In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  UNITY IN DIVERSITY

  Ashoka’s political order did not survive, but his empire had opened up communications in India by land and sea. From the first century AD, drawn by India’s wealth, Mediterranean merchants flocked there on the monsoon winds. From ports like Cochin, in Kerala, Arab traders bore some of India’s greatest scientific discoveries to the West, including her most brilliant invention, the mathematical system of nine digits and zero which we all use today. But the real motive for the trade was spice.

  In the trading post of Cochin, for centuries foreign merchants bought the famed spices of the Malabar coast, especially pepper and ginger, which are both originally south Indian words. Such contacts helped breed an outward-looking and tolerant society, as Kerala still is. Many foreign merchants came here and settled, becoming Indian, even if they retained their own religion. Evidence of their presence is found everywhere up the little rivers and creeks in the Cochin backwaters. Tradition says the Jews came to Kerala from Iraq in the sixth century BC. Tamil and Sanskrit loan words in the Hebrew Bible suggest tradition could be right: they were certainly here by Roman times. At Parur is one of the oldest and loveliest synagogues in the world. It is maintained by only one family now, carefully performing the rites as best they can. Recently local girls have converted to marry into the family, so they still hope their traditions will be passed on. Near Parur, at Chendamangalam, the synagogue is now closed, but next door is a thriving church of the Syrian Christians, who claim they were founded by the Apostle Thomas himself. It was to this coast that King Alfred of Wessex was said to have sent alms in the ninth century all the way from Viking Age England! Islam meanwhile came here peacefully by sea in the seventh century with Arab traders, not as elsewhere by war and conquest; today in a beautiful little wooden pillared mosque with a tiny bathing tank, the Muslim children of the village learn the classical Arabic of the Koran by rote. So here today in Chendamangalam, Hindu, Christian, Muslim and Jew live side by side. ‘All these people of different faiths,’ says Krishna in the Gita, ‘whatever form of worship they choose to fulfil their desires, ultimately their worship comes back to the same source.’

  THE COMING OF ISLAM

  Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism are all indigenous to India, and all, as we have seen, drew on deep roots. From India they (especially Buddhism) spread to Asia and the world. By the ninth century AD, though, Buddhism was practically wiped out within India, largely because its ideas were absorbed back into mainstream Hindu thought by reformers like the brilliant young philosopher from Kerala, Adi Shankara. Henceforth the Buddha would be more commonly seen on the pilgrim stalls of Indian cities as one of the incarnations of the god Vishnu. Jainism on the other hand was able to survive within the Hindu tradition. But the coming of Islam, which would become the second religion of India in terms of numbers and importance, was a revolutionary event which broke the ancient bonds between India and its indigenous religious systems.

  Initially Islam was brought to India towards the close of the seventh century, by Muslim traders travelling old routes long used by Arab seafarers, to the Indus and to Kerala, where the oldest Muslim community in India is believed to be and where the Muslim faith easily found a hold. But in northern India however, the impact of Islam was very different. ‘India is full of riches,’ wrote the Muslim historian Al Biruni, ‘entirely beautiful and delightful, and as its people are mainly infidels and idolaters, it is right by order of God, for us to conquer them.’ Within a few decades of the prophet’s death, Islam had swept westwards to Spain and eastwards to the Indus valley. Sind was taken in 711 AD. Then a long and bitter struggle ensued between the newest and the oldest faith. Eventually Muslim attacks shattered the old Hindu kingdoms of the north. Benares itself fell in 1194, and many of the city’s most famous Hindu temples would be sacked and demolished time and again over the next few centuries: a tale repeated in all the pilgrim cities of the north as periods of tolerance alternated with bouts of persecution by the Muslim rulers of the medieval sultanates of Delhi and the Deccan. These tragedies initiated a long and tortuous relationship between Hindu and Muslim which both enriched India and which even in our own time has threatened to tear it apart. The early arrival of Sufism in Sind, for example, was the beginning of one of the richest strands of Indian Islam which has had a profound influence on the whole of Indian religious life, even today. In time, Indian Islam was ‘Hinduised’: in India Mohammed’s biography could become a variation on the Hindu Krishna story, and Imam Hussayn, the martyr of Kerbala, could be portrayed as an avatar of the god Vishnu among the thriving Shiite communities which grew up in cities like Lucknow.

