The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  Today, of the canonical five epics most admired by the scholars of the Middle Ages, two remain lost, and one has yet to be translated from Tamil. But although much of the early poetry has been lost, even today manuscripts are still being found in private hands, as I discovered while we were filming, when a Tamil scholar I had contacted in Madurai phoned me with a new discovery. We arranged to meet at the Minakshi temple one gorgeous spring morning, light slanting across the gate towers and glinting on the golden roof of the goddess’s shrine. We sat down under a neem tree in a small, sunlit courtyard near the temple office, while Dr Sivakkolundu carefully unwrapped a manuscript that had come from an old family in a village outside the city. The manuscript was an eighteenth-century copy of the epic called Silapaddikaram, which was composed in the fourth or fifth century, and is set partly in Madurai.

  The leaves were tied together on a loop in long, thin strips. The text had been incised with a sharp metal point, then rubbed with lamp black to bring out the letter forms. Silapaddikaram is rather like one of the late Shakespearean romances: a tale of love and passion, mistaken identities, shipwrecks and sea changes, and fateful coincidences. It’s a tale whose characters and locations reflect the age of the Periplus: wealth made on overseas voyages, grand mansions, captivating courtesans, precious gems, fine clothes … There are the young lovers, the captain’s daughter Kannaki, she of ‘a body like a golden creeper’, and the merchant’s son Kovalan, who was ‘Murugan incarnate’. At the centre of the tale, malign as Desdemona’s handkerchief, is the lost anklet that brings disaster on its possessors. And the background is the age when international commerce was opening up, when ‘handsome great ships of the Yavanas came splashing on the foam’ to the greatest port on the Tamil coast, Puhar, or Kaveripatnam. This morning, as the sun rises over the brightly painted gopuras (gateways), and temple bells ring deep in the interior, Dr Sivakkolundu begins to read India’s oldest living classical language:

  Great and renowned kings envied the immense wealth

  of the seafaring merchants of the opulent city of Puhar.

  Ships and caravans from foreign lands poured in abundance rare objects and diverse merchandise.

  Its treasure would be untouched through the entire world, bound by the roaring seas.

  The lotus-eyed Kannaki and her loving husband were fortunate: they were high-born and, like their fathers, heirs to untold riches …

  The tale moves between Madurai and the now-vanished city of Kaveripatnam, whose temples and ‘tall mansions’ stood at the mouth of the Cavery river before they were washed away by the sea or covered in dunes. Now underwater archaeologists are scouring the shallow seabed to find fragments of broken buildings. In the hinterland, down wonderful forested lanes, are ancient red-brick foundations of lost palaces, and old temples where the priests still tell legends of the fabled city that sank into the sea: the ‘emporion Khaberis’, as Pliny and Ptolemy call it. The Tamil epics celebrate it as ‘the city of Puhar, which equalled heaven in its fame and the Serpent World in its pleasures’, a town crammed with foreign merchandise ‘which came by ship and caravan … Himalayan gold, pearls from the South Seas, red coral of the Bay of Bengal, the produce of Ganges and Cavery, grain from Ceylon and the rarest luxuries of Burma’.

  NEW WORLDS: THE TRADE WITH CHINA

  Combine the Tamil poems with the Greek and Roman gazetteers, contracts and geographies, and together they tell a big story about India opening up to the world. But the Periplus also offers fascinating clues to the very beginning of Indian commerce with China. According to the Periplus, it was the Tamils who ran the trade up the east coast of India, with big, sea-going catamarans made of split logs. Sailing north from the Tamil lands along the coast to Orissa, says the author,

  … the shore begins to curve eastwards, ocean on right, land on left; then eventually the Ganges appears in sight … the greatest river of India, which has a seasonal rising like the Nile. On it is an important trading post with the same name as the river, Ganges town, through which are exported malabathron and spikenard and pears, and the finest quality muslins called ‘Gangetic’. Beyond this country there lies a very great inland place called China, from which raw silk and silk yarn and Chinese cloth are brought overland …

