ABOUT

THE AUTHOR

Andrew Robinson is a King’s Scholar of Eton College and holds degrees from
Oxford University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He
has been a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and is currently a
Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is the author of twenty-five books in the
arts and sciences, nine of them on aspects of Indian history and culture,
including two definitive biographies, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, and the co-
authored Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, the first of which was
described by V. S. Naipaul as ‘an extraordinarily good, detailed and selfless
book’.
www.andrew-robinson.org
 Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:

Maharaja:
The Spectacular Heritage of Princely India

The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra

Raghu Rai’s Delhi

Turkey: A Short History

See our websites

www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
 CONTENTS

Preface
Introduction
1 The Indus Valley Civilization
2 Vedas, Aryans and the Origins of Hinduism
3 Buddha, Alexander and Asoka
4 Hindu Dynasties
5 The Coming of Islam
6 The Mughal Empire
7 European Incursions and East India Companies
8 The ‘Jewel in the Crown’
9 End of Empire
10 The World’s Largest Democracy
Postscript

Map
Chronology
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Index
 PREFACE

Contemporary India attracts the attention of the world. Yet, only a few decades
ago, the subcontinent was largely ignored by outsiders. Writing in the early
1960s, the future Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul famously termed India An Area of
Darkness after his first disillusioning sojourn in his ancestral land. In the mid-
1970s, when I first arrived in India from Britain, before going to university, to
teach science in a school in the Himalayas and see the country, I knew
practically nothing of its history and culture, despite India’s historic, two-century
relationship with Britain. In my school history classes, I had briefly studied
Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and the foundation of the British empire in India
in the mid-18th century, but the history of the Mughal empire, Hindu kingdoms,
the empire of Asoka, the life of the Buddha and the spread of Buddhism, or the
ancient Indus Valley civilization was a blank – not to mention the story of
Mahatma Gandhi and the end of empire in the subcontinent.
The same indifference was commonplace during the colonial period, before
India’s independence from Britain in 1947, perhaps surprisingly. In 1925, the
historian of India Edward J. Thompson (father of E. P. Thompson) regretted that
‘British lack of interest in India is no new thing’ in a controversial little book,
The Other Side of the Medal, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s
Hogarth Press, intended to ruffle more than half a century of imperial
complacency with news of hitherto concealed British atrocities against Indian
civilians during the uprising of 1857–58 known to the British as the Indian
Mutiny. ‘It has been notorious, and a theme of savage comment by Indians, that
the Indian Debate in the House of Commons has been regarded with indifference
by the few who attended, with contempt by the many who stayed away’,
Thompson noted. A century earlier, in 1833, at the time of a crucial British
parliamentary debate about the government’s effective nationalization of the East
India Company, the MP and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay – shortly to
set sail for India from London as a high government official – regretted ‘the
strange indifference of all classes of people, members of Parliament, reporters
and the public to Indian politics’. However, he also privately admitted to his
family his own profound ambivalence towards India: ‘Am I not in fair training to
be as great a bore … as the greatest?’ For all his praiseworthy dedication to
improving the educational and legal systems of India, Macaulay would himself
come to epitomize British indifference to Indian culture. He had polyglot gifts in
European languages, but never bothered to learn any Indian language during his
four-year stint in India. In his much-quoted Minute on Education, written in
Calcutta in 1835, Macaulay asserted: ‘who could deny that a single shelf of a
good European library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia’.
Indifference persisted through the 1980s, more or less. When I worked for
Granada Television at the time of the making of The Jewel in the Crown, the
justly acclaimed drama serial set near the end of the British Raj, the production
staff looked at India chiefly through colonial-period spectacles – both on screen
and off. When I published a biography of India’s most internationally acclaimed
living cultural figure, Satyajit Ray, in 1989, there were many reviews; but the
London and New York film critics were plainly not much interested in Indian
culture – only in Ray’s artistry as a film director, as being worthy of comparison
with, say, Jean Renoir’s, Vittorio de Sica’s or Robert Flaherty’s. The editor of the
film magazine Sight and Sound (for which I was then writing), despite having
revered Ray’s films since the classic Apu Trilogy of the 1950s, had nevertheless
not felt the desire to visit an Indian film festival – perhaps because she suspected
that India’s prosaic urban reality and Indian filmgoers’ apparent addiction to
song and dance would not chime with Ray’s enchanting vision of his country. As
Ray himself candidly remarked to me in London in 1982: ‘the cultural gap
between East and West is too wide for a handful of films to reduce it. It can
happen only when critics back it up with study on other levels as well. But where
is the time, with so many films from other countries to contend with? And where
is the compulsion?’
At the beginning of the 1990s, however, the tide began to turn, fairly rapidly,
cresting in the first decade of the new millennium as something of an India
wave. There were many reasons: empires had gone out of fashion; former
servants of the Raj were dead or dying off; younger westerners free from
colonial baggage were travelling extensively in India, not just to the usual tourist
spots such as Delhi and Rajasthan; some were even marrying Indians and
settling there; young India-based writers were being published in the West to
considerable acclaim; ‘Bollywood’ films were becoming partially known to non-
Indians. Most important of all, a diaspora of Indian citizens and people of Indian
origin was making its mark in Europe, North America and other parts of the
globe in business, the media and the professions, especially medicine, science
and technology, including information technology. At the same time, within
India, following the government’s liberalization of the country’s commerce after
1991, the economy began to grow fast, averaging just over six per cent per
annum during the rest of the decade. The flourishing of the Indian diaspora and
of India’s own economy made Europeans and Americans curious about the
country as a whole, and provided the compulsion – Satyajit Ray’s word – to
understand the sources of this unfamiliar success.
The sea change was symbolized by the commercial triumph in 2008–09 of a
multi-Oscar-winning movie, Slumdog Millionaire, which owed almost as much
to Bollywood as to Hollywood cinema. The film was not to my taste, but there
was no denying its public appeal in both East and West – if that old polarity can
any longer be said to mean much in our globalized world. Back in the 1970s,
such a British-directed production about India would have provoked outrage
from the Indian government and almost every Indian for its lurid revelling in
Indian poverty and squalor – as happened with the Indian government’s banning
in India of Louis Malle’s mammoth documentary, Phantom India, in 1970, after
it was shown on BBC Television. Even Ray’s prize-winning Apu Trilogy
suffered severe criticism in the Indian parliament in the early 1980s for its
projection of Indian poverty to audiences in Europe and America. Now, instead
of old-fashioned patriotic outrage, Slumdog Millionaire’s worldwide success was
greeted in India with nearly unanimous applause. The film’s go-getting message,
that even a slum kid from Mumbai with some brains could make a million in a
TV quiz show – and in real life get to step on the red carpet in Hollywood –
jibed with the brash confidence of India’s newly rich middle class. After all, the
film was based on an English-language novel written by one of their own, a
successful Indian diplomat.
The upsurge of interest in India prompted the publication of scores of non-
fiction books. Naipaul began the trend in 1990 with India: A Million Mutinies
Now, by interviewing a wide variety of ‘unknown’ Indians (to recall the title of
Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s remarkable 1951 memoir, The Autobiography of an
Unknown Indian) and narrating their personal histories. Writers, journalists,
political activists, business people and academics from many fields – both
Indians and non-Indians – followed on. Whereas the first decade or so of these
books, including Naipaul’s, was understandably optimistic about India,
emphasizing its refreshing prominence, later books veered towards pessimism.
For example, in Accidental India, the India-based economic analyst Shankkar
Aiyar argued that almost all of the beneficial economic changes in independent
India – including the agricultural ‘green revolution’ of the 1960s, the economic
liberalization of 1991 and the software revolution of the 1990s – happened as a
result of ‘accidents’, not government planning: often they arose from crises
forced upon India by incompetent official policies. ‘Governance in India, in
2012, is a sham and a shame’, summarized Aiyar. ‘In every crisis …, the
common thread is the inability of successive governments to think imaginatively
and act decisively. India deserves better.’ Few present-day Indian commentators
would disagree with that last remark.
Virtually all of the books restricted themselves to India of the past century or
two – that is, the British colonial period and after. Most also focused on politics
and economics, underplaying India’s intellectual, religious and artistic life. Still
to be written was an introductory, non-academic history of India since the Indus
Valley civilization of the third millennium BC, tackling its significant aspects
rather than striving for the completeness of a textbook, and paying as much
notice to individuals, ideas and cultures as to the rise and fall of kingdoms,
political parties and economies. Although Indian democracy is certainly a
remarkable achievement, worthy of study and at times even of celebration,
despite its longstanding failures and perversions of justice, India’s political
system does not – at least in my view it should not – define the country’s
importance to the world, whatever politically minded pundits may instinctively
believe. Indian history deserves better than an exclusive focus on politics and
economics (or indeed the prejudices of a Macaulay).
India: A Short History aims to steer a middle path between polarized reactions
to India, whether positive or negative. Indian history is undeniably full of
fascinating extremes; but a historian must try to view them sub specie
aeternitatis. For me personally, the book is also an attempt to understand
somewhat better a civilization that has changed my life.
NOTE ON NOMENCLATURE
Since this is a history book, recently changed Indian spellings of place-names,
such as Mumbai (previously Bombay), are not used, except where appropriate in
describing present-day India. Personal names and terms taken from Indian
languages follow common usage, without being entirely consistent, for example
Asoka (rather than Ashoka) but dharma (rather than dhamma); diacriticals have
been omitted.
 INTRODUCTION

Startling material wealth has long been a feature of India. Ancient Rome’s taste
for Indian luxuries is proved by the enormous numbers of Roman gold coins
found in southern India. Writing in the first century AD in his Natural History,
Pliny the Elder complained of the ‘drain’ caused by Indian luxuries on the
Roman economy, and deplored the fact that Rome and India had been ‘brought
nearer by lust for gain’. The Buddhist cave paintings of Ajanta, created in the
first millennium AD, lost in the jungles and rediscovered by the British in the
early 19th century, depict lavish personal adornments. The Muslim invaders of
India in the eleventh century, such as the Afghan, Mahmud of Ghazni, brought
home vast loot by stripping Hindu temples of gold and jewels. The reputation for
splendour of the courts of the Great Mughals in the 16th and 17th centuries –
symbolized by the jewel-encrusted Taj Mahal built by the Emperor Shah Jahan –
attracted the attentions of European traders: first the Portuguese, then other
European nations. In 1700, the heyday of the Mughal empire, India’s share of
world GDP, at 24.4 per cent, almost equalled Europe’s share, 25 per cent. Indian
wealth underpinned the rise of the British East India Company and the
foundation of the British empire in India in the 18th century; by the 1780s,
European Calcutta was justifiably known as the ‘City of Palaces’. During the
British Raj, Indian princes became bywords for opulence and excess. Today,
rather than the feudal maharajas, there are ostentatious Indian business moguls
who number among the world’s richest men – along with institutionalized
corruption on a scale so unbridled it threatens the stability of the nation. In 2008,
the combined net worth of the four richest Indians in Forbes list of billionaires
equalled 16 per cent of India’s total GDP.
Grinding poverty seems always to have been a fact of Indian life, too. In the
5th or 6th century BC, ‘Prince’ Siddhartha Gautama, before his enlightenment as
the Buddha, was painfully shocked by the poverty and disease beyond his palace
walls. In the 3rd century BC, India’s first great ruler, the Mauryan emperor
Asoka, established what can be called the world’s first welfare state, inspired by
Buddhism. As the caste system became more rigid under Hindu rulers guided by
the values of the highest caste, the Brahmins, the poorest became outcastes from
society, in due course known as untouchables (rechristened Harijans by Gandhi,
and now generally known as Dalits). Famines regularly afflicted British India
from the time of Clive in the 1760s until as late as 1943. In the first half of the
20th century, Mahatma Gandhi deliberately adopted the dress of the poor and
focused much of his activism on poverty alleviation. In 1971, Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi, having just abolished the privy purses of the Indian princes, won
a landslide election victory with the Hindi slogan ‘Garibi Hatao’ (‘Abolish
Poverty’). ‘Indeed, even today, after twenty years of rapid growth,’ the
economist Amartya Sen warned in 2011 in an Indian news magazine, ‘India is
still one of the poorest countries in the world, something that is often lost sight
of, especially by those who enjoy world-class living standards thanks to the
inequalities in the income distribution.’ Only sixteen countries outside Africa
had a lower gross national income per capita than India: Afghanistan, Cambodia,
Haiti, Iraq, Kyrgystan, Laos, Moldova, Nepal, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Papua New
Guinea, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen. ‘This is not exactly a club
of economic superpowers’, commented Sen, who was awarded a Nobel prize in
1998, chiefly for his work on famines and poverty.
It is a cliché that India has long been, and still is, a land of inequality and
extremes of wealth and behaviour. Acceptance of inequality may be the main
reason why India eventually rejected Buddhism and its philosophy of social
equality and moderation during the first millennium AD – but not Jainism, a
religious movement contemporaneous with Buddhism, which fostered the
accumulation of great wealth along with the practice of rigorous asceticism.
Endemic disparity is part of India’s uniqueness and fascination, and must form
an essential theme of any history.
In the arts, for instance, India has produced some of the world’s most unique
and refined literature, sculpture, painting, music, songs and dance. Poems, plays
and novels in several languages by writers such as Kalidasa (Sanskrit), Kabir
(Hindi), Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali) and R. K. Narayan (English); the
sculpture of the Sun Temple at Konarak in Orissa and the Chola bronze statues
of Tamil Nadu; the murals of Ajanta, the Rajput miniature paintings and the
contemporary paintings of Binode Bihari Mukherjee; the ragas of Ravi Shankar
and Ali Akbar Khan; Bharata Natyam and Kathakali dancing – to name just a
few Indian artistic achievements – are recognized contributions to universal
culture, which have exerted a powerful influence on 20th-century non-Indian
artists, such as the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the sculptor Antony
Gormley, the novelist Graham Greene, the musician George Harrison and the
poet W. B. Yeats. In the cinema, Satyajit Ray, the first Indian to win an Oscar for
his lifetime achievement, was praised by leading artists from all regions of the
world, including his fellow film directors, at the same time as being loved by
ordinary audiences in his native Bengal for his films’ warmth, humour and
penetrating honesty. From Japan, the director Akira Kurosawa even said: ‘Not to
have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun
or the moon.’ And yet it is also true that most of the output of India’s film
industry, which is the biggest in the world, is now (after its increasing
commodification in recent decades) among the tawdriest in the world, even
when compared with the trashiest of Hollywood films. The Himalayan peaks and
the monotony of the north Indian plain can sometimes seem like metaphors for
the behaviour and achievements of the subcontinent’s human inhabitants.
A second great theme for a history must be the interaction of India with other
cultures, whether towards the east and south, in China, Japan, Southeast Asia
and Sri Lanka, or towards the west, in the Islamic world, ancient Greece and
Rome, and modern Europe.
Buddhism formed a vital part of Chinese history from the 1st to the 11th
century AD and of Japanese history from the 6th century until today. Whether it
reached China from India via a maritime route and was first practised in
southern China, in the Yangtze River and Huai River region, or it arrived via the
overland routes of the Silk Road and was first practised in western China, at the
Han dynasty capital Luoyang, has long been disputed. But certainly the spread of
Buddhism led to the printing of the world’s earliest dated printed book, The
Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text published in Chinese in AD 868, which was
discovered in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Dunhuang on the Silk
Road and brought to the British Museum in 1909. In Sri Lanka and Southeast
Asia – Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and some other countries of the
region – Indian Buddhist and Hindu influence is obvious in their art and
architecture, for example at Anuradhapura (Sri Lanka), Pagan (Burma), Angkor
Wat (Cambodia) and Borobudur (Indonesia), despite much debate about how this
influence actually occurred. While the old theories of conquest and colonization
of an uncultured Southeast Asia by Indian traders, followed by their marriage to
local women, have been abandoned, the formation of states in these areas during
the mid-first millennium AD is intelligible only by reference to the spread of
Buddhism (in its two major traditions, Mahayana and Theravada) and Hinduism
from India.
In the West, Indian influence arrived considerably earlier. The Roman
historian Eusebius claimed that learned Indians visited Athens and conversed
with Socrates in the 5th century BC. Asked to explain the object of his
philosophy, Socrates is said to have replied: ‘an inquiry into human affairs’. One
of the Indians burst out laughing and asked: ‘How can a man grasp human things
without first mastering the Divine?’ This early example of an East–West
encounter may be apocryphal (though Alexander the Great definitely
encountered Indian philosophers in the 4th century BC), but it is certain that
Buddhists from India visited ancient Alexandria. In the 3rd century AD, the
Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria was the first Greek writer to
mention Buddha by name (as ‘Boutta’). Clement also declared, tendentiously,
that the Greeks acquired their philosophy from these ‘barbarian’ visitors. Some
centuries later – by the 9th century, at the latest – the decimal place-value
system, including a symbol for zero, was indubitably invented by anonymous
Indian mathematicians and passed on to Arab mathematicians, who gave it to
Europe around 1200, where the ten symbols became known as ‘Arabic
numerals’: India’s greatest practical gift to the world. In the 15th century, the
Indian folk tales known in Sanskrit as the Panchatantra were translated into
Latin and thence into modern European languages, forming the basis of Jean de
la Fontaine’s second book of Fables, published in 1678. In the late 18th century,
British scholars working in India learned Sanskrit – most notably Sir William
Jones, who discovered the Indo-European language family (including Sanskrit,
Greek and Latin) in the 1780s – and began to translate ancient Indian works of
literature, law and philosophy; these had a significant impact on the German
Romantics, including Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Arthur
Schopenhauer. This was followed in the mid-19th century by the European
rediscovery of Indian Buddhism – both as archaeology at magnificent sites such
as Sanchi and Sarnath, and as a living philosophy in Sri Lanka, Burma and Tibet.
The converse influence – of the Middle East, Islam and Europe on India – is
of course profound. From archaeological evidence, we know there was trade
between ancient Mesopotamia and the first urban Indian culture, located in the
Indus Valley, as early as the turn of the third millennium BC. Thereafter came the
Aryan migrations from Iran into India in the mid-second millennium BC; the
Greek influence on northwest India – around the time of Alexander’s invasion
and thereafter – in the late first millennium BC; the invasions of Muslim warriors
in the early second millennium AD; the rise of the Mughal power after 1526; and
the European colonial period in the late second millennium. In addition, India
was invaded from the east, from the direction of Burma, by a Tai/Shan people
who established the Ahom dynasty in Assam in the early 13th century. The
Ahoms successfully resisted Mughal domination in the 17th century and ruled
the Brahmaputra Valley for an impressive six centuries until their conquest by
the British in 1826.
Scholars by no means agree on which aspects of Indian history and
civilization should be regarded as indigenous to the subcontinent and which
were the result of outside influences. The European colonial period is perhaps
the most controversial, being closest in time and emotion, but even the Aryan
migrations continue to provoke impassioned debate, fuelled by Hindu
nationalists, who resist the scholarly consensus of a foreign, Aryan origin for
Hinduism. What cannot be denied is the complexity of the European influence
on India, including the development of the country’s system of parliamentary
democracy, introduced by the British in the 1930s. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru,
independent India’s first prime minister, B. R. Ambedkar, the leader of India’s
untouchables, and Tagore, India’s first Nobel laureate, each openly recognized
the vital role played by European thought in their own lives: for example, John
Ruskin’s Unto This Last (Gandhi), Fabian socialism (Nehru), western political
philosophers (Ambedkar) and English Romantic poets (Tagore). Gandhi even
selected a slogan, ‘Do or Die’, as his mantra for the mass agitation of the 1942
Quit India movement, which he had adapted from Alfred Tennyson’s phrase ‘do
and die’ in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. In the 1980s, Satyajit Ray frankly
said that he thought of himself as ‘50 per cent western’. Today, the economic
revival of India, relying on international trade and information technology,
would almost certainly have proved impossible without the widespread use and
prestige of the English language in India, bequeathed as part of the British
colonial legacy.
Given such complexity of influences, India presents some formidable
challenges to historians. To begin with, how are they to accommodate India’s
traditional indifference to the kind of European historical writing conceived
during the European Enlightenment – the very period in which Britain colonized
India? For instance, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by
Edward Gibbon.
In 1924, having read during a spell in a British-Indian jail some of the leading
European historical works, including Gibbon’s, Gandhi declared: ‘I believe in
the saying that a nation is happy that has no history’. He added: ‘our Hindu
ancestors solved the question for us by ignoring history as it is understood today
and by building on slight events their philosophical structure.’
In the midst of the Second World War, Gandhi published an article in the
newspaper he edited, entitled ‘How to Combat Hitlerism’, which unwittingly
explained the meaning of his above remarks. This was in June 1940, just after
the totally unexpected, shocking but comparatively bloodless fall of France to
the German army. Gandhi asked: ‘What will Hitler do with his victory? Can he
digest so much power?’ Gandhi’s view was as follows: ‘Personally he will go as
empty-handed as his not very remote predecessor Alexander. For the Germans
he will have left not the pleasure of owning a mighty empire but the burden of
sustaining its crushing weight.’ Instead of imperial Britain and other free
European nations choosing to offer violent resistance to a coming German
invasion, Gandhi recommended they offer non-violent resistance. ‘Under non-
violence only those would [be] killed who had trained themselves to be killed, if
need be, but without killing anyone and without bearing malice towards
anybody’, Gandhi claimed – no doubt thinking of his own non-violent
campaigns against the British empire in India during the 1920s and 1930s. ‘I
dare say that in that case Europe would have added several inches to its moral
stature. And in the end I expect it is the moral worth that will count. All else is
dross.’
Of course, Gandhi’s advice was not taken by Winston Churchill and the
British nation. After more German military victories, in early 1942 Gandhi
speculated in a further article, ‘Suppose Germany Wins’, on a German invasion
of India. ‘If the Nazis come to India, the Congress will give them the same fight
that it has given Great Britain. I do not underrate the power of satyagraha
[literally, ‘truth-force’, but often translated as passive resistance],’ he wrote.
‘Imperialism has kept its grip on India for more than 150 years. If it is
overthrown by a worse type of rule, the Congress can have the negative
satisfaction of knowing that no other “ism” can possibly last beyond a few years
even if it establishes a foothold in India.’ He ended with a reference to shattering
legendary Indian military events believed to have occurred in the same era as the
Trojan War during the internecine struggle between the victorious Pandavas and
the defeated Kauravas in the epic, The Mahabharata:
Personally I think the end of this giant war will be what happened in the fabled Mahabharata War. The
Mahabharata has been aptly described … as the permanent History of Man. What is described in that
great epic is happening today before our very eyes. The warring nations are destroying themselves with
such fury and ferocity that the end will be mutual destruction. The victor will share the fate that awaited
the surviving Pandavas. The mighty warrior Arjuna was looted in broad daylight by a petty robber. And
out of this holocaust must arise a new order for which the exploited millions of toilers have so long
thirsted. The prayers of peace-lovers cannot go in vain. Satyagraha is itself an unmistakable mute prayer
of an agonized soul.

Gandhi’s attitude to history, as stated here, in many ways suggests the

difficulties of writing a history of India. For the Mahatma was certainly no
historian, despite being one of the handful of figures in Indian history known to
the entire world. Without apparent irony, Gandhi saw no difficulty in telescoping
Adolf Hitler and Alexander of Macedon into fellow tyrants, despite their
separation by more than two millennia and two utterly different cultures. He felt
able to equate German Nazism with British imperialism, despite their evident
dissimilarity – both in their political foundations and in their use of violence
against unarmed civilians. (Hitler, in conversation with a former British viceroy
of India, Lord Halifax, in the late 1930s, advised the British to shoot Gandhi and
his fellow Congress party leaders. Instead, the British jailed them. ‘Had the
British authorities not behaved like honourable officers and gentlemen, Gandhi’s
non-violent campaigns would never have been possible’, admitted one of the
jailed leaders, Minoo Masani.) Moreover, Gandhi saw no obstacle in comparing
the mythical battles of the ancient Mahabharata with 20th-century technological
warfare. Above all, he read history as a morality tale, dominated by eternal
spiritual values, rather than as the temporal rise and fall of rulers, merchants and
empires.
Throughout the span of Indian civilization, Indians have been inclined to a
view of history resembling that of Gandhi. They include Tagore, who wrote
some essays on Indian history, and even, in some important respects, Nehru, who
wrote significant historical books while he was in and out of various colonial
jails, notably The Discovery of India, published in 1946. There Nehru
approvingly quotes these words about the distant past written by Tagore: ‘I love
India, not because I cultivate the idolatry of geography, not because I have had
the chance to be born in her soil, but because she has saved through tumultuous
ages the living words that have issued from the illuminated consciousness of her
great ones.’ On the whole, over the centuries, Indians have shown a puzzling
lack of curiosity about the facts of history, whether ancient or more recent; and a
disinclination to record important events in written form. How else to account
for the astonishingly outdated and impoverished presentation of history in key
Indian museums, and for the dearth of biographies of Indians, even of leading
figures in the independence movement, other than Gandhi and Nehru? The chief
biography of Ambedkar, for example, was first published many decades ago, in
1954, when its subject was still alive. Where a biography does exist, it often
lacks historical context and tends towards the hagiographical.
In the 1970s, Satyajit Ray faced this problem while making his period drama
in Urdu based on a story by Prem Chand, Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess
Players), about the controversial British military annexation of the north Indian
state of Oudh (Awadh) in 1856 – a pivotal event in the build-up to the uprising
of 1857. ‘People just didn’t know anything about the history of Lucknow and its
nawabs,’ explained Ray. Purely to educate his Indian audience, he felt obliged to
add a ‘documentary’ prologue to the film. This prologue encapsulated, in a
palatable and entertaining way (using cartoons), the history of Lucknow during
the Mughal and British period. For his extremely detailed historical research on
the mid-19th century in Oudh, Ray had to rely almost exclusively on
contemporaneous British sources, including memoirs and biographies, and on a
visit to former imperial archives kept in London, in the absence of more than a
handful of Indian sources.
Professional historians of India – whether non-Indian or Indian – are
handicapped by a lamentable lack of indigenous records for the period preceding
the Muslim chroniclers, that is, before AD 1000. A. L. Basham was vexed by ‘the
annoying uncertainty of much ancient Indian history’ in his highly influential
study, The Wonder That Was India, first published in 1954. D. D. Kosambi
claimed that ‘India has virtually no historical records worth the name’ in The
Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India. John Keay, in his India: A History,
opens with the comment: ‘Histories of India often begin with a gripe about the
poverty of the available sources.’ Romila Thapar, a former student of Basham,
repeats his complaint in her Early India: ‘The chronology of the earlier part of
Indian history is notoriously uncertain compared to that of China and the
Mediterranean world.’ The earliest, really substantial, non-Muslim source comes
from Assam: the chronicles of the Ahom conquerors, dating from the early 13th
century, who had ‘a keen historical sense’, notes Edward Gait in his history of
Assam. Indeed, India’s lack of written history might almost be regarded as a
third theme of this book.
There are very early readable records from ancient Mesopotamia (in
cuneiform) and from ancient Egypt (in hieroglyphs); they date from the early
third millennium BC. For ancient Greece and ancient China, records date from
the second half of the second millennium BC, written in Mycenaean Linear B and
the Shang character script, respectively. Not so for ancient India. The exquisitely
carved seal script of the Indus Valley civilization dates from the second half of
the third millennium BC, long before the Shang records; but the script is
tantalizingly undeciphered, despite much effort by scholars since it was
discovered in the 1920s by British and Indian archaeologists (in what is now
Pakistan). Until it is deciphered, the earliest readable materials from the Indian
subcontinent date only from the 3rd century BC, that is, the relatively brief stone
inscriptions of the great emperor Asoka, who ruled most of the subcontinent;
while the earliest archaeological remains – other than those found in the Indus
Valley – are not much older than those of Asoka, besides being of no great
significance. Indo-European linguistic evidence, however, shows that the origin
of Sanskrit is much older than the inscriptions of Asoka written in Magadhi
Prakit. Sanskrit may have been spoken and memorized as early as the first
centuries of the second millennium BC; but if the sacred language was written
down, the records have not survived.
As a direct consequence of this dearth of written evidence, it is impossible to
specify the date of composition in Sanskrit of the earliest Hindu scriptures, the
Vedas of the second millennium BC, or of the later epics, The Mahabharata and
The Ramayana, with an accuracy better than perhaps half a millennium. As for
the dates of the earliest known historical figure in India, Siddhartha Gautama,
these vary by more than a century, depending upon which source one consults –
without any prevailing consensus. There is no argument that the Buddha lived
for eighty years, according to the Buddhist scriptures. But according to the Sri
Lankan Buddhist tradition, he died in 544 BC (hence the international celebration
of the Buddha’s 2500th death anniversary in 1956), whereas according to some
modern scholars of Buddhism the date of his death lies around 483 BC, while
others favour a date as late as 400 BC (contemporary with the death of Socrates).
Part of the chronological problem is that the dating of the Buddha depends on
the dating of his admirer Asoka, which is somewhat uncertain.
Pursuing this catalogue of chronological uncertainty, three or four centuries
after Asoka another important ruler and patron of Buddhism, Kanishka, is
thought by some scholars to have acceded to the throne in AD 78 – year zero of
the Indian national (Saka) calendar; however, others place Kanishka’s accession
as late as 144. The dates of ancient India’s greatest writer, the Sanskrit poet and
playwright Kalidasa – much admired by the poet and playwright Goethe – are
usually given as some time in the late 4th to mid-5th century AD; but we can be
certain only that Kalidasa lived some time between the 2nd century BC and AD
634! Another celebrated writer, the Tamil poet and philosopher Thiruvalluvar,
lived some time between the 2nd century BC and the 8th century AD. Even the
date of completion of India’s most famous monument, the Taj Mahal, is not
precisely known (not to mention the names of its architects, which were not
recorded in the chronicles of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan): it lies somewhere
between 1643 and 1648.
The shortage of early evidence leaves Indian history open to conflicting
interpretations, which are sometimes motivated by modern political agendas.
Hindu nationalists, such as those of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who came
to power in New Delhi in the late 1990s, not surprisingly dislike the idea that the
most prestigious Indian language, Sanskrit, is an Indo-European language
deriving from the language of the Aryans; they therefore attempt to maintain that
the language of the undeciphered Indus Valley script – which is indubitably
indigenous – must be Sanskrit, against the dominant scholarly consensus that the
Indus language is likely to be related to the Dravidian languages (such as Tamil)
spoken in the subcontinent before the arrival of the Aryans. There is argument,
too, about the extent to which the empire of Asoka was Buddhist or Brahmin in
its orientation; this feeds into a debate about whether Brahmin intolerance of
Buddhism was, or was not, the chief cause of the mysterious evanescence of
Buddhism from the land of its birth, during the first millennium AD. This in turn
raises the question of the supposed Hindu tolerance of other religions, and the
vexed question of Hindu–Muslim relations in India during the second
millennium AD, beginning with the raids into India of Mahmud of Ghazni from
AD 1000 and culminating in the partition of India in 1947.
At times, as Hindu nationalists claim, there was unquestionably active
persecution of Hindus by Muslim invaders and rulers. At other times, though,
peaceful cooperation prevailed, along with a remarkable synthesis of Hindu and
Muslim cultures, for example in music and painting – most famously under the
Mughal emperor Akbar in the second half of the 16th century and in Lucknow in
the decades before 1857, where the flamboyant king of Oudh, Wajid Ali Shah,
went so far as to dress up as a Hindu god (as shown in The Chess Players).
Eventually, of course, in the 1940s, the two-nation theory predominated, and the
subcontinent was bloodily partitioned into India and Pakistan, leaving India as
chiefly Hindu but with a very substantial Muslim minority – in fact virtually the
same size today as the entire Muslim population of Pakistan, about 180 million
people (exceeded only by the number of Muslims in Indonesia and in
Bangladesh).
Historians have been picking over the reasons for the partition of India ever
since 1947. The catastrophic loss of status of Indian Muslims with the collapse
of the Mughal empire in the mid-18th century, the divide-and-rule policy of the
British Raj (now favouring Hindus, now favouring Muslims), the arrogance of
the Congress party’s high command led by Nehru, and the intransigence of the
Muslim League led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, all played a part. And so,
perhaps, did historians themselves. Romila Thapar pins some blame on the
History of British India of 1818 written by the Scottish historian and philosopher
James Mill, who never visited India. This was the first book to periodize Indian
history into the Hindu civilization, the Muslim civilization (including the
Mughal empire) and the British period. ‘[Mill’s] division of the Indian past …
has been so deeply embedded in the consciousness of those studying India that it
prevails to this day. It is at the root of the ideologies of current religious
nationalisms’, laments Thapar. ‘It has resulted in a distorting of Indian history
and has frequently thwarted the search for causes of historical change other than
those linked to a superficial assessment of religion’. Thapar herself is more
inclined towards secular, economic interpretations of Indian events.
In any nation, historians search for both continuities and discontinuities
between the past and the present – whether for intellectual and academic
purposes or for emotional and patriotic reasons. Colonialism reinforced this
desire, as Indian nationalists sought from history rational explanations for their
domination by the British, and also consolation and strength to fight for their
freedom from colonialism.
Gandhi drew inspiration from The Mahabharata, as we know. Nehru looked
to the ancient edicts of Asoka carved on imperial inscriptions all over India, such
as: ‘All sects deserve reverence for one reason or another. By thus acting a man
exalts his own sect and at the same time does service to the sects of other
people.’ He chose the sculpted lion capital of the Asokan pillar inscription at
Sarnath as the symbol of the new government of India in 1947, and the capital’s
24-spoked Buddhist wheel, the dharmachakra, as the emblem on the Indian flag
(replacing the 1930s image of the spinning wheel favoured by Gandhi). A recent
president of India, the nuclear missile scientist A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, born and
brought up during the independence movement, claimed in 2012: ‘Freedom and
democracy have all along been an integral part of India’s culture’, as far back as
the local assemblies (known as sabhas and samitis) in the putative ‘village
republics’ of ancient India. ‘Our choice of a democratic political system on
achieving Independence was therefore an automatic continuation of the ethos
that had always been there in Indian culture’, claims Kalam.
But this factually unsubstantiated attitude to the past and present raises
problems for Indian historians writing in a less nationalistic age. How influential
has the political and religious tolerance of, say, Buddha, Asoka and Akbar really
been in the later history of India? Did it survive in a meaningful sense into the
20th century?
One looks in vain for a single reference to these three great historical figures
in The Idea of India published by Sunil Khilnani in 1997, and finds no
significant reference to them in a far lengthier study, India after Gandhi, by a
second historian of modern India, Ramachandra Guha, published in 2007. In
general, argues Khilnani, supported by Guha, the period of colonialism should
be seen not as a continuity in Indian history, but as a discontinuity. ‘Contrary to
India’s nationalist myths, enamoured of immemorial “village republics”, pre-
colonial history little prepared it for modern democracy’, writes Khilnani.
‘Democracy was established after a profound historical rupture – the experience,
at once humiliating and enabling, of colonialism …’.
Amartya Sen, by contrast, in his 2005 collection, The Argumentative Indian,
promotes both Asoka and Akbar as exemplary figures of Indian tolerance,
hugely influential in their lifetimes and also long after their deaths, even in
today’s India. Unlike Khilnani and Guha – but quite like Kalam – Sen is
determined to locate the beginnings of Indian democracy not in the British
colonial period but in ancient India, starting with the Buddhist councils held
some time after the death of the Buddha, the largest of which is associated with
Asoka. Sen argues: ‘Asoka’s championing of public discussion has had echoes in
the later history of India, but none perhaps as strong as the Mughal emperor
Akbar’s sponsorship and support for dialogues between adherents of different
faiths … In the deliberative conception of democracy, the role of open
discussion, with or without sponsorship by the state, has a clear relevance.’
Sen and Guha have disagreed publicly over the significance of pre-colonial
Indian history to a post-colonial nation. Sen argues that a ‘historical disjunction’
between the two periods ‘does not do justice to India’s past or present’, whereas
Guha argues for the existence of just such a disjunction, and elects to begin his
history of modern India with the colonial period. Their difference of opinion is
somewhat ironic, given that Sen, born in the early 1930s, actually experienced
colonialism, whereas Guha, born in the late 1950s, grew up in independent India.
One might perhaps have expected Sen to view the colonial period as a historical
discontinuity, Guha to see it as a continuity.
Such contradictions are typical not only of colonial and post-colonial India,
but also of Indian history taken as a whole, as we shall see in this book. They
bring to mind what Satyajit Ray said when asked how he felt about the British
heritage in India, which he had so subtly (and ambivalently) portrayed in The
Chess Players – using a game, chaturanga, which was invented in classical India
in the 6th century AD, then exported to Persia as shatranj and hence to medieval
Europe, where it was subsequently modified, made faster, and eventually
reimported into colonial India as the modern game of chess. After a long pause
for thought, Ray responded: ‘It’s a very, very complex mixed kind of thing. I
think many of us owe a great deal to it. I’m thankful for the fact that at least I’m
familiar with both cultures and it gives me a very much stronger footing as a
film-maker, but I’m also aware of all the dirty things that were being done. I
really don’t know how I feel about it.’
ONE The Indus Valley Civilization
 THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION

