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Summary: On the Left side of Indian History
Comment: Mr. Abraham Eraly's acidic views on current affairs and the various malaises that India presumably suffers from are well-known. This also makes him noticed in the left-leaning press circles. He has earlier written a book on Mughal period of Indian history. The present volume goes back to beginning of history (Genesis) and covers the period upto Alexander's invasion.
When I picked up this book, I had great expectations. Some of these were met. Mr. Eraly offers a grand vision, and writes on a sweeping canvas. This book has therefore the makings of a good history for the general reader, containing mostly a gist of the current theories of Indian history.
Mr. Early begins the book with an overview of its geological history, talks about the Vedic period, and moves on to the Upanishads. He then moves to Buddhism (the gem in the lotus), and devotes considerable time and effort to it over four chapters. He closes the book with two chapters on the Kautilyan state, and Alexander's invasion.
The book often uses Biblical terms (genesis, savior, prophets), and essentially follows the religious developments in India, from Vedic times to the coming of Buddha. His choice of phrases is sometimes puzzling, often irreverent and inappropriate, and sometimes irrelevant as well. For instance, the composers of epics, and the Vedic seers are called 'Sanskrit writers' (p.9). Vedic seers and sages are mostly addressed as 'poets'. At one stage, he finds that the Vedic poet was `gloating' (p.25). This is of course based on the assumption that the Vedas are a set of historical poems or ballads, rather than being religious or inspired spiritual texts in verse, as most Hindus hold.
Some of his interpretations are misleading: year and rain are denoted by two different words in Sanskrit (varsh and varsha), and not by the same word, varsha. The Aryan invasion theory, and the separation of India into Aryan and Dravidian 'races', continues to influence his writing. According to him, India has essentially been populated by migrations and invasion. At the same time, we are informed that everyone descended from a single African woman (Eve?) who lived about 150,000 years ago, and therefore, language and race are superficial.
His dour nature, and general annoyance with anything Indian, also shows up in the terms and phrases he quotes with approval: for instance, in Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, the 'Big Brother was everywhere'! There was a 'terrible efficiency' about the Indus civilization! The houses in Indus civilization were characterized by 'grey, joyless regimentation, and bleak functionality'! Street doors were 'tucked furtively into side alleys'.
The famous bust of the Indus priest-king, normally characterized as having a serene expression, appears to having an 'air of sullen authority' to Mr. Eraly. At another place, he calls it 'smug, faintly disdainful' expression. The famous dancing girl has an expression which is at once 'saucy and sullen'. Either Mr. Eraly means something else by 'sullen' than what common people understand, or the dancing girl managed to achieve an impossible expression. It is more likely that Mr. Eraly's leftist friends have given him a 'sullen' view of life, which keeps interfering with his work.
The Indus society was 'passive' and 'conservative'. Personal hygiene was a 'fetish'! Standardization of bricks was 'not entirely a good thing' as it stifled innovation and progress! He is also unable to see his own contradictions: though Indus valley was not innovative, and chose to ignore the 'superior techniques' of Sumerians, the civilization nevertheless exported a lot of its production, and had large crafts industries! And of course, Mr. Eraly finds that 'rigor mortis' soon set into the Indus society.
His information is also a little dated. He states (p.21) that at its height the Indus civilization covered an area of 1.3 million square kilometers - actually, this is now known to be 2.5 million square kilometers (1600 km from north to south, and equally from east to west, p.270, Dawn of Indian Civilization, ed. G.C. Pande, PHISPC). The same problem arises with his estimation of the lifespan of the civilization (800 years, 2500-1700 BC, p.21), whereas modern scholars project this as being from 4000 BC to 1400 BC (Pande, pp.275-276).
The paperback edition has very little space in the margins for comments. The text is also close together, and this makes it difficult to underline passages. The paper is of relatively poor quality, and is likely to become yellow rather quickly.
Buy this book if you would like to know how the Left views Indian history.
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Summary: A useful introduction
Comment: This is, on the whole, a very readable introduction to the earliest history of India, though in a few places it is a little dense, while in other places the quotations from Indian texts are perhaps rather too long.
The book begins with an account of the geological formation of the subcontinent, itself a fascinating story, well told. Equally interesting is what we can deduce from archaeology about its earliest, the Indus or Harappan, civilization, from ca.2250 to ca. 1550 BC: its pictographic texts have not yet been deciphered, and little of them survived anyway. The Aryan invasions submerged, without totally drowning, that civilization, and produced that astonishing corpus of the Vedic hymns to their deities, whose transmission, on the insistence of the Brahmins or priestly caste, was entirely oral for nearly a thousand years. During that time the Brahmins were challenged by Jainism and by Buddhism. For Eraly Buddhism is the "gem" in the Hindu lotus, and he gives a good and sympathetic account of what the Buddha taught. Buddhism received an enormous boost when the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka (3rd c. BC) espoused and propagated that faith throughout an empire that covered almost the whole of the subcontinent. By that time there were already schisms in Buddhism. Although Ashoka insisted on tolerance towards all the Indian religions, he himself played a significant role in making Theravada Buddhism the orthodox version. At that point Eraly's story ends, and so we do not learn from it anything about the rise of Mahayana Buddhism from the 1st c. BC onwards, or about what caused Buddhism largely to collapse in India and to find new foci in Sri Lanka, Tibet, Burma, China, Indochina, Thailand, Japan and Korea.
Eraly gives quite a detailed account of Alexander the Great's invasion of North-Western India in the 4th c BC. The Hellenic influence on India is not generally well known, and there is also a section in the book devoted to Greek accounts of Indian civilization. The precise narrative about Alexander's campaign in India makes quite a contrast with the vagueness which surrounds dates and details of other important aspects of India's early history. Indeed it was not until 1913 that historians discovered that "the Beloved of the Gods" who had caused so many Buddhist texts to be inscribed on rocks or pillars throughout India was the Emperor Ashoka: until that time he had been merely a name about whom hardly anything was known.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Highly readable
Comment: It must be pointed out that data on Ancient India seems to be rather scarce if compared to other civilizations (such as China , Egypt or Summer). I had tried a couple of times to find a book on India, informative and easy to read, and I had failed. Abraham Eraly's Gem in the Lotus happens to be the book, able to expose available knowledge without making you fall asleep. So I daresay that this is a book that can be savoured by the professional historian and educated layperson alike.
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