A Book Review.....and a Synopsis of 'India Discovered' by John Keay

I recently finished reading 'India Discovered' by John Keay. It is a must read book for every Indian, who wants to maintain a balanced view on the Right-wing nationalist version of history, the  Sone ki Chidiya story, which seems to be getting more and more popular.

John Keay is a respected author who has written many well received books on India and China. But, what convinces me that he would provide a reliable and unbiased account is the endorsement by William Dalrymple, my favorite author on Indian history, saying "It is the first book I read on India and it is still my favourite". The book is an account of the discovery of 'the history of India' by the Western World, and ironically, our own awakening to our glorious past. If this book is to be believed, and I am highly inclined to, we learnt about our Sone ki Chidiya past from the British.

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I am not enamored by firangs. They have got where they are on the strength of their cunning, savagery and destructive weapons, which allowed them to conquer and exploit the civilized world. And I hate the fact that they are today in a position to give judgement on problems they created in the first place (I can write a whole blog, and more, on their hypocrisy). However, I also believe that the best of them had great vision, a sharp intellect, perseverance and sincerity of effort, while on the other hand, no amount of reading about our past or the news of the present inspires any kind of confidence in our own vision or sincerity. There are exceptions, but they are far too few to affect our progress as a people.

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Introduction

Most of our famous cultural and historic sites were discovered by Westerners. The list of such sites include Elephanta caves, Ajanta, Ellora, Sanchi, Khajuraho, Konark, etc. Many others were saved from destruction by the repairs carried out by them. This is not to say that all, or even the majority, of these outsiders were sensitive to our great historic past. Most of them were least bothered about preserving our past, or even aware that such a past existed. They were responsible for destruction of a large number of sites, either due to disregard and ignorance, as by engineers building the railroads who blasted anything coming in the way, or due to deliberate malice such as part of the reprisals after the First War of Independence in 1857, when many a fort and mosque were razed to the ground to give way to military barracks. However, the destruction wrought by them was no more than what was already being done by us on our own. In this general situation of wanton destruction, we were fortunate to have a few academics among those who came to administer and rule over us, and it is to these men - who had to fight against both us Indians and their own superiors - that we owe our thanks, for what we know and see of our wonderful past. This is what Fergusson, who wrote a seminal book on Indian architecture, had to say about the destruction of temples by the Muslims - 'Europeans have been equally destructive, and the Hindus, by their neglect and indifference, probably more so than others'. This remark about our disregard for our own heritage, made in the eighteenth century, can be seen even today on every monument and property defaced by the general public.

It is also fascinating that we were not even vaguely aware of our own glorious history. Our ignorance about our history was such that we did not even seem to know that Buddha was born in India. Vishnu's avatar as Buddha was considered to be an unrelated god, who in any case had no active worshippers or temples, like many others in the Hindu Pantheon. We were not aware of the existence of any great king named Chandragupta Maurya or Ashoka. In fact, whatever interesting sites were found in India were initially ascribed to the Greeks as we were considered incapable of being  their architects. This book shows how this perception slowly and gradually changed as the world discovered India's rich and glorious history.

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Before I continue, here's another disclaimer. This post is not actually a review of the book, but more of a synopsis. It gives an overview of what you can expect when reading the book, chapter by chapter. For the benefit of those who may not get the time to read this book, I have also included a few of those incidents or passages I found most fascinating.

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The Book Review cum Synopsis

'India Discovered - The Recovery of a Lost Civilisation' was first published in 1981. It is divided into chapters, each discussing a different theme or area of study. However, the narrative follows a broad chronological arc, roughly covering the period from 1783 to 1925.

Chapter 1 & 2.    The book begins with a short introduction by the author about India and it's colonial past. This is followed by the first two chapters which are an introduction to Oriental Studies. The author discusses it's development in conjunction with the life of Sir William Jones, considered by many as the 'Father of Oriental Studies'. It is also a glimpse into India, as it was, when he arrived at Calcutta in 1783.

The British, through Clive's treaty with the Mughal Emperor in 1765, had been granted the Diwan of the whole of Bengal, which in those days stretched from Benares to Burma. As the holdings of the East India Company increased, the administration of these territories gained importance over purely commercial motives and as a part of this effort, Sir William Jones had been appointed as the Supreme Court Judge at Calcutta. These chapters, through the life of Jones, shows us the progress of scholarship on India, from being considered inferior and not worthy of study to a new level of respectability. As Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, said after reading the first ever English translation of the Gita - "Not very long since, the inhabitants of India were considered by many as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life. Now their civilization was being revealed in this masterpiece from an age 'preceding even the first efforts of civilization in our own quarter of the globe.' he ended with the prophetic statement - "These will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance."

