New book on ‘Bharata before the British’ decolonises Indology

Shonaleeka Kaul is India’s leading cultural and intellectual historian specializing in Sanskrit literature. She is a Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and has also held Chairs at Yale, Leiden and Heidelberg. She has authored 9 path-breaking books demolishing colonial fallacies about India. This is an excerpt from her latest: Bharata Before the British and Other Essays: Towards a New Indology, 2024.

 

The Indian Constitution famously begins with the words “India, that is Bharat”. The title of this book then, Bharata Before the British, is not only for alliterative effect but a nod to the reclamation of selfhood that our Independence from British rule in 1947 symbolised and for which it set the stage. The essays that this book brings together address in one way or another a number of fundamental questions regarding the history of early India. It is written expressly for the layperson, bringing exciting new insights and in-depth explorations from the arena of scholarship out into the world of the general reader who is curious and invested in knowing authentically about the early career of Indians as a people.

 

How far back does the idea of Bharata, that is India, go? Did the British bring India into existence or is she an ancient nation? Was Kashmir historically ‘unique’ and isolated from the rest of India or thoroughly connected with it? How was Islamisation culturally experienced in mediaeval Kashmir? Is myth the antithesis of history or a historical mode in its own right? What is the antiquity of Krishna worship at Mathura? How did Shakti veneration shape the identity of a people and their land? On a different plane, is there only one way of timekeeping or did premodern India host multiple temporal visions and worldviews — ways of knowing and being — that have been suppressed by an unequal world order? Did ancient Indians write history? Was there an Indic vision of the discipline as different from modern Western notions? Was Sanskrit an elitist language or a literary culture with public reach and relevance? Did it speak only for the rich and the powerful or did it recover the voices of marginalised Others, including non-human animals? What was the purpose of architecture in ancient India, could it be an instrument of liberation (moksha)? On the other hand, what was the ancient idea of erotics (kama) and how did it relate to society? How did it feel – smell, sound, touch, appear — to live in an ancient Indian city? Does Sanskrit poetry contain merely stereotyped and idealised depictions of ancient times, or have we been reading it wrong? What were the overarching goals of Indic knowledge systems and how far have we come from them today?

 

In engaging these varied issues, in filling gaps in our knowledge about ancient India or its regions, in correcting misplaced perspectives, and in offering culture-sensitive methods with which to work through our texts and traditions, Bharata before the British invites us to rethink our understanding of India and Indology. It challenges in particular the hold on the profession of history of colonial and neo-imperial approaches, on the one hand, and political ideologies, on the other. These have taken us considerably away from developing a robust emic understanding of ourselves — our nation, our thoughts, our practices and patterns of belief and behaviour. The diverse essays in this book, penned over the years and bringing together history, literature, philosophy, anthropology and art, attempt to reclaim such an understanding in ways that do justice to our historical sources on their own terms rather than compromise them in the service of extra-academic imperatives.

 

We do live in a time of fake narratives and social media-fuelled disinformation, on the one hand, and hubris of some professional historians towards ‘public’ histories, on the other. Fittingly perhaps then, this book also discusses the state of Indian history today and what the way forward may be to ameliorate the ills of the academic establishment, the associated stasis in the field and its disconnect with the masses.

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In an ancient, continuously living civilization like our own, the past is never past but an important completive and context to situate the present. This is not only because national identities typically form in the longue durée. This longue durée perspective is important to reclaim also — and all the more so — for societies that have undergone the colonial disjuncture: the irruptive epistemic violence that colonial modernity wreaked on much of the non-west, including Bharata or India, forcing a break with the endogenous in the service of Empire, and making necessary today a fresh, decolonized engagement with our past and our selves. A prime example is the question: how old is the idea of India?

 

Of course, 75 years into independence we should not have had to still be wondering whether and what the idea of India in premodernity was, and yet here we are. One of the reasons why this remains an enduring question rather than a long-clarified one is that mainstream ancient Indian historians, but for exceptions like RK Mookherji and BD Chattopadhyaya, have shown reticence in engaging with this fundamental question, as if there were something inherently reactionary or chauvinistic about it. Indeed, in today’s deeply antagonistic political climate, if you even make a claim about an ancient idea of India, you can in certain circles be villainised for it! You can be subjected to invectives and slander and accused of having a certain sectarian ideological motive.

