined dramatically and was probably lower than that of Europe by the eighteenth century.
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The hierarchical nature of the caste system, with its control over village life from top to bottom, no doubt aided the acceptance of such crippling exactions.
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Educated in the religious texts of both religions, Dara took his stand on the Koran’s revelation (in Sura 56) that before the Prophet Muhammad, God had sent humanity messengers to all peoples –and given them scriptures.
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The wisdom of India, then, was just that: the earliest spiritual vision of humanity.
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Dara’s translation of the Upanishads played a major role in the discovery of India in Europe in the early nineteenth century,
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Of course, it was impossible that such enquiries in a great prince could be seen as non-political.
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but as we look at it now, sixty years on from Independence and Partition, when the effort of mutual comprehension failed, this seed of reconciliation is worth pause.
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He is suggesting British had no hand in partition?
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‘The Confluence of the Two Oceans’.
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southern court in Tanjore during the eighteenth century, which imported Western texts on medicine, optics, anatomy and surgery.)
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Hinduism among India’s elites (as opposed to religion at the popular level) might have evolved on a path more in line with its monotheistic potential
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He even attempted to outlaw music and wine-making, and to ban Diwali.
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His simple tomb, open to the sky at Khuldabad, is still reverently maintained, and visited by wandering dervishes.
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Aurangzeb, more than most, paved the way for the problems of the modern period, leading to Partition.
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ENTER THE HONOURABLE EAST INDIA COMPANY
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the 1765 treaty with the Mughals gave the British the diwan, the rule of Bengal, and, above all, the right to collect taxes.
Six: Freedom and Liberation
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The mythological navel of the Earth, it is a place whose symbolic life is even richer than its real history.
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Between the 1760s and 1799 the British fought four wars with the Muslim rulers of Mysore, who were French allies,
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Lord Macaulay’s 1835 edict on Indian education, which announced the replacement of Persian by English as the new language of government.
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India was now to be taught the new secular dharma of the West.
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To achieve this they set about the ideological and practical construction of modernity in India. Time, space, geography, caste, religion –all would be redefined by the supposedly superior knowledge, science and ethics of the imperialists.
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Sir George Everest, for example, after whom the world’s highest mountain is named,
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The imposition of the British legal system was another crucial introduction, along with the codifying of Hindu and Muslim law, and the detailed categorizing of caste in Indian society, as customary law was caste-based.
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their attack on the ancient Gond culture in Orissa,
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Texts such as the Bhagavadgita or the Tamil Tiruvasagam were given Christianizing interpretations by missionary scholars, quarrying the monotheistic or monist strand in Hindu thought. There was and still is some truth in such ideas, though the great medieval teaching texts of the Saivas and Vaishnavas could equally well be used to demonstrate that these were separate religious systems, with different supreme deities and different sacred texts, rituals and eschatologies.
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The British project also involved giving a British education to the native ruling class, who would interpret their own culture to the Indian masses in British terms.
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As we have seen throughout this book, India had never existed as one unified state at any time in its history,
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But it was the British who first conceived of India as a political unity; a country rather than a state of mind.
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‘There is no such thing as India’.
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The strong perception far back in time, then, is of a broad cultural unity.
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‘a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India’
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The last four decades of the Victorian era coincided with a disastrous phase in the world climate:
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From Bengal down to the south, India was caught up in a cycle of global famine that began with the failure of the El Niño world climate system.
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3 million people died in one year, and there were 6 million homeless.
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in some regions not touched by famine grain was even shipped abroad.
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The story of the Indian freedom movement from 1885 to 1947 has generally been told to the outside world through the powerful and seductive narrative of the Congress.
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that the idea of a separate country for Muslims was first mooted by a Hindu nationalist in 1924.
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Did the British tacitly approve it because it would help them divide and rule in the post-war, cold war world? Full publication of the papers in the last forty years at least absolves the British of that.
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The historical parallels are instructive. When the American states debated after 1776, the powerful ones conceded rights and powers to the small in order to achieve the Union.
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The Discovery of India
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militant RSS
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ironically, the dig proved that there had been no significant structure on the site before the Middle Ages:
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But the world’s largest democracy is now firmly set on the path of growth and change, and will go about it in the way that Indian people have always done –adopting what is useful from the outside and holding on tenaciously to the old goals of life inherited from their past.
Further Reading
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Many of the great texts of Indian history are easily available in translation: the Rig Veda for example by Wendy Doniger (Penguin, 1981),
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P. Richmann’s Many Ramayanas
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The Kamasutra is published in Oxford World’s Classics by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (2002).
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1993). I have contributed to a recent study of one great southern religious centre: Chidambaram (ed. V. Nanda, Marg, 2004)
Picture Section
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An Indian hump-backed bull with huge dewlaps.
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The harvesting of pepper trees in Kerala from a medieval manuscript.
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The Peutinger Table, a map of the Roman world, showing (bottom right) the port of Muziris on the Kerala backwaters with its ‘temple of Augustus’.
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Rajaraja the Great and his guru Karuvur Devar: one of the Cholan paintings hidden inside the temple’s shrine ambulatory.
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Inside the inner sanctum of the great temple: incredibly privileged access granted by the priests allowed these extraordinary images to be taken of the beautiful ceremonies at the Shiva lingam, dedicated by Rajaraja himself in 1010.
Acknowledgements
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and Romila Thapar for kind words of advice to a young beginner many years back.
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there are many contentious topics, such as the ‘Aryan’invasion, or the interpretation of Islam and Hinduism in the Middle Ages to name but two, and the conclusions drawn are mine alone;