Book review - India Discovered

India Discovered by John Keay

This fascinating book starts in 1783, around the arrival of Sir William Jones and Colin Mackenzie to the shores of India and covers roughly a century and half of exploration, discovery and research on India. I thoroughly enjoyed the brief volume (211 pages).

The book starts with the arrival of Sir William Jones in India, and describes how he falls in love with India, Sanskrit and nature. Jones was a lawyer, legislator, linguist and a keen student of mathematics, astronomy and sciences.  The original motivation for his trip to India was the generous salary that would let him retire in comfort. However, his curiosity and quest for learning tied him to India and made him learn Sanskrit, collect manuscripts and get tutored in the Sanskrit classics that were until then remained in the oral tradition. He translated Kalidasa’s Shakuntala to English.

Jones writes:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots and verbs and forms of grammar, can possibly be produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all without believing them to have sprung from some common source.

While this sounds self-evident now, it was a phenomenal intellectual leap at that time. This theory later led to the study and creation of a classification called the Indo-European family of languages.

Jones’ work helped date Alexander’s visit to India precisely, and placed the references to Pataiputra and Chandragupta Maurya, which will later help piece together, the Mauryan history and Ashoka’s life.

The hero of the chapters “Thus spake Ashoka” and, “Black and Time Stained rocks” is James Princep. This story starts in 1819. The chapter is a thrilling story of how Pricep associates William Jones’ work with subsequent discovery of rock carvings and numismatic clues. This fascinating bit of history was explored further in the book “Ashoka, the search for India’s last emperor”. Click here to read my review of that book.

Princep’s last achievement was the creation of two plates showing the evolution of the modern Devanagari script from Ashoka Brahmi scripts, a tool that has helped archeologists since.

The book then moves on to the exploration of the Buddhist history of India by Alexander Cunningham, the discovery of Ajanta, and Ellora caves, comparisons with European art, Greek influence on Gandhara art. The chapters are a wonderful read that describe the realization of the composite and heterogeneous nature of Indian art, the Jain and Buddhist art that are very different from the Moghul art, the initial reaction of the Europeans when they encountered the Khajuraho temples (which they thought was ‘A little warmer than necessary’!).

The next section describes how Sir John Marshall and Alexander Cunningham discover Mohanejo-daro, Harappa and the origins of the Indian civilization. Who were the Indus valley people? One theory is that they were Dravidian people who were either overrun by the invading Aryans who went battled on the horseback and hence had a military advantage. Or were they wiped out a calamitous flood? Marshall didn’t draw conclusions as to the exact relationship of the Indus Valley civilization to the Aryans. A more recent book by Graham Hancock presents a well- argued theory on the timeline for Indus valley, the Vedas and the Aryans. I found both these chapters and the Hancock arguments fascinating.

The story of the birth of Survey of India is fascinating as well. Early surveyors were really military folks on specific assignments to map the terrain for to assist the military operations. Amazingly, they had time for interest in archeology, ethnology and art exploration.  The first self-appointed full time surveyor was William Lambton. Lambton, his team and his successor George Everest braved the weather, health hazards, leeches, tigers and deep forests to undertake one of the greatest mathematical exercises known to mankind at that time – surveying and triangulating the whole territory of India. This, Keay explains in greater detail in The Great Arc.

There is a chapter talks of how Colonel James Tod is moved by the story of princess  Krishna Kumari who is poisoned by her father as the only way out of a desperate political deadlock. Tod then goes on to chronicle the history of the Rajputs, strikes a great rapport with the Rajputs and their subjects alike and documents his pilgrimage to the Dilwara  complex In Mount Abu.

The curiosity of the Brits extended to the flora fauna, and the tribes of India. A noteworthy discovery by one Dr. Wallich is  the Assam tea, which he rightly predicts would be a huge success back home.

To wrap up, the characters in the book display a great deal of tenacity, objectivity and quest for knowledge. What would motivate and Englishman to learn Sanskrit, explore the animals and plants of an unfamiliar region, or cultivate a curiosity in an emperor who lived two thousand years ago? Why would he argue people back home on whether a mountain that he saw could actually be taller than any in the Andes or Alps?

Folks in India have a black or white view of the British; the British are either the monsters who exploited the country, jailed Gandhi and killed innocent folks in Jalianwala Bagh; or they built the railways, gave India an administrative system, and made a nation out of a bunch of disconnected princely states. (Ok, made *three* nations). The heroes of the book provide an alternative view of British motives. I find the description of a few British characters who are genuinely curious and bent on learning fascinating. These folks spent a lifetime fighting against the challenges of a new country, the political vitriol from guys such as Lord Macaulay, or their own biases or their day jobs to advance something out of academic interest. They are inspiring for that reason alone.

A few other extracts from the book:

Keay on the role of the English in discovering and promoting the heritage of India

For every act of vandalism, there were several of conservation and for every paragraph of orientalist disparagement, there was a page of wide eyed wonder… On balance though, I believe that to the scholars of the Raj, India’s heritage came to represent not some antithetical ‘other’ to be denigrated and marginalized, but a spectacular survival with which they were anxious and proud to be associated, a jewel indeed, in the crown.

Warren Hastings on Gita and Mahabharat:

“I hesitate not to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality, of a sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind of a theology accurately corresponding to the Christian disposition, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental doctrines….

I should not fear to place, in opposition to the best French versions of the most admired passages of Iliad and Odyssey, or of the first and sixth books of our own Milton… the English translation of the Mahabharata. …

These will survive when the British dominion of India has long ceased to exist and when sources which once it yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.