  The port of the Ganges mentioned by the Greek navigator, where goods were transported by land towards China, we now know from recent excavations was Tamluk, which stood, and still stands, on a tributary of the Hooghly river 30 miles south of Calcutta in West Bengal. Now silted and overgrown with palm forests, this is one of those fascinating forgotten corners of India. It was once ancient Tamralipti, where a thriving port existed from Ashoka’s day. Mentioned by the geographer Ptolemy in the second century AD, it became a famous Buddhist city and a major centre of scholarship, with twenty-two monasteries when the famous India traveller Hsuan Tsang stayed here in the seventh century AD. Indian and Chinese accounts show that this was the most important jumping-off point for China because it stood at the junction of three great trade routes. First was the sea route we have just travelled, down the east coast to southern India and Sri Lanka and across the Arabian Sea to the west. Then there were the two ancient routes to China: the sea route across the Bay of Bengal to Java, Sumatra and Indochina, and the land route through northern India across the Himalayas to Khotan on the Silk Route. Still an important Buddhist town in the seventh century, the port is marked on Chinese gazetteers and portolans as late as the fifteenth century, but lost its importance when it silted up, to be superseded by the East India Company’s Diamond Harbour, and ultimately by Calcutta itself.

  We have reached a fulcrum point of history, then. ‘The city of the Ganges mouth’ was a junction of world trade routes on the verge of a new world order; it is the last place in the Periplus, which stops here after listing the ports all the way from the Red Sea to East Africa as far as Zanzibar, Arabia, the Gulf and the coasts of India. From there onwards the routes were then still unknown: ‘This China is not easy to reach,’ concludes the author of the Periplus, sitting with the old salts in his taverna on the shores of the Mediterranean around AD 70 (‘like frogs around a frogpond’, as Plato said). ‘People seldom come from it, and not many go there.’ Beyond that were only travellers’ stories of migrants, nomadic traders who carried goods over the passes to China. Our sailor from Alexandria, the ‘capital of memory’, ends with this enigmatic final note: ‘The lands beyond these places [i.e. China], on account of excessive winters, hard frosts and inaccessible country, are unexplored – perhaps also on account of some divine power of the gods …’

  So that is where geographical knowledge stood in the 70s of the first century AD. But knowledge was about to expand with astonishing rapidity as the Silk Route opened up and the first direct contacts were made between East and West. For at the very same moment that the old navigator put down his pen in Alexandria, events were unfolding far to the east that would open up another spectacular phase in the story of India – an incredible tale of lost treasures, forgotten empires and personal drama – the tale of an empire that may have been as influential as the Mughals or the British, but that is almost unknown today. And the tale begins far from India, near the border of China, beyond the Han dynasty’s first Great Wall, where a people the Chinese called Yueh-chi were defeated in battle and driven westwards around the scorching wastes of the Taklamakan desert, to a new destiny and a place in world history.

  THE LONG MARCH OF THE KUSHANS

  These days we are used to understanding human geography, making our mental maps, in terms of the boundaries of nation states. Most of history, though, has not been like that. Often the migrations and movements of peoples have resembled matter dissolving and re-forming, coalescing, spreading huge distances across the face of the Earth. Standing at the centre of the Old World, India has experienced such flux from prehistory to the present. Although often portrayed as a static civilization, resisting change, India has, in fact, been amazingly fluid and dynamic: the borders of her civilization hav
e spread far beyond the boundaries marked on today’s maps. Dravidians, Aryans, Greeks, Turks, Afghans, Mongols, Mughals, British … all played their part, bringing new languages, cultures, foods and ideas to the deep matrix of Indian identity. The tides of her history have been a constant interaction between the indigenous and the foreign. And so it was with the Kushans, whose tale opens almost incredible vistas, even by Indian standards.

