The Greek Experience of India

From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks

Richard Stoneman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691185385
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grèce antique

An exploration of how the Greeks reacted to and interacted with India from the third to first centuries BCE When the Greeks and Macedonians in Alexander's army reached India in 326 BCE, they entered a new and strange world. They knew a few legends and travelers' tales, but their categories of thought were inadequate to encompass what they witnessed. The plants were unrecognizable, their properties unknown. The customs of the people were various and puzzling. While Alexander's conquest was brief, ending with his death in 323 BCE, the Greeks would settle in the Indian region for the next two centuries, forging an era of productive interactions between the two cultures. The Greek Experience of India explores the various ways that the Greeks reacted to and constructed life in India during this fruitful period.From observations about botany and mythology to social customs, Richard Stoneman examines the surviving evidence of those who traveled to India. Most particularly, he offers a full and valuable look at Megasthenes, ambassador of the King Seleucus to Chandragupta Maurya, and provides a detailed discussion of Megasthenes' now-fragmentary book Indica. Stoneman considers the art, literature, and philosophy of the Indo-Greek kingdom and how cultural influences crossed in both directions, with the Greeks introducing their writing, coinage, and sculptural and architectural forms, while Greek craftsmen learned to work with new materials such as ivory and stucco and to probe the ideas of Buddhists and other ascetics.Relying on an impressively wide variety of sources from the Indian subcontinent, The Greek Experience of India is a masterful account of the encounters between two remarkable civilizations.

PART I

First Impressions

1

Writing a Book about India

In India everything is done differently from the rest of the world. This will never change.

—BABUR (CITED IN DALRYMPLE 1998, 173)

Everyone who wrote about India preferred the marvellous to the true.

—STRABO 15.1.28

Hindus differ from us [Muslims] in everything which other nations have in common.

—AL-BIRUNI (SACHAU 1910, 17)

India is the inner state of every man.

—BILL AITKEN 1992, 194

Drawing aside the Curtain

An outsider writing a book about India faces a formidable problem, which is even greater today than it was for Megasthenes. Centuries, indeed millennia, of familiarity, or should one rather say unfamiliarity, with India have erected a series of curtains through which it is difficult to peer clearly. As great a writer as Carlo Levi confessed that he found India ‘impossible to describe’.¹ Every age has had its own picture of India, always from the vantage point of an observer who finds what he observes essentially alien. Yet the otherness of India exerts a pull, a fascination, which naturally results in a particularly strong distortion of reality to fit what the observer thinks he sees, wishes to see, or believes he ought to see. In order to understand how Greeks such as Megasthenes saw India, it is necessary to peel back these curtains or at least to be aware of the distorting, pixillating effect each separate one has on our field of vision.

I draw back, or at least identify, the curtains one by one, starting with the most recent.² I don’t know what your mental picture of India is, but there are a few things I was aware of before visiting the country. As I grew up in the sixties India came into my consciousness when the Beatles went there, bringing back an aura of joss-sticks and sitar music that infested our teenage rooms. A never-forgotten experience was a Ravi Shankar concert in Coventry Cathedral (I came away with the great man’s signature on a record sleeve), at which, after about a quarter of an hour, a friend leaned over to me and asked, ‘Has he finished tuning up yet?’ Growing maturity made me conscious of major political figures and events, and a general picture developed of a vast, crowded, untidy country, full of intellectuals and mystics, and bathed in startlingly brilliant colours.

This view of India can be traced as early as the 1930s. The central character of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge sought enlightenment (and acquired the skills of hypnosis) in India. A modern-day saint and mystic, after visiting the Elephanta caves and seeing the colossal heads of Brahma, Viṣṇu and Śiva, he ‘suddenly became aware of an intense conviction that India had something to give me that I had to have’. He enters a period of study with a swami given to such pronouncements as ‘By meditation on the formless one I found rest in the Absolute’.³

Anita Desai’s novel Return to Ithaca traces the experience of two lost Westerners trying to find meaning and their ‘true selves’ in India.⁴ Amrit Lal Vegad describes meeting a young French couple on an island in the Narmada: ‘what magical thread had drawn the young Frenchman and his wife across the seven seas to this deserted island in the Narmada? The hunger for beauty? Solitary meditation? Or an intense desire to escape the rat race of the West and immerse themselves in the peace of the East?’⁵ Even Indians can fall for the clichés about ‘escaping the West’, as depicted in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novel English, August, where the disquiet of the protagonist caught up in the need for a career still allows him to satirise the Englishman for whom it is all too easy: ‘John Avery … had sensed a country through the books and films of other climes, and had been moved to take a passage, only to be a little bewildered, and perhaps feel a little foolish.’⁶ Even The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel presents an India which catalyses spiritual change in all the characters.