When the first Hindu nationalist government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party,
came to power around the beginning of the new millennium, it set about
rewriting India’s history. Revised school textbooks, by biddable historians, were
required, essentially to promote the antiquity, dominance and independence from
foreign influence of Hinduism.
Indian history was now claimed to have started in the third or fourth
millennium BC with the beginnings of Hinduism among people indigenous to the
subcontinent – in deliberate contradiction of the scholarly consensus since the
19th century that Aryan ‘invaders’ of the subcontinent migrating from the
northwest in the mid-second millennium BC were the originators of the Indo-
Aryan, Vedic religion that gave rise to Hinduism in the first millennium. For the
most extreme of Hindu fundamentalists, all so-called Muslim structures in India
are really the work of Hindus. Even the Taj Mahal is believed once to have been
‘Tejo-Mahalaya’, a Shiva temple, by ‘many a visitor, who is at pains to put his
foreign fellow visitors right about the origin of the building’, writes the leading
scholar of the history of the Taj, Ebba Koch.
One of the controversial textbook revisions introduced by the National
Council of Educational Research and Training at this time was to rename India’s
earliest urban culture, the Indus Valley civilization, as the ‘Indus-Saraswati’
civilization. There is some support among reputable archaeologists and scholars
for such a change. The ancient Saraswati River apparently dried up in the second
millennium and its course no longer exists above ground – unlike, evidently, the
Indus River – but part of the Saraswati’s course has been identified by some
scientific surveys with an existing river (Ghaggar-Hakra), east of the Indus,
which flows intermittently during the monsoon through the desert on both sides
of the India-Pakistan border, and is densely lined by ancient sites of the Indus
Valley civilization. However, for Hindu nationalists, the Saraswati River is
important not so much for its disputed geography as for the fact that it is
prominently mythologized in the Vedas, the oldest and most sacred of the Hindu
scriptures. ‘Foremost mother, foremost of rivers, foremost of goddesses,
Saraswati. In thee, Saraswati, all generations have their stars’, proclaims one of
the hymns of the Rigveda, the oldest of the Vedas. Long after the period of the
Vedas, Saraswati became the name of the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music,
arts and science. Thus, renamed the Indus-Saraswati civilization, the Indus
Valley civilization might conceivably be trumpeted as the forerunner of the
Vedic civilization, which is the indisputable fountainhead of the Hindu religion
and also, according to the nationalists, of ancient Indian mathematics and
science. Over the past century and more, some of them have claimed to discern
in the Vedas calculations of the speed of light, allusions to high-energy physics
and even the outlines of advanced technology of our own times, such as
aeroplanes.
However, this new theory immediately stumbled against serious historical
obstacles. The most obvious characteristics of the archaeological remains of
ancient cities and towns in the Indus Valley and surrounding areas, which we
shall describe shortly, bear no evident relationship to the pastoral, semi-nomadic
society described in the Vedas. The language of the Indus Valley civilization, so
far as it can be understood from analysis of the undeciphered Indus script, seems
to have little in common with Sanskrit, the unquestioned language of the Vedas.
Moreover, to unbiased eyes, the Vedas contain no sophisticated mathematics –
unlike certain elements of the Indus Valley civilization – and precious little in
the way of scientific knowledge.
In need of bolstering evidence, Hindu nationalist historians appealed to a new
book, The Deciphered Indus Script, written by two Indians with some linguistic
and scientific credentials. The book’s authors, N. Jha and N. S. Rajaram, made
astounding claims, announced to the Indian press with a fanfare in 1999 and
published in 2000. The Indus script was apparently even older than had been
thought (the mid-third millennium BC), dating back to the mid-fourth
millennium, which would make it the world’s oldest readable writing, predating
Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. It employed some kind of
alphabet, two millennia older than the world’s earliest-known alphabets from the
Middle East. Perhaps most sensationally of all, at least for Indians, its
inscriptions could be read in Vedic Sanskrit; one of them was found to mention
the Saraswati River, albeit obliquely (‘Ila surrounds the blessed land’).
Astonishing further support for the Hindu nationalist view seemed to come in
the form of an excavation photograph from the 1920s showing a broken Indus
seal inscription depicting the hindquarters of an animal, accompanied by four
signs. The book’s authors claimed that the animal was a horse, as shown in a
‘computer enhanced’ drawing published by them; and that the signs could be
read, in Vedic Sanskrit, as ‘arko ha as va’, which they translated as ‘Sun indeed
like the horse’. Another Indus inscription – the longest inscription so far
discovered (as recently as 1990) – they translated as: ‘I was a thousand times
victorious over avaricious raiders desirous of my wealth of horses!’
But horses were unknown to the Indus Valley civilization, almost all scholars
had long maintained, since horses were not depicted among the many animals
(including buffaloes) shown on its seals and in its art, and no horse bones had
been discovered by excavators – or at least no bones that convinced
zooarchaeologists specializing in horse identification. Horses are generally
thought to have arrived in northwestern India only with the horse-drawn chariots
of the Aryans; certainly, in later history, Indian armies imported their horses
from outside India. Horses are, however, abundantly mentioned in the Vedas. If,
after all, horses did feature in the Indus inscriptions, was this not important
evidence that the creators of the inscriptions and of the Vedas were one and the
same – indigenous – people?
The arguments in The Deciphered Indus Script would probably have been
ignored by most people, as had happened with literally dozens of failed Indus
script decipherments announced since the 1920s by both Indian and non-Indian
scholars, including eminent figures in their field like the Egyptologist Flinders
Petrie. But on this occasion, because of their potentially explosive educational
and political implications, the book attracted widespread attention, both in India
and internationally.
Within months, the authors’ claims of a successful decipherment were easily
demonstrated to be nonsense in articles for national news magazines in India
written by scholars, notably Iravatham Mahadevan, the leading Indian expert on
the Indus script, Asko Parpola, the leading non-Indian expert, and Michael
Witzel, a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, with his collaborator Steve
Farmer. Mahadevan termed the so-called decipherment ‘completely invalid … a
non-starter’. Witzel and Farmer’s chief article was entitled ‘Horseplay in
Harappa’, in reference to Harappa, the best-known city of the Indus Valley
civilization. They demonstrated beyond question, even for non-specialists, that
the supposed Indus alphabet was so absurdly flexible that it could be
manipulated to produce almost any translation that the authors might desire.
Furthermore, the supposed Indus Valley horse – after comparison of the broken
seal photograph with photographs of various similar-looking, but more complete,
Indus seals – was shown to be a ‘unicorn’ bull of a type commonly depicted in
the inscriptions. The horse image had to be a hoax created by one of the book’s
authors, an Indian-born, US-trained engineer with experience of computer
drawing (and a taste for Hindu nationalist propaganda), as he more or less
admitted under questioning by Indian journalists.
The entire, farcical, episode might seem too trivial to dwell on here. Yet, as
Witzel and Farmer presciently concluded in 2000: ‘If reactionary trends in
Indian history find further political support, we risk seeing violent repeats in the
coming decades of the fascist extremes of the past.’ Despite theirs and other
scholars’ exposure of this particular book’s intellectual bankruptcy, the new
Indian school textbooks introduced in 2002 referred to ‘terracotta figurines’ of
horses in the ‘Indus-Saraswati civilization’, and continued to do so until the fall
of the BJP-led government in 2004, when the textbooks were withdrawn by the
incoming Congress-led government. More important, the idea that the language
of the Indus Valley civilization is Sanskrit or Indo-Aryan, and of local origin,
continues to enjoy wide support in India, to the consternation of most scholars
trained in Indo-European linguistics.
Unfortunately, the Indus Valley civilization has always suffered – and
probably always will suffer – from a paucity of evidence and an excess of
speculative interpretation, compared with the well-endowed and well-
documented ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. It was lost
to the world even at the time of Alexander the Great. When Alexander’s
emissary, Aristoboulus, visited the area in 326 BC, he found ‘an abandoned
country, with more than a thousand towns and villages deserted after the Indus
had changed its course’. It was not mentioned again in historical records for over
two thousand years. In the early 1920s, an Indian archaeologist, R. D. Banerji,
out searching for non-existent victory pillars put up by Alexander on his retreat
from India, stumbled across the true significance of the ruin mound at Mohenjo-
daro (‘mound of the dead’), which is now in Sindh province of Pakistan. His
discovery, and a similar discovery 350 miles away at Harappa (also now in
Pakistan), would double the recorded age of Indian civilization from 250 BC (the
inscriptions of Asoka) back to about 2600 BC.
Excavation proved to be a challenge from the very beginning; indeed, most of
the sites of the Indus Valley civilization are unexcavated today for lack of
resources. Even at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, only the central area has been
excavated, leaving extensive areas of these cities unknown. At Mohenjo-daro,
later structures, including a ruined Buddhist stupa dating from the centuries after
Alexander, stood on top of the so-called ‘citadel’ (though it lacks fortifications),
while the rest of the city was largely buried by deep alluvial deposits laid down
by the floods of the Indus River. At Harappa, a Muslim cemetery and a modern
town covered much of the ancient city, which had been quarried for its ancient
bricks by the town’s inhabitants and, much more destructively, by 19th-century
railway contractors in need of vast quantities of brick rubble.
Notwithstanding, a team under Sir John Marshall, director general of the
Archaeological Survey of India, immediately began excavating at both sites in
the early 1920s. ‘Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to
[Heinrich] Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to [Aurel] Stein in the deserts
of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization,’ Marshall
wrote excitedly in 1924 in the Illustrated London News. ‘It looks, however, at
this moment, as if we are on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the
Indus.’ Since then, over almost a century of study, archaeologists from many
countries have identified about a thousand settlements belonging to the Indus
Valley civilization in Pakistan and northwest India, covering an area of 300,000
square miles (approximately a quarter the size of Europe), with a population of
one million people. This was the most extensive urban culture of its time, larger
than either the ancient Mesopotamian or Egyptian empires of the third
millennium BC.
Most of the settlements were villages, but five were major cities. Harappa and
Mohenjo-daro were comparable with cities like Ur in Mesopotamia and
Memphis in Egypt in the mature period of the Indus civilization, that is, between
about 2600 and 1900 BC according to radiocarbon dating. (Its beginnings are
naturally older; indeed there is impressive evidence of village habitation in
northwest India dating as far back as 7000 BC at Mehrgarh.)
The Indus Valley cities cannot boast grand pyramids, palaces, temples, statues
and graves, or hordes of gold. But their society, fed by the waters of the Indus,
appears to have been remarkably prosperous, storing food in granaries filled by
two growing seasons in agriculture: in the winter, they grew barley, wheat, oats,
lentils, beans, mustard, jujube and linen; in the summer during the monsoon,
millets, cotton, sesamum, melons, jute, hemp, grapes and dates. The civilization
certainly traded with Gujarat, northern Maharashtra, Afghanistan, the Persian
Gulf and Mesopotamia, where Indus jewelry, weights, seals and other objects
have been excavated; and the trade with Mesopotamia seems to have been
chiefly in favour of the Indus Valley (which was apparently known as Meluhha
in cuneiform records), since very few objects from Mesopotamia have been
found in the Indus Valley. Its cities’ well-planned streets, bathrooms and
advanced drainage – including what is termed the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro –
put to shame all but the town planning of the 20th century AD, as proudly noted
by Jawaharlal Nehru in his Discovery of India after he had twice visited
Mohenjo-daro in the 1930s. Some of its ornaments, such as the necklaces of
long, finely drilled, biconical carnelian beads found as far afield as the royal
cemetery of Ur, rival the treasures of the Egyptian pharaohs for loveliness and
technical sophistication. Experiments show that each bead could have taken up
to two weeks to produce; a necklace might have required a year. Its remarkable
system of standardized weights – consisting of stone cubes and truncated spheres
– based on a binary system for small quantities and a decimal system for large
quantities, was unique in the ancient world; the system provided the weight
standards for the earliest Indian coins, issued in the 7th century BC; and it is,
amazingly, still used in traditional markets in Pakistan and India. The inspiration
seems to have been the weight of a seed of a particular creeper, equivalent to
1/128th part of the basic Indus weight unit: known as the ratti, this is still used
by Indian jewellers. In addition, the Indus seals are exquisitely carved miniature
works of art: ‘little masterpieces of controlled realism, with a monumental
strength in one sense out of all proportion to their size and in another entirely
related to it’, enthused the Indus excavator Mortimer Wheeler. And of course the
undeciphered Indus script has long been one of the most tantalizing mysteries of
the ancient world. Numerous problems of the Indus civilization might be solved
at a stroke, if only its script could be read, as can Babylonian cuneiform and
Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Indus Valley archaeology has come a long way since the 1920s. Yet, it has so
many unanswered fundamental questions that the Indus Valley civilization still
risks being regarded as the dowdy poor cousin of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt
and China, and as a receptacle for speculative theories, some of them motivated
by current Indian political agendas, as discussed above.
What type of authority held together such an evidently organized, uniform and
far-flung society, which apparently managed without palaces, royal graves and
rulers, temples, icons and priests, fortifications, military weapons and warriors?
No unambiguous evidence for any of the above has been found in excavations –
unlike, of course, in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. We simply do not
know the answer to this question, although most scholars assume that the
civilization was a federation with some kind of unifying central administration,
rather than consisting of independent ‘village republics’ with a shared culture.
The puzzling absence of evidence for luxurious palaces and powerful rulers,
combined with the overwhelming evidence for diverse specialization in
sophisticated crafts, and the apparent emphasis on (ritual?) bathing, has led some
scholars to attribute the origin of the Hindu caste system to the Indus Valley
civilization. However, the Indian concept of caste involves more than simply
social class, craft and career specialization and an aristocracy of relatively
austere priests; it depends on an underlying philosophy of a cosmic order,
expressed in the concept rita in the Rigveda, where the first indisputable hint of
the concept of caste appears (as we shall see), which foreshadows the later,
better-known concept of dharma, the eternal law of the cosmos. Since the Indus
inscriptions cannot be read, nothing definite can be said about Indus philosophy,
and whether it had a comparable concept.
 Other scholars wonder if the apparent absence of war marks the beginning of
the Indian tradition of pacifism and non-violence, inaugurated by the Buddha
and epitomized in modern times by Gandhi (who was born in the region covered
by the Indus Valley civilization). Here, the archaeological evidence is more
decisive, given the lack of evidence for the defensive fortifications, military
weapons and mutilated corpses found in other ancient civilizations. Wheeler’s
powerful conviction in the 1940s that he had discovered evidence at Mohenjo-
daro of a massacre of defenders – perhaps at the hands of attacking Aryans – has
now been conclusively disproved by careful analysis of the find spots and
conditions of the skeletons; they were not killed in war but may have been
victims of a disease, such as malaria. That said, it seems inherently improbable
that any civilization could sustain itself for more than half a millennium without
the need for coercion and fighting. Certainly, the violent struggles of subsequent
Indian history, including that of the Vedas and the early Buddhist period, provide
no warrant whatsoever for believing that non-violence is intrinsic to India.
As for the enigmatic Indus religion, there are undoubtedly images on the seals
of humanlike figures and animals with clear echoes in later Hinduism. One of
these images, showing a ‘yogic’ figure with folded legs wearing a horned
headdress surrounded by a tiger, an elephant, a water buffalo and a rhinoceros,
was influentially dubbed ‘proto-Shiva’ by its discoverer Marshall. ‘In the
religion of the Indus people there is much, of course, that might be paralleled in
other countries’, Marshall wrote. ‘But taken as a whole, their religion is so
characteristically Indian as hardly to be distinguished from still living
Hinduism.’ Nehru, though not personally attracted to religion, eagerly agreed
with Marshall. While admitting ‘many gaps and periods about which we know
little’, Nehru claimed to see ‘an underlying sense of continuity … It is surprising
how much there is in Mohenjo-daro and Harappa which reminds one of
persisting traditions and habits – popular ritual, craftsmanship, even some
fashions in dress.’ An interesting example is the swastika symbol, first seen on
Indus Valley objects, and still used as a good luck symbol on the walls of Indian
homes.
Whether Marshall was right or not about the Indus religion remains a matter
of interpretation and dispute. Consider the discovery at many Indus sites of the
sacrificial hearths known as fire altars, which were at first doubted but are now
accepted. At Kalibangan, these consist of clay-lined pits containing ash,
charcoal, the remains of a clay stele and terracotta cakes; at Lothal, a terracotta
ladle with smoke-marks was found near such a hearth. Such discoveries recall
the Hindu ritual of libation of the five products of the cow (milk, sour milk,
melted butter, urine and dung) in the presence of a fire as offerings to a clay
lingam in the worship of Shiva. A parallel with the Vedic fire ritual is striking,
too. In the Vedas, the heated milk is considered to be the sun or the sun’s seed
poured into the womb. ‘Surya (the sun) and Agni (the fire) were in the same
receptacle [yoni, meaning ‘womb’]. Thereupon Surya rose upwards. He lost his
seed. Agni received it … he transferred it to the cow. It (became) this milk.’ But
while there can be no doubt that such sacrifice at fire altars was integral to the
Vedic religion, there is no proof that the excavated Indus Valley hearths are fire
altars in the Vedic sense. ‘The similarities have been overemphasized and the
shared elements of fire and animal sacrifice are too common, being found in
many religions, to be a culturally diagnostic link’, notes Jane McIntosh in her
account of the Indus Valley civilization, A Peaceful Realm. Religion is
notoriously tricky to reconstruct with confidence without scriptures – which are
plentiful for the Vedic religion, but of course non-existent (or anyway
indecipherable) for the Indus religion.
The crux of the problem in penetrating the Indus Valley civilization remains
its undeciphered script. So it is worth returning to the subject in slightly more
detail, in order to grasp what is understood about the script. Unlike ancient
Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, Mesopotamian cuneiform, Shang (Chinese)
characters and Mycenaean Linear B – all of which can now be read with varying
degrees of completeness – the Indus script appears not on walls, tombs, statues,
stelae, clay tablets, papyri and codices, but rather on seal stones, pottery, copper
tablets, bronze implements and ivory and bone rods, found scattered in the
buildings and streets of Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and other urban settlements. No
doubt it was written, too, on perishable materials, such as the bark and palm
fronds traditionally used for writing in India. The seal stones are the most
numerous of the inscriptions and are justly celebrated for their exquisiteness and
unique style of carving (achieved using a burin, probably a flint tool with an
angled blade, comparable with a modern scalpel). Once seen, they are never
forgotten.
About 3,700 inscribed objects are known, 60 per cent of them on seals, but
some 40 per cent of these are duplicate inscriptions, so the useful total for the
decipherer is not as large as it seems. More were found in the 1990s, but it is not
an abundant corpus, especially as the inscriptions are brief: the average has
fewer than four signs in a line and five in a text, the longest only twenty-six
signs divided along the three sides of a terracotta prism. Many of the seals carry
a boss on the back with a hole drilled in it, suitable for a string. Very likely, they
were worn around the neck of a person, whose signature was spelt out on the
seal. In addition to the signs, many seal stones are engraved with an often-
detailed intaglio of animals. These are generally recognizable – buffaloes,
elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers and zebus, for instance, though no horses, as
already noted, and curiously no cobras, monkeys or peacocks – but some are
fantastic or chimerical, including a one-horned bull, which the early excavators
promptly dubbed a ‘unicorn’ (a creature legendarily originating in India).
Unidentified anthropomorphic figures, sometimes seated in yogic postures, also
feature and may be gods and goddesses. Many scholars, beginning with
Marshall, have suggested that some of these figures are precursors of the Hindu
deities, as mentioned earlier.
Most decipherments of ancient scripts have proved feasible because the
language of the script proved to be related to a known language: for instance, the
language of the Egyptian hieroglyphs was related to the Coptic language, that of
Babylonian cuneiform to Semitic languages, that of Mycenaean Linear B to
archaic Greek, that of the Mayan glyphs to modern Mayan languages and that of
the Shang characters to modern Chinese. But even before the related language
has been detected, it is always possible to make some progress in decipherment
by internal analysis of inscriptions, without taking a stab at guessing the
underlying language.
In the case of the Indus script, by internal analysis scholars have settled the
direction of writing and reading (overwhelmingly, right to left); they have
established an approximate number of signs (425, plus or minus 25) and a sign
list on which there is considerable agreement; they have agreed on some of the
numerals (one to seven appear to be written with one to seven short strokes,
suggesting a base-eight system, although larger numbers seem to use a decimal
system); and they have shown – by comparing repeated sequences of signs in
different inscriptions – that inscriptions containing these sequences are likely to
be segmentable into what may be discrete words. Beyond this, though, there are
yawning disagreements between the most distinguished of scholars, for example
on how to interpret the iconic nature of many signs. The most frequent sign of all
is .To the Finnish scholar Asko Parpola, this shows the head of a horned cow
seen from the front; to the American Walter Fairservis, a pot with handles; and to
the Russian Yuri Knorozov (the key player in the recent Mayan decipherment), a
pipal tree. Each has his reasons. As Parpola was obliged to admit in his
massively erudite survey of attempts to decipher the Indus script: ‘Many of the
signs … are so simplified and schematic that it is very difficult to understand
their pictorial meaning unambiguously and objectively.’
Other informed speculations about the script have depended on the
assumption that the Indus language is Dravidian, so we shall now very briefly
review the evidence concerning the complex issue of what the language may be.
In doing so, we must discount the possibility that the language has completely
died out, if we are to make any progress – an assumption for which there is some
rationale, given the exceptional linguistic continuities of Indian civilization as a
whole. We shall also discard a second possibility, that the Indus language is
related to the Munda languages of central and (mainly) eastern India, a part of
the Austro-Asiatic family that covers most of the languages of Southeast Asia,
because this theory receives little support from linguistic evidence and no
support from archaeology. That leaves us with the Indo-Aryan hypothesis, which
favours the Sanskrit language, and the Dravidian hypothesis, which favours the
languages of south India, such as Tamil.
Archaeologically, the evidence is adverse to the Indo-Aryan/Sanskrit
connection, as already discussed. However, archaeology provides no definite
support for the Dravidian connection either, although the chance discovery in
2006 in a pit in Tamil Nadu of a Neolithic stone celt apparently bearing four
signs of the Indus script is certainly intriguing. Geographically, Sanskrit has the
edge over Dravidian, since Sanskrit was the classical language of north India
(like Latin in Europe), while today’s Dravidian speakers belong almost
exclusively to south India, far away from the Indus Valley region. That said, an
important and fascinating caveat arises. Pockets of Dravidian languages exist in
north India, such as Kurukh and Malto, and one of these languages, Brahui,
spoken by around 300,000 nomadic people in Baluchistan (western Pakistan), is
significantly close to the Indus Valley. These Dravidian speakers are presumably
remnants of a Dravidian culture once widespread in the Indian subcontinent
before it was submerged in the north by encroaching Indo-Aryans during the
second millennium BC – pools left by the receding tide, so to speak – although it
is conceivable that modern Brahui speakers could be descended from people
who migrated to their present locations from the south. There is disagreement
about this, but in general it seems improbable that a people would migrate from
the relatively clement plains of India into the rugged and hostile mountains of
Baluchistan. ‘If the Brahuis were not the indigenous inhabitants of Baluchistan,
who were?’ asks Parpola, reasonably enough. ‘Certainly not the Baluch, who
came from northern Iran in the 10th century AD or later.’
The Dravidian hypothesis is therefore favoured over the Indo-Aryan by a
majority of scholars, though in no sense proven. On the working assumption that
it is correct, they try to look for sensible links between the meanings of words in
early Dravidian languages such as Old Tamil, and the iconic and iconographic
signs and images on the Indus seals and other inscribed Indus Valley objects,
taking help from cultural evidence about Dravidian civilization and its religious
beliefs and archaeological evidence about the Indus Valley civilization.
The simplest example – and still the most intuitively convincing one – was
first suggested by the Jesuit Father Henry Heras (who lived in India) in the
1950s. The word for fish in almost all Dravidian languages is ‘mīn’. In many
Dravidian languages ‘mīn’ also means ‘star’. Could the very frequent ‘fish’ sign
on the Indus seals have been pronounced mīn but have had the dual meaning
‘fish’ and ‘star’, which, as Parpola demonstrates, is an emblem of divinity and
can thus stand for ‘god’? The ‘fish’ sign could then be part of a theophoric name
– a very common occurrence in Indian culture, where people are often named
after gods and goddesses, for instance, Rama, Krishna, Ganesh, Indira, Lakshmi
and Arundhati.
One could object to this: why is the star not represented pictorially too, like
the fish? We are used to representing a star with a few short lines crossing at a
point (‘twinkling’, so to speak), but this is just our particular convention, which
happens to distinguish all other stars from our sun, which we generally represent
with a small circle with ‘rays’ sticking out of it. It is quite conceivable that the
Indus Valley writers could have chosen a different, and more subtle, approach
based on a homophony in their language between the Indus words for fish and
for star that English does not possess. (An English parallel might be ‘son’ and
‘sun’.) As Robert Caldwell, the bishop of south India who published the first
grammar of the Dravidian language family in 1856, beautifully observed: ‘Who
that has seen the phosphorescence flashing from every movement of the fish in
tropical seas or lagoons at night, can doubt the appropriateness of denoting the
fish that dart and sparkle through the waters, as well as the stars that sparkle in
the midnight sky, by one and the same word – viz., a word signifying that which
glows or sparkles?’ On certain Indus Valley pottery, drawings of fishes and stars
(pictured as small circles with ‘rays’ sticking out) appear as a closely integrated
artistic motif, which appears to support the idea of the drawings’ linguistic
equivalence.
Several scholars have extended this approach to other Indus inscriptions with
ingenuity based on their knowledge of Dravidian languages and Indian culture,
most notably Parpola. But it can at best be highly speculative, in the absence of
any proof that the Indus language is Dravidian, and at worst it can fall into
absurdity, as happened with the fanatical espousal of the Sanskrit hypothesis in
The Deciphered Indus Script discussed earlier. As Parpola himself frankly states
in his Deciphering the Indus Script: ‘It looks most unlikely that the Indus script
will ever be deciphered fully, unless radically different source material becomes
available’ – such as a large haul of substantial inscriptions from some newly
unexcavated Indus sites, or perhaps the Holy Grail of decipherment: a bilingual
‘Rosetta Stone’, perhaps written in both the Indus script and Mesopotamian
cuneiform (given the trading links between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia).
‘That, however, must not deter us from trying’, says Parpola.
In all this uncertainty, one aspect of the script, so far unmentioned, is certain.
Once the Indus script ceased to be used in the early part of the second
millennium BC, with the decline of the Indus Valley cities, it was never revived.
Its signs bear no resemblance at all to the next writing that appeared in India,
after a vast gap of a millennium and a half, that is, the Brahmi and Kharosthi
alphabetic scripts used to write the inscriptions of Asoka in the 3rd century BC.
At least in respect of its script, there is a decided discontinuity between the Indus
Valley civilization and later Indian culture.
The reasons for the disappearance of the civilization after 1900–1800 BC are,
however, obscure. Among its early excavators, the idea of an invasion by the
Aryans was favoured – mainly on the evidence of the Rigveda, which vividly
describes the destruction of the ninety-nine forts of the dark-skinned Dasas by
Indra, the god of war. But there is no archaeological evidence to identify such
literary forts with the excavated ‘citadels’ of Indus Valley cities, nor the literary
Dasas with the people of the Indus Valley civilization. More likely is an
environmental explanation. A possible human-made hazard was deforestation
caused by over-grazing with cattle or the burning of wood in brick-making and
copper-smelting. Natural hazards could include changes in river systems brought
about by tectonic activity in the Himalayas. This could have caused the drying
up of the Saraswati River, and, perhaps, prolonged flooding of the Indus River
and salination of the fields used for crops, as has happened in Pakistan with
disastrous impact in modern times. If so, not only agriculture but also the
navigability of the Indus, and hence river-borne trade – for example, with
Mesopotamia – would have declined; moreover, water-borne diseases, such as
malaria and cholera, would have spread. Even a major earthquake cannot be
ruled out, given the record of earthquakes in the region in modern times, as
recently as 2001 in the case of a highly destructive shock in Gujarat. But it has to
be admitted that there is no compelling evidence for any of these environmental
explanations. Most probably, the decline of the Indus Valley civilization was
gradual and the result of a combination of factors, including changes in
hydrology, floods, diseases and an increasing rejection of central authority,
perhaps due to migrations of foreigners from the northwest.
TWO
Vedas, Aryans and the Origins of
Hinduism
 VEDAS, ARYANS AND THE ORIGINS OF HINDUISM

Unlike the physical legacy of the Indus Valley civilization, the oral literature
memorized and compiled in the Vedas and their associated later scriptures during
the second and first millennium BC forms part of everyday life for modern
Hindus, whether in its original form or reinterpreted by the many subsequent
reform movements in Hinduism. No Hindu marriage ceremony would be
complete without the incantation of Sanskrit verses from the Rigveda,
accompanied by the performance of Vedic rituals in the presence of a sacred fire.
Ayurveda, the still-popular traditional system of Indian medicine, basing itself on
ideas of balance in the bodily system – as in the ancient Greek medical concept
of the balance of the four humours – and emphasizing diet, herbal treatment and
yogic breathing, is derived from verses in the first and the last of the Vedas, the
Rigveda and the Atharvaveda. The origins of the Indian caste system, which
divided Hindu society into four basic castes (from the Portuguese word for ‘race,
lineage or breed’), are first mentioned in a famous verse of the Rigveda. This
describes the Primeval Man at the Creation and how his body was dismembered
into the four varnas (Sanskrit for ‘colours’). From his mouth came the priest,
from his arms the warrior, from his thighs the trader and from his feet the
servant. In Hindu society, the priests belonged of course to the Brahmin varna,
the warriors to the Kshatriya varna, the traders, cultivators and herders to the
Vaishya, and the servants and serfs to the Shudra. Even anti-Brahmin feeling – a
perennial theme in Indian history – occurs in certain verses of the Vedic
literature that satirize unthinking and gluttonous Brahmins. In any controversy
about Hindu values, the authority – or otherwise – of the Vedas is likely to be
invoked, today almost as much as in the past.
During the early 19th century, for instance, Hindu society in British-ruled
Bengal was split over the longstanding and increasingly common custom of sati
(suttee), in which widows immolated themselves by climbing onto the funeral
pyres of their deceased husbands, sometimes voluntarily but often through
coercion. Did sati have religious sanction, or was it simply a murderous solution
welcomed by unscrupulous relatives faced with the problem of an unwanted
woman?
 Orthodox Bengali Hindus claimed that a certain verse in the burial hymns of
the Rigveda supported sati. This states: ‘Let these women, whose husbands are
worthy and are living, enter the house with ghee (applied) as collyrium (to their
eyes). Let these wives first step into the pyre, tearless, without any affliction and
well adorned.’ Although this verse nowhere mentions widowhood, it does
mention a funeral pyre. Yet, the very next verse of the Rigveda, which
unambiguously mentions widows, explicitly states that the widow should not
forfeit her own life with the death of her husband. ‘Rise, come unto the world of
life, O woman – come, he is lifeless by whose side thou liest. Wifehood with this
thy husband was thy portion, who took thy hand and wooed thee as a lover.’
The leading Bengali social reformer of the period, Rammohun Roy, despite
being himself a Brahmin, decided to overlook the first of these verses in the
Rigveda, and appeal instead to somewhat later commentaries on the Vedas, the
philosophical and esoteric Upanishads, as well as to the religious prohibition of
suicide and to rational and moral arguments, so that he could support a
government move in Calcutta to eradicate widow-burning in Bengal. The
abolition of sati became law in 1829, although the governor-general, Lord
Bentinck, remained convinced that ‘the conventional belief of every order of
Hindoos, with few exceptions, regards it as sacred.’ Sure enough, soon after the
legislation was passed, some prominent orthodox Bengalis in Calcutta founded
an institution called the Dharma Sabha for the purpose of repealing the act; but
in 1832, their petition to the government in London not to interfere with this
Hindu custom was dismissed, partly as a result of the arguments of Roy.
However, cases of sati continued to be reported long after its official abolition.
Later in the 19th century, it became clear to scholars that the confusion about
the meaning of the Rigveda on such a vital issue had arisen because one
consonant of a Sanskrit word, yomiagne, in the first verse above, meaning ‘fire’
(or ‘pyre’, in this burial context), had been changed from the original word,
yomiagre, meaning ‘house’. Therefore, the second sentence of the verse should
properly read as follows: ‘Let these wives first step into the house, tearless,
without any affliction and well adorned.’ Probably, the alteration was a
deliberate, mischievous interpolation by those who supported sati; but it might
have been a scribal error in successive copyings of the manuscript. Yet, sad to
report, the claim of Rigvedic support for sati has refused to die, even in the 21st
century. In 2002, a widow committed sati, and two others attempted to do so, in
the state of Madhya Pradesh. A senior Indian diplomat felt stirred to write a
newspaper article, headlined ‘The Rigveda: widows don’t have to burn’,
explaining the true scriptural position, and ended with this appeal to fellow
Hindus: ‘If greedy people incite a widow to commit suicide on the pyre of her
husband, let us not say or believe that widow burning is sanctified by the
Rigveda or by Hinduism.’
The confusion created by these two verses hints at intractable difficulties and
obscurities in the way of translating the Rigveda and other very early Indian
scriptures, which translators have complained about since the time of the
Sanskrit scholar and comparative philologist Friedrich Max Müller and his
pioneering series, Sacred Books of the East, published in English in the late 19th
century. In 1938, Rabindranath Tagore, when asked to advise on an ongoing
British translation of the Upanishads, which he had been reading in Sanskrit
since boyhood, remarked to its British publisher: ‘Upanishads in some of their
parts are incomprehensible owing to the symbolic language used which has
utterly lost its significance. These portions should have been avoided, for
grammar and lexicon are no proper guide to them and there are no means
whatever today for realizing their spirit.’ The leading present-day Vedic
translator, Wendy Doniger, confesses: ‘Like the Englishman who announced that
he preferred English to all other languages because it was the only language in
which one said the words in the order that one thought of them, one feels that the
Rigveda poets are not saying the words in the order that they thought of them, let
alone the order that we would think of them.’ The fact that the two Rigvedic
verses bearing on the issue of sati are actually in sequence – and so should
presumably enjoy a logical connection – is actually of little assistance in
understanding their meaning, explains Doniger. ‘Perhaps the single factor that
tends to interfere most with the poetry throughout the Rigveda is the fragmentary
quality of the work. Not only is each hymn a separate statement (though some
work well together), but each verse stands on its own and often bears no obvious
relationship with the verses immediately preceding and following it’, she writes.
‘This discontinuity – which is, ironically, the one continuous thread in the
Rigveda, the one universal semantic feature – tends to produce a kind of poetry
that can be overpowering in the intensity of the separate forces that it juxtaposes
but disconcerting to anyone looking for a sustained mood.’
The opacity inherent in the Vedas for modern readers leaves them open to
widely differing interpretations. Earlier, we contrasted the agricultural and urban
society of the Indus Valley civilization, and its plethora of specialized crafts and
long-distance trade, with the pastoral, semi-nomadic society that most scholars
have perceived in the Vedas. But for Hindu nationalists, keen to stress the
continuities between the archaeological evidence of the Indus Valley civilization
and the literary evidence of the Vedic culture, this contrast is simply false in the
light of the available evidence. Thus S. P. Gupta, the archaeologist who proposed
the name Indus-Saraswati civilization for the Indus Valley civilization, claims
that the Vedic culture, like the Indus-Saraswati civilization, had ‘many centres,
many craft specializations, many mining activities, many trade routes, and many
talents for management of long-distance trade’, and that ‘the Vedic people were
also metallurgists’, though Gupta wisely stops short of claiming that the people
were also literate, since there is not even a glimmer of a notion of writing in the
Vedas, despite the many contexts where a reference to script might be expected
to occur. The reason why this congruence between the Vedic and Indus bodies of
evidence is not more widely accepted is because of scholarly prejudice against it,
Gupta alleges. Almost all translators of the Vedas, from Max Müller to Doniger,
have chosen to emphasize only cattle-keeping as the mode of economic life
described in the Vedas and to ‘dishonestly suppress’, says Gupta, the references
that prove Vedic awareness of other, non-pastoral, economic activities.
There may be something to Gupta’s view – but not very much, if we consider
the basic content matter of the Vedas and leave aside the nuances of translating
particular phrases. In Doniger’s detailed index and glossary for her (admittedly
selective) edition of the Rigveda, there are very occasional references to villages,
but none at all to towns and cities; there are references to crafts such as weaving
and leather work, but none to brick and jewelry making; there are very
occasional references to iron, but none to metallurgy or mining; and there are
occasional references to journeys and even to boats and ships (though the ships
are probably metaphorical), but none at all to merchants and trade, whether long-
distance or not – not to mention no references to complex weights and measures,
such as those found in the Indus Valley civilization. Beyond reasonable dispute,
the overwhelming majority of the Rigveda’s verses concern sacrifices, rituals
and gods, generally named, with many references to nature and natural
phenomena, creation, women, animals (especially cows and horses), pastoral
life, chariots, war and death.
This is not to say that the people of the Indus Valley civilization were entirely
unlike those of the Vedic period. For example, the Indus Valley people gambled.
Numerous of their clay gaming boards and dice made of simple split reeds,
cowrie shells, clay and stone cubes, and finely carved ivory rods with circles
incised on each face, have been excavated. And so did the Vedic people, as
described in the following verses, seven and eight, of the Rigveda’s powerful
‘Gambler’s Lament’ (in Doniger’s translation):
The dice goad like hooks and prick like whips; they enslave, deceive and torment. They give presents as
children do, striking back at the winners. They are coated with honey – an irresistible power over the
gambler./ Their army, three bands of fifty, plays by rules as immutable as those of the god Savitri [the god
of the rising and setting sun]. They do not bow even to the wrath of those whose power is terrifying; the
king himself bows down before them.
 In addition, the Vedic people probably lived in small settlements, practised
some degree of agriculture (ploughs are occasionally referred to), employed
carpenters and metal workers to make and repair their wheeled chariots,
fashioned precious adornments for their women and supported traders who made
journeys from village to village. But these things and activities were not
sufficiently extensive or permanent to leave any remains behind today, or at least
nothing that archaeologists have discovered – except for the Vedic peoples’ oral
literature. Whatever Hindu nationalists may wish, no amount of special pleading
can marry up the society described in the Vedas with the Indus Valley
archaeological remains.
There are 1,028 hymns in the Rigveda, the oldest of the Vedas, arranged in ten
sections. Most of the Samaveda consists of transposed parts of the Rigveda. The
Yajurveda deals with the correct way for priests to perform the sacrifices
required by the gods. The tone of the Atharvaveda is different from the
preceding three; it consists mainly of magical spells and incantations, including
medical spells. Within the four Vedas, scholars have distinguished strata:
subsections of the whole apparently drawn from different periods and various
sources in Vedic society (which helps to explain the fragmentary quality that
bedevils translation).
The principal Vedic gods are beings known as devas, the ‘shining ones’, and
not surprisingly they are associated mostly with the sky and the heavens, rather
than with the ground, the soil and the mysteries of fertility. The union of the
Vedic Sky Father, Dyaus Pitar (compare Greek Zeus Pater, Latin Jupiter), with
Mother Earth provides the earliest creation myth in the Rigveda. But we do not
hear much about Dyaus, whose place is taken by Varuna, guardian of the sacred
law and cosmic order (rita). Varuna, with his thousand eyes ever watchful for
wrongdoing, is one of the Vedic gods who always behaves ethically. But then
Varuna, in his turn, gives way to Prajapati, the Lord of Creatures, who, in the
form of the Primeval Man, is dismembered to form the phenomenal world,
including the four castes. Other gods include Mitra, the god of integrity and
friendship, who is closely linked with Varuna; Surya, the sun god; Agni, the god
of fire, who consumes sacrificial offerings and thereby conveys them from men
to the gods; Soma, who is both a god and an elixir of immortality, made from the
juice pressed from a hallucinogenic plant (perhaps a mushroom); and in the
afterlife, Yama, the god of death, who presides over the spirits of the dead. There
are also important goddesses, such as the goddesses of Earth, the dawn (Ushas)
and speech (Vac). Most important of all, however, is the warrior Indra, god of
war and god of weather, with many of the characteristics of Zeus and Thor, as
shown in his exploits. Indra kills the demon Vritra by wielding his thunderbolt,
and thereby releases the waters of life. He rescues the sun from another demon
(possibly a reference to a solar eclipse) with the help of the high priest. He
destroys the walled fortresses of the enemy known as the Dasas. He is borne by
an eagle to heaven and returns with Soma for men and gods. And he regularly
overdoes the drinking of Soma in noisy wassails.
Many of the gods’ names first seen in the Rigveda continue in later Hinduism,
for example Varuna, Surya, Agni, Yama and Indra, though with varying degrees
of importance attached to them compared to their Vedic originals. But there is
little sign in the Vedic pantheon of the two greatest gods of ‘classical’ Hinduism:
Shiva and Vishnu. The Vedic storm god, Rudra, ‘in whom are later incorporated
other ideas in the Hindu conception of Shiva, is a turbulent god more to be
propitiated than petitioned,’ notes the Indo-Aryan specialist Thomas Trautmann,
while Vishnu in Vedic literature is ‘a dwarf who with three giant strides wins the
earth, air and sky for the gods and consigns the demons to the nether world.’
Indeed, few of the Vedic deities became the major gods and goddesses of
Hinduism, and only one of the major deities, Surya, kept a central position in
later Hindu art as a dynastic deity. Objectively viewed, there is no great
connection between the Vedic gods and the gods of modern Hinduism, despite
the high regard for the Vedas among current Hindus.
This evolution of the gods between Vedic times and the appearance of
classical Hinduism in the first millennium AD raises the question of the date of
composition of the Vedas. Max Müller, working on his translation of the Rigveda
in the mid-19th century, was the first scholar to provide an estimate. He
suggested that the search should begin with the date of the Buddha in the 6th
century BC, and then reckon back from this, on the assumption that Buddhism –
which regards certain doctrines first put forward in the Upanishads as axiomatic
– emerged from the full development of successive strata of Vedic texts. These
texts begin with the Rigveda, the Samaveda, the Yajurveda and the Atharvaveda,
and are followed by the later collections and commentaries: first the hymn
collections known as the Samhitas, then the prose texts explaining the Vedic
mythology and sacrificial rituals known as the Brahmanas, and finally the prose
philosophical works known as the Upanishads. Allotting two or three centuries
to the development of each of these three strata, Max Müller posited an
approximate date for the Rigveda of 1200 BC, which was for a long time taken to
be reasonable, if entirely unproven.
Today’s estimated date generally lies somewhat earlier than this, in the period
1500–1200 BC. The argument for it depends on epigraphical evidence discovered
in the early 20th century, not in India but in eastern Turkey, at Bogazkale, the
site of the ancient capital of the Hittite empire, whose official language was
Indo-European. The document in question relates to the kingdom of the Mitanni,
which existed in the period from about 1500 BC to about 1360 BC in northern
Mesopotamia, in what is now northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia. It is a
treaty between the king of the Mitanni and the king of the Hittites, written in
cuneiform, dateable to around 1380 BC on the basis of reliable king-lists of the
region, in which the Mitannian king calls upon the gods of the Mitanni to
guarantee his promises to the Hittite king. Although the chief language of the
treaty is not an Indo-European one (it is Akkadian, a Semitic language used as a
lingua franca in Mesopotamia), the part dealing with the gods mentions
Arunashshil, Mitrashshil, Indara and Nashattiyanna – names that are remarkably
close to the names of the Vedic gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra and Nasatyas, which
of course are Indo-European. The names of Mitannian princes, some numerals
and some technical terms for horse training are also recognizable in Vedic
Sanskrit. The explanation for these surprising linguistic resemblances appears to
be that the Mitannian elite, like the Hittite rulers, were Indo-European speakers.
But how could two groups located as geographically far apart as northern
Mesopotamia and northwest India seem to have spoken closely related
languages? The reason must be that both languages – that of the Mitannian elite
and the Sanskrit (Indo-Aryan) of the Vedic peoples – were derived from a
common proto-Indo-European source. While this fits with the theory of the
dispersion of the ur-Aryans and the creation of the Indo-European language
family, it is surprising to scholars that the above-mentioned names of the
Mitannian gods resemble Vedic gods more closely than they resemble the names
of Zoroastrian gods in the ancient Avestan language of Iran. The Mitannian god
Nashattiyanna is equivalent to the Vedic god Nasatyas and to the Zoroastrian god
Naonhaitya. Yet, not only is Iran geographically much closer to India than is
northern Mesopotamia, the very name of the country, Iran, means ‘land of the
Aryans’ in Persian and has been in use since antiquity. In fact, the affinity
between Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan has been demonstrated to be closer than that
between any other two branches of the Indo-European language family – so
much so that the idea of a common ancestry for ancient Indians and ancient
Iranians, with a common culture and a common language, is established beyond
doubt. (For example, both Hindus and Zoroastrians have a sacred-thread
ceremony marking the second ‘birth’ of a child as a full member of his religious
community.)
There seem to be two possible explanations for the surprising similarity in the
names of the Mitannian and Vedic gods. Either the ur-Aryans migrated
southwards from their original homeland – wherever that was, perhaps on the
steppes of southern Russia – into the area of the Mitannian kingdom before the
Indo-Iranian language split into Iranian (Avestan) and Indian (Sanskrit); if so,
then any subsequent changes in the Iranian language – such as the name
Naonhaitya – would not be reflected in the Mitannian language. Or, some
Indians, after the Indo-Iranian split, migrated far across the Iranian plateau into
the area of the Mitannian kingdom, bringing their Vedic language with them.
Although considerable linguistic evidence exists, it is probably insufficient to
decide between these two incompatible hypotheses. But there can be little
hesitation in declaring that the date of composition of the Rigveda in Sanskrit
cannot be much earlier than the date of the Mitannian-Hittite cuneiform treaty, c.
1380 BC.
This suggests a gap of several centuries between the decline of the Indus
Valley civilization in the early part of the second millennium BC and the rise of
the Indo-Aryan Vedic culture in the middle of the millennium – rather than the
earlier idea of an Aryan invasion from the west that destroyed the Indus Valley
cities. Although there is no archaeological and little linguistic evidence to
illuminate what actually happened in this period, it seems more probable than
not that Indo-European-speaking migrants came in their chariots from Iran to
India through the mountain passes of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan.
They populated first the northwest and then the north of the subcontinent – the
valley of the river Ganges – and in the process encountered, and sometimes
fought with, the area’s existing Dravidian-speaking inhabitants. This collision,
rather than some military subjugation of the Indus Valley cities, might account
for the Vedic god Indra’s attacks on the fortresses of the Dasas (Sanskrit for
‘slaves’) mentioned in the Rigveda.
The paucity of evidence did not (and does not) inhibit scholars and others
from erecting a precarious structure of theory concerning the origin and
development of the Indo-Aryans, which continues to wobble in the fierce winds
of opinion. This is hardly surprising, given that some of the foundations of the
structure were originally fashioned along racial lines, and depend on an over-
interpretation of the Rigveda, involving a mere two passages about the dark skin
of the Dasas, and a single, disputed, passage about their possibly flattened,
‘primitive’, noses.
What Trautmann, in his Aryans and British India, calls ‘the racial theory of
Indian civilization’ was constructed by European Indologists and some scientists
– such as the British ethnographer H. H. Risley, who oversaw the 1901 census of
India – in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The idea that races could
define civilizations was then in its heyday, and ethnicity was widely assumed to
be intimately linked with language, despite a few warnings to the contrary. In
outline, the racial theory proposed that the fair-skinned, Indo-European-
speaking, Aryan invaders were civilizers of the dark-skinned, non-Indo-
European-speaking, Dasa aboriginals, and thereby the source of all that was
finest in subsequent Indian history and culture, especially classical Hinduism.
The higher the caste, the greater the proportion of Aryan blood, thought Risley.
Thus, when a newly built Indian Institute at Oxford University was opened in
1883, it carried a Sanskrit inscription with the following official English
translation: ‘This Building, dedicated to the Eastern sciences, was founded for
the use of Aryas (Indians and Englishmen) by excellent and benevolent men
desirous of encouraging knowledge.’ The late Victorian racial theory had
sanctioned the dubious translation of Sanskrit ‘Arya’ as including both races, not
just the Indian.
At its most inclusive and sophisticated, the racial theory was a vision that
inspired the Oxford-based Max Müller for decades until his death in 1900,
during which he spoke out against both anti-Semitism in Europe and the
denigration of Indians by the British in India. While lecturing ‘on the science of
language’ before a capacity audience at London’s Royal Institution, he enthused
about the Aryan ‘clan’ and their Indo-European origins as follows:
Before the ancestors of the Indians and Persians started for the south, and the leaders of the Greek,
Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic colonies marched towards the shores of Europe, there was a small
clan of Aryans, settled probably on the highest elevation of Central Asia, speaking a language, not yet
Sanskrit or Greek or German, but containing the dialectic germs of all; a clan that had advanced to a state
of agricultural civilization; that had recognized the bonds of blood, and sanctioned the bonds of marriage;
and that invoked the Giver of Light and the Life in heaven by the same name which you may still hear in
the temples of Benares, in the basilicas of Rome, and in our own churches and cathedrals.

For the British living in India, the racial theory held obvious appeal. It meant
that they could pride themselves on following in the footsteps of the ancient
Indo-European-speaking invaders with a modern civilizing mission, and could
also attribute the best of Indian civilization to outside influences. Less
predictably, the theory also appealed to many educated Indians, especially to
high-caste Brahmins. For it offered them the consolation of being elevated to be
‘Aryan brethren’ (a favourite concept of Max Müller), in other words fellow
members of the Indo-European-speaking family, rather than offspring of inferior,
Dravidian-speaking aboriginals. As a result, Max Müller, despite never having
visited India, came to be regarded by leading Indians of the time, such as Swami
Vivekananda, as India’s greatest well-wisher in the West. ‘Gratified by the
discovery of their proud historical pedigree, India’s aspiring nationalists
embraced the Aryans as readily as did Europe’s cultural supremacists’,
comments John Keay in his history of India. In due course, the Aryan idea would
prove as attractive to many Indians for the promotion of racial brotherhood with
Europeans in India as it was to Nazi theorists for the promotion of racial hatred
in Europe.
Indeed, the theory gave a fillip to turn-of-the-century Hindus of several
different persuasions. It legitimized orthodox Hindus to become more dogmatic
and intolerant about their religion. It encouraged reformist Hindus inspired by
Christianity, such as Tagore, to clothe their religious life under the cover of
Upanishadic teachings. It impelled Hindus with less intellectual confidence to
accept their religion from dubious European interpreters such as the
Theosophists, led by the Russian spiritualist Madame Blavatsky. And lastly, it
induced the half-Europeanized part of the Hindu intelligentsia, such as the
followers of the back-to-the-Vedas movement known as the Arya Samaj, ‘to
bolster up a peculiarly xenophobic nationalism, without any realization of its
spiritual value’, writes Nirad C. Chaudhuri in his biography of Max Müller.
The progeny of this last group live on today in the form of the Hindu
nationalists, who still have a love-hate attitude towards European and American
praise for their religion. Of course their arguments have changed during the
intervening century. They know that the racial theory of civilizations is now
widely discredited, along with the 19th-century notion that a race must be linked
with a particular language – in a globalized world where more Indians in India
speak English than the entire indigenous population of England. Moreover, the
discovery of the Indus Valley civilization (in the 1920s) has fundamentally
altered our understanding of India’s prehistory. Today’s Hindu nationalists,
instead of embracing a foreign influence in the Vedic religion, strongly deny it,
along with the concept of Aryan migrations into India. However, they still cling
to a racial theory of Indian civilization by maintaining that Vedic Sanskrit, the
supposed language of the first Indians, originated not in some Indo-European-
speaking homeland such as the south Russian steppes but in India, among the
natives of the Indus Valley civilization.
Yet, even if the nationalists and a few more serious scholars may choose to
deny the Aryan migrations, they cannot simply wish away the compelling
evidence for an Indo-European family of languages. First presented by Jones to
the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1786, the Indo-European concept has
withstood the scrutiny of more than two centuries of scholarship in both the West
and India. To give three simple examples out of hundreds of striking
resemblances between Sanskrit and European languages, the Sanskrit word for
‘father’ is pita, while the Greek word is pater; the Sanskrit for ‘wife’ is gna,
while the Greek is gyne; and the Sanskrit for ‘two’ is dva, while the Greek is
dyo. A more complicated example is the Sanskrit word cakra, which means
‘wheel’; it is thought to have originated from a proto-Indo-European word
pronounced something like kwekulo, which was also the ancestor of the Greek
for ‘wheel’, kuklos, and the Old English word hweogol, from which modern
English ‘wheel’ is derived.
That said, there is little agreement between scholars on how the postulated
Indo-European linguistic changes came about through migration of actual
language-speakers. In the discouraging words of a detailed 2001 survey, The
Quest for the Origins of the Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate by
Edwin Bryant: ‘how the cognate languages got to be where they were in
prehistory is as unresolved today, in my mind, as it was two hundred years ago
when William Jones announced the Sanskrit language connection to a surprised
Europe.’ And yet, short of postulating that the first speakers of the proto-Indo-
European language were born in ancient India, rather than on the Russian
steppes, and arguing that some of them then migrated from India westwards
towards Europe – a fantasy for which there are no grounds archaeologically and
almost no grounds linguistically – there must have been an actual migration of
Indo-European-speaking people into India from the northwest to account for the
resemblances between so many Asian and European languages. By what route,
under what conditions, and at what date these migrations occurred, are questions
that will continue to be debated until such time as more solid evidence may be
discovered.
THREE Buddha, Alexander and Asoka
 BUDDHA, ALEXANDER AND ASOKA

In the 6th century BC, Indian history begins to free itself from the silence of the
archaeological excavations in the Indus Valley and from the myths and dubious
traditions of the Vedic literature. The written record is yet to come into
existence, or at any rate it has not survived. However, we now encounter not
only the first historical Indian figure but also the person who, ‘even if judged
only by his posthumous effects on the world at large … was certainly the
greatest man to have been born in India’, as the historian A. L. Basham notably
describes Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.
Rabindranath Tagore went even further than this in his praise. Towards the
end of his life, in a moving speech honouring the birthday of the Buddha, Tagore
described him as ‘the greatest man ever born on this earth’. He recalled a visit to
the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodhgaya in Bihar, the place of the Buddha’s
enlightenment under a bodhi tree, where he saw a poor Japanese fisherman who
had travelled across the seas from Japan ‘to expiate for some misdeed’. As
Tagore observed the fisherman, ‘Evening passed slowly into the solitude and
silence of midnight, and still he sat with folded hands repeating with intense
concentration, Buddham saranam gacchami: In the Buddha do I seek my
refuge.’ Tagore also recalled his visit to the Buddhist temple at Borobudur in
Java, where he saw the celebrated stories depicting everyday life in ancient India
and the nativity of the Buddha, known as the Jatakas, ‘carved in hundreds of
images round the stupa, each a perfect specimen of the sculptor’s art, chiselled
with loving care and infinite pains.’
In many parts of northern India, there are ancient Buddhist stupas – some of
them built by Asoka to honour the Buddha’s ashes – and other Buddhist
monuments, including the stupa built on top of the ruins of the city of Mohenjo-
daro. The highest concentration of these remains is in the birthplace of
Buddhism, which now occupies part of the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar
Pradesh plus a small part of Nepal (where Siddhartha Gautama was actually
born). Indeed, Buddhist stupas, not Hindu temples, are the oldest surviving
religious architecture in India. The Buddhist religious remains from the period
200 BC to AD 200 so far discovered by archaeologists outnumber by far those
belonging to early classical Hinduism and to Jainism. At the best preserved of
these sites, the stupa and gateways of Sanchi in the state of Madhya Pradesh –
which are superbly sculpted with stories from the Jatakas – building began in
the 3rd century BC and carried on until the 6th or 7th centuries AD. At the Ajanta
caves in the state of Maharashtra, the Buddhist murals – many of which are
among the greatest works of Indian art – were painted from about 200 BC over a
period lasting for well over half a millennium, until perhaps as late as AD 650.
(Some scholars favour an earlier date for the caves’ abandonment, 480.) ‘Was
ancient India “Hindu” or Buddhist?’ asks Gail Omvedt in her study Buddhism in
India. ‘Art and architecture testify that it was overwhelmingly Buddhist for over
a millennium.’
Nonetheless, by the early 19th century, when Europeans first began to
investigate these Buddhist remains, the living religion had vanished from its
homeland and from the rest of India, except for Assam, the foothills of the
Himalayas and Kashmir. It had to be reconstructed by European scholars – who
encountered hardly any living Buddhists – from surviving Buddhist texts; and
then popularized by writers such as Edwin Arnold in The Light of Asia, his
bestselling biography of the Buddha, published in 1879, which tailored its
subject’s life to a Victorian British readership steeped in the Christian gospels.
An extraordinary and revealing historical fact is that not a single Buddhist text
was preserved in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, whether written in the Pali or the
Sanskrit languages. References to this vanished Indian literature by modern
scholars rely on Buddhist manuscripts that were preserved in monasteries in Sri
Lanka, Tibet and China. Today Buddhism (like Jainism) is very much of a
minority religion in India: less than 1 per cent of the population is Buddhist,
compared with three times as many Indians who are Christians. Even the
worldly-cum-spiritual emperor Asoka, whose ethical government seems to have
been much inspired by the Buddha’s teachings, cannot be said to be a living
presence in India, apart from the use of Asoka’s sculpted lion capital from
Sarnath on banknotes and government documents as the national emblem of
India – despite the high respect for Asoka and the Buddha shown by Nehru. His
house as prime minister in New Delhi, Teen Murti, had an image of the Buddha
in almost every room, including a photograph of a Buddha image on the table
next to his bed; and he named his daughter Indira Priyadarshini Nehru, her
second name meaning ‘Beloved-of-the-Gods’: the favourite title adopted by
Asoka in his edicts.
In The Discovery of India, Nehru writes of the mid-20th-century relationship
between Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism as follows:
 Jainism, a rebel against the parent religion and in many ways utterly different from it, was yet tolerant to
caste and adapted itself to it; and so it survives and continues in India, almost as an offshoot of Hinduism.
Buddhism, not adapting itself to caste, and more independent in its thought and outlook, ultimately
passes away from India, though it influences India and Hinduism profoundly.