  In Benares, the sacred city of the Hindus, the Muslims became the mainstay of the city’s economy; the thousands of silk weavers, with their tiny shops and hand looms, are all Muslim. It was here in the fifteenth century that the poor weaver Kabir preached the brotherhood of Hindu and Muslim. Kabir was born into a Muslim community in Benares – his name is Muslim – but the major influence on his life was from the Hindu followers of Vishnu and their bhakti devotional movement which saw God (whom Kabir called Ram, not Allah) as love: ‘Reading book after book, the whole world died. And none ever became learned. He who can decipher just a syllable of “love” is the true pandit.’

  Like many great religious thinkers Kabir rejected the externals of religious practice, in his case both Hindu and Muslim. He rejected Muslim prayer ritual and Hindu image worship; the Muslim Haj to Mecca, and the Hindu pilgrimage to Benares; Muslim circumcision and the Brahmin sacred thread (on the interesting grounds that they exclude women). All were a hindrance to the expression of true religion which he saw as a matter of personal experience. Kabir attracted a large following among Hindus and Muslims. But as so often in history, the legacy of such great figures becomes dogged by sectarianism. The modern Kabiri sect regard themselves as Hindu, though they still maintain their monotheism and a strong ethical code, and they oppose caste and image worship. Kabir’s was the most thoroughgoing, grassroots attempt in the Middle Ages to bridge the divide between the religions and, in a typically Indian way, was deeply rooted in the past.

  So Islam became an integral part of the diversity of India, transforming India and Hinduism and transformed in its turn. India’s 100 million Muslim people make it the second largest Muslim country in the world, even after the partition of Bangladesh and Pakistan. These tremendous events are still working themselves out. The secular constitution of 1950, based on European models, attempted to set the seal on the ancient wounds and enmities of the past, but religion is still the great power in India for good and ill and she has not escaped sectarian strife since Independence. Indeed, now that the dust has settled, the conflicting claims of different gods (and social classes) have become all the more clamorous. In the 1990s a rising tide of Hindu fundamentalism saw riots and the wrecking of the weavers’ shops in the old Muslim quarter of Benares. Thousands of looms were smashed, and lives were ruined as India’s ideal of unity in diversity went through a new ordeal of fire – an ordeal from which it now appears to have emerged.

  THE MOGHUL EMPIRE

  In the sixteenth century, the mixed Muslim and Hindu culture which arose in the north gave birth to yet another brilliant flowering of Indian civilization – the Muslim dynasty of the Moghuls. Originally from the high plateau between Persia and Afghanistan, the Moghuls created a great land empire with a centralized administration which laid the basis of the later British and modern Indian states.

  The Moghul empire also created an art and architecture which still defines our popular image of India today in its flamboyant mixture of Hindu, Persian and Muslim, symbolized by the Taj Mahal and the city of Fatehpur Sikri, founded in 1569 near Agra by Akbar the Great. Emperor and Generalissimo, Akbar was a noble patron of the arts and literature, and commissioned a translation of the Mahabharata into Persian, along with many wonderful painted manuscripts. Like other rulers of India before and after, he came to understand that the only way to rule India, indeed any
civilization, is with tolerance and pluralism and increasingly he was drawn to the deepest currents in Indian thought.

  The most fascinating aspect of Akbar’s career was his attempt to find a synthesis of all the religions in his empire. It could only ever have happened, perhaps, in the heady religious climate of India. And it is all the more remarkable because Akbar was brought up a devout Muslim, and was illiterate; his tutors unanimously condemned him as a bad pupil! But impressed by the terrible evils which are unleased by religious intolerance (and perhaps not unmindful of political considerations) Akbar summoned holy men from the Hindus and the Jains, the Christians and the Jews, the Zoroastrians, even Mandaeans from Persia along with Sunni and Shia Muslims. Out of their discussions he attempted to formulate a simple belief in God, a ‘doctrine of right conduct’ which strangely echoes Ashoka, even though Akbar knew nothing of him nor, it seems, of Buddhism. Akbar was even prepared to acknowledge the rightness of the case for vegetarianism, although as a good meat-eating Moghul that was one aspect that he was unable to fulfil in his personal life! This belief in God, so Akbar hoped, could be a simple, basic moral guide for the élite in his empire of so many religions. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in history.

