by Michael Wood
ART, POETRY AND SCIENCE IN THE GUPTA AGE
Like other great epochs of Indian history, the Gupta age was a pluralist time. Although the kings were followers of Vishnu, they sponsored other religions, and Buddhism in particular, as the Chinese pilgrims’ accounts show, enjoyed a great flowering with royal patronage. The monastery at Nalanda, with its university, was a Gupta-period foundation, the first residential university in the world. It became a global institution, drawing students from the Far East and Persia, and lasted until the twelfth century.
It was also a time of major scientific advances. Aryabhata, the astronomer and mathematician, defined the concept of zero and proved that the Earth revolves around the sun and turns on its own axis some 1000 years before Copernicus and Galileo expounded this idea in the West. A hallmark of the age, then, seems to have been curiosity about the world in all its manifestations. Artistic creation, especially of the human form, is another. Some of the wall paintings of the life of the Buddha at Ajanta are from this time, and some of the finest stone images in Indian art come from the Gupta period: chief among them are sculptures made by Dinna, the first Indian artist for whom we have a name and a collection of works.
The Gupta court also sponsored literature and poetry. Later legend speaks of the ‘nine jewels’ in the royal court, one of whom, Kalidasa, seems to have been the court poet to Kumaragupta, rather as Virgil was to Augustus Caesar. He was the author of poems, epics and plays, the most famous of which is Sakuntala, a charming comedy (tragedy seems to be unknown as a genre in Indian drama – perhaps the law of karma would preclude it?). The play has distant similarities to A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the king’s love for a forest nymph, the lovers’ pursuit in the woods, the contrast between court and country, the fairy-tale ambience. But what is most revealing in the play is what it tells us about the courtly culture thriving in Gupta cities such as Ujain and Patna and its self-reflexive quality. The play starts in an almost Pirandellian fashion, with a prologue where the director and his leading lady discuss tonight’s show:
‘They are a very high-powered audience tonight, they are the intelligentsia … really discriminating … So we need to serve them up something really good …
‘With your direction nothing can go wrong,’ says the star, perhaps with a hint of irony.
‘Unfortunately, my dear,’ the director replies, ‘however talented we may be, we still all crave the applause of the discerning …’
Kalidasa’s three surviving plays and his lyric poems (such as the ‘Birth of the War God’ and his Raghuvamsa) flatter the Gupta line, as Shakespeare’s history plays do the Tudor monarchs, and make specific homage to the current ruler. This was fitting in a time of historical consciousness, when court scholars collected and edited the texts of the Puranas, compendia of the myths, history and genealogies of the northern dynasties. The fourth book of the Raghuvamsa glorifies the mythical dynasty of King Rama in a eulogy to the heroic deeds of his current representative on Earth. In this way the real world battles recorded on the Allahabad pillar are turned into literary art.
So the transformation of history into myth was part of the programme of the Gupta rulers. Whereas earlier rulers in the ancient Indian tradition saw their job as being to keep the cosmic order going, performing Vedic sacrifices advised by their Brahmin priests, or, like Ashoka, propounding a moral order articulated by Buddhist or Jain gurus, now kingship itself was central to the discourse: the Gupta kings were thought to be gods on Earth, bringing about a new golden age by means of their heroic deeds in battle, but also sponsors of a court culture where arts could flourish. In style and substance it would be the template of all later rulership in India.
THE KAMA SUTRA: SEX AND LIFE
The most remarkable of all the products of Gupta culture – and, for obvious reasons, the most interesting to our sex-obsessed time – is The Kama Sutra, the treatise or exposition on delight, love, pleasure or sex, though as Kama is also the personified god of love, the title could simply be translated as ‘The Book of Cupid’. The oldest surviving Hindu textbook on erotic love, it was composed in Sanskrit perhaps between 300 and 400. The author, Vatsayana Mallanaga, was probably writing in Patna, the old Ashokan capital, still an imperial city under the Kushans and Guptas. The cultural context of the text is urban and cosmopolitan; the target readership is the nagaraka, the man about town, and it gives us a fascinating glimpse (echoed in the sensuous and pleasure-loving sculpture of the age) of what India was like in the age of the Guptas.
