by Amartya Sen
First, the European exoticists’ interpretations and praise found in India a veritable army of appreciative listeners, who were particularly welcoming given the badly damaged self-confidence resulting from colonial domination. The admiring statements were quoted again and again, and the negative remarks by the same authors (Herder, Schlegel, Goethe and others) were systematically overlooked.
In his Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru comments on this phenomenon: ‘There is a tendency on the part of Indian writers, to which I have also partly succumbed, to give selected extracts and quotations from the writings of European scholars in praise of old Indian literature and philosophy. It would be equally easy, indeed much easier, to give other extracts giving an exactly opposite viewpoint.’34 In the process of accepting the exoticist praise, the Indian interpretation of the past has extensively focused on the objects of exoticist praise, concentrating more on the mystical and the anti-rationalist for which many in the West have such admiration.35
Second, the process fitted into the politics of elitist nationalism in colonial India and fed the craving for a strong intellectual ground to stand on to confront the imperial rulers. Partha Chatterjee discusses the emergence of this attitude very well:
Anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains – the material and the spiritual. The material is the domain of the ‘outside,’ of the economy and of statecraft, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proved its superiority and the East had succumbed. In this domain, then, Western superiority had to be acknowledged and its accomplishments carefully studied and replicated. The spiritual, on the other hand, is an ‘inner’ domain bearing the ‘essential’ marks of cultural identity. The greater one’s success in imitating Western skills in the material domain, therefore, the greater the need to preserve the distinctiveness of one’s spiritual culture. This formula is, I think, a fundamental feature of anticolonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa.36
There was indeed such an attempt to present what was perceived to be the ‘strong aspects’ of Indian culture, distinguished from the domain, as Chatterjee puts it, ‘where the West had proved its superiority and the East had succumbed’.
Chatterjee’s analysis can be supplemented by taking further note of the dialectics of the relationship between Indian internal identity and its external images. The diagnosis of strength in that non-materialist domain was as much helped by the exoticist admiration for Indian spirituality as the acceptance of India’s weakness in the domain of science, technology and mathematics was reinforced by the magisterial dismissals of India’s materialist and rationalist traditions. The emphases on internal identity that emerged in colonial India bear powerful marks of dialectical encounters with Western perceptions.
Third, as the focus has shifted in recent decades from elitist colonial history to the role of the non-elite, the concentration on the intellectual traditions of the elite has weakened. Here we run into one of the most exciting developments in historiography in India. There has been a significant shift of attention from the elite to the underdogs in the writing of colonial history, focusing more on the rural masses and the exploited plebeians – a broad group often identified by the capacious term ‘subalterns’.37 The move is entirely appropriate in its context (in fact, much overdue), and in understanding colonial history, this is a very important corrective.
While this shift in focus rejects the emphasis on elitist intellectual traditions in general (both of the materialist and the non-materialist kind), it is in many ways easier to relate the religious and spiritual traditions of the elite to the practices and beliefs of the non-elite. In contrast, the cutting edge of science and mathematics is inevitably related to formal education and preparation. In this context, the immense backwardness of India in mass education (an inheritance from the British period but not adequately remedied yet) compounds the dissociation of elite science and mathematics from the lives of the non-elite. Acceptance of the achievements of Indian spirituality tends to look less ‘alienated’ from the masses than the achievements in fields that demand more exacting formal education. Thus, the exoticists’ praise of India is more easily accepted by those who are particularly careful not to see India in elitist terms.
The fact remains, however, that illiteracy is a deprivation. The issue of inter-class justice cannot be a matter only of recognizing the real role of the subalterns in history (for example, in anti-colonial national movements), important though it is. It is also a matter of remedying the immense inequalities in educational and other opportunities that severely limit, even today, the actual lives of the subalterns.
Interestingly enough, even by the eleventh century the seriousness of this loss was noted by Alberuni himself (one of the major curatorial authors whose work was referred to earlier). Alberuni spoke of the real deprivation of ‘those castes who are not allowed to occupy themselves with science’.38 This substantive deprivation remains largely unremedied even today (except in particular regions such as Kerala). In understanding the nature of Indian cultures and traditions, focusing mainly on the achievements – rather than deprivations – of the Indian subaltern can yield a deceptive contrast.*
This shift in emphasis has also, to some extent, pushed the interpretation of India’s past away from those achievements that require considerable formal training. While this move makes sense in some contexts, a comparison of a self-consciously non-elitist history of India with the typically classical understanding of the intellectual heritage of the West produces a false contrast between the respective intellectual traditions. In comparing Western thoughts and creations with those in India, the appropriate counterpoints of Aristotelian or Stoic or Euclidian analyses are not the traditional beliefs of the Indian rural masses or of the local wise men but the comparably analytical writings of, say, Kauṭilya or Nāgārjuna or Āryabhaṭa. ‘Socrates meets the Indian peasant’ is not a good way to contrast the respective intellectual traditions.