Jones made numerous important contributions to the study of India. They included such varied fields as history, religion, architecture, literature, linguistics, anthropology, botany and many more. Here are just two of his more important contributions. The first was the dating of Indian history. Sanskrit literature included long lists of kings and writing extolling the virtues of many kings, but no chronicles or historical accounts. Thus there were no dates from the pre-Mohammedan period. The only known date from the whole of ancient India was 326 BC, a date every westerner knew, the date when Alexander invaded Punjab. However, there was no mention of it in any Indian account. Alexander was just another foreigner who had tried to invade a small kingdom somewhere in the north. How Jones deduced and gave an event in ancient Indian history a date, accurate within a decade, and which then formed the basis for the entire chronology of Indian history is extremely interesting. Jones, who learnt Sanskrit, was the also first scholar to recognize the similarities between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek as not merely coincidence, and proposed the theory of the existence of an Indo-European branch of languages, and in the process gave birth to the field of comparative linguistics. This section ends with his death in India, in 1795, having made Indian studies a much more respectable field of scholarship.

Chapter 3 and 4 are about the discovery of Ashoka - yes, I said discovery. Nobody in India knew about the existence of any king named Ashoka. As in the earlier chapter, the author fleshes out this story by weaving it with the life of the next great figure in the understanding of Indian history, James Prinsep, who arrived in India in 1819 as a simple official in the Mint. He was the first to recognize that the stone pillars scattered all over India, from Gujarat to Bihar and Nepal to Madhya Pradesh were the same Royal edict and had been put up by the same King. This may seem obvious today, but in those days, the script, now called Ashoka script, was undeciphered. The etchings on stone had faded and were difficult to discern, and the stones themselves were not considered special. Many of them had been broken and used by locals for use in building or decoration, and some were even found being used as the base for washing clothes by washermen. When Prinsep finally deciphered the script, the name on it was Devanampiya Piyadasi, meaning the beloved of Gods and of gracious men. A name was finally connected to him when someone read a buddhist text in Ceylon which said that this epithet was used by a great Indian King, otherwise known as Ashoka. Thus was India's first Great King, ruling over a vast Empire, revealed.

Chapters 5 is on Buddha. As I said earlier, the origins of Buddha were not known. No one even suspected that he may have been from India. After all, there were no Buddhists in India, in spite of being surrounded by them. All buddhist structures in India, including the one in Bodh Gaya, were in charge of brahmins, being used as temples. The ancient texts of the buddhists in the neighbouring countries referred to Buddha's origins in India, but neither any Indians nor the British had access to them yet. The pundit in Bodh Gaya, in fact admitted to being puzzled by the fact that every now and then, strange visitors from far off lands would come to visit the temple and reverently tour the overgrown ruins with books in their hands. Most scholars in the Western world believed that Buddha was an Egyptian or Ethiopian. It was only with the discovery of various archaeological sites, which were obviously buddhist in origin, and the study of buddhist texts from Tibet and Sri Lanka that the Indian origin of Buddha was established. In this chapter, we are also introduced to the next great figure in this journey, Alexander Cunningham.

Chapter 6 and 7 follow Alexander Cunningham, who during his more than fifty years in India, traveled across the subcontinent - from Burma to Afghanistan, from Central India to Tibet. Not only is he considered the 'Father of Indian Archaeology', but for a quarter of a century, he was Indian archaeology. He arrived in India as a Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, in 1833. He followed his archaeological pursuits even as he was posted in various parts of India, including Central India, Punjab during both the Anglo-Sikh wars, Nepal during the Anglo-Gurkha wars, etc. In 1861, at the age of forty seven, he retired as a Major-General. For the next twenty five years, he tramped across the length and breadth of India. Cunningham did not concentrate on conservation, but on discovering, studying and recording as many sites as he could. What is sad is that in many of the places, he would excavate a temple or Stupa, and when he would return a few months later, he would find nothing as the villagers would have carted everything away to use in their buildings and houses. As the author says "Every site recorded might be a site saved. He was too late in many of the sites, too late at Sultanganj where the ruins furnished brick ballast for many miles of line and too late at Tigowa where 36 temples were destroyed and carted away by the local railway contractor." These chapters also discuss the discovery and excavations at various famous sites such as Taxila, Sanchi, Barhut, etc.

Chapters 8 and 9 discusses the architecture of India including the story of the discovery of Khajuraho and Konark temples. The author also discusses the various views and reactions to the highly erotic sculptures decorating the hindu temples, especially Khajuraho and Konark. Even as many struggled to understand the reason for the presence of such images in places of worship, a few like Sir William Jones understood and put it across so elegantly- In Hinduism, 'it never seems to have entered the heads of the legislators or peoples that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a singularity that pervades all their writings and conversations, but is no proof of depravity in their morals'. This section also looks at how the early scholars categorised the various temples and other architectural structures on ethnological lines, such as the Dravidian style, the Chalukyan Style, the Mughal style, the Pathan style, Rajput style, etc.

