by John Keay
Traditionally their route is supposed to have proceeded from Peshawar to Kabul and over the Hindu Kush via Bamiyan, a tight valley above which two gigantic statues of the Buddha were carved high in the vertical cliffs. There they stood for 1500 years until in March 2001 Taliban zealots tested them with anti-tank mines, targeted them with artillery and finally toppled them with dynamite. (Exactly six months later Bamiyan’s twin Buddhas were followed to extinction by New York’s ‘twin towers’; the first outrage inspired the second and has often been attributed to the same agency.) Other remains in Bactria itself still attest the Buddhist presence, and thence north and east across the Pamirs, round the desert of Takla Makan and across Lop Nor a succession of Buddhist sites marks the trail to China. ‘The road is long,’ reported a later Chinese pilgrim who had made the return journey to India; looping laboriously right round that mountain bastion of India’s ‘Great Wall’ it is all of three thousand kilometres. There is no doubt that it was indeed an important route for the traffic of both ideas and commodities; but what the road-builders in the 1970s discovered was that there had been a shorter and better signposted route by way of the upper Indus and Hunza rivers along the line of their Karakoram Highway.
As reconstructed by Dr Ahmad Hasan Dani, Pakistan’s leading archaeologist, the historical trail begins north of Taxila, where the modern highway strikes off into the hills. Suitably enough the first ‘signpost’ is a Kharosthi version of Ashoka’s Major Rock Edict engraved on two badly weathered boulders at Mansehra. The road runs between them and, in view of the incidence of other Ashokan inscriptions at major route intersections, it seems safe to infer that the Indus route into the mountains was in use in the third century BC and here linked with feeder routes from Taxila, Peshawar and Swat. Thence the new road traverses the switchback hills of Kohistan, where innumerable caves and rock drawings continue the Buddhist theme; one drawing is identified by an inscription as being of ‘the monastery of Maharajah Kanishka’. As the roadway wriggles above, and then through, the awesome Indus gorges, more such graffiti on cliffs and rocks – ‘beside the tunnel’, ‘above the petrol station’ – record the passage of individual monks and the presence of stupas and viharas.
West of Chilas, beneath the snowy massif of Nanga Parbat, the Indus valley opens out into a scorching lunar wasteland, devoid of vegetation but garish with rocks of every hue. Here one of many inscriptions mentions the Kushana king Wima Kadphises. Nearer the windswept little town a scene etched on a boulder by the river clearly identifies the Shaka king Maues; it is ‘the first proof of the conquest of this region by the Scythian ruler’8 who seems to have actually ‘invaded’ the Panjab by this route. On the other side of Chilas one of many illustrated boulders is known as the Rock of Gondophares; its inscription lauds the Parthian king who was ‘doubting Thomas’s’ patron.
A sculpted Buddha and more stupas lie in the valleys round Gilgit. Thence both highway and Buddhist trail funnel into the Hunza valley for the spectacular climb up to the glaciers. K2 and associated peaks lie to the east with the Khunjerab Pass and the Chinese border dead ahead. The highway terminates at Tashkurgan, an ancient staging post on the main Silk Route. As a final reminder that this vital trail and all the territory through which it passed lay within the Kushana empire, there is a veritable data-bank of ancient kings, cults and passing strangers, including notices of both the first Kadphises and again of Kusana Devaputra [‘son of God’] Maharajah Kaniska, on the so-called Sacred Rock of Hunza.
The new Karakoram Highway which runs along its southern face … led to the discovery of this monument of world importance that had remained hidden for centuries. The Sacred Rock has stood adamantly through the ravages of time and maintained the carvings and writing of men to tell us about the long-forgotten history of the place and of the pathway along which man travelled from Gandhara to China.9
So the Karakoram Highway, though defying geography, can scarcely be said to have confounded history. In fact it faithfully follows what is now recognised as the preferred route of Buddhist missionaries carrying their teachings to Sinkiang and China.
