The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  SPREADING DHARMA TO THE WORLD

  Ashoka’s ambitions for his dharma were not confined to India. The edicts tell us that he sent his Buddhist embassies to Gandhara and Kashmir, to the Himalayan regions, and overseas to Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma. But of special interest are the missions to the West. Ashoka sent his ambassador Dhamaraksita (who is described as being Greek himself) to the Yonas (Greeks) in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan; and further embassies went to the Mediterranean world, to the Greek kings of Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Cyrene, Epirus and Macedonia. So three generations after Alexander had brought fire and sword to the Indus valley, India looked for the first time to the West, sending envoys to preach the dharma and spread Ashoka’s message of friendship and brotherhood. We know that Greek ambassadors visited the Mauryan capital too; for example, Dionysus from Ptolemaic Egypt stayed in India for some time and, according to Pliny, wrote a book ‘enlarging on the power and vast resources of the Indian nations’. It is tantalizing that, as yet, no record of these exchanges has been discovered in Western sources, though an interesting story told by the geographer Strabo gives an idea of how difficult it was to make the journey from the Ganges plain to the Mediterranean, a round distance Ashoka describes as being some 600 yojanas, nearly 5000 miles. The party reached Antioch in Syria with gifts carried by eight servants clad only in loincloths: ‘three had survived, the others died on the long journey.’ On the missions to the Eastern world things are less clear. We know Ashoka’s son led one to Sri Lanka; later stories say others went over the Himalayas to Tibet and the Tarim basin, and even to China, but these are less certain.

  DEATH OF A DREAM

  In his later years there are signs that Ashoka lost control. In the last ten years of his reign there were no new edicts. There are hints that before his death Ashoka partitioned the empire between his sons. In the twenty-ninth year of his reign his chief queen, Asandhimitta, died. Four years later, in 237 BC, he raised one of his lesser queens, Tissarakha to the rank of chief queen. She was young and beautiful, and Ashoka succumbed to her charms. In later Buddhist legend she occupies the role of the wicked queen, evil enough to match any counterpart in Western fairy tales. She is portrayed as vindictive, proud and foolish, while Asandhimitta had been a good queen, friendly towards the Buddhists. Two years later, the story goes, jealous of Ashoka’s deepening devotion to the bodhi tree at Bodhgaya, that she in some way fatally injured the sacred tree by piercing it with a thorn steeped in a magic potion or poison. The tree withered away (according to a Chinese version it was cut down). Ashoka was devastated, prayed that the tree might still live, and offered fervent puja, as the Buddhist monk who is the present custodian of the tree at Bodhgaya told me: ‘Ashoka poured libations of holy water and the milk from a thousand mares, and sure enough, though the tree was dead, there was a miraculous revival of the root.’ The present-day tree, plus others, including one in Sri Lanka, are supposed to be from cuttings, but there seems little doubt that the original tree died, though modern botanists say it is impossible to kill a tree by scratching it with poison. Perhaps this is just a fairy tale told by the Buddhists to blacken the queen?

  The last legend of the wicked queen is darker still, and hints at wider dissension within the royal house. It is told in the wonderful Asokavadana, a collection of stories about the king from the second century AD. The legend goes as follows: Ashoka has a son, Kunala, who is very handsome, a gifted musician and singer, with extraordinarily beautiful, captivating eyes. But an oracle says he will lose his sight. In the story his stepmother, the wicked Tissarakha, is infatuated with him, rather like the Greek legend of Phaedra and Hippolytus. The prince repels her advances, and she plans to harm him in revenge. When Ashoka falls ill, she cures him by her magic and in return asks for a boon. She takes control of his royal seal and sends a letter in his name to Taxila (where Kunala is suppressing a revolt). The letter orders the governor to blind Kunala and then kill him. The governor cannot bring himself to kill the young man, but carries out the blinding. Shedding his identity as a prince, Kunala now becomes an outcast, walking across India, playing the vina and singing, a nameless wanderer. Then one day, in the streets of Patna, the frail old king Ashoka hears his song from a palace window and recognizes his son’s voice. On being told the whole story, Ashoka has the wicked queen put to death.