Concluding Remarks
The internal identities of Indians draw on different parts of India’s diverse traditions. The observational leanings of Western approaches have had quite a major impact – positively and negatively – on what contributes to the Indian self-image that emerged in the colonial period and survives today. The relationship has several dialectical aspects, connected to the sensitivity towards selective admirations and dismissals from the cosmopolitan West as well as to the mechanics of colonial confrontations.
The differences between the curatorial, magisterial and exoticist approaches to Western understanding of Indian intellectual traditions lie, to a great extent, in the varying observational positions from which India has been examined and its overall images drawn. The dependence on perspective is not a special characteristic of the imaging of India alone. It is, in fact, a pervasive general feature in description and identification.39 ‘What is India really like?’ is a good question for a foreign tourist’s handbook precisely because the description there may sensibly be presented from the particular position of being a foreign tourist in India. But there are other positions, other contexts, other concerns.
The three approaches investigated here have produced quite distinct views of Indian intellectual history, but their overall impact has been to exaggerate the non-material and arcane aspects of Indian traditions compared to its more rationalistic and analytical elements. While the curatorial approaches have been less guilty of this, their focus on what is really different in India has, to some extent, also contributed to it. But the bulk of the contribution has come from the exoticist admiration of India (particularly of its spiritual wonders) and the magisterial dismissals (particularly of its claims in mathematics, science and analytical pursuits).
The nature of these slanted emphases has tended to undermine an adequately pluralist understanding of Indian intellectual trad
itions. While India has certainly inherited a vast religious literature, a large wealth of mystical poetry, grand speculation on transcendental issues, and so on, there is also a huge – and often pioneering – literature, stretching over two and a half millennia, on mathematics, logic, epistemology, astronomy, physiology, linguistics, phonetics, economics, political science and psychology, among other subjects concerned with the here and now.40
Even on religious subjects, the only world religion that is firmly agnostic (Buddhism) is of Indian origin, and, furthermore, the atheistic schools of Cārvāka and Lokāyata have generated extensive arguments that have been seriously studied by Indian religious scholars themselves.41 Heterodoxy runs throughout the early documents, and even the ancient epic Rāmāyaṇa, which is often cited by contemporary Hindu activists as the holy book of the divine Rama’s life, contains dissenting characters. For example, Rama is lectured to by a worldly pundit called Jāvāli on the folly of his religious beliefs: ‘O Rama, be wise, there exists no world but this, that is certain! Enjoy that which is present and cast behind thee that which is unpleasant.’42
What is in dispute here is not the recognition of mysticism and religious initiatives in India, which are certainly plentiful, but the overlooking of all the other intellectual activities that are also abundantly present. In fact, despite the grave sobriety of Indian religious preoccupations, it would not be erroneous to say that India is a country of fun and games in which chess was probably invented, badminton originated, polo emerged, and the ancient Kāmasūtra told people how to have joy in sex.* Indeed, Georges Ifrah quotes a medieval Arab poet from Baghdad called al-Sabhadi, who said that there were ‘three things on which the Indian nation prided itself: its method of reckoning, the game of chess, and the book titled Kalila wa Dimna (a collection of legends and fables).’43 This is not altogether a different list from Voltaire’s catalogue of the important things to come from India: ‘our numbers, our backgammon, our chess, our first principles of geometry, and the fables which have become our own.’44 These selections would not fit the mainstream Western image of Indian traditions, focused on religion or spirituality.
Nor would they fit the way many Indians perceive themselves and their intellectual past, especially those who have come to take a ‘separatist’ position on the nature of Indian culture. I have tried to discuss how that disparity has come about and how it is sustained. I have also tried to speculate about how the selective alienation of India from a very substantial part of its past has been nourished by the asymmetrical relationship between India and the West. It is, oddly enough, the rationalist part of India’s tradition that has been affected most by this dialectical alienation.
8
China and India*
‘Is there anyone in any part of India who does not admire China?’ asked Yi Jing in the seventh century, on returning from India to China.1 Yi Jing may have fallen a little for exaggerated rhetoric, but there was certainly much intellectual interest about China in India at that time, as there was about India in China. Yi Jing had just spent ten years at the institute of higher learning, Nālandā, which attracted many scholars from outside India, in addition to domestic students.
Yi Jing, who studied medicine in Nālandā (in particular, ‘Ayurveda’ or ‘the science of longevity’) in addition to Buddhist philosophy and practice, was one of many Chinese scholars who visited India in the first millennium to study Buddhism and other subjects (and also to collect Sanskrit documents), and many of them spent a decade or more in India.† In the other direction, hundreds of Indian scholars went to China and worked there between the first century and the eleventh. They were engaged in a variety of work, which included translating Sanskrit documents into Chinese (mostly Buddhist writings), but also other activities, such as the pursuit of mathematics and science. Several Indian mathematicians and astronomers held high positions in China’s scientific establishment, and an Indian scientist called Gautama Siddhārtha (Qutan Xida, in Chinese) even became the president of the official Board of Astronomy in China in the eighth century.
