Indian history is
straightforward. In the distant beginning there was the Indus Valley
Civilization of roughly 3000 BCE that morphed into early, middle and late
Harappan lasting from 2500 BCE to 1900 BCE. Then came the Vedic period (roughly
1700 BCE to 500 BCE). This was the period in which the Rig Veda, one of the
four canonical texts of Hinduism, was composed. It is a remarkable fact that
everything we know about the Harappan culture is archeological—there are no surviving texts—while
everything we know about the Vedic period is literary—there are virtually no surviving artifacts.
The next great empire was
the Mauryan (322-185 BCE), one of the largest in the world, at the time
dwarfing any other on the Indian subcontinent. After the Mauryans we have the
Gupta Empire (320-700), the so-called Golden Age of India, the period when the great
poet Kalidasa wrote his epics. After the Guptas we have the late classical age
(700-1192), a period of great economic growth when India controlled a quarter
of the world’s worth. Then the Muslims arrived. The two major Muslim periods
were the Sultanate from 1192 to 1526 and the Mughals from 1526 to 1757. Then
came the British and then in 1947 independence.
This is just a brief
sketch. It leaves out
several hundred intervening dynasties in which what's-his-name defeats whozit
at the battle of whatchamacallit and whozit doing likewise to what's-his-name's
second son and so on and so forth. In the course of all of this every so often
someone would pause to raise a monument to whozit. There you have it in a
nutshell. Nothing could corroborate better the adage that history is one damned
thing after another.
The buildings I saw on a recent trip to India, among them the tomb of Humayun, the Jama Mosque, the Qutb Minar tower, the
India Gate, the Red Fort--as it happens all of them in Delhi--are like all such monumental buildings anywhere in the
world. They are the bookmarks of history. Sultans, emperors, generals go to
war. Soldiers die. Someone builds a monument. We get to see it.
Are there any lessons to
be learned from this 4500-year sweep of history aside from the obvious one that
war has been the basso ostinato of homo sapiens over which the highest—as well as the lowest—of human achievements
have been built? In India among the highest one would certainly have to count
the temples at Khajuraho, Mughal architecture, the concept of “zero,” the Kama Sutra and the
discovery by Indian astronomers that the earth spun on its own axis. And the
lowest? Well, the caste system comes immediately to mind.
Although discrimination by caste is illegal in India, the fact of caste remains the elephant in the room. Every guide I met found an opportunity to assure me that he or she was a Brahmin. Or a Vaishya. No one ever admitted to being a Dalit.
The harshest thing about the caste system is its permanence. Once an untouchable, always an untouchable. In America a poor boy can grow up to be president. In India a poor boy can grow up to be a poor man.
Now that caste is illegal that may change. But the pace to this outsider seems glacial.
