The Kamasutra’s description of the lifestyle of a fourth-century man-about-town is fascinating, and finds an echo in much later periods. The lives of the idle nawabs of nineteenth-century Lucknow and the Bengali zamindars of early-twentieth-century Kolkata have been common themes in literature and film, but some of these characters would have not been out of place if they had been transported back fifteen centuries to imperial Pataliputra. Like other aspects of Indian culture, this tradition too lives on in the world of ‘Page 3’ socialites in cities like Delhi and Mumbai.
So what did all these people and their world really look like? Despite the long passage of time, we have carvings and paintings that give us a visual insight into this world in the Ajanta and Ellora caves in Maharashtra. These were constructed under the rule of the Vakatakas, close allies of the Guptas. The paintings are obviously stylized but they give us a sense of what Indians of this period idealized. One of the things that strikes me is that most of the people in the paintings are very dark-skinned. It appears that ancient Indians had a preference for dark skin. This is supported by a lot of other evidence. For instance, the epitome of male handsomeness in the Hindu tradition is Krishna who is clearly dark. His name literally means ‘The Dark One’ (his depiction as ‘blue-skinned’ is merely a medieval artistic innovation). Similarly, the beautiful Draupadi, the common wife of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata, is also described as being very dark.
This preference for dark skin appears to have survived well into the medieval period. Indeed, Marco Polo specifically mentions this in his comments about India: ‘For I assure you that the darkest man is here the most highly esteemed and considered better than others who are not so dark. Let me add that in very truth these people portray and depict their gods and their idols black and their devils white as snow.’18 One only needs to look at the idol of Lord Jagannath in Puri to see what Polo meant.
It is unclear when and why this preference switched, but it shows that the traditional Indian aesthetic was very different from how we now perceive it. This may be somewhat inconvenient to those who sell skin-whitening creams to modern Indian consumers. Of course, Indians are not the only ones subject to changing tastes. Just five generations ago, Europeans considered pale white skin so attractive that Victorian women were willing to risk poisoning by using an arsenic-based compound to whiten their skin. Today, their descendants risk skin cancer from too much sun-bathing. Basically, you cannot win.
BATHING IN HOLY WATERS
By the first half of the sixth century, the Gupta Empire began to gradually crumble in the face of internal frictions and repeated attacks by Hunas (White Huns) from the North West. Taxila, the famous centre of learning where Chanakya had once taught, was sacked by the Hunas around 470 AD. Over the next few decades they pushed the Gupta defences back into the Gangetic valley. A rump empire would remain for several generations, but the glory days were gone.
In the centuries that followed, a number of powerful kingdoms rose and fell in northern India—the Palas of Bengal, Harsha of Thaneshwar and so on. The city of Pataliputra slowly went into decline and was replaced by Kannauj (now a small town in Uttar Pradesh). Nonetheless, most things drifted along. Both Nalanda and Ujjain remained important centres of learning. Thinkers like Bhaskara and Varahamihira made great contributions to mathematics and astronomy. Chinese scholars continued to visit India to study Buddhism. The most prominent of these scholars was Xuan Zang who visited India in the seventh century, more than two hundred years after Fa Xian.
Like his predecessor, Xuan Zang (also spelled Hiuen-Tsang) made his way to India through Central Asia, which was then inhabited primarily by Buddhist and pagan Turks. He spent over a decade in the subcontinent during which he crisscrossed the Gangetic plains and went as far east as Assam. He even spent two years studying at Nalanda, which was then at the height of its fame.