Other writers become simply impatient with India. Arthur Koestler in 1960 devoted a journey to investigating the most extreme forms of mystical battiness, and judged all Indian thought by that measure. A tone of contempt suffuses his book. ‘The genuine mystic is entitled to state experiences and affirm convictions which contradict logic, science and common sense. But he is not entitled to borrow words which have a precise meaning in science and philosophy and roll them around in a game of Wonderland croquet with mobile hoops.’⁷ V. S. Naipaul seems to see nothing in India but human shit and tedious bureaucracy.⁸ Allen Ginsberg ignores the bureaucracy but substitutes photographs of mutilated limbs which for him apparently represent the essence of India.⁹ Undoubtedly more examples could be brought in to illustrate these and related reactions.

My studies of Alexander the Great increased my awareness of India, but only from the point of view of its would-be conqueror. This book is an attempt to see not just what Alexander saw, but also what his more studious companions had more time to see. Onesicritus, Megasthenes, Nearchus and the rest acquired a dubious reputation in antiquity as ‘liars’, as did their predecessors Herodotus and Ctesias, because no one in the Greek world could believe what they reported. This book aims to recover their observations and to test them against what we can know from an Indian point of view, as well as to identify the patterns in the curtains that prevented them too from seeing India clearly. They may, I hope, emerge as better reporters of what their informants told them than curmudgeons like Strabo took them for.

Curtain number two, for a British writer, must be the complex of attitudes associated with British imperial rule in India, which ended in 1947 (four years before I was born). It can be quite startling now to read the comments of some nineteenth-century writers, including major intellectuals like Thomas Macaulay and James Mill, on India as they saw it: the country was not fit for self-government, and so on. Even great thinkers like Hegel and Marx were blind to the qualities of India, defining the country as a place without history, because of its immersion in an immemorial ‘oriental’ stasis. It is true that historical works in India are hard to find: the distinguished scholar F. E. Pargiter wrote, quoting his predecessor Arthur A. Macdonell, ‘Ancient India has bequeathed to us no historical works. “History is the one weak spot in Indian literature. It is, in fact, non-existent”.’¹⁰ Hegel went a step further and made a value judgment out of this fact. ‘India has no history at all, at least no known history’, he wrote; ‘what we call its history is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society’.¹¹ Even Louis Dumont, author of the classic Homo Hierarchicus, doubts whether there is a history of India, a country and people immutable and indifferent to time.¹² Carlo Levi, more philosophically, saw India as a land of ‘time without action’: ‘What I have seen, with its infinite brilliant and multiform faces, is nothing more than the tiniest fragment of a boundless, limitless reality. Time flows as slowly as the sacred rivers that coil back on themselves in these grasslands’.¹³

Such expressions of bafflement are by no means always as hostile as Hegel’s comment sounds. But many of them are. Edward Said has collected plenty of examples of such attitudes, to which he gave the unfortunate descriptor ‘Orientalism’, in a casual insult to many scholars who are proud to call themselves orientalists.¹⁴ Others found Indian art no better than the work of ‘savages’; blinded by the classical ideal of Greek art, Sir George Birdwood wrote in 1910, à propos a Javanese statue of Buddha,

This senseless similitude, by its immemorial fixed pose, is nothing more than an uninspired brazen image, vacuously squinting down its nose to its thumbs, knees and toes. A boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as a symbol of pass...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Conventions
• Prologue: The Moon at Noon
• PART I. FIRST IMPRESSIONS
• PART II. MEGASTHENES’ DESCRIPTION OF INDIA
• PART III. INTERACTIONS
• Appendix: Concordance of the Fragments of Megasthenes
• Bibliography
• Index