The Penguin History of Early India by Romila Thapar

Author:Romila Thapar
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141937427
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-07-20T21:00:00+00:00

Cultural Interactions

Although coin hoards from the Roman maritime trade were more evident in southern India, the impact of Greco-Roman ideas and artefacts was obvious in the north. This was doubtless due t6 the longer association of north-western India as a neigbour of Hellenistic culture. Exchange of merchandise led inevitably to an exchange of ideas. At one level, words, largely of a technical kind, were borrowed. At another level the aesthetic impact is seen, particularly in Buddhist art. Buddhism may have been more popular with the Hellenistic Greeks because it provided easier access to Indian society than Brahmanism. Coin legends in Greek point to the continued use of the language in addition to Prakrit and Sanskrit. Indian folk-tales and fables travelled westwards and collections such as the Panchatantra were subsequently translated into neighbouring languages, appearing in European literature under various guises that perhaps included some versions of Aesop’s fables. Chaturanga, a game named after the four traditional wings of the Indian army and played by four players, became popular in west Asia and evolved into chess.

One of the enduring results of this contact was the fairly detailed references to India in the various works of the Mediterranean world, such as Diodorus’s Library of History, Strabo’s Geography, Arrian’s Indika, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the Periplus Maris Erythraei, and Ptolemy’s Geography. The first three claimed to be quoting at length from earlier but lost writings on India, such as the Indica of Megasthenes. That the supposed quotations from Megasthenes were paraphrases becomes clear from the variations in specific statements from the first three texts. The others were writing afresh. These works began to supersede the accounts associated with Alexander’s campaign. India was now visible in the Greco-Roman world not merely as a land of the fabulous, but more realistically as a place with potential for trade and with traditions of knowledge that interested Mediterranean scholars. But despite this the image of its being ‘the Other’ wascontinually reinforced. Little attempt was made to correct the errors in the Indica of Megasthenes, although there was now far more familiarity with things Indian. The seven divisions of Indian society became axiomatic for these authors.

The most direct and visible interface was in the realm of art, with the emergence of Gandhara art in Afghanistan and north-west India. Gandhara art evolved as a mixture of styles, one of which was the Greco-Roman style of Alexandria, from where sculpture in bronze and stucco travelled along the west Asian trade routes to influence Hellenistic and Indian models nearer home. The emergence of Gandhara art coincided with the introduction of multiple celestial beings and heavens in Buddhist theology, which lent themselves ideally to manifestations in sculpture and painting. The diverse influences affecting Gandhara art suggest that it should not be taken as a uniform style and should be subdivided according to its diversity.

Indian ideas can also be traced in some west Asian belief systems and particularly in the doctrines of the Manichaeans, Gnostics and Neo-Platonists. The last of these had

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