One of the places he visited on these travels was Allahabad (then called Prayag). This town is near one of the most sacred sites in Hinduism—the ‘Triveni Sangam’ or the Mingling of Three Rivers. Two of the rivers are obvious: the sacred Ganga and the Yamuna. However, the factor that gives this spot a special significance is that the Saraswati is also said to flow underground and join the other two at this place. In this way, a primordial memory of the vanished river is kept alive. For a Hindu, the sins of a lifetime are washed away by taking a dip in the confluence of these rivers. It is especially auspicious to do this at the time of the Kumbh Mela, which is held here every twelve years.19 This is part of a four-year cycle by which this event is held in turn in Ujjain, Haridwar, Nasik and Allahabad. However, it is the great Kumbh Mela of Allahabad that is the largest and most prestigious. The last time this festival was hosted in Allahabad in January 2001, an estimated sixty million people participated—the largest human gathering in history.
Xuan Zang tells us that large numbers of people participated in the festival in the seventh century including the rulers of different countries and even Buddhists. Most interestingly, he describes the rituals of the sadhus (ascetics). Evidently, a large wooden column was erected in the middle of the river and the sadhus would climb it. At sunset they would hang from the column with one leg and one arm while stretching out the other leg and arm into the air. Thus would they stare into the setting sun. The wooden pole and the particular ritual are no longer around, but, considering the ash-covered sadhus who still congregate at the Kumbh Mela, the ritual seems entirely in character.20
Despite these outward signs of continuity, one does get the feeling that the economic and cultural centre of gravity steadily shifted to the south. Even militarily, the southern kings could more than hold their own against the kingdoms of the Gangetic plains. When Xuan Zang visited India, the northern plains had been welded into an empire under Emperor Harsha, but he was roundly defeated by the Chalukya king Pulaksen II when he attempted to extend his empire into the Deccan.
The source of southern power was trade—both with the flourishing Indianized kingdoms of South East Asia as well as with the Persians and Arabs who had replaced the Romans in the west. The kingdoms of the south were aware of the importance of commerce and actively encouraged it. When necessary, they were not afraid to use military might to keep the trade routes open. The most famous examples of this are the Chola naval expeditions to South-East Asia in the eleventh century.
The Cholas were an ancient dynasty and are even mentioned in Ashokan edicts. In the ninth to the eleventh century AD, they created an empire that covered most of peninsular India and briefly extended to the banks of the Ganga. Unusually for an Indian empire, however, it also had a maritime empire that included Sri Lanka and the Maldives. For the most part, they also had very good relations with kingdoms of South-East Asia. Inscriptions on both sides show the existence of large merchant communities and that the kings exchanged emissaries and gifts. For instance, we have an inscription that tells us that Sri Mulan, the agent of the Srivijaya king of Sumatra, Malaya, had donated several lamp-stands to be installed at the Shiva temple in Nagapattinam.
The problem probably arose because the Cholas began to create direct trade links with the Song empire in China. Records show that Cholas and the Chinese exchanged a number of trade delegations in the early eleventh century. Indo–Chinese trade relations were not new. We know from Chinese sources that a large Indian merchant community had long been established in Guangzhou and that there were three Hindu temples functioning there. However, Song–Chola diplomacy appears to have led to a further boom in Indo–Chinese trade.
Unfortunately, the Srivijaya kings probably felt that their role as middlemen was being threatened by such direct linkages. They reacted by tightening controls and imposing heavy taxes on ships passing through the Straits of Malacca. A contemporary Arab text tells us that the Srivijaya kings were demanding a levy of 20,000 dinars to allow a Jewish-owned ship to continue to China.21 This was a serious matter and the Cholas felt that they had to react. This led to a naval raid against Srivijaya in 1017 AD a
nd then a more substantial expedition in 1025. These represent very rare examples of Indian military aggression outside of the subcontinent. The hostility was fortunately not long-lasting and a few decades later we find the Cholas and Srivijaya sending joint embassies to the Chinese.
I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that India’s relationship with South-East Asia was one of cultural, economic and, occasionally military, domination. Indian trade and civilization clearly had a very large impact on this part of the world, but it was a two-way flow. For instance, the university of Nalanda may have been founded by the Guptas, but its subsequent growth was partly due to the strong financial support extended by the Srivijaya kings. Moreover, South-East Asian kingdoms like Angkor, Majapahit and Champa took the Indian input and built on it. These people were not blindly copying Indian prototypes but innovating and indigenizing.
