Book Review: Can India do it again?

“In one of the great ironies of history, India gave the West financial and commercial tools that Europe would later use to take over India itself,” the author so tellingly writes.

The timing for such a book could hardly have been better for an aspirational, resurgent India. It tells the Indians what they want to hear and vaguely know from their WhatsApp University in bits and pieces, but it needed a better threading of the jewels to become that necklace, that the ‘golden bird’ of the Gupta period, that all Indians know about in obscure terms. For the world, it may not all be music as India’s economy races ahead of most of the European economies, with only two more to overtake. The book also tells at great length about how the two great Indian and Chinese civilisations had once lived in trust, exchanging knowledge and wisdom under the banner of Buddhism.

If every literate citizen of Bharat could read this tome, they would stand on more exalted ground and hopefully work with the buoyant confidence to lead the world again by the ’sheer power of ideas’ as Dalrymple points out, while posing the question, whether India has the means within to repeat its history. With 153 pages of notes and an impressive bibliography, there is an ocean of reading for those who may want to venture deeper into this vast subject. But the book remains a must-read for history buffs who hope that China and India can unite to create a new world order.

An an inveterate traveller of the body and the mind in the vast Indian subcontinent, William Dalrymple has widened his research of the original sources and more authentic translations, to create a vast library within his own cerebral skull. In this book, the dazzling Dalrymple library connects some very unlikely dots to open up clear windows, where there were once only notions of our knowledge – or simply walls. Willy Brandt, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, before the Berlin Wall was razed to the ground, had famously remarked: ‘People who build walls often forget that they make prisoners of people on both sides.’ The knocking down of these narrow walls of half knowledge always creates an open sea for readers to swim in. In this case, it is also the Great wall of China and our planet’s grandest natural wall of the Himalayas, both of which lower their resistance to new scholarship. Footnotes become headlines. Ujjain gets linked again to Toledo; Sanskrit texts in Baghdad adapted by Khwarizmi, possibility a Zoroastrian priest from Persia, whose work was updated by Maslama of Madrid, when he also incorporated the work of the Roman-Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy. Finally, it was Christendom that was the wiser for it. The cusped arches of the ancient Kashmir temples married multi-foil lobed and cusped arches under Moorish masons.

Dalrymple on Aman Nath

A few years ago, Yogi Vaid, a school friend of Aman Nath, put together a hundred recollections of Aman Nath from friends and family. One of these tributes came from none other than William Darlymple, who had then become an established author. The introduction that Yogi gave to William is as follows:

Born a Scotsman, William Darlymple is a historian, writer, art historian and curator, as well as broadcaster and critic. Winner of numerous awards for his writing, TV and documentary series, he is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

And, this is what Dalrymple writes of Aman:

In the late 1980s, when Olivia and I first arrived in India, Aman and Francis appeared to us like Delhi’s answer to the Medici- great and generous patrons of the arts who used their eye and their energies to make things happen for emerging talent.

Aman was certainly the first person to realise Olivia’s artistic potential, long before she had shown in London, Venice or New York. In 1989, when we had only just pitched up in Delhi, he took a warm interest in her work and gave her first break, offering her a show at the Carma Gallery. I well remember his regular visits to our tiny rooftop barsati in Golf Links, as he came to check on her progress. Olivia even painted a joint double portrait of him and Francis in the rather surprising garb of sanyasis.

In real life, I am glad that Aman and Francis never embraced poverty and penance, as it might have robbed us of the good taste and artistic ‘eye’ of two of Delhi’s pioneering aesthetes. At a time when Delhi was still a small, sarkari city, full of mutlabi philistines hustling their way to prosperity, Aman and Francis were rare beacons of culture and aesthetics. They loved history at a time when Delhi and Rajasthan’s past was almost entirely neglected. They loved the old at a time when everyone else was a neophiliac, obsessed with the new. And they loved art at a time when everyone was concerned only with money.

