The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  In the days before Independence all those houses on the hill were lived in by Hindus. This was an old Hindu part of town. By then there was no Hindu temple any more, as there was in the old days, though they still had shrines to their gods in their houses, and pilgrims still came here from far away, even from Delhi. They used to have a Hindu mela – I can’t remember when, but I think some time in the summer.

  I recall Foucher speaking of a Hindu festival here a century ago, around the time of the festival celebrating the conception of the Buddha. Could this have been a hangover from the commemorations established under Kanishka, which continued until the end of Buddhism here after the Muslim conquest?

  We sit in the custodian’s garden, again marvelling at the continuities in the memory of the people, despite the tidal waves in the history of the subcontinent, the rise and fall of its empires. This is another of those wonderful moments on a historical search where one stumbles on a living link, however tenuous, with the lived past. The custodian refills our cups and regales us with another story …

  On the flat roofs of the village children fly kites, on long lines so high that we almost lose sight of them in the kingfisher sky. And as I look up, in my mind’s eye the giant stupa appears before me, its huge square base rising in five tiers, with friezes of the life of the Buddha, then the giant dome, which one story said was hung with fine netting sewn with pearls that made little sparkling points of light whether lit by sun or moon. Witnesses claimed that the dome was 300 feet high, shining with painted plaster and gilt, and on top was the decorated pinnacle, which is represented in later illustrations and votive models: thirteen tiers in wood, capped by copper umbrellas mounted on an iron-clad pillar, with huge flags snapping from the apex like dragons’ tails in the wind. One of these banners, presented by a Han Chinese queen, was made of sewn silk and was more than 300 feet long. The whole edifice would have been a monstrous, garish thing to our taste – gleaming colours, burnished copper, painted wood and gilt, variegated streamers of silk – but what a sight! And don’t forget the sounds that went with it: the tinkling of a myriad puja bells and wind chimes, the mysterious susurration of flags, the clatter of rattles … It was like a vast sounding chamber: a Buddhist wind orchestra.

  Zahoor shakes hands with the custodian as we leave and gives his card to our guide. At the edge of the graveyard we turn back for a last look. What an incredible spectacle it must have been across the plain of Peshawar, a beacon visible from the Khyber or from the route down the Indus gorges at the end of the perilous journey from central Asia – a vision from a lost world.

  THE EMPEROR’S CASKET

  ‘Here you are,’ says the keeper of Peshawar Museum as he turns the key to the old glass case. ‘I challenge you not to be excited! Now you will feel you can almost touch Kanishka.’

  We are back in the museum, a cavernous colonial building with classical pillars and varnished wooden floors, to look at some of the world’s most amazing collection of Gandharan art from the Kushan age, when this foreign dynasty changed the way the Buddha was represented and his story told. All around the galleries stand larger than life, polished black stone images of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas from the Kushan age, looking for all the world like 1970s rock stars, with their long, wavy hair and moustaches, their bare, muscled chests dripping with chunky jewellery. The Kushans, it has to be said, took the look of Buddhism – and, indeed, its ideology – into a very different place.

  In the base of the great stupa at Peshawar, according to the Chinese pilgrims, Kanishka deposited a sacred relic of the Buddha himself: a casket with a small quantity of ashes. The casket, dated to the first year of Kanishka’s reign, was discovered in a tiny chamber under Kanishka’s stupa during the archaeological excavations of 1908–9. The tiny reliquary inside contained three bone fragments of the Buddha: these were given to the Buddhists in Burma, and remain today in Mandalay. The empty casket, though, is still here: the keeper takes it out and carefully hands it to me. I experience a little shiver, as if it still has a faint charge of spiritual radioactivity. The keeper continues:

  There is some discussion today about whether it is actually of his time, or if it was put under the stupa by his successor. The text is signed by the maker, who is possibly (though there is argument over this too) an artist with a Greek name, Agesilas, who oversaw the work at Kanishka’s foundation. The inscription has been read like this: ‘The servant Agesilas, the superintendent of works at the vihara [shrine] of Kanishka in the monastery of Mahasena’. But other readings are possible.

