In my last column, I wrote about how there was an idea of India long before the British colonised us and that its core tenet was this country’s vastness and diversity. The piece was warmly received by readers of this newspaper and beyond. However, a specific section of academia was, as if on cue, enraged. This is a section that has disowned the idea of an Indian ‘nation’ and attempts to villainise any engagement with it. So what if the engagement is based on irrefutable historical references. It must still be suppressed by the attribution of political and ideological motives, if not also slander, in the process exposing perhaps the deeply antagonistic agenda of such persons.
Indeed all ‘founding fathers’ of modern India swore by the ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, but today these seem to have become swear words for some. To speak of India’s unity through all her vibrant diversity may invite invective in these quarters. And to refer to her antiquity and ancient texts evinces a condescension and communalised hostility (again a throwback to colonial mindsets). This is accompanied by the teleological championing of the present and the recent as all things real and enlightened.
However, the politics and hubris of myopia should not disable efforts to address the simplest curiosity a people can have: How far back do they go? Here then are some more examples from premodern history of a clear conception of India as a unified geographical space peopled by cultural and other kinds of plurality.
We spoke last time of the subcontinental evidence from the Mahabharata and Vishnu Purana (5th cent. BCE – 5th cent. CE), the Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang (7th cent.), and Shankaracharya’s pan Indic voyages (8th cent). Of a kind is the testimony of the Indika attributed to the Greek ambassador, Megasthenes (4th cent. BCE), who was based at the Mauryan court in ancient Patna. Megasthenes is reported to have described the land of the ‘Indoi’ thus: “It has its eastern and western side [till the south] bounded by the great sea … on the northern side it is divided from Scythia [central Asia] by Mt. Hemodos [abode of snow]… while the western side is bounded by the river Indus.”
Later, Ptolemy (2nd cent. CE), the celebrated geographer from the Roman Empire, defined India and her regions in copious detail and claimed she was marked by Hindukush in the west, snowy mountains in the north, (mouth of) the Ganga in the east, and the ocean in the south. Interestingly, he also spoke of an India beyond the Ganga reaching up till China. At about the same time, Sangam texts like the Patirruppattu, and the later Tamil epic Silappadikaram (5th cent. CE), were also invoking the same geographic imagery of the space between the snowy Himalayas and Cape Kumari (Comorin) in the oceanic south.
In the 6th century, the Indian astronomer and polymath Varahamihira in his Brhat Samhita describes ‘Bharatavarsha’ in over 20 remarkable verses, including an exhaustive enumeration of her many regions and communities, which includes everyone from Kashmir, Kangra and Peshawar upto Dravidas, Kerala and Karnataka, and from Assam, Bengal and Odisha upto Punjab and Saurashtra. As clear, robust and inclusive a notion as could be.
Again, the Arab traveller Al beruni, in his 11th century Kitab ul Hind, describes ‘Hind’ thus: “Limited in the South by the Indian Ocean, and on all three other sides by the lofty mountains.” This Hind he identified with “the world extending southwards from Himavant … Bharatvarsha, which is the centre of Jambudvipa”. We come across Bharata kshetra or Bharat khanda in southern Jambudvipa in Jaina cosmological literature as well.
Then, the famed Mughal historian Abul Fazl in the 16th century Ain-i-Akbari writes: “The sea borders Hindustan on the east, west and south. In the north, the great mountain ranges separate India from Turan, Iran and China … Intelligent men of the past have considered Kabul and Qandahar as the twin gates of Hindustan… By guarding these two, Hindustan obtains peace from the alien (raider).” Note the reference to Kabul also resonates with Ptolemy and Xuan Zang.
The Tibetans on the other hand called India rGya-gar (Vast Land?) or Phags-Yul (Noble Country), the source-country of their Buddhist masters. Their works like Lama Taranath’s 16th century History of Buddhism in India and the later Jewel Garland of Buddhist History mention gurus from Phags-Yul belonging to Kashmir and Peshawar (N), Andhra and Kanchi (S), Saurashtra (W) and Bengal (E).
Thus on view, again and again, over an enormous span of time and variety of contexts, are astonishing convergences in the perception or knowledge of what India—Bharatavarsha, Indu, Hind, Indoi, rGyar, Phags-Yul, Hindustan—was. Though not necessarily identical in every respect, nor coterminous with present-day boundaries or concepts, the fact that there seems to be a great deal that continued to be held in common in the idea of India across the centuries by Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Jains, by residents as well as foreign travellers, by pilgrims, poets and chroniclers, itself deserves to be explored. To deny traditions of continuity where they may exist, even in the midst of so much historical movement and change in an ancient continuous living civilisation like India, would be to put riven politics above the pursuit of history.
Shonaleeka Kaul
Associate Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
(shonaleeka@mail.jnu.ac.in)