  The story begins out in the wastes of the Taklamakan desert in Xinjiang, central Asia, under the eroded fingers of the Flaming Mountains in the burning oasis of Turfan and the gravel wastes of Lop Nor. Here a strange discovery was recently made: the mummies of red-haired people of Caucasoid physiognomy, whose writings preserved in Buddhist caves reveal that they were speakers of an Indo-European language, the easternmost of the huge language group related to Sanskrit, Greek and the Western languages. Among the various names these people gave themselves, one is still (astonishingly) remembered by today’s farmers near the banks of the Jumna river south of Delhi at Brindavan, the town of Krishna. Here, at Tochari Tila (the mound of the Tocharians), a family shrine was built by their rulers at the height of their power, when they ruled from central Asia to the Ganges. We know them as the Kushans, for reasons shortly to be explained.

  Their first appearance in history comes in the annals of the Chinese historians, who call them Yueh-chi, a people threatening the edge of China in the wilderness beyond the mud-brick predecessor of the Great Wall, whose remains still snake out into the sandstorms of the Taklamakan from the Gate of Heaven at Jaiyuguan. This first wall of China had been built by the Han dynasty around 200 BC to keep out such peoples, nomads and migrants. The Chinese tell a terrible legend of a treacherous parley, in which they murdered the paramount chief of the Yueh-chi and then made his skull into a drinking cup. Assailed by Chinese armies, the Yueh-chi packed their tents and they moved westwards into the Tarim basin, the lands above Tibet. There for a while they ruled in Khotan, before their migration further westwards into central Asia and Bactria between the 160s and 120s BC.

  Within a century they had established themselves as a power in the region of the Oxus river north of the Hindu Kush. The Chinese then speak of them as 900,000 people in four great tribal groupings, one of which gives us the name by which we know them today: the Kushans. Chinese chronicles mention a king whom we know as Kujula Kadphises, the first significant ruler of the dynasty. He unified the ‘great Yueh-chi tribes’ and invaded the Kabul valley, Gandhara and Kashmir, before dying at the age of eighty, perhaps around AD 80. Over the next ten or twenty years his son Vima Takto added northern India to the Kushan realm, and ‘from this time,’ say the Chinese, ‘the Yueh-chi became extremely rich’. By now we pick them up in Western sources: Greek historians, who report that Bactria, the old province of the Persian and Greek empires in northern Afghanistan, had fallen to mysterious outsiders. So by the late first century AD, just the time that the Periplus gives us its wonderful portrait of the world between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, Kushan power had extended from Bactria across the Hindu Kush into Gandhara and northwest India. In a relatively short time the Kushans had become a world power and come to control two of the most important land routes in Asia.

  Once in Afghanistan and the Indus valley, when they came into contact with Indian and Indo-Greek civilizations, Kushan culture began to undergo an extraordinary transformation. The Indo-Greek kingdoms in those parts had long been multilingual, even minting coins using Greek and Sanskrit. Now the Kushans adopted the Greek script and language for their own inscriptions and coins. Then, in the early second century, they introduced their own ‘Aryan’ language, but still using a modified Greek script. Their language, which we know today as Bactrian, has only recently been deciphered with the help of new inscriptions, and an astonishing cache of letters, deeds and other documents written on leather, cotton and wood, from a Kushan site north of the Hindu Kush. These finds also reveal that their language continued to be used for centuries in northern Afghanistan, into the Islamic period, and it is fascinating that there are many words from it still in common speech there today, including some deriving from Greek.

  From the Hindu Kush and the Kabul valley the Kushans, within a generation or two, came down from the Khyber to Peshawar, crossed the Punjab and overran northern India as far as Mathura on the Jumna. Exactly when and how this happened is still unknown. According to the Chinese account of the rise of the Kushans, a son of Kujula Kadphises was the conqueror, who then ‘appointed a general to rule India on his behalf’. This was surely Vima Takto, who minted coins with a Greek inscription that called him ‘Kings of kings – great saviour’. It may have been Vima who inaugurated a new era in AD 78, which survives as the Shaka era and is found today on the front page of Indian newspapers alongside the AD dating of the Christian era. With that the Kushans could justifiably call themselves ‘kings of India’.