  The decorations on the casket form an eloquent – and intimate – testimony to the eclectic bent of the Kushans. The lid shows the Buddha on a lotus pedestal, worshipped by Brahma, the creator god of the Hindus, and Indra, the old sky god of the Rig-Veda. I turn it over in my hands. The matt bronze finish is unblemished and looks almost new. On the edge of the lid is a frieze of flying geese, Buddhist symbols of the achievement of enlightenment. On the casket itself in relief is a Kushan monarch, probably Kanishka, with the Iranian sun and moon gods at his side. The king wears the same big nomadic boots and greatcoat he wore on the smashed statue in Kabul Museum and on his vivid portrait coins – could this perhaps have been a mass-produced, ‘authorized’ image? On the sides are two ima-ges of a seated Buddha, worshipped by royal figures. A garland, supported by cherubs, goes around the scene in typical Hellenistic style. The casket is a tiny artefact, tucked away on one of the lower shelves in the museum, but as a symbol of the Kushan age, it’s perfect.

  THE HAPPIEST TIME

  At the top of the town is Ghor Khuttree, the huge walled Mughal caravanserai built by Akbar, towering above the houses like a fortress. Until recently it was the police station, but now it’s a public garden with a tea shop, and over to one side of the courtyard is a deep, rectangular pit, scene of the most ambitious recent archaeological excavation on the subcontinent.

  ‘We think this may be the oldest continuously inhabited town on the subcontinent,’ says Professor Ihsan Ali. Gingerly, we pick our way down rough steps cut into the earth down the side of the hole. The dig already descends through more than 50 feet of strata, with each of the main periods labelled: so far they have reached the Kushan age: ‘Look, you can see: you British are already 2 feet down!’ he says smiling.

  The last two or three centuries have left 6 feet of habitation deposits. The deeper layers are still to be uncovered, but it certainly looks like the oldest city in the subcontinent so far verified scientifically by archaeology. And the point is that, as you can see, its life has been continuous. This is why it is such a wonderful opportunity for the archaeologist to see the whole pattern of human society here – the continuities of the material life over a vast span of time through all the changes of rulers and dynasties.

  We stand in the bottom of the pit by the Kushan levels, the later history of the subcontinent above us, each phase neatly labelled: Guptas, Ghaznavids, the Sultanate, Afghans, Mughals, British. The Kushan Empire reached its greatest extent and power from around AD 120 to 150, the time of the Antonines in Rome and the Han emperors in China, both of whom avidly exchanged their most exotic products for the spices, gems and cosmetics of India and Sri Lanka, and the precious stones and furs of central Asia. The Kushans, situated exactly midway on the Silk Route, certainly made the most of their advantageous position. As one of the Chinese chronicles puts it, ‘after they conquered northern India, the Yueh-chi became very rich indeed’.

  I asked Ihsan Ali why he thought it was such an extraordinarily international epoch. ‘It’s simple,’ he said. ‘Civilization is ravaged by war and prospers with peace. The answer is peace.’

  COMMERCE AND THE SPREAD OF BUDDHISM

  Evening is coming on, and there’s a sudden chill in the air as the temperature drops. It’s December on the Northwest Frontier. I’m standing on top of the great gate of the Ghor Khuttree caravanserai, looking over the packed wooden houses of old Peshawar, with their flat rooftops and timber balakhana screens (
source of our word ‘balcony’), where secluded women took their private exercise. Beyond the city there’s a fabulous view of the Afghan mountains, with the Khyber Passetched against an eggshell sky. In the clear, wintry light it seems close enough to touch. From here you understand something about the history of the subcontinent; you see why Peshawar has been so important, and why several historic capitals in India were out here controlling the foot of the pass. For the Kushans especially it was the key link in the route between central Asia and the Indian plain.

