Globalization has polarized people into nativists and cosmopolites. Nowhere is that truer than in India. The nativist reaction in India to profound technological, commercial and social changes of today takes refuge in the myth of an unchanging, hermetically sealed, and eternal civilization. Audrey Truschke’s 600-page survey of five millennia of history shows how misguided this myth is, while explaining why it has triumphed politically in recent years.
Recent historical and archaeological research demonstrates how India, contrary to the nativist narrative, found itself connected to outside cultural and commercial currents, thanks to its strategic position between South East Asia, China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Africa. Truschke reminds us that phenomena as traditional as marigold flower garlands or chili paste represent India’s debt to the seafaring Portuguese. India exported as well. Indus Valley traders travelled to Afghanistan to acquire lapis lazuli and carried it by ship to Sumer and Ur, adding in their own coveted cornelian and cowry shells. People also came and went, riding into the sub-continent over the Hindu Kush, or sailing away to Indochina and Indonesia.
In such an environment, India has never been as homogeneous or as unchanging as imagined by the nativists. For much of its history, despite the cultural significance of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Sanskrit language, and Brahmin science, many other traditions vigorously competed for cultural prominence. India’s greatest empire before the Mughals was that of Ashoka, a Buddhist king. The common practice of vegetarianism did not proceed from the Vedas, whose celebrants enjoyed a barbecue, but from the Jains, whose teachings were contemporary with early Buddhism. Paradoxically Buddhism almost completely disappeared in India proper, while Jainism survived as a small but emulated community. No one, looking at India in the year 1000 CE could have foreseen the emergence of modern India as a Hindu country, as any notion of Hinduism did not exist at the time. How did this come about?
Truschke unpicks these developments by focusing not on the elites and the dynasties, but on the stories of individual groups whose relationship to the Vedas or the Brahmins was distant or ambiguous. This makes her book a worthwhile complement to Romila Thapar’s 1965 classic text, with its more traditional chronological approach. The focus on India’s myriad communities provides a more granular, kaleidoscopic picture of the past. In this telling women, Dalits, Adivasis, Jains and many others share the stage with maharajas and nawabs.
Women appear early on as the authors of the Therigatha, a collection of poetry by Buddhist nuns. The 19th century witnessed the inspiring careers of Anandibai, who studied medicine in the USA, and Pandita Ramabai, a stalwart tribune of women’s emancipation. Not all women benefited from modernity. In the 20th century traditional female artists, the tawaifs and the devadasis were forced off the stage in favour of high caste women, in order to promote the Bharatanatyam as India’s national dance form.
Sometimes, in her attempt to give voice to the common man, the author sounds like an earnest undergraduate: “Urban life concentrated wealth and thus enabled inequality to blossom.” This is certainly true, but one could also argue only the Adivasis, the forest dwellers, enjoyed real equality, and most Indians would not have wanted to remain hunter-gatherers. About the builders of the Taj Mahal, she would have us keep in mind the “non-elite groups (eg, laborers), who collectively built and maintained the Mughal Empire … [W]ithout laborers—who were often illiterate and almost never speak for themselves in historical texts—there would have been no Mughal Empire,” adding little perhaps to our understanding of either the Mughals or the working classes.
Cumulatively, however, these stories from the bottom up help trace the way in which modern Indian identities emerged from the pre-modern ones. Islam and later Christianity altered people’s perception of who they were. A 17th-century Sinhalese poet, in the shadow of Dutch colonialism, criticized his fellow Buddhists who indulged in syncretic practices, arguing for a more distinct Buddhist identity. Forest dwelling people belonging to local traditions, not associated with the Vedas or the Puranas, were attracted by the expanding urban economy of Bengal (notwithstanding Truschke’s concerns about inequality) and embraced Islam under the Mughals This, not conversion from a still inchoate Hinduism, resulted in eastern Bengal becoming majority Muslim.
Still other groups began to imitate the upper castes, like the warriors and merchants of central India, who adopted vegetarianism and Krishna devotion, hitherto not part of their tradition. The concept of “Hinduism”, originally a Persian exonym, began to crystalize when separate groups like the Lingayats (Shaivites) and Vaishnavites who “long considered themselves distinct”, began to argue about which of the two practiced the correct form of devotion. Diverse, high-caste communities of Chitpavans, Devarsis and Maharashtrian Brahmins, who originally would not eat together, began to consider themselves as equals.
On top of this, the British further crystalized identities by promulgating a Hindu law code, based on the Laws of Manu and applying these to all cases where the protagonists were “not Muslim” (there were even instances where people did not know if they were Muslim or Hindu). So, many peoples who never considered themselves Hindu, notably the forest dwellers and tribals, found themselves so identified in the eyes of colonial law. The British also categorized the several thousand endogamous groups into the hierarchy of the four castes. These newly-minted castes often argued that they should be higher-ranked than the British assumed. (It is however now common for groups to seek recognition as lower caste, the better to obtain reserved government jobs.) The jostling of all these competing interests together with national aspirations for a more homogenous society, explain the emergence of the nativist movements, longing for a simpler and more coherent identity, with a will to impose one by force on the recalcitrant. Modernity itself, with mass media and transportation, enables the rise of an aggressive, dominant identitarian discourse.
In any survey, the need for concision leads to some controversial formulations. The author is oddly even-handed by writing about “China’s humiliation of Indian defenses during a 1962 border dispute”, without alerting the reader that Nehru perceived this unprovoked attack as naked aggression. She has Indira Gandhi “intervening in December 1971, hitting East and West Pakistan”, without mentioning Pakistan’s earlier preemptive (and unsuccessful) air raid on India. Finally, she says India initiated a police action in Hyderabad in 1948, but does not address the reign of terror of the Razakars against the majority population. Critics may seize on these as evidence of anti-Indian bias. I merely mention them to add caution to what is otherwise a pretty fair and painstakingly bias-free discussion of 5,000 years of history.
Truschke has been targeted by the right-wing American Hindu nationalists, who argue, absurdly, that only a South Asian has the right to write about South Asian History. Indeed as a victim of modern Hindu extremism, Truschke has a solid foundation for explaining how this movement rose to prominence. At the same time, Truschke marks herself off from the intellectual left, arguing that much recent history writing has overemphasized theories like Post-Colonialism over coherent narrative, with a loss of relevance to the educated public. Neither bias nor readability is an issue with the present volume. Readers will appreciate the vast scope of Indian history, while gaining a fuller understanding of what makes modern India appear simultaneously so distinctive and multi-faceted.
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