Modern visitors to such popular Buddhist sites as the Mahabodhi Temple at

Bodhgaya, and Sarnath where the Buddha first began to teach his followers the
dharma (dhamma in Pali), cannot fail to notice that the vast majority of the
pilgrims have come from Asian countries outside India, in particular Burma,
China, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Tibet, which have living
Buddhist traditions, and from Europe and the United States; Indian visitors make
up a small minority. In fact, it is possible to visit the less prominent of the
ancient sites on the Buddhist ‘circuit’ in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh without seeing
Indian pilgrims – rather as if, in the Catholic world, one were to see no Italian
Catholics worshipping in the great cathedrals of Italy, only groups of Irish,
Spanish and Portuguese, South Americans and Filipinos. Buddhism did not
begin to make a comeback in the heartland of the subcontinent until the mid-
1950s (a decade after Nehru wrote the above words), when Ambedkar, the leader
of the untouchables, having convinced himself that the first untouchables were
really Buddhists outcasted by Hindu society, underwent a conversion from
Hinduism to Buddhism at a controversial public ceremony in Maharashtra just
months before his death. Hundreds of thousands of other untouch-ables, who
wished to escape the oppressive restrictions put upon them by orthodox Hindu
society, underwent conversion at the same time. About three quarters of the
Buddhists in present-day India are Dalits, while the remaining quarter are
concentrated in Assam and the Himalayan regions, including Dharamsala, the
headquarters of the Tibetan community in exile.
The complex historical relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism is
encapsulated in the complicated story of the Mahabodhi Temple. Its beginnings
as a Buddhist shrine go back to Asoka’s time, but the structure of the present-day
building dates from much later than this: the 5th or 6th century AD. Yet even in
the mid-7th century, when a Buddhist pilgrim from China, the celebrated
Xuanzang, toured parts of India and visited Bodhgaya, he found the site to be
virtually engulfed in drifting sand dunes. By the time a Tibetan translator and
Tantric Buddhist named Dharmasvamin visited in about 1234, he saw the shrine
in great disrepair following damage to it by recent Muslim invaders. On the door
he observed an image of Shiva, which he imagined to be a guardian deity from
the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon. ‘It was just as likely evidence of an increased
level of Hindu activity at the shrine’, suggests the anthropologist Alan Trevithick
in his history of the Mahabodhi Temple. The temple was finally abandoned by
its Buddhist monks in the 15th century, and taken over by local Hindus probably
some time in the 17th century. They dedicated it to Vishnu in the form of
‘Buddha Dev’ – Vishnu’s ninth incarnation, according to classical Hinduism. But
all memory of its original Buddhist significance was apparently lost. A British
servant of the East India Company conducting a statistical survey, who reached
Bodhgaya in 1811 and questioned the leader of a group of Hindu ascetics living
in the partially restored ruins, was told by the man that he had been in complete
ignorance of Buddhism until quite recently, when some emissaries sent by the
king of Ava (in Burma) had informed him of Bodhgaya’s sacred importance to
the Burmese.
At this time, British officials and scholars themselves knew virtually nothing
of Buddhism. After a British army officer out hunting accidentally discovered
the Ajanta caves in western India in 1819, there was speculation that the
mysterious paintings had been created by unknown conquerors who had sailed to
India from Egypt. From the 1840s onwards, though, after the decipherment of
Asoka’s edicts by James Prinsep and others – beginning with Asoka’s title,
Piyadassi (Priyadarshini in Sanskrit) – and the discovery in Tibet of Buddhist
texts in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese and Mongolian, Eugène Burnouf and a select
group of European scholars developed some understanding of the Buddha and
much admiration. Later in the 19th century, British archaeologists led by
Alexander Cunningham set about renovating the Mahabodhi Temple. Soon,
Bodhgaya began to be visited by practising Buddhists from Sri Lanka, Burma
and other Buddhist-dominated countries, led by an evangelical Sri Lankan monk,
Anagarika Dharmapala, who founded the Mahabodhi Society in 1891, with the
express aim of reclaiming the temple at Bodhgaya from the Hindus. This led to
an acrimonious struggle between local Hindus and foreign Buddhists over the
management of the temple, ending in 1949 with some Bihar government
legislation (supported by Nehru) that established a joint management committee
with a mix of Hindu and Buddhist members and a Buddhist superintendent in
charge of the temple rituals. In the debate over the legislation one local
politician, a Brahmin and a major landowner, while attempting to justify
continued Hindu domination, argued, quite typically for a high-caste Hindu:
‘After all – what were Hindus? – they were neither Shaivas, Jains, Buddhists nor
other branches of religion but were inheritors of one great Aryan culture.’ During
the second half of the 20th century, the new managerial arrangement between
Hindus and Buddhists, though sometimes fraught, led to a startling revival of
Buddhist attendance at Bodhgaya, including the international crowds that
flocked to see the Dalai Lama on his regular visits to teach, and to a huge boost
in temple donations by Buddhists.
 Tempting as it may be to conclude from the story of the Mahabodhi Temple
that Hinduism, fuelled by undoubted Brahminical antipathy towards Buddhism,
must have been the chief enemy of Buddhism within India, in truth the mystery
of Buddhism’s disappearance from the land of its birth appears to be more
puzzling. Unlike in Europe, with its battles between Catholic and Protestant
theologians and kingdoms, there was never any overt political, or indeed
military, struggle between Hinduism and Buddhism in India. The explanation for
Buddhism’s decline appears to have more to do with the diminishing appeal to
Indians of its social, political and philosophical outlook, even if the precise
reasons for this diminishing are controversial.
To understand what may have transpired and why, we need to consider how
Buddhism, and simultaneously Jainism, may have arisen in the societies of the
middle Gangetic basin valley in the mid-first millennium BC. As the initially
tribal Vedic culture of the second millennium BC spread from its upper Gangetic
source eastwards down the Ganges valley, it appears to have become weaker.
Although it influenced the political and religious forms of the middle Ganges,
they departed from the original Vedic culture in new directions. Inevitably,
archaeological evidence for this transformation is lacking (there are no
excavated remains of any Gangetic settlements from this period); conclusions
have to be drawn from textual sources, that is, from late Vedic (Upanishadic) and
early Buddhist literature.
The dominant early Vedic emphasis in the Rigveda on sacrificial rituals, for
example, which was suited to an essentially pastoral, semi-nomadic, tribal
society in the second millennium, must have been less attractive to later, settled
societies practising agriculture, commerce and urban living, which naturally
preferred to use their economic surplus for building and trading, as well as for
individual pleasure. Moreover, unnecessary animal slaughter in sacrifices seems
to have become increasingly offensive to people. This hypothesis would account
for an obvious change of emphasis in the youngest Vedic texts, the Upanishads,
in which the concept of sacrifice is interpreted by their Brahmin authors more
philosophically than in the Vedas, so as to ritualize the entire round of life for an
individual – both from day to day and from birth to death. It would also fit with
the consistent criticism of animal slaughter found in the Buddhist texts, and
especially in the Jain texts, which from the outset promoted non-injury to living
beings (ahimsa) and vegetarianism.
The geographical setting of the Upanishads was probably the three, newly
founded, neighbouring eastern kingdoms of Kosala, Kashi (the ancient name for
Varanasi/Benares) and Videha, all in the middle Gangetic basin, on the evidence
of certain names in the texts, for example Janaka, a king of Videha, and
Yajnavalkya, a Brahmin adviser to Janaka, both of whom are mentioned in the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. It is also clear that a king such as Janaka – in the
manner of monarchs throughout history seeking new prestige – competed with
other kings to attract noted Brahmins from the original, upper Gangetic heartland
of the Vedic culture to his eastern court. Not only did the mere presence of
Brahmins at court lend legitimacy to a ruler, the Brahmins would also be
encouraged by the king to indulge in philosophical discourse and debate with
other Brahmins, with substantial prizes awarded to the victors. Sage Yajnavalkya
is said to have defeated in argument the best of the established Vedic
theologians, including even the great sage Uddalaka Aruni, who is vilified in the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.
A fourth kingdom, Magadha, east of Kashi, with its capital at the fortress of
Rajagriha, was the least dominated by Brahmins. Unsurprisingly, the Brahmin
authors of late Vedic literature were contemptuous of the Magadhans. In the
Atharvaveda, notes Trautmann, a medicinal spell ‘wishes fever away to the
peoples of Magadha and their eastern neighbours of Anga (Bengal) along with
other undesirables.’ But in due course Magadha would become by far the most
influential of these four kingdoms.
The jostling for power between the middle Gangetic kingdoms – frequently
referred to in the early Buddhist texts – provided the setting for the rise of three
contemporaneous religions of renunciation in the 6th century: Buddhism,
Jainism and Ajivikism, the last of which survived in India until about AD 1400.
Both Siddhartha Gautama and Vardhamana the Mahavira (Great Hero), founder
of Jainism, were born in the princely class. The first belonged to the Sakya tribe,
who were under the sway of Kosala, and was born in the foothills of Nepal,
while the second was born in Videha; little is known of the origins of Makkhali
Gosala, the Ajivika teacher.
Asceticism and renunciation have roots in India at least as old as the Rigveda,
which mentions visionaries known as munis who went about without speaking,
either naked or in orange rags and with their hair matted. By the 6th century, in
the eastern kingdoms, such ascetics had become commonplace, presumably in
reaction against increasing materialist values among the rulers, merchants and
general population. Some of them lived as celibate hermits in the forests; others
were wandering beggars and preachers; still others practised harsh penances
involving extreme heat and cold, or sat in silent meditation. Collectively, they
were known as Shramanas, meaning ‘renouncers’.
The Shramanas utterly rejected the authority of the Vedic tradition and its
keepers, the Brahmins. So much so, that traditionally the Brahmana (Brahmin)
and the Shramana are compared to the cobra and the mongoose. For the two
groups differed profoundly over the purpose of human existence. The Brahmin
was enjoined by the Vedas to procreate a son in order to perpetuate the ancestral
cult, whereas the Shramana took a vow to observe lifelong celibacy so as to be
released from the otherwise endless cycle of rebirth.
The Buddha, by contrast, enjoined for the ordinary person neither the
sacrificial worship of gods in the Vedic tradition nor the asceticism of the
Shramanas, but rather a path of mental discipline and moderation. And of course
he rejected the Vedic caste system and the dominant status of Brahmin priests.
The kernel of his teaching is contained in the Dhammacakkapavattana Sutta, the
‘Sermon of the Turning of the Wheel of the Law’, which the Buddha is said to
have preached (after his enlightenment at Bodhgaya) to his first disciples at
Sarnath, near Benares. It includes the ‘Four Noble Truths’ and the ‘Noble
Eightfold Path’. Since these two are accepted as basic tenets by all Buddhist
sects – and since they sum up the Buddhist world view – it is worth quoting
them verbatim (though in a somewhat abridged form). They begin with the
introductory phrase characteristic of Buddhist texts:
Thus have I heard. Once the Master was at Benares, at the deer park called Isipatana. There the Master
addressed the five monks:

‘There are two ends not to be served by a wanderer. What are those two? The pursuit of desires and of the
pleasure which springs from desires, which is base, common, leading to rebirth, ignoble and unprofitable;
and the pursuit of pain and hardship, which is grievous, ignoble and unprofitable. The Middle Way of the
Tathagata [one of the titles of the Buddha, meaning “He who has thus attained”] avoids both these ends;
it is enlightened, it brings clear vision, it makes for wisdom, and leads to peace, insight, full wisdom and
Nirvana. What is this Middle Way? … It is the Noble Eightfold Path – Right Views, Right Resolve, Right
Speech, Right Conduct, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Recollection and Right Meditation. This is
the Middle Way….

‘And this is the Noble Truth of Sorrow. Birth is sorrow, age is sorrow, disease is sorrow, death is sorrow,
contact with the unpleasant is sorrow, separation from the pleasant is sorrow, every wish unfulfilled is
sorrow – in short all the five components of individuality are sorrow.

‘And this is the Noble Truth of the Arising of Sorrow. [It arises from] thirst, which leads to rebirth, which
brings delight and passion, and seeks pleasure now here, now there – the thirst for sensual pleasure, the
thirst for continued life, the thirst for power.

‘And this is the Noble Truth of the Stopping of Sorrow. It is the complete stopping of that thirst, so that
no passion remains, leaving it, being emancipated from it, giving no place to it.

‘And this is the Noble Truth of the Way which Leads to the Stopping of Sorrow. It is the Noble Eightfold
Path – Right Views, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right
Recollection and Right Meditation.’

By the beginning of the 5th century BC, during the lifetime of the Buddha (if
we accept that he died in the 480s), Kosala, located at the confluence of the
Ganges and the Yamuna Rivers, was the most powerful of the eastern kingdoms,
having absorbed Kashi and several tribal states on its northern borders (now in
Nepal), including the Buddha’s Sakya tribe. Videha, to the east, on the northern
bank of the Ganges, was by now controlled not by a king but by a tribal
confederacy dominated by the Vrijjis and the Licchavis. Magadha, south of
Videha on the southern bank of the Ganges, was overshadowed by Kosala and
Videha, though able to dominate further to the east, in Anga (Bengal) and
Assam.
Within less than half a century, however, Magadha succeeded in absorbing
Kosala and Videha. The two key figures in the Magadhan success were the
energetic Bimbisara, an admirer of the Buddha, and Bimbisara’s son, also known
to the Buddha, Ajatasattu, who murdered his father and seized the throne of
Magadha around 490 BC. Ajatasattu then fought a series of wars with Kosala and
Videha and, according to the Buddhist tradition, undermined the Vrijjian
confederacy with the help of his wily chief minister. By pretending to have fallen
out with Ajatasattu, the minister persuaded the Vrijjis to give him refuge in their
capital Vaisali and then, once he was inside their city, fomented trouble among
them. Having now taken over Videha and gained access to the Ganges,
Ajatasattu shifted his capital from Rajagriha to Pataliputra (modern Patna) on the
river, which gave control of all riverborne trade to Magadha’s growing empire.
By the time Ajatasattu died around 460 BC – murdered by his son, according to
the Buddhist tradition (though the Jain tradition differs) – his power extended
from the Bay of Bengal to the Nepal Himalayas. Subsequent Magadhan rulers
continue to be remembered for their bloody dynastic successions and their
unscrupulousness in pursuing territory, as well as for their wealth and their
upstart origins. By the time that Alexander the Great’s army appeared on the
Indian scene in 326 BC, the Nanda dynasty of Magadha, with its great capital at
Pataliputra, was ruling the largest empire yet seen on the subcontinent. Having
either destroyed or subjugated all earlier kingdoms, Magadha controlled the
whole Ganges basin, indeed all of northern India east of the Indus basin,
excluding Rajasthan, Sindh, Punjab and the northwest, where tribal rule
remained dominant.
The Greek invaders never engaged with the Magadhan empire. After crossing
the Indus River and reaching the Jhelum River (known to the Greeks as the
Hydaspes), Alexander outwitted and defeated the much larger, elephant-mounted
army of a warlike king of the Punjab, Porus (a name probably connected with
Puru, an old Vedic name), with the loss of perhaps 200 cavalry and 700 infantry,
as against 12,000 dead on Porus’s side and the seizure of almost all of his
elephants. According to Greek sources, Porus – who stood over six feet six
inches tall – remained defiant when finally captured, though he was wounded in
nine different places. Brought before Alexander and asked how he wished to be
treated, Porus replied: ‘As befits me – like a king!’ An impressed Alexander
made Porus a vassal, restored his kingdom and left him in charge of the Punjab.
But despite this victory, and much against the desire of Alexander, the Greek
army turned back at the Beas River, the border of the mighty Magadhan empire.
In effect, the ordinary troops mutinied against their leader’s ‘seemingly
unquenchable thirst for further exploration and conquest’, writes Paul Cartledge
in his history of Alexander. ‘The many years of horrendously tough marching
and campaigning, the appallingly dispiriting monsoon rains, chronic home-
sickness and a heightened fear of the unknown had taken a heavy toll.’
This was not the first time that Greek soldiers had encountered Indian vigour.
According to Herodotus, Indians fought in the Persian army during the second
Persian invasion of Greece in 479 BC. In 331, the Persian empire under Darius
III, while fighting Alexander’s forces at the crucial battle of Gaugamela,
deployed a small detachment of Indian troops from the west of the Indus with
fifteen elephants. After subduing the Persians and a long campaign in Bactria,
Alexander, on his way through the Punjab, stopped at the city of Takshashila
(modern Taxila in Pakistan), where the king offered no resistance and feasted the
Greek army with a Vedic-style sacrifice of 300 oxen. Here, Alexander personally
encountered learned Brahmins and naked ascetics, Shramanas, whom the Greeks
called gymnosophists – but apparently no Buddhists. Near the banks of the
Indus, having captured ten gymnosophists who had helped to inspire rebellion
against him, a curious Alexander interrogated them, declaring that he would put
to death the first of them who made an incorrect answer. According to the
ancient Greek historian Plutarch’s much later Life of Alexander, Alexander was
intrigued by their responses to his questions. The first gymnosophist, when
asked ‘which, in his opinion, were more numerous, the living or the dead, said
that the living were, since the dead no longer existed.’ Another, ‘being asked
which, in his opinion, was older, day or night’, replied: ‘Day, by one day’, and
added, upon Alexander’s expressing amazement, that ‘hard questions must have
hard answers.’ Yet another, when asked ‘how a man could be most loved’,
replied with pointed bravery: ‘If he is most powerful, and yet does not inspire
fear.’
Retreating from India, Alexander and his army sailed down the Indus past
long-deserted ancient towns and cities on their arduous journey back to
Mesopotamia. But they left behind no monuments or remains in northwestern
India – unlike Asoka less than a century after Alexander’s invasion and the later
Indo-Greek kingdoms in the area. Perhaps more surprisingly, ‘The name of
Alexander is not found in Indian literature’, writes A. K. Narain in his history of
the Indo-Greeks.
Plutarch claims that Alexander was encouraged by an Indian stripling –
known to classical historians as Sandrocottus – to advance across the Beas River
and attack the Magadhan empire. Its people would rise against the Nanda
dynasty, said the youth, because the Nanda ruler was ‘hated and despised on
account of his baseness and low birth’. Another classical historian, Justin, states
that the boldness of Sandrocottus at some point offended Alexander, who
ordered his execution; but that Sandrocottus escaped. ‘Some time after, … a wild
elephant of great bulk presented itself before him of its own accord, and, as if
tamed down to gentleness, took him on its back, and became his guide in the
war, and conspicuous in fields of battle.’ Whether or not all of these stories are
true, after the death of Alexander in Babylon in 323, forces led by Sandrocottus
were able to defeat the Greek satrapies in northwest India left behind by
Alexander and expel the Greeks from India.
Around the same period, Sandrocottus himself defeated the Nanda ruler and
became known to Indian chroniclers not as Sandrocottus but as Chandragupta,
the first emperor of the Mauryan dynasty of Magadha. Chandragupta Maurya’s
date of accession is usually given as around 321, though there is considerable
uncertainty about this, and about the exact order of his conquests. By the time of
his death, however, around 298, he had laid the foundation of an empire, the
Mauryan empire, which would grow to cover almost the entire subcontinent
under Chandragupta’s grandson, Asoka, during the second half of the 3rd
century.
Chandragupta’s rise to power owed a great deal, according to all Indian
traditions, to his much older chief minister, a highly capable but unscrupulous
Brahmin possibly born and educated at Takshashila, who had a grudge against
the Nanda court. Known variously as Kautilya, Chanakya and Vishnugupta, he is
often regarded as an ancient Indian equivalent of Machiavelli, and has also been
compared with such modern practitioners and theorists of realpolitik as Otto von
Bismarck and Henry Kissinger. Appropriately enough, Chanakyapuri is the
name of the diplomatic enclave that was built in New Delhi after Independence.
The main source of Kautilya’s fame is a treatise on statecraft known as the
Arthashastra, attributed to him. However, its origin and dating are problematic,
as with so many aspects of ancient Indian history. Its very existence was
unknown until 1904, when it was discovered by the Sanskritist R. Shamasastry
in an archive in south India among a heap of palm-leaf manuscripts. While the
Arthashastra may possibly be the work of a single author living in the 4th
century BC (Kautilya’s dates are unknown), most scholars now assume that the
original version was revised by others and may not have reached its final form
until as late as the 3rd or 4th century AD. One reason is that the text contains
references to people and places that were apparently unknown to Indians in the
4th century BC, for instance ‘silk and silk-cloth from the land of China’. Another
is that the terminology the text uses for government is not generally similar to
that of the inscriptions of Asoka but instead came into regular use only after the
Mauryan period.
As its basic principle, the Arthashastra – a title translated as ‘Economics’ by
Amartya Sen – unabashedly states that ‘material wellbeing (artha) alone is
supreme … for spiritual good (dharma) and sensual pleasures (kama) depend on
material wellbeing.’ It therefore argues that a ruler has an ethical duty to make
artha his priority, in order to promote the welfare of his state and people.
‘Kautilya, if reborn as an economist today, would be at home with his sensibility
in any high-level international meeting of finance ministers’, argues the
American attorney Bruce Rich in a recent study of Kautilya, Asoka and global
ethics. With wealth promotion in mind, the Arthashastra discusses economic,
social, legal and foreign policy and justifies more or less any kind of government
surveillance of, and intrusion into, people’s lives, including a vigorous secret
service, to which the Arthashastra devotes two chapters. For example, petty
officials, known as gopas, were to be responsible for forty households each; they
were expected to keep records of the households’ births and deaths, income and
expenditure, and even their visitors – all to be permanently recorded in the
central archives of a town. How many of the text’s recommendations were
actually applied is unknown, though it is reported by Megasthenes, a Greek
ambassador from the neighbouring Seleucid empire to the early Mauryan court
at Pataliputra, that the movements of strangers were carefully monitored and
recorded. If the spy-ridden Mauryan state begins to sound somewhat like
Communist East Germany, consider instead a comparison with the United States,
says Rich. ‘The contrast between [Kautilya’s] proclaimed goals of social good
and the unsavoury methods he sometimes advocated is hardly as glaring as the
spectacle of a new country 2200 years later that claimed to be the cradle of
human liberty, but that tolerated a system of slavery harsher and more absolute
than anything that existed in Kautilya’s India.’
The grandson of Chandragupta, the immortal Asoka, came to the throne of
Magadha around 269 and died around 232 BC. ‘In the history of the world there
have been thousands of kings and emperors who called themselves “their
highnesses”, “their majesties”, “their exalted majesties” and so on,’ wrote H. G.
Wells in The Outline of History. ‘They shone for a brief moment, and as quickly
disappeared. But Asoka shines and shines brightly like a bright star, even unto
this day.’
 Asoka’s first decade as a ruler was dedicated to the ruthless statecraft
recommended in the treatise of his grandfather’s adviser Kautilya, while the rest
of his reign was dominated by the philosophy of non-violence and dharma
discussed in the discourses of the Buddha. The pivotal event, which caused his
volte-face, was his brutal conquest of the Kalinga kingdom in central-eastern
India (now Orissa), probably in 261 or 260 BC. His first rock edict, at Girnar, on
the western seaboard of India, records that 100,000 Kalingas were slaughtered
by the Magadhan forces, half as many again were deported and many more died
from other causes. Then, speaking of himself, Asoka writes: ‘After the Kalingas
were conquered, Beloved-of-the-Gods [King Piyadassi] came to feel a strong
inclination towards the Dharma, a love for the Dharma and for instruction in
Dharma. Now Beloved-of-the-Gods feels deep remorse for having conquered the
Kalingas …’ Others of the thirty-three edicts, inscribed on rocks and pillars
scattered across the subcontinent, extend this message of non-violence, including
non-violence to all living creatures, even into the royal kitchens, where the
slaughter of most animals was henceforth prohibited. For example, ‘… now with
the writing of this Dharma edict only three creatures, two peacocks and a deer,
are killed, and the deer not always. And in time, not even these three creatures
will be killed.’ Carved in one of two scripts, Brahmi and Kharoshti, most of the
edicts are written in the north Indian languages of the 3rd century known as
Prakrits, but a handful of them, in the Indus valley and beyond, are written in
Greek and Aramaic, a lingua franca of the former Persian empire, which exerted
a considerable influence on Asoka. (The very idea of rock and pillar inscriptions
was surely part-inspired by the great rock and pillar inscriptions of the Persian
ruler Darius I, written in cuneiform.)
At the same time, according to the edicts, an excellent and enlightened
administration prevailed throughout the empire. Highways were constructed;
wells were dug beside them for refreshment; trees were planted to provide shade
for travellers and animals. Botanical gardens, the planting of medicinal herbs
and hospitals were introduced. As for individual and social relationships,
Asoka’s ‘Dharma’ advocated respect for Brahmins, Shramanas, parents, friends
and inferiors. Religious bigotry and controversy, such as that between Brahmins,
Shramanas, Buddhists and Jains, was discouraged – as Nehru approvingly noted
in The Discovery of India. Yet, while the tone of Asoka’s edicts is always one of
persuasion and exhortation, rather than coercion, it appears that the Mauryan
state also continued to maintain its army, the death penalty (abolished under
some later Indian kings) and judicial torture. Significantly, Asoka’s remorse over
the conquest of Kalinga is not recorded in the two rock edicts that have been
discovered in the area where the slaughter took place.
 It seems virtually certain that Asoka was personally drawn to Buddhism. Why
else would he have erected so many stupas, along with some inscribed pillars at
sites known to be connected with events in the life of the Buddha, including
Sarnath and the Buddha’s birthplace at Lumbini (now in Nepal)? He is also
thought to have convened a major Buddhist Council at Pataliputra in order to
resolve certain doctrinal disputes within the Buddhist monastic order, the
sangha, although Buddhist sources disagree about whether this event actually
occurred. What is puzzling, however, is that only a single edict by Asoka refers
directly to the Buddha and the sangha; and this edict is one of his earliest rock
inscriptions. There are frequent references in the edicts to Brahmins, Shramanas
and the Dharma, and yet Asoka never states that he means the Buddhist
dhamma. From his edicts alone, it would be impossible to guess that Asoka was
a Buddhist. As a result there is considerable controversy about his government’s
treatment of Buddhism. Some scholars, such as Abhishek Singh Amar, argue
that Buddhism was effectively the state religion of the Mauryan empire under
Asoka, but was not officially declared as such for strategic reasons. Others,
including Romila Thapar, maintain that Asoka’s edicts should be interpreted
more literally and believe that he espoused a broader ethic than Buddhism in his
governance. Whatever the reality was, it seems that Asoka must have recognized
– probably keeping in mind the advice of the essentially secular Arthashastra –
that Buddhism might not appeal to an influential section of the population of his
empire. To have embraced its philosophy officially would most likely have had
divisive, rather than unifying, consequences for his unique imperial rule.
FOUR Hindu Dynasties
 HINDU DYNASTIES

If the predominant religion of the Mauryan empire in the 3rd century BC cannot
be unambiguously described as Buddhist, neither can it be said to have been
Hindu – at any rate not in the modern sense of that word. The ancient meaning
of ‘Hindu’ was geographical, not religious: it derived from the Sanskrit word
sindhu, meaning ‘river’, specifically the Indus River. The ancient Persians from
the time of Darius dropped the ‘s’ and used hindu to mean ‘pertaining to the
region of the Indus’ – the area now known as Sindh. In the pioneering map of the
world created in the 2nd century AD by the Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy,
the approach to India from the west is marked ‘Indiostena regio’, Latin for
‘region of Hindustan’. Thereafter, the Arabs, who conquered Sindh in the 8th
century, gradually extended the meaning of the word to denote the entire region
of northern India as ‘Hindustan’.
During the first millennium AD, most Indians – other than Buddhists and Jains
– identified themselves by their caste or sect. ‘The clubbing together of all the
castes, non-castes and sects under one label – Hindu – would have been strange
to most people and even repugnant to some, since it would have made Brahmins,
Shudras and untouchables equal members of a religious community of
“Hindus”,’ observes Romila Thapar. ‘This was alien to the existing religions in
the subcontinent.’ Not until the second millennium did ‘Hindu’ acquire its
current meaning connected with a group religious identity. The earliest use of the
term in this sense came in the 14th century, though it was still infrequent, while
its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1655, from the
work of a British travel writer who visited the court of the Great Mughal: ‘The
Inhabitants in generall of Indostan were all antiently Gentiles, called in generall
Hindoes.’
The first temples that are recognizably Hindu, which are dedicated to Shiva
and Vishnu, did not appear until the Gupta empire of the 4th–6th centuries AD,
while the finest ones postdate the Gupta period. For example, the Shiva Temple
in a cave on the island of Elephanta near Mumbai, with its classic three-headed
(trimurti) Shiva sculpture symbolizing creation, protection and destruction, was
possibly built under the Kalachuri dynasty, or perhaps under the Chalukya
dynasty, in the 6th century. The ‘Shore’ Temple on the coast at Mahabalipuram
in Tamil Nadu, with its three shrines to Shiva and a reclining Vishnu, was built
under the Pallava dynasty in the early 8th century. The giant Kailasanath Temple
at Ellora in Maharashtra was sculpted out of the living rock by the Rashtrakuta
dynasty in the mid-8th century. The Brihadishwara Temple at Thanjavur in Tamil
Nadu, with its astonishing pyramidal tower, was constructed by the Chola
dynasty in the early 11th century. And the Kandariya Mahadeva temple at
Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, with its notorious erotic sculptures, was built by
the Chandella dynasty in the mid-11th century.
Between the end of the Mauryas in the 2nd century BC and the close of the
first millennium AD, there developed what is often called classical Hinduism,
involving a multifarious divine pantheon and devotional rituals, scriptures and
literature that remain popular in present-day India. Unlike the Vedic religion of
the Brahmins, the asceticism of the Shramanas or the austerity of the Buddhists,
this religion was suitable for the masses in need of reward, guidance and comfort
from offering their devotion to a god. Thus, the ten incarnations of Vishnu, the
cult of the Shiva lingam, the Manusmriti (Laws of Manu), the Puranas (Ancient
Stories) and the two epic poems, The Mahabharata and The Ramayana (the first
of which includes the Bhagavad Gita), all date from this long period of
development of classical Hinduism, even if their origins must in many cases lie
much earlier, in the period when the Vedas and the Upanishads were composed.
Despite much scholarly effort, there is insufficient evidence to date the
completion of the two epics in their latest form, or even to decide whether The
Ramayana was composed before The Mahabharata, or vice versa. The
Ramayana is sometimes dated to around 300 BC, and The Mahabharata to
around AD 400, but these dates mean little without specifying which stage in the
process of composition they refer to. Yet, as mentioned in the Introduction, the
epics have played a key role in forming the conception of ‘history’ of most
Indians – including that of Gandhi. The reason is implied in the preface to The
Mahabharata, written by its mythical author, Vyasa, who states that:
This work opens the eyes of the world blinded by ignorance. As the sun dispels darkness, so does Bharata
[the epic] by its exposition of religion, duty, action, contemplation, and so forth. As the full moon by
shedding soft light helps the buds of the lotus to open, so this Purana by its exposition expands the human
intellect. The lamp of history illumines the ‘whole mansion of the womb of Nature.’

Of all the writings that have come down from ancient India, the epics have
probably had the most lasting influence – not only on the visual and dramatic
arts (chiefly in India, though in Southeast Asia, too, on the walls of Angkor Wat
in Cambodia and in the shadow puppet plays of Java) but also on the lives of
Hindus. In his fascinating study of The Mahabharata, The Difficulty of Being
Good, Gurcharan Das, a successful Indian executive educated at Harvard
University, who gave up his business career to become a writer, comments: ‘The
Mahabharata is about our incomplete lives, about good people acting badly,
about how difficult it is to be good in this world. It turned out to be a fine guide
in my quest to make some sort of sense out of life’. In V. S. Naipaul’s India: A
Million Mutinies Now, a Bangalore-based engineer whose grandfather was a
Brahmin priest tells Naipaul about the epic’s influence at a more populist level:
Recently [1989] there have been on TV the serials of the epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata.
Most of the people on the streets of Bangalore haven’t actually read those epics. They haven’t read them
in the original or in an English version or in any version. They take them for granted; they’re there. They
would have known the main characters and the broad theme. They wouldn’t have known the details; they
wouldn’t know the inside characters. But the TV serials were an instant success.

Indeed, the televised Ramayana – which was transmitted in seventy-eight

weekly episodes on the national channel from early 1987 until mid-1988,
followed by The Mahabharata in ninety-four weekly episodes from late 1988 to
mid-1990 – is generally regarded to have been the most popular programme in
the history of Indian television, which brought the country to a virtual standstill
while it was on screen.
There have been many attempts to translate The Ramayana and The
Mahabharata into European languages since their European scholarly discovery
in the 19th century, most recently in an English edition of The Mahabharata
published by Penguin Classics which, though abridged by its translator John D.
Smith, nevertheless runs to some 900 pages. (The original is seven times the
length of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined.) Perhaps the most accessible
editions are the two 1970s prose versions in drastically abridged form by India’s
greatest English-language novelist, R. K. Narayan. In his introduction Narayan
regards The Mahabharata as ‘a great tale with well-defined characters who talk
and act with robustness and zest – heroes and villains, saints and kings, women
of beauty, all displaying great human qualities, super-human endurance, depths
of sinister qualities as well as power, satanic hates and intrigues – presented
against an impressive background of ancient royal capitals, forests, and
mountains.’ However, his versions are retellings, rather than translations. ‘I have
not attempted any translation, as it is impossible to convey in English the rhythm
and depth of the original language. The sound of Sanskrit has a hypnotic quality
which is inevitably lost in translation. One has to feel content with a prose
narrative in a story form.’ In truth, reading Narayan’s retellings, one cannot help
feeling that he was a little out of his depth. The very qualities of preciseness,
subtlety and humour in a purely domestic, contemporary setting for which
Narayan’s own fiction is affectionately cherished, are surely the antithesis of
epic poetry about the ancient past that is profoundly concerned with dynastic
politics, war and extreme violence.
The Ramayana, reputedly written by the sage Valmiki, is the shorter and
simpler of the two epics. It describes the royal birth of Rama in the kingdom of
Ayodhya, his tutelage under the sage Vishvamitra, and his winning of Sita, the
daughter of Janaka (the king mentioned in the Upanishads) by bending Shiva’s
mighty bow at a ceremony for a girl to choose her husband from a range of
suitors, known as a swayamvara. But Rama is banished from the court at
Ayodhya through an intrigue, and spends fourteen years in exile in the forest
with Sita and his favourite half-brother, Lakshmana. There the demon-king of
Lanka, Ravana, sends a golden deer to distract Sita’s protectors, and abducts her.
Imprisoned in his capital, Sita rejects Ravana’s attentions without wavering.
Rama and his brother make plans to rescue her, and after many adventures form
an alliance with the king of the monkeys, Sugriva; with the aid of the monkey-
general Hanuman and Ravana’s own brother, they attack Lanka. Rama slays
Ravana and rescues Sita. In a later version she undergoes an ordeal by fire so as
to clear herself of any suspicions of infidelity. But once Rama and his wife are
back in Ayodhya, he learns that his people still have doubts about Sita’s chastity,
and so he banishes her to the forest. There she meets Valmiki and gives birth at
his hermitage to Rama’s two sons. When the sons come of age, the family is
reunited, but Sita, having once more protested her innocence, requests
deliverance from the earth, which swallows her up.
The central plot of The Mahabharata is a family feud that becomes a civil
war, waged between the five Pandava brothers and their far more numerous
Kaurava cousins at Kurukshetra, a real place near Delhi in the modern state of
Haryana. It begins with the death of a king and a disputed succession between
his sons. The elder of two princes, Dhritarashtra, who is blind, is passed over in
favour of his brother Pandu. Dhritarashtra has a hundred sons – all named in the
epic – the eldest of whom is Duryodhana; but Pandu is prevented from fathering
children by a curse. However, his wife Kunti asks the gods to father children in
Pandu’s name. The gods agree to this request: the god Dharma will father
Yudhishthira; the god of wind Vayu will father Bhima; the god Indra, Arjuna;
and the twin gods of sunrise and sunset, the Ashvins, Nakula and Sahadeva (also
twins, who are born to Pandu’s second wife, Madri). When Pandu dies, enmity
and jealousy develop between the cousins and force the five Pandava brothers to
leave the kingdom. In their forest exile they jointly marry Draupadi, who is born
out of a sacrificial fire and is won by Arjuna after he shoots an arrow through a
row of targets. They also meet their cousin Krishna (not a Kaurava, but instead
related to them via their mother, Kunti), who becomes their friend and
companion. Although the Pandavas return to the kingdom, they are again sent
into exile after Yudhishthira loses everything to Duryodhana, the eldest of his
Kaurava cousins, in a rigged game of dice – this time for twelve years. The feud
culminates in a series of great battles, during which, through the Bhagavad Gita,
Krishna, as charioteer of the archer Arjuna, encourages a morally squeamish
Arjuna to do his duty by killing his Kaurava cousins. ‘To die in one’s duty is life:
to live in another’s is death.’ All the Kauravas die, and the Pandavas are
victorious, but on the Pandava side only the five brothers and Krishna survive.
Krishna dies when a hunter, mistaking him for a deer, shoots him in his foot –
his one vulnerable spot. The five brothers, along with Draupadi and a
companionable stray dog, set out for Indra’s heaven in the Himalayas. But each
of them, one by one, falls en route, leaving only the sinless Yudhishthira to reach
the gate of heaven. After passing further tests of his fidelity and constancy,
including a refusal to abandon his dog – who is then revealed to be the god
Dharma, Yudhishthira’s father, in disguise – Yudhishthira is at last reunited with
his four brothers and Draupadi, as well as with his cousin enemies, the Kauravas.
All now enjoy perpetual bliss.
Only a little over a fifth of The Mahabharata is occupied with this central
plot. The rest of the epic concerns a wide range of myths and legends, including
the romance of Damayanti and her husband, Nala, who gambles away his
kingdom as Yudhishthira did, and the legend of Savitri, whose devotion to her
dead husband, Satyavan, convinces the god of death, Yama, to restore him to
life. There are also descriptions of places of pilgrimage in various parts of India,
such as those associated with the Ganges and the Himalayas.
The great length of the two epics and the difficulty of translating them from
the Sanskrit cannot alone account for the generally cool western response to
them. The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, who
knew Sanskrit, famously quoted some words of Krishna to Arjuna in the
Bhagavad Gita – ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ – to
describe his feelings after watching the first detonation of the bomb in the
American desert in 1945. However, there are precious few other widely familiar
references to the Indian epics in western culture. More typical is the Macaulay-
like reaction of a young journalist in India, Rudyard Kipling, reviewing in 1886
the early instalments of a sixteen-volume edition of The Mahabharata translated
by Pratap Chandra Roy, in the pages of the Civil and Military Gazette.
According to Kipling:
section after section [of the epic] – with its monstrous array of nightmare-like incidents, where armies are
slain, and worlds swallowed with monotonous frequency, its records of impossible combats, its lengthy
 catalogues of female charms, and its nebulous digressions on points of morality – gives but the scantiest
return for the labour expended on its production…. [The] bare outlines of [the epics’] stories are known
and sung by the village folk of the countryside, taking the same place as folklore and love ditties; but as
living forces, they are surely dead and their gigantic corpses, like whales stranded by an ebbing tide, are
curiosities to be regarded from a distance by the curious, and left alone by those who look for any solid
return from laborious reading.

Not to be vanquished by the challenge of translation, a century later, in the

1980s (coincidentally at the very same time as the hugely popular Indian
television series), the English theatre director Peter Brook and the French writer
Jean-Claude Carrière teamed up to create an ambitious stage version of The
Mahabharata in English, followed by a film, both with an international cast. The
Brook production eschewed the unimaginative literalness of the Indian-made
television adaptation, but failed to be a masterpiece of dramatic art. Its staging
was splendid and ingenious but – despite some wonderful moments – the effect
was ultimately an unmoving cavalcade, curiously reminiscent of the great
French director Jean Renoir’s failure to make sense of Hinduism in his 1951
film, The River, even down to Renoir’s uncomfortable use of English, a language
in which he was no more at home than were many of Brook’s actors.
The most clear-sighted modern artist to attempt the presentation of The
Mahabharata in translation has been the film director Satyajit Ray, who was
uniquely placed to view it through both Indian and western eyes. Like R. K.
Narayan, Ray had the advantage of knowing the epic from a young age. As a
boy, he had heard the whole story read to him by a great-uncle, in a Bengali
version for children created by his writer grandfather – including a particular
grisly episode involving severed and exploding heads, which the boy Satyajit
wanted to hear at least four times. At the same time, Ray was also steeped in
European and American cinema, as well as being conversant with English
literature. In the late 1950s he read and reread The Mahabharata, ‘never ceasing
to marvel at it’, as he said, but feeling that a film could succeed only by
concentrating not on action scenes but on ‘the personal relationship – so
profound and so timeless, and the reflections on war and peace, with their eternal
verities.’ Yet, after giving a film adaptation much thought over several years in
the 1960s, Ray found himself stumped by the problem of how to introduce even
the main characters of its sprawling cast to a non-Indian audience, which he
assumed would have to see the film to make such a grand subject financially
viable. Without solving this, Ray knew, foreign audiences would be as
indifferent to a filmed Mahabharata as was Kipling to the literary original.
He never solved the problem. ‘I gave up for the very good reason that I
couldn’t establish the relationships for a foreign audience,’ Ray said in the
1980s. ‘In a film you have to address somebody as an uncle three times at least
to establish that he is an uncle.’ He was also bothered by the choice of language,
especially as he had in mind (like the later Brook) an international cast,
including the Japanese Toshiro Mifune, the lead actor in Akira Kurosawa’s
Seven Samurai (1954). ‘Bengali wouldn’t do,’ Ray said, ‘and Hindi doesn’t
sound right when spoken by Mahabharata characters. Perhaps English would
have been better.’ Sanskrit he didn’t even consider; Ray’s aim, like Brook in his
stage production, was to create ‘very modern human beings with modern
psychological feelings.’ That aim, and some particular cinematic possibilities,
explain Ray’s attraction to filming just the dice game episode of the epic, in
which Yudhishthira loses the kingdom to Duryodhana, watched by the Pandavas
and the Kauravas. ‘It shows all the characters, and all their aspects,’ said Ray. ‘I
don’t think I could have tackled the War at all. You see Peter Brook can suggest
a whole chariot with just a wheel. In cinema you can’t do that kind of thing.’
Mythical as the Indian epics are, their complex plots and confusing structures
are undoubtedly a reflection of the complexity and confusion of real dynastic
struggles, warfare between petty states and widespread rapine experienced by
the subcontinent during the centuries of their composition. The five centuries
between the overthrow of the Mauryas in a military coup d’état by their general,
Pushyamitra Shunga, who founded the Shunga dynasty in 187 BC, and the ascent
to the throne of Magadha by the first Gupta emperor, Chandra Gupta I (not to be
confused with Chandragupta, the first Mauryan emperor), in AD 320, are often
considered by historians to be a dark period. Shunga rule lasted for about a
century, despite an invasion by an Indo-Greek king, Demetrius I of Bactria,
which may have reached as far as Pataliputra. Thereafter came a dearth of strong
indigenous rulers, weakened by the further invasions from the northwest of three
different peoples descended from the mounted nomadic herdsmen of Central
Asia: the Scythians, the Parthians and the Yuezhi, who were known in India as,
respectively, the Sakas, the Pahlavas and the Kushans. Indian civilization
acquired little from the invaders except their cavalry techniques and ‘an almost
pathological dread of anarchy’, writes Basham, expressed in the concept of
matshya-nyaya, literally ‘the way of the fishes’ or, in modern parlance, ‘dog-eat-
dog’.
In the words of The Ramayana:
Where the land is kingless the cloud, lightning-wreathed and loud-voiced, gives no rain to the earth.

Where the land is kingless the son does not honour his father, nor the wife her husband.

Where the land is kingless men do not meet in assemblies, nor make lovely gardens and temples.

Where the land is kingless the rich are unprotected, and shepherds and peasants sleep with bolted doors.
 A river without water, a forest without grass,

A herd of cattle without a herdsman, is the land without a king.

With which view of kingship and anarchy, The Mahabharata concurs:

A man should first choose his king, then his wife,
and only then amass wealth;
for without a king in the world
where would wife and property be?

The son of Chandra Gupta I, Samudra Gupta, expanded the Gupta kingdom
through warfare. He annexed almost all of the small states along the Ganges and
Yamuna Rivers, and forced the eastern and northern border kingdoms of Bengal,
Kamarupa (Assam) and Nepal to pay tribute to the Guptas, along with the
western tribal oligarchies; even the kings of the Indo-Iranian borderlands offered
submission to him. In the south, he appears to have exerted less direct influence,
but he did send an expedition down the east coast as far as the Pallava kingdom
based at Kanchi (Kanchipuram) in Tamil Nadu, and he received the personal
submission of the king of Sri Lanka. During the reign of Chandra Gupta II, the
son of Samudra Gupta, Saka (Scythian) rule in western India was brought to an
end after three centuries. By the beginning of the 4th century – half way through
Chandra Gupta II’s reign – the Gupta empire covered most of northern India, and
what is often considered to be a ‘Golden Age’ of prosperity for India began, just
as the western empire of ancient Rome fell into disarray at the hands of invaders
from Central Asia. However, during the second half of the century, India, too,
was once again invaded by nomadic peoples from Central Asia, the Hunas
(Huns). Skanda Gupta initially achieved victory over the invaders, but during a
second wave of Huna invasion in about 500, the Gupta ruler saw his empire
splinter as Gupta vassals in the northwest and Rajasthan transferred their
allegiances to the Hunas. (Some scholars attribute the mysterious origin of the
later ‘Rajput’ tribes of Rajasthan – so named during the Mughal empire – to the
integration of the Hunas into the Hindu military stratum.) Narasimha Gupta, in
coalition with another Indian king, was able to defeat the Hunas and drive them
out of India in 528, but the Gupta empire was essentially finished by about 550,
although its suzerainty survived in the east, in Bengal, Orissa and Assam, until
as late as 570.
The Gupta and the Mauryan empires differed in important respects. For a
start, the Gupta empire had no commitment to non-violence, and indeed
employed war as a means of expansion. Secondly, it was somewhat smaller, but
more importantly, it was much less centralized. The Gupta emperor ruled more
through vassal kings, and was less directly in touch with the people, than the
Mauryan. One royal panegyric, a compound word of twenty components, titles
the emperor as ‘binding together the whole world by putting forth his strength
and by [accepting] acts of service [from other kings], such as paying personal
homage, the presentation of gifts of maidens, and soliciting his charter, sealed
with the Garuda-seal, to confirm them in possession of their territories’.
But while the affairs of state were still the Gupta emperor’s sole prerogative,
the organization of society was not. Socially, the authority of the Brahmins and
the taboos of the caste system were more powerful than they had been under the
Mauryas, as we might expect given the intervening centuries of development of
Hinduism. Under the Guptas, ‘the king’s recognized duty was to punish the
wicked, protect the good, direct men to their appropriate duties (varnashrama-
dharma), and prevent the intermixture of the various castes. However, the
classical Indian king was not to reform society or improve human nature, as
Asoka had attempted to do’, writes Thomas Trautmann. ‘Society, through the
system of castes, was largely capable of regulating itself, with minimal
interference by the state to restore the balance from time to time.’ The
importance of caste is shown by the first indisputable evidence of the practice of
something like untouchability in this period. According to the memoir of the
Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian, who visited Gupta India at the start of the 5th
century, the dwellings of a certain caste were segregated from the rest of society;
moreover, members of this caste, on approaching a market or a city, were
required to beat a piece of wood so as to announce their presence to those who
wished to avoid ‘polluting’ contact with them – a practice that would persist in
parts of India until the 20th century, in the beating of a small leather drum.
The Guptas also placed emphasis on the arts, unlike the Mauryas. Fine gold
coins struck by Samudra Gupta portray him as a warrior (wielding a battle-axe,
or slaying a tiger) and as a supporter of religion (conducting the Vedic horse
sacrifice) but also as a musician (playing the Indian lyre known as the veena).
The Gupta court patronized poetry, music and other fine arts, and scholarship,
including the founding of a university at Nalanda, not very far from Pataliputra.
The traditions of central Indian Gupta art seem to have influenced the soft
modelling of the figures and the delicacy of the carving in the paintings of the
later caves at Ajanta. But alas, there is no direct description of life at the Gupta
court in the poems and plays of the greatest literary figure in Sanskrit, Kalidasa.
However, on the evidence of his works’ refined style, many scholars think that
Kalidasa probably flourished some time during the reigns of Chandra Gupta II
and his son Kumara Gupta, that is, between 375 and 455.
 In the 7th century, however, well after the Gupta empire, one of the greatest
masters of Sanskrit prose, Banabhatta (or Bana), becomes a prolific source of
information about life in a relatively insignificant northern kingdom. Thanks to
Banabhatta’s biography, Harshacarita (The Deeds of Harsha), and to the Indian
travel journal of the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, historians know more
about life in the empire of the Buddhist king Harsha (or Harshavardhana) than
they do about life in the Gupta empire, or indeed in any ancient Indian kingdom,
including that of Asoka.
Harsha was originally the prince of a small state near Delhi. Over a reign of
four decades he assembled an empire stretching along the Gangetic valley from
the eastern Punjab to Bengal and Orissa, with allies further west in Kathiawar
and further east in Kamarupa (Assam), all of which quickly unravelled after his
death in 647. From Xuanzang’s account, it is clear that only Harsha’s personal
presence could have held such an unwieldy empire together. Harsha was
constantly on tour with his army, except during the rainy season, every day
(except when he was in battle) distributing alms to both Buddhists and
Brahmins, hearing the grievances of people against his officials, and residing in
temporary grass shelters that were burned after his departure.
Banabhatta – a Brahmin who had lost both his parents at a young age and
decided to lead a bohemian life, travelling adventurously to various courts and
universities with a group of friends including his two half-brothers by a lower-
caste woman, a snake doctor, a goldsmith, a gambler and a musician, before
returning home and eventually, after some coolness from Harsha, joining his
court – was a camp follower on Harsha’s tours. Although his Sanskrit is ornate,
as befits a court writer, and he sometimes exaggerates the virtues of the emperor,
as is only to be expected, Banabhatta’s powers of observation are exact and
concrete, and he shows an empathy with the poor that is rarely found in ancient
Indian literature. Banabhatta is perhaps the most modern in outlook of all of the
Sanskrit writers from the first millennium.
Here, for example, are a few sentences from his gritty description of Harsha’s
army striking camp to march against the enemy (in E. B. Cowell and F. W.
Thomas’s translation):
In front went the field-kitchens of the chief vassals. Standard bearers led the ranks. As the troops left
their small huts hundreds of their friends came out to meet them. The feet of the elephants trampled the
hovels by the roadside, and the people came out and threw clods at their keepers, who called on
bystanders to witness their assaults. Poor families ran from their wrecked and ruined huts. Oxen, bearing
the wealth of unfortunate merchants, fled from the hubbub. Clearing a path through the crowd with the
glare of their torches, runners led the way for the elephants bearing the women of the harem. Horsemen
shouted to the dogs running behind them. The veterans praised the tall Tangana horses, which trotted so
smoothly and quickly that they made travelling a pleasure. Unhappy Southerners upbraided their fallen
 mules. The whole world was swallowed in dust.