 

This is deeply unfortunate because it attempts to sabotage the query from being what it is: an impulse to know our past on its own terms, on the strength of irrefutable historical testimonies. But the irony is that while all ‘founding fathers’ of modern India swore by the Indian ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, today these seem to have become swear words for some. To speak of India’s unity through all her vibrant diversity may invite abuse in these quarters. And to refer to her antiquity and ancient texts evinces a condescension (oh what do these Puranas know!) and worse, a communalized hostility (again a throwback to colonial mindsets) that ancient Indian texts speak for only one denomination or faith, which is an unhistorical supposition.

 

Broadly, reactions today to the question ‘How far back does the idea of India go?’ range from taking India as an unexamined, given, eternal category at one end, to denying its very existence before the British colonized us, at the other. The latter is perhaps a more serious historiographical problem because, as we will see, it chooses to ignore or silence rather too vast a body of evidence that does attest to the existence of a clear premodern idea of India.

 

Why is there this denial? One reason is modern myopia and hubris that pre-empts looking back beyond the colonial disjuncture, which is seen as defining of everything we are today — as great an irony as there can be for any 5000-year-old civilization. A second reason is clearly a hangover of imperialist politics and historiography, which prided itself in this instrumentalist disinformation that there never was an India. For instance, in 1880, Sir John Strachey, a British administrator who trained the Imperial Civil services of India, would begin his lectures by saying:  “The first and most important thing to learn about India is that there is not and never was an India”! Coming from a representative of the colonial state then, whose political conquest of the land had indeed been piece by piece, this divisive statement uninformed by historical insight should perhaps not surprise. What is surprising, however, is that nearly a century and a half later, there is still epistemic confusion over the question of how far back India as a territorial entity and unity goes, and it is not uncommon to find some leading scholars deny the very possibility… These positions show the persistent hold of colonial and Western thought worldwide. For so deep is the dependence on European models of historical development and vocabulary, such as that of German and Italian unification or the French Revolution, that the fundamental difference between a nation and a nation-state is lost sight of in these denials of the ancient idea of India.

 

To be sure, unlike a nation-state, which is a formal and political arrangement, a nation is first and foremost a notion: The jointly held sense of belonging to a common territorial and cultural entity that a people name and assert; a community of emotion, of belief, and of praxis; “a felt community”, as Rajat Kanta Ray called it, and a classic ‘subjective region’, as Bernard Cohn may have said. Now, even a working acquaintance with what are known as the master texts of Indic civilization and the cultural geography contained in them yields the presence of this notion of a felt community and a common bounded entity which is affirmed and named. Moreover, there are astonishing convergences over two millennia in the way a disparate set of historical commentators and observers attest to this readily recognizable idea of Bharata or India. And further, remarkably, this idea is seen to embrace, with no apparent unease, both India’s spatial unity as well as her incredible diversity. This will sound familiar to those conversant with the claims of India’s nationalist movement leading up to 1947 and after; however, it is not the invention of that movement. We have premodern Indian texts that put out this inclusive vision of what India was ages ago and it is time we acknowledge and substantiate this remarkable phenomenon.

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Perhaps the earliest text to define India, ‘Bharatavarsha’, broadly yet resonantly, as the land between the Himalayas and the sea, is the hoary Mahabharata (conservatively dated to between the 5^th/4^th century BCE to 4^th century CE). In particular, its sixth book, the Bhishma Parva’s tenth chapter, details in more than 70 verses first the historical geography of India – all the many mountain ranges and rivers of this land running from north and north-west to the south and from north-east to the west, including Ganga, Sindhu, Vitasta or Jhelum, Saraswati, Yamuna, Chandrabhaga or Chenab, Gomti, Sarayu, Godavari, Narmada, and Mahanadi (Mahabharata 6.10.1–74). It then documents the ethnography of the land, namely, the janapadas or territories occupied by variegated communities (janas) that peopled Bharatavarsha.

 

Significantly, in a so-called ‘mythological’ text, the janas included are all historically attested people, from those of Kashmir, Gandhara (Peshawar), Kamboj (Afghanistan), and Punjab in the north to Vidarbha and Malava in central India, and from Kashi, Magadha, Odisha, Bengal, and Assam in the east to Dravida, Kerala, Karnataka, Kuntala (Telangana), and Chola in the south. (This should urge a reconsideration of the myth versus history binary. See chapters 9 and 11 of Bharata Before the British.) Those named also included mlecchas and yavanas, on the one hand, ‘outsiders’, so to speak, and ‘tribes’ such as the Nishadas, Shabaras, Kiratas, and Abhiras, on the other. There is also an explicit reference to all four castes (varṇas) inhabiting Bharatavarsha.

