Lalit Mengi
lkmengi@rediffmail.com
India had blazed a trail across the world, in the millennium and a half from 250 BC to 1200 AD in art, religion, astronomy, music, literature, mathematics and mythology, but somehow remained in oblivion, yearning to find its rightful place. It is an irony that ancient India’s footprints and remarkable achievements remained frozen rather than in the headlights of world’s history.
I happened to go through a beautiful book “The Golden Road” by William Dalrymple, which deals comprehensively with ancient Indian history, revealing how Indian ideas transformed the world. Before that I had made a humble endeavour to bring to light India’s enviable past and devoted an exclusive chapter in my book “Musings Unabated”. But after going through Dalrymple’s book, I was prompted to go a step further and share with the readers India’s unrecognised past in greater detail.
India is one of the oldest civilisations in the world spanning a period of almost 5000 years, with a rich cultural heritage: It is also called a cradle of civilisation, for establishing Harappan culture in Sindhu valley (Indus valley civilisation) which was most extensive of the three earliest civilisations, with Mesopotamia and Egypt, the other two. Our lofty mountains, the Himalayas kept us safe long enough. But then, hordes of invaders from north-western passes one after the other ravaged our landscape. Yet India’s strong resilience and intense spirituality withstood repeated plunder and did not let its precious civilisation to perish under the wheels of the testing times of history.
Philosophy in ancient India was essentially spiritual in nature. The Mundaka Upanishad speaks of Brahma-Vidya or the science of the eternal as the basis of all sciences. Our supremacy nonetheless was not confined to the subjective. Ancient Indians measured the land, divided the year, mapped out the heavens and traced course of the sun and planets.
“Swami Vivekananda, in his lecture at Brooklyn (New York, USA) on the subject “India’s Gift to the World” in 1895, spoke of the wondrous beauties of his native land. India was said to have made great contribution to mathematics: algebra, geometry, astronomy, mixed mathematics, the ten numerals, the very cornerstone of present civilisation, were all discovered in India and are indeed Sanskrit words”.
There is an interesting story of how these Indian discoveries from India, passed on to Baghdad (Arabia) in the late 8th century. There the Viziers were a family of Sanskrit-literate hereditary Buddhists, from Afghanistan who had converted to Islam; had studied Indian mathematics in Kashmir, the then one of the great centres of learning. In Baghdad, the knowledge of ancient India was cross-fertilised with that of ancient Greece. Envoys were sent to India to learn Indian medicine, mathematics and astronomy.
From Baghdad these ideas spread across Islamic world: ‘Fibonacci’ a brilliant Italian mathematician who had grown up in Algeria, where he learnt Arabic mathematics, authored Liber Abaci- the ‘Book of Calculation’. It was he who first popularised in Europe the use of what was later thought of as Arabic numerals, but these numbers were not Arabic in origin, as Fibonacci and his Arab masters recognised, that they were Indian, besides accepting a revolutionary Indian concept of Zero (Al-Sifre in Arabic and Shunya in Sanskrit). The “nine figures” (numerals) of India were first written down in the Brahmi script in 3rd century BCE in Bihar at the time of emperor Ashoka. Europeans made their best efforts to erase these facts, and its high time, these need to be retrieved from oblivion.
Nonetheless our Sanskrit language is now universally acknowledged to be the foundation of all European languages. In literature our epics, poems and plays ranked as high as those of any other language, like Kalidas’s play Shakuntala. In music India gave to the world her system of notation with the seven cardinal notes and the diatonic scale, as early as 350 BC while it came to Europe in eleventh century. India also gave to the world the fables of Aesop, which were copied by Aesop, a Greek storyteller, from an old Sanskrit book: it has also given the ‘Arabian Nights’, even the story of ‘Cinderella’ and the ‘Bean Stalks’. In manufacture, India was the first to make cotton and dye; and was proficient in all works of jewellery. Vivekananda had satirically said that it was due to superiority of India in every respect that drew to her borders the hungry cohorts of Europe, thereby indirectly bringing about discovery of America”.
Today, over half the world’s population lives in areas, where Indian religions and cultures were once dominant. Xuanzang, one of China’s greatest scholars, travellers and translators, gave an interesting account of his journey from western China to Kanchipuram (Tamil Nadu). In particular he mentioned about India’s prestigious Nalanda university, housing about 10,000 monks, and international scholars, who studied texts of different schools of Buddhism, sacred Vedas, philosophy, medicine, mathematics and astronomy. Above all he described the magnificence of 9 storied Nalanda’s library, regarded then as the greatest repository of knowledge. Xuanzang studied for five years, copied out by hand the Sanskrit manuscripts, which he took back home to China.