  The biggest cultural product of the peace was the spread of Buddhism across the East – to China, Korea and Southeast Asia, finally reaching Japan 150 years later. This was one of the great movements in history. Standing on the road to central Asia, Peshawar was at the heart of these political, religious and commercial activities. There were already Buddhist monasteries in the city, but things moved on to a different level when Kanishka decided to support Buddhism. While the evidence from coins and inscriptions at Rabatak and Surkh Kotal shows that the Kushans maintained Iranian religious beliefs and practices, other inscriptions provide abundant evidence of the patronage of Buddhism under Kanishka and his successors. The ideals of Buddhism were very congenial to the merchant classes, and Buddhism initially spread through Kushan merchants from Gandhara and Kashmir travelling through the mountains of northern Pakistan to the Tarim basin and into China. We can recognize the ethical message of Buddhism, but it is easy to forget what the ancients saw as its commercial ethos.

  So it was the Kushans who began the first formal relations between China and India. It is said that Kasyapa Matanga was the first to go from Peshawar and take Buddhism to China in the first century AD. The Kushan monk Lokaksema in the second century became the first translator of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, and established a translation bureau at the Chinese capital of Loyang by the Yellow river. These were followers of Mahayana Buddhism, as are the majority of Buddhists in the world today, and it was Kanishka who patronized and propagated this sect of Buddhism. (Earlier, Ashoka had supported the more austere Hinayana Buddhism.)

  One characteristic of this new school of Buddhist thought was to stress the miraculous life and personality of the Buddha, and this seems to have been officially sanctioned by Kanishka in his patronage of Buddhist art and literature. This humanization of the Buddha led directly to a desire for a representative figure of the Buddha who had, until this time, been depicted by such symbols as a wheel, an empty throne, a riderless horse or a footprint. Hence, it was here in Gandhara that the image of the Buddha we know today, wearing a Greek toga, was created. The revival of Buddhism by Kanishka, and the attendant emergence of Gandharan art, are among the enduring legacies of Kushan culture, and are the reason why, in eastern Asia, Kanishka is still seen as the third pillar of Buddhism.

  THE MAGICAL CITY OF MATHURA

  Three hours down the Grand Trunk Road on the new highway from Delhi stands Mathura. From the road you can see Aurangzeb’s mosque over to the east on the horizon, a memorial to later, less open-minded days (see here). It’s a great pilgrim centre for Indians, though the tourist coaches pass it by rushing on to Agra and the Taj. But it’s a magical city. Coming down the Grand Trunk from Peshawar, said an early traveller, ‘it is only when one reaches Mathura, with its monkeys in the streets and sacred turtles in the river, that one feels the real character of Hindustan’.

  Today it is still one of the seven sacred cities of India, with its picturesque river frontage lined with temples, pilgrim shops and hostels. It is the centre of the cult of Krishna, as it already was in the ancient world. Inside the town many of the numerous shrines perch on the massive remains of ruined Buddhist and Jain structures from the Kushan age. Meanwhile, the city’s ancient earthen defences still encircle it in a great crescent 1 mile across and 2 miles from north to south – a sign of its huge size and importance 2000 years ago.

  The Kushans captured Mathura in the late first century AD under Vima Takto. The city had long had connections with the northwest: indeed, Mathura had been ruled by Greek dynasts for over a century in the age after Ashoka, so the arrival of another ‘Aryan’ dynasty perhaps was not such a great shock. The Kushans refurbished the outer defences and erected a rectangular inner fortress 650 yards long, with semicircular bastions and round towers at the corners. The contemporary Harivamsa describes the newly rebuilt city: ‘crescent-shaped behind its high defences and moats, well established and laid out, prosperous, cosmopolitan and teeming with strangers.’ Under Kanishka and his successors it became ‘large, prosperous and beneficial, abounding in people, and a place where alms are easily obtainable,’ says the Lalitavistara (a contrast with the ‘poor dusty village’ of the Buddha’s time, where charity was reputedly hard to come by). To another writer, Mathura was ‘simply perfection on Earth, rich in money and grain, full of noble, wealthy folk, a city of the highest excellence’. Along with Kapisa-Bagram and Peshawar, it would become a main place of residence for the Kushan kings, and their winter capital. From here, according to the Afghan inscription found at the Kaffir’s Castle, Kanishka mounted an expedition down the Ganges and annexed Saketa (present-day Ayodhia), Kausambi, Patna and Champa (now Bhagalpur). By then his empire dominated the heartland of Indian civilization.