 

In this way, in the Indian epic’s testimony, no conflict is seen between the spatial unity and identity of Bharatavarsha and its inherent diversity. Instead, a frank acknowledgement of its geographic and ethnic complexity obtains rather than any exclusionary vision of the land. Thus, to see this unity as only a “retrospective thrust of hegemonic [modern] nationalism”, as some scholars suggest, is to miss the capaciousness and pluralism within the ancient-most ideas of India. Bharatavarsha emerges here as a singularity that subsumed rather than erased the many.

 

Further, while the thrust of our discussion here will be this ethnic and cultural idea of India, let me just say a little bit about the politics, because this is something that some scholars like to insist was missing before the British. But the truth is even politically, Bharatvarsha is already seen in the Mahabharata as this singular aspirational realm for all kings to want to bring under one rule, as the conversation between Dhritarashtra and Sanjay in the same adhyaya tells us.

 

Moreover, this idea of Bharatavarsha as chakravartin kshetra or the area of the great conqueror is echoed many times in historical inscriptions from across the country. For example, the Hathigumpha inscription of King Kharavela of Kalinga (Odisha) in Prakrit dated as early as 1^st century BCE … mentions how this king went out to conquer all of Bharatavarsha. Satavahana king Shri Pulumayi’s Nasik inscription (also in Prakrit) and Shaka king Rudradamana’s Girnar inscription in Sanskrit, both from the 2^nd century CE, as well as Samudragupta’s 4^th century Allahabad prashasti, enumerate the two halves of the subcontinent, the northern (uttarapatha) and the southern (dakshinapatha), thereby presuming the larger whole, just like in ancient Buddhist literature. The 9^th century Pala king of Bihar and Bengal, Devapala’s rhetoric of conquest also included the land “bounded by the snowy mountains in the north, Setubandha-Rameshvaram in the south and the two seas in the west and east”.

 

So clearly, right across a millennium and a half, India is present as a term of political reference and aspiration. And occasionally, it showed up as not just a political reference but political reality too, for we know that the first pan-Indian empire in our history, that of Asoka Maurya in the 3^rd century BCE, covered nearly the whole of the subcontinent. And much later under Akbar and his successors, the Mughal Empire displayed a similar vastness… Several other inscriptions also refer to Bharatavarsha: be it the Rishthal inscription of western Madhya Pradesh from 515 CE, which refers to a temple built as a symbol of Bharatavarsha, or the Rashtrakuta king Govinda IV’s 918-933 inscription, and Chalukyan king Someshvara IV 1038 inscription both of which show Kuntala (Andhra) to be in Bharata, the Shravana Belgola epitaph of Mallishena dated to 1129 CE where the entire extent of what we know as India is meant, or the Handala grant of Vijayanagara king Harihara 1356, where Karnataka is described as in the south of Bharatavarsha. So, the idea spouted by some that only one kind of idealized literary source in antiquity refers to India and not the supposedly more pragmatic, everyday sources like inscriptions, is untrue.

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Now, returning to chronology in our story, after the Mahabharata, in the 4^th century BCE, the Greek ambassador to India, Megasthenes, in his book Indika also named the land of India as bounded by the sea to the east, west, and south, by Mt. Hemodos (‘Abode of Snow’) to the north where it was separated from Central Asia (Scythia), and by the Indus to the west… He adds for good measure that: “It is said that India, being of enormous size when taken as a whole, is peopled by races both numerous and diverse, of which not even one was originally of foreign descent, but all were evidently indigenous.”

 

After him, Ptolemy, the celebrated 2nd-century geographer from the Roman Empire based in Egypt … claimed similarly that India was bounded by the ocean in the south and the snowy mountains in the north; further, he fascinatingly spoke of an India that went east of the mouth of the river Ganga right up to China, thereby including perhaps what is known as the North East today as well as Bangladesh. He cited the Hindukush as this country’s western boundary, much like Xuan Zang after him (see below).

 

At about the same time, in the far south, Tamil Sangam texts like the Patirruppattu and the later epic Shilappadikaram (5th century CE) were also invoking the same geographic imagery of the space between the snowy Himalayas and Cape Kumari (Comorin) in the oceanic south.

 

Meanwhile, in the 5th century CE, the Vishṇnu Mahapuraṇa (2.3.1, 8) mapped not just Bharata’s geographic but also ethnic and cultural boundaries thus:

 

Uttaram yatsamudrasya himadreShchaiv dakshinam

Varsham tadbharatam nama bharati yatra santatih

Yojananam navasahram tu Dvipoayam daksinottarat

Purve kirata yasyante paShcime yavanaḥ sthitaḥ.