  And what is the truth? Ashoka may have been beset with revolts in the empire, and may have had troubles with queens and princes in his last years, but first-hand sources are simply lacking. From some of the edicts we get the impression of a driven man sometimes working day and night, available ‘at any hour and any place’. ‘I am never fully satisfied with the end product of all my work, my exertions and the conclusion of my business … But work I must for the public good.’ (This brings to mind Philip II, scribbling his late-night missives in the Escorial, or Napoleon in Jacques-Louis David’s famous 4 a.m. painting.) Twenty-five edicts passed in thirteen years, the wear and tear of ceaseless royal itineraries, bombarding his councillors with ideas: Ashoka sounds to me like a man who worked too hard. ‘Let the highest and the lowest both do their bit,’ he urged. Perhaps he believed too much in the possibility of changing human nature. A fatal mistake in a politician? One of his later edicts has this admission: ‘now I realize how hard it is to persuade people to do good.’

  Ashoka died in 233 or 232 BC, his thirty-seventh regnal year, aged about seventy-two.

  There is one last story. Ashoka wanted to give all his wealth at his death to the Buddhists, but his ministers and sons conspire to stop him. When the time comes for the customary royal gift of alms to the monks of his favourite monastery in Patna, all the dying Ashoka can give them is his sole possession, half a mango. ‘Tell me now,’ he says to his councillors, ‘who now is lord of the Earth?’It is a story that, like the best fairy tales, turns a full and perfect circle. But did he really die sad and disappointed, stripped of all his power? According to the Buddhist legends, since suffering on Earth is the lot of every human being even the great Ashoka had to face his share of it. For him, however, it was all the greater, since it came so hard at the end of a glorious reign.

  The Mauryan Empire did not long survive Ashoka. Although its end is shrouded in mystery, it is clear that it was overcome finally by the resurgent Greek kingdoms of northwest India and Bactria. Buddhism itself has long ceased to be a great force in Indian society. In the cold light of day Ashoka’s dream, you could say, vanished, a heroic failure, leaving edicts on weathered rocks and cliffs from Kandahar to the Bay of Bengal to be deciphered millennia later by young men from a distant land. But Ashoka created one of those great moments in history when we can see the power of ideas working in the real world. The Mauryans laid down a template for the future of India. A ruler on the Ganges plain calling himself king of India, a ruler who used ideas to define the morality of politics. We moderns can often admire ideas of the past without necessarily thinking they are relevant to us today. But Ashoka’s dharma – however imperfectly executed – was one of the great ideas of history, like the American Declaration of Independence or the Communist Manifesto. His edicts go to the key moral question of human life on Earth. How do you persuade human beings to do good? In their commitment to the power of ideas, they are like a bolt of lightning across the pages of history.

  INDIA’S BUDDHIST LEGACY TO THE WORLD

  Buddhism itself disappeared in the heart of India, submerged by the Huns, Turks, Afghans and Mongols, by Islamic iconoclasts and also by its Hindu Brahminical enemies. It lingered on in the south until the fifteenth century, and in eastern Bengal until modern times. Today it survives in strength only in the Himalayan regions and Ladakh, though these days many young Indians are attracted to its teachings, and many dalits (untouchables) are converting to Buddhism in an attempt to escape the chains of caste. In the western parts of Ashoka’s world – the great Buddhist lands of Gandhara – it vanished completely under the tide of Islam. But the Buddha’s message, distilled into the blood of Indi
a and throughout the subcontinent, permeates the country today, ‘strewn and diffused everywhere in the thought world of India’ as Akbar’s biographer Abul Fazl so acutely wrote.

  The ideas of the Buddha have had a tremendous impact on the rest of the world. In the West, Buddhist influence on the ancient world was probably greater than has been recognized. The Greek Sceptic philosophers, for example, traced their ideas to Indian philosophers, who were clearly Buddhists. The core of the Sceptics’ doctrine was a quest to attain ataraxia (unperturbedness), that is tranquillity and peace of mind, with the goal of removing mental conflict and pain. ‘A wise man,’ said the philosopher Pyrrho, ‘keeps himself in a state of inner calm.’ Sceptics believed that through reason and discussion one can cure human ills, namely self-centredness, rashness and dogmatism. These ideas had a profound influence on European thought during the Renaissance, and subsequently on the whole of modern Western philosophy.

  But it is in China and east Asia that Buddhism has had its greatest influence. It was the most successful ever export of Indian culture. It became a unifying cultural idea across Asia over the last two millennia, and now unites hundreds of millions of people. And it happened without coercion, which cannot be said of Christianity or Islam. Now, in the twenty-first century, as Asia rises again and the dust settles on the colonial era, cultures that were great long before the brief heyday of the West are rediscovering the common set of ideals, customs and beliefs they share in Buddhism.

