India Discovered Read online

  INDIA

  DISCOVERED

  The Recovery of a Lost

  Civilization

  JOHN KEAY

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE

  This Wonderful Country

  CHAPTER TWO

  An Inquisitive Englishman

  CHAPTER THREE

  Thus Spake Ashoka

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Black and Time-Stained Rocks

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Legacy of Pout

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Old Campaigner

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Buddha in a Toga

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Little Warmer than Necessary

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wild in Human Faith and Warm in Human Feeling

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Subject of Frequent Remark

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Hiding Behind the Elgin Marbles

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Some Primitive Vigour

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  New Observations and Discoveries

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  An Idolatrous Affection

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Stupendous Fabric of Nature

  Author’s Note To Third Edition

  Sources and Bibliography

  Index

  Chronology 1765–1927

  The Great Arc

  India: A History

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  List of Illustrations

  1. Aurangzeb’s mosque above Panchganga.

  2. James Prinsep with Hindu pandits, Sanskrit College, Benares.

  3. The rock of Girnar.

  4. The temples of Mahabalipuram.

  5. Cave temples of western India.

  6. The stupas of Sanchi.

  7. The ruined temple of Boddh Gaya.

  8. A Buddhist stupa railing at Mathura.

  9. The Buddha.

  10. A Boddhisattva.

  11. The temple complex of Khajuraho.

  12. Carving at Khajuraho.

  13. The festival of Jagannath at Puri.

  14. Colin Mackenzie at work.

  15. Bishop Heber’s drawing of Amber palace.

  16. Gwalior, the ‘Gibraltar of India’.

  17. The Qutb mosque.

  18. Shah Jehan’s Jama Masjid.

  19. The tomb of Humayun in Delhi.

  20. The Taj Mahal in Agra.

  21. The Sanchi torso.

  22. The wall paintings in the caves of Ajanta.

  23. A scene depicting ‘The Temptation’ in Ajanta Cave.

  24. Colonel James Tod. 25. Colonel Colin Mackenzie. 26. E. B. Havell. 27. Sir William Jones. 28. Lord Curzon. 29. B. H. Hodgson. 30. General Sir Alexander Cunningham. 31. Sir George Everest by William Tayler.

  32. Mohenjo-daro Giri.

  33. Seals from the Indus Valley civilization.

  The author and publisher are grateful to the following for their kind permission to reproduce the above illustrations: the India Office Library, British Museum for nos. 1–5, 7, 11, 13–16, 19, 22, 25–30; the Victoria & Albert Museum for nos. 6, 9, 17, 18, 23 and 24; the British Museum for nos. 10 and 33; the Werner Forman Archive, London for no. 12; the British Architectural Library, RIBA for no. 20; the National Portrait Gallery no. 31; and the National Museum, New Delhi for no. 32. Illustration no. 8 is reproduced from Archaeological Survey of India, Report of a Tour in the Central Provinces Lower Gangetic Doab 1880–81 by Alexander Cunningham, Vol. XVII, Plate xxi.

  Introduction

  Some day the whole story of British Indology will

  be told and that will assuredly make a glorious,

  fascinating and inspiring narrative.

  A. J. Arberry, British Orientalists (1943)

  Two hundred years ago India was the land of the fabulous and fantastic, the ‘Exotic East’. Travellers returned with tales of marble palaces with gilded domes, of kings who weighed themselves in gold, and of dusky maidens dripping with pearls and rubies. Before this sumptuous backdrop passed elephants, tigers and unicorns, snake charmers and sword swallowers, pedlars of reincarnation and magic, long-haired ascetics on beds of nails, widows leaping into the pyre. It was like some glorious and glittering circus – spectacular, exciting, but a little unreal.

  Now, in place of the circus, we have the museum. India is a supreme cultural experience. Instead of the rough and tumble of the big top, we have meditation and the subtle notes of the sitar. It is temples and tombs, erotic sculpture, forlorn palaces and miniature masterpieces. Hinduism is studied in deadly earnest; the ascetic no longer needs a bed of nails to ensure an audience. Even the elephants and tigers have become too important to be fun; they too must be carefully studied and preserved.

  This dramatic change in attitude was principally brought about by a painstaking investigation of all things Indian. No subject people, no conquered land, was ever as exhaustively studied as was India during the period of British rule. It is this aspect of the British affair in India which forms the subject of this book.

  The nineteenth century was the age of enquiry. It was perhaps inevitable that India should have its Darwin, its Livingstone and its Schliemann. There was also something in the paternalistic nature of British imperialism that attracted the scholar and the scientist. The men who discovered India came as amateurs; by profession they were soldiers and administrators. But they returned home as giants of scholarship.

  And then, above all, there was India itself, exercising its own irresistible fascination. The more it was probed the greater became its antiquity, the more inexhaustible its variety, and the more inconceivable its subtleties. The pioneers of Indian studies, described in this book, rose to the challenge. ‘Man and Nature; whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other’ would be the field of their enquiries.