  That remarkable tale has been pieced together only recently with the decipherment of the Bactrian language; and into that picture we can now place some of the most tantalizing and brilliant archaeological finds of the modern era, the most amazing being made at Bagram, north of Kabul, on the eve of the Second World War.

  THE TREASURE OF A FORGOTTEN EMPIRE

  Bagram, near Charikar. The giant airstrip that formerly belonged to the Soviets in their war against the Afghan resistance is now the US military base in their war on the Taliban, where giant Hercules transport planes thunder in day and night, and F-116s rise into the sky with an ear-splitting crack. The strip lies in the plain of Kabul, and looking north there is a wonderful view towards the snow-capped mountains of the Hindu Kush. In the foreground, across green fields dotted with brown mud-brick houses – typical Afghan fortified farmsteads – a promontory sticks up over a steep drop to the Panjshir river, a place called Abdullah’s Castle. The citadel is about 300 yards across, and the fortifications of the outer city are nearly half a mile further to the south. This is the site of a Greek city founded by Alexander the Great – Alexandria under the Caucasus, later known as Kapisa, the summer capital of the Kushans. Here, in 1937, French archaeologists found the greatest single hoard of artistic treasures ever discovered in Afghanistan: a wonderfully eclectic mixture of Silk Route artefacts from as far away as China and the Mediterranean, and dating from the second century. There were ivory-backed chairs of Indian origin, lacquered boxes from Han China, and Greek glass from Alexandria and Syria, including a unique glass painting of one of the Wonders of the World, the Pharos of Alexandria. There were also Hellenistic statues and silverware, stucco mouldings, and images from the Greek myths, including Cupid and the rape of Ganymede by Zeus. This extraordinary mixture is a testimony to the cosmopolitan nature of the Kushan rulers of the city, evoking the brilliant age when Afghanistan was the stepping-stone between central Asia, India and the Mediterranean.

  As the site was the summer capital of the Kushan kings, the building excavated in 1937 may have been a palace storeroom. The fabulous delicacy and discernment of the pieces almost suggests the taste of an art connoisseur, or perhaps a collection of diplomatic gifts, and it gives us a vivid sense of the high culture behind the Kushans’ embassies to Han China and Hadrian’s Rome. This was a time of diplomatic and commercial exchanges between all the great powers of the classical age, with the Kushan Empire standing in a central position at the junction of the land and sea routes between East and West. The first East–West meeting took place at this time in central Asia on the Silk Route, when caravans of Greeks and Romans met the Chinese at the White Tower of Tashkurgan, on the border between Xinjiang and Tajikistan, the mid-point between Europe and China. This was a time when there was peace in most of the lands from the Yellow River to Hadrian’s Wall, which is why the historian Edward Gibbon in a famous passage described it as ‘the happiest time in the history of the world’.

  The greatest ruler of Kushan India is remembered even today in the Buddhist legends of China, Mongolia and Tibet. In Japan he even appears as the evil g
enius of one of the most famous manga comic books. In Sri Lanka and southern Asia he is remembered as one of the four pillars of Buddhism, even though his shrines and coins show he also worshipped the Iranian fire gods, and Hercules and Athena. In India he is remembered as a tyrant, and may even be commemorated in a famous cycle of religious dramas. But the real ruler is a man so mysterious that until very recently we were not even sure in what century he lived: Kanishka the Great.

  SURKH KOTAL, ‘THE RED PASS’

  Crucial inscriptional evidence for Kanishka has come to light in Afghanistan since the 1950s, surviving despite the cycle of war and destruction that has followed the Russian invasion of 1979. And the ten years since I last visited have been particularly fruitful.