Arjun Mahey: Alexander in India
Arjun Mahey in the Outlook Traveller, June 2002. Outlook Traveller is a Tourist supplement of the Outlook magazine. Originally titled The Discovery Of India.
Ultra Auroram et Gangem. That, according to Juvenal, poet at the court of the Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar, was where India was situated. Beyond the Dawn and Ganges
Juvenal could have been speaking for all European antiquity.
Today the exotic centres of the known world lie largely in Anglo-America. Most perfume bottles carry the exalted tag of New York, London, Paris. But the fact is, it was not always thus; not until very recently in the vast spread of human history.
For antiquity, India was an enormous museum of marvels, and chiefly of marvellous creatures. The compiler Diogenes Laertes speaks of gymnosophists and magis, while Pharasmenes, in an apocryphal letter to the Emperor Hadrian, records with some horror a race of Indian women with "tusks like a boar's, hair down to their ankles, and the tails of oxen on their behinds." They are also 13 feet tall, beautiful, with marble-white bodies, and have camel-like feet and donkey-like teeth.
This twin tune about India, of wisdom and composite monsters, was one that could be heared in Europe through all antiquity right up to the middle ages. It is surprising that despite this, the usually intrepid Greeks and Romans had no desire to travel to India. Even Alexander, the lone figure in European antiquity to try, fell back defeated, leaving no trace of his arrival and departure in any Indian text, though he did bring back with his retreat a legacy of wondrous tales and bizarre legends which were intervowen into the millennium long tradition of the Alexander Romances. They ranged in the second millennium from the French Romances to Persian Sikander Namas. Throughout this geographically illiterate phase in the world's history, nobody knew where India was. Ultra Auroram et Gangem was as close as they got.
It was otherwise for China, or Persia for that matter. Chinese travellers, more resolute than their European kin, travelled to India151;considered west of China151;on foot, impelled largely by a religious quest for the land of the Buddha which they always found. At least one consequence of the journeys of Huein Tsang, Fa Hein, I-Tsing, and a host of lesser Chinese monks, was a massive Sino-Indian undertaking: a good 6000 Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese from the Sanskrit. It was clearly the most difficult of bilingual transformation the human mind is capable of, and without question the largest act of translation in any part of the world during antiquity. They were rapidly followed by Islamic intellectuals, usually trailing in the footsteps of some marauding tribal king or other. The best known of them, the Ghaznavid king Mahmud, was accompanied by al'Biruni, whose 11th-century masterwork on India, the Ta'ri'k al-Hind or Kitab al-Hind (Alberuni's India in the English translation), remains an exemplary account of pre-modern South Asia.
The first maps in which India figures in Christian or Islamic Europe are tiny, notebook sized prints, usually tapestries. Invariably India (and the Ganges, frequently one of the 4 rivers of Paradise) is upper-most, cheek by jowl—and sometimes overlapping—with Eden. Above Eden, which represents the eastern limit of the world, a mystical Christ hangs in mid-air, no doubt signifying his lineage from Paradise, and blending the Tree of Adamic Knowledge with his Crucifix. The first such known map is the English Psalter Map (4 by 6 inches) which supposedly hung in King Henry III's bedroom; the best known is the Hereford Mappa Mundi.
Islamic scholars from India sometimes claimed that Paradise was in India, or on the droplet island to its south, Serendip, where Adam was created and where the imminent premise of Mohammad became possible. Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka still bears that name. No less than for the Christians who had moved away from classical monstermirroring, and for whom India was the land of Prester John), for certain Muslims India was sacred for its early divine promise of deliverance through the Qu'ran which, though made manifest in Arabia, was given its potential existence simultaneously with Adam.
It would be too much to say that the Muslims or the Christians came to India in the same religious spirit as the Buddhists did earlier, but it is certainly not a small part of their motivation, which was chiefly plunder or trade, but included proselytisation and a desire to persuade the natives to return to the fold.
The curious conquistadors of Europe over a millenium, then, followed the promptings of the incurious Greeks. Columbus' voyage to India made possible the New World while the old one, further west (or east) remained unplundered. But soon after Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese managed to break the Arab trade monopoly with India and became the first European travelers to establish trade-contracts with India.
Treated with great courtesy, despite some rather violent displays on their part, the Portuguese managed for centuries to keep the rest of Europe out of the picture. They had come, and remained still, for the spice trade—being, as it were, wholly incapable of conquest pitched against a massive west-coast naval flotilla. Portuguese maps of India were a state secret. One could only see them in Portugal under the most severely controlled conditions; tampering with, or stealing them was treasonous and death was the expected result.
Yet the Spanish and the British stole a map and, with it, the Portuguese stranglehold over India. The Italian cartographer Bartholomeo copied a secret map in Lisbon and sold a copy to the impoverished Christopher Columbus, who then used it to persuade Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain to finance his lunatic venture to find a route westward to India. (No other monarch was willing). Needless to add, the Spanish royal couple agreed; the rest, of course, is history. Over the next few centuries English trade turned to plunder and thence to crafted extraction and hence to the tired story of Empire and its consequences. India's exotic days in the travel limelight were over, but they had lasted for two and a half millenia, which had given it more than its fair share of the world's attention.
Arjun Mahey in the Outlook Traveller, June 2002