  All the strands of the story come together in an extraordinary incident which has only recently come to light. In January 1575 Akbar travelled with his closest Hindu adviser to Prayag, ‘king of pilgrimage places’, for the great bathing festival. He had already launched his campaign for a new ‘belief in God’ (Din-i Ilaha), and now he renamed Prayag Ilah-abas, a mixture of Arabic and Hindu meaning ‘the place of God’. So was the primal creation place in Hindu mythology deliberately chosen as a centre of the new religion? Was the new dharma, like the old of Ashoka, to be proclaimed and guaranteed from the cosmic centre with its axis mundi and its Tree of Life? Remarkably, Akbar would go on to construct a vast fortress residence around the ‘undying tree’ and the ‘Ashokan’ pillar of laws at Allahabad (as it would later become known). His apartments were built above the holy tree, looking out over the spot where, as his biographer relates, ‘most strangely, when Jupiter enters the constellation of Aquarius, a small mound appears out of the Ganges, remaining for one month; and here the people offer worship.’

  One of his friends at court said that Akbar had the one quality which makes a ruler truly great, namely ‘the capacity to meet people of whatever rank or whatever religion with the same eye of favour.’ His tolerance would be remarkable even today, but in the sixteenth century was astonishing. At that time Western Europe, for example, was torn apart by religious wars, with unspeakable cruelties being done to people in the name of God. Akbar’s moving and sincere attempt to express the divine in a combination of Islam, Christianity and Upanishadic Hinduism was perhaps doomed to failure, but his insight into the Indian predicament was not lost on Nehru, nor on Mahatma Gandhi, who insisted that ‘all religions are true.’ In Fatehpur Sikri at the Gate of Victory, this great son of a great Muslim dynasty left us this enigmatic epitaph. ‘Jesus, peace be on him, said this, “The world is a bridge, cross it but build no house upon it, the world endures for but an hour, spend it in devotion, the rest is unseen.”’

  Akbar’s city of dreams was deserted because of lack of water. Today Fatehpur Sikri lies high and dry on its ridge near Agra looking over a parched red plain. His empire had created a unified state giving the same rights to Muslim and Hindu. An empire of the sword had succumbed to the empire of the spirit. ‘In the past,’ said Akbar, ‘to our shame, we forced many Hindus to adopt the faith of our ancestors. Now it has become clear to me, that in our troubled world so full of contradictions, it cannot be wisdom to assert the unique truth of one faith over another. The wise person makes justice his guide and learns from all. Perhaps in this way the door may be opened again, whose key has been lost.’

  DARA SHUKOH:THE DREAM IS LOST

  In the heartland of India, fifty years after Akbar’s death, two Moghul royal brothers, his great-grandsons, fought a battle over his legacy whose effects are still with us today. The issue was the course Indian Islam should take. The elder, Dara Shukoh, the disciple of radical Sufis, was impressed not only by the most problematic figure in Islam – Hallaj, but by the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. The younger brother, Aurangzeb, was educated by legalists and orthodox Sufis, the converting order who had made much headway converting Hindus in Kashmir and Bengal.

  Dara went further than Akbar. A scholar of the religious classics of Islam and Hinduism, he took his stand on the Koran’s revelation that God had sent messengers to all peoples and given them their scriptures (as indeed the god Krishna says in the Gita). Dara then insisted that it was the moral duty of Muslims to learn from other religions, indeed that the ‘concealed scriptures’ of Surah 56 of the Koran were none other than the Upanishads: the original core of monotheism. Dara translated the Gita and some of the Upanishads into Persian. (Put into Latin in Paris in 1802, his version was part of the influx into the West of Hindu mysticism, which inspired Blake and Schopenhauer among others – but that is another story!) Dara maintained that his translation was intended to clarify the Koranic revelation, not to devalue it. He also wrote a Lives of Muslim Saints and a treatise on comparative religion, The Meeting of the Two Oceans, in which he tried to prove the equivalence of technical vocabulary of Sufi and Hindu mysticism.