In fact, the Indonesians independently conducted their own maritime expeditions. From the third to the sixth century AD, they crossed the Indian Ocean in their outriggered ships and settled in Madagascar in large numbers. Thus, the first humans in Madagascar came from distant Indonesia rather than nearby Africa. The descendants of the Indonesian settlers still form a significant proportion of the population of the island country and the Malagasy language retains the strong influence of dialects from Borneo!
A CHAIN OF HISTORY
It is commonly argued by scholars that ancient Indians only wrote one formal history—Kalhana’s Rajatarangini or River of Kings, a history of the kings of Kashmir written in the twelfth century. This is then put forward as proof that Indians did not have a sense of their history or of the continuity of their civilization. This is simply not accurate and it is important to recognize the degree to which this sense of continuity is deliberately maintained over generations. Even if one ignores works like Bana’s Harshcharita as being royal eulogies, there are numerous examples, such as the Vanshavali tradition of Nepal or the Burunjis of Assam, where lengthy genealogical records were meticulously maintained. There is obviously a very developed sense of historical continuity.
Kashmir’s Kalhana too saw himself as a link in a chain, and he tells us that he read the works of eleven earlier historians as well as inspected temple inscriptions and land records. He even criticizes fellow historian Suvrata for leaving out details and making his history too concise.22 Most of these other works may have been lost but they all clearly existed. Moreover, Kalhana is followed by three other works that continue the chronicle down to the time of Mughal emperor Akbar. When Akbar conquered Kashmir in the sixteenth century, he was given a copy of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini that was translated into Persian for his benefit. A summary was then included in the Ain-i-Akbari, the chronicles of Akbar’s own rule, in order to link him back to the historical chain.
Kalhana’s history is not just about kings and battles but contains an interesting account of how human intervention altered the landscape of Kashmir. He tells of the minister Suyya who carried out a number of major engineering works during the reign of Avantivarman in the ninth century. We are told that landslides and soil erosion had led to a great deal of rubble and stone being deposited in the Jhelum, which was impeding the flow of the river. The rubble was dredged and embankments were built. The landscape was restructured to human use as dams created new lakes while old lakes were drained to clear the way for cultivation. It is even suggested that Suyya may have significantly altered the courses of the Jhelum and Indus rivers.23 It appears, therefore, that much of the beautiful ‘natural’ landscape of Kashmir may be due to thousands of years of human intervention!
5
From Sindbad to Zheng He
At about the same time that Emperor Harsha was consolidating his empire and Xuan Zang was setting off on his long pilgrimage, a former merchant called Muhammad had set in motion a chain of events that would dramatically change the political and religious landscape of Arabia and eventually of the world. By the time Prophet Muhammad died in 632 AD, he already controlled much of the Arabian peninsula. However, within a century, his followers created an empire that stretched from the Iberian peninsula to Central Asia. In the eighth century, the Arabs established a toehold in Sindh by defeating Raja Dahir.
The Muslim conquest of Sindh, however, did not seem to have impacted the Indian heartland. Arab attempts at further expansion appear to have been fended off by the Rashtrakuta and the Gurjara–Pratihara kingdoms (the latter gave their name to the state of Gujarat). Arab chroniclers specifically wrote about the excellent quality of Indian cavalry. Indeed, the emerging Rajput military class appears to have made counter-raids of its own and much of Afghanistan continued to be ruled by the Hindu Shahis well into the tenth century. Thus, for the first several centuries of Islam, India’s interaction with Islam was defined not by conquest but by trade.