It is also clear that the teachings in question were increasingly those of Mahayana Buddhism. At the Fourth Buddhist Council held under Kanishka’s auspices a long-simmering dispute within the sangha had led to schism. Those purists who adhered to the essentially ethical content of the Buddha’s teachings became the Hinayana school, while those who would elevate the Buddha and other potentially ‘enlightened ones’ to the status of deities deserving of worship, and so make of his teachings a conventional religion, became the Mahayana. The former persisted in not representing the Buddha as a human figure; in Hinayana art his presence is traditionally indicated merely by a footprint, a throne, a tree, an umbrella. But the Mahayana introduced the Buddha as icon, depicting the ‘enlightened one’ and a host of other Boddhisatvas, together with their female counterparts, in human form. The idea may have come from the imagery of Graeco-Roman gods introduced by the Bactrian Greeks and from the mainly Roman statuary which was evidently much treasured and traded thereafter. Certainly from this coincidence of Mahayanist demand and Mediterranean supply arose the distinctive style and motifs of Gandhara art.
The Kushana, controlling east – west trade in Bactria as well as vast territories in India, had wealth to lavish on both the new faith and the new art; they may even, like Gondophares, have imported western craftsmen like St Thomas. The style developed rapidly, influencing architecture and painting, and inspiring a narrative art based on Buddhist legend but using Graeco-Roman compositions and mannerisms. Exceptionally, the figure of the Buddha himself proved less susceptible to this ‘forum’ decorum; though draped in classical folds and endowed with a serene Grecian countenance, his posture, gestures and physical features conformed strictly to Indo-Buddhist iconography. Such was the Gandhara tradition, a curious synthesis of Kushana patronage, Graeco-Roman forms and Indian inspiration. In sculpture, stucco, engraving and painting, it was this synthesis which passed on up the Karakoram route, or round via Bamiyan and Bactria, to fill the monasteries along the Silk Route and provide the inspiration for later Buddhist art in China and beyond.
The Karakoram trail would be little trodden after the fourth century, when Buddhism in north-west India would be eclipsed by more intruders from central Asia, this time the Huns. Despite those ravages of time and nature, the Karakoram records have therefore remained comparatively undisturbed. Significantly, they reveal little about the route being used for trade. Chinese silks, in particular, were imported into India for re-export from India’s west coast ports to Egypt and Rome. If such caravans avoided the Karakoram route it was presumably because they found the gradients and the grazing of the Bactrian route more agreeable than the cliff-face ladders of Hunza and the landsliding slopes of the Indus gorges. Lacking commercial potential, the Karakoram route was quietly abandoned.
LOOKING OUTWARDS TO THE SEA
Elsewhere the exchange of ideas matched that of commodities stride for stride, stage for stage. In peninsular India – the region south of the Narmada river comprising the Deccan and the extreme south – the last centuries BC and the first AD witnessed those processes of urbanisation and state-formation which had taken place three centuries earlier in the Gangetic region. But here it was trade which stimulated the transition and trade routes which defined it, especially in the western Deccan (Maharashtra and adjacent regions) and in the extreme south (Tamil Nadu and Kerala). Something of that slow metamorphosis from pastoralism and subsistence agriculture to wet rice-cultivation and an agricultural surplus is also discernible. The construction of irrigation works in the south goes back to the second century BC and was accompanied by a demographic shift from upland settlements to the alluvial and easily watered soils of the deltas. ‘In the Chola country, watered by the Kaveri, it was said that the space in which an elephant could lie down produced enough rice to feed seven’ (people, presumably, rather than elephants).10 But here a surplus laboriously realised from agr
iculture, and then partially squandered on oblations designed to ensure its repetition, was second-best to the surplus on offer from the export of marine and forest produce (especially pearls and pepper) and the re-export of luxury items from further afield. Such options, not open to the Gangetic states, propelled the peninsula from Stone Age to statehood in record time.
Before the first century BC the southern extremity of the subcontinent scarcely features in India’s history. Today’s southern states – Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala – correspond to the languages spoken in each, respectively Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. All belong to the Dravidian family, which is quite distinct from the Indo-Aryan whence Sanskrit and most of north India’s contemporary languages derive.