  The results, even in an age of discoveries, were as sensational as the country and the scope of the undertaking. For a start, Indian history was pushed back two thousand years, roughly from the age of William the Conqueror to a millennium or so before that of Tutankhamun. In the process two great classical civilizations were discovered, and one of the richest literary traditions was revealed to the outside world. So were the origins of two of the world’s major religions. What Lord Curzon called ‘the greatest galaxy of monuments in the world’ was rescued from decay, classified and conserved. Ancient scripts were deciphered, dated and used to disentangle the history of kings and emperors. Coins and paintings by the hundred were discovered, and their significance charted. Western sensibilities struggled to come to terms with the discovery of erotic sculptures in places of worship. In the natural sciences one of the most exciting flora and fauna was studied and catalogued; so too was the incredibly rich human miscellany of racial, linguistic and religious groups. The entire sub-continent was surveyed and mapped; in the process the world’s highest mountains were measured. And so on. In short the modern image of India was pieced together.

  In tracing this process, I have tried to convey something of the wonder of each new discovery and the excitement of each new deduction. The men who stumbled upon sites like the temple complex of Khajuraho or the painted caves of Ajanta, felt as if they had suddenly come upon the Uffizi swathed in creepers, swarming with bats and unvisited for a thousand years. It is not hard to understand their astonishment. Parts of India are still littered with monuments and ruins that have never attracted the attention of conservationists. Herdsmen bivouac in royal palaces, mirror-work mosaics crunch underfoot, and bees’ nests hang from painted ceilings. It is one of India’s perhaps ironic glories that, in addition to the more po
pular and spectacular sites, she still has real ruins, untended, still crumbling, still succumbing to the rains and the vegetation.

  The discovery of these varied and magnificent monuments stimulated curiosity about India’s past. It is hard to appreciate now that as late as the end of the eighteenth century nothing whatsoever was known of Indian history prior to the Mohammedan invasions. ‘It is at this epoch [AD 1000]’, wrote Thomas Twining in 1790, ‘that we come to a line of shade beyond which no object is distinctly discernible. What treasures might not be discovered if the light of science should ever penetrate this darkness.’ To Twining, Indian history was like some deep Aladdin’s cave. The outer chambers were well lit thanks to recent Mohammedan chroniclers, but beyond them the cave was in darkness. How far back it went no one could tell. There was just one uncertain clue – the invasion of Alexander the Great in 326 BC. By exploring every possible source, and by combining guesswork with some brilliant deduction, the orientalists successfully penetrated this darkness. The excitement when, deep in the gloom, some new light was shed, was tremendous. But much remained in the gloom; whole centuries defied illumination.

  For all the excitement and the very considerable achievements, Indian history is still far from complete. There are almost no ancient historical works to provide a framework, no chronologies to provide the dates and, above all, no contemporary chronicles to provide the detail. It is devoid of almost everything that traditionally makes history palatable for the general reader. There are no anecdotes, no scandals, no well-documented campaigns and no personalities. A chronological approach soon becomes an incredibly confusing list of dynasties and kings, reigning in obscurity, to whom neither reliable dates nor defined kingdoms can be attributed.

  To some extent the same goes for Indian art and architecture. The artists, builders and sculptors are mostly anonymous and so, in many cases, are their patrons. We know little about how they worked and nothing of the problems they encountered. In Indian painting, for example, there is a near hiatus of some 1000 years which makes any discussion of the subject highly conjectural.

  In this book I have concentrated more on the historians than the history, more on the Indologists than India. The careers of men like Sir William Jones, James Prinsep, Sir Alexander Cunningham, James Fergusson – and many more – reveal almost as much about British India as about the centuries that preceded it. Moreover, the problems and prejudices they had to surmount in coming to terms with a very alien art and culture are the same as those that any non-Indian unfamiliar with the subject has still to face. The story of the pioneers makes an excellent guidebook to an understanding of India.

  To appreciate this story it is not necessary to be in sympathy with the British raj. The government’s role in it was the usual one of too little too late. It was a constant source of shame that, whereas other European governments generously supported research on Indian subjects, the British authorities displayed little interest. The field was left to individual initiative. The men who took up the challenge were no more enlightened or liberal in their attitudes than other British officials of the day. Some were deeply respectful of all things Indian. They criticized government policy and were themselves pilloried as ‘Brahminized’. Others, perhaps the majority, regarded contemporary Indians as quite unworthy of their glorious heritage. Either they attributed all that was finest in Indian culture to outside influences, or they portrayed Indian history as one of steady decline towards cultural bankruptcy and moral degeneracy.

  This story would not be complete without also including those servants of empire who, acting often out of the worthiest of motives, were nothing short of iconoclasts and vandals. The damage wrought on India’s fortresses by British cannon was surpassed by that caused by British officers in their search for suitable barracks. And there were engineers whose appetite for in-fill for their dams and railway embankments resulted in some of the most tragic archaeological depredations. Even the zoologists were sometimes sportsmen who could see no contradiction in studying India’s wildlife and contributing towards its gradual extinction.