The author of The Kama Sutra says his work follows many other writers in the past – earlier sexologists – but his is the first to survive. It became a landmark, being quoted as early as 400, and influenced many other Indian writers on sex and love through the Middle Ages, and came to be seen as a foundational authority on sexuality. It also had a deep impact on Indian literature: on Sanskrit and vernacular erotic poetry, as in the fabulous eroticism of Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, which devotes the whole of its eighth book to the love-making of Shiva and Parvati as a paradigm of the way lovers grow in knowledge of each other through sex. As a text that was very aware of theorists on psychology and sex, this book echoes some of the concerns of The Kama Sutra, and was criticized by some Indians in later ages for its too overt sexuality.
The cataloguing of behaviour, acts, moods and traits is a cultural obsession in India, and the way the book is organized reflects that numbers game: the sixty-four sexual positions, for example, echo the sixty-four diseases in medical texts, the sixty-four arts, and even the sixty-four ‘playful games’ of Shiva. The book itself is wrapped in a further numerical conceit – that it is only a distilled essence, a boiled-down account of human behaviour, which has been drawn from an original text (rather like those lost encyclopedias in the mirrored world of Jorge Luis Borges), a text claimed to comprise 100,000 chapters– so various are the ways of human sexuality.
It is, on the face of it, incredible that the first true manual on sexual love in the West was that of Alex Comfort in the 1960s. But The Kama Sutra is not, as is usually thought, a text only about the positions of the sex act. It is a book about the art of living: a book concerned with a central aspect of human psychology. In it we see a fundamental difference between Indian and Western culture. Kama is a third pillar of human behaviour, alongside religious custom (in the law of Manu) and social law in the Arthashastra (which, as discussed in Chapter 2, was originally a Mauryan compilation expanded in later times down to the Guptas). All three of these texts are representative of what seems to have been a Guptaperiod tendency to codify and regularize aspects of human, that is to say, Indian, knowledge. For them the science of pleasure was one of the principal sciences, along with dharma (virtue) and artha (prosperity), one of the three aims of human life.
Like all lasting works of literature, The Kama Sutra is brimming with perennial concerns. Its discussion of the sex act itself talks about the variety of regional customs, about violence in sex, about dangerous sex – ‘acts outside this book’, which also heighten passion but are only to be used with care, ‘For the territory of the textbooks,’ says Vatsayana, ‘extends only so far as the limits of men’s appetites. But when the wheel of ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook, and no order.’ In our own time, which has so many issues about safe sex and the danger of HIV, this is still true; indeed, in present-day India, which has a growing Aids problem, these ancient writings are now being used as educational texts for prostitutes.
The monotheistic religions, of course, have a different emphasis. Early Christianity, for example, problematized sexual love, and surrounded the act itself with guilt. Consequently, Christian visitors to India saw erotic temple sculptures as disgusting and inexplicable on a sacred building – still quite a common judgement among tour groups visiting Khajuraho today. But as it says in the law of Manu, ‘There is no sin or fault in eating meat, drinking alcohol or having sex because they are natural human inclinations, even though one attains happiness in being free of them
.’ The key in Indian thought is not constraint: rather, by including the physiology and psychology of sex and relationships within the totality of human behaviour, The Kama Sutra remains thoroughly modern in its concerns.