Dravidian-speakers are thought to have preceded Indo-Aryan-speakers in the subcontinent. It has yet to be proved that the Harappans’ language was some form of Dravidian, but the survival of a pocket of proto-Dravidian-speakers in Baluchistan, the Pakistan province which borders with Iran, does suggest that the language was in use west of the Indus and could have emanated from there. It also once enjoyed a wide currency in Gujarat and Maharashtra, though whether in the course of a ‘descent’ to the south, or an ‘ascent’ from it, is uncertain. By the mid-first millennium BC, it was certainly well established in the south, perhaps as a result of dissemination by Dravidian-speakers possessed of the horses and iron weaponry usually associated with the Sanskritic arya, or possibly very much earlier as the language of those responsible for the megalithic sites found in upland regions of the peninsular interior.
The four Dravidian languages must have developed from proto-Dravidian at an early stage since they were already distinct from one another in prehistoric times. Each, too, was already confined to the region represented by today’s states. In fact the continuity of such geo-linguistic entities is the outstanding feature of south Indian history. Here, unusually, definable linguistic units seem to predate the states into which they would become integrated.
Megasthenes in around 300 BC knew of the Pandya kingdom; then, as subsequently, it occupied ‘the portion of India which lies southward and extends to the sea’; and it had 365 villages, a not incidental number in that each was expected to supply the needs of the royal household for one day in the year. Ashoka was even better informed. In the Major Rock Edicts he lists his southern neighbours as the Cholas and Pandyas (respectively the northern and southern Tamil-speaking peoples), the Satiyaputras (whose identity is disputed), the Keralaputras (or the Malayalam-speakers of Kerala), and the people of Sri Lanka. Although none formed part of the Mauryan empire, all, according to the Beloved of the Gods, acknowledged the superiority of dhamma and had imitated the Ashokan provision of roadside shade trees and of medical care for men and animals.
Later the all-conquering Kharavela, king of Kalinga (Orissa), also noticed the southern kingdoms. In his one extant inscription he typically pretends to have defeated a confederacy of Tamil states and to have acquired a large quantity of pearls from the Pandyas. Pearls and shells, along with the fine cottons of Madurai, the Pandya capital, are also mentioned in the Arthasastra. There, in a discussion on how to maximise the state’s revenue, Kautilya’s mentor rashly suggests that north India’s most valuable trade is that with central Asia. The know-all brahman puts him right in no uncertain terms: the trade via the Daksinapatha (the ‘Southern Route’) is the more valuable and, besides, the route is very much safer. Thus trade with the south, albeit in prestige goods, was well-established in Mauryan times; and by way of the secure – and, no doubt, well-shaded – Daksinapatha prestigious ideas also travelled down the peninsula.
Of these and much else about the south we know from anthologies of Tamil poetry and from an early Tamil grammar. The poems, of which the oldest date from about the time of Christ, were composed and first recited at marathon arts festivals, or assemblages (sangam), organised by the Pandyan court. They were collected into the ‘Sangam’ anthologies and committed to writing only very much later. Like the Sanskrit classics, they may therefore contain additions and revisions. On the other hand, unlike the Sanskrit classics, they were not the property of a particular caste and served no obvious ritual purpose. Moreover, they provide much reliable detail about social conditions. ‘It would be difficult to make too much of this fact,’ writes an American authority on Sangam literature. ‘Not only does ancient Tamil literature furnish an accurate picture of widely disparate classes; it also describes the social conditions of Tamil Nadu much as it was before the Aryans arrived in the south.’11
This verdict suggests some future Aryan mass-migration, for which the evidence is scant. Besides, Sangam literature was already aware of Aryan and Sanskritic ideals. The Tamil poets – and poetesses – knew the epics well and were keen to associate their patrons with the heroes of the Mahabharata. Place-names like Madurai, a variant of ‘Mathura’, reflect the early adoption of the sacred geography of the epics; and just as ‘Ayodhya’ travelled on to Thailand and central Java, so ‘Mathura/Madurai’ would make a further landfall in the crowded island of Madura off eastern Java. The Sangam poets also knew of the fabled wealth of the Nandas and of the one-time presence of the Mauryas in Karnataka. Brahmans were already well-established in the south and were the recipients of land grants; Buddhism and Jainism were also familiar; and the script used in the Tamil dedications of their caves was a form of north Indian Brahmi.