After Harsha, the Indian kingdoms of the late first millennium once again
revert to relative anonymity. In the north, in the middle of the 8th century, the
Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty rose to power in the middle Gangetic basin once ruled
by Harsha, with their capital at Kanauj. Their control was contested by the Pala
dynasty, until the Gurjara-Pratiharas defeated the Palas, who nevertheless
retained control of Bengal and Bihar, where they were active patrons of
Buddhism and of the Nalanda university until the 11th century. When the
Gurjara-Pratihara empire itself weakened in the 10th century, one of its vassals
established itself as the Chandella dynasty in central India, with its first capital at
Khajuraho.
Further south, new dynasties appeared on opposite sides of the peninsula. On
the northwestern side, in the Deccan, the Chalukyas of Badami ruled in the time
of Harsha, whom they fought under their ruler Pulakeshin II and defeated in 620,
agreeing to establish the Narmada River as the boundary between the Chalukya
kingdom and Harsha’s empire. But in the 8th century the Chalukyas were
themselves defeated by the Rashtrakutas, who went on to establish a powerful
state that clashed with both the Gurjara-Pratiharas to the north and the rulers of
the Tamil country to the south, until the Rashtrakuta dynasty was replaced in the
late 10th century by a revived Chalukya dynasty, generally known as the
Western Chalukyas (to distinguish them from the Eastern Chalukyas, a buffer
state between the Western Chalukyas and the south-eastern Chola empire). On
the southeastern side of the peninsula, the Tamil country and the Coromandel
coast, the Pallavas ruled from at least the time of Samudra Gupta’s expedition to
the south in the 4th century, perhaps even as early as the 2nd century. Pallava
rule lasted until the 9th century, when Vijayalaya Chola, who was probably a
vassal of the Pallavas, established the Chola kingdom, its name coming from one
of the three ancient Tamil kingdoms. The Chola empire, renowned for its bronze
sculptures combining simplicity with ornamentation, reached its zenith under
Rajaraja and his son Rajendra I in the 11th century, dominating not only much of
southern and eastern India but also Sri Lanka and Sumatra, Java and the Malay
peninsula – as a result of an unprecedented Chola naval expedition to Southeast
Asia.
We may know the names of these Indian dynasties (as well as those of other
dynasties of the first millennium AD), and the names of many of their rulers, but
we know rather little of their society and thought from their surviving
inscriptions. Even so, it is clear from the records that they presided over states
that were often stable, substantial and creative. Many dynasties endured for
centuries, with their rulers reigning for an average of twenty years: for example,
the Eastern Chalukyas lasted for over 400 years, the Palas of Bengal for nearly
400 years, and the Cholas of south India for more than 300 years – a period
considerably longer than that of the British empire in India. They also
commissioned and embellished some of the greatest of India’s Hindu temples at
sites such as Badami, Elephanta, Ellora, Khajuraho, Mahabalipuram and
Thanjavur, and filled them with treasures. India in the late first millennium
certainly did not descend into anarchy, as it did in the dark period between the
Mauryas and the Guptas. But neither were its rulers capable of uniting, as they
had under Asoka and Chandra Gupta II. And so, when the next great wave of
invaders after the Hunas arrived around 1000, western and northern India would
prove to be vulnerable to attack.
FIVE The Coming of Islam
 THE COMING OF ISLAM

India’s initial encounter with Islam was a peaceful and productive one. The
religion came in the shape of Arab merchants landing on the coastlines. Long
before the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Arab, Greek and Roman traders had
journeyed by boat from ports on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea such as
Berenike along the Arabian and African coasts of the Indian Ocean. In due
course they learned how to sail directly across the ocean to India with the
summer southwesterly monsoon wind; this method may first have been used by
a Greek skipper, Eudoxus of Cyzicus, between 120 and 110 BC, under the
guidance of an Indian sailor who had been shipwrecked in the Red Sea and
offered his navigational services in Alexandria. Some of the Arab traders settled
in the ports of the Malabar coast in southwestern India, such as ancient Muziris,
where they intermarried with the locals. From the 7th century, after their
conversion to Islam, they became a Muslim community in Kerala known as the
Moplahs (or Mappilas). Tradition has it – there is no historical evidence – that
one of the ruling Chera dynasty of Kerala even converted to Islam during the
lifetime of the Prophet and built the first Indian mosque in Kodungallur
(Cranganore) in 629, perhaps on the site of today’s Cheraman Juma Masjid, a
mosque built in the 12th century.
Subsequent Muslim incursions were less peaceful, however. The first Arab
(Umayyad) conquest of Indian territory occurred in Sindh, in 711; but the
attempted expansion of this Arab empire further into India was successfully
resisted by both the Chalukyas and the Gurjara-Pratiharas in the 730s. There was
now a hiatus until the late 10th century, when Turkish raids on India from
Afghanistan began, led by Mahmud of Ghazni; these raids continued for two
centuries until the defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan, leader of the Rajput Chauhan
dynasty, by Muhammad of Ghor at the second battle of Tarain, north of Delhi, in
1192. Soon after, the first Muslim government in India was established by
Turko-Afghans with its capital in Delhi: the first mosque there was completed in
1198, and what is known as the Delhi Sultanate began on Muhammad of Ghor’s
death in 1206 with the accession of his slave governor, Qutb-ud-din Aibak. It
endured through five successive dynasties, the Mamluks, Khiljis, Tughlaqs,
Sayyids and Lodis, although a sultan’s average reign was only ten years and
often ended squalidly in murderous violence, including the catastrophic sack of
Delhi by the Mongol ruler Timur (Tamerlane) in 1398. Then, in 1526, yet
another invasion from Afghanistan, this time by Babur, descendant of Timur and
Genghis Khan, inaugurated the Mughal empire, which ruled most of India until
the mid-18th century.
Thus, for some six centuries, the leading power in India was Muslim, not
Hindu. Even after the beginning of British rule in 1757, for many decades the
language of government and diplomacy remained Persian, as it had been under
the Mughals. At the time of Independence in 1947, undivided India had the
largest population of Muslims in the world – larger than the entire Muslim
population of the Middle East in the original homeland of Islam – before it split
into two nations, India and Pakistan, the first having a Hindu majority but
retaining a very substantial Muslim minority. The great question for historians is
whether the partition of India was an inevitable outcome of the long and often
troubled history of Hindu–Muslim relations in India, or not.
What caused the Hindu rulers of the 11th and 12th centuries to be more
vulnerable to the Turko-Afghan attacks than their predecessors had been to the
Arab attacks in the 8th century? Historians have advanced various theories since
the 19th century, including the enervating effects of tropical climates, the petty
rivalries born of feudal loyalties, the inherent divisiveness of the caste system
and the unwieldiness of the rulers’ elephant-mounted armies. However, all of
these factors would presumably have applied during the abortive 8th-century
Arab expansion. A more convincing explanation lies in the comparative strength
of the later invaders. ‘While several factors defeated the Hindu rulers, the
overriding elements in the Muslim victory were their advanced military tactics
and the tenacity of their Turkic leaders, who from their childhood were nurtured
in the guerrilla warfare of the steppes’, argues the historian S. A. A. Rizvi. ‘If
able leadership counted for anything, Mahmud [of Ghazni] and Muhammad [of
Ghor] were such leaders.’ Moreover, ‘Prospects of limitless Indian loot united
the tribes’. No doubt Muslim religious zealotry against Hindu idolaters was an
additional motivating factor; but while much evidence exists of Muslim
iconoclasm, surprisingly little is available for the forced conversions of Hindus
to Islam by the invaders.
There can be no question about the scale of the destruction by the Turko-
Afghans in India in the three centuries from the time of Mahmud of Ghazni to
the death of Alauddin Khilji in Delhi in 1316 – if we judge from the accounts of
Muslim chroniclers, such as al-Biruni, who was a contemporary of Mahmud.
Between 1001 and 1027 Mahmud made seventeen great raids on India, carrying
back to Ghazni enormous quantities of loot, as well as slaves, from palaces and
Hindu temples in the west and north of India, as far apart as the great Shiva
temple at Somnath in Kathiawar, the cities of Kanauj and Mathura in the Ganges
valley, which were captured and plundered, and the central Indian kingdom of
the Chandellas (not to mention Mahmud’s plundering of cities with ‘heretic’
Muslim populations such as Multan in the Punjab and Rey in Iran). At Somnath,
Mahmud ordered the upper part of the Shiva lingam to be broken and the
remainder to be taken to Ghazni, ‘with all its coverings and trappings of gold,
jewels and embroidered garments’, writes al-Biruni. ‘Part of it has been thrown
into the hippodrome of the town … Another part … lies before the door of the
mosque of Ghazni, on which people rub their feet to clean them from dirt and
wet.’ In the 1190s, the first mosque in Delhi, named Quwwat-ul-Islam (Might of
Islam), with its famous victory tower known as the Qutb Minar, was constructed
by Qutb-ud-din Aibak from the reassembled pillars, capitals and lintels of no
fewer than twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples (as noted in a Persian
inscription on the mosque’s gateway). In 1309–11, after Malik Kafur, a slave
who became general of the army of Alauddin Khilji, had campaigned
southwards as far as Madurai in Tamil Nadu, his army eventually returned to
Delhi with booty consisting of 612 elephants, 20,000 horses, 96,000 man of gold
(estimated to be 241 metric tons) and countless boxes of jewels and pearls, one
of which was said to have been the Koh-i-noor diamond – as recorded by the
historian Ziauddin Barani, who was personally present in Delhi. Barani writes in
his chronicle: ‘The old inhabitants of Delhi remarked that so much gold had
never before been brought into Delhi. No one could remember anything like it,
nor was there anything like it recorded in history.’
Scholarship and libraries suffered, too, under the Turko-Afghan assaults. The
great university at Nalanda in Bihar, founded under the Gupta dynasty, appears
to have been ransacked and its library burnt by the forces of Muhammad
Bakhtiyar Khilji around 1193, according to a contemporary Persian historian,
Minhaj Siraj – though he does not specifically name Nalanda, referring only to
the destruction of a city in western Bihar that was found to be a place of study. In
1234–35, the travelling Tibetan translator Dharmasvamin (who had noted the
invaders’ damage at Bodhgaya) was an eyewitness when Nalanda, now reduced
to just two monasteries with seventy monks, was attacked. A 17th-century
Tibetan authority on Buddhism in India, Taranatha, refers to three separate
attacks in the same period, in which ‘the Turks conquered the whole of Magadha
and destroyed many monasteries; at Nalanda they did much damage and the
monks fled abroad’ (chiefly to Tibet), or were massacred. Partly as a result of
such Turko-Afghan depredations, Buddhist manuscripts disappeared altogether
from India, as we know; and as much as 90 per cent of the extant Sanskrit
literature postdates 1200 and was written in the Indian regions unaffected by the
Muslim conquest, such as Kerala, according to an estimate by a modern Sanskrit
scholar.
Even from this one example of Nalanda, it is clear that the sources on the
looting and destruction of cities are not always specific and to some extent differ,
besides having their own possible biases. When it comes to the totality of Hindu
temple desecration by Muslim invaders and rulers, the debate becomes seriously
contentious and distinctly politicized. Hindu nationalists such as Sita Ram Goel
and other contributors to a two-volume work published in the 1990s, Hindu
Temples: What Happened to Them, have compiled a list from historical sources –
both Hindu and Muslim, contemporary and retrospective – ‘of 2000 Muslim
monuments built on the sites and/or with the materials of Hindu temples’; others
claim to have found as many as 60,000 instances of temple desecration. By
contrast, the historian of Indian Islam, Richard Eaton, in his book challenging
such claims, Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India, argues
for a mere eighty ‘reasonably certain’ cases of desecration based on a strict
reliance on ‘contemporary or near-contemporary epigraphic and literary
evidence’ for the period 1192–1729. Eaton explains:
Undoubtedly, some temples were desecrated but the facts in the matter were never recorded, or the facts
were recorded but the records themselves no longer survive. Conversely, later Indo-Muslim chroniclers,
seeking to glorify the religious zeal of earlier Muslim rulers, sometimes attributed acts of temple
desecration to rulers even when no contemporary evidence supports their claims. As a result, we shall
never know the precise number of temples desecrated in Indian history.

In 1990, the Hindu nationalist BJP launched a so-called ‘Rath Yatra’ (a term
normally denoting a Hindu chariot festival) at the Somnath Temple in Gujarat,
the site of the temple desecrated in 1026. The idea was that the BJP’s air-
conditioned Toyota van, decorated as a Hindu rath (chariot), would journey from
Somnath across northern India towards Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, the birthplace
of Lord Rama according to The Ramayana. There, said Hindu nationalists, an
ancient temple dedicated to Rama had been obliterated in 1528 by the
construction of a mosque on the authority of the first Mughal emperor Babur.
This political stunt had a major impact in galvanizing electoral support for the
BJP. It also prepared the way for the violent demolition of the mosque in
Ayodhya, known as the Babri Masjid, by a crowd of activists at the end of 1992
– an act that divided Indians and alerted the world to the growing power of
Hindu nationalism.
‘The destruction of the mosque was justified by some groups as the Hindu
reply to Mahmud’s iconoclasm’, notes Romila Thapar in her Somanatha: The
Many Voices of a History. ‘Such a view is historically untenable, because apart
from other factors, it nullifies the events that took place in and around
Somanatha [Somnath] during the intervening thousand years.’
The historiography of the Somnath Temple’s desecration is unexpectedly
confusing and complex. Turko-Persian and Arab writers, including al-Biruni,
discuss Mahmud’s raid, but give conflicting accounts, even on the question of
whether the idol was a lingam or some other kind of image. Al-Biruni is definite
about a lingam, as mentioned above, and some writers concur with him; other
early writers refer to an idol of a pre-Islamic goddess of southern Arabia, Manat,
or to an anthropomorphic figure stuffed with jewels. Al-Kazwini, writing in the
13th century, fails to describe the idol’s form but provides a long and incredible
account of how it floated in mid-air without any visible means of support,
perhaps because it was made of iron and its canopy was an ingeniously contrived
lodestone, as one of the raiding party suggested to Sultan Mahmud. ‘Whoever
beheld it floating in the air was struck with amazement, whether he was a
Mussulman or an infidel.’
Among Hindus, no contemporary or near-contemporary local source refers to
the raid, other than a passing mention in a Jain text, so it clearly did not outrage
Hindus at the time it occurred. It was still unmentioned two centuries later, in the
mid-13th century, during the rule of the Chalukya-Vaghela dynasty, when the
town authorities gave permission for a mosque to be built in the vicinity of the
temple by a Muslim shipping magnate with trading connections in Somnath, one
Nuruddin Firuz from Hormuz in Persia. The local raja, the town’s elite and the
Brahmin priests of the temple all welcomed this proposal, according to a lengthy
bilingual inscription in Sanskrit and Arabic drawn up by the Persian merchant,
which details the gift of land from the temple estate for the construction of the
mosque. There is no hint in this document of any earlier ill-feeling between
Hindus and Muslims at Somnath.
Indeed, the very first historical reference to any Hindu outrage at Mahmud’s
raid comes, strangely enough, from a heated debate over the Somnath Temple in
the British Parliament in 1843. The governor-general of India, Lord
Ellenborough, had issued a controversial proclamation to the chiefs and princes
of northern and western India. In a clear attempt to curry favour with Hindus,
and to repudiate the Afghan Muslims with whom Britain was then at war,
Ellenborough ordered the original gates of the Somnath Temple, which Mahmud
had supposedly carted away to Ghazni in 1026, to be restored to the temple, with
the express intention of avenging an 800-year-old insult to Hindu pride. But
rather than evoking a positive response in India from the princes and Hindus in
general, the British proclamation instead provoked a battle in London, with a
flight of rhetoric from Macaulay in the House of Commons attacking
Ellenborough, not only for advocating shameful Hindu idolatry of an
unmentionable kind (phallus worship) but also for employing the language of an
Indian potentate rather than an English imperialist. Why, said a mocking
Macaulay, should Ellenborough not imitate the Indian princes by sitting cross-
legged, allowing his beard to grow to his waist, wearing a turban and riding
about Calcutta ‘on a horse jingling with bells and glittering with false pearls’?
Although a parliamentary motion to censure Ellenborough was defeated, he was
recalled from India a year later, partly as a result of his misjudged Somnath
Temple proclamation.
From now on, the historical desecration of the temple began to acquire its
modern symbolic resonance. In the 1860s, the mysterious idol was incorporated
into the plot of Wilkie Collins’s hugely successful mystery novel, The
Moonstone, in the form of the Yellow Diamond. ‘Of all the deities worshipped in
the temple, the moon-god alone escaped the rapacity of the conquering
Mohammedans. Preserved by three Brahmins, the inviolate deity, bearing the
Yellow Diamond in its forehead, was removed by night, and was transported to
the second of the sacred cities of India – the city of Benares’, writes Collins. In
reality, the controversial gates in Ghazni were apparently retrieved by the British
and brought back to India, but discovered to be of non-Indian workmanship
(made from Afghan deodar, not the alleged Indian sandalwood) and discreetly
relegated to a storeroom in the Agra Fort. Yet, a century or so later, in 1951,
there was a report from Peshawar in Pakistan that millions of Afghan tribesmen
were willing to prevent the return of the gates from Afghanistan to India. Prime
Minister Nehru felt obliged to inform the prime minister of Pakistan that the
story was completely false: ‘In fact nobody knows if there are any such gates
anywhere and nothing of the kind is being sent from Afghanistan to India.’ In her
book on Somnath, Thapar notes a recent claim that the gates are now part of an
unidentified haveli (private mansion) in Rajasthan. ‘The claim to the identity of
the gates will doubtless be revived from time to time.’
On the whole, concludes Eaton from his careful study of the records,
desecration of temples was motivated far more by politics than by religion. In
other words, when a Hindu dynasty was overthrown by military force, a temple
that was particularly identified with the ruler’s power – typically because it
housed an image of his state-deity (usually Vishnu or Shiva) – tended to be
looted and destroyed by the invaders. Temples that were not identified in this
way, or which had been abandoned by their royal patrons, were normally left
alone. The Somnath Temple, which had long been closely associated with royal
power in Gujarat, was therefore targeted for desecration in 1026, and
subsequently by Alauddin Khilji in 1296, by two different sultans of Gujarat in
1375 and 1451, and yet again by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1701. But
the temples of the Chandella dynasty at Khajuraho were left undesecrated
(despite their explicit sexual imagery), because their royal patrons appear to have
abandoned them before the appearance of Turko-Afghan armies in the area in the
early 13th century. A further example of such differing treatments comes from
Benares under Mughal rule. In 1659, Aurangzeb, despite his well-known
religious orthodoxy, ordered local officials to prevent the harassment of Brahmin
priests in charge of the temples in the sacred city: ‘you must see that nobody
unlawfully disturbs the Brahmins or other Hindus of that region, so that they
might remain in their traditional place and pray for the continuance of the
Empire.’ Yet only ten years later, in 1669, Aurangzeb ordered the demolition of
the most important Hindu temple in Benares, the Vishvanath Temple, and the
construction of a mosque on the site. This was punishment for a rebellion of
landholders in Benares, whom Aurangzeb suspected of assisting the escape from
Mughal detention of his arch-enemy, Shivaji, the leader of the Marathas
(Mahrattas), a warrior caste found predominantly in the Deccan (modern
Maharashtra). Among the prime suspects was the great grandson of Raja Man
Singh, who had almost certainly built the Vishvanath Temple in the previous
century.
Cooperative Hindus formed part of government and administration under the
Delhi Sultanate, though much less so than they would under the Mughals. In
Delhi, and also in the sultanate’s provincial capitals, the court consisted
principally of Turks, Afghans and Persians, with few Indians. ‘Ethnic as much as
religious exclusivity made the Delhi regime totally alien to most of India’s
peoples’, notes John Keay.
At the apex of power was the Turko-Afghan military aristocracy, who
occupied the chief military and political offices of the kingdom. They ruled
through a group of Iranian Muslim administrators, many of whom were glad to
escape the disaster inflicted on Iran in 1258 by the Mongol invasion that
destroyed Baghdad and finished the Abbasid caliphate. These Iranians knew that
the Delhi Sultanate made ‘a practice of honouring strangers, and showing
affection to them, and singling them out for governorships or high dignitaries of
state’, in the words of the Moroccan traveller Ibn Batuta, who worked as a judge
in Delhi under the fabulously rich and bloodthirsty Sultan Muhammad bin
Tughlaq in the 1330s. Thus, thanks to Mongol rule in Iran, and to the wealth and
generosity of the military aristocracy in Delhi, India gave employment to a
steady stream of émigré Iranian Muslims literate in the Persian language who
became judges, land revenue officers and bureaucrats, scholars and teachers,
poets and artists. This continued to be true under the Mughals and, for a short
while, even under the British. It is these Indo-Persian chroniclers – both grateful
to and nervous of their generous Turko-Afghan patrons in Delhi – who must bear
some of the responsibility for the British colonial division of Indian history into
the ‘Hindu’ and ‘Islamic’ eras. With the important exception of Akbar’s courtier
Abu’l Fazl, most of the chroniclers took it for granted that Indian history began
with the advent of Indo-Muslim rule in 1192.
How then, given the separation between the Muslim rulers and the non-
Muslim ruled in these centuries of Muslim dominance, did India come to acquire
such a substantial Muslim population? Liaisons and marriages between Turkish,
Afghan and Persian men and Indian women certainly occurred, as happened in
the growth of Kerala’s Moplah community (and between early British
colonialists and Indian women in the 18th and early 19th centuries). These
naturally contributed to the numbers of Muslims in the cities. So, too, did the
conversion of Indians to Islam. But it appears that the process of conversion was
far from the stereotype of the invading Muslim warrior converting the Hindu
infidel under threat of imminent death.
There are three common theories to explain the conversion of Indians to
Islam. The first, involving military force, was favoured by Orientalist scholars in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who identified Islam as a religion of the
sword. But the evidence for it is weak. In Indo-Persian chronicles, it is true that
there are frequent phrases about the conquered like ‘they submitted to Islam’ and
‘they came under submission to Islam’, which suggest that the Indians changed
their faith under coercion. Read in context, however, the passages in which these
phrases occur generally refer not to religion but to submission to the state or its
army. Furthermore, and more convincing, the areas of India where there are most
Muslims are not the areas that came most directly under the rule of the Delhi
Sultanate and the Mughal empire, as one would expect from this theory, but
rather the areas on the fringes of Indo-Muslim rule, in eastern Bengal (present-
day Bangladesh) and the western Punjab. In addition, forced conversion of large
numbers of Indians would have created a reservoir of resentment – a potentially
disastrous policy for the vastly outnumbered Turko-Afghan elite.
A second theory involves political patronage and careerism. The idea here is
that Indians converted to Islam in exchange for favours granted by the ruling
class, for instance promotion within the administration or relief from taxes. Non-
Muslims under the Delhi Sultanate were liable for a poll tax (jizya) and a heavy
tax on agricultural land (kharaj), whereas Muslims paid no poll tax and a much
lower rate of tax on agricultural land. Census records from the 19th century note
that many Hindu landholding families had earlier declared themselves to be
Muslims in order to avoid imprisonment for non-payment of kharaj, or to keep
ancestral lands in the family. But again this theory stumbles on the fact that
conversions to Islam were highest not in regions near the centres of political
patronage in Delhi and the provincial capitals but in peripheral regions.
Moreover, it is by no means clear that a new convert was financially better off
than he had been as a Hindu. Although a Muslim was exempted from paying
jizya and kharaj, he was liable for zakat, a tax based on a man’s wealth, specified
in the Qur’an as a way of redistributing wealth to poor and distressed Muslims.
‘Islamicization neither undermined state finances nor helped the convert
financially’, according to Rizvi.
The third theory, which is by far the most popular one today, attributes
conversion to a natural human desire to escape social oppression. As Dalits in
post-Independence India converted to Buddhism to escape caste oppression, so
those living under Muslim rule oppressed by the Hindu caste system are thought
to have converted to Islam, with its message of social equality. But there are
serious difficulties with this theory too, flattering as it may be to modern
advocates of social justice. It is predicated on the concept of a monolithic Hindu
social order, unchanging over time and equally oppressive in all parts of India,
which is historically invalid. It assumes that Islam in pre-colonial times was
linked with ideas of social equality, for which there is actually no evidence, as
Eaton points out. Moreover, the geography of conversion to Islam is yet again
opposed to the theory. The vast majority of Islamicization under the Delhi
Sultanate and the Mughal empire took place not among Hindus in areas of
historic Brahmin domination, such as the valley of the Ganges, but in areas that
had never experienced the Hindu social order: among indigenous peoples in
eastern Bengal, western Punjab, the Northwest Frontier and Baluchistan.
Just how complex was the question of conversion is shown by the life of the
mystic poet Kabir, who is probably the best known of the many religious
reformers who formed part of the Hindu bhakti movement, which flourished in
the 14th–17th centuries. All of these reformers believed in the worship of a
personal god through love, and in their vernacular language, rather than in the
Sanskrit favoured by the Brahmins. Apart from Kabir, they include Sankaradeva
from Assam, Nanak from Punjab, Chaitanya from Bengal, Meera Bai from
Rajasthan, Tukaram from Maharashtra and Tyagaraja from Tamil Nadu. Nanak,
the first of the ten Sikh gurus, founded Sikhism by combining elements from
Hinduism and Islam into a monotheistic religion that rejected the caste system
but in due course – under its tenth guru – adopted five distinctive outward forms
of dress: long hair (to be covered by a turban) and an uncut beard, a comb, a
short sword, a steel bangle and short trousers (for horse riding).
 Kabir’s dates are sometimes given as 1440–1518, but there is no certainty. Not
even his family’s religion is certain. Was he a Muslim, as his name suggests? Or
perhaps a Hindu attracted to Islam? Tantalizing legends surround Kabir’s birth in
the region of Benares. In one version he is said to have been the illegitimate son
of a Brahmin widow who, to avoid public shame, left her baby near a pond
outside Benares, where he was found by a childless Muslim weaver and his wife,
who adopted him; his name (which means ‘Great’ in Arabic) was given to him
by a local judge.
In adult life Kabir became an ardent opponent of sectarianism, lambasting the
religious beliefs and rituals of both Hindus and Muslims in bitter and sarcastic
language that still has the power to offend. Here is a sample (translated by the
modern poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra):

If you say you’re a Brahmin

Born of a mother who’s a Brahmin,
Was there a special canal
Through which you were born?

And if you say you’re a Turk

And your mother’s a Turk,
Why weren’t you circumcised
Before birth?

As for his own faith, Kabir declared:

Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas
Nor the Qur’an
Will teach you this:
Put the bit in its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup,
And ride your wild runaway mind
All the way to heaven.

He also said:
 I am not Hindu nor Muslim
Allah-Ram is the breath of my body!

When he died, Kabir’s Hindu disciples wanted to cremate his body, while his
Muslim disciples wished him to be buried. Today Kabir has two graves, one
venerated by Muslims, the other by Hindus; and his reputation and poetry have
been embraced as much, if not more, by Hindus (including Tagore) as by
Muslims. For Hindus, Kabir seems to belong in the Vaishnavite tradition, that of
devotees of Vishnu, while for Muslims, he is close to Sufism.
Kabir’s vehemence against religious orthodoxy was presumably a response to
the society of his age, observes Gail Omvedt in her study of Buddhism and
Brahminism. ‘Brahminism in alliance with kings, whether Muslim or “Hindu”,
was in firm control of [Kabir’s] social world.’ Certainly such conservatism was
typical of both Delhi and Benares. They were barren places, artistically
speaking. The aesthetic of the Delhi Sultanate was borrowed from the Middle
East, as expressed in its mosques, fortifications and tombs, and was more
forbidding than enchanting; the softening and enlivening influence of Indian art
was yet to come. The Qutb Minar, the ruins of Tughlaqabad and the Lodi tombs
– perhaps the most striking survivals from the sultanate period in Delhi – are no
match for the finest buildings of the Mughals.
But this picture was not so true away from the capital city, in the provinces of
Bengal, the Deccan, Gujarat, Jaunpur, Kashmir and Malwa. The Delhi Sultanate
reached its furthest extent in India in the 1330s, during the reign of Muhammad
bin Tughlaq, and then started to fall apart. In 1336, two brothers whom the sultan
is said to have captured and converted, renounced Islam and founded the Hindu
kingdom of Vijayanagar, which over the next two centuries would become a
great empire in what is now the southern state of Karnataka. Although Hindu in
name, Vijayanagar was Hindu and Muslim in practice, its rulers even adopting
the costume of the Delhi sultans as a norm of diplomatic dress. In 1338, Bengal
became effectively independent of Delhi, followed by the Deccan in 1347 under
Bahman Shah. During the next century, after Timur’s sack of Delhi in 1398 that
accelerated the sultanate’s decline, all of the above provinces became either
partly or entirely independent of the centre.
In such provincial capitals as Ahmedabad, Gaur, Hyderabad and Mandu,
where Muslims were not in a majority, there was a much greater synthesis of
Muslim and Hindu cultures in architecture than in Delhi. At Mandu, on a
fortified hilltop with twenty-five miles of perimeter wall near Indore, in Madhya
Pradesh, the Malwa sultans spent the century or so before they too fell to the
Mughals, creating extraordinarily graceful and unorthodox architecture, both
religious and secular – a foretaste of the best Mughal architecture. The domed
tomb of the Malwa ruler Hoshang Shah, who ruled from 1405 to 1435, is the
first building in India to have been entirely marble-clad. The beauty of its
proportions moved the builder of the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan, on a pilgrimage to
Mandu in 1659, to ‘show his reverence’ in a Persian inscription beside the
entrance door. The fanciful Jahaz Mahal or Ship Palace, 400-feet long, is a two-
tiered edifice, with domed pavilions on its ‘deck’, and a sort of stone prow,
which appears to float at anchor in an artificial lake if viewed from an
appropriate angle, especially during the monsoons when the lake brims with
water. Rupmati’s Pavilion, built on a high point at the far edge of the fortress
overlooking the Narmada River, is named after Rani Rupmati, a singer, a Hindu
(possibly of Rajput origin) and the favourite queen of Baz Bahadur, Malwa’s last
sultan. Baz Bahadur and Rupmati are perhaps the Romeo and Juliet of India,
celebrated in songs, poems and movies. Baz Bahadur was defeated in battle by
the forces of the Mughal emperor Akbar in 1561 and forced to flee; Rani
Rupmati was captured and committed suicide, apparently by swallowing ground
diamonds.
SIX The Mughal Empire
 THE MUGHAL EMPIRE

The Mughals, for all the Medici-like aura that surrounds their name as India’s
most powerful and glamorous ruling dynasty, occupy an ambiguous position in
modern India. In a nation that scarcely lacks for statues of public figures, since
Independence not a single statue of a Mughal emperor has been erected in Agra,
the former Mughal capital, as noted by the historian William Dalrymple. Nor has
the Indian postal service produced any stamp with a portrait of a Mughal
emperor, despite issuing stamps commemorating many comparatively obscure
Indian leaders. Indeed, only four stamps from the decades since 1947 have
referred directly to the Mughal rulers. One shows calligraphy by the last Mughal
ruler, the accomplished Urdu poet Bahadur Shah Zafar, and was issued in 1975
on the bicentenary of his birth; another depicts the tomb of the emperor Akbar at
Sikandra, near Agra; while the other two show the Taj Mahal at Agra: the tomb
of Akbar’s grandson, the emperor Shah Jahan, and his favourite queen, Mumtaz
Mahal, which is often regarded as the greatest artistic achievement of the
Mughals.
Such an absence of public depiction of the emperors during the three centuries
or so of the Mughal empire, from its foundation by Babur in 1526 up to 1857, is
easily explained. Orthodox Islam discourages portraiture: there are no portraits
at all of the rulers of the Delhi Sultanate, for example – not even on their coins;
the Mughal emperors were unorthodox in commissioning numerous miniature
portrait paintings of themselves by their court artists. Nor is it surprising that the
Mughal rulers were not publicly celebrated during the British Raj after 1857.
Bahadur Shah Zafar, officially known as the king of Delhi, was the titular leader
of the disastrous uprising against British rule in 1857–58; the colonial authorities
were therefore hardly likely to celebrate Mughal rulers, however much they may
have wished to inherit the mantle of the Mughals as an aid to maintaining their
own power, by renovating Mughal monuments and using them as settings for
British imperial pomp and splendour. But the absence becomes harder to
comprehend in post-Independence India, especially at the time of the centenary
of the uprising in 1957, when Bahadur Shah Zafar might perhaps have been
expected to be hailed by Indians as an early freedom fighter against colonialism.
 Nehru, in The Discovery of India, expressed open admiration for the Mughals,
especially Akbar’s reign as embodying some kind of Italian Renaissance court.
‘Round himself Akbar collected a brilliant group of men, devoted to him and his
ideals’, wrote Nehru. ‘It was in his reign that the cultural amalgamation of Hindu
and Muslim in north India took a long step forward. Akbar himself was certainly
as popular with the Hindus as with the Muslims. The Mughal dynasty became
firmly established as India’s own.’ But this somewhat romanticized feeling did
not translate into official action after 1947 and was, it seems, not widely shared
by Nehru’s contemporaries, including Gandhi, and their descendants.
As Dalrymple remarks in The Last Mughal, his lively history of the pivotal
events of 1857–58:
The profoundly sophisticated, liberal and plural civilization championed by Akbar, Dara Shikoh [eldest
son of Shah Jahan] or the later Mughal emperors has only a limited resonance for the urban middle class
in modern India. Many of these are now deeply ambivalent about the achievements of the Mughals, even
if they will still happily eat a Mughal meal, or flock to the cinema to watch a Bollywood Mughal epic, or
indeed head to the Red Fort [in Delhi] to hear their prime minister give the annual Independence Day
speech from the battlements in front of the Lahore Gate.

Taking the long view of Mughal history, this attitude is comprehensible,

however. For all its undoubted artistic achievements, especially in architecture
and the visual arts, the Mughal empire was always a despotic and heavily
militarized regime, even under Akbar – and even when compared with some of
the militaristic regimes of the Delhi Sultanate. Secondly, the empire remained, in
many ways, a foreign imposition on India, not least in its ruling cadre and its
administrative language, Persian. Thirdly, the empire’s state religion was of
course Islam, though practised by its elite with widely varying degrees of
orthodoxy.
On the whole, departures from Islamic orthodoxy – as seen in the building of
the Taj Mahal, which despite being a tomb has the minarets appropriate to a
mosque – would prove to be a strength for the empire. In matters of religion and
politics, the Mughals were arguably stronger in India when their regime was
inclusive of all faiths, as under Akbar in the second half of the 16th century, and
weaker when they became more exclusively Islamic, as under Aurangzeb. It
was, after all, Aurangzeb, the most orthodox of the Great Mughals, who
weakened the empire by attempting to expand it to its greatest extent from the
1660s until his death in 1707, thereby creating the conditions for its decline and
breakup during the first half of the 18th century.
The same is true, too, of the unorthodox way in which the emperors involved
women in the running of the empire, whether as patrons of architecture and
investors in business, or more directly in court politics during fratricidal
succession struggles, and even as rulers in the case of Nur Jahan, the twentieth
and favourite wife of Akbar’s son Jehangir. In the memoirs and letters of the
emperors are recorded Babur’s Friday afternoon visits to his aunts, Akbar’s
devotion to his mother, Jehangir’s admiration for Nur Jahan and Aurangzeb’s
respect for his sister, Jahanara, despite her opposition to his succession. It was
Akbar’s 80-year-old mother, along with one of his wives, who managed to patch
up a feud between Akbar and Jehangir at the end of Akbar’s life, prevent civil
war between father and son, and ensure a peaceful succession.
Even from their unorthodox attitude to mood-enhancing drugs, which went
against the tenets of the Qur’an, the Mughal emperors seem to have derived a
certain strength. Many indulged seriously in alcohol and opium but managed to
control their consumption, unlike some of their offspring who died from alcohol
addiction, including two of Akbar’s three sons. Babur, before a great battle with
the Rajputs in 1527, ordered all of his gold and silver drinking goblets to be
smashed and the metal given to the poor, and the supplies of wine in his camp to
be destroyed. But a year or so later he wrote: ‘Everybody regrets drinking and
then takes the oath; but I have taken the oath and now regret it.’ He soon
returned to his old habits, much to the relief of his soldiers. Akbar, however, is
on record as having tried the newly arrived intoxicant tobacco in a hookah,
against the advice of his physician, on the grounds that ‘we must not reject a
thing that has been adopted by people of the world, merely because we cannot
find it in our books; or how shall we progress?’ – and then rejected the smoking
habit, despite tobacco’s popularity among the nobles of his court.
In many ways Babur, whose name means ‘Tiger’, set the tone for the entire
dynasty, combining audacious conquest with intelligent hedonism. Born in
Central Asia (now Uzbekistan) in 1483, the descendant of Timur on his father’s
side and of Genghis Khan on his mother’s side, Babur was a swashbuckling
adventurer and a distinguished military commander, determined to win for
himself a kingdom worthy of his ancestry. His deepest desire was to retake his
patrimony, Samarkand, but though he succeeded in doing so twice, the first time
at the age of only 15, his army was unable to hold the city. Eventually, Babur
captured Kabul and made it his base. From there he launched his first raid into
northwest India in 1505. But it took another two decades before he made a direct
attack on the Delhi Sultanate of Ibrahim Lodi, at the invitation of Lodi’s
opponent, the governor of the Punjab. In the decisive battle of Panipat in 1526,
Babur defeated the Lodi army of 100,000 men supported by 1,000 elephants
with a mere 12,000 men, by relying on a combination of the loyalty to him of his
compact group, skilful manoeuvering by his cavalry, and the use of firearms and
the new weapon of field artillery under the command of a Turkish officer
(neither of which was available to the Lodi army).
Within this soldier-statesman, however, was a poet and a man of letters, ‘of
sensibility and taste and humour’ (writes the historian Percival Spear), with a
particular love of the Afghan hills and streams and of Persian gardens. The
combination of soldier and artist is revealed in Babur’s engaging memoirs, the
Baburnama, written in his Turkic mother tongue, translated into Persian at the
behest of Akbar, and then into English. In them Babur expresses a low opinion
of the flat plains of Hindustan he had conquered, compared with the Persia and
Afghanistan of his youth and early triumphs. He shows none of the curiosity
about Indian life and thought to be found in his grandson Akbar, but rather
eloquently expresses the Persian and Afghan orientation that would influence the
Mughal elite from the beginning of the empire to its end in 1857. In Babur’s
words:
Hindustan is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. The people are not handsome. They have
no idea of the charms of friendly society, of frankly mixing together, or of familiar intercourse. They
have no genius, no comprehension of mind, no politeness of manner, no kindness or fellow-feeling, no
ingenuity or mechanical invention in planning or executing their handicraft works, no skill or knowledge
in design or architecture; they have no horses, no good flesh, no grapes or musk melons, no good fruits,
no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in their bazaars, no baths or colleges, no candles, no torches,
not a candlestick.

Although Babur died at Agra, in 1530, and was at first buried there, it is no
surprise that his body was soon reburied in a tomb in Kabul, the place where he
felt that he belonged.
Babur’s son, Humayun, is normally regarded as the second Mughal emperor,
who reigned from the death of Babur until 1556. Less well known is the fact that
Humayun was emperor only in name for fifteen years; in fact, between 1540 and
1555, the fledgling Mughal empire ceased to exist. After a decade of fighting
with the sultans of various provinces in the 1530s, in which he failed to
introduce an effective administration, Humayun was chased out of Hindustan
altogether after a battle with an Afghan leader who had risen to power in eastern
India as the prime minister of the sultans of Bihar, Sher Khan. In place of
Humayun, Sher Shah Suri, as Sher Khan now styled himself, reigned in Delhi
until his death in 1545 in an accidental explosion of gunpowder. He proved to be
an able ruler, who laid the foundations of systems of administration, revenue
collection and justice on which Akbar would build. Sher Shah’s most lasting
achievement were four great roads across northern India (one of them a
precursor of the modern Grand Trunk Road), lined with fruit trees and with
1,700 caravanserais placed at regular intervals. Humayun, by contrast, was
forced into a wandering existence. He at first took refuge in the deserts of Sindh
and Rajasthan, where he spent three years trying to raise support and produced
his son Akbar, born at Umarkot in Sindh in 1542. The next year, he fled to Iran
with a very small entourage and was welcomed by Shah Tahmasp, the Safavid
ruler. After struggles with two of his brothers for control of eastern Afghanistan
over the next decade, Humayun managed to return to power in Delhi, when his
general, Bairam Khan, defeated the divided successors of Sher Shah in 1555.
But he reigned again as Mughal emperor for only six months. In early 1556, it is
said that Humayun was on the roof of his library in Delhi’s Purana Qila (Old
Fort) discussing with his astrologers when Venus was expected to rise, when he
heard the call to prayer from a nearby mosque. Rising to go, he somehow caught
his foot in his robe and fell, bashing his head on some stone stairs, and died two
days later. ‘Like his father, he both lost a kingdom, and gained one, and came
from Kabul to do so’, notes Francis Robinson in his history of the Mughal
emperors.
Akbar was only 13 when his father died. Humayun had made Bairam Khan
his son’s formal guardian while Akbar was growing up in Afghanistan during his
father’s wilderness years. Bairam Khan immediately had Akbar formally
crowned and then acted as his regent. In a second battle at Panipat, in late 1556,
the general saved the newly restored empire by defeating a much larger Afghan
force from the Suri dynasty. But in due course tensions grew between the regent
and the youthful ruler. In 1560, they came to a head when Akbar successfully
dismissed Bairam Khan, inviting him to proceed on pilgrimage to Mecca. Two
years later, he was forced to discipline another general, his foster-brother Adham
Khan, the conqueror of Malwa (including Mandu), who had murdered Akbar’s
newly appointed prime minister within the royal palace itself and may have
intended to assassinate Akbar himself. Akbar personally struck Adham Khan on
the head with a crushing blow from his fist and ordered that he be thrown from
the terrace of the harem, twice, to ensure that his brains were spilled. Thus, aged
20, Akbar achieved a personal grip over the empire as it grew to cover most of
the northern half of India, which would not slacken for the next four decades. He
is, by universal consent, the greatest of the Great Mughals.
Part of Akbar’s genius was undoubtedly his shrewd ability to understand and
deal with people at all levels of society – perhaps born out of his insecure early
years in Afghanistan, but certainly fed by his insatiable curiosity. He seems to
have been equally at home with nobles and commoners, Muslims and Hindus,
warriors and priests (including Jesuit Fathers from Goa), intellectuals and artists,
the virtuous and the villainous. In one of the many intriguing stories told in the
Akbarnama, Abu’l Fazl records a story he heard from the emperor himself of his
attendance, aged 18 or 19, at a crowded local festival in Agra – incognito.
 He was engrossed in observing the various sorts and conditions of humanity present, when ‘suddenly
some ruffians recognized me and said so to one another. When I became aware of this, I without the least
delay or hesitation rolled my eyes and squinted and so made a wonderful change in my appearance. In a
way that they could not imagine I, as a spectator, was observing the devices of Fate. When those people
looked closely at me, they, on account of the change in my appearance, could not recognize me, and said
so to one another: “These are not the eyes and features of the King.” I quietly moved away from the
scene and went to my palace.’ While telling the story his Majesty showed us what he had done, and so
made our wonder the greater. In truth, it was a very strange performance.