 

This translates to “the country north of the sea and south of the Himalayas is Bharata and her children are Bharati. Nine thousand yojanas from north to south, it has kiratas in the east and yavanas in the west”. Kiratas refer to denizens of Assam and the eastern Himalayas, while yavanas refer to those settled in Greater Punjab. On view then is an explicit and inclusive self-understanding of the land… articulated again in the 6th-century encyclopaedia Bṛhat Samhita by the polymath Varahamihira which (14.1–31) exhaustively enumerates the many regions and peoples that were part of India, displaying, yet again, clarity and detail of this idea as a unity through her plurality.

 

This would resonate with Xuan Zang, the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim’s testimony in the 7th century CE. Zang travelled all over India and left a detailed account of the land, Si Yu Ki. Zang says that standing at Langham, not far from ancient Nagarahara (modern Jalalabad, Afghanistan), west of the Khyber Pass, he felt he stood at the gateway to the country called ‘Indu’. He described Indu, again, in classical terms as bounded by the snowy mountains to the north and the sea on three sides, extending to an area of 90,000 li (Chinese mile) and inhabited by 70 different kingdoms. He tells you the meaning of the name Indu, calling it the Sanskrit word for ‘moon’ since the country, likewise, was luminous from the collective radiance of its sages. He says Indians liked this name best even though the Chinese had earlier other names for this country, like Tien chu Kuo which meant Country of the Heavenly Bamboo or Hsi-yu, the Western Domain. So, the idea of India in Chinese perceptions went back much further than Xuan Zang.

 

What all of this suggests is that well before the 7^th century, there was in place a clear notion of India as a conceptual and lived place. Moreover, the modern view that this land was too vast and diverse to ever have been one country or nation ignores the fact that the ancient Indian concept of ‘nation’ could well recognize and embrace that vastness and diversity and acknowledge, alongside, a common unified sphere of cultural circulation.

It should come as no surprise, then, that clear geographic and circulatory horizons would inform the itinerary of any premodern traveller seeking to circumambulate this robust cultural sphere. Indeed, through their movements, such travellers would have simultaneously enacted this sphere and its routes and pathways… Thus, notwithstanding its endemic pluralism, India was also acknowledged as a common unified sphere of cultural circulation and a singular episteme.

Perhaps there is no greater illustration of this idea of India as both many and one, both diverse and unified, than the stellar example of Adi Shankaracharya, the seer-intellectual who in the 8^th century established the supremacy of trans-sectarian Vedanta advaita i.e unified consciousness beyond multiplicity and form.

The 13th-century Shankara Digvijaya narrates that Shankara, together with his disciples and King Sudhanva, undertook a great tour of the land (digvijaya), debating a great variety of schools of thought. He set out from Kaladi (Kerala) and traversed first to Rameshavaram, then Kanchi (Tamil Nadu), then Andhra, Vidarbha and Karnaṭaka, defeating, in particular, Tantric Shaivas like the Bhairavas and Kapalikas. Thereafter he reached the shores of the western sea and then Gokarṇa (Maharashtra), Saurashṭra, and Dvaraka (Gujarat), defeating along the way Vaishṇavas, Shaivas, Shaktas and Sauras. He is then said to have moved onwards to Ujjayini (Madhya Pradesh), Bahlika (Bactria?), Shurasena (Mathura), Darads (Gilgit Baltistan), and Kuru and Pañchala (Punjab and Haryana).

Following that, he is described as taking his exegetical endeavours to Kamarupa (Assam), Koshala (Uttar Pradesh), Anga, Vaṅga, and Gauḍa (Bengal), defeating Shaktas, Pashupatas, Baudhas, and Kshapaṇakas (Jainas) (Shankara Digvijaya 15.166–185) … He also went to Badrinatha and Kedaranatha later (Shankara Digvijaya 16). The text tells us:

 

“The doctrine of brahmavidya that Shankara preached, which confers liberation through the elimination of all duality, reigns victorious over the country – from Rameshvaram in the south, where Rama built his bridge dividing the seas, to the northern boundaries marked by the Himalaya mountains which bowed down with its peaks to Shiva at the time of the conquest of the Tripuras; and from the eastern mountains where the sun rises to those of the west where it sets.” (Shankara Digvijaya 6.106–07)

The culmination, as it were, of these advaitic travels was, we are told, all the way in north Kashmir … at the renowned Sharada piṭha (16.186–195) … today in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. We know independently from the 12th-century history of Kashmir, Kalhaṇa’s Rajataraṅgiṇi, that the Sharada piṭha, the seat of the goddess Shakti-Saraswati, was a pilgrimage of subcontinental renown and draw in the 8th century CE. Al Beruni also informs us that it continued to be among the top three shrines of the entire Hind in the 11th century.

