Improbable Visitors

A Curmudgeon riding on an elephant, hanging on for dear life while trying to make sense of the landscape we’re crashing through.

That’s pretty much how I felt reading today’s volume, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India by Upinder Singh. She subtitles her work “From the Stone Age to the 12th Century,” which is a hint: the woman takes her Stone Age seriously, as we shall see. She has also written not a book for the generalist reader, but an actual textbook, one suitable “for undergraduate and postgraduate students.” God help the undergraduates. The level of detail really is appropriate to a graduate semester-long course, and the book was undoubtedly intended to be supported by classroom lecture. Tough sledding for those of us well past our university years and who approach the material with approximately zero background.

The most improbable-seeming people made it to or through India, from Alexander the Great to Francis Xavier (of Jesuit fame) to the Beatles. What made those intersections seem odd is modern maps, which have India somewhere off in the lower right. For a better understanding, consider the world as it was known before the discovery of the Western Hemisphere…you can see it here. Add in the fact that sailors aren’t crazy about getting too far from land and suddenly India’s prominence makes sense. For most of history India was quite literally at the center of the world.

Let us begin our consideration of Indian history with the origin of the Earth.

Literally…after a bracing discussion of definitions and sources, our author takes us through the formation of the Earth and a description of plate tectonics, pointing out that the Himalayas are being formed as India rear-ends Asia, and that said mountains are fold mountains rather than, say, your block-fault. Singh is precise, right down to her orogenies. She largely skips over the Precambrian Era (harrumph!) and nods at the Paleozoic, but waxes poetic on the three major divisions of the Mesozoic before hitting her stride in the bright lights and glamour of the Cenozoic.

As a former geophysicist, I was in my element. Then the archaeology started.

Pre-humans it would seem originated in Africa, and the group of interest to Indian history migrated first to southern India, then fanned out to the rest of the subcontinent from there. We know about those populations only from artifacts they left behind, since written language was well in the future. These hominoid ancestors of modern Homo sapiens seem to have arrived on the Indian subcontinent as early as Homo erectus. (Quit snickering.) Our intrepid author introduces us to some of the basic methods of archaeology. Of no small note is the matter of pottery…archaeologists use pot shards to date stratigraphic layers of a dig much the same way geologists use layers of hard rock. By tracing the spread of various ceramic technologies, one is able to trace both the geographic distribution of prehistoric people and their technical evolution. Which our intrepid author does, at great length and in often mind-numbing detail. Such, children, is the experience of graduate school.

Civilization implies cities, of course (city-civitas-civilization), and the first Indian cities we have uncovered were built by an indigenous people called the Harappans. They appear starting at about 2600 B.C., so just slightly later than the Minoans (3500 B.C.) and somewhat later than the Egyptians (5000 B.C.). We know about the Harappans from ruins of the cities they built, which showed a high level of engineering skill and urban planning; these ruins are found scattered along the Indus River valley. Harappan cities were organized along a grid system, with streets and lots that while not perfectly rectilinear were clearly standardized. Photos (the illustrations are excellent throughout) reveal wide boulevards lined with shops. Personal artifacts imply specialization of crafts and possible existence of guilds. And the cities had sewers, which implies somebody to clean them out, a job Singh ponders at undue length.

Plus, here’s the kicker about the Harappans: they had a written language and their inscriptions undoubtedly tell us all about themselves…but we can’t read it. Sheesh. Frankly, it wasn’t on my radar that there were written languages out there that we haven’t decoded, I must have over-internalized the Rosetta Stone. But exist they do, creating a term new to me, “protohistory.” History is defined by the written record, and one moves from the prehistoric to the historic period with the arrival of writing. Protohistory is the gray zone between the two, when a civilization left written records but we do not understand their language. Your Harappans, for example. The distinction matters to the work at hand in that everybody wants the bragging rights of being the first, and people like Egypt and the Mesopotamians enter the historic (i.e., written) record about 2500 B.C. or so. When somebody cracks the code on the Harappan language, the Harappans would move from protohistory to lead position as Oldest in History, by a nose. Sports fans will understand the thrill, and it is no joke to say that international fame awaits any home cryptologist who can crack the Harappan code.

Ironically, the culture that nobody can read about has its own website: www.harappa.com.

The first major civilization in India who left writing we can read is the Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya in 322 B.C. (Not to be confused with Chandragupta II and the Gupta Empire, who appeared some six hundred years later.) The Maurya were a really big deal, in part because Chandragupta was the first person to unite all of subcontinent into one kingdom, save for its far southern tip. He was also the guy who encountered Alexander the Great as Alexander completed his conquest of Persia by marching into northwest India. I am indebted to Singh for pointing out that in the confrontation Alexander’s general, Hephaistion, led a great battle in which the Greeks defeated the Maurya. Singh doesn’t unwind the fact, but in addition to being his general, Hef was Alexander’s long-term lover. It’s nice to find out Hef was more than just a pretty face and hot tentmate.

But the emergence of written history presents any number of problems for the would-be student. All the early Indian writing that survives is either devotional, theoretical, or a government inscription of some sort. None of these forms prioritizes fact or objectivity, to the point that our author speaks of the archaeological and the literary tracts of Indian history, which have only a few touchpoints between them. In essence, it’s a bit like trying to understand Western history armed with the Bible, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and a few digs to go on. And the literary track of Indian history is complicated by the presence of three major religions (Hindu, Buddhist, Jaina) plus numerous minor and regional sects; several different languages (Prakrit, Sanskrit, and Tamil among them), plus local dialects; and each of the languages could be written in more than one alphabet. Singh even says she won’t attempt to reconcile facts between the archeological and literary tracts, which she does not.

Yikes.

The underlying events really did become more convoluted as history progressed. The first three Maurya kings - Chandragupta, Bindusara, and Ashoka - were strong and held a unified empire together for over a century. Ashoka even made it into Buddhist literature, notable for advocating non-violence and being presented as the ideal king. However, following his rule the empire crumbled (non-violence has its military limitations) and the subcontinent was ruled by regional and local powers, at least through the 12th century. Much like Rome immediately after its fall, the individual stories are easily enough understood, but it is difficult to make them gel into a coherent, unified narrative.

A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India is, like all works, a product of both its sources and its time. If the book has a failure, it is the absence of synthesis, the distillation of fact into a narrative view of the history at hand. In part Singh is doing something I applaud: she is clearly writing Indian history for an Indian audience without reference to European analogs. She is attempting to find a middle way between 19th century European historians who tended to see India as Mesopotamia South, a branch office of the “real” culture up north, and Indian historians in the 20th century who tried to reject such influences entirely. Regrettably, the second bit of narrative failure may be the current fad of writing history that is “non-hierarchical” and not “events-driven.” A fool’s errand if ever there was one, since human groups are inherently hierarchical, and since events are to history as atoms are to matter. (Analogy is key to success in graduate school.) Even domestic history is event-driven: buy a new puppy, you get events…all over the house.

One does not read a textbook as literature, of course. But buried among all the facts you do find a few good stories in Singh’s history. Near the end of the volume we run across a deity named Tara. (That’s her on the cover of the book.) I, of course, immediately had the theme from Gone With the Wind running through my head, but she wasn’t wearing a hoop skirt, there were no Tarleton Twins, and the main body of the text says little about her. However, a sidebar tells the fuller story. Tara took many forms and had several names, but her most important manifestations arose when Avalokiteshvara saw the horrors of those in hell and cried real tears as a result. From his tears, Tara arose…she is alleged to have the ability to relieve human suffering.

Turns out even Margaret Mitchell made it to India, at least intellectually. …Max, cue the music!