Akbar’s most influential act of government policy was to institute an imperial

civil service based on the concept of rank, or mansab, held by an officer, which
came in thirty-three grades. In return for supplying a number of men and horses
for military service – ranging from ten to 10,000 men – a mansabdar was
granted the right to draw revenue from certain lands (known as a jagir) assigned
to him. However, the jagir could not be held in the region where the officer was
posted, and it was non-hereditary; moreover, the officer would be moved from
one post to another during the course of his service; and upon his death, his
property would be resumed by the state. Akbar’s intention was to prevent the
development of a landed aristocracy, and to limit the opportunities for
corruption. But his mansabdari system had the unintended effect of encouraging
needless spending. ‘Why not get the glory to be derived from ostentation and
public works when you could pass nothing on to your family?’ Spear observes.
‘Thus the Mughal nobles were notable for their ostentation, their crowds of
retainers with even more than average insolence of office, their works of piety in
the shape of mosques, wells, and rest houses, of ease like their gardens and
summerhouses, and of remembrance like their great domed tombs.’
The system was, however, open to both Hindus and Muslims, and deliberately
included the Rajput warrior lineages, who were given high rank, despite a
terrible military struggle between certain Rajput dynasties and the Mughal
emperor in Rajasthan in the 1560s. At the same time, Akbar took Rajput
princesses as wives, and arranged Rajput marriage alliances for his sons. This
adroit policy towards the Rajputs helped to make the whole Hindu community
accept the Mughal government as in some sense their own. In 1564, Akbar also
lifted the imposition of the long-established jizya (poll tax) on non-Muslims.
Even so, lists in the Ain-i-Akbari, the record of Akbar’s fifty-year administration
kept in Persian, show that the imperial service was dominated by foreigners.
About 70 per cent of its personnel were from the northwest, and only 30 per cent
from India, roughly half of the Indians being Muslim and half Hindu. This
pattern persisted in the empire through the 17th century, and proved to be helpful
to the Mughals’ British colonial successors by accustoming Indians to
administration by foreigners.
 Akbar’s curiosity about other religions is well known. Islam, on its own, did
not satisfy him, as he made clear while hosting formal debates between Muslim
theologians, to the consternation and anger of the orthodox. On one side of the
great gate to the chief mosque in the extraordinary capital city, Fatehpur Sikri,
which Akbar built near Agra in the 1570s, appears a Persian inscription that
reads: ‘Jesus Son of Mary (on whom be peace) said: The world is a bridge, pass
over it, but build no houses on it.’ In 1580, Akbar attracted Jesuits to his court
and spent many months in colloquy with them; at times, he seemed to them to be
on the point of converting to Christianity. Father Antonio Monserrate even
accompanied the emperor and his army to Afghanistan and kept a detailed record
of the campaign, ‘though it is a wonder that he returned alive, for on the Khyber
Pass he would certainly have been stoned to death for his denunciation of the
Prophet before a crowd of angry Muslims, had not fear of Akbar restrained
them’, notes Laurence Binyon in his biography of Akbar. The emperor was also
keenly interested in Zoroastrianism, Jainism and Hinduism. In 1582, he
commissioned a Persian translation of The Mahabharata, in an abridged form, to
be made with the help of learned Brahmins. This literal version was then
polished by the poet Faizi, the brother of Abu’l Fazl, and completed in 1586 as
the Razmnama (Book of Battles). Akbar ordered copies to be made for libraries
so that knowledge of the work would spread among the nobility throughout the
empire. Yet, in the end, it appears that no existing religion was sufficient for him,
and this led to the creation of an eclectic cult based on his own person, known as
the Din Ilahi (Divine Faith). The cult was, however, limited to his own circle and
not promoted in the empire. In one of Akbar’s remarks collected together at the
end of the Ain-i-Akbari by Abu’l Fazl, he is quoted rather winningly as follows:
‘The Indian sages say that for the garnering of good works, one should have
death constantly in view, and, placing no reliance on youth and life, never
comfort the self. But to me it seems that in the pursuit of virtue, the idea of death
should not be thought of, so that without any hope or fear, one should practice
virtue simply because it is good.’
However, not even Akbar could solve the problem of his succession – a
problem that would dog every Mughal emperor after him. As with the Delhi
Sultanate, vicious struggles between fathers, sons and brothers were common
among the Mughals, given that the principle of primogeniture did not apply. In
Akbar’s case, since two of his three sons had predeceased him through
alcoholism, the choice inevitably fell on his eldest son, Salim. He, however, now
in his thirties, was so impatient to step into his father’s shoes that he had coins
struck in his name as emperor in 1602. Akbar sent his close friend Abu’l Fazl to
intercede, and Salim had his father’s trusted emissary murdered. Negotiations
broke down altogether, as Akbar contemplated using the army against his son.
But in 1604, Salim, now under pressure from his own son, was persuaded to
come to court, where he was slapped in the face by his father and placed in the
care of a doctor. The following year, on his deathbed, Akbar invested Salim as
his successor. He titled himself Jehangir (World-Seizer).
Hardly surprisingly, Jehangir’s own death in 1627 precipitated a succession
crisis, too. The winner, Jehangir’s third son Prince Khurram, on gaining the
throne as Shah Jahan, immediately had six of his male relatives killed: his
younger half-brother, the two sons of his deceased older brother and the three
sons of his deceased uncle. Nur Jahan, Jehangir’s powerful wife, was pensioned
off; she retired from government to supervise the building of the late emperor’s
tomb in Lahore.
The most notorious succession struggle was that of Shah Jahan and his four
sons, notably his eldest son Dara Shikoh and his third son Aurangzeb. Dara was
his father’s favourite and his designated successor. An intellectual and scholar,
who had translated the Upanishads into Persian, and a patron of painting, music
and dancing, he resembled his great-grandfather Akbar in his open-mindedness
and wide-ranging religious interests. Aurangzeb, by contrast, was unloved by his
father, with devastating results. A successful military commander and
administrator, he was puritanical in personal behaviour and orthodox in religious
matters. Aurangzeb disliked all that Dara represented, seeing him as a threat to
Islam in India. In 1658, Aurangzeb seized the fort at Agra and imprisoned Shah
Jahan there, within sight of the emperor’s Taj Mahal. With the help of another
brother, Aurangzeb then defeated Dara in battle near Agra, and declared himself
emperor. Although Dara escaped, he was eventually handed over by a
treacherous Afghan chieftain. Now Aurangzeb – supported by his sister
Rawshanara but opposed by another sister Jahanara – had his elder brother killed
for apostasy from Islam. Dara Shikoh’s headless body was paraded through
Delhi, and then buried in the tomb of Humayun. In a grisly revenge on his father,
Aurangzeb is said to have had the severed head of Dara sent to the ageing Shah
Jahan in his fortress prison inside a meat dish.
Like Akbar, Aurangzeb ruled for almost fifty years, during which he brought
most of India at least nominally under Mughal control, and considerably
increased the economic wealth of the empire. But this expansion came at a cost.
Impressive and indomitable as he was, in most respects Aurangzeb’s rule lacked
the zest and flair of his great predecessor. Francis Robinson puts it well: ‘once in
power, all his passion was expressed through the business of ruling, which he
embraced with an implacable and joyless sense of duty.’ Many historians have
seen this as the result of Aurangzeb’s Islamic orthodoxy – for example, in his
resented reimposition of the jizya abolished by Akbar, in 1679 – although
religion was not always in evidence in his decisions. It is, however, indisputable
that Aurangzeb succeeded in antagonizing a wide range of regional rulers by his,
often brutal, military interventions: the Sikhs and the Jats in the Punjab, the
Rathor Rajputs in Rajasthan, the Ahoms in Assam and, most of all, the Marathas
in the Deccan, led by Shivaji until his death in 1680, and then by his son.
Aurangzeb’s obsessive focus on the Deccan during the second half of his rule,
and his consequent absence from Agra and Delhi, combined with his ultimate
failure to subdue the Marathas, despite campaigning relentlessly against them
into his late eighties, prepared the way for the disintegration of the Mughal
empire after his death, culminating in the sack of Delhi by the Persian invader,
Nadir Shah, in 1739.
It is hard to disagree with Aurangzeb’s own disillusioned and guilt-ridden
assessment of himself, written to his son Prince Azam only a few days before he
died:
May peace be upon you and those who are near you. Old age arrived and … strength departed from the
limbs. I came alone [into this world] and I go as a stranger [to the next world] … I was devoid of
administrative [tact] and care for the welfare of the people. [My] dear life has been spent in vain. God is
present in this world but I do not see Him…. The whole [royal] army is confused and confounded….
Though I have strong hope in the favours and mercy [of God], my actions do not allow me to think over
[i.e. I am afraid on account of my actions] … Goodbye; goodbye; goodbye.
SEVEN
European Incursions and East India
Companies
 EUROPEAN INCURSIONS AND EAST INDIA COMPANIES

Long before the Jesuits visited Akbar at the Mughal court in the 1580s,
Europeans had made their way to India. The earliest to arrive – discounting
Alexander of Macedon and his Greeks, who stopped not far beyond the Indus –
were ancient Greek and Roman sailors and merchants, about whom little is
known. Their reports of the mysterious lands of the East contributed to
Ptolemy’s map of the world in the 2nd century AD, and their yarns may have
helped to spawn the fantastical tales of India in medieval European bestiaries.
The Indian elephant, for example, was said to have legs like pillars without
knee joints, so that it could not get up if it fell over. Elephants therefore had to
sleep standing up against trees; and so hunters were said to saw through trees
half way in the hope that elephants would lean against these trees, fall down and
become trapped.
Indubitably real, however, was the Greek and Roman maritime trade with
India in spices and textiles in exchange for European gold. Roman coins
excavated from peninsular India and Ceylon are so plentiful that the coins must
have circulated at this period as Indian currency, although there is no evidence
that European traders settled in the subcontinent. The first Europeans actually to
live in India were Jews who settled on the Malabar coast. They probably arrived
as early as the first century after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, given that a
Roman merchant ship plying regularly between the Red Sea and Arabia,
Malabar and Ceylon found a Jewish colony in Kodungallur (Cranganore) in the
2nd century. At any rate, a Jewish community was established in Kodungallur by
the 5th century, at the latest, when it received a grant of land and other rights
from a local Indian ruler, recorded on a copper plate in an early Tamil script,
which still exists.
The European colonialists who took over control of northern India from the
Mughals in the mid-18th century were therefore relative latecomers from the
West. The British arrived in India only in the early 17th century after the
founding of the East India Company in London, with a royal charter from Queen
Elizabeth dated 31 December 1600 granting the ‘Governor and Company of
Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ a national monopoly of trade
in the East. Other nation-based East India Companies, founded by the Dutch, the
Danes, the Portuguese and the French, were chartered in 1602, 1616, 1628 and
1664, respectively. Of these, the serious rival to the British was the Dutch East
India Company, officially called the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie
(VOC), which was particularly successful in Ceylon and south India, and of
course in the Dutch East Indies and South Africa. By 1669, at the zenith of its
success, the VOC had more than 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000
employees and a private army of 10,000 soldiers, and was the richest private
company the world had ever known, paying a dividend of 40 per cent on the
shareholder’s original investment. Between its founding in 1602 and its
liquidation at the end of the 18th century, the VOC operated 4,785 ships and
carried more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods, as compared with 2,690
ships operated by the British East India Company carrying one-fifth of the
tonnage of its Dutch competitor.
But of course it was Portugal, not Holland or Britain, which was the earliest
European nation to settle in and rule over any part of India. In 1498, Vasco da
Gama sailed across the Indian Ocean from Malindi in east Africa to Calicut
(Kozhikode) on the Malabar coast, in search of ‘Christians and spices’, as he
said. In 1503, the Portuguese admiral, Afonso de Albuquerque, established the
Portuguese empire in India by doing battle with the zamorin (ruler) of Calicut
and building a fort at Cochin, which became the first Portuguese capital. On a
second expedition, Albuquerque sailed further north and took Goa from the
Muslim king of Bijapur in 1510, with some help from a small force of Malabari
soldiers led by a Hindu privateer in the service of the Vijayanagar empire.
Unsure of their victory after this conquest, the Portuguese lived on board their
fleet anchored along the shore for ten years. Then they firmly established their
rule on the west coast of India, known as the Estado da India (State of India), by
trading with the world, building elaborate Catholic churches and colonial
mansions in Goa, converting the local heathen, starting up the Inquisition and
sending Jesuit emissaries to the courts of Akbar and Jehangir – as well as
persecuting the Jews further down the coast, including the Jew Town at Cochin
with its famous synagogue, which the Portuguese sacked when they occupied
Cochin. In 1535, they acquired from the sultan of Gujarat the seven islands of
Bombay – the name is probably derived from an Old Portuguese phrase – which
were handed over to the British in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of
Braganza, daughter of the king of Portugal, when she married King Charles II.
Portuguese rule in India lasted for some four and a half centuries until 1961, in
which year Goa – along with two other Portuguese coastal enclaves further north
on the coast of the Arabian Sea, Daman and Diu – was forcibly annexed by the
Indian army at the behest of Nehru, bringing an end to the last European colonial
possessions in India.
The Dutch explorer, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, visiting Goa in 1583, noted
that one could buy there the products of all Asia. Some of the church vestments
were fine examples of local raised gold and silver embroidery, while a chasuble
had all the qualities of Chinese porcelain in its style, motifs and composition,
altar frontals were marked by Persian influence in their treatment of foliage, and
capes displayed a Mughal flavour in their decorations of flower sprigs.
Portuguese global trade introduced into India an amazing variety of plants,
vegetables and fruits from the Americas, Africa and the East Indies. The chilli
pepper – that apparently indigenous spice of Indian cuisine – came to India with
the Portuguese from Pernambuco in Brazil. The cashew nut also came from
Brazil, and the peanut from Africa. Tobacco arrived from the Americas via the
Deccan at the Mughal court in Agra by the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar,
as we know, and was denounced by Akbar’s son Jehangir as a pernicious weed.
The pineapple, brought from the Caribbean to Europe by Christopher Columbus,
reached the dining table of the Mughal emperor via Portuguese merchants. The
papaya came from the Spanish Indies ‘by way of the Philippines or Luzon to
Malacca and so to India’, according to Linschoten. Cassava, the sweet potato,
the mangosteen, the lichee, the sweet orange, medicinal drugs such as ‘China
root’ (Smilax glabra) and decorative garden plants such as the ‘marvel of Peru’
(Mirabilis jalopa), were also introduced by the Portuguese. Their record of
beneficial activity prompted the 17th-century French Protestant traveller, Jean-
Baptiste Tavernier, who worked extensively in India as a diamond merchant, to
remark that ‘the Portuguese, wherever they came, make the place better for those
that come after them’. So important was Portuguese as a language in India that
throughout the 18th century the British East India Company required its
ministers to learn it. Robert Clive, the founder of the Company’s rule in Bengal,
was fluent in Portuguese, though not in any Indian language. Portuguese was
even used for some Protestant preaching in church in British Calcutta during the
1780s.
Portuguese rule in India was distinct from British rule in several important
ways. From its beginnings around 1500, the Portuguese had modest territorial
ambitions, regarding themselves as a primarily maritime power with only a small
army, unlike the British. Secondly, the colonial authorities in Goa always ruled
their Indian possessions in the name of the royal government in Lisbon, whereas
the British ruled through the London-based court of directors of their East India
Company, which was admittedly regulated with increasing firmness by the
British Parliament after 1773 but not formally dissolved until the assumption of
government in India by the British Crown after the uprising of 1857–58. British
policy from the early decades of their rule was therefore dominated by the
commercial considerations of a joint-stock company. Social reforms (for
example, the abolition of sati), changes to Hindu and Muslim family law (for
example, giving rights to women) and religious proselytization by Christians
against idol worshippers, were discouraged on the grounds that they would upset
Indians and therefore trade. Indeed, Christian missionaries were banned from
British India until 1813, whereas the Inquisition operated in Goa from as early as
1560.
Perhaps most significant of all, the attitude to the colonized country in
Portuguese Goa resembled that in the British dominions of America, Canada and
South Africa rather than the one prevalent in the British Raj. The Portuguese in
many cases regarded India, rather than Portugal, as their home, with generations
born and brought up in Goa. By contrast the settlement of British men and
women in India – though floated from time to time by influential Britons and
even some Indians – was actively discouraged by the East India Company, for
fear that it would lead to friction between British settlers and Indians. Those who
did settle were looked down upon by those who did not; and if they married
Indians, their offspring – originally known as Eurasians, but later called Anglo-
Indians – were generally unwelcome in official circles. Instead of staying on,
most of the British in India returned to Britain after completion of their service,
unless they were unfortunate enough to succumb to disease like the linguist
William Jones, mentioned earlier, who was a judge in Bengal; they also
preferred, if feasible, to educate their children in Britain, not India. As a colonial
governor of the Dutch East India Company, Anthony van Diemen, remarked in
the first half of the 17th century, ‘Most of the Portuguese in India look upon this
region as their fatherland, and think no more about Portugal. They drive little or
no trade thither, but content themselves with the port-to-port trade of Asia, just
as if they were natives and had no other country.’
Nevertheless, Portuguese culture failed to spread in India, unlike British
culture. Today, beyond Goa, it has almost completely vanished. ‘The West,
though mingling its Portuguese blood with the Indian, remained culturally alien
and sterile’, writes Percival Spear. Anyone visiting Panaji, the modern capital of
Goa, India’s smallest state, cannot fail to be struck by the impression that it is the
only city in India that might almost be taken for a European city – not least in its
orderliness and cleanliness.
At the heart of the Estado da India, there was a contradiction concerning
assimilation between the colonizer and the colonized: although the Portuguese
were less racially exclusive than the Indians (certainly as compared to the
British), at the same time they were more religiously intolerant. The Inquisition
in Goa brought to trial more than 16,000 persons, of whom fifty-seven were
executed, during the two centuries up to its temporary abolition in 1774. The
conversations about Christianity between the Jesuits from Goa and the Mughal
emperor Akbar failed mainly for reasons of Catholic dogmatism, including
disgust at Akbar’s rejection of monogamy. In Goa itself, the Indians, for their
part, while embracing Catholicism, generally continued to adhere to caste.
When, in 2004, the British journalist Edward Luce, with his Indian wife, visited
the home of a well-known Goan Catholic female author, Luce happened to ask
her whether there was any Portuguese blood in her family. ‘Oh no, that is out of
the question,’ she told him. ‘Our family is Brahmin.’ As for the Dalit Catholics
in Goa, notes Luce, they have ‘separate churches and separate cemeteries’.
The British East India Company made its first contact with India at Surat, an
important commercial city and entrepôt on the coast of Gujarat, where its ships
began to dock in 1608. It also despatched a Turkish-speaking emissary, Captain
William Hawkins, to the court of the Great Mughal, where he was welcomed but
granted no commercial rights. In 1611, it built its first Indian ‘factory’ (that is, a
warehouse) on India’s southeastern Coromandel coast at Masulipatnam
(Machilipatnam), and a second factory at Surat in 1612. Then, again seeking a
commercial treaty with the Mughal empire, the Company sent an ambassador,
Sir Thomas Roe, to the Mughal court carrying a letter from the British king,
James I, addressed to Jehangir. Landing at Surat, Roe proceeded to Ajmer, where
Jehangir was holding his court. He attended at court from 1615 to 1618 and was
a success, despite Jehangir’s contempt for the presents that the ambassador
brought from London, with the exception of some English paintings including
portraits of the English royal family, which the emperor greatly admired. In
1617, Jehangir addressed the following letter to the British monarch via Roe,
thanking James for his letter:
Upon which assurance of your royal love I have given my general command to all the kingdoms and
ports of my dominions to receive all the merchants of the English nation as the subjects of my friend; that
in what place soever they choose to live, they may have free liberty without any restraint; and at what
port soever they shall arrive, that neither Portugal nor any other shall dare to molest their quiet; and in
what city soever they shall have residence, I have commanded all my governors and captains to give
them freedom answerable to their own desires; to sell, buy, and to transport into their country at their
pleasure.

For confirmation of our love and friendship, I desire your Majesty to command your merchants to
bring in their ships all sorts of rarities and rich goods fit for my palace; and that you be pleased to send
me your royal letters by every opportunity, that I may rejoice in your health and prosperous affairs; that
our friendship may be interchanged and eternal.

Jehangir’s letter to James I was a reasonable start for the Company, especially
as it openly mentioned protection from Portuguese commercial hostilities; but it
was far from granting the favoured nation status that the court of directors in
London had hoped for, and was in no sense a monopoly of Indian trade of the
kind that the Company had been granted at home. In practice, the Company’s
‘factors’ (merchants) would continue to be harassed in various ways by local
officials in the ports and provincial capitals of the Mughal empire. What the
Company was really seeking was an imperial decree to its sole advantage,
known as a firman. The Mughal emperors, however, were in no pressing need of
income from the British East India Company during the 17th century.
Even so, the Company’s trade in and via India was permitted to expand,
mainly in cotton, silk, indigo dye, saltpetre (the essential ingredient of
gunpowder) and Chinese tea; the opium trade came later. In 1639, it founded a
factory at Madras on the Coromandel coast, in territory outside Mughal control
ruled by a governor of the Vijayanagar empire, and built Fort St George in 1644
to secure its trade. In 1668, it leased the islands of Bombay under a charter from
the British Crown in exchange for a loan of £50,000 (with interest) to an
impecunious Charles II and a yearly rent of £10, and fortified the Bombay Castle
on the site of a manor house built by the Portuguese. In 1690, it established a
settlement in Bengal at Calcutta, which was soon protected by Fort William.
During the same period, the Dutch East India Company started factories on the
Coromandel coast at Pulicat (1608), in Bengal at Chinsura (1656) and on the
Malabar coast at Cochin (1669), as did the French East India Company south of
Madras at Pondicherry (1674) and at Chandernagore in Bengal (1675). The
forces required to defend these factories, consisting of Indian soldiers under
European officers, were the nucleus of the national armies that would clash for
control of India during the next century – in which wars Clive would first
distinguish himself fighting against the French in the Carnatic region of southern
India.
In the early 1670s, Bombay was attacked once by Dutch and twice by Siddi
naval forces working for the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in pursuit of his war
against Shivaji and the Marathas. (Siddis were Indians of African ancestry.) In a
further attack in 1689, Aurangzeb’s target was the East India Company factory
itself. This followed a period of tension between Company shipping and Mughal
shipping using the port of Surat, leading to misjudged acts of piracy by the
Company against Mughal shipping in the Arabian Sea. Aurangzeb retaliated
with disastrous consequences for the British. Bombay was besieged from the
sea, and when the garrison surrendered in early 1690, the Company had to
accept the most humiliating peace terms. The envoys it sent to Aurangzeb had
their hands bound and were obliged to prostrate themselves before the emperor,
while agreeing to pay an indemnity of 150,000 rupees, to restore all captured
Mughal ships and plundered goods in the harbour at Bombay, and to expel the
British governor of Bombay from India. (He died before this could happen.) In
return, the Mughal emperor graciously reinstated the Company’s trading rights
throughout the empire granted by his grandfather, Jehangir, in 1617.
Not until after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 was the Company able to
extract the firman it had long craved. It was granted in 1716 by the ineffectual
emperor Farrukhsiyar, fully a century after the visits of Roe and Hawkins to
Jehangir, following the failure of much bribery by a Company mission sent to
Delhi, though only under duress. The Company had threatened to withdraw
altogether from Surat and its other factories in Gujarat, entailing a serious loss of
revenue to the Mughal treasury and the potential ruin of the empire’s main port
with the Arabian Sea. In exchange for a mere 3,000 rupees per year, the firman
granted the Company duty-free trading rights in all of Bengal. However, its
effect was less powerful than the British had hoped. By now, the Mughal
emperor’s writ did not run in the provinces, especially after the assassination of
Farrukhsiyar in 1719. Taking advantage of the now obvious disintegration of
Mughal imperial power, the governors (nawabs) of Bengal ignored the directive
from Delhi and went on collecting customs duty from the East India Company.
Farrukhsiyar’s firman would, however, eventually prove useful in the hands of
Clive, four decades later, when he wished to justify his overthrow of the nawab
of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, at the battle of Plassey in 1757.
Clive’s pivotal victory at Plassey was secured by deceit, as is well known.
Prior to the battle, he negotiated a pact, which was kept secret, with two of Siraj-
ud-Daula’s generals, who agreed to hold back their armies. Siraj-ud-Daula,
learning of this only during the battle, had no choice but to flee, and was later
assassinated. One of the generals, Mir Jafar, was now installed as nawab of
Bengal, a puppet ruler supported by the forces of the Company. Three years
later, after Clive had returned to England, the Company deposed Mir Jafar in
favour of his son-in-law, Mir Qasim, but he too proved insufficiently generous to
the Company’s coffers, rebelled and fled to Oudh. Mir Jafar was reinstated as
nawab.
In 1764, having defeated an alliance of troops led by Mir Qasim, the nawab of
Oudh and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II at the battle of Buxar in Bihar, the
East India Company itself became the de facto ruler of Bengal. Clive now came
back to India. In return for the Company’s payment of a fixed annual revenue of
2.6 million rupees from Bengal to a destitute Shah Alam, the Company was
granted in 1765 the diwani – the fiscal administration – of Bengal in a firman
issued by the emperor sitting on his throne in Clive’s tent at Benares, containing
the following words:
That whereas in consideration of the attachment and services of the high and mighty, the noblest of
exalted nobles, the Chief of illustrious warriors, our faithful servants and well-wishers, worthy of all
royal favours, the English Company, we have granted them the Dewannee of the provinces of Bengal,
Bahar [Bihar], and Orissa … with an exemption from the payment of the Customs of the Dewannee,
which used to be paid to the court….

Technically, the Company was still some kind of vassal of Shah Alam, but this
was merely a form of legal language to conceal the humiliating military and
diplomatic reality. From now on, until 1857, the Mughal emperor would be a
pensioner of the East India Company. As Clive himself remarked in his final
private advice to the Company’s directors in India before departing permanently
for Britain in 1767: ‘Nothing remains to him but the Name and Shadow of
authority.’ But Clive presciently warned his successors: ‘This Name, however,
this Shadow, it is indispensably necessary we should seem to venerate …’, if
British rule were to survive and take hold in India.
Clive is a controversial figure – a ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ (says Spear) in
his attitude to the Company’s corruption – who was severely criticized in his
own lifetime and committed suicide for unknown reasons in London in 1774 at
the age of only 49. The year before his death, he famously told a parliamentary
committee enquiring into the Company’s takeover of Bengal and considering the
official regulation of the East India Company: ‘I walked through vaults which
were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! Mr
Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!’ Yet it is
indisputable that Clive enormously benefited from the takeover and its
aftermath, to the tune of £400,000 – ‘much the greatest fortune ever made by a
[British] individual in India’, according to the historian P. J. Marshall, who
calculates that £1,250,000 were eventually distributed to British individuals from
the Bengal treasury. In 1770, Bengal was struck by a terrible famine said to have
taken ten million lives in a year, initiated by drought but aggravated by the
Company’s misgovernment. Undoubtedly, the early years of the Company in
Bengal were ‘chequered with guilt and shame’, said Macaulay in Parliament in
1833 during the great debate on its further regulation, due to ‘rapacious,
imperious and corrupt’ Company merchants, the so-called white nabobs (an
Anglicized form of ‘nawab’), inspired by Clive’s example. When they returned
to England from Bengal with their ill-gotten gains, the nabobs flaunted them
before their shocked, and often envious, fellow countrymen.
The reform of the Company under the Regulating Act of 1773 began with the
appointment of Warren Hastings as the first governor-general of India from 1774
to 1785. He deposed the Indian deputies who had hitherto collected revenue on
the Company’s behalf, and instituted a Board of Revenue in Calcutta and
English collectors in the districts. By the time Hastings left India, Bengal had
been transformed from a revenue administration into a state. Reform gathered
pace under the next governor-general, Lord Cornwallis. In 1793, he introduced
the so-called Permanent Settlement of revenue due to the Company from large
landlords (known as zamindars), in other words a permanently fixed amount of
revenue rather than an annually varying sum, intended to encourage agricultural
production and reduce exploitation of the tenant farmers. More successfully,
Cornwallis divided the Company’s service into commercial and political
branches. From now on, a Company servant had to belong to one or the other
branch. For a merchant, private trade was still permitted, but not for a
government official, who had to be content with a large salary. Cornwallis also
Europeanized the services, in the belief that corruption among Europeans could
be controlled and even cured, unlike corruption among Indians. With the
exception of one Indian judge in Benares, Ali Ibrahim Khan, regarded as
incorruptible, all high Indian officials were dismissed and replaced by Europeans
– a policy that would remain in force for more than a century, until 1909. The
Cornwallis reforms of the late 1780s and 1790s marked the end of the
dominance of trade in the Company’s administration, the beginning of the Indian
Civil Service ethos of the 19th century and the introduction of a racial aloofness
into British rule that would characterize it until 1947.
Beyond Bengal, the Company was at war, first with the French and then with
Indian rulers, for a century after the battle of Plassey, as it vastly expanded the
territory that was either directly or indirectly under its control. Its armies
consisted of small numbers of British officers commanding large numbers of
Indian soldiers, supplemented by a smaller contingent of British soldiers. Their
military superiority, at least to begin with, lay not in numbers and technology, as
compared with the armies of the Mughal period, but rather in their ‘rapidity and
massing of firepower achieved through close formations of well-drilled men’,
notes Thomas Trautmann, although their Indian opponents soon learned the
lesson and began training and drilling their troops with European officers, some
of whom had served in the armies of the recently defeated Napoleon Bonaparte.
In addition, the Company formed strategic alliances with Indian rulers against
other Indian rulers, as it had with Mir Jafar in Bengal.
From 1767 to 1799, there were four Anglo-Mysore Wars in the south: the first
and second against Hyder Ali, the sultan of Mysore, the third and fourth against
his son, Tipu Sultan, who died defending his fortress at Seringapatam. Between
1775 and 1818, three Anglo-Maratha Wars occurred in central India, during the
second of which Company troops captured Delhi in 1803 and with it the Mughal
emperor, still Shah Alam II, who was found in the Red Fort seated under a
tattered canopy, blind and decrepit, and left in peace by his British ‘protectors’.
The Ahom kingdom in Lower Assam, which Aurangzeb had attempted and
failed to hold, was annexed in 1826, after the first Anglo-Burmese War, followed
by Upper Assam in 1838. In the 1840s, after the death of the Sikh ruler Ranjit
Singh in 1839, two Anglo-Sikh Wars ended in the annexation of Sindh and the
Punjab. Next, under the governor-general Lord Dalhousie, the Company pursued
a policy of political annexation of princely states with the threat of military
force, culminating in the bloodless annexation of Oudh in 1856. By now, British
rule covered almost the entire subcontinent, although one third of the landmass
was left formally in the hands of princes, who controlled the internal affairs of
their domains under the watchful eye of a British Resident, including the large
states of Hyderabad, Kashmir, Rajputana (modern Rajasthan) and later Mysore.
The British empire in India, as it now was, would always rest ultimately on
military force for its survival. However, it would prosper in the 19th century not
by military means but through force of ideas. The advent of British rule was
welcomed by large numbers of educated Indians, beginning in Bengal with
figures such as the reformer Rammohun Roy and his friend, the entrepreneur
Dwarkanath Tagore (grandfather of Rabindranath), who grasped not only the
new opportunities for social improvement and personal enrichment but also the
opening of India to the English language and to western education, literature,
science and technology. The Mughal and nawabi rule of the very recent past
seemed atavistic to these Indians. Realizing this, British officials and their
advisers in Calcutta and London soon found themselves divided between those
who wished to leave Indian society and religion alone – which was the original
policy of the East India Company – and those who believed in intervention. The
first group, known as Orientalists, supported the education of Indians in their
own culture and in their own languages, including Sanskrit; the second, the
Anglicists, favoured a broadly western-style education, chiefly in English.
In the 1780s, under Hastings, the Orientalists dominated. In 1784, for
example, the Asiatic Society was founded by Jones with the aim of investigating
and celebrating Indian, and more broadly Asian, culture. By the 1830s, however,
the Anglicists had the upper hand, encouraged by both the evangelical Christians
and the utilitarians in Britain – who included the historian James Mill and his
philosopher son John Stuart Mill, both of them officials of the East India
Company – although these two groups argued for the Anglicist policy from
somewhat different points of view. Eventually, the Anglicists would form
government policy, although the Orientalists would retain a degree of influence.
When Macaulay, the son of an evangelical social reformer and former colonial
governor in Africa, arrived in India in 1834 as the first law member of the
governor-general’s council, he immediately embraced the Anglicist cause. After
being introduced to the former Wadiyar raja of Mysore, who had been placed on
the throne by the Company as a child after its defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799 and
then deposed by the British for maladministration in 1831, Macaulay felt
contemptuous. The raja’s palace was a ‘mixture of splendour and shabbiness
which characterizes the native courts’, he wrote to his sister in England. Its
private drawing room full of English furniture, proudly displayed to him by the
raja, was not unlike that of ‘a rich, vulgar, Cockney cheesemonger’, and its
household gods included ‘a fat man with a paunch like Daniel Lambert’s [the
fattest man in England], an elephant’s head and trunk, a dozen hands, and a
serpent’s tail’ – Macaulay’s inaugural encounter with Ganesh. But instead of
blaming the raja for his failure to measure up to English standards, Macaulay
severely censured the former governor-general, Lord Wellesley, for his original
policy towards the raja. ‘To give a person immense power, to place him in the
midst of the strongest temptations, to neglect his education, and then to degrade
him from his high station because he had not been found equal to the duties of it,
seems to me to be a most absurd and cruel policy’. Instead of having allowed the
young raja to grow up as a confused Hindu, without good tuition, the British
should have educated him as ‘an accomplished English gentleman’.
Yet perhaps, in his heart, Macaulay was not entirely convinced by his
Anglicist prescription for successful British rule in India. He himself had agreed
to leave London and take a post in the empire for strictly pecuniary, rather than
any missionary, reasons; his explicit intention was to save enough money in
Calcutta in order to be able to retire to England as a gentleman scholar.
Macaulay continued his family letter with a frank warning: ‘We are strangers
[here]. We are one in two or three thousand to the natives. The highest classes
whom we have deprived of their power would do anything to throw off our yoke.
A serious check in any part of India would raise half the country against us.’ Two
decades later, in 1857, this part of Macaulay’s analysis would prove to be
formidably accurate.
EIGHT The ‘Jewel in the Crown’
 THE ‘JEWEL IN THE CROWN’

To English Royalists of the 17th century, the Great Rebellion was the name for
what modern historians call the English Civil War. Likewise, the watershed
events of 1857–59 that terminated the East India Company and ushered in the
rule of the British Crown with India as its brightest imperial jewel – beginning
with the mutiny of eighty-five sepoys at Meerut and ending in the British
deportation from Delhi of the former Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar –
have undergone various name changes over the course of a century and a half.
To the British of the Raj, the events were known either as the Sepoy Mutiny or
as the Indian Mutiny, or often simply as the Mutiny – the term favoured even by
Edward Thompson in his revisionist tract, The Other Side of the Medal. To
others, however, they had a wider significance. Karl Marx, commentating at the
time in articles for an American newspaper, was the first westerner to refer to the
struggle as a ‘national revolt’. Half a century later, the Indian revolutionary and
Hindu nationalist Veer Savarkar published his History of the War of Indian
Independence in Marathi, followed by an English translation printed outside
India in 1909, which was promptly banned as seditious by the Indian
government and remained proscribed until the end of the Raj in 1947, after
which it was reprinted in India. Nehru, in The Discovery of India, more or less
endorsed Savarkar’s nomenclature for what happened in 1857, claiming that: ‘It
was much more than a military mutiny and it spread rapidly and assumed the
character of a popular rebellion and a war of Indian independence.’ Savarkar’s
term was also borrowed in 1959 when Marx’s 1850s newspaper articles
appeared in Moscow under the title, The First Indian War of Independence. But
the historian Surendra Nath Sen, in his influential study Eighteen Fifty-Seven,
published in 1957 by the Indian government, was somewhat more cautious:
Outside Oudh and Shahabad [in Bihar] there is no evidence of that general sympathy which would invest
the Mutiny with the dignity of a national war. At the same time it would be wrong to dismiss it as a mere
military uprising. The Mutiny became a revolt and assumed a political character when the mutineers of
Meerut placed themselves under the king of Delhi [Bahadur Shah Zafar] and a section of the landed
aristocracy and civil population declared in his favour. What began as a fight for religion ended as a war
of independence for there is not the slightest doubt that the rebels wanted to get rid of the alien
government and restore the old order of which the king of Delhi was the rightful representative.
 Today, most historians avoid ‘National’ and ‘War of Independence’, and use
‘Mutiny’, ‘Rebellion’, ‘Revolt’ or ‘Uprising’, for example Rosie Llewellyn-
Jones in The Great Uprising in India, 1857–58: Untold Stories, Indian and
British. ‘I would prefer to call it the 1857 Uprising’, notes Andrew Ward in Our
Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
‘But whether in India, the United Kingdom, or the United States, whenever I sit
down with historians to talk about 1857, no matter how fastidious we try to be,
by the end of the evening we are all talking about the Mutiny.’ William
Dalrymple, too, favours ‘Uprising’, but sidesteps the issue with his title The Last
Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857.
The first and foremost difficulty for 20th-century Indian nationalists wishing
to claim the Mutiny as a forerunner of the national freedom movement was that
the violent unrest of 1857–58 barely touched most of India. It was restricted to
Delhi, the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) – most famously Meerut, Lucknow
and Cawnpore (Kanpur) – and parts of central India and Bihar: areas that
included the major recruiting grounds of the sepoys, most of whom came from
Oudh in the United Provinces. In the east, the sepoys stationed in Bengal at
Berhampore and Barrackpore became agitated, but were soon neutralized by
British troops redeployed from China and the Persian Gulf. In the northwest, the
Punjab had recently been settled after the Anglo-Sikh Wars. In the west and
south, the Bombay and Madras armies both remained loyal to the British.
Secondly, it was a backward-looking uprising, which aimed to reinstate the
ancien régime of the Mughals and to preserve the dominance of the higher castes
in the countryside. It was ‘essentially … a feudal outburst,’ wrote Nehru (who
was himself from Allahabad in the United Provinces), ‘headed by feudal chiefs
and their followers’, notably the landed gentry (talukdars) of Oudh. The
talukdars were disaffected from the British in 1857 because they had recently,
after the Company’s annexation of Oudh the previous year, been deprived of
their undocumented ancestral lands by a British land settlement in favour of their
tenant farmers; yet the tenants, rather than being grateful to the British for their
new property rights, sympathized more with their masters, to whom they were
bound by ties of tribal kinship and feudal allegiance. Hence the fact that the
uprising held little or no resonance for educated Indians in the major cities of
British colonial origin, such as Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.
Lastly, the uprising failed not because it lacked courageous soldiers and
sufficient weapons and military training but chiefly because of its dearth of
unified leadership – unlike its British opponents. Bahadur Shah Zafar was 81
years old in May 1857 and a poet entirely without military experience, incapable
of active leadership even if he had desired it. The uprising’s other leaders were
far from inspiring figures, with two notable exceptions, the Maratha leader Tatya
Tope and Lakshmibai, the rani of Jhansi (in the United Provinces), who are
widely regarded as heroes in India. ‘The leaders of the revolt could never agree.
They were mutually jealous and continually intrigued against one another. They
seemed to have little regard for the effects of such disagreement on the common
cause. In fact, these personal jealousies and intrigues were largely responsible
for the Indian defeat’, admitted the former freedom fighter Maulana Azad, by
then minister of education in Nehru’s government, in his substantial foreword to
Sen’s Eighteen Fifty-Seven.
Perhaps the only ray of encouragement for 20th-century nationalists was the
absence in the uprising of communal antipathy between Hindus and Muslims, as
witness the surprising fact that Hindu sepoys, who formed the great majority in
the Company’s army, rallied voluntarily to the cause of a Muslim figurehead. On
the other hand, this Hindu–Muslim alliance may have arisen as much out of
mutual antipathy to the British army authorities on account of their insensitivity
to both Hinduism and Islam as out of mutual regard for each other. The
interaction between the Hindu sepoys and Bahadur Shah Zafar’s court in the Red
Fort at Delhi was continually vexed. Azad’s claim that there was not even ‘a
single instance when there was a clash or conflict on a communal basis’ among
the rebels in 1857–59 is historically inaccurate. Still less convincing is his
statement – surely influenced by nationalist propaganda – that ‘before the days
of British rule, there was no such thing as the Hindu–Muslim problem in India.’
The proximate cause of the Mutiny was undoubtedly the army’s offence to the
religion of both the Hindu sepoys (most of whom were of high caste) and the
Muslim sepoys arising from the enforced introduction in early 1857 of the
notorious Enfield rifle cartridges covered in grease, probably containing beef or
pork fat, which the sepoys were ordered to bite in order to release the
gunpowder. The underlying cause, however, was the growing social gap between
Indians and British, starting from the Cornwallis administrative reforms of the
1790s. As Dalrymple nicely observes, the wills of Company civil servants show
a steep decline in the number of them that mention Indian wives and consorts
(bibis), from one out of three wills in 1780–85 to one out of four in 1805–10 to
one out of six in 1830 to practically none by the middle of the century. In the
1780s, young Englishmen joined the Company before their 16th birthday and
were generally unmarried on arrival in India; by the 1850s, they arrived in their
mid-twenties, often with an English wife in tow.
In the Company’s army, Indians outnumbered British by a ratio of about nine
to one in 1857. Moreover, sepoys and sahibs – their British officers – were no
longer living on terms of intimacy, according to a unique memoir, From Sepoy to
Subedar, written by a sepoy who remained loyal during the Mutiny (unlike his
son, who became a rebel), published a decade or so after the events. Speaking of
the Company’s army in the early years of the century, Subedar Sitaram Pandey
recalled:
In those days the sahibs could speak our language much better than they do now, and they mixed more
with us. Although officers today have to pass the language examination, and have to read books, they do
not understand our language … The only language they learn is that of the lower orders, which they pick
up from their servants, and which is unsuitable to be used in polite conversation. The sahibs often used to
give nautches [performances by professional Indian dancing-girls] for the regiment, and they attended all
the men’s games. They also took us with them when they went out hunting … Nowadays they seldom
attend nautches because their padre sahibs have told them it is wrong…. I know that many officers
nowadays only speak to their men when obliged to do so, and they show that the business is irksome and
try to get rid of the sepoys as quickly as possible. One sahib told us that he never knew what to say to us.
The sahibs always knew what to say, and how to say it, when I was a young soldier.

This apartheid – in which many British, including the younger army officers,
now openly referred to Indians with contempt as ‘niggers’ – unquestionably
grew in the late Victorian decades after the Mutiny, along with an increasing
confidence among the British in their imperial mission. But it was far from being
a product of the events of 1857, as is often assumed. One has only to read
Macaulay’s writings in India to appreciate its existence and development during
the 1830s. The change in attitude began in the early decades of the century and
was encouraged by the widespread success of British-officered armies against
native rulers, in which serving sepoys acquiesced, and by the evangelical
Christian movement, which was contemptuous of Indian religions. The Mutiny
was not its point of origin, only its ugliest expression – despite many acts of
Indian and British heroism and kindnesses shown by individual Indians to
fugitive Britons during this terrible period.
In late September 1857, after the British-led forces had captured Delhi
through a bloody assault, the governor-general, Lord Canning, wrote disgustedly
of a ‘violent rancour of a very large proportion of the English Community
against every native Indian of every class’, in a letter to Queen Victoria. ‘There
is a rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad, even amongst many who
ought to set a better example, which it is impossible to contemplate without
something like a feeling of shame for one’s fellow countrymen’, he noted. ‘Not
one man in ten seems to think that the hanging and shooting of 40 or 50,000
Mutineers beside other rebels, can be otherwise than practicable and right …’
The mutineers and their supporters had committed some appalling atrocities,
headed by Nana Sahib’s ordering of the cold-blooded massacre at Cawnpore of
just over 200 European women and children, most of whose bodies were stuffed
into a well. But the British retribution, when it came, was out of proportion to
their tribulations. It had a racist tinge, as Canning had feared, and was often
lynch law, judging from the frank letters and reports written at the time by
British soldiers and civilians on the spot. One example will suffice, from an
anonymous letter about the British sack of Delhi published in the Bombay
Telegraph in September 1857:
All the city people found within the walls when our troops entered were bayonetted on the spot; and the
number was considerable, as you may suppose, when I tell you that in some houses forty and fifty
persons were hiding. These were not mutineers, but residents of the city, who trusted to our well-known
mild rule for pardon. I am glad to say they were disappointed.