Caste distinctions were also observed in the south, but may well predate contact with the Sanskritic north. Certainly they did not conform to the hierarchical four-tier varna system; native ksatriya and vaisya are practically unknown in the south to this day. In caste functions, in hero-worship of the dead, and in the taboos and importance attached to relations between the sexes, there is indeed much that is non-Aryan. Equally unprecedented is the Sangam’s spirit of joyous celebration, which pervades both the endless wars between Cheras (Keralans), Pandyas and Cholas as well as the scenes of peaceful plenty and royal munificence which intervene. The impression given by these poems is not that of a society defying the rigid orthodoxies of inevitable Aryanisation, more of one voluntarily adjusting to prestigious new values and selectively adopting from them.
Patterns of Aryanisation were typically spontaneous and here, as outside India, Sanskritic innovations did not necessarily spread through direct contact with the Gangetic heartland. Thus it seems that the southern kingdoms derived as much from their seaward contacts as from landward intercourse. Literacy, for instance, ‘and indeed incipient civilisation in general’12 look to have originally spread not southward from the Gangetic valley but northward, from Sri Lanka. Heavily indebted to Ashoka’s missionising, Sri Lanka had stolen a march on the mainland. Its Buddhist chronicles provide the only cross-dating yet established for any of the kings mentioned in the Sangam poems. And from Sri Lanka the Brahmi script is thought to have crossed the straits to neighbouring parts of the Pandya country and thence on to Kerala and the Chola country. By this roundabout route other Aryanising traits may have followed.
The maritime dimension would continue to be crucial; in fact it is from their detailed descriptions of commercial life and foreign trade that the Sangam poems derive much of their authenticity. For in references to busy markets, bulging warehouses, ships from many lands, elaborate import/export procedures, and the Yavanas (not only the Bactrian Greeks, but foreigners in general) ‘whose prosperity never wanes’, there is an impressive convergence of Tamil testimony with what we know of south India in the first century AD from other sources, principally archaeology and copious references in the literature of the Roman empire.
This was the age of Rome’s commercial expansion. The new empire’s demand for exotica was insatiable, and the acquisition of Egypt in 30 BC had opened the maritime route to the East to Roman investors. A text written by a Greek of the first century AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, contains detailed navigational, commercial and even political information on the ports of the Indian Ocean, many
of which have been reliably identified with maritime outlets on India’s coast. Ptolemy’s second-century ‘Geography’ adds further details; and the Elder Pliny was already rehearsing an argument, which would become something of a European refrain in the seventeenth century, about Roman bullion being drained away by the purchase of frivolous luxuries from the East. The emperor Augustus claims to have received ‘frequent’ Indian embassies which look to have come from as far afield as Gandhara and the Pandya kingdom; and it was during his reign (31 BC – 14 AD) that Europe’s first concerted bid for the exotic produce of the East saw fleets making annual sailings from the Red Sea. Crewed by Greeks and Egyptians, they were familiar with the monsoon trade winds and headed straight for the steamy ports of India’s Konkan and Malabar coasts.
There numerous examples of Roman pottery, including wine-impregnated amphorae, have been found in both the south and along the west coast; and hoards of Roman coins have been unearthed in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and elsewhere. On the east coast near Pondicherry (south of Madras) what has been described as ‘one of a series of Indo-Roman trading stations’ has been excavated at Arikamedu. ‘To Arikamedu suddenly, from unthought-of lands five thousand miles away, came strange wines, tablewares far beyond the local skill, lamps of a strange sort, glass, cut gems.’13