  REVOLUTIONS IN WAYS OF SEEING

  It often happens with foreign dynasties – the British and the Mughals are other cases in point – that outsiders who want to improve their understanding of the lands they rule seek to record, codify and explain the indigenous culture. Several great figures in Indian culture are associated by later tradition with Kanishka’s court. In the indigenous Indian tradition of medicine, Ayurveda, the physician Caraka (or Charaka), one of its two traditional ‘founders’ (whose works are still passed down in lineages by oral teaching), is said to have been the guru of Kanishka, and is the subject of many legendary tales as far away as China. It is also likely that during this period revisions of the early epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were produced, just as they were under the Guptas, the Cholas and the Mughals, all of whom had a great interest in ‘imperial’ and ‘national’ epics. Indeed, new evidence suggests that it may have been under the Kushans that Sanskrit, hitherto a sacred language that was the preserve of the Brahmins, began to be disseminated as a ‘classical’ literary language, eventually assuming the role across southern Asia that Latin would have in the medieval West.

  Another important intellectual figure at this time was Asvagosh, a Buddhist teacher, who was a poet and a dramatist, but also the author of a great collection of Buddhist jatakas (magical birth tales), which were transmitted across eastern Asia, and have been described as the forerunners of The Arabian Nights and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Asvagosh’s work as a playwright is especially interesting in view of the still continuing tradition of miracle plays in Mathura. The earliest evidence for acting troupes in India comes from the Kushan age in Mathura, with inscriptional references to a courtesan from a ‘family of actresses’ and a travelling company of ‘players from Mathura’ working across northern India.

  But perhaps the most fascinating product of the Kushan age is the art developed in Mathura: a uniquely cosmopolitan art that would influence the whole history of Indian and eastern and southern Asian art. Under the Kushans a revolution in Indian art took place, driven by Kushan and native Indian traditions, and by the Greek–Buddhist art of Gandhara. Its characteristics are a vigorous sense of life, a roving curiosity and an eclectic mind borrowing from many sources. It was an art that served its purpose of mass communication better than most in history to that time, so was multiplied everywhere that Indian culture took root. It was humanistic and people-centred (including fine portraits); it handled long narrative; it revelled in technical experimentation. And there were some surprising inventions. For example, the tradition in Indian religious art of many-armed, many-headed gods seems to have started in Mathura, defining forever the representation of the Brahminical deities. Sometimes particular artistic innovations are so us
eful that they transform ways of seeing: and this meeting of Greek, Indian and central Asian styles on Indian soil in the second century AD proved so successful that regional cultures across the subcontinent swiftly adapted it to their own uses, galvanized by the extrovert energies of the day.

  The museum at Mathura houses an unrivalled collection of Kushan sculptures. Among them is a famous statue of Kanishka, closely matching the famous statue from Surkh Kotal in Afghanistan. Carved in the characteristic local red sandstone, it came from a mysterious Kushan family shrine at Mat, on the other side of the river Jumna. The site was excavated badly a century ago, and the findings were never published, but the place is still known as Tochari Tila (the mound of the Tocharians), a reference to the old racial identity of the Kushans before they ever came to India. From the same time are wonderful images of young nobles in turbans, and voluptuous bacchic scenes, a hint of the courtly culture of this multiracial empire in the mid-second century AD, when the Old World was largely at peace from Hadrian’s Wall to the Yellow river.

  THE BEGINNING OF A WORLD ECONOMY

  It is at this time that we begin to detect the coming shape of a world economy. The Kushans inherited a run-down currency in the northwest, but they soon started to supplement the debased silver and copper coins with newly introduced gold coins on the weight standard of the Romans, which had a very wide circulation. Beautifully designed and minted, the coinage is one of the most fascinating and unexpected aspects of their rule, both practical and symbolic. Like later foreign dynasties – the Mughals and the British, for example – the Kushans aimed at a high-value currency that would enable large-scale commercial enterprise. Wholesale business could now be conducted in a vast area from Bactria to the Ganges basin, and perhaps in the internal economy of India part of the flow of bullion into southern parts from the Roman spice trade found its way north to be recoined by the Kushans.