For some months in 1857–58, Delhi was a ghost city inhabited chiefly by
corpses. It would take a long time to recover. ‘By God, Delhi is no more a city,
but a camp, a cantonment’, lamented the Urdu poet Ghalib, one of a handful of
survivors from the Mughal court, in 1861. ‘No Fort, no city, no bazaars, no
watercourses …’.
Memoirs of the British participants in the Mutiny, written later, tend to be
more reticent. ‘Many men whose names will never be forgotten in India seem to
have kept absolute silence on the deeds which made them memorable there; you
can meet their sons today, and find that they know nothing of what happened’,
remarked Thompson in 1925. The number of Indians killed in the suppression of
the Mutiny cannot be quantified for lack of documentary evidence, almost all of
which comes from the British side. Thompson offers no estimate, neither does
Sen. Ward estimates ‘thousands’, Dalrymple ‘tens if not hundreds of thousands’,
a recent Indian writer, Amaresh Misra, ‘almost ten million people over ten years
beginning in 1857’, which seems unlikely. What is certain is that very little of
the indiscriminate British slaughter was admitted in print by the earlier British
historians of the Raj, and none of it was (or is) taught in British school history,
only the heroism of the British side. In a three-volume History of the Indian
Mutiny running to over 1,500 pages, published in 1904–12, the Indian
administrator and historian Sir George Forrest, son of an army captain who had
won a Victoria Cross at the siege of Delhi for preventing the British powder
magazine from falling into the hands of the mutineers, made not a single
reference to any British atrocities, not even glancingly. ‘Justice was done, mercy
shown to all who were not guilty of deliberate murder, the land cleansed of
blood’, runs the final sentence of Forrest’s enormous history. ‘One might throw
the lists open to the literature of the whole world, and still not find a more superb
example of smug effrontery’, comments Thompson.
On 1 November 1858, repression officially gave way to conciliation. Queen
Victoria’s proclamation, read out at every station in India, announced that the
East India Company was no more and the British government would now rule
India directly; that the existing treaties between the Company and native princes
would be honoured; that there would be no further annexations of territory; that
there would be a general amnesty for all rebels except those who had taken part
in the murder of Europeans; and that religious toleration would be observed and
ancient customs would be respected. The celebrated war correspondent William
Howard Russell, who had reported the Mutiny for The Times in London,
attended the ceremony in Allahabad at which Canning himself read out the royal
proclamation from a platform. Russell was ‘greatly amused’ to overhear a British
sergeant who was on duty at the foot of the platform staircase loudly instructing
one of his men, ‘I am going away for a moment; do you stay here and take care
that no nigger goes up.’
Not officially announced was a drastic reorganization of the army in India, to
ensure that no further rebellion would be possible. By 1863, the number of
Indian troops had been reduced from over 200,000 to 140,000, and the number
of European troops had increased to 65,000; from now on, the ratio of Indians to
British would be maintained at about five to two. Artillery training for Indian
troops was abandoned. Many regiments were disbanded. New and extant
regiments were deployed around India in such a way as to avoid concentrating
together soldiers hailing from any one region; while the rapid expansion during
the 1860s and 1870s of the railway system, opened in 1853, made the movement
of troops much easier than it had been in 1857. Recruitment moved away from
its former areas in the United Provinces and Bihar to the Punjab and the hill
regions; many of the new recruits were Sikhs and Gurkhas, whom the British
came to see as ‘martial peoples’. Both groups had fought enthusiastically for the
British side in Delhi, the Sikhs being keen to avenge their historic oppression by
several Mughal emperors. In addition, large areas of Mughal Delhi were levelled
for defensive purposes, including 80 per cent of the Red Fort, part of which was
replaced by a hideous British barracks – a ‘fearful piece of vandalism … of the
most splendid palace in the world’, noted the architectural historian James
Fergusson in 1876, which still shocks the informed visitor to Delhi.
The government’s policy to support princely rule, however archaic this was
and almost regardless of the idiosyncrasies of individual princes, and to avoid
confrontation with Hinduism and Islam, was, in effect, a conciliatory gesture
towards the conservative demands of the 1857 rebels and a repudiation of the
Anglicizing policy followed since the 1830s. In fact, it was a regression to the
policy of non-interference in religions, customs and traditions of the early days
of the East India Company in Bengal. For example, Canning, now transformed
from a governor-general into a viceroy, quickly restored the confiscated lands of
the talukdars of Oudh – some of whom had supported the rebels – in order to
win their loyalty. In addition, the talukdars were granted judicial and financial
powers without precedent, thereby reinforcing the feudal order. And when, at the
same time, the government of Bombay declared that all government-funded
schools must admit students without regard to religion or caste, it then backed
away in the face of a threatened upper-caste boycott, which ensured the
continued exclusion from government education of any untouchable students.
After the promulgation of the Indian Penal Code (drafted by Macaulay) in 1861,
which involved little practical change, social legislation was abandoned until
1929, the date of an Age of Consent Act aimed at preventing child marriages,
which the government did little to enforce.
Overall, the post-Mutiny policy marked the beginning of ‘an extreme
unwillingness to interfere with religious and caste questions’, noted Edward
Thompson and G. T. Garratt in their still remarkably balanced 1934 study, Rise
and Fulfilment of British Rule in India. ‘The Englishman’s duty was to keep the
peace, maintain law and order, bring India some of Europe’s material blessings,
but not to worry about the Indian’s family life or private morals.’ Ironically, the
policy’s introduction coincided with the government’s founding, in 1857, of
colonial India’s first universities, in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, in which the
language of instruction was English and the modern educational curriculum ran
diametrically opposite to the post-Mutiny policy. Eventually, these two
government policies – the politically conservative one and the educationally
progressive one – were bound to come into unresolvable conflict.
One further important legacy of the Mutiny has been mentioned already. It
stimulated racial arrogance among the British, with a concomitant bitterness
among Indians. The official failure to condemn British post-Mutiny excesses,
while highlighting Indian excesses – not least with memorials to the British dead
in Cawnpore, Lucknow and Delhi – rankled with Indians for decades. ‘There is
no memorial for the Indians who died’, noted Nehru in 1945. Racial
discrimination became elevated into a form of loyalty to the Raj and
institutionalized in the civil service and the army through their opposition to
promoting Indians to positions of responsibility, notwithstanding individual
British officers who disagreed with it. The Indian Civil Service appointed its first
Indian (Satyendranath Tagore, elder brother of Rabindranath) in 1863 and its
next Indians in 1869, yet by 1911 – the year of the Delhi Durbar for King
George V and the zenith of the Raj – a mere 6 per cent of ICS officers were
Indians; in the Indian Army, there were no commissioned Indian officers until
after the First World War. For all his genuine Anglophilia, the Harrow-educated
Nehru wrote bluntly of the period from the Mutiny onwards that: ‘The future
historians of England will have to consider how far England’s decline from her
proud eminence was due to her imperialism and racialism, which corrupted her
public life and made her forget the lessons of her own history and literature.’
The introduction of western liberal ideas and culture through education in
English, coupled with the stinging wound to Indian pride inflicted by British
imperialism and racialism, gave birth to a variety of religious and social reform
movements initiated by Indians, not by the British, during the second half of the
19th century, prior to the emergence of the nationalist movement.
In Bengal, there was the monotheistic Brahmo Samaj (Society of Brahma),
inaugurated by Rammohun Roy in 1828 as the Brahma Sabha and led by
Debendranath Tagore, the son of Dwarkanath and the father of Rabindranath,
until his death in 1905, and also by Keshab Chandra Sen. Drawing its
membership mainly from high-caste intellectual Hindus exposed to western
learning and Christianity, the Brahmo Samaj firmly opposed idol worship and,
less firmly, the practice of caste, while considering Brahmos still to be Hindus.
Later on came the Ramakrishna Mission, taking its teachings from the unlettered
mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and led by the Calcutta University-educated
Narendranath Datta, who adopted the name Swami Vivekananda. Having
travelled in the United States to great acclaim in 1893, Vivekananda vigorously
preached a Vedantic philosophy based on the Upanishads to America and
Europe, while encouraging Indians to reform Hindu social practices, before his
premature death in 1902.
In the Punjab, there was the Arya Samaj, founded in 1875 by Dayananda
Saraswati, a Hindu ascetic unversed in English but well versed in Sanskrit. His
motto was ‘back to the Vedas’ and to a society free of caste, idol worship,
multiple gods, temples and elaborate rituals. Everything worth knowing, even
the most recent western technology such as the railways, was said to be alluded
to in the Vedas. Anti-Christian, the Arya Samaj aimed to convert Indians from
other religions to Hinduism. It spread overseas at the turn of the century to the
many colonies where Hindus had settled, such as Fiji and Trinidad.
In Maharashtra, unlike in Bengal, social reform was generally considered
more important than religious reform, so the reform movements operated within
Hinduism. Among the best known was the Satyasodhak Samaj (Society of
Truthseekers), founded in 1873 by the low-caste Jyotirao Phule to fight
oppression by the Brahmins. Besides writing a great deal, Phule started girls’
schools, schools for untouchables and a foundling home for widows’ children.
His work marks the beginning of the anti-Brahmin political movement in
Maharashtra, and heralds the 20th-century Maharashtrian movement for the
emancipation of the untouchables led by Ambedkar.
 Finally, Indian Muslims, aware of their increasing political, social and
economic disadvantage after the disappearance of Mughal culture in the Mutiny,
started the Aligarh movement to encourage Muslim exposure to modern ideas. In
1875, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a scholar and jurist who had been close to both the
Mughal court and the East India Company, founded the Mohammedan Anglo-
Oriental College in Aligarh on the model of an English public school (later
renamed the Aligarh Muslim University); its primary aim was to expose Muslim
students to instruction in English and science. ‘Reason alone is a sufficient
guide’ was his favourite statement. A decade later, he started the annual
Mohammedan Educational Conference, which would provide the seedbed for the
All-India Muslim League, founded in 1906 after his death. (His grandson, Syed
Ross Masood, formed a close friendship with E. M. Forster, who dedicated his
novel A Passage to India to Masood.)
The Brahmo Samaj was the most influential of these early movements among
Hindus, judging by its spread within the major cities of India and its stimulation
of other movements, including the Arya Samaj. The writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri,
who was born in East Bengal in 1897, was not a Brahmo, but imbibed Brahmo
values as a child. In Chaudhuri’s view, under Brahmo and related reforming
influences, the Hindu middle class in the period 1860–1910 showed ‘greater
probity in public and private affairs, attained greater happiness in family and
personal life, saw greater fulfillment of cultural aspirations, and put forth greater
creativeness’ than at any time in recent centuries. A Bengali of the next
generation, Satyajit Ray, whose family were prominent Brahmos, though he
himself was not, also admired the period. Brahmos of the late 19th century, said
Ray, were ‘very powerful figures, very demanding figures with lots of social
fervour in them: the willingness, the ability and the eagerness to do good to
society, to change society for the better.’ All this was true, at least in Bengal; and
yet Brahmoism failed to inspire the vast majority of Indians. Ultimately more
concerned with intellectual and religious matters than with social reform and
political freedom, Brahmoism declined and gave way to explicitly political
movements, including Marxism, some of whose leading members were
Brahmos.
The most important of these was the Indian National Congress, which met for
the first time in 1885, in Bombay; after 1920, under the leadership of Gandhi, it
would lead the Indian freedom movement. Its first president was an Anglophile
Indian barrister, W. C. Bonerjee, but its founder – and the general secretary
during its first decade – was a British civil servant, Allan Octavian Hume, with
an anti-establishment streak and a passion for Indian ornithology. During the
Mutiny, Hume saw active service at the head of an irregular force of Indian
troops recruited by himself, for which he was decorated by the government; but
his subsequent criticism of British repression and his zealous promotion of
Indian agricultural reform irritated his superiors. ‘An unsafe, impulsive,
insubordinate officer’ by his own admission, Hume took early retirement from
the Indian Civil Service in 1882. His founding of the Congress arose directly
from the viceroy Lord Ripon’s controversial Ilbert Bill of 1883, which sought to
give Indian judges some jurisdiction over Europeans. Appalled by the European
community’s attacks on the bill, reminiscent of the racist language used in the
Mutiny, Hume issued an appeal to Indian graduates of Calcutta University to
organize themselves for national reform. As a firm believer in constitutional
methods, Hume was convinced that the councils of the Raj needed to hear advice
and criticism from a group of informed Indian leaders.
For many years, the Indians in the Congress were more moderate than Hume.
In fact, until 1916 the Congress was barely more than a talking club for the
westernized elite of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, not a real political party with
local branches, a regular membership and an annual subscription. It had a small
impact on the government, which introduced at its own stately pace a degree of
elected representation for Indians in the Indian Councils Act of 1909 (the
Morley-Minto reforms), including contentious reserved seats for Muslims at the
insistence of the Muslim League. ‘The pre-Gandhian Congress … remained
always little more than an annual conference, organized by a small “inner circle”
of leaders maintaining contact through private correspondence’, notes the
historian Sumit Sarkar. When Rabindranath Tagore attended early Congress
meetings he criticized how much time went on hospitality and chatter, instead of
constructive work. In his novel The Home and the World, written in 1915–16, a
patriotic leader of the Swadeshi (Our Country) movement in Bengal brazenly
declares: ‘When I was attached to the Congress party I never hesitated to dilute
10 per cent of truth with 90 per cent of untruth.’
In the meantime, some Indians took to extremism. It began in Maharashtra
under the direction of Bal Gangadhar Tilak with the murder of two British
officers in 1897, then started in Bengal and later spread to the Punjab. The non-
violent Swadeshi movement – provoked by Lord Curzon’s viceregal decision to
partition the large province of Bengal in 1905 without consulting any of its
inhabitants, whether Hindu or Muslim, soon dissipated itself in Hindu–Muslim
riots and terrorist attacks on government officials. In 1909, an India Office
official was assassinated in London by an Indian working under the direction of
Savarkar, who was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime.
In 1912, a bomb was thrown into the howdah of the viceroy’s elephant during a
ceremonial procession in Delhi to celebrate the move of India’s capital from
Calcutta to Delhi. Lord Hardinge, though wounded, escaped, along with his
wife, but the mahout was killed. During most of the First World War, a Punjabi
terrorist movement based in California, the Ghadar party, conspired against the
Indian government with German government assistance; it even targeted Tagore
for assassination on his visit to San Francisco in 1916. At a sensational Hindu–
German Conspiracy Trial in San Francisco in early 1918, one of the Indian
Ghadar defendants shot dead another defendant in open court, and was himself
shot dead by a US marshal firing across the room over the heads of the attorneys.
Inevitably, Indian terrorism provoked British repression. In March 1919, the
Indian government passed the Rowlatt Act, indefinitely extending the
‘emergency measures’ that had been in force during the First World War to
control public unrest and extirpate conspiracy, which included arrest without
warrant and indefinite detention without trial. There were immediate public
protests. In the Punjab, the response was particularly turbulent. At Amritsar, a
mob murdered five British men, beat up a British female missionary and left her
for dead, and ransacked and burned many buildings before the arrival of troops.
On 13 April, Gurkhas under British command fired without warning for between
ten and fifteen minutes on an unarmed public protest meeting of some 20,000
people in an area of open ground enclosed by high walls known as the
Jallianwala Bagh. They killed at least 480 people, but almost certainly many
more, and wounded several thousand, who were left overnight without medical
treatment because of a curfew.
This was the most brutal government repression since the Mutiny in 1857,
and, as in that fateful time, the action received immediate and vocal support
from the majority of Britons, in Britain as well as in India, with more discreet
support from Indian vested interests. But after a critical public enquiry, in a
British parliamentary debate the following year even Winston Churchill, then
secretary of state for war and no friend to Indian political freedom, called the
mass shooting ‘without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British
empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical
occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the
civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which
stands in singular and sinister isolation.’ Although Churchill saw no comparison
with the repression of the Mutiny, his condemnation of the Amritsar massacre
was unreserved.
After Amritsar, it was clear to both the British and the Indian elites that the
British empire in India was entering its final phase. Neither the moderate
constitutional approach of the Congress, nor the violent strategy of the
extremists, nor the repression of Indian political aspirations by military force,
seemed to have any realistic prospect of long-term success. The stage was set for
a new technique of political agitation: the non-cooperation movement led by an
Indian-born, London-trained lawyer, who had cut his political teeth as an activist
against colonialism in South Africa over two decades, before returning to India
for good in 1915 – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
NINE End of Empire
 END OF EMPIRE

Among the influential British who became openly opposed to imperialism in

India in the wake of the Amritsar massacre in April 1919 was the author, editor
and political activist Leonard Woolf. In the first decade of the century he had
spent more than six years as a notably effective, at times even ruthless, colonial
officer in Ceylon before resigning in 1911 and returning to England, where he
married Virginia Stephen and became a founding figure of the Bloomsbury
Group. By the 1920s, Woolf was regularly encouraging Labour politicians in
Britain to meet Indian demands for self-government. Looking back over the
disappearance of the British empire in the subcontinent during his lifetime, in his
autobiography written in the 1960s, he observed:
I have no doubt that if British governments had been prepared to grant in 1900 what they refused in 1900
but granted in 1920; or to grant in 1920 what they refused in 1920 but granted in 1940; or to grant in
1940 what they refused in 1940 but granted in 1947 – then nine-tenths of the misery, hatred, and
violence, the imprisonings and terrorism, the murders, flogging, shootings, assassinations, even the racial
massacres would have been avoided; the transference of power might well have been accomplished
peacefully, even possibly without Partition.

The first Indian to make a public protest against the Amritsar massacre was
not Gandhi or any other leader of the Indian National Congress, but rather
Rabindranath Tagore. Unable to persuade the politicians in Calcutta to hold a
meeting against the Punjab repression because they feared government reprisal
under the Rowlatt Act, at the end of May 1919 Tagore reluctantly wrote a
personal letter to the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford. ‘The accounts of the insults and
sufferings undergone by our brothers in the Punjab have trickled through the
gagged silence, reaching every corner of India, and the universal agony of
indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers –
possibly congratulating themselves for imparting what they imagine as salutary
lessons …’. Tagore then asked to be relieved of the knighthood conferred upon
him in 1915 by Chelmsford’s more liberal predecessor, Lord Hardinge. ‘The
time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in the
incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all
special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who for their so-
called insignificance are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.’
 Tagore’s letter was published in the Indian press in early June 1919 and
widely read within India, though largely ignored in the London press. But this
public gesture of non-cooperation with the government did not catch the
imagination of Indians. Probably it was made too soon, long before the
government’s judge-led public enquiry into the massacre known as the Hunter
Commission, the parliamentary debate in the House of Commons in July 1920
and Gandhi’s launch of the non-cooperation movement in 1921. For whatever
reason, not one Indian political leader, including those from Bengal, openly
welcomed Tagore’s gesture – not even Gandhi.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Tagore, while admiring Gandhi enough to lead
the way in calling him ‘Mahatma’ (Great Soul), would be Gandhi’s most even-
handed and intelligent critic, in return for which Gandhi would call Tagore
‘Gurudev’ (Spiritual Teacher). When Tagore died in 1941, Nehru, again
languishing in jail, noted in his diary:
Gandhi and Tagore. Two types entirely different from each other, and yet both of them typical of India,
both in the long line of India’s great men. How rich and extravagant is India to produce two such men in
a generation – just to show what she can do even in her present distress and lowly state…. There are
many of course who may be abler than them or greater geniuses in their own line. Einstein is great. There
may be greater poets than Tagore, greater writers … It is not so much because of any single virtue but
because of the tout ensemble, that I felt that among the world’s great men today Gandhi and Tagore were
supreme as human beings. What good fortune for me to have come into close contact with them.

Many others since Nehru have been intrigued by the comparison between
Gandhi and Tagore, including three remarkably different Nobel prize-winners:
Aung San Suu Kyi, Amartya Sen and the brilliant scientist Subrahmanyan
Chandrasekhar, who said in 1995: ‘Tagore was intellectually more perceptive
than Gandhi.’ A recent biographer of Gandhi, Kathryn Tidrick, remarks that:
‘Had Gandhi not lived, Tagore would be remembered as the quintessential
Indian of the first part of the 20th century.’ So it is worth taking time to
understand their major points of disagreement over non-cooperation, before
turning to the more familiar landmarks of the Indian independence struggle.
Indeed, the issues that Gandhi and Tagore debated would continue to resonate in
India well after political independence in 1947.
In March 1921, Tagore, then lecturing in the United States (where Gandhi
never went), fired the first salvo in a letter published in a Calcutta magazine:
Non-cooperation appear[s] to me to be the progeny of the union of rejection from one party and dejection
from the other party and therefore though I tried to shed upon it my best smile, I long hesitated to
welcome it to my heart … It is like the exclamation of a malcontent dog to its neglectful master: I was
willing to guard your door and beautifully wag my tail at you, if you had provided me with the remnant
of your dinner, but as you never cared to do so, I go to join my own species.
Gandhi responded in June:
In my humble opinion, rejection is as much an ideal as the acceptance of a thing. It is as necessary to
reject untruth as it is to accept truth. All religions teach that two opposite forces act upon us and that the
human endeavour consists in a series of eternal rejections and acceptances … Neti [not this] was the best
description the authors of the Upanishads were able to find for Brahman [God].

I therefore think that the Poet [i.e., Tagore] has been unnecessarily alarmed at the negative aspect of
Non-cooperation. We had lost the power of saying “no” to the Government. This deliberate refusal to
cooperate is like the necessary weeding process that a cultivator has to resort to before he sows. Weeding
is as necessary to agriculture as sowing.

Although Gandhi was probably not aware of it, he was here following in the
footsteps of the Buddha. The first historical example of non-cooperation comes
from the Buddhist literature, noted the Buddhist monk and scholar Walpola
Rahula. It occurs shortly before the Buddha’s death, when he asks his disciples
after he is gone to boycott a violent monk, Channa – his former charioteer – who
has persistently refused to follow his teachings. ‘Don’t talk to Channa; don’t
advise him; don’t associate with him; if he talks to you, don’t answer him;
completely boycott him and avoid him.’ In this case non-cooperation succeeded:
Channa in due course admitted his fault, promised to follow the Buddha’s
teachings and became a good man.
In early September 1921, Gandhi came in person to Calcutta in the hope of
recruiting Tagore for the political movement. They met at Tagore’s ancestral
house behind closed doors, and their momentous conversation was not reported
at the time; but soon afterwards Tagore reconstructed it for the benefit of his
friend, the agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst (later co-founder of the
Dartington Hall Trust), who published it only in the 1970s, long after the
passions of the time had cooled.
‘Gurudev, you were yourself a leader and promoter of the Swadeshi
movement some twenty years ago’, said Gandhi. ‘You always wanted Indians to
stand on their own feet as Indians and not to be poor copies of westerners. My
“Swaraj” [Home Rule] movement today is the natural offspring of your own
“Swadeshi”. Join me now and fight with me for Swaraj.’
‘Gandhiji, the whole world is suffering today from the cult of a selfish and
short-sighted nationalism. India has all down her history offered hospitality to
the invader of whatever nation, creed or colour. I have come to believe that, as
Indians, we not only have much to learn from the West but that we also have
something to contribute. We dare not therefore shut the West out.’ Western ideas
and achievements would help Indians to learn how to collaborate among
themselves, Tagore implied.
‘Gurudev, I have already achieved Hindu–Muslim unity.’ Here Gandhi was
referring to his controversial support for Indian Muslims in the Khilafat
movement, a violent pan-Islamist organization, which had become embroiled in
serious anti-British and anti-Hindu rioting in 1921. Tagore dissented: ‘When the
British either walk out, or are driven out, what, Gandhiji, will happen then? Will
Hindu and Muslim then lie down peacefully together? You know they will not!’
‘But, Gurudev, my whole programme for the winning of Swaraj is based on
the principle of non-violence. That is why, as a poet, who believes in peace, you
can feel free to ally yourself with this peaceful movement and work for it.’
‘Come and look over the edge of my veranda, Gandhiji, look down there and
see what your so-called non-violent followers are up to.’ The non-cooperators
had stolen pieces of foreign-made cloth from the nearby bazaar and lit a bonfire
with them in the courtyard of Tagore’s house. ‘You can see for yourself. There
they are howling around it like a lot of demented dervishes. Is that non-violence,
Gandhiji? We Indians are, as you well know, a very emotional people. Do you
think you can hold our violent emotions under firm control with your non-
violent principles? No! You know you can’t. Only when the children of our
different religions, communities and castes have been schooled together can you
hope to overcome the violent feelings which exist today.’
So Gandhi appealed to Tagore – who had opened his school at Santiniketan in
1901, followed by an international university, Visva-Bharati, in 1921 – to
support his own new programme of national education. ‘Hundreds of young
teachers and students are now, at my suggestion, leaving the government schools
and colleges. They are enlisting in my scheme.’
‘Yes, but, Gandhiji, I notice that you first pick out the brightest of the young
men and enlist them in your political organization. The less bright you allow to
open schools that can offer only a travesty of education.’ These new schools,
Tagore said, had too limited an objective. ‘This is why I am inviting scholars [to
Santiniketan] from all over the world to come and help and at the same time to
learn something from the creative aspects of our own culture.’ The first of these
visitors, a highly distinguished Indologist from Paris, was about to arrive in
Santiniketan.
Tagore went on to accuse Gandhi of manipulating the people with symbols
instead of substance. ‘But Indians by nature have always been worshippers of
symbols, of images’, Gandhi countered. When talking of economic wrongs,
Gandhi said, it was legitimate to refer to foreign-made cloth as ‘impure’. Only a
word such as this would induce Indians to sacrifice their foreign-made cloth and
burn it. (A decade later, in his inspired Salt March to the coast, Gandhi would
turn the collection of untaxed sea salt, in defiance of a British government
monopoly on salt, into another resonant symbol of political protest. He would
also deploy symbolism in his condemnation of orthodox Hindu practices such as
animal sacrifice and untouchability.)
‘Well,’ said Gandhi, ‘I can see my request for your help is almost hopeless. If
you can do nothing else for me, at least you can put these Bengali bhadralok
[gentlemen] to shame by getting them to do something practical. Gurudev, you
can spin. Why not get all your students to sit down around you and spin.’ They
both laughed, since Tagore was well known for being a thoroughly
unmechanical person. ‘Poems I can spin, Gandhiji, songs and plays I can spin,
but of your precious cotton what a mess I would make!’
Spinning and the spinning wheel, the charka, would become a focus of
irreconcilable disagreement between Gandhi and Tagore. Gandhi, as is well
known, was generally agin machines, which he early on equated with ‘sin’ and
‘evil’ in his 1909 nationalist tract, Hind Swaraj, though not without giving
machinery careful thought and to some extent softening his opposition over time.
He opposed the bicycle, mainly on the grounds that the cost of buying such a
luxury would get Indians into debt. He employed typists in his legal practice in
South Africa, learned how to type and then abandoned the typewriter back in
India, disliking it as ‘a cover for indifference and laziness’, he claimed,
preferring to handwrite his voluminous letters and articles. He opposed the rice
mill, firstly because it would deprive very poor women of their income from
pounding rice, secondly because pounding was good exercise and thirdly
because milling removed the vitamin thiamine in the pericarp of the rice grain,
causing the tragic disease beriberi. But he much favoured the spinning wheel and
also the treadle sewing machine, notably those made by the Singer company –
‘one of the few useful things ever invented’, he said. This was not only because
the charka provided employment and clothing – hand-woven khadi – for poor,
unemployed Indians but also because he firmly believed that spinning
encouraged self-rule, both of the individual and the political kind. Tagore,
though generally in favour of science and modern technology (as he made clear
in his conversations with Albert Einstein), as firmly detested the notion that to be
a true Indian one must regularly spin. He termed Gandhi’s spinning decree ‘the
cult of the charka’.
After their meeting Tagore published a powerful essay, ‘The call of truth’.
Gandhi replied equally powerfully with ‘The great sentinel’ – his name for
Tagore. The rising Nehru read both essays in 1921 and found himself agreeing
more with Gandhi. ‘But the more I have read what Tagore wrote then, the more I
have appreciated it and felt in tune with it’, he wrote on Tagore’s birth centenary
in 1961, when he was prime minister. Their exchange, in Nehru’s view,
represented ‘two aspects of the truth, neither of which could be ignored.’
 The first phase of non-cooperation ended in February 1922, when a crowd of
Congress and Khilafat volunteers, after being fired on by police, set fire to a
police station at Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces; twenty-two policemen
inside were either hacked to death as they fled or forced back into the flames, to
the cries of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ (‘Victory to Mahatma Gandhi!’). Gandhi
called off the movement – but not immediately, as is often stated, only after
several days of difficult deliberation with himself and others. Satan had tempted
him to carry on with the campaign, he confessed later, by arguing that
withdrawal would be ‘cowardly’.
Throughout his career in India, Gandhi was acutely aware of India’s potential
for violence. In 1918, writing to an English clergyman friend, C. F. Andrews,
who claimed that Indians had in the past repudiated ‘bloodlust’, Gandhi frankly
disagreed. ‘Is this historically true? I see no sign of it in The Mahabharata or
The Ramayana,’ he noted, or in the ancient law code of Manu, which ‘prescribes
no such renunciation that you impute to the race’. As for the period of Muslim
domination in India, ‘The Hindus were not less eager than the Mahomedans to
fight. They were simply disorganized, physically weakened and torn by internal
dissensions.’ Buddhism was banished from India with ‘unspeakable cruelty’, he
claimed, if the legends were true. Even among the Jains – among whom Gandhi
had grown up in Gujarat – the doctrine of non-violence had failed. ‘They have a
superstitious horror of blood[shed], but they have as little regard for the life of
the enemy as an European.’ He concluded soberly: ‘All then that can be said of
India is that individuals have made serious attempts, with greater success than
elsewhere, to popularize the doctrine. But there is no warrant for the belief that it
has taken deep root among the people.’
However, this view of Indian violence does not account for Gandhi’s delay in
suspending non-cooperation in 1922. Not only had he expected violence in the
struggle, he could even welcome it – provided that it was the violence of others
bravely borne by the non-cooperators. As the historian Faisal Devji writes in The
Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence, ‘if Gandhi was
horrified by the violence exercised from time to time by his followers, he longed
to provoke it from those who had to be opposed by their non-violence.’ Hence,
Gandhi’s recommendation of non-violent non-cooperation to the British in the
face of a Nazi invasion of Britain in 1940. And also his surprising decision to
volunteer as a recruiting sergeant for the Raj in the final year of the First World
War (at the time he wrote to Andrews). After traipsing through Indian villages in
1918 with a notable lack of success in recruiting farmers for the European
trenches, Gandhi expressed his disgust ‘that not one man has yet objected
because he would not kill. They object because they fear to die. This unnatural
fear of death is ruining the nation.’ He made other comparable statements on the
difference between killing and dying, and implied many times that India’s
political independence would come violently. As far back as Hind Swaraj, he
wrote that if Indians should begin to fight after a British withdrawal, ‘there can
be no advantage in suppressing an eruption: it must have its vent. If therefore,
before we can remain at peace, we must fight among ourselves, it is better that
we do so.’ In 1930, he observed: ‘I would far rather be witness to Hindus and
Mussulmans doing one another to death than that I should daily witness our
gilded slavery.’ In April 1947, before the Partition was officially agreed, he told
the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, that ‘the only alternatives were a
continuation of British rule to keep law and order or an Indian bloodbath. The
bloodbath must be faced and accepted.’
What neither Gandhi nor any other leader of the Congress in the 1920s
anticipated is that the Hindu–Muslim problem would be solved not only by
bloodshed but also by the division of the subcontinent into two nations.
Although Sir Syed Ahmad Khan had supported the idea of a separate Muslim
nation in the late 19th century, which was reiterated by the poet and philosopher
Sir Muhammad Iqbal in 1930, the political possibility of Pakistan would catch
hold only after 1937, as a result of the stand-off between the British, the
Congress and the Muslim League, led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah. With the
outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, ‘There would seem to have been
rivalry as to which side should make the most mistakes’, notes a wry Percival
Spear. Who was most responsible for Partition – the British government, the
Indian National Congress or the All-India Muslim League – and whether the
split could have been avoided in favour of a unitary, federal India, or rendered
less violent given more time for the handover of power, are still very
controversial issues for historians, made more so by the ongoing conflict
between India and Pakistan since 1947.
Jinnah was born in Karachi to a merchant family with no particular interest in
religion, and trained as a lawyer in 1890s London, where he was influenced by
English liberalism. He then returned to India to practise as the sole Muslim
barrister in Bombay, and entered politics, first in the Congress in 1904 and then,
after the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, as an elected representative on the
Imperial Legislative Council for the reserved Muslim seat of Bombay. In 1913,
he became the leader of the Muslim League and continued in this role until
1947. His dual involvement with the Congress and the League in these early
days was dedicated to persuading both bodies to work in harmony for reforms of
the viceroy’s legislative councils. At the Congress and League annual meetings
in Lucknow in 1916, Jinnah engineered a pact regarding the percentage of
reserved seats for Muslims in each council. He became the acknowledged leader
of Indian politics in the 1917–18 negotiations for the next round of reforms by
the British enshrined in the Government of India Act of 1919. Indeed, he
epitomized the Anglophile elite who ran the pre-Gandhi Congress. But now his
relations with both the British and the Congress came under severe strain. Jinnah
was opposed to the government’s repression in the Punjab, and also opposed to
Gandhi’s alliance with the Khilafat movement, which he regarded as an
endorsement of Muslim religious fanaticism. In 1919, he resigned from the
Imperial Legislative Council in protest at the passing of the Rowlatt Act, and in
1920 he resigned his positions in the Congress, after being humiliatingly shouted
down by delegates to the annual Congress meeting when he argued against the
non-cooperation movement and in favour of constitutional politics.
‘The fact is – as Jinnah seems dimly to have perceived – that with Gandhi’s
decision not to cooperate with the British and to launch a campaign of civil
disobedience the seeds of separation were being sown’, comments a British civil
servant in the Punjab during the years leading up to the Partition, Penderel
Moon, in his famous memoir Divide and Quit. ‘Civil disobedience involved an
appeal to the masses, and an appeal to the masses by an organization headed and
symbolized by Gandhi was necessarily an emotional, semi-religious appeal to
the Hindu masses and not to the Muslims; for Gandhi with all his fads and
fastings, his goat’s milk, mud baths, days of silence and fetish of non-violence
was pre-eminently a Hindu.’
The gap between Jinnah and Gandhi from the beginning of their relationship
right up to the Partition – despite the fact that both were London-trained lawyers
– was unbridgeable: in education, politics, culture, religion, tastes and personal
habits, symbolized by the polar opposition in their dress. A classic photograph of
the two leaders at their failed talks on the issue of Pakistan in Bombay in 1944
shows a wizened Gandhi clad in a dhoti and shawl and holding a wooden staff
like a Hindu mendicant, gesturing open-handedly towards Jinnah, who stands
quite stiffly in an impeccably creased three-piece Savile Row suit with a
cigarette in his hand. When Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, Jinnah chose to
describe him as ‘one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community’.
The Congress’s Nehru Report on constitutional reform, produced under the
presidency of Motilal Nehru in 1928 as a riposte to the all-British Simon
Commission, was deeply unsatisfactory to Jinnah and the Muslim League. The
report rejected the idea of reserved electorates for any community or weightage
for minorities, which had been agreed in the Lucknow pact of 1916. And it
proposed that the provinces of India should give up certain residuary powers,
such as defence, to the central government, which the Muslim League knew
would inevitably be dominated by the Congress after the departure of the British.
But it was really the failure of the Muslim League in the 1937 provincial
elections – the first to be held under the 1935 Government of India Act – that
proved to be the parting of ways between Congress and the League. Despite the
retention by the British government of separate electorates for Muslims (and
some other minorities, including untouchables), the Muslim League won only 21
per cent of the reserved Muslim seats, while the Congress formed governments
in six out of eleven provinces. In 1940, meeting at Lahore, the League officially
committed itself to a demand for ‘separate and sovereign Muslim states … in
which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the north-western and
eastern zones of India’ – in other words the areas that became West and East
Pakistan in August 1947. When after this announcement Maulana Azad, then
president of the Congress, proposed talks with Jinnah, Jinnah rejected the
overture outright in a telegram: ‘Can’t you realize you are made a Muslim show-
boy Congress President? … The Congress is a Hindu body. If you have self-
respect resign at once.’
The simultaneous resignation of the six Congress provincial ministries in
protest at the viceroy’s lack of consultation of Congress in declaring war against
Germany in 1939 weakened the Congress’s negotiating position with both the
British and the Muslim League. For the British, especially an intransigently
imperialist Churchill, the League was now a useful tool in the battle to retain
India. Gandhi’s declaration of the violent Quit India movement in August 1942,
which immediately incurred the prolonged imprisonment of the Congress
leadership (except for the Bengali leader Subhash Chandra Bose, who had
escaped India in 1941 in order to pursue the path of armed resistance), played
into the hands of the Muslim League, leaving it to drum up popular support
without interference from the Congress. In the 1945–46 general elections, the
Muslim League polled 87 per cent of the Muslim vote and won all thirty of the
Muslim seats in the central legislative assembly, and 75 per cent of the Muslim
vote in the provincial assemblies, securing 439 out of the 494 Muslim seats.
Jinnah’s time had arrived. After the breakdown of complicated negotiations
between the British, the Congress and the League, Jinnah went all out for the
creation of Pakistan by calling for direct action on the streets on 16 August 1946.
The resultant communal riots in Bengal and Bihar over several months –
especially in Calcutta, where 5,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in four
days – pressurized the British government, now led by Labour, into declaring in
February 1947 that the British would leave India by June 1948, and the
Congress, led by Nehru, into at last accepting the inevitability of Partition. When
Mountbatten arrived in Delhi in late March, his almost insuperable task was to
work out how to achieve the division of the subcontinent in a way that would
satisfy both Congress and the Muslim League.
Why did the British rush the process, so that India became independent in
August 1947, ten months ahead of the British government’s timetable? Opinion
among historians is divided. Some, including Moon, take the view that a longer
period for the transfer of power would have precipitated a civil war between
Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. Others think that Mountbatten’s haste encouraged
the violence that did break out, and blame the British for cynicism. According to
the historian Mushirul Hasan, ‘The British, having read the writing on the wall,
had no desire or motivation to effect a peaceful transfer of power.’ The answer
depends to a great extent on how the historian interprets the centuries of Hindu–
Muslim relations in the subcontinent.
By 3 June, the Mountbatten plan was agreed by both parties: it entailed a
‘mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan’, Jinnah admitted, consisting of the Muslim-
majority districts of West Punjab and East Bengal; and it was resisted by Gandhi
up to the moment of its announcement. In mid-July, the British Parliament
ratified the plan and declared that Independence for India and Pakistan would
come into effect on 15 August. In the meantime, with the agreement of Jinnah
and Nehru, a British lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, frantically got to work defining
the boundaries of the nations-to-be, while Mountbatten, assisted by an Indian
civil servant, V. P. Menon, flattered and coerced hundreds of Indian princes into
relinquishing states they had ruled since the days of the East India Company. On
14 August, Jinnah presided over a ceremony in Karachi to declare Independence
for Pakistan, while in Delhi, near midnight on the same day, Nehru spoke
eloquently to the Indian Constituent Assembly of the end of the British Raj and
India’s long-awaited ‘tryst with destiny’.
But it is perhaps the private words of Radcliffe in a letter to his stepson in
England, written on 13 August, that offer ‘the true imperial epitaph’ (as Sunil
Khilnani aptly remarks in The Idea of India):
I thought you would like to get a letter from India with a crown on the envelope. After tomorrow evening
nobody will ever again be allowed to use such stationery and after 150 years British rule will be over in
India – Down comes the Union Jack on Friday morning and up goes – for the moment I rather forget
what, but it has a spinning wheel or a spider’s web in the middle. I am going to see Mountbatten sworn in
as the first Governor-General of the Indian Union at the Viceroy’s House in the morning and then I
station myself firmly on the Delhi airport until an aeroplane from England comes along. Nobody in India
will love me for the award about the Punjab and Bengal and there will be roughly eighty million people
with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me. I have worked and
travelled and sweated – oh I have sweated the whole time.

On 17 August 1947, Radcliffe flew out of Delhi accompanied by the secretary to

the boundary commission. Before the plane took off, the pilot searched it for
bombs.
That same day, the Radcliffe award was announced by Mountbatten. For the
next three months, much of the Punjab was enveloped in civil war on either side
of the new boundaries between India and West Pakistan. In Bengal, there was
relatively little slaughter – mainly because of the courageous personal presence
of Gandhi – but almost as much displacement of people. Estimates of the total
number of deaths vary hugely, from 200,000 to as many as three million.
Estimates of the refugee population are more precise. Between 1946 and 1951,
about six million Muslims migrated to Pakistan, as against nearly nine million
Hindus and Sikhs moving in the opposition direction – four million of whom
migrated to India from what became East Pakistan, and five million from West
Pakistan. (Among the latter was a 14-year-old Sikh, Manmohan Singh, who
would become prime minister of India half a century on.) The end of the British
empire in India caused one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the
world.
TEN The World’s Largest Democracy
 THE WORLD’S LARGEST DEMOCRACY

‘As the years pass, British rule in India comes to seem as remote as the Battle of
Agincourt’, remarked the journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge as the
mid-1960s began to swing in London, with a touch of satirical exaggeration.
Muggeridge, who had been a young teacher in India in the 1920s, died in 1990;
and within a decade there were almost no British survivors of the colonial
period. But while life under the Raj had finally just about receded into history –
in India as well as in Britain – its legacy, which pervaded the subcontinent in the
decades after 1947, continued to influence Indians in ways that were both
diverse and profound, for better and worse. (The same is true of Pakistanis, but
that is a subject for another book.)
At the political level, against the expectations of many non-Indians in its early
decades, the Republic of India has of course preserved and developed the system
of parliamentary democracy implanted on Indian soil in the 1930s by the Raj. It
is now the largest democratic system in the world, governing half of the global
population that lives in a democracy, in stark opposition to China, which went
for Communism at almost the same time as India went for democracy. It has also
defended India’s colonially demarcated borders – in the eastern Himalayas, in
Kashmir and in Bengal – through wars fought with China in 1962 and with
Pakistan in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999, which led to the creation of Bangladesh
in 1971.
At the level of official administration, India has benefited enormously from
the unifying effect and usefulness of the English language, introduced in the
1830s into the civil service and law courts in place of the Persian language of the
Mughal empire. In 1947, it also took over, almost intact, ‘the entire colonial state
apparatus, with its laws, conventions, ubiquitous rules [and] faith in the
impartiality of the few good men that comprised the state,’ writes Pratap Bhanu
Mehta in The Burden of Democracy. In fact, without the Indian Civil Service –
trained by the British but staffed largely by Indians at Independence – it is
doubtful whether India would have survived as a nation in the traumatic period
following the Partition.
At the educational and cultural level, there is still much appreciation in India
for the heritage of English literature, liberal attitudes and rational thinking – not
to speak of sportsmanship and cricket – that formed the outlook of a generation
of Indian political leaders, especially Nehru. This legacy helped to prevent
independent India from yielding to military coups and dictatorship (unlike
Pakistan), apart from the hiccup of Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule in 1975–77.
It also stimulated the work of some of the most original Indian artists and
scientists, such as the novelist R. K. Narayan, the film director Satyajit Ray, the
nuclear scientist Homi Bhabha and the experimental physicist Chandrasekhara
Venkata Raman. On the front jacket of a recent biography of Macaulay, subtitled
‘Pioneer of India’s Modernization’, the Indian publisher makes the reasonable
claim: ‘If you’re an Indian reading this book in English, it’s probably because of
Thomas Macaulay.’ The book’s author, Zareer Masani (who comes from a family
of distinguished Parsis), himself writes: ‘Whatever one thinks of Macaulay’s
personal prejudices, and he had many, his institutional legacies, I would argue,
are the glue that still holds independent India together as a multilingual,
democratic, federal state with English as its lingua franca.’
Although the political and administrative influence of colonialism receives
more attention from both Indian and foreign historians, for obvious reasons, the
cultural influence is perhaps more interesting, because it is unique to India rather
than being shared with other post-colonial nations of the former British empire.
Consider, for example, the astonishing life of the early 20th-century Tamil
mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who has long been regarded as one of the
great mathematicians of all time. Beyond the world of mathematics,
Ramanujan’s life has inspired in Britain and the United States an excellent
television documentary, Letters from an Indian Clerk, made for his birth
centenary in 1987, a major biography, The Man Who Knew Infinity, an award-
winning theatre production and a novel, as well as a ‘Google doodle’ on the
internet search engine to celebrate Ramanujan’s 125th birth anniversary in 2012.
In barest outline, Ramanujan, born in 1887 to poor parents, was an
impoverished, devout, Brahmin clerk working at the Madras Port Trust, self-
taught in mathematics and without a university degree, who claimed that his
mathematics was guided by a Hindu goddess, Namagiri. Ramanujan was
inclined to say: ‘An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a
thought of God.’ Out of desperation at the dearth of appreciation of his theorems
by university-trained mathematicians in India, in 1913 Ramanujan mailed some
of the theorems, without proofs, to a leading mathematician (and confirmed
atheist), G. H. Hardy, based at Cambridge University. Despite their unfamiliar
and highly improbable source, the formulae were so transcendently original that
Hardy dragged a reluctant Ramanujan from obscurity in India to Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he collaborated extensively with him, published many joint
papers in journals, and demonstrated that Ramanujan was a mathematical genius.
In 1918, Ramanujan was elected the first Indian fellow of Trinity College and of
the modern Royal Society. (The very first, a Parsi shipbuilder, was elected in
1841, before the reform of the Royal Society.) But, having fallen mysteriously ill
– possibly with tuberculosis – and attempted suicide on the London
Underground, Ramanujan then returned to India to recuperate, still producing
major new theorems on his sickbed, and died tragically in 1920 at the age of just
32.
After his death, a dazzled Hardy wrote of Ramanujan:

The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity … His ideas as to what constituted a
mathematical proof were of the most shadowy description. All his results, new and old, right or wrong,
had been arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was entirely
unable to give any coherent account.

Ramanujan’s American biographer Robert Kanigel writes in his masterly

study that: ‘Ramanujan’s life was like the Bible, or Shakespeare – a rich find of
data, lush with ambiguity, that holds up a mirror to ourselves or our age.’
Kanigel gives four fascinating examples. First, the colonial education system
flunked Ramanujan out of college in his teens – but a few individuals in India
sensed his brilliance and rescued him from near-starvation by getting him a job
as a clerk. Second, Hardy recognized Ramanujan’s genius from his 1913 letter –
but drove him so hard in Cambridge that he may have hastened his Indian
protégé’s death. (Ramanujan, characteristically, had predicted his death before
the age of 35, from his horoscope.) Third, had Ramanujan received Cambridge-
style mathematical training in his early life he might have reached still greater
heights – but possibly, instead, such training might have stifled his originality.
Lastly, Hardy, as an atheist, was convinced that religion had nothing to do with
Ramanujan’s intellectual power – but it is at least plausible that Hindu India’s
longstanding mystical attraction to the concept of the infinite was a vital source
of Ramanujan’s creativity. ‘Was Ramanujan’s life a tragedy of unfulfilled
promise? Or did his five years in Cambridge redeem it?’ asks Kanigel. ‘In each
case, the evidence [leaves] ample room to see it either way.’ Ramanujan’s
contemporary in age, Nehru – for whom the development of science and
technology in the service of industrialization was a national priority – was
understandably divided in his response. In his Discovery of India, published on
the threshold of Independence, Nehru chose to derive a political message from
Ramanujan’s story:
Ramanujan’s brief life and death are symbolic of conditions in India. Of our millions how few get any
 education at all, how many live on the verge of starvation; of even those who get some education how
many have nothing to look forward to but a clerkship in some office on a pay that is usually far less than
the unemployment dole in England. If life opened its gates to them and offered them food and healthy
conditions of living and education and opportunities of growth, how many among these millions would
be eminent scientists, educationists, technicians, industrialists, writers, and artists, helping to build a new
India and a new world?

Ramanujan may have been a very unusual case who succeeded by a lucky
chance against the colonial odds. Yet he was not entirely alone in colonial Indian
mathematics and science. Despite little support for pure research from the
government pre-1947, several scientists from Bengal and Tamil Nadu, educated
and working in India, made internationally recognized contributions to science.
In the 1890s, the experimental physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose became the first
modern Indian scientist to receive western acclaim, including a fellowship of the
Royal Society in 1920, for work that contributed to the development of wireless
telegraphy and radio. (One of Bose’s inventions was used by Guglielmo Marconi
without attribution, after Bose had refused to take out a patent.) In the 1920s,
Meghnad Saha was a remarkable astrophysicist nominated for a Nobel prize,
who in 1938 founded the important National Planning Committee of the
Congress with Nehru as chairman. Also in the 1920s, the theoretical physicist
Satyendranath Bose, with the collaboration of Einstein, gave his name to Bose-
Einstein statistics and the boson, a class of subatomic particles, which includes
the photon. The experimental physicist C. V. Raman conducted pioneering
research on the scattering of light, and was awarded India’s first Nobel prize in
science in 1930. Before 1947, ten Indian scientists (if we include the
mathematician Ramanujan) had been elected fellows of the Royal Society.
Since Independence, however, Indian science has been notable more for its
lack of originality. Post-colonial India has failed to fulfil the scientific promise
shown by its exceptional scientists in the first half of the 20th century. Indian-
born scientists have continued to make discoveries – as witness the Nobel prizes
for the biochemist Hargobind Khorana (1968), the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan
Chandrasekhar (1983) and the molecular biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
(2009) – but their research was in each case conducted outside India, mainly in
the United States and the United Kingdom. (Moreover, Chandrasekhar’s Nobel
prize was for work done in the 1930s.)
This failure has occurred despite the huge expansion of Indian science post-
1947 as a result of the money and staff poured into scientific higher education
and research by the Indian government under Nehru, such as the foundation of
the Indian Institutes of Technology, conceived by a British-Indian government
committee in 1946 and launched in the late 1950s; of the burgeoning of India’s
nuclear and space programmes; and of the boom in Indian business, especially
its computing and software industry, since the early 1990s. Although Indian
laboratories for some years after Independence continued to be underfunded
compared to western and Japanese laboratories, in the past few decades India’s
leading institutions, such as the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in
Mumbai and Pune and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (also founded
by the Tata company), have caught up with their foreign equivalents in terms of
financial support, if not in achievement. A senior professor at the Indian Institute
of Science, the chemist Gautam Desiraju, who did his doctoral training in the
United States but returned to India permanently in the late 1970s, lamented in
the science journal Nature in 2012:
At the glitzy level, we have had no Nobel prize winner since C. V. Raman, no highly Shanghai-ranked
university, no miracle drug for a tropical disease and no sequencing of the rice genome. At the industrial
level, there have been no breakthroughs to rival the telephone, the transistor or Teflon. At the
organizational level, we do not have a postdoctoral system worth the name, and our undergraduate
teaching is in a shambles. We figure occasionally in the best journals, yet we tolerate plagiarism,
misconduct and nepotism. And yet, the innate abilities and talents of India are palpable. Why is it that
this country has not been able to harness its strengths into deliverables?