Dalrymple concludes with two full cycles of our civilisational history: “The Indic numerals assisted the growth of banking and accounting first in Italy and then Europe.” These innovations helped seed the commercial and banking revolution that financed the Renaissance, and in time, as these ideas spread, the rise of Europe, ultimately, helping propel it back towards the riches of India, the source of all these ideas.” The next phase demolishes the rungs and pulls down the ladder, whereby India rose, only for the snake of success to swallow its own tail! “In one of the great ironies of history, India gave the West financial and commercial tools that Europe would later use to take over India itself”, the author so tellingly writes.

A young admirer gets a copy autographed at the JLF London!

My personal favourite chapters among the ten in this golden book are the Fourth: The sea of jewels: exploring the great library of Nalanda, and the Fifth chapter: The fifth concubine. A fascinating and detailed account of the Chinese traveller, whom we had known in school as Huien Tsang, but is now phonetically more correctly written as Xuanzang, unravels the jewel that the world’s largest Buddhist university of Nalanda was. To think of travelling 3000 perilous miles, south-west of Chang’an in 629 CE, seems a difficult and rather daring proposition even today. Fully aware of the dangers, the scholar-traveler wrote: ‘I determined to go out from the land of my birth and throw myself into the realm of ten thousand deaths.’ While officials travelled and described their love of the dancing girls of the Chinese capital ,where ’one look…would surrender the city.’ Dalrymple records, how a lovely flower girl born to a timber Merchant in 624 CE, was to become ‘Empress Wu Zetian – the only woman who became emperor in her own right in 3000 years of Chinese history.’ She was single-handedly responsible for fighting and subduing the Confucian patriarchy to establish Buddhism in a country as vast as China. Her investiture was presided over by 5000 Buddhist monks before a crowd which sources say, numbered one million!

In Empress Wu’s reign, 150 huge Buddhist monasteries surpassing, as some said, the imperial palaces in design, extravagance, splendour, and finesse were raised. Ten Indian monks were enlisted to manufacture The Great Cloud Sutra to suit her purpose.

This reinterpreted Confucian philosophy was to make place for a woman at the helm. This unwittingly produced an Indic Renaissance at the heart of China. The ultimate irony is that this had been achieved by a sadistic, lascivious concubine, far beyond any lady Macbeth that Shakespeare could had created. Daoism’s fire was doused by Taoism. While the Empress banned the slaughter of animals and the catching of fish, as the Buddhist edicts of Ashoka had ordained, she charged the former Empress and her daughter for witchcraft and a plot to poison the emperor. ’First the two women were severely beaten by the executioners. Then their feet and hands were cut off. They were then thrown, bound, into a half-filled vat of wine. The exultant, new Empress remarked: ’Now these witches can drink to their bones’. After several days of agony, the two victims died, their corpses were decapitated and cut into pieces.

As a part of the Buddhist inspiration from Indian Buddhism, Empress Wu commissioned impressive cave excavations on the Indian model, borrowed from the Gupta and Pala innovations as ‘more than 380 vast and imposing images were carved out of towering sandstone cliffs of Longmen’ complete with frescoes. Chang’an alone had 150 huge Buddhist monasteries. After the death of the Empress, the ousted Confucian order returned and claimed that this concubine-Empress, who had once served the previous Taizong emperor with her body, then seduced the new emperor ‘to commit fornication with him’ once when he was changing his clothes!

Opposed by the male-dominated customs of China, the Empress turned to India to import customs and to become a ’Chakravartin or Wheel- Turning universal ruler’. After her diabolic plans succeeded, this former fifth concubine was finally revered as a universal sovereign and even the future Buddha!

She erected an 880 feet high Maitreya Buddha, where the head alone measured 150 feet and several tens of men would stand on its fingers. This sadly caught fire. That was the time when fifty Chinese monks were studying at Nalanda. Dalrymple notes ‘it was a high watermark of Indian influence in China, and one that would never be reached again.’

In the bad, mistrustful, and dangerous world that we have woven for ourselves, the lesson from history holds out that India’s trump card was its openness. But there would be much innocence in imagining that surrounded today by terrorism and fanaticism, India can return to its lost status by just putting roses in the barrels of guns while dark and ominous atomic mushrooms lie hidden beyond the thunderous Indian monsoon clouds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aman Nath is chairperson of Neemrana Hotels, author and historian, a conservation specialist and an authority on heritage preservation in hospitality.

 

 


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