Book Review: INDIANS by Namit Arora

 

INDIANS

by Namit Arora 

Pages- 250+

Year Published -2020 

A captivating reconstruction of India’s civilization since the faint stirrings of history to present times penned with the keen avidity and exuberance of an explorer - one awestruck and magically charmed by the immensity and magnificence of grandeur revealed by ruins of lost cities. 

The writer, Namit Arora, is curious, what caused ancient cities, lampposts of world civilisation, to be lost to antiquity. In pursuit of this yen he goes globetrotting till the wanderlust brings him to India and culminates in this excellent book - ‘Indians : a brief history of a civilisation’. 

History is a much travelled highway. And as present dissolves into past the highway keeps getting longer, the traffic denser. Many wannabe historians take to it. Their freewheeling approach unencumbered by structured thought processes of the subject discipline has its own allure, a whiff of freshness, rendering the storytelling immensely readable, appealing and  likely to have a broader outreach.  

It is important, he writes, to understand ‘What happened in the past and why did it end’. Contemporary India is reappraising its ‘ place in the new world in new ways’. And ‘how we see our past is increasingly shaping our idea of India and where we want to go as a society.’ He is therefore impelled almost as a bounden duty to ferret out  ‘continuity and dead ends between India’s past and its contemporary society.’ 

He journeys to Dholavira, a Harappan site in the Rann of Kucch with an extensive water management system ; Nagarjunasagar lake under which is submerged the ruins of Vijayapuri, the Ikshvaku capital, host to  a melange of religions, the only Indians to raise memorial pillars for prominent people; Nalanda, the Buddhist university with an active outreach to foreign lands; Khajuraho , famous for explicit erotica as decorative carvings in temples  ; Hampi, the glittering capital of  Vijayanagar empire, ‘the best provided city in the contemporary world’ according to the Portuguese traveller, Domingo Paes; Varanasi, the cultural legatee of ancient Kashi.

While others are truly lost cities , modern Varanasi isn’t. It, however, the writer feels is far adrift from the sparkle and splendour of the syncretic cultural ethos of Kashi scripted in our annals of history. Thomas Babington Macaulay - the one credited with proposing a cadre of Brown Sahibs - found the city in 1830s ‘ a labyrinth of lofty alleys rich with shrines and minarets and balconies and carved oriels to which the sacred apes cling by hundred .The trader could scarcely make his way through the press of mendicants not less holy bulls! Along the river lay great fleet of vessels laden with rich merchandise. From the looms of Benares went forth the most delicate silks that adorned the bells of St James and Versailles.’ Varanasi has not only  moved immeasurably beyond ancient ‘Kashi’, it has even lost its socio-economic moorings of 1830s ; in essence it is as lost a city as the other five. 

Distilling a civilizational span of  5000 years into 250 odd pages, a span in which the very identity of the land transitioned from Meluhha to Aryavarta to Hind to Hindustan and finally to India with concomitant transformations in character and breadth of its cultural milieu is a hell of a lot of things to condense ! Namit Arora’s improvisation is to flit from summit to summit -six lost cities separated in historical time and space that were high watermarks of civilization and bedazzled rest of India by the glimmer of their cultural opulence. That leaves him with sufficient space to vividly flesh out  the elegant richness and grandeur of civilizational efflorescence. With facile eloquence he breathes life into dead ruins, even manages to evoke nostalgia for bygone eras. I, with just a passing acquaintance with history, remained hooked and fully immersed in the story unfolding. 

He quotes tellingly from memoirs of prominent Firangis including  Megasthenes, Alberuni, and Marco Polo who lived a while or travelled through India. They inject the  disinterested outsider perspective on the nature and rhythm of contemporary life. Many vignettes of social life chronicled by them sharply repudiate official versions , or refute bases on which alternate versions of history are peddled by Hindutva forces. For instance, contrary to their assertions sati was in vogue among  Hindu elites much  before muslim rule. Alberuni documented it in 11th century bce itself. The puritan Hindu would be outraged by Abdur Razzaq chronicling the ‘elaborateness of their (Vijayanagar) brothels’, or by Barbosa’s observation that when Vijayanagar goes to war, courtesans accompany warriors ( aka Japanese ‘comfort girl’?). Contrary to Mughal India being dubbed ‘sone ki chidiya’ ,Francois Bernier finds that in Delhi of ‘ two or three who wear decent apparel there are 7/8 poor, ragged, miserable beings’. Some of their observations are however bizarre and fantastical. Herodotus tells that Indian men ‘naturally produce black semen’. Megasthenes saw people with ears of a dog and feet turned backwards. 

The chapter on Khajuraho is especially insightful. It demystifies two historical conundrums. How could a people given to frowning at pleasures of the flesh not only tolerate but also appreciate  the sexually explicit depictions that pass for hard core porn today ? Capt Burt who chanced upon these temples was scandalised enough to coin the phrase ‘ecclesiastical erections’. The other quandary, how did Brahminism morph into the amorphous, pan India faith, Hinduism, one that has the veneer of Vedic religiosity overlaid on myriad substrates of folk rites, rituals and deities. The unraveling of these enigmas is enlightening. 

Much of our past is still with us. The book points to many cultural continuities and dead ends. To name a few, the confluence of many sub-cultures into a unity is a bequest from the past, though the writer feels it under threat. The age of ‘kutuhal shalas’ is no more. Ayodhya in Huang Tsang’s time had many more Buddhist monasteries than temples, now none. 

A  muted refrain ripples through the narrative. Many current re-evaluations of our past, the writer opines, are premised  on dodgy selection of facts intended to make history a handmaiden of political ideologues. They ‘put the cart of interpretation before the horse of facts’.  The writer is in the predicament of sant Kabir, 

Saints, I see the world is mad

If I tell the truth they rush to beat me

If I tell a lie they trust me. 

As I sign off a final thought strikes me- is there a hidden symbolism somewhere ? The narrative opens with Death of our earliest civilization, Dholavira, only to end in the city of Death where the whisper of ‘taraka mantra’ is in the air-Varanasi. Maybe, maybe not ! Over all histories is superimposed the one immutable, universal history of existence— ‘the final oneness -from earth to earth, from ashes to ashes, from dust to dust’.

A refreshing and engagingly told foundational history- one reimagined perceptively and with a touch of wistfulness , empathy and humanity, ; not cerebral but pretty educative. I profited much from it.