India produced not just pioneering merchants, astronomers, scientists, mathematicians, doctors and sculptors, but also the holy men, monks and missionaries of several distinct brands of Indic religions- of Hinduism, and of various sects of Buddhism. These diverse religious faiths collectively came to dominate Asia. What Greece was once to Rome and then to the European world, India was, to Southeast and Central Asia and even China, influencing its philosophies, political ideas and architectural forms, not by conquest but by sheer cultural approval and charm. India became a sort of teacher of the Arab world.
The entire spectrum of early Indian influence has always been there: in the Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, in the place names of the then Burma and Thailand (Suvarnabhumi); in the murals and sculptors of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in Laos and Cambodia and in the Hindu temples of Bali. Yet somehow, these diverse forms and geographies into a single cultural unit, a vast Indo-sphere, has never been recognised and given a name.
Indic religions greatly influenced Asia’s theological, philosophical, cultural, economic and political discourse for almost 2000 years, reflecting in the greatest Buddhist structure in the world in Java, and the largest of all Hindu temples, not in India but at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, most spectacular religious structure in the world. Doesn’t it sound surprising and interesting as well, that despite Cambodia lying so close to China geographically and having large Chinese population, yet the Khmer Kings traced their ancestry not to Confucious but to an Indian named Kaundinya? There was influence of Hindu and Buddhist Gods, and Buddhism remains dominant religion in Cambodia and across South-East Asia even today. However, it is scientific rather than spiritual ideas that India stood out most dramatically. By the 5th century the great Indian mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata, had correctly proposed a spherical earth that rotated on its own axis, while using the decimal system and calculating the length of the solar year up to an accuracy of seven decimals.
India lies at the centre of network of navigable sea roads and maritime trade routes, and the Indian peninsula sits in the middle of the vortex of winds, which blow one way for six months a year, and then reverse for the next six. Indian sailors used the predictable seasonal shift of monsoon for outward journeys to southeast Asia and Africa, and the southwest monsoon for the return voyage back to India. Indian traders exported high-value goods like spices (pepper, cinnamon) textiles (cotton, silk) precious stones (diamonds, pearls) ivory, sandalwood etc. to east-Africa and southeast Asia, while importing / in exchange for gold, horses, Chinese silk, metals, Egyptian wine and exotic goods. By the 5th century, a major direct sea route through the straits of Malacca, had further facilitated the trade links.
A remarkable gift of India to the world is Yoga to live a healthy life and to be in harmony with nature. Yoga and other aspects of Indian philosophy caught imagination of the western societies during the mid-19th century. “Swami Vivekananda was the first Hindu teacher to advocate and disseminate Yoga: he toured Europe and United States of America in the 1890s and got good response from philosophers and scholars like Max Mueller.”
Question then arises if India’s transformative effect on the religions and civilisations around it were so closely linked with world history, why is its impact not better and more widely known? As it logically appears, how would the British pretend bringing civilisation to a part of the world if they recognised, that it had already been supremely civilised for thousands of years? The fact is that British regime in India was indeed a rapacious, imperialist machine bent on the subjugation of Indians for the purpose of profits, resulting into the expropriation of Indian wealth to Britain, draining it of its resources. It must not be forgotten that the India the British entered was a wealthy, thriving and commercializing society-that was why the East India Company was interested in it in the first place.
Vedic Values-pluralism:
Four religions have taken birth in India: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism and along with Christianity and Islam form a perfect bouquet of pluralism. Each religion has its individual identity and culture but remarkably under the shared heritage breathes freely, which reflects in art, music and Urdu poetry, and in the insightful writings of Guru Gobind Singh.
I may now conclude with the following few stanzas from my book “Musings Unabated”
An agnostic, heretic and sceptic
A free thinker, individualist and non-conformist,
A consumerist, materialist and hedonist,
Religious, rigorous and strict:
All flourish in the soil of India without conflict,
But for some who, at times, from sanity drift
To their peril, the majority gives them a short shrift
Religion in India is not dogmatic.
Indians possess precious psychological traits,
Nurtured in the hermitage; our rich heritage
Of philosophy of life and human values we still engage
With, carrying forward the legacy we love and appreciate.
Invaders did plunder our wealth but only to sully their reputation
Our civilization withstood ravages of time and beyond.
Our multi-religious society, like an enigmatic tapestry,
Binds the strands of diversity into enviable unity.
In our psyche, there is no place for animosity.
It’s a bouquet of multi-cultural, pluralistic variety.
There is a befitting Urdu couplet to sum-up:
Kuch baat hai ki hasti mit-ti Nahin hamari
Sadiyon raha hai dushman douray jahan hamara
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