Chapter 10 is mainly about Delhi and its surroundings. While discussing the ruins around Delhi, this eye witness account by one of the early European visitors to Delhi in 1790 is very illuminating - "As we advanced (into Delhi) the ruins became more thickly scattered around us, and at length covered the country on every side as far as the eye could see. Houses, palaces, tombs, in different stages of dilapidation, composed the striking scene. The desert we had passed was cheerful compared to the view of desolation now before us." The person giving this account was also the one who discovered Humayun's tomb, which lay uncared, forgotten and in ruins. We also read about the decay of Red Fort as the Mughal Empire declined and finally the aftermath of the First War of independence in 1857 which led to some of the worst acts of vandalism by the British. In fact, Jama Masjid survived being razed to the ground by a mere whisker. Many of the mosques were taken over by the British for use as barracks or armories, and were handed back for prayer only after many years.

Chapter 11 is on the discovery of Ajanta and how it gave us a new appreciation of Indian art, which till then was considered undeveloped and crude, and not worthy of study. The caves were lost in the jungles and were used by bears, tigers and other animals as shelters. "Nothing more forcibly conveys the plight of India's heritage than the image of primitive tribesmen and wild beasts sheltering amidst the painted splendours of Ajanta". Ajanta is another example of the extreme dedication shown by some Europeans in the conservation of Indian heritage. On being commissioned by the British to record all the paintings, Major Robert Gill arrived at Ajanta in 1844 and commenced the painstaking work. He worked tirelessly for twenty one years, on site, and completed the work in 1865. Sadly though, his work was futile. His oil paintings of the Ajanta murals went on display at the Crystal Palace, London. In December 1866 all were destroyed by fire; the canvases had not yet been photographed. However, with staggering resilience, Gill returned to Ajanta to begin his life's work again, but died, on site, a year later. It is stories like these which make you wonder if the people in those times were made of some different stuff. BTW this second set of paintings too met the same fate, but fortunately these had been photographed before their fiery destruction.

Chapter 12 is on the discovery of the Indus Valley civilization and Chapter 13 on the Great Trigonometric Survey. Both these topics are vast in scope and this book only introduces us to them. The Indus Valley civilisation, of course, extended our history even further back and catapulted us into the category of "Cradles of Civilisation". The Great Trigonometric Survey, on the other hand, was not directly connected with the discovery of Indian history. But as the author shows, it had a great impact as many of the people who undertook this massive undertaking for mapping the entire subcontinent were people with varied interests, who commented and wrote about what they encountered during their travels across the country. Another equally important outcome of the survey was the idea of India. As the author says - "But what the trigonometric survey did do was embrace the whole of India. In its adoption lay the seed of an idea that would soon translate itself into the reality of an all-Indian empire; and in its completion would lie the important acknowledgment of India's physical integrity". 

Chapter 14 is on the discovery of the heritage of various ethnic groups and tribes. A major portion of it is dedicated to the Rajputs and how their self-esteem was restored by a British soldier named Colonel James Tod. I dont know how true this is, as it seems unbelievable that the Rajputs have not always thought of themselves as proud warriors. But I am guessing that the author has done his research. What he brings out is that in the seventeenth century, the Rajput principalities had been rejected by the British and were under Maratha rule. (for those who have read my earlier posts - yes, the Marathas again). They were a humiliated lot and were at the mercy of not only the Marathas, but also various adventurers. In 1806, as the British agent at the court of Scindia of Gwalior, Major Tod witnessed the suicide of the Princess of Mewar, who calmly drank a cup of poison in front of her father, the Maharana, as there were two rival kings encamped outside the city vying for her hand and a share of the spoils. He was so moved by this that he resolved to espouse the Rajput cause. He became the leading authority on the region and in 1817, when Rajputs were finally accorded British protection, he was nominated as the Political Agent. He is credited with rescuing and recording the oral traditions of the Rajputs, reconstructing their history from ancient texts and folklore, reconstructing the framework of their society which had been ravaged by foreign invaders, saving many princely families, including the Maharana of Udaipur, from destitution, reviving trade, restoring the peace and prosperity of the region (300 deserted towns were repeopled) and restoring their pride as a race. That is a stupendous list of achievements for a single person (and this is a condensed list). Though the author refers to various contemporary accounts and historical literature, how much of it is true and how much is self-serving propaganda (by the British and Tod himself), is something I am not sure about.

The Last Chapter is on the various scholarly endeavours in documenting the flora and fauna of this vast country. On reading this, I finally realised why every town established/used by the British, such as Calcutta, Ooty, Shimla, Shillong, etc have a Botanical Garden. The East India Company was basically a trading concern, which initially came to India to trade in spice. Thus, a lot of money was invested in studying the plants in the subcontinent to determine which could be used for extracting any commercially useful product. The Botanical Gardens were the testing labs as well as repositories for the collection and study of samples of plants received from all over the country.

Conclusion

In conclusion, India Discovered is an excellent book on how any of our heritage managed to survive. It made me ponder hard on why we continue to destroy what little has survived even today with our neglect and indifference. 

For a history book, it is surprisingly easy to read and is just 150 pages long. I highly recommend reading this book and give it a 5/5.