THE AGE OF SINDBAD
Arabs had been actively involved in trade with India from pre-Islamic times. In the early seventh century, the ports along the western coast were regularly visited by Byzantines, Persians, Yemenis, Omanis, and even Ethiopians. There were merchants from the Mecca region too; Muhammad would have personally known several merchants who had visited India. The Cheraman Juma mosque in Kerala claims to have been established in 629 AD. If true, this would not just make it India’s oldest mosque but also the second oldest in the world! 1 While exact dates are difficult to prove, there is no doubt that the mosque is very old and was built in the very early years of Islam. It stands close to the site of ancient Muzaris. Old photographs show that the building was originally an adaptation of local temple architecture. Sadly, during renovations in 1984, the old structure was replaced with one sprouting domes and minarets in order to conform to a more ‘conventional’ view of Islamic architecture. It was an inexcusable act of vandalism. Now there is talk of recreating the old structure to attract tourists, but it is never quite the same thing.
With the creation of the Islamic empire, with its headquarters in Baghdad, the Arabs came to control a vast trading network. Arab merchants sailed the Mediterranean, criss-crossed the Sahara in camel caravans, traded for Chinese silks in the bazaars of Central Asia and made their way down the East African coast in search of slaves. This was the age of Sindbad the Sailor. Even if the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights are fictional, they retain the colourful spirit of the times.
The Iraqi port of Basra became the most important trading hub of the empire because of its proximity to the capital. Indian goods and merchants so dominated the trade that the Arabs spoke of Basra as ‘belonging to al-Hind’. 2 The merchandise included perfumes, spices, ginger, textiles and medicinal substances. After the Arab conquest of Sindh, large numbers of slaves were also brought in from the province 3 . Interestingly, the most important Indian export of the period was the steel sword. The country was famous at that time for the quality of its metallurgy, and the swords used by the early Muslim armies were often of Indian origin. 4 This remained true even at the time of the Christian Crusades and the famous ‘Damascus Sword’ was either imported directly from India or was made using Indian techniques.
Just as in South-East Asia, there was a large diaspora of Indian merchants along the ports of the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf as well as in inland trading towns. Abu Zayd reports in the ninth century that ‘Hindus came to Siraf and when an Arab merchant invites them to a feast, their numbers often approach or exceed a hundred’. 5 Similarly, Arab merchants came in large numbers to the ports along India’s western coast. The famous Arab historian and geographer, Masudi tells us that Indian kings welcomed the traders and allowed them to build their own mosques. He tells us of a particularly large settlement of ten thousand Muslims in the district of Saymur where immigrants from Oman, Basra, Siraf and Baghdad had permanently settled. Farther south, there were a number of Arab settlements in Kerala where they mixed with local converts. Their descendants, called the Moplahs or Mappilas, account for a quarter of the state’s population today 6 . By a reversal of fortune, since the 1970
s, they have been going in large numbers to work in the oil-rich Arab states. Thus, the churn of people continues.
Meanwhile, farther north, Gujarat came to host the last remnants of the once-powerful Zoroastrian tradition. As discussed in Chapter 2, the origins of this tradition are closely linked to the Rig Vedic people. For fifteen hundred years or more, Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion of Persia. However, it went into sharp decline after the Islamic conquest. A small group escaped persecution and sailed to Gujarat in the eighth century. According to the Qissa-i Sanjan, 7 the local Hindu king allowed them to settle on the condition that they adopt the local language (Gujarati) and cease to bear arms. They were otherwise allowed full freedom in religious matters. Their descendants, known as Parsis, migrated to Mumbai in the nineteenth century to repair and build ships for the British. Some of them sailed to British-controlled Hong Kong and made large profits from participating in the opium trade with China. The Parsis then ploughed the money back into building large commercial and industrial businesses back in Mumbai. They remain one of the country’s most successful business communities.
In addition to slaves and merchants, there were several other Indian groups in the Middle East during this period, including mercenaries. According to the oral tradition of the Mohyal Brahmins of Punjab, some of their ancestors died fighting for Hussein in the Battle of Karbala, Iraq, in 680 AD. This is why this group of Hindus, also known as Husseini Brahmins, still join Shia Muslims during the ritual mourning of Muharram every year. 8 Such are the complex twists and turns of human history.
Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography Page 12