The principal reason for the lacklustre performance in creative research

appears to be the Indian government’s bureaucratic dominance of Indian
universities and even the best national laboratories and research institutes since
1947. Thus, the vice-chancellors and directors of these institutions are always
appointed not by the faculty of the institution in question but by government
committees sitting in New Delhi (‘conclaves of old men’, says Desiraju), which
are inevitably caught up more in politics than in promoting education and
science. Secondly, these research institutions are not involved in undergraduate
teaching, while the universities, which do teach undergraduates, are generally
not involved in research. As a result, ‘the majority of higher education
institutions in the country are currently dysfunctional’, observes the Indian-
American economist Pranab Bardhan.
To this bureaucracy is added the deadening effect of caste politics. This has
intensified in India since 1947, with the introduction of caste-based reservation
of jobs under India’s new constitution in 1950, drafted by the untouchable leader
Ambedkar, who became India’s first law minister, and government attempts to
implement further reservation recommended by the Mandal Commission in
1980, creating violent protests and suicides among the upper castes. By the mid-
1990s, the administration of the caste-reservation programme had developed into
‘a massive, inefficient and highly dispiriting apparatus’, in which the most
sought-after benefits were jobs in the bureaucracy of the programme itself, note
Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany in their study, The Untouchables. ‘No
serious observer now imagines that the scheme is anything so grand as a way of
overcoming the overall subordination of the untouchables.’ In a nationwide poll
of 15,000 Indians by the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies in 2006, 74 per cent of respondents – and 56 per cent of graduates –
said they did not approve of intercaste marriages. ‘In India you do not cast your
vote; you vote your caste’, a Congress politician remarked pithily in 1995.
Although this observation is true more of the villages than of the towns, caste is
definitely more important than socio-economic status in deciding how Indians
vote, as shown by the long-running political success of the caste-based Bahujan
Samaj party in Uttar Pradesh, which virtually annihilated the state’s Congress
party in the 1990s.
Caste politics certainly affected Indian science before 1947; indeed scientists
who were Brahmins dominated the first Hindu nationalist group, the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (National Patriotic Organization), founded by a physician
in 1925, which is the parent of the BJP. Although many of the most original of
Indian scientists have been Brahmins (including three of the four Nobel
laureates, Raman, Chandrasekhar and Ramakrishnan), some were not, notably
Saha, who was the son of a low-caste grocer from East Bengal, for which he
suffered considerable discrimination that helped to motivate his interest in
nationalist politics. At any rate, casteism is anathema to the practice of
outstanding science because it encourages the perpetuation of social hierarchies
and discourages the questioning approach to knowledge integral to science.
Desiraju is hard-hitting in his criticism of this crucial handicap on Indian
science:
Our cultural value system, backed by Hindu scriptural authority, has created a strongly feudal mindset
among Indians. Centuries of servitude, right up until 1947, have made the average Indian docile, obedient
and sycophantic. ‘Behave yourself and be rewarded’, is the pragmatic mantra. I believe this feudal-
colonial mentality has had far-reaching and debilitating consequences for research.

In many ways, the history of Indian science since Independence reflects the
contradictory history of India as a whole in this period. The expansion of Indian
higher education has produced many more graduates than existed in the colonial
period; but the overall standard of intellectual life has if anything declined
because of an entrenched cultural conformism, which takes the political form of
Hindu nationalism. The authority of central government, inherited from the Raj,
has led to some remarkable technological successes based on western models;
but it has stifled individuality and originality in Indian society. The increasingly
populist nature of Indian democracy, expressed in the fragmentation and decline
of the Congress and the rise of the Hindu nationalist and caste-based parties in
the 1989 general election and after, has provided more opportunities for
worthwhile achievement by the many, especially in the middle class; but this has
come at the expense of the excellence achieved by the few under the
undemocratic and inegalitarian colonial regime. Ramanujan’s triumph over
adversity in the 1910s appears, alas, to have been more like a one-off success
than the harbinger of Indian eminence of which Nehru dreamed in 1946.
To what extent was Nehru himself responsible for these contradictions? For
example, he did more than anyone in post-Independence India to develop a
higher education system that might conceivably have recognized the potential of
a future Ramanujan – and yet he signally failed to improve the government-
funded school education system that flunked Ramanujan in the first decade of
the century. At the time of Nehru’s death in 1964, literacy had risen from 12 per
cent of India’s population in 1947 to only 30 per cent, while primary and
secondary school education was still firmly divided into an inferior public
system and a superior private one: a split that the government’s Kothari
Commission roundly condemned in 1966 as ‘increasing social segregation and
perpetuating and widening grade distinctions’. Of course, the inertia of the
bureaucracy was partly to blame for this lack of educational progress: in 2011,
India still had a literacy rate, at 74 per cent, that was well below the world’s
average, 84 per cent, and the world’s largest population of illiterates, along with
a public system of school education that was generally regarded as dismal
(‘absolutely dismal’, noted Amartya Sen in 2013). Universal, free and
compulsory education for all children between the ages of 6 and 14, though
stated as a directive policy in the 1950 constitution, has yet to be achieved. That
said, it is undoubtedly the case that India’s first prime minister showed curiously
little enthusiasm for creating a system of mass education, despite his enormous
political authority in the 1950s.
If Mahatma Gandhi was in some sense the founding father of the Indian
nation, Nehru – with some help from India’s first home affairs minister,
Vallabhbhai Patel, and its first law minister, Ambedkar – was its builder. Nehru
served as prime minister for seventeen years from 1947 until 1964; his daughter,
Indira Gandhi, and his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, served as prime minister for a
further twenty years, between 1966 and 1989 (with a gap in 1977–80 after the
Emergency); Rajiv’s widow, Sonia Gandhi, became president of the Congress in
1998, turned down the prime ministership after the general election of 2004, but
retained considerable control over the direction of the government. Hence Nehru
– and the political dynasty he founded, whether intentionally or not – has
unquestionably exerted more influence on modern India than any other single
politician since Gandhi. A discussion of Indian history since 1947 must entail an
assessment of Nehru’s life, work and legacy.
Today, Nehru tends to be regarded more as a nationalist and socialist
intellectual than as a statesman, because of his vaunted but ineffective non-
aligned foreign policy and his mishandling of India’s dispute with China over
Tibet and the status of the Dalai Lama, which escalated into a brief war
disastrous for his reputation. But it should not be forgotten that Nehru had
personal courage and popular appeal on a level comparable with that of his
mentor Gandhi. During the Partition riots Nehru, like Gandhi, went into the thick
of the violence. On one occasion in Delhi in 1947, according to an elderly
witness interviewed by Patrick French in his history of Partition, Liberty or
Death, Nehru climbed on a wall and stopped a communal riot by telling the
rioters: ‘I want to be the prime minister of a country where Hindus, Muslims,
Sikhs and Christians can live in harmony. Did we get our freedom so that you
could kill each other?’ In India’s first general election, held in 1951–52, which
had an electorate spread over more than a million square miles, Nehru travelled
25,000 miles by air, car, train and boat. ‘He addressed 300 mass meetings and
myriad wayside ones. He spoke to about twenty million people directly, while an
equal number merely had his darshan, eagerly flanking the roads to see him as
his car whizzed past’, writes Ramachandra Guha, who quotes an anonymous
Congress booklet, no doubt gilded but nevertheless evocative of a politically
more innocent time:
[At] almost every place, city, town, village or wayside halt, people had waited overnight to welcome the
nation’s leader. Schools and shops closed: milkmaids and cowherds had taken a holiday; the kisan
[farmer] and his helpmate took a temporary respite from their dawn-to-dusk programme of hard work in
field and home. In Nehru’s name, stocks of soda and lemonade sold out; even water became scarce …
Special trains were run from out-of-the-way places to carry people to Nehru’s meetings, enthusiasts
travelling not only on foot-boards but also on top of carriages. Scores of people fainted in milling crowds.

The result was an overwhelming majority for the Congress in the lower house
of Parliament (the Lok Sabha): 74.4 per cent of the seats under the first-past-the-
post system. Nonetheless, twenty-eight Congress ministers failed to win a seat,
and more than half of the electorate, 55 per cent, voted for non-Congress
candidates. In fact, at the height of Congress’s success – between Independence
and India’s defeat of Pakistan in the Bangladesh war in 1971 – over the course of
five general elections Congress’s average share of the vote remained 45 per cent;
it never once won a majority of the votes.
Moreover, in the state elections of 1951–52, the party did less well, winning
68.6 per cent of the seats with 42.4 per cent of the vote. This pattern, too, would
be repeated in later polls, creating standoffs between the Congress and
opposition parties in the states that the central government increasingly resolved
by recourse to coercive powers inherited from colonial times: ‘heirlooms of the
Raj, eagerly appropriated by Congress’, in the wry phrase of historian Perry
Anderson. These powers had been retained in Article 356 of the Constitution
with the approval of Nehru and Patel and delegated to the president, who usually
followed the advice of the prime minister. President’s Rule was first used at the
request of Nehru in 1951, in the Punjab, to remove the chief minister, and
notoriously in 1959, in Kerala, when the Communist state government was
dismissed by the president despite its enjoying a majority in the state legislature.
Up to 1964, President’s Rule was invoked nine times, but over the next three
decades over ninety times – for example, during the Communist-led Naxalite
movement in West Bengal in the early 1970s, the Assam agitation against illegal
migrants in the 1980s and the Sikh agitation for Khalistan in the Punjab that led
to the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 – until in 1994 a Supreme Court
judgment reduced the abuse. Since 1994, the power has been invoked less than
twenty times, most notably to deal with Jammu and Kashmir, which fell under
President’s Rule in 1990–96, 2002 and 2008–09. ‘The representative institutions
of Indian democracy were thus from the start anchored in a system of electoral
distortion, and armour-plated with an ample repertoire of legal repression’, notes
Anderson. Even so, Nehru was much more sparing in his use of such repression
than most of his successors.
He also handled with considerable skill the vital matter of the reorganization
of the states, including the patchwork of princely states, inherited from the Raj.
Although he was not sympathetic to the linguistic division of India (which has
twenty-two official languages, including Hindi but excluding English), Nehru
was compelled to accept the need for some new linguistic states by a violent
agitation among Telugu-speakers for a Telugu-speaking state in the northern
portion of the Madras state; this new state was inaugurated in 1953 as Andhra
state. In response to further linguistic agitations, especially from Marathi-
speakers in Bombay and Punjabi-speakers, including the Sikhs, Nehru set up a
commission that led to the States Reorganization Act in 1956, which defused
some of the tension in Bombay state and the Punjab, and further expanded
Andhra state into Andhra Pradesh by adding to it the Telugu-speaking areas of
the former Hyderabad princely state, including the city of Hyderabad. In 1960,
however, after further agitation Bombay state had to be split into Marathi-
speaking Maharashtra and Gujarati-speaking Gujarat. Then in 1966, soon after
Nehru’s death, following years of protest by Sikh organizations, the Punjab was
split into two new states: Punjab for Punjabi-speakers, and Haryana for Hindi-
speakers, with the newly completed city of Chandigarh on the border between
the two states as a union territory acting as the capital for both states; the
remaining Pahari-speaking areas were given to the hill state now known as
Himachal Pradesh, with its capital at Shimla.
Other new states were created less on linguistic and more on ethnic and
political lines, often after years of armed regional rebellion. The first was
Nagaland in the north-east of India, carved in 1963 from the state of Assam. It
was followed by more north-eastern states, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur,
Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura, in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2000,
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand were created out of Madhya Pradesh,
Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, respectively, in the first two instances as a result of the
longstanding demands of tribal peoples, generally now known as adivasis
(aboriginals). In 2013, Telangana was created out of the northern part of Andhra
Pradesh, including Hyderabad. Today, there are twenty-nine Indian states and
seven union territories (including Delhi): more than the eight major and five
minor provinces of British India, yet far fewer than the 565 princely states
existing in 1947.
However, Nehru’s greatest success lay not in holding fair elections and
holding together the Indian Union, but in his social legislation, which reformed
Hindu personal law. The British had abolished sati and introduced the Indian
Penal Code (drafted by Macaulay) to cover criminal law, but they had made no
attempt to introduce a common civil code to replace the religiously sanctioned
laws of India’s many different communities, governing such matters as marriage,
divorce, alimony and inheritance. Nehru, backed by Ambedkar – both of whom
were lawyers trained in the British tradition – was determined to do this. But
both men quickly realized that there was little support for a common code
among the large Muslim minority. Muslim personal law was therefore left alone
by Nehru, and remains unreformed – despite an abortive attempt in the mid-
1980s by the government of Rajiv Gandhi, who backed off for fear of losing
Muslim votes. Nehru and Ambedkar concentrated instead on a common, secular
code for Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and other religious communities. Their
intention was to replace a Hindu personal law still largely based on the ancient
laws of Manu – in which caste mattered more than the individual, the ‘joint’
family was the norm, the marriage of children was arranged by their parents, the
man was master of the woman – with a more individualist and liberal view of
human rights. Unsurprisingly, Nehru had a bruising fight on his hands to enact
the legislation, not least with a socially conservative president, Rajendra Prasad,
which lasted for nearly ten years after Independence. At one point, Nehru
referred Parliament ironically to the fidelity of women stressed in The Ramayana
and The Mahabharata, in order to remind its (mainly male) members of the
hypocrisy endemic in the Hindu personal law. ‘It is only the women who have to
behave like Sita and Savitri; the men may behave as they like.’ In the end, the
legislation had to be split up. In 1955, the Hindu Marriage Act was passed,
followed by three more acts in 1956, covering succession, guardianship,
adoption and alimony. Finally, though, women acquired equal rights with men in
regard to the succession to and holding of property; monogamy was put on a
legal basis; and divorce entailed the payment of alimony.
Nehru’s greatest failure was his economic policy, which has come to dominate
his reputation since the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s. This is
somewhat unfair, given the meagre and uncompetitive industrial base on which
he had to build in 1947; the fact that Indian industrialization postdated
democracy (unlike in most European countries); and that Nehru’s successors
were more blameworthy than him until the 1990s – not least in the way that they
turned a blind eye to bribery at the highest levels of politics. However, Nehru
himself cannot be acquitted of setting a bad economic example, with his heavy,
government-directed emphasis on bureaucrats and planning committees (led by
the physicist and statistician Prasanta Mahalanobis), rather than businessmen and
companies, as the primary source of major investment decisions. His
overweening faith in science and technology, such as large dams, was also ill-
informed, though commonly shared at this time of widespread belief in scientific
progress. Nehru stated that: ‘It is science alone that can solve the problem of
hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and of
deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich
country inhabited by starving people …’. Rhetoric such as this led him, and
subsequent Indian leaders, to waste precious resources on nuclear power, which
is yet to prove itself economic in India and is ‘very unlikely’ to do so, according
to the physicist and environmentalist M. V. Ramana, in his ironically entitled
book on nuclear energy in India, The Power of Promise.
The legacy of Nehruvian central planning, compounded by two decades of
economic stagnation and growing corruption under Indira Gandhi and the
coalition governments of 1977–80, created an insidious ‘licence-inspector-quota
raj’, in which government ministers and bureaucrats in New Delhi with control
over an array of industrial licences had the power to make or break business
decisions, often in exchange for large bribes. In one of several absurdities cited
by the analyst Shankar Aiyyar, a Small-Scale Industries licence issued in Delhi
capped production of video-cassettes by a business at a quota of 20,000 per year,
as against a manufacturing capacity for the imported cassette-making machine of
20,000 per week. In order to keep the machine running at full capacity
throughout the year, the owner of the machine was therefore compelled to
register the same business fifty-two times under different names, even though
the address for the manufacturing unit remained identical. ‘In my thirty years in
active business,’ writes Gurcharan Das—the former executive turned student of
The Mahabharata mentioned earlier—in his book India Grows at Night, ‘I
hardly met a single official who really understood my business, yet he had the
power to ruin it.’
Some of these crippling restrictions were lifted in the mid-1980s by the
Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi, which abolished licensing in thirty
industries and encouraged the use of information technology. But after 1987,
with the revelation of the Bofors corruption scandal over arms sales involving
alleged kickbacks to key defence officials and politicians at the very top of the
Congress government, the reform process stalled and Rajiv Gandhi lost power in
the elections of 1989. By the summer of 1991, India found itself on the edge of
bankruptcy as a result of the collision of three international events: the
disappearance of India’s trade with the Soviet Union after the latter’s collapse in
1990–91; the loss of remittances from hundreds of thousands of Indian workers
in Kuwait following the invasion by Saddam Hussein in 1990; and a spike in the
price of oil because of the Gulf War that more than doubled the monthly bill for
India’s petroleum imports from $280 million to $671 million. In order to secure
a massive rescue loan from the International Monetary Fund, the Indian
government under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and his finance minister,
Manmohan Singh, was left with no alternative but to agree to dismantle most of
the licence-inspector-quota raj that had grown up since 1947. Economic
liberalization got underway the following year, producing dramatic growth
against a background of unprecedented political turmoil: six prime ministers and
five governments during the 1990s. With it began a new, and still developing,
phase in India’s contradictory history.
 POSTSCRIPT

An American economist has predicted that in the next century India will be an economic
superpower. I don’t want India to be an economic superpower. I want India to be a happy country.
(Industrialist J. R. D. Tata, 1992)

Contemporary India pulsates with newly created wealth, energy and optimism. It
also teems with historic poverty, violence and distress. The economic reforms of
1991 led to the growth of a large and unprecedented middle class: between a
fifth and a third of the country by income, as compared with less than 2 per cent
at Independence. Yet between 1995 and 2012 nearly 285,000 Indian farmers
(according to conservative official figures) committed suicide, in despair at their
indebtedness created by the drive towards corporate farming: ‘the largest
sustained wave of such deaths recorded in history’, notes the journalist P.
Sainath. And 50 per cent of Indian households have to resort to open defecation
for lack of a household toilet, according to the national census of 2011. Extreme
polarization defines India today and demands attention, whether from
politicians, business people and economists, writers and artists, or simply the
concerned Indian citizen. In almost every country in the world – but possibly
most of all in India – the disparity between haves and have-nots increased during
the two decades on either side of the new millennium, including the financial
crash of 2008. So did the extent and scale of corruption, despite the
disappearance of most of the ‘licence raj’.
In mid-1991, at the same time that the Indian government was facing financial
bankruptcy, the 70-year-old Satyajit Ray gave a press interview in which he
commented trenchantly on corruption. ‘Looking around me I feel that the old
values of personal integrity, loyalty, liberalism, rationalism and fair play are all
completely gone,’ said Ray. ‘People accept corruption as a way of life, as a
method of getting along, as a necessary evil. In accepting material comforts you
grow numb with placid acceptance. Maybe you resist in the beginning. But the
internal and external pressures crowd to a point where you learn to overlook the
moral decline they spell.’ This was no off-the-cuff remark; Ray’s last three films,
including his 1989 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People,
updated to contemporary Bengal, had been explicit meditations on corruption. In
fact, the subject had preoccupied his films ever since the making of his sinister
tragi-comedy, The Middle Man, in 1975, in protest against Indira Gandhi’s
Emergency, with its devastating vignette of a shady Congress politician that
somehow eluded the censors in Delhi.
Two decades after Ray’s death in 1992, corruption was a word on the lips of
every Indian. Since the unresolved Bofors scandal of the late 1980s, there had
been a catalogue of financial misbehaviour at the top of government, the military
and business. ‘Moral failure pervaded our public life and hung over it like
Delhi’s smog’, wrote Gurcharan Das in The Difficulty of Being Good, published
in 2009, soon after its author was shocked by the public revelation of the largest
fraud in Indian corporate history, perpetrated by the founder of an internationally
respected Indian software company, Satyam Computer Services. Das listed a
variety of less extreme examples:
One out of five members of the Indian parliament elected in 2004 had criminal charges against him. A
survey by a Harvard professor found that one out of every four teachers in government primary schools is
absent and one out of four is simply not teaching. A World Bank study found that two out of five doctors
do not show up at state primary health centres and that 69 per cent of their medicines are stolen. A cycle
rickshaw driver in Kanpur routinely pays a fifth of his daily earnings in bribes to the police. A farmer
cannot hope to get a clear title to his land without bribing a revenue official and that too after a
humiliating ordeal of countless visits to the revenue office.

In his book Public Money Private Agenda, published in 2013, the journalist A.
Surya Prakash catalogues how government largesse provided under the Members
of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme, established in 1993 to give MPs
power to help their constituents directly, has been regularly diverted from
financing public facilities, such as community halls and computers for schools,
into private and commercial facilities, such as premises for local lawyers’
associations and shopping complexes, not to mention untraceable ‘assets’.
‘Parliamentarians fail to realize that the credibility of Parliament remains intact
only when privileges and ethics are seen as two sides of the same coin’, writes
Prakash. Instead, ‘their hackles are raised when people demand that the concept
of accountability ought to keep pace with the burgeoning privileges of MPs.’
In response to rising public pressure, peaking in the national anti-corruption
movement of 2011–12 led by Anna Hazare, action was taken by a reluctant
central government to punish the most flagrant malfeasance. However, the
cancer seemed too deeply rooted in the Indian body politic to be removed
without systemic reforms. Public-interest litigation filed in 1999 by professors at
one of the Indian Institutes of Management calling themselves the Association
for Democratic Reforms, backed by India’s Supreme Court, intending to compel
political parties to reveal election candidates’ criminal convictions and cases
pending against them, was resisted by twenty-one political parties. It was
eventually implemented, yet, after the 2009 elections, more than a quarter of the
elected MPs had criminal records, including pending charges of murder.
Moreover many, perhaps most, educated Indians appeared to accept corruption
as a corollary of becoming personally richer. Even Das – pursuing his faith in the
free market advocated in India Unbound – had earlier welcomed the idea that
economic growth required that ‘people shamelessly follow their self-interest in
the bazaar rather than lofty moral principles’, although he now admitted to
having second thoughts.
For sure, official corruption has been a fact of life in all societies in certain
periods, not least in the ‘rotten boroughs’ of early 19th-century Britain before the
reform of the House of Commons in 1832. In India, it was rife in Mughal Delhi
in the period after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, and in mid-18th-century
Bengal under the East India Company nabobs before the reforms of Hastings and
Cornwallis. It must have flourished, too, in the Mauryan empire, judging from
the blunt advice on controlling official corruption in Kautilya’s Arthashastra,
which includes the recommendation that corrupt officials be publicly smeared
with cow dung and ashes. But also true is that such corruption was stamped on
during the British Raj and frowned on in the nationalist movement under Gandhi
and Nehru. Of all the pungent criticisms levelled against these two extraordinary
Indian leaders, no one has accused them of feathering their own nests by
accepting bribes. The rot started after Nehru, as is generally agreed, with Indira
Gandhi, her sons Sanjay and Rajiv, and their successors.
If this is not discouraging enough – as well as potentially damaging for the
future growth of the Indian economy – India’s once-creative intellectual life also
seems in danger of atrophy. Scientific research lacks originality, as already
discussed. In commerce, Indian technology companies have invested too little in
research and development, notes Dinesh Sharma in his recent history of India’s
IT industry, The Long Revolution. One highly successful IT entrepreneur,
Nandan Nilekani, regrets that ‘lack of innovation seems to be the default
mindset’ in his Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century. The offices of
India’s IT companies in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Gurgaon and elsewhere may
look ‘like twinkling towers of innovation’, an American sociologist, Shehzad
Nadeem, writes in his well-researched study, Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is
Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves, but in reality, says Nadeem,
‘like plastic fruit, they are imitations’. A former director-general of the Council
of Scientific and Industrial Research in New Delhi, Raghunath Anant Mashelkar,
agrees with this criticism: ‘Historically India has not done well in science-led
innovation but now it can’t remain a nation of imitators.’
India in the early 21st century has no lack of competent academics,
commentators and journalists, not to speak of successful writers and artists, as
well as a core of well-trained and altruistic professionals in, for example, health
care. However, it sorely needs original thinkers, independent of the government,
approaching the calibre of its pre-Independence reformers, writers and scientists,
such as Gandhi, Tagore, Raman and Ramanujan, not to speak of such historical
religious figures as Kabir and of course the Buddha.
Gurcharan Das is probably the best of the current Indian public intellectuals,
with a pan-Indian – even international – audience beyond their particular
discipline. But he was educated and trained largely outside India, in the United
States, where professional immigrants from India such as Amartya Sen have
been able to make a considerable national impact; and Das is one of a group
small enough to be counted on the fingers of two hands. V. S. Naipaul’s hopeful
prediction in an essay for the magazine India Today on the 50th anniversary of
Independence in 1997, that ‘in another ten years, India will probably be one of
the world’s most intellectually gifted countries’, has not been fulfilled. More
accurate, one fears, is the home-grown analysis of Markandey Katju, chairman
of the Press Council of India and a former Indian Supreme Court judge. In 2012,
Katju deplored the fact that the large majority of his fellow countrymen – he
controversially claimed ‘90 per cent’ – prefer to vote on the basis of caste rather
than merit, to believe in astrology, to turn cricket into a ‘religion’ and to idolize
‘Bollywood’ stars, rather than attempt to improve democracy and society by
rational and scientific thinking. ‘I want to see Indians prosper, I want poverty
and unemployment abolished, I want the standard of living of the 80 per cent
poor Indians’ – those who live on less than about $2.50 per day, according to the
World Bank – ‘to rise so that they get decent lives’, said Katju. ‘But this is
possible [only] when their minds are rid of casteism, communalism and
superstition’.
The infection of current Indian culture by ‘Bollywood’ films tends to confirm
Katju’s scathing judgement. Once upon a time, beginning in the 1950s – the era
of the actor-directors Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor – Hindi films were watchable
enough as entertainment, with some talented acting, witty dialogues and lovely
songs (though almost always unimaginatively directed); they were something of
a guilty pleasure for artistically discerning Indians, as I recall during the 1970s.
But now most of the films are just vehicles for the display of consumerism and
raunchiness. Yet, so commercially successful is the film industry that even
academics and serious writers have been seduced into lauding its output. It takes
one of the industry’s own to speak the truth. In 2009, the Urdu poet, scriptwriter
and hugely successful songwriter, Javed Akhtar, remarked of current Hindi
films: ‘In a way, they mirror the fact that we are not ready to stop and think.
Everybody is in a hurry and is looking for instant gratification without caring for
those around them. We are making films that sell this lifestyle to a small,
affluent, multiplex-going audience that doesn’t bother about the small town and
rural population.’ By contrast, said Akhtar, Satyajit Ray’s films ‘depicted a
compassion, a sensitivity that is sadly missing not just from films, but from our
lives as well.’ They famously lack villains: ‘Ray’s characters only had negative
shades. They were people trapped in their own thinking and beliefs. While Hindi
films had ferocious villains who only evoked hatred, you actually felt sad for
Ray’s negative characters. Such was the sensitivity of the man.’ Akhtar
concluded by suggesting: ‘We need to take a long, hard look at ourselves. Or
else, we shall continue to feel incomplete and fail to appreciate the subtlety that
Ray’s films depicted.’
Needless to say, I couldn’t agree more. Culture matters as much as politics and
economics. Only a great civilization with a long train of achievement could have
given birth to the films of Satyajit Ray. So I would add my own, objective,
suggestion to Akhtar’s subjective one. Indians need to become curious to study
India’s history more critically, in particular its dynastic tendency, as a way of
understanding their present and future. The Mahabharata may be an important
guide to history, as Gandhi believed; but so is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
Otherwise – to recall the aphorism of a western philosopher about failing to
remember the past – India risks condemning itself to repeating its past mistakes.
 CHRONOLOGY

BC
c. 7000 Village habitation at Mehrgarh (Baluchistan)
c. 2600–1900 Indus Valley civilization
second mill. Migration of Aryans into northwest India
c. 1500–1200 Composition of Rigveda
c. 1200–500 Composition of later Vedas, Samhitas, Brahmanas and
Upanishads
c. 950 Mahabharata War
? 563–483 Life of Siddhartha Gautama, founder of Buddhism
sixth/fifth cent. Life of Vardhamana the Mahavira, founder of Jainism
c. 543–321 Magadhan empire
326 Alexander the Great invades Punjab
c. 321–298 Reign of Chandragupta Maurya
fourth cent. Composition of Kautilya’s Arthashastra
c. 300 Composition of Ramayana begins
c. 269–232 Reign of Asoka; inscriptions in Brahmi and Kharoshti
c. 200 Cave paintings begin at Ajanta
c. 187 End of Mauryan empire
second cent. Shunga dynasty in north India
late second cent. Monsoon wind permits Greeks to sail across Indian Ocean
AD
first cent. Bharata Natyam dance form emerges in Tamil Nadu
first cent. Buddhism reaches Southeast Asia and China
first cent. Roman maritime trade with India begins
78 Saka era begins
first–second cent. Jews settle at Kodungallur
c. 200 Ramayana reaches its present form
c. 300–888 Pallava dynasty in south India
320–c. 335 Reign of Chandra Gupta I
c. 400 Mahabharata reaches its present form
early fifth cent. Faxian visits India
fifth cent. Nalanda University founded
sixth cent. Buddhism becomes influential in Japan
c. 500 Second wave of Huna invasions
c. 550 End of Gupta empire
c. 550–757 First Chalukya dynasty in Deccan
606–47 Reign of Harsha
629–45 Xuanzang visits India
c. 630–970 Eastern Chalukya dynasty in Deccan
712 Arabs occupy Sindh
c. 750–950 Gurjara-Pratihara dynasties in Ganges basin
757–973 Rashtrakuta dynasty in Deccan
c. 760–1142 Pala dynasty in Bengal, Bihar and Assam
c. 850–1267 Chola dynasty in south India
10th–12th cent. Odissi dance form emerges in Orissa
c. 916–1203 Chandella dynasty in central India
973–c. 1189 Second Chalukya dynasty in Deccan
973–1048 Life of al-Biruni
1001 Mahmud of Ghazni begins raids on India
1026 Destruction of Somnath Temple
1192 Second battle of Tarain
c. 1190s Destruction of Nalanda University
c. 1200 ‘Arabic’ numerals, invented in India, reach Europe
1206–1526 Delhi Sultanate
1228–1826 Ahom dynasty in Assam
1325–51 Reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq
1336–1565 Vijayanagar empire
1398 Timur sacks Delhi
1401–1562 Malwa Sultanate
? 1440–1518 Life of Kabir
15th–16th cent. Sattriya dance form emerges in Assam
1498 Vasco da Gama reaches India
16th cent. Mohinyattam, Kathak and Kuchipudi dance forms emerge
in Kerala, north India and Andhra Pradesh, respectively
1526–1858 Mughal empire
1556–1605 Reign of Akbar
1600 East India Company founded (London)
1627–1658 Reign of Shah Jahan
1632–1640s Taj Mahal built
17th cent. Kathakali dance form emerges in Kerala
1680 Death of Shivaji
1707 Death of Aurangzeb
1739 Nadir Shah sacks Delhi
1757 Battle of Plassey
18th cent. Manipuri dance form emerges in Manipur
1764 Battle of Buxar
1765 East India Company granted fiscal administration of
eastern India
1770 Famine in Bengal
1774–85 Governor-generalship of Warren Hastings
1784 Asiatic Society of Bengal founded
1786 Indo-European language family announced by William
Jones
1793 Permanent Settlement of Bengal and reform of civil
service
1799 Death of Tipu Sultan
1828 Brahma Sabha (later Brahmo Samaj) founded by
Rammohun Roy
1830s English replaces Persian in government
administration/education
1857–58 Sepoy Mutiny and Indian Uprising
1858 British Crown replaces East India Company as ruler of
India
1885 Indian National Congress founded
1905 Partition of Bengal; Swadeshi movement in Bengal
1906 All-India Muslim League founded
1909 Indian Councils Act (Morley-Minto Reforms)
1912 Capital of India moved from Calcutta to Delhi
1913 Rabindranath Tagore awarded Nobel Prize in Literature
1914–18 First World War
1918 Srinivasa Ramanujan awarded fellowship of Royal
Society
1919 Amritsar massacre
1921 Non-cooperation movement launched by Mahatma
Gandhi
1930 Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman awarded Nobel Prize in
Physics
1935 Government of India Act
1937 First democratic elections, won by Indian National
Congress
1939–45 Second World War
1940 Pakistan resolution by All-India Muslim League
1942 Quit India movement launched by Gandhi
1943 Famine in Bengal
1947 Independence of India and Partition into India and
Pakistan
1947–64 Prime ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru
1948 Gandhi assassinated
1956 States Reorganization Act
1962 Indo-China War
1968 Hargobind Khorana awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine
1971 Bangladesh War
1975–77 Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi
1983 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar awarded Nobel Prize in
Physics
1984 Indira Gandhi assassinated
1991 Rajiv Gandhi assassinated
1991 Liberalization of Indian economy leads to rapid growth
1992 Satyajit Ray receives Academy Award for Lifetime
Achievement
1992 Destruction of Babri Masjid, Ayodhya
1998 Bharatiya Janata Party elected to lead national coalition
government
1998 Amartya Sen awarded Nobel Prize in Economics
2009 Venkatraman Ramakrishnan awarded Nobel Prize in
Chemistry
 FURTHER READING

With a vast subcontinent and more than four millennia to cover, plus some of the
imperial history of the Islamic world and the colonial history of modern Europe,
it is difficult to know where to begin in recommending reading about the history
of India. This brief survey covers the sources of every major quotation in the
book, while also mentioning some important unquoted sources and giving some
references to subjects omitted from the main text for lack of space. Much as I
would like to have included a few books and articles in Indian languages, I have
stuck to English, given that there are more than twenty official languages in
India, of which I myself read only one (Bengali); and that rustily. I have also
omitted references to the internet – invaluable as it is for research – purely for
lack of space, as is customary with short histories.
Before coming to the individual chapters, something should be said about
histories of India as a whole. The sole, up-to-date, short history in print is
Thomas R. Trautmann’s 250-page India: Brief History of a Civilization (New
York, 2011), an introductory textbook for American students that stresses the
pre-colonial over the colonial period and naturally avoids expressing many
personal opinions. Other one-volume textbooks by professional academics are
considerably longer, for example, Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund’s A
History of India (fifth edition, London, 2010). None, it must be said, is an
enjoyable read. By contrast, the writer and historian John Keay’s 600-page
India: A History (London, 2000) is aimed at a non-academic readership, well
researched and enjoyably written, with plenty of opinion but not always factually
accurate, especially on the modern period. Otherwise, general histories come in
more than one volume, written by more than one expert. The best known, rightly
so, is The Wonder That Was India, vol. 1 by A. L. Basham (third revised edition,
London, 1967), covering the period up to the coming of Islam, and vol. 2 by S.
A. A. Rizvi (London, 1987), taking the story up to 1700; to which must be added
Early India: from the Origins to AD 1300 by Romila Thapar (London, 2002) and
A History of India, volume 2, by Percival Spear (revised edition, London, 1978),
covering from the Mughal empire to the post-Independence period. Also still
valuable are some of the scholarly essays in Basham’s edited collection, A
Cultural History of India (Oxford, 1975), and the well-illustrated Time-Life
Cultural Atlas of India (Amsterdam, 1995) by Gordon Johnson (general editor of
the New Cambridge History of India) with contributions from others. Another
highly illustrated book, Manosi Lahiri’s Mapping India (New Delhi, 2012),
shows maps of India through the ages, beginning with Ptolemy’s. Some of the
above books are long in the tooth, especially Spear’s book and Basham’s two
books, the older of which was influenced by the first flush of Indian
independence. Even so, no academic or general writer has yet managed to beat
Basham’s Wonder for its range, its depth, its readability and the quality of its
many translations from Indian languages.

Introduction
I begin with two classics: Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (London,
1946) and Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
(London, 1951). Both books are intellectually flawed but beautifully written. B.
R. Ambedkar’s The Untouchables: Who Were They?: And Why They Became
Untouchables (New Delhi, 1948) is also historically important, and powerfully
argued, as is the Marxist D. D. Kosambi’s The Culture and Civilisation of
Ancient India in Historical Outline (London, 1965). All my quotations from
Mahatma Gandhi may be found in the comprehensive volumes of the Collected
Works of Mahatma Gandhi, published by the Indian government since 1958.
Most of Satyajit Ray’s English writings on Indian and world cinema and
culture, dating from 1948–91, can be found in his two collections, Our Films
Their Films (New Delhi, 1976) and Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema (New
Delhi, 2012). Ray’s English screenplay of The Chess Players appears in The
Chess Players and Other Screenplays, edited by me (London, 1989). My
biography of Ray is Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (second edition, London, 2004).
Amartya Sen’s academic writings are extensive. The most readable of those
about India are collected in The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian
History, Culture and Identity (London, 2005). Sen’s magazine article on Indian
growth, ‘Putting Growth in its Place’ (Outlook, 14 November 2011), was written
with his collaborator Jean Drèze, with whom he wrote An Uncertain Glory:
India and Its Contradictions (London, 2013). Ramachandra Guha’s critical
review of Sen’s 2005 collection, ‘Arguments with Sen’ (Economic and Political
Weekly, 40 (2005), pp. 4420–25), was followed by Sen’s response, ‘Our Past and
Our Present’ (Economic and Political Weekly, 41 (2006), pp. 4877–86). Guha’s
thorough and impressive history of India since 1947, India after Gandhi: The
History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London, 2007), is essentially a
political and economic, rather than a cultural, study.
 Selecting the most significant from the outpouring of books about the ‘new’
India is inevitably invidious, nor can I claim to have read all of them. But I can
vouch for the intelligence and readability of the following books (in date order
of publication): V. S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now (London, 1990),
which should be compared with Naipaul’s more personal first book on India, An
Area of Darkness (London, 1964); Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India (London,
1997; revised edition, 2003); Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound: From
Independence to the Global Information Age (New Delhi, 2000); Pratap Bhanu
Mehta’s The Burden of Democracy (New Delhi, 2003); Edward Luce’s In Spite
of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (London, 2006; second edition,
2011); Pranab Bardhan’s Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the
Economic Rise of China and India (Princeton, 2010); Patrick French’s India: A
Portrait (London, 2011); Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life,
Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum (London, 2012); Aman Sethi’s A Free Man:
A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (London, 2012); and Shankkar Aiyar’s
Accidental India: A History of the Nation’s Passage through Crisis and Change
(New Delhi, 2012). Also of interest, though less well written, is A. P. J. Abdul
Kalam’s Turning Points: A Journey through Challenges (New Delhi, 2012),
given that its scientist author served as a notable president of India.
I have omitted from the book recent English-language fiction about India,
because there are so many writers and none of them is absolutely outstanding, at
the literary level of R. K. Narayan (or Naipaul). Interesting are: Aravind Adiga,
Amit Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy
and Salman Rushdie. Also omitted, with regret, are visual artists such as M. F.
Husain, Bhupen Khakhar, K. G. Subramanyan, Abanindranath and
Gaganendranath Tagore and Ravi Varma, though I have made an exception for
my favourite modern Indian artist, Benode Bihari Mukherjee. See Benodebehari
Mukherjee (1904–1980): Centenary Retrospective (New Delhi, 2006), the
catalogue of a National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition curated by the painter
Gulammohammed Sheikh and R. Siva Kumar.

1 The Indus Valley Civilization

Accessible, well-illustrated studies of the Indus Valley civilization include:
Michael Jansen, Máire Mulloy and Günter Urban’s Forgotten Cities on the
Indus: Early Civilization in Pakistan from the 8th to the 2nd Millennium BC
(Mainz, 1991); Jonathan Mark Kenoyer’s Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley
Civilization (Karachi, 1998); and Jane R. McIntosh’s A Peaceful Realm: The
Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization (Oxford, 2002).
The leading study of the Indus script is Asko Parpola’s erudite Deciphering
the Indus Script (Cambridge, 1994), but for a brief introduction see the relevant
chapter in my Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts
(revised edition, London, 2009). Gregory L. Possehl’s Indus Age: The Writing
System (Philadelphia, 1996) discusses in detail, often entertainingly, the many
attempts to decipher the script since the 1920s. A recent attempt by N. Jha and
N. S. Rajaram published in The Deciphered Indus Script: Methodology,
Readings, Interpretations (New Delhi, 2000) is criticized by Michael Witzel and
Steve Farmer in ‘Horseplay in Harappa’ (Frontline, 13 October 2000).
Nayanjot Lahiri’s Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization Was
Discovered (New Delhi, 2005) is a well-written history. Sudeshna Guha’s edited
collection, The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology (Ahmedabad,
2010), is a lavishly illustrated study of the work of Sir John Marshall, though it
devotes relatively little space to the Indus Valley.

2 Vedas, Aryans and the Origins of Hinduism

The best-known modern version of the Vedas is The Rig Veda: An Anthology,
translated by Wendy Doniger (London, 1981). The Upanishads, translated by
Juan Mascaró (London, 1965), is one of several currently available translations.
Rabindranath Tagore’s comment on the Upanishads appears in Selected Letters
of Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson
(Cambridge, 1997).
Thomas R. Trautmann’s Aryans and British India (Berkeley, 1997) is the most
readable introduction to the tangled debate about the Indo-Aryans, especially
when read alongside Trautmann’s edited collection, The Aryan Debate (New
Delhi, 2005), which includes S. P. Gupta’s ‘The Indus-Saraswati Civilization:
Beginnings and Developments’. The most comprehensive discussion is,
however, Edwin Bryant’s The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-
Aryan Migration Debate (New York, 2001). A fierce critic of the Indo-Aryan
theory as racist is the archaeologist Dilip K. Chakrabarti in his book, The Oxford
Companion to Indian Archaeology: The Archaeological Foundations of Ancient
India, Stone Age to AD 13th Century (New Delhi, 2006).
Enjoyable biographies of William Jones, Friedrich Max Müller and
Rammohun Roy are, respectively: Michael J. Franklin’s Orientalist Jones: Sir
William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (Oxford, 2011),
supplemented by Alexander Murray’s edited collection, Sir William Jones 1746–
1794: A Commemoration (Oxford, 1998); Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Scholar
Extraordinary: The Life of Friedrich Max Müller (London, 1974); and Amiya P.
Sen’s Rammohun Roy: A Critical Biography (New Delhi, 2012).
3 Buddha, Alexander and Asoka
There are dozens of recent introductions to the life and thought of the Buddha. I
recommend: Karen Armstrong’s Buddha (London, 2000); Paul Williams with
Anthony Tribe and Alexander Wynne’s Buddhist Thought (second edition,
London, 2012); Pankaj Mishra’s An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
(London, 2004); and The Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha, translated
by Thomas Byrom (London, 2002). Also of interest, though hard going, is
Thomas McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in
Indian and Greek Philosophies (New York, 2002), on how Buddhism may have
reached the classical world; and Donald S. Lopez Jr’s From Stone to Flesh: A
Short History of the Buddha (Chicago, 2013), on how East and West understood
the Buddha prior to the 19th century. The much-disputed dating of the Buddha is
discussed by Richard Gombrich in Heinz Bechert’s edited collection, The Dating
of the Historical Buddha, vol. 2 (Göttingen, 1992). Criticism of this book,
mainly by Indian scholars, appears in A. K. Narain’s edited collection, The Date
of the Historical Sakyamuni Buddha (New Delhi, 2003).
Buddhism’s disappearance in India and its modern revival are the subject of
Gail Omvedt’s Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste (New
Delhi, 2003) and Trevor Ling’s Buddhist Revival in India: Aspects of the
Sociology of Buddhism (Basingstoke, 1980). The story of the European scholars
responsible for Buddhism’s rediscovery is told in Charles Allen’s The Buddha
and the Sahibs: The Men Who Discovered India’s Lost Religion (London, 2002);
and the Ajanta cave paintings (now almost hidden in darkness for visitors) are
wonderfully displayed in the photographer Benoy K. Behl’s The Ajanta Caves:
Ancient Paintings of Buddhist India (London, 1998). On the Mahabodhi Temple,
see Alan Trevithick’s The Revival of Buddhist Pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811–
1949): Anagarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Temple (New Delhi, 2006)
and David Geary, Matthew R. Sayers and Abhishek Singh Amar’s edited
collection, Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on a Contested Buddhist Site: Bodh
Gaya Jataka (London, 2012). Rabindranath Tagore’s comment on the Buddha
appears in his ‘Buddhadeva’ (Visva-Bharati Quarterly, winter 1956/57, pp. 169–
76).
An excellent recent biography of Alexander is Paul Cartledge’s Alexander the
Great: The Hunt for a New Past (London, 2004). On the later Greek influence in
northwestern India, see A. K. Narain’s The Indo-Greeks (revised edition, New
Delhi, 2003). Charles Allen’s Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor
(London, 2012) is a well-constructed history that does not skimp on difficult
scholarly issues. The attorney Bruce Rich promotes Asoka (and Kautilya) for the
modern world in To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from
Ancient India (Boston, 2010), without being entirely convincing.

4 Hindu Dynasties
There are no accessible studies focusing on the Hindu dynasties, so it is best to
read the general histories of Romila Thapar and A. L. Basham. Brief
introductions to the ideas behind classical Hinduism include K. M. Sen’s
venerable Hinduism (London, 2005, with a foreword by Sen’s grandson,
Amartya Sen) and Sue Hamilton’s Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford, 2001), as well as A. L. Dallapiccola’s Hindu Myths (London, 2003). I
also recommend Richard Lannoy’s The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture
and Society (London, 1971).
The novelist R. K. Narayan’s ‘shortened modern prose versions’ of the Indian
epics are: The Ramayana (London, 1972) and The Mahabharata (London,
1978). There is a translation by the Sanskrit scholar John D. Smith, The
Mahabharata: An Abridged Translation (London, 2009). Rudyard Kipling’s
comment on The Mahabharata appears in Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches
1884–88, edited by Thomas Pinney (Basingstoke, 1986). Gurcharan Das
stimulatingly relates The Mahabharata to modern Indian concerns in The
Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma (New York, 2009). Many
classics of Sanskrit literature are available in the translations of the Oxford series
World’s Classics and the series Penguin Classics.
On Hindu aesthetics, T. Richard Blurton’s Hindu Art (London, 2002) is a good
introduction. George Michell’s The Penguin Guide to the Monuments of India,
vol. 1 (London, 1989), covering Buddhist, Jain and Hindu structures, is intended
as a guidebook but in addition serves as an excellent source of reliable
information, based on the author’s thorough research on the spot. There are also
numerous large-format, highly illustrated studies intended for both scholars and
coffee tables, such as A. L. Dallapiccola’s edited collection, Krishna: The Divine
Lover (London, 1982) and Christopher Tadgell’s The History of Architecture in
India (London, 1990). On India’s relationship with Southeast Asia, there is a
dearth of writing; Paul Wheatley’s ‘India Beyond the Ganges: Desultory
Reflections on the Origins of Civilization in Southeast Asia’ (Journal of Asian
Studies, 42:1 (1982), pp. 13–28) is good.

5 The Coming of Islam

Francis Robinson’s highly illustrated reference book, The Mughal Emperors:
and the Islamic Dynasties of India, Iran and Central Asia (London, 2007), has
the virtue of seamlessly combining the Islamic world, beginning with the
Mongols in Iran, and the later world of Indian Islam. S. A. A. Rizvi’s essays on
medieval Indian Islam in A. L. Basham’s A Cultural History of India are also
helpful. The archaeologist and sailor Brian Fagan’s Beyond the Blue Horizon:
How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans (London, 2012)
has a chapter on the maritime history of the Arabs in the Indian Ocean.
The translation of al-Biruni by Edward C. Sachau, Alberuni’s India (London,
1888; abridged edition by Ainslie Embree, New York, 1971), is a crucial
contemporary source on the Muslim conquests. Sita Ram Goel’s edited
collection, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, vols 1 and 2 (New Delhi,
1993–98), makes an impassioned Hindu nationalist case for the severity of
Muslim iconoclasm. More measured assessments appear in Richard M. Eaton’s
brief Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India (New Delhi,
2004) and in Eaton’s edited collection, India’s Islamic Traditions, 711–1750
(New Delhi, 2003), in which his introduction discusses theories of conversion to
Islam. Romila Thapar investigates Muslim iconoclasm at Somnath in depth in
Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (New Delhi, 2004). Some evidence
for the destruction of Nalanda appears in C. Mani’s edited collection, The
Heritage of Nalanda (New Delhi, 2008). On the Vijayanagar empire, the leading
modern authorities are John M. Fritz and George Michell. Among their several
books, an excellent illustrated introduction is Hampi Vijayanagara (revised
edition, London, 2011).
A well-known early edition of Kabir in English is One Hundred Poems of
Kabir, translated by Rabindranath Tagore with the assistance of Evelyn
Underhill (London, 1915). More reliable editions include a translation by
Charlotte Vaudeville, Kabir (Oxford, 1974), and another by the poet Arvind
Krishna Mehrotra, Songs of Kabir (New York, 2011).