  Needless to say, such syncretistic leanings did not go down well with the ruling Muslim orthodoxy, for whom the Koranic message was complete and could neither be added to nor taken away from. Dara’s younger brother Aurangzeb felt he had ‘become a kaffir’ and induced the lawyers to pronounce him apostate for claiming, among other things, that Hinduism and Islam were ‘twin brothers’. Defeated in a civil war, Dara was murdered in 1659. Gifted as he was as a ruler, Aurangzeb’s long reign (he died in 1707) left a bitter memory among Hindus, for he destroyed scores of their temples including the greatest shrines to Shiva and Vishnu in Benares; a legacy now being exploited by Hindu fundamentalists.

  In fact, the experiments of Akbar and Dara Shukoh were not a total failure: some Indian Sufi orders, for example, changed their attitude to Hinduism, allowing a fruitful crossover, as there had been among the bhakti devotional poets of the Middle Ages. But if these remarkable Moghuls had succeeded, then perhaps Hinduism might have evolved on a path more in line with its monotheistic potential (as it did under the impact of Christianity in the nineteenth century). Indeed Indian Islam might even have become absorbed into it, rather as Buddhism and Jainism had been. But this did not happen, and the great struggle to reach accommodation and understanding still continues.

  THE SOUTH

  In the far south of India, a verdant and fecund land of temples, the ancient Dravidian culture of the Tamils escaped the full Muslim impact. And here the Hindu vision of unity survived. Far into the tropics, nearly 2000 miles south of the snowy peaks of Kashmir, Tamil Nadu was a rich rice-growing region whose wealth was based on the massive irrigation works of the Cauvery river delta. Marco Polo called it ‘the most splendid province in the world,’ and its distinctive culture had roots going back far into prehistory. Separated from the north by race and language, the Tamils exemplify India’s search for unity in diversity.

  The Tamil shore, the Coromandel coast, was frequented by Greek and Roman traders. ‘Here,’ said a Tamil poet, ‘beautiful great ships of the Greeks bearing gold came splashing on the white foam to return laden with spices.’ And in their turn the Tamils would later take Hindu culture as far as Java and Cambodia, spreading the empire of the spirit to become the dominant culture of south-east Asia: islands like Bali are still Hindu today.

  Here in the ninth century a powerful state arose under the Chola dynasty who left a brilliant legacy in poetry, painting and sculpture. It was King Aditya (871–907) who laid the foundation, ‘building a row of great stone temples to Shiva down the banks of the Cauvery river all the way from the elephant-haunted Sahya mountains down to the ocean which has the moon playing on the folds o
f its restless waves.’ These temples are among the finest of all Indian architecture. Some of the shrines were already famous in the sixth century AD, and would be expanded and embellished to become the greatest temple cities in India, if not in the world. They are still renowned pilgrimage centres today, places such as Tiruvarur, Srirangam, and Chidambaram, the home of the Cholan royal cult to Shiva as the dancing god. Chidambaram represents the accretion of many layers of India’s cultic past: Dravidian, Aryan and aboriginal. Sacred tree, holy tank, tiger shrine, primordial lingam, primeval goddess, aboriginal Tamil dancing god: all found their place here. Its tiny core is a ninth-century wooden hall covered with gilded tiles surrounded by the vast towers and halls of the Chola age. In its treasury are many bronzes from that time, for this was the heyday of the ancient Indian craft of bronze casting which stretches back to the Indus cities. One group of master craftsmen, possibly a single family, worked for a small temple in the Cauvery delta at Tiruvengadu where no less than thirty bronzes cast in the early eleventh century have survived the vagaries of time and war. They deal with themes of great antiquity: Shiva as the dancing god, the great yogi, or the androgyne, and the great goddess in both her terrible and benign aspects: themes still capable of potent reinvention even today in the cinema or on television. Among their masterpieces is an image of Shiva in his archaic role as lord of the animals. But here the wild god of prehistory is transformed by the Tamil sensibility into a sinuous and sensuous cowherd with a turban of snakes. This was cast in one piece by the lost wax process in 1011. There had been nothing like it since the ancient Greeks.