 

The Shankara Digvijaya narrates:

 

“In the world, Jambudvipa is the most famous region. In that region, Bharata excels all others. In Bharata, Kashmir is the most famous place. For there, it is said, that Mother Sharada is present. In that region, there is a temple with four gates dedicated to Sharada. Within is the Throne of Omniscience. . .. Scholars from the east, west and north, who could prove their omniscience, have in the past opened the three gates pertaining to their respective directions. It is said that till now there has been no learned man from the south who could open the southern gate.” (16.54–61)

Note how the symbolic unity of Bharatavarsha’s directions as coming together in Kashmir is self-consciously stated here. Hearing this, Shankara headed towards Kashmir and successfully passed the test that the goddess Saraswati herself set him, and thereafter he ascended the sarvajñapitha.

 

Commemorating this association with Kashmir appears to be the 8th-century Shankaracharya temple, a landmark till today in Srinagar city, built atop a hill at the site of the old temple of Jyeshṭheshvara, which is said in the Rajataraṅgiṇi (I. 124) to have been founded by a descendant of Mauryan King Ashoka circa 2nd century BCE. Shankara’s connection with Kashmir and his strong local memory there indicates the remarkable centrality of the far north of India to the imagination of its far south and vice versa, pointing again to coherent territorial assumptions… corresponding to the extent of India as it was mapped in premodernity.

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In the 11^th century, the Arab traveller Abu Raihan Al Beruni in his Kitab ul Hind, describes India (‘Al Hind’) thus: “Limited in the South by the above mentioned Indian Ocean, and on all three other sides by the lofty mountains, the waters of which flow down to it” … We come across Bharata kshetra or Bharata khanda in southern Jambudvipa in Jaina cosmological literature as well from this early medieval period.

 

There are still more examples: In the 14^th century, Indo-Persian poet Amir Khusrau in his Nuh Sipihr (3.5.69-72) resoundingly speaks of Hind as his watan (nation) and cites Hind’s dozen diverse languages (hindawi) to include Sanskrit, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada and Tamil. His understanding of Hind, then, was co-extensive with this entire area peopled by these languages.

 

Further, throughout the same chapter 3, Khusrau praised Hind as the one country that was paradise on earth (firdaus) and superior to other countries thanks to its temperate climate, its abundant flora, and so on … and also because of its classical language of learning, Sanskrit, which he describes as a pearl amongst pearls. According to Khusrau, the intellectual wealth of Hind was incomparable, and the world’s scholars came to India to gain knowledge whereas Indians did not need to go to the world for the same. He goes on to name all the knowledge systems that thrived in India, traditions of wisdom (danish) and philosophy (hikmat) including logic, astronomy, mathematics, and the physical sciences. Khusrau affirms that India invented the numerals (today ironically known as Arabic numerals!) especially the zero, and also the game of chess (shatranj). He writes:

 

“There cannot be a greater teacher than the way of life of the people here.

It is the gift of the almighty, this cultural environment, is very rare in other countries that

If perchance any Iranian Greek or Arab comes by

He will not lack for anything

Because they will treat him as their own!”

 

This son of a Turkish settler from Uzbekistan clearly knew and admired his adopted country!

 

Then, in the 16^th century, the famed Mughal historian Abul Fazl wrote in the Ain i Akbari: “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, Hindustan obtains peace from the alien raiders.” Note the reference to Kabul also resonates with Ptolemy and Xuan Zang. Interestingly, however, Fazl claims that Hindustan also included Sarandip (Sri Lanka), Achin (in Sumatra), Maluk (Malaya), Malagha (Malacca) and many islands “so that the sea cannot really demarcate its limits”. He probably referred to the spread of Indic culture here.

 

Fazl, much like Khusrau, further writes of the inhabitants of Hindustan: “The people of this country are God-seeking [all acclaim the oneness of God], generous-hearted, friendly to strangers, pleasant-faced, of broad forehead, patrons of learning, lovers of asceticism, inclined to justice, contented, hard-working and efficient. True to salt, truth-seeing, and attached to loyalty.”

 

Contemporary 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, is staggering evidence, over an enormous span of time and variety of contexts, of 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 Bharata across the centuries by Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Jains, by residents as well as foreign travellers, by pilgrims, poets and chroniclers, should have a sobering effect on modern debates that deny traditions of continuity where they may exist in an ancient living civilization like India even amid much historical movement and change.