6 The Mughal Empire

Bamber Gascoigne’s beautifully illustrated, but also seriously researched, history
of the Mughal empire, The Great Moghuls (London, 1971), has worn well. There
are of course many illustrated books on Mughal art and culture, such as the
Victoria & Albert Museum’s The Indian Heritage: Court Life and Arts under
Mughal Rule (London, 1982). An up-to-date cultural study, based on an
exhibition taken from the manuscript collections of the British Library, is J. P.
Losty and Malini Roy’s Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire (London, 2012).
Philip Davies’s The Penguin Guide to the Monuments of India, vol. 2
(London, 1989) covers Islamic and Rajput buildings, including those of the
Mughals, and is a useful reference source. On the Taj Mahal, the definitive book
is Ebba Koch’s The Complete Taj Mahal: and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra
(London, 2006), while Giles Tillotson’s Taj Mahal (London, 2008) is a briefer
history, which also explores the cultural significance of the Taj to the world.
Among books about individual Mughal emperors, the foremost is probably the
memoirs of Babur. The original translation is Memoirs of Zehir-Ed-Din
Muhammed Babur, Emperor of Hindustan by John Leyden and William Erskine
(revised edition, Oxford, 1921), from which I quote. There is also a 1921
translation by Annette Susannah Beveridge, Babur Nama (abridged edition by
Dilip Hiro, London, 2007), and an illustrated large-format edition translated by
Wheeler M. Thackston, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and
Emperor (New York, 1996). The art historian and poet Laurence Binyon’s brief
biography, Akbar (London, 1932), is still worth reading, while Shireen Moosvi’s
collection, Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and
Reminiscences (New Delhi, 1994), captures the diverse facets of Akbar’s
personality vividly. William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: The Fall of a
Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (London, 2006) portrays the last Mughal ruler, his court in
Delhi and his downfall.

7 European Incursions and East India Companies

India’s trading history is covered in Tirthankar Roy’s India in the World
Economy: from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2012). Dick Whitaker’s
‘Conjunctures and Conjectures: Kerala and Roman Trade’ (South Asian Studies,
25 (2009), pp. 1–9) contains informed speculations on the earliest period. James
Chiriyankandath’s ‘Nationalism, Religion and Community: A. B. Salem, the
Politics of Identity and the Disappearance of Cochin Jewry’ (Journal of Global
History, 3 (2008), pp. 21–42) is good on the Jewish community. On the
Portuguese empire, J. B. Harrison’s essay in A. L. Basham’s A Cultural History
of India is an excellent introduction; Heta Pandit’s edited collection, In and
Around Old Goa (Mumbai, 2004) is also useful, with good illustrations. The
most complete history of Assam, at least for the Ahom and colonial period, is
probably still Edward Gait’s A History of Assam (second edition, Calcutta,
1926).
On the origins and development of the British trading empire, a general
history is John Keay’s The Honourable Company: A History of the English East
India Company (London, 1991). The period is also covered in an excellent and
well-illustrated exhibition catalogue edited by C. A. Bayly, The Raj: India and
the British 1600–1947 (London, 1990); in studies of Robert Clive and the
Company in Bengal, such as Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Clive of India: A Political
and Psychological Essay (London, 1975) and P. J. Marshall’s East Indian
Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976); and
in Gillian Tindall’s City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (London, 1982).
On the controversy between the Orientalists and the Anglicists, see Lynn
Zastoupil and Martin Moir’s edited collection, The Great Indian Education
Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–
1843 (London, 1999). It also features in Jon E. Wilson’s The Domination of
Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke,
2008); in Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher’s biography of the founder of the
Royal Asiatic Society, The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas
Colebrooke and the East India Company (London, 2012); and in Blair B. Kling’s
Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern
India (Berkeley, 1976).

8 The ‘Jewel in the Crown’

Life in the Indian Army before the 1857 Mutiny is described in James Lunt’s
edition of Sita Ram Pandey’s From Sepoy to Subedar (London, 1970) and in
Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s brief account, Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or
Accidental Hero? (New Delhi, 2005). Although there is some doubt about the
authenticity of Pandey’s manuscript, most military historians accept it as
genuine.
William Howard Russell’s My Diary in India, in the Year 1858–9, 2 vols
(London, 1860) is a vital eye-witness account of the last stage of the Mutiny and
its aftermath. Modern historical accounts include: Surendra Nath Sen’s Eighteen
Fifty-Seven (New Delhi, 1957); Christopher Hibbert’s The Great Mutiny: India
1857 (London, 1978); Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Avadh in Revolt, 1857–1858: A
Study of Popular Resistance (New Delhi, 1984); Andrew Ward’s Our Bones Are
Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (London,
1996); Rosie Llewellyn-Jones’s The Great Uprising, 1857–58: Untold Stories,
Indian and British (Woodbridge, 2007); and Amaresh Misra’s War of
Civilizations: India AD 1857 (New Delhi, 2007). The British demolition of part
of the Red Fort in Delhi is criticized in James Fergusson’s History of Indian and
Eastern Architecture (London, 1876). On the Indian Civil Service, see David
Gilmour’s The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London,
2005).
Some 19th-century Indian reform movements are discussed in Ramachandra
Guha’s edited collection, Makers of Modern India (Cambridge, MA, 2011),
which includes essays by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Jyotirao Phule and Bal
Gangadhar Tilak. The Brahmo Samaj is covered in David Kopf’s The Brahmo
Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, 1979). Sumit
Sarkar’s The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908 (Calcutta, 1973) is the
standard history of the Swadeshi movement.
On the Amritsar massacre, Winston Churchill’s humane parliamentary speech
in 1920 appears in his India: Speeches and an Introduction (London, 1931),
which may be compared with his later contempt for Indian lives, described in
Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the
Ravaging of India during World War II (New York, 2010). Recent studies of
Amritsar include Nick Lloyd’s The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One
Fateful Day (London, 2011) and Nigel Collett’s biography, The Butcher of
Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (London, 2005).

9 End of Empire
The conversation in 1921 between Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore
appears in Leonard K. Elmhirst, Poet and Plowman (Calcutta, 1975). For a
detailed discussion of their relationship, see Krishna Dutta and Andrew
Robinson’s biography, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (revised
edition, London, 2007), and also Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s edited collection,
The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore,
1915–1941 (New Delhi, 1997). Gandhi’s early views on machines are found in
his Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge, 1997), edited by Anthony J.
Parel; all of his views are discussed in David Arnold’s Everyday Technology:
Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago, 2013).
There is of course no end to books on Gandhi. Two recent biographies of
interest are his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi’s Mohandas: A True Story of a Man,
His People and an Empire (New Delhi, 2006) and especially Kathryn Tidrick’s
Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (London, 2006). Faisal Devji’s The
Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (London, 2012)
grapples with Gandhi’s attitude to violence. Arthur Herman considers Gandhi
and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age
(London, 2008).
The best introduction to the Partition of India is The Partition Omnibus (New
Delhi, 2002), with an introduction by Mushirul Hasan, which includes the full
texts of two books by two civil servants present at the Partition: Penderel
Moon’s Divide and Quit (London, 1964) and G. D. Khosla’s Stern Reckoning: A
Survey of the Events Leading Up To and Following the Partition of India (New
Delhi, 1950). Other eye-witness accounts appear in Patrick French’s Liberty or
Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London, 1997) and in
Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Thy Hand, Great Anarch!: India 1921–1952 (London,
1987). Cyril Radcliffe’s letter is quoted from Edmund Heward’s biography, The
Great and the Good: A Life of Lord Radcliffe (Chichester, 1994). The effect of
Partition on the Indian princes is discussed in my book, Maharaja (London,
1988).
Leonard Woolf’s verdict on the British-Indian empire is from his memoir,
Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939 (London,
1967). For an Indian view, see the historian Tapan Raychaudhuri’s memoir, The
World in Our Time (Delhi, 2011). More objective verdicts appear in Lawrence
James’s Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London, 1997), Piers
Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 (London,
2007) and John Darwin’s Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
(London, 2012).

10 The World’s Largest Democracy

Zareer Masani’s Macaulay: Pioneer of India’s Modernization (Noida, 2012)
makes a thought-provoking case. The importance of English in India emerges
fascinatingly from Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell’s dictionary-cum-glossary-
cum-encyclopedia, Hobson-Jobson (London, 1886; recent editions,
Sittingbourne, 1994, with a ‘historical perspective’ by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and
Oxford, 2013, edited by Kate Teltscher).
Srinivasa Ramanujan comes alive in Robert Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew
Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (New York, 1991). On the history of
Indian mathematics before Ramanujan, see Kim Plofker’s Mathematics in India
(Princeton, 2009). The current state of Indian science is described in Gautam S.
Desiraju’s ‘Bold Strategies for Indian Science’ (Nature, 484 (2012), pp. 159–60).
Its troubled development during the 20th century occupies Abha Sur’s Dispersed
Radiance: Caste, Gender, and Modern Science in India (New Delhi, 2011) and
also Jahnavi Phalkey’s ‘Not only Smashing Atoms: Meghnad Saha and Nuclear
Physics in Calcutta, 1938–48’ in Uma Das Gupta’s edited collection, Science and
Modern India: An Institutional History, c. 1784–1947 (New Delhi, 2011). On
modern caste politics in general, see Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany’s
The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India
(Cambridge, 1998).
The most substantial biography of Jawaharlal Nehru is Sarvepalli Gopal’s
Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, 3 vols (London, 1975–84), but there are many
other more recent biographies. Katherine Frank’s Indira: The Life of Indira
Nehru Gandhi (London, 2001) is probably the best biography of Indira Gandhi.
Perry Anderson’s The Indian Ideology (Gurgaon, 2012) is highly critical of
Nehru and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty – too dismissive of Nehru, but
nevertheless worth reading.
On the current Indian economy, among many recent books I recommend: a
provocative collection of essays, The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with
Change (New Delhi, 2002), and India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a
Strong State (New Delhi, 2012), by Gurcharan Das, a former businessman with
philosophical training; William Nanda Bissell’s Making India Work (New Delhi,
2009), an ethical plan for development by a successful Indian businessman;
sociologist Shehzad Nadeem’s Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is Changing the
Way Indians Understand Themselves (Princeton, 2011); journalist Dinesh
Sharma’s detailed history The Long Revolution: The Birth and Growth of India’s
IT Industry (New Delhi, 2009); M. V. Ramana’s The Power of Promise:
Examining Nuclear Energy in India (New Delhi, 2012), a scientist’s highly
informed, independent and balanced assessment of the reasons for the failure of
India’s nuclear power industry; and Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari’s
disturbing study of corporate power, Churning the Earth: The Making of Global
India (New Delhi, 2012), by an economist and an ecologist.

Postscript
Satyajit Ray’s 1991 interview (with Gowri Ramnarayan) is quoted in my Satyajit
Ray: A Vision of Cinema (London, 2005, with photographs by Nemai Ghosh).
Extracts from Javed Akhtar’s memorial lecture on Satyajit Ray appear in my The
Apu Trilogy: Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic (London, 2011), and more
fully in the Times of India, 4 May 2009. V. S. Naipaul’s comment appears in ‘A
Million Mutinies’ (India Today, 18 August 1997). Markandey Katju’s remarks
are from the Indian Express, 9 April 2012. Significant studies of corruption are:
A. Surya Prakash’s Public Money Private Agenda: The Use and Abuse of
MPLADS (New Delhi, 2013) and Arvind Kejriwal’s Swaraj (New Delhi, 2012),
written by a former inland revenue official turned social activist and politician.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Unlike some of my earlier books on Indian subjects, this book is chiefly a work
of synthesis. The many historians on whose work I have drawn are duly
acknowledged in the main text and in Further Reading. I thank Jamie Camplin of
Thames & Hudson, who first commissioned me to write on India in the 1980s,
for keeping faith with my writing over a quarter of a century. I also thank the
book’s editor, Julia MacKenzie, for some perceptive suggestions, and Maria
Ranauro for her picture research.
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece Girl seated beside a street shrine in Rajasthan, 1950s. Photo

Richard Lannoy

pp. 28–29 Left: ‘Unicorn’ seal, 2500–2000 BC, excavated at Mohenjo-daro.

National Museum of India, New Delhi. Photo Art Archive/DeA Picture
Library/G. Nimatallah; Right: ‘Proto-Shiva’ seal, 2500–2000 BC. Photo Erja
Lahdenperä for Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions 1 (1987), M-304 A,
courtesy Archaeological Survey of India and Asko Parpola

pp. 46–47 Vishnu as Matsya killing the demon Shankhasura and rescuing the
four Vedas. Pahari School, c. 1760. Gouache painting on paper, 16.4 × 25.4 cm
(6½ × 10 in.), British Museum, London

pp. 62–63 Excavation photo of the discovery of Asoka’s lion capital at Sarnath,
1905. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge,
image no. P.44599.ORT

pp. 82–83 Thomas and William Daniell, Sculptured Rocks, at Mavalipuram

[Mahabalipuram], on the Coast of Coromandel, October 1792 or February 1793,
plate 1, Oriental Scenery, V: Antiquities of India, 1799. Coloured aquatint,
British Library, London

pp. 100–101 Qutb Minar, Delhi, c. 1880. Photo Universal Images

Group/SuperStock

pp. 118–19 Attributed to Bhawani Das, The rulers of the Mughal dynasty with
their ancestor Timur (centre), c. 1707–12. First, second and third from far left:
Aurangzeb, Jehangir and Humayun; first, second and third from far right: Shah
Jahan, Akbar and Babur. Opaque watercolour and gold on paper, 25.8 × 34.2 cm
(10⅛ × 13½ in.), The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, MS 874.
Photo Nour Foundation, London
pp. 132–33 Attributed to Chokha, A processional scene depicting Captain (later
Colonel) James Tod riding an elephant. Udaipur, 1817. Opaque watercolour on
thin cardboard, 25.2 × 40.5 cm (9⅞ × 16 in.), Victoria & Albert Museum,
London

pp. 150–51 Reception for King George V and Queen Mary at the Gateway of
India, Bombay, December 1911, on their arrival in India for the Coronation
Durbar in Delhi. Photographed by Myers Brothers

pp. 168–69 Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, 1946. Photo Universal
History Archive/Getty Images

pp. 186–87 Film still from Aparajito, the second part of the Apu Trilogy directed
by Satyajit Ray, 1956, showing Apu in Benares
 INDEX

All page numbers refer to the 2014 print edition

Abu’l Fazl 111, 126, 128, 129

Adham Khan 126
Afghanistan 36, 57, 103, 108, 109, 110, 111, 124, 125–6, 128, 130
Agra 109, 120, 124, 126, 128, 130, 131, 137
ahimsa 70
Ahmedabad 116
Ahom dynasty 16, 20, 131, 146
Aiyar, Shankkar 9–10, 202
Ajanta 11, 13, 65, 68, 96
Ajatasattu (ruler) 74
Ajivikism 71
Ajmer 140
Akbar (Mughal emperor) 23, 25, 111, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125–9, 131,
134, 136, 137, 139
Akhtar, Javed 209, 210
al-Biruni 104–5, 107
Albuquerque, Afonso de 135, 136
Alexander the Great 15, 17, 18, 34, 74–6, 134
Alexandria 15, 102
Ali Akbar Khan 13
Ali Ibrahim Khan 145
Aligarh 163
al-Kazwini 107
All-India Muslim League 23, 163, 165, 179–82
Allahabad 154, 159
Amar, Abhisek Singh 80
Ambedkar, B. R. 16, 19, 67, 163, 194, 197, 201
Amritsar 166
Amritsar massacre (1919) 166–7, 170
Anderson, Perry 199
Andhra Pradesh 200
Andrews, C. F. 177, 178
Anga 71, 73
Angkor Wat 86
Anglicists 147, 160
Anglo-Burmese War 146
Anglo-Indians 138
Anglo-Maratha Wars 146
Anglo-Mysore Wars 146
Anglo-Sikh Wars 146, 154
Arabian Sea 136, 142
Arabic language 108, 114
Arabic numerals 15
Arabs 15, 84, 102, 103–4, 107
Aramaic language 79
Archaeological Survey of India 35
Aristoboulus 34
Arnold, Edwin 65
Arthashastra 77–8, 80, 207
Arunachal Pradesh 200
Aruni, Uddalaka 71
Arya Samaj 60, 162, 163
Aryans 15, 16, 22, 30, 32, 38, 42, 44, 48–61, 69
asceticism 13, 71, 72
Asiatic Society (of Bengal) 61, 147
Asoka (Mauryan emperor) 6, 10, 12, 21, 22, 24, 25, 44, 65, 66, 68, 76, 77, 78–
80, 95, 96, 99
Assam 16, 20, 65, 67, 73, 94, 95, 96, 113, 131, 146, 199, 200
Atharvaveda see Vedas
Athens 14
Aurangzeb (Mughal emperor) 110, 122, 130–1, 141–2, 146, 207
Ava 68
Avestan language 56–7
Ayodhya 88, 107
Ayurveda 48
Azad, Maulana 155, 181
Azam (Mughal prince) 131

Babri Masjid (Ayodhya) 107

Babur (Mughal emperor) 103, 107, 120, 122, 123–4
Babylonia 37, 40, 76
Bactria 75, 93
Badami 98, 99
Baghdad 111
Bahadur Shah Zafar (king of Delhi) 120–1, 152, 153, 154, 155
Bahman Shah (ruler) 116
Bahujan Samaj party 195
Bairam Khan 125–6
Baluchistan 42, 113
Banabhatta (Bana) 96–8
Banerji, R. D. 34
Bangalore 87, 193, 207
Bangladesh 23, 112
Bangladesh War 188, 198
Barani, Ziauddin 105
Bardhan, Pranab 194
Barrackpore 154
Basham, A. L. 20, 64, 93
Baz Bahadur (ruler) 117
Beas River 75, 76
Benares 59, 70, 72, 109, 110, 114, 115, 143, 145
Bengal 13, 49–50, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 112, 113, 116, 137, 141, 142–5, 154, 162,
163–4, 175, 182, 183, 184, 188, 192, 195, 199, 207
Bengali language 91, 92
Bentinck, Lord (governor-general) 49
Berenike 102
Berhampore 154
Bhabha, Homi 189
Bhagavad Gita 85, 89, 90
bhakti 113
Bharata Natyam 13
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 22, 30, 34, 106–7, 195
Bihar 64, 65, 67, 68, 98, 105, 143, 153, 154, 159, 182, 200
Bijapur 136
Bimbisara (ruler) 73
Binyon, Laurence 128
Bismarck, Otto von 77
Blavatsky, Madame 60
Bodhgaya 64, 66, 67–9, 105
Bofors scandal 203, 205
Bogazkale 55
‘Bollywood’ films 8, 121, 208, 209
Bombay 9, 10, 85, 136, 141–2, 154, 160, 161, 164, 165, 179, 180, 193, 200
Bonaparte, Napoleon 146
Bonerjee, W. C. 164
Borobudur 64
Bose, Jagadish Chandra 192
Bose, Satyendranath 192
Bose, Subhash Chandra 181
Brahma Sabha 162
Brahmanas 55
Brahmaputra River 16
Brahmi script 44, 79
Brahmin (caste)/Brahminism 12, 22–3, 48, 49, 59, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 77, 79–80,
 84, 85, 87, 95, 97, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 115, 128, 139, 163, 190, 195
Brahmo Samaj 162, 163–4
Brahui language 42
Brihadishwara Temple (Thanjavur) 85
Britain/British empire 6, 16, 18, 19, 23, 24, 26, 59, 99, 103, 108, 120–1, 137–8,
145–8, 152–67, 170–84, 188, 196, 207
Brook, Peter 91, 92
Bryant, Edwin 61
Buddha 6, 12, 15, 21–2, 25, 38, 55, 64, 65, 71, 72, 73, 74, 79–80, 173, 208
Buddhism/Buddhists 6, 12, 14, 15, 21, 22–3, 38, 55, 65–9, 71–4, 79–80, 84, 85,
95, 96, 97, 98, 105, 113, 115, 173, 177
Buddhist-Hindu relations 65–72, 80
Buddhist art and architecture 11, 24, 34, 65–9, 80, 105
Burma 14, 15, 16, 66, 68, 146
Burnouf, Eugène 68
Buxar, battle of (1764) 143

Calcutta 7, 11, 49, 61, 109, 141, 144, 147, 148, 154, 161, 165, 170, 173, 182
Caldwell, Robert 43
calendar (Indian national) 22
Calicut 135–6
Cambodia 14, 86
Cambridge 190–1
Canning, Lord (viceroy) 157, 159, 160
Carnatic 141
Carrière, Jean-Claude 91
Cartier-Bresson, Henri 13
Cartledge, Paul 75
caste/caste system 12, 37, 48, 72, 95–6, 104, 113, 139, 154, 155, 160, 162, 194–
5, 196, 201, 209
Catherine of Braganza 136
Catholicism see Christianity
Cawnpore see Kanpur
Central Asia 59, 93, 94, 123
Ceylon see Sri Lanka
Chaitanya 113
Chalukya dynasties 85, 98, 99, 102, 108
Chanakya see Kautilya
Chanakyapuri 77
Chand, Prem 20
Chandella dynasty 85, 98, 104, 110
Chandernagore 141
Chandigarh 200
Chandra Gupta I (Gupta emperor) 93, 94
Chandra Gupta II (Gupta emperor) 94, 96, 99
Chandragupta (Mauryan emperor) 76–7, 78, 93
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan 172, 193, 195
charka 176
Charles II, King 136, 141
chaturanga 26
Chaudhuri, Nirad C. 9, 60, 163
Chauhan, Prithviraj 103
Chauri Chaura 177
Chelmsford, Lord (viceroy) 171
Chera dynasty 102
chess see chaturanga
Chhattisgarh 200
chilli pepper 137
China 14, 21, 34, 37, 41, 66, 67, 68, 77, 95, 96, 136, 137, 141, 154, 188, 197
Chinsura 141
Chola, Vijayalaya (ruler) 98
Chola art 13, 99
Chola empire 85, 98, 99
Christianity/Christians 60, 65, 66, 128, 135, 138, 139, 147, 157, 162, 198, 201
Churchill, Winston 166–7, 181
Clive, Robert 6, 12, 137, 141, 142–4
Cochin 136, 141
coins 36, 96, 120, 134
Collins, Wilkie 109
Columbus, Christopher 137
Congress party see Indian National Congress
conversion (to Islam) 112–3
Coptic language 40
Cornwallis, Lord (governor-general) 145, 155, 207
Coromandel coast 98, 139, 141
corruption 11, 142, 144, 145, 202, 203, 204–7
Cowell, E. B. 97
Cranganore see Kodungallur
Cunningham, Alexander 68
Curzon, Lord (viceroy) 165
da Gama, Vasco 135

Dalai Lama (14th) 69, 197

Dalhousie, Lord (governor-general) 146
Dalits 12, 67, 84, 95–6, 113, 139, 160, 163, 175, 181, 194
Dalrymple, William 120, 121, 153, 155, 158
Daman 136
dance 13
Dara Shikoh (Mughal prince) 121, 130
Darius I 79
Darius III 75
Das, Gurcharan 86, 203, 205, 207, 208
Datta, Narendranath see Vivekananda, Swami
Deccan 98, 110, 116, 131, 137
Delhi 8, 66, 77, 104, 105, 110–1, 115–16, 125, 130, 131, 142, 146, 153, 155,
157–8, 160, 161, 165, 182, 183, 198
Delhi Durbar (1911) 161
Delhi Sultanate 103, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115–16, 120, 122, 123, 129
Demetrius I 93
democracy 10, 16, 24, 25, 188, 196, 199, 202, 206, 208
Desiraju, Gautam 193–4, 195–6
Devji, Faisal 178
dhamma see dharma
Dharamsala 67
dharma 37, 66, 79–80
Dharma Sabha 49
Dharmapala, Anagarika 68
Dharmasvamin 67, 105
Diemen, Anthony van 138
Din Ilahi 129
Diu 136
diwani 143
Doniger, Wendy 51, 52, 53
Dravidian languages 22, 41–4, 57, 59
Dutch East Indies 135
Dutt, Guru 209

earthquakes 45
East India Company:
British 7, 11, 68, 135, 137–8, 139–48, 152, 155–6, 159, 160, 163, 183, 207
Danish 135
Dutch 135, 138, 141
French 135, 141
Portuguese 135
Eaton, Richard 106, 109, 113
economics 8, 9, 11–12, 14, 15, 16, 35–6, 51–3, 70, 77–8, 102, 108, 134, 135–7,
138, 139, 140–2, 143–5, 175, 202–03, 204, 207, 209
education 30, 34, 105, 124, 147, 148, 161, 162, 163, 175, 191, 192, 193–4, 196–
7
Egypt 21, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 68
Einstein, Albert 172, 176, 192
Elephanta 85, 99
elephants 38, 40, 74, 75, 76, 97, 104, 105, 134, 165
Ellenborough, Lord (governor-general) 108–9
Ellora 85, 99
Elmhirst, Leonard 173
Enfield rifle 155
English language 16, 88, 91, 92, 146–7, 161, 163, 188–9
Estado da India 136, 139
Eudoxus of Cyzicus 102
Eurasians see Anglo-Indians
Eusebius 14
extremism (political) 165–7

Fabian socialism 16
Fairservis, Walter 41
Faizi 128
famine 12, 144
Farmer, Steve 33–4
Farrukhsiyar (Mughal emperor) 142
Fatehpur Sikri 128
Faxian 95–6
Fergusson, James 160
Fiji 162
firman 141, 142, 143
First World War 161, 165, 166, 178
Firuz, Nuruddin 108
flag (Indian national) 24, 183
Forrest, Sir George 158
Forster, E. M. 163
‘Four Noble Truths’ (Buddhist) 72–3
French, Patrick 198

Gait, Edward 20
gambling 52
Gandhi, Indira 12, 66, 189, 197, 199, 202, 205, 207
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma Gandhi) 6, 12, 17–19, 24, 38, 86,
121, 164, 167, 170, 171–8, 179–80, 182, 184, 197, 198, 207, 208, 210
Gandhi, Rajiv 197, 201, 203, 207
Gandhi, Sanjay 207
Gandhi, Sonia 197
Ganges River 57, 69, 70, 73–4, 90, 94, 96, 98, 104, 113
Garratt, G. T. 160
Gaugamela, battle of (331 BC) 75
Gaur 116
Genghis Khan (Mongol emperor) 103, 123
George V, King 161
Ghadar party 165–6
Ghalib 158
Ghazni 104–5, 108, 109
Gibbon, Edward 17, 210
Girnar 79
Goa 126, 136, 137, 138, 139
Goel, Sita Ram 106
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 15, 22
Gormley, Antony 13
Gosala, Makkhali 71
Grand Trunk Road 125
Greece 14, 15, 21, 74–6, 84, 102, 134
Greek language 40, 59, 61, 79
Greene, Graham 13
Guha, Ramachandra 25–6, 198
Gujarat 36, 45, 107, 110, 116, 136, 139, 142, 177, 200
Gujarati language 200
Gulf War (1991) 203
Gupta, S. P. 51–2
Gupta empire 85, 94–6, 99, 105
Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty 98, 102
Gurkhas 159, 166
gymnosophists 75–6

Halifax, Lord 19
Harappa 34–5, 38, 40
Hardinge, Lord (viceroy) 165, 171
Hardy, G. H. 190, 191
Harijans see Dalits
Harrison, George 13
Harsha (ruler) 96–8
Haryana 89, 200
Hasan, Mushirul 182
Hastings, Warren (governor-general) 6, 144–5, 147, 207
Hawkins, William 139, 142
Hazare, Anna 206
Heras, Father Henry 43
Herodotus 75
Himachal Pradesh 200
Himalayas 13, 45, 65, 67, 90, 188
Hindi language 92, 199, 200, 209
Hindu art and architecture 11, 39, 40, 65, 85, 96, 99, 104–10
Hindu nationalism 16, 22, 23, 30–4, 51–2, 53, 60, 107, 196
Hindu-Muslim relations 23, 103, 104–17, 121, 127–8, 155, 174, 178, 179–84
Hinduism/Hindus 14, 16, 17, 23, 30–1, 38, 48–61, 65, 66, 67–72, 84–99, 103–4,
109–10, 113–15, 116, 128, 148, 155, 160, 162, 163, 165, 175, 177, 180, 182,
184, 191, 198, 201
Hindustan 84, 124
Hitler, Adolf 17, 18–19
Hittite empire 55–6, 57
Hollywood 8, 13
Homer 87
Hormuz 108
horses 32, 33, 34, 40, 96, 124
Hoshang Shah (ruler) 116
Humayun (Mughal emperor) 124–5, 130
Hume, Allan Octavian 164
Huna (Huns) 94, 95, 99
Hydaspes River see Jhelum River
Hyder Ali (ruler) 146
Hyderabad 116, 146, 200, 207

Ibn Batuta 111

Ibsen, Henrik 205
Indian army 154, 155–7, 159–60, 161
Indian Civil Service 145, 161, 164, 189
Indian diaspora 8
Indian Institutes of Technology 193
Indian Mutiny 6, 121, 138, 152–61, 163, 164, 166, 167
Indian National Congress 18, 19, 23, 34, 164–5, 167, 170, 177, 178–82, 195,
196, 197, 198–9, 203, 205
Indian Penal Code 160, 201
Indian princes 11, 108, 146, 147–8, 160, 183, 199, 200
Indo-Aryans see Aryans
Indo-European languages 15, 22, 34, 55–7, 58, 59, 60–1
Indonesia 14, 23
Indore 116
Indus River 31, 35, 45, 74, 76, 84, 134
Indus Valley civilization 6, 10, 15, 21, 30–45, 48, 51, 52–3, 57, 60, 64
Indus Valley script 21, 22, 31–4, 36, 39–44
Indus Valley weights 36
industrialization see technology
Inquisition 138, 139
intellectuals 208
Iqbal, Sir Muhammad 179
Iran 15, 56–7, 104, 111
Isipatana 72
Islam 15, 102, 103, 112–15, 116, 120, 122, 128, 130, 160

Jahanara 122, 130

Jainism/Jains 13, 65, 66, 69, 71, 74, 79, 84, 105, 108, 128, 177
James I, King 140
Jammu and Kashmir see Kashmir
Janaka (ruler) 70, 88
Japan 14, 64, 66
Jats 131
Jatakas 64, 65
Jaunpur 116
Java 64, 86, 99
Jehangir (Mughal emperor) 122, 129, 136, 137, 140, 142
Jerusalem 134
Jesuits 126, 128, 134, 136, 139
Jews 134–5, 136
Jha, N. 32
Jhansi, rani of 154
Jharkand 200
Jhelum River 74
Jinnah, Mohammed Ali 23, 179–83
jizya 112–13, 128
Jones, Sir William 15, 61, 138, 147
Justin 76

Kabir 13, 113–15, 208

Kabul 123, 124, 125
Kafur, Malik 105
Kailasanath Temple (Ellora) 85
Kalachuri dynasty 85
Kalam, A. P. J. Abdul 24, 25
Kalibangan 39
Kalidasa 13, 22, 96
Kalinga 79, 80
Kamarupa see Assam
Kanauj 98, 104
Kanchi 94
Kandariya Mahadeva Temple (Khajuraho) 85
Kanigel, Robert 191
Kanishka (ruler) 22
Kanpur 154, 157, 161, 206
Kant, Immanuel 15
Kapoor, Raj 209
Karachi 179, 183
Karnataka 116
Kashi 70, 71, 73
Kashmir 65, 116, 146, 188, 199
Kathakali 13
Kathiawar 96, 104
Katju, Markandey 208–9
Kautilya 77–8, 207
Keay, John 20, 59–60, 111
Kerala 102, 106, 111, 199
Khajuraho 85, 98, 99, 110
Khalistan 199
kharaj 112–13
Kharosthi script 44, 79
Khilafat movement 174, 177, 180
Khilji, Alauddin (ruler) 104, 105, 110
Khilji, Muhammad Bakhtiyar 105
Khilji dynasty 103
Khilnani, Sunil 25, 183
Khorana, Hargobind 193
Khurram see Shah Jahan
Khyber Pass 128
Kipling, Rudyard 90–1, 92
Kissinger, Henry 77
Knorozov, Yuri 41
Koch, Ebba 30
Kodungallur 102, 134–5
Koh-i-noor diamond 105
Konarak 13
Korea 66
Kosala 70, 71, 73, 74
Kosambi, D. D. 20
Kshatriya (caste) 48
Kumara Gupta (Gupta emperor) 96
Kurosawa, Akira 13, 92
Kurukshetra 89
Kushan dynasty 93
Kuwait 203

La Fontaine, Jean de 15
Lahore 130, 181
Lakshmibai see Jhansi, rani of
Licchavis 73
‘licence-inspector-quota raj’ 202–3, 204
Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van 136, 137
Lisbon 137
literacy 197
Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie 153
Lodi, Ibrahim 123–4
Lodi dynasty 103, 116
London 8, 20, 50, 108, 137, 144, 147, 148, 159, 179
Lothal 39
Luce, Edward 139
Lucknow 20, 23, 154, 161, 179, 181
Lumbini 80

Macaulay, Thomas Babington 7, 10, 90, 108, 144, 147–8, 157, 160, 189, 201
Machiavelli, Niccolò 77
McIntosh, Jane 39
Madhya Pradesh 50, 65, 85, 116, 200
Madras 141, 154, 161, 165, 190, 200
Madurai 105
Magadha 71, 73–4, 75, 76, 78, 79, 93, 105
Magadhi Prakit script 21, 79
Mahabalipuram 85, 99
Mahabharata, The 18, 19, 21, 24, 85, 86–8, 89–92, 93, 128, 177, 201, 203, 210
Mahabodhi Society 68
Mahabodhi Temple (Bodhgaya) 64, 66–9
Mahadevan, Iravatham 33
Mahalanobis, Prasanta 202
maharajas see Indian princes
Maharashtra 36, 65, 67, 85, 110, 114, 162–3, 165, 200
Mahavira, Vardhamana the 71
Mahmud of Ghazni (ruler) 11, 23, 103, 104, 107, 108
Malabar coast 102, 134, 135, 141
Malay peninsula 99
Malindi 135
Malle, Louis 9
Malwa 116, 126
Mamluk dynasty 103
Man Singh (ruler) 110
Mandu 116, 126
Manipur 200
Manmohan Singh 184, 203
Manu 85, 177, 201
Manusmriti 85
Marathas (Mahrattas) 110, 131, 141, 154
Marathi language 200
Marconi, Guglielmo 192
marriage 48, 59, 111, 127, 160, 195, 201
Marshall, Sir John 35, 38, 39, 40
Marshall, P. J. 144
Marx, Karl 152, 153
Marxism 164
Masani, Minoo 19
Masani, Zareer 189
Mashelkar, Raghunath Anant 208
Masood, Syed Ross 163
Masulipatnam 139
mathematics 15, 41, 190–1
Mathura 104
Mauryan empire 76–80, 84, 85, 93, 95–6, 99, 207
Mayan languages 39, 40, 41
Meera Bai 113
Meerut 152, 153, 154
Megasthenes 78
Meghalaya 200
Mehrgarh 35
Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna 114
Mehta, Pratap Bhanu 189
Mendelsohn, Oliver 195
Menon, V. P. 183
Mesopotamia 15, 21, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 44, 45, 56
Mifune, Toshiro 92
Mill, James 23–4, 147
Mill, John Stuart 147
Mir Jafar (ruler) 143, 146
Mir Qasim (ruler) 143
Misra, Amaresh 158
Mitanni 56, 57
Mizoram 200
Mohenjo-daro 34–6, 38, 40, 65
Mongol empire 103, 111
Mongolian language 68
Monserrate, Father Antonio 128
Moon, Penderel 180, 182
Moplahs 102, 111
Morley-Minto reforms 165, 179
Mountbatten, Lord (viceroy) 178, 182, 183, 184
Muggeridge, Malcolm 188
Mughal empire 6, 11, 16, 23, 85, 94, 103, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 120–31, 134,
135, 136, 137, 139, 140–3, 145, 147, 154, 160, 163, 189
Muhammad, Prophet 102, 128
Muhammad of Ghor (ruler) 103, 104
Mukherjee, Binode Bihari 13
Müller, Friedrich Max 50, 52, 55, 58–9, 60
Multan 104
Mumbai see Bombay
Mumtaz Mahal 120
Munda languages 41
music 13, 96
Muslim art and architecture 30, 116–17, 120, 122, 160
Muslim League see All-India Muslim League
Muslims 16, 23–4, 67, 102–17, 120–31, 155, 163, 165, 177, 180, 182, 184, 198,
201
Mutiny see Indian Mutiny
Muziris 102
Mysore 146, 147

nabobs 144, 207

Nadeem, Shehzad 207–8
Nadir Shah (ruler) 131
Nagaland 200
Naipaul, V. S. 6, 9, 86–7, 208
Nalanda university 96, 98, 105, 106
Nana Sahib (ruler) 157
Nanak 113, 114
Nanda dynasty 74, 76, 77
Narain, A. K. 76
Narasimha Gupta (Gupta emperor) 94
Narayan, R. K. 13, 87–8, 91, 189
Narmada River 98, 117
Naxalite movement 199
Nazism 18, 19, 60, 178
Nehru, Indira see Gandhi, Indira
Nehru, Jawaharlal 16, 19, 23, 24, 36, 38, 66, 67, 68, 80, 109, 121, 136, 152, 154,
155, 161, 171–2, 176–7, 182, 183, 189, 191–2, 193, 196–202, 207
Nehru, Motilal 180
Nepal 65, 71, 73, 94
New Delhi see Delhi
Nilekani, Nandan 207
Nobel prizes 12, 16, 193, 194, 195
non-cooperation movement 171, 172–3, 177–8, 180
non-violence 17, 19, 37, 38, 78, 79, 95, 177–8, 180
Northwest Frontier 113
nuclear power 193, 202
Nur Jahan 122, 129–30

Omvedt, Gail 65, 115

opium 123, 141
Oppenheimer, J. Robert 90
Orientalists 147
Orissa 13, 79, 95, 96, 143
Oudh 20, 23, 143, 146, 153, 154, 160

Pahari language 200

Pahlava dynasty 93
Pakistan 21, 23, 35, 36, 42, 45, 57, 75, 103, 109, 179, 180, 181, 182–4, 188, 189,
198
Pala dynasty 98, 99
Pali language 66
Pallava dynasty 85, 94, 98, 99
Panaji 139
Panchatantra 15
Pandey, Sitaram 156
Panipat, battle of (1526) 123
Panipat, battle of (1556) 126
Paris 175
Parpola, Asko 33, 41, 42, 43, 44
Parsis 189
Parthians see Pahlava dynasty
Partition of India (1947) 23, 103, 170, 178, 180, 182, 189, 198
Pataliputra 74, 78, 80, 93, 96
Patel, Vallabhbhai 197, 199
Patna 74
Permanent Settlement (of Bengal) 145
Pernambuco 137
Persia 26, 75, 79, 105, 108, 110, 124, 131, 136
Persian Gulf 36, 154
Persian language 103, 105, 107, 111, 112, 116, 122, 124, 128, 130, 189
Peshawar 109
Petrie, Flinders 33
Philippines 137
Phule, Jyotirao 163
Plassey, battle of (1757) 142–3, 145
Pliny the Elder 11
Plutarch 75, 76
Pondicherry 141
Portugal/Portuguese empire 11, 135–9, 140
Portuguese language 137
Porus (ruler) 74–5
poverty 12, 97, 204, 208–9
Prakash, A. Surya 206
Prasad, Rajendra 201
Prinsep, James 68
Ptolemy, Claudius 84, 134
Pulakeshin II 98
Pulicat 141
Pune 193
Punjab 74, 75, 96, 104, 112, 113, 123, 131, 146, 154, 159, 162, 165–6, 171, 179,
180, 182, 183, 184, 199, 200
Punjabi language 200
Puranas 85

Quit India movement 181

Qutb Minar 105, 115
Qutb-ud-din Aibak (ruler) 103, 105
Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque (Delhi) 105

race/racialism 58–60, 139, 157, 161, 162, 164

Radcliffe, Sir Cyril 183, 184
Rahula, Walpola 173
Raj see British empire
Rajagriha 71, 74
Rajaraja (ruler) 99
Rajaram, N. S. 32
Rajasthan 8, 74, 94, 109, 113, 125, 127, 146
Rajendra I 99
Rajput art 13
Rajput dynasties 94, 103, 117, 123, 127, 131
Rajputana see Rajasthan
Ramakrishna Mission 162
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa 162
Ramakrishnan, Venkatraman 193, 195
Raman, Chandrasekhara Venkata 189, 193, 194, 195, 208
Ramana, M. V. 202
Ramanujan, Srinivasa 190–2, 193, 196, 208
Ramayana, The 21, 85, 86–8, 93, 107, 177, 201
Ranjit Singh (ruler) 146
Rao, Narasimha 203
Rashtrakuta dynasty 85, 98
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh 195
Rawshanara 130
Ray, Satyajit 7–8, 9, 13, 16, 20, 26, 91–2, 163, 189, 205, 209, 210
Renoir, Jean 7, 91
Rey 104
Rich, Bruce 78
Rigveda see Vedas
Ripon, Lord (viceroy) 164
Risley, H. H. 58
Rizvi, S. A. A. 104, 113
Robinson, Francis 125, 130
Roe, Sir Thomas 140, 142
Rome 11, 14, 59, 94, 102, 134
Roy, Pratap Chandra 90
Roy, Rammohun 49, 50, 146, 162
Royal Society, Indian fellows of 190, 192, 193
Rupmati, Rani 117
Ruskin, John 16
Russell, William Howard 159

Saddam Hussein 203

Saha, Meghnad 192, 195
Sainath, P. 204
Saka dynasty 93, 94
Sakyas 71, 73
Salim see Jehangir
Salt March (Gandhi’s) 175
Samarkand 123
Samaveda see Vedas
Samhitas 55
Samudra Gupta (Gupta emperor) 94, 96, 98
San Francisco 166
Sanchi 15, 65
Sandrocottus see Chandragupta (Mauryan emperor)
sangha 80
Sankaradeva 113
Sanskrit language 15, 21, 31, 32, 34, 42, 44, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 66, 68, 84,
92, 108, 113, 147, 162
Sanskrit literature 15, 22, 48, 50, 88, 90, 96, 97, 106
Santiniketan 175
Saraswati, Dayananda 162
Saraswati River 30–1, 32, 45
Sarkar, Sumit 165
Sarnath 15, 24, 66, 72, 80
sati (suttee) 49–50, 138, 201
satyagraha 18
Satyam Computer Services 205
Satyasodhak Samaj 162
Savarkar, Veer 152, 165
Sayyid dynasty 103
Schliemann, Heinrich 35
Schopenhauer, Arthur 15
science 147, 163, 176, 191, 192–4, 195–6, 202, 207, 208
Scythians see Saka dynasty
Second World War 17–18, 181
Semitic languages 40, 56
Sen, Amartya 12, 25–6, 77, 172, 197, 208
Sen, Keshab Chandra 162
Sen, Surendra Nath 153, 155, 158
sepoys see Indian army
Seringapatam 146
Shah Alam II (Mughal emperor) 143, 146
Shah Jahan (Mughal emperor) 11, 22, 116, 120, 128, 130
Shah Tahmasp (ruler) 125
Shahabad 153
Shakespeare, William 191
Shamasastry, R. 77
Shankar, Ravi 13
Sharma, Dinesh 207
Shimla 200
Shivaji (ruler) 110, 131, 141
Shramanas 71–2, 75, 79–80, 85
Shudra (caste) 48, 84
Shunga dynasty 93
Siddhartha Gautama see Buddha
Siddis 141
Sikandra 120
Sikhs/Sikhism 114, 131, 146, 159–60, 182, 184, 198, 199, 200, 201
Silk Road 14
Sindh 74, 84, 102, 125, 146
Siraj, Minhaj 105
Siraj-ud-Daula (ruler) 142–3
Skanda Gupta (Gupta emperor) 94
Smith, John D. 87
Socrates 14, 22
Somnath 104, 106–9, 110
South Africa 135, 138, 167, 176
Southeast Asia 14, 42, 86, 99
Soviet Union 202
Spear, Percival 124, 127, 139, 144
Sri Lanka 14, 15, 21, 66, 68, 94, 99, 134, 135, 170
Stein, Aurel 35
Sufism 115
suicides of farmers 204
Sumatra 99
Surat 139, 140, 141, 142
Suri, Sher Shah (ruler) 125
Suri dynasty 126
Suu Kyi, Aung San 172
Swadeshi movement 165, 174
Swaraj movement 174
swastika 38
Syed Ahmed Khan, Sir 163, 179

Tagore, Debendranath 162

Tagore, Dwarkanath 146, 162
Tagore, Rabindranath 13, 16, 19, 50–1, 60, 64, 115, 146, 161, 162, 165, 170–2,
173–7, 208
Tagore, Satyendranath 161
Taiwan 66
Taj Mahal (Agra) 11, 22, 30, 116, 120, 122, 130
Takshashila see Taxila
talukdars see zamindars
Tamerlane see Timur
Tamil language 22, 42, 43, 135
Tamil Nadu 13, 22, 42, 85, 94, 98, 99, 105, 114, 190, 192
Tantricism 67
Tarain, battle of (1192) 103
Taranatha 105
Tata, J. R. D. 204
Tata company 193
Tatya Tope (ruler) 154
Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 137
Taxila 75, 77
tea 141
technology 16, 147, 176, 191, 193, 196, 202, 203, 207–8
Telangana 200
Telugu language 200
Tennyson, Alfred 16
Thailand 14, 66
Thanjavur 85, 99
Thapar, Romila 20, 23–4, 80, 84–5, 107, 109
Theosophism 60
Thiruvalluvar 22
Thomas, F. W. 97
Thompson, Edward J. 6–7, 152, 158, 159, 160
Tibet 15, 66, 67, 68, 105, 197
Tidrick, Kathryn 172
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 165
Timur (Mongol emperor) 103, 116, 123
Tipu Sultan (ruler) 146, 147
Trautmann, Thomas 55, 58, 71, 95, 145
Trevithick, Alan 67
Trinidad 162
Tripura 200
Tughlaq, Sultan Muhammad bin (ruler) 111, 116
Tughlaq dynasty 103
Tughlaqabad 116
Tukaram 113
Turkey 55, 103, 110, 111, 114
Turkic language 124, 139
Turko-Afghans 103–6, 110–1, 112
Tyagaraja 114

Umarkot 125
United Provinces see Uttar Pradesh
United States of America 78, 172, 193, 208
untouchables see Dalits
Upanishads 49, 50–1, 55, 60, 70–1, 86, 88, 130, 162, 173
Ur 36
Urdu language 20, 120, 158, 209
Uttar Pradesh 65, 67, 107, 153, 154, 159, 177, 195, 200
Uttarakhand 200

Vaisali 74
Vaishya (caste) 48
Valmiki 88
Varanasi see Benares
varna 48
varnashrama-dharma 95
Vedas 21, 31–3, 37, 38, 39, 44–5, 48–61, 70–1, 72, 86, 115, 162
Vedic religion 30, 39, 53–5, 56–8, 60, 69–72, 85
Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) see East India Company, Dutch
Victoria, Queen 157, 159
Vicziany, Marika 195
Videha 70, 71, 73, 74
Vijayanagar empire 116, 136, 141
Vishnugupta see Kautilya
Vishvanath Temple (Benares) 110
Visva-Bharati university 175
Vivekananda, Swami 59, 162
Vrijjis 73, 74
Vyasa 86

Wadiyar dynasty 147

Wajid Ali Shah (ruler) 23
Ward, Andrew 153, 158
Wellesley, Lord (governor-general) 148
Wells, H. G. 78
West Bengal see Bengal
Wheeler, Mortimer 36, 38
Witzel, Michael 33–4
Woolf, Leonard 6, 170

Xuanzang 67, 96–7

Yajnavalkya 70
Yajurveda see Vedas
Yamuna River 73, 94
Yeats, W. B. 13
Yuezhi see Kushan dynasty

zamindars 145, 154, 160

Zoroastrianism 56–7, 128
 First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 as
India: A Short History
ISBN 978-0-500-25199-7
by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181a High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX
and in the United States of America by
Thames & Hudson Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10110

India: A Short History © 2014 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London

This electronic version first published in 2014 by

Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181a High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX

This electronic version first published in 2014 in the United States of America by Thames & Hudson Inc.,
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On the cover: Ghat on the Ganges at Benares (Varanasi), c. 1923.© Gervais Courtellemont/National
Geographic Society/Corbis