Xuanzang (Hiuan-tsang) returning to China with Sanskrit manuscripts from India in 645 AD
Intellectual links between China and India, stretching over much of the first millennium and beyond, were important in the history of the two countries. And yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice they do get tends to come from those interested in religious history, particularly Buddhism. But religion is only one part of a much bigger story of Sino-Indian connections over the first millennium, and there is need for a broader understanding of the reach of these relations. This is important for a fuller appreciation not only of the history of a third of the world’s population, but also for the continuing relevance of these connections, linked as they are with contemporary political and social concerns.
It is certainly correct to see religion as a major reason for the historical closeness of China and India, and to appreciate the central role of Buddhism in initiating the movement of people and ideas between the two countries. However, even though Buddhism served as a critically important influence, the intellectual interactions between the two countries initiated by Buddhism were not confined to religion only. The non-religious (or what, in current terminology, may be called ‘secular’) consequences of these relations stretched well into science, mathematics, literature, linguistics, architecture, medicine and music. We know from the elaborate accounts left by a number of Chinese visitors to India, such as Faxian in the fifth century and Xuanzang and Yi Jing in the seventh,2that their interest was by no means restricted to religious theory and practices only. Similarly, the Indian scholars who went to China, especially in the seventh and eighth centuries, included not only religious experts, but also other professionals, such as astronomers and mathematicians.
It is not, however, easy to rescue the variety and reach of early Sino-Indian intellectual relations from their interpretational confinement in the religious basket. Indeed, religious reductionism has been reinforced in recent years by the contemporary obsession with classifying the world population into distinct ‘civilizations’ defined principally by religion (well illustrated, for example, by Samuel Huntington’s partitioning of the world into such categories as ‘Western civilization’, ‘Islamic civilization’, ‘Buddhist civilization’, ‘Hindu civilization’).
There is, as a result, a tendency to see people mainly – or even entirely – in terms of their religion, even though that attribution of a singular identity can miss out on much that is important. This segregation has already done significant harm to the understanding of other parts of the global history of ideas and commitments, for example through the confusion it generates between the history of Muslim people in general and Islamic history in particular, ignoring the flowering of science, mathematics and literature pursued by Muslim intellectuals, particularly between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries.*
There is, in fact, another factor that influences this interpretational bias. There is an odd dichotomy in the way in which Western and non-Western ideas and scholarship are currently comprehended, with a tendency to attribute a predominant role to religiosity in interpreting the works of non-Western intellectuals who had secular interests along with strong religious beliefs. It is, for example, not assumed that, say, Isaac Newton’s scientific work must be understood in primarily Christian terms (even though he did have Christian beliefs), nor presumed that his contributions to worldly knowledge must somehow be interpreted in the light of his deep interest in mysticism (important as mystical speculations evidently were to Newton himself and even perhaps for some of the motivation for his efforts). In contrast, when it comes to non-Western cultures, religious reductionism tends to exert a gripping influence. For example, there is a widespread tendency to presume that none of the general intellectual works of Buddhist scholars or of Tantric practitioners in India or China could be ‘properly understood’ except in the special light of their religious beliefs and practices.
The extensive contacts that were generated between India and China through Buddhist connections were not confined to the subject matter of Buddhism only. They had significant effects in other fields as well, including science, mathematics, literature, linguistics, medicine and music. They also broadened, in a general way, the intellectual horizons of people in the two countries, and even helped to make each of them less insular. This essay is concerned specifically with Sino-Indian historical relations in the first millennium that went beyond the confines of religious interactions. A particular focus of attention is the catalytic role that the connections inspired by Buddhism, and fostered by Buddhist contacts, played in advancing what can be broadly described as secular pursuits.
Trade, Religion and Beyond
As it happens, Buddhism was not the only vehicle of Sino-Indian relations, which began almost certainly with trade. Indian traders were engaged in importing goods from China for re-export to Central Asia more than two thousand years ago. Zhang Qian, an early Han emissary to Bactriana in the second century BCE, was surprised to find, in the local markets, Chinese goods from Yunnan (mainly cotton and bamboo products), and on enquiry he learned that they had been brought there by Indian caravans through India and Afghanistan.3 Indian intermediation in trade between China and the west of Asia continued over the centuries, though the commodity pattern went on changing. Silk was very important initially, but ‘by the eleventh century … porcelain had already replaced silk as the leading Chinese commodity transshipped through India’.4