That brings us to one last observation. Alain Danielou, the great French Indologist who lived for many years with Saivite sects before the Second World War, saw The Kama Sutra as a characteristic product of an intellectually open society, a free society by the standards of the age. Vatsayana says that anyone, not just a ‘man about town’, can live a life of pleasure. Of course, the ideas in the book were not for the mass of society. But were there also other readers or hearers less privileged? Or was the text just for the rich, for city dwellers and merchants? A fantasy book, like men’s magazines today (and a male fantasy at that)? Homosexual sex is not a major feature of the text, as one might expect in an ancient society where there were punishments, if mild ones, for gay sex. A bigger issue is that from the feminist point of view much of it is male-orientated, to which one would counter again that this is, after all, a fourth-century text. The author, moreover, does quote women in direct speech saying things that men were advised to take seriously, and he is often very realistic about women’s sexual desires. Women readers are implied too. Indeed, Book Six in the textual tradition is said to have been commissioned by the most talented and literate, high-class courtesans of Pataliputra, a city evidently still redolent of grandeur in the Gupta age. All in all, then, The Kama Sutra is a remarkably revealing text about Indian society. Its realism, and its sexual fantasy, are the culmination, no doubt, of centuries of erotic meditations every bit as complex as the parallel ascetic speculations of the spiritual gurus. The Kama Sutra, one might say, is as typical of India as the Bhagavadgita and the eightfold noble path.
HARSHA THE GREAT AND THE END OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
The Gupta age ended with succession crises, weak kings and foreign invasion. Renewed attacks by the Huns destroyed many monasteries in Gandhara and northwest India, but the monarchy was restored under a chakravartin (universal ruler) in the seventh century. This was King Harsha, who revived the Gupta style of kingship both as warrior and patron. Another Chinese account of India survives from this time by the famous Buddhist monk Hsuan Tsang, who knew Harsha and praised him. He spent seventeen years in India during the 630s and 640s, which gives his observations unmatched authority. At that time the chief city of the north was Kannauj, an ancient city on the Ganges, which had been known to Greek and Roman geographers. Kannauj is now a forgotten field of ruins 4 miles across, dotted with villages, its chief landmark being the giant mosque built by Shah Ibrahim out of the debris of earlier temples and buildings. But after Delhi and Patna, Kannauj is the third of northern India’s great imperial cities. Until the tenth century, as a Persian geographer reported, it was the seat of a raja ‘who is a great king obeyed by most of the kings of India, and said to be able to muster a huge army, 150,000 cavalry with 800 war elephants’. All of this, perhaps, gives an idea of Harsha’s power.
Just as Chandragupta II is praised for his musicianship and his compositional skills, Harsha was a poet and wrote plays that have survived. Hsuan Tsang describes him (with pardonable enthusiasm, as he benefited greatly from the king’s patronage) as ‘virtuous and patriotic; all people celebrate his praises in song’. The king’s life story is told by his chief minister, Bhanna, in the first full-scale Indian secular biography, which begins with the drama of his accession, the younger brother of the murdered king ‘whose royal appearance and demeanour’, as the Chinese monk also says, ‘were recognized in conjunction with his great military talents. His qualifications moved heaven and earth; his sense of justice was admired by gods and men.’ After Harsha ‘made himself master of India, his renown spread abroad everywhere, and all his subjects reverenced his virtues. The empire having gained stability, the people were at peace.’
What followed immediately taps into old themes in Indian history, suggesting no one more than Ashoka himself. Once peace was established, says Hsuan Tsang, ‘Harsha put an end to offensive military expeditions, and began to put into storage all his weaponry. He gave himself up to religious duties and prohibited the slaughter of animals … he founded sangharamas (Buddhist monasteries) wherever there were sacred traces of religion.’ But as with earlier epochs, the king’s role in religion was ecumenical, and there was no state religion. Instead religious festivals embraced all faiths in great acts of royal charity. ‘Every fifth year,’ says Hsuan Tsang, ‘Harsha convoked a grand assembly and distributed the surplus of his royal stores as an act of charity.’ In 642 Hsuan Tsang witnessed a great gathering of this kind on the sands at the confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna, where ‘from ancient times until now, royal and noble personages endowed with virtue and love, for distribution of their charitable offerings, have all come to this place for that purpose. At the present time King Harsha, following this custom, has distributed here the accumulated wealth of five years, over a period of seventy-five days.’ This, as we saw in Chapter 2, may be the ‘great assembly’ mentioned by the Greeks in 300 BC, and the predecessor perhaps of the medieval and modern festival at the same place, the Kumbh Mela, the biggest religious gathering on Earth. However, like a number of other present-day traditions – including the ramlilas in Benares and the durga puja in Calcutta – the kumbh reached its present form during the British period.