  We live in challenging times, and the problem of suffering in the world, posed by the Buddha 2500 years ago, has not gone away. Indeed, it is compounded today by the pervasive pressures on the individual to desire and possess, and by the revelation of human responsibility for environmental destruction, the extinction of species and global warming. In all these areas Buddhist thinking is as relevant now as when the tradition began. As the Buddha said in his last words: ‘Be a light to yourselves. Seek no other. Never give up’.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION

  NIGHT IS FALLING off the shore of Cranganore, close enough to the Kerala coast to waft the fresh smell of palm forests after rain. Our boat is a 120-foot ocean-going uru, the same size as the Roman ships that plied between the Red Sea and India 2000 years go. Ours is a boat out of Cuddalore, with a Tamil-speaking crew, trading between the Andamans, Sikkal in Gujarat and the Gulf, carrying a cargo of cement, pepper and spices. After four months at sea the crew are looking forward to the thrills of the old port of Dubai: the steersman stirs cardamom and ginger into our coffee, spits out his pan and grins: ‘There a man may be free!’

  Trade is one of the key factors in civilization. By allowing civilizations to make contact, to share and test ideas, trade also allows them to grow. Our image of India, influenced by colonial writing and historiography, has so often been of a civilization stopped in time, stuck in the past, but in fact Indian civilization has always grown and changed through dialogue with other civilizations. The tidal waves of Indian history have produced great native dynasties, but also great foreign rulers, and receptivity to outside ideas has always been part of the Indian experience. Many of the greatest developments in the story of India have been shaped by dialogue with other civilizations, which began back in the Harappan age, when Indian ships traded with the Gulf. Contacts with the Persian world had grown intensive from 500 BC, but it was only in the final centuries BC that regular sea routes opened up between the Mediterranean and peninsular India. The opening of the Spice Route to the Mediterranean spurred contacts between Rome and the kingdoms of southern India, while the development of the Silk Route established contacts between China, Europe and India. This was the time of Hadrian and the Antonine emperors in the West, a time the historian Edward Gibbon thought the happiest in the history of the world. And in the beginning the chief motivation, believe it or not, was the produce of a weed: pepper.

  Our boat is heading up to Gujarat via the old port of Mumbai. Indians have sailed this coast up to the Gulf since at least the third millennium BC. And in the harbours of the Indian Ocean, the picturesque old dhow ports from Oman to Gujarat and the Kerala coast, you can still touch on the commerce that became one of the earliest long-distance international trades in world history, uniting the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, and opening up the sea lanes to Southeast Asia and China.

  They still use the old technology too. The construction yards at Beypore near Calicut almost died in the 1980s, when their manpower and skills passed to the Gulf, where the money lay. But the old shipbuilding arts have been rekindled in recent years – for good economic reasons. The old boats quite simply are still good value. The builder’s boast is that an owner will make his or her money back in four years, when the lifespan of a good boat is over forty. Construction here in Kerala was often in the hands of the Mopylas, descendants of Muslim traders and craftsmen, long naturalized, who married Indian women and had their own guilds in the Middle Ages. The mestiry (master builder) here, though, is a Hindu: named Gokuldas, he is only in his thirties, and his father and ancestors were also boat carpenters ‘since 500 years’.

  On the forested estuary of the Beypore river his construction yard is at the end of town, behind warehouses and chandlers’ shops. Inside the gates piles of cut timber and two tree trunks lie outside two enormous wooden sheds, where two boat frames, each the size of a large house, rise under a rattan roof. Beyond the fence in the somnolent heat brightly painted ferries with tall prows criss-cross the river, emerging from creeks in the palm forests fringing the other side, just as they must have done in Roman times.

  ‘We use no plans, even for boats this size,’ says Gokuldas. ‘There is a lot of secret calculation and mathematics involved in the process of building an uru. All the secrets are passed on from father to son. That’s how we do it with no technical drawing – how we make such big ships to full perfection. The curve of the ship and the overall shape and structure come from working out in the mind.’