  But none of this need detract from the achievement. (The vandals were eventually stopped; even the government was brought to some awareness of its responsibilities.) The products of British scholarship deserve to stand alongside those more commonly cited legacies of the raj – the railways, the judiciary and civil service, democracy. In any large library, India requires a quite disproportionate length of shelf space (in the London Library nearly five times that of China). To work, or just to walk, along those groaning shelves is a stimulating experience. Take away the travelogues and memoirs, the political commentaries and the official papers, and the shelves are still crammed – 200-odd volumes on archaeology, a similar number on the work of the surveyors, nearly fifty concerned purely with ancient inscriptions. Here surely is an aspect of the raj of which an Englishman can be proud without reservation, a unique salute by a conquering power to an older, nobler and more enduring civilization.

  CHAPTER ONE

  This Wonderful Country

  On I September 1783 the Crocodile, five months out of Portsmouth, struck sail and anchored off Madras. On board Sir William and Lady Jones eyed with concern the wall of spray where the rollers of the Indian Ocean crashed onto the offshore reefs. With the other passengers – the ladies in voluminous, rustling gowns and the men all cocked hats and swords, silk stockings and buckled shoes – they trooped into wooden cages and were lowered over the side. Below, an armada of canoes and catamarans manoeuvred for custom; duckings were commonplace, drownings not unusual.

  The first glimpse of India, in the shape of the boatmen, was also less than reassuring. They ‘wear no sort of covering but a small piece of rag, not entirely hiding their members’, wrote William Hickey, ‘a very awkward exhibition this for modest girls on their first arrival.’ The brown bodies glistened with the spray and rippled with each stroke of the paddle. And – an early lesson in the nature of British rule in India—these stalwarts had the fine ladies and gentlemen entirely in their power: safely through the foaming breakers, each passenger had to embrace one of those hard brown torsoes for a piggyback through the shallows.

  Arriving in Madras was not a dignified business. But on the beach, a parade of well-dressed gentlemen and handsome carriages awaited the new arrivals. Behind, the city shone in the sunshine, white and neoclassical amidst the waving palms, ‘rather resembling the images that float in the imagination after reading The Arabian Nights’. This at last was India, home for months or years to come, a place where a gentleman could live like a lord and simultaneously amass a fortune.

  Sir William Jones was no exception. His first priority was to attain financial independence, or to be precise, a clear £30,000. On the strength of his appointment to the post of Supreme Court judge in Calcutta, he had been knighted and had married. His salary, he calculated, would enable him and Anna Maria to save the £30,000 within six years. Then back to England, to his books and his friends.

  But he was already more predisposed towards the East than most new arrivals. His professional qualifications as a jurist were unique. Edward Gibbon, then writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, described Jones as ‘the only lawyer equally conversant with the year-books of Westminster, the commentaries of Ulpian, the Attic pleadings of Isaeus, and the sentences of Arabian and Persian cadhis [judges]’. On board the Crocodile, Jones had continued his studies in Persian law. He needed to make a small fortune, but he also expected to administer justice to the people of Bengal according to their own laws, and indeed, to study and clarify these.

  Elsewhere Gibbon described Jones as more than a lawyer; he was ‘a genius’. And it was for his other attainments, considerable by any standards, spectacular by those of British India, that he was already best known. The son of an eminent mathematician, he was a keen student of mathematics, astronomy and the sciences – and yet first achieved distinction as a classical scholar. Greek and Latin literature were his passions; he modelled
his letters on Cicero, his speeches on Demosthenes, and spattered both with classical allusions. At Oxford he turned to modern languages and then Persian and Arabic. His first published works were typical: a Persian grammar and a translation from Persian into French. He was also a much acclaimed poet, was intensely interested in music, and had the bottomless memory so vital to any polymath; aged eleven, it is said, he amazed his schoolfellows by supplying them with the entire text of The Tempest out of his head.

  But oriental literature was now his leading interest. Whilst in India he intended to collect manuscripts; he was even prepared to invest some of the £30,000 in them. As the Crocodile had sped across the Arabian Sea, with India ahead and Persia to port, he had been overcome with a flush of intense excitement. Culturally speaking, what a vast and unexplored field lay about him; what untold riches were hidden there; and what a glorious achievement if he could lead men in their systematic discovery.

  After a couple of days in Madras, the Joneses were back on board ‘the sweet little Crocodile’ and heading for Calcutta. Madras, once the pride of the British settlements in India, had already been eclipsed. Calcutta, founded less than 100 years before, was now the great attraction. Through Clive’s treaty with the Moghul emperor in 1765, the whole of Bengal, stretching from Benares to Burma, had been ceded to the East India Company. Commercial priorities were giving way to administrative and fiscal necessities. Casually, precariously, but inexorably, British dominion in India was being created. Jones himself described Bengal as ‘this wonderful country which fortune has thrown into Britain’s lap while she was asleep’. Administrative responsibility meant collecting revenue, developing communications, regulating trade and administering justice; hence the judiciary and the Supreme Court, not to mention the network of civil and military officials. From being a trading settlement for seventy years, Calcutta had suddenly become a colonial metropolis.