Harsha would be remembered among Buddhists as the fourth and last pillar of Buddhism, after Ashoka, the Greek king Menander and Kanishka, and the intellectual exchanges in his day between India and China are part of the history of the whole of humanity. Hsuan Tsang returned to China in 646. The Wild Goose Pagoda built to store his manuscripts still stands in Xian, and the small monastery that is his final resting place survives in a delectable wooded valley outside the city. Spared at the express command of the communist leader Chou En-lai (or so its abbot told me many years back), its library still holds palm-leaf manuscripts in the Pali language of Sri Lanka.
A stele in the library shows Hsuan Tsang, rucksack on his back, a lamp to light his way, braving the elements to bring home his precious cargo of manuscripts. Only fairly recently, copies of his letters have come to light, written nearly twenty years on to his old friends in India: they are among the most arresting texts in the history of civilization. To the master of Maghagda he sends news from China: ‘the great king of the Tang, with the compassion of a chakravartiraja, rules in tranquillity and spreads the teachings of the Buddha: he has even penned with his own hand a preface to a translation he ordered copied and circulated, and it is being studied too by neighbouring countries.’ To the abbot of Mahbodhi in Bodhgaya the tone is even more touching, for they belonged to opposed schools:
It has been a long time now since we parted, which has only increased my admiration for you … Now there is a messenger returning to India, I send you my sincere regards and a little memento as a token of my gratitude. It is too inadequate to express my deep feelings for you. I hope you appreciate that. When I was returning from India I lost a horse-load of manuscripts in the river Indus. I attach herewith my list and request that copies be sent to me. This much for the present.
Yours, the monk Hsuan Tsang
THE COMING OF ISLAM
The synchronicities of history are sometimes striking. In the summer of 632 Hsuan Tsang, on the last stage of his journey to seek the wisdom of India, was staying in Kashmir, then a land of hundreds of Buddhist monasteries. At that point Buddhism, having spread to China, the Far East and Southeast Asia, may well have had the largest number of followers of any organized religion in the world. That June, far away to the west in Medina, the Prophet Muhammad died, having enjoined his followers to ‘seek knowledge as far as China’. An amazing new epoch in the history of the world was about to open up – one that would see within a single century the establishment of an Islamic caliphate and the spread of Islam over a vast area from Spain to the Indus valley.
The coming of Islam is fraught with diff
iculty in Indian historiography, and all the more so in light of the confrontational rhetoric of international politics at this moment in the twenty-first century. It is the subject of two great and conflicting narratives that have long been articulated in Indian politics, culture and education. On the one hand there is the secular interpretation fostered, for example, by the Congress Party, the main force in the Independence movement, which is supported by many secular Indians, by many Muslims, and by many liberal progressive Hindus. On the other hand there is the religious interpretation, broadly espoused by Hindu nationalists of various persuasions, from hardline fundamentalists to many in the middle of the road, such as those who resented the partial communal politics bequeathed by the British. The first admits a tale of conquest, but one in which the foreign invaders adapted, changed and became Indian; in which conversion, more often than not, happened through dialogue, and out of which an extraordinary exchange and interaction developed over many centuries, during which northern India became an Indo-Islamic civilization in which most Hindus and Muslims coexisted peacefully: in other words, another phase of India’s unity in diversity. The Hindu nationalist view, however, says that the coming of Islam marked a break, an alien intrusion; it insists that foreign dynasties came bearing a form of monotheism fundamentally irreconcilable with Hindu religion, and that their intolerance towards Indian religions began centuries of hostility exacerbated in the modern era by British ‘divide and rule’ tactics.