  Incredibly, here on this sleepy backwater, Gokuldas has just built one uru boat over 170 feet long, with a 40-foot beam. High as a three-storey house and weighing in at over 1000 tons, it has a cargo capacity of 1500 tons, and now trades between the Gulf and Gujarat. Careened and re-caulked in the old dhow yards of Dubai or Sikkal, it will have a good lifespan and pay for itself many times over. ‘Working the old way, we get no complaints,’ Gokuldas went on. ‘The boats are stable and strong, and no change is needed.’

  This gives you a sense of the scale of ancient oceangoing shipping: the big Greek and Roman cargo boats that in the Roman period plied from Myos Hormos on the Red Sea, 120 of them every year; or the five-masted trading junks that roamed the South China Sea down to Vietnam and Java well after 1949. (You could still see them in the early 1980s, as hulks and houseboats on the Shanghai river.) Similarly, the big Arab dhows that dominated the China trade in the Middle Ages are still constructed in the yards of Karachi and Dubai, though now with engines as well as sails. Scratch below the surface of the modern world, and the old ways are still there, especially in India. This is the antithesis of globalization: the persistence of local knowledge.

  At the jetty down by the river in the little port of Beypore are five big uru boats, the largest a vessel from Tuticorin, from whose cavernous hold a crane is unloading sacks of soda ash amid clouds of choking white dust. The ship has one big, stubby mast with a giant main spar and lateen sail; she’s sailing on to the Andamans. His face burnt black by the sun, the captain offers me tea heavily spiced to hide the taste of the bad water.

  ‘We’ve sailed to the Yemen, Aden, Iraq, Iran and Somalia,’ he tells me. ‘From there you can come “straight over” in the summer months with the southwest wind.’

  That’s just as the Roman navigators used to do. Like them too, his cargo includes sacks of pepper. This is what first enticed the Greeks and Romans here. (The word ‘pepper’, incidentally, like ‘rice’, comes from the Tamil.) At its peak, tons of the stuff were heaped in the pepper ba
rns by the Tiber. The cost was huge. According to Pliny the Younger, ‘By the lowest reckoning, the India trade takes from our empire 100 million sesterces a year – at the lowest reckoning. That’s what our luxuries and our women cost us.’ That’s about 10 tons in gold – probably equivalent to the annual yield of the Roman imperial gold mines in Spain. And Pliny was perhaps only talking about the sea trade via the Red Sea, not the overland route. Interestingly enough, India is still the biggest importer of gold in the world – £9 billion worth per annum; the addiction went both ways, and still does.

  The Roman craze for pepper was all about food, of course. Nothing better underlines the idea that the story of civilization is also the history of food and cooking; and Indian cooking – now a mainstay in Britain – was perhaps the first international cuisine in the world. In the Roman Empire the celebrity chef Apicius wrote a famous cookbook in which 350 of the 500 recipes – from spiced flamingo and curried ostrich to dormice stuffed with peppercorns – used pepper and southern Indian spices. Read Apicius and you get the impression that to go to a high-class dinner party in imperial Rome was to risk having your taste buds irreparably blasted. Pliny raged at the stupidity of it all: ‘It’s incredible that pepper has become such an obsession. With some foods the appearance is what is appealing; with some, taste or sweetness. But pepper has nothing to recommend it other than its pungency. For that we go all the way to India! Who first thought that up?’

  AN ANCIENT GUIDE TO THE INDIAN OCEAN

  In the pages of their geographies and gazetteers we can follow the Roman obsession down the Red Sea and all the way across to the west coast of India. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant’s guide to the India trade from the 70s or 80s of the first century AD, is one of them. In fact, to my mind it is one of the most fascinating of all historical texts. An old Alexandrian salt who had travelled all over the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, Hippalos, adds his own details of winds and tides, of good and bad harbours, of where to buy and what to sell. Over the years I’ve tracked many of them, camping at night stops on the desert route from the Nile valley; picking over dumps of Roman pottery in sweltering Red Sea ports, such as Berenike or Adoulis; waiting in coffee shops in old Massawa, Eritrea, for the winds to change; sleeping on white sands strewn with pale crimson coral at the heavenly anchorage of Qana in the Yemen. The Periplus lists them all. From its pages drift the exotic substances of the ancient world: malabathron and spikenard, pepper, cloves, coral, antimony, red and yellow orpiment, along with other riches that the Mediterranean world coveted: elephant ivory, fine cotton, Chinese silk and Argaritid muslins, pearls from the Gulf of Mannar.