The golden oldies

A thousand-page history of India’s Golden Age is old-fashioned in approach but intriguing all the same.

Here is a book to read in the mornings, and not late at night. It must be taken in small bites when fresh. Too much, and the palate grows quickly jaded. At night, as chapter after chapter of this 1,000-page history marches endlessly on, the flavour fades and it is difficult to resist the author’s own pessimism. After all, when he is telling you of a Golden Age that once was, and about the rigid and uncreative age that replaced it and that has, by implication, lasted till the present day, you know not to look forward to a happy ending or indeed any sort of climax.

Read it in the morning, and in bits, and you can take more pleasure in the nuggets plucked from historical sources — there on every page. Naturally the most eyecatching ones are in the chapter on “Kama’s Slaves”. (Even these are better read in the morning.) There is a nice pairing where first a woman describes in 10 poetic lines her man getting to third base, as it were, and then a man describes a similar moment in eight lines; in the first the lady participant modestly swoons, in the second she tosses the lotus from behind her ear at the lamp to extinguish it. Both are selected from an early medieval Sanskrit anthology, the Subhasita-ratnakosa. This is excellent erotica, charming rather than explicit like the temple carvings that nobody quite knows what to make of.

The honest, liberal pleasure in the here and the now, the ability to observe and compose based on a mix of the ideal and of experience, without the imposition of an arid morality or too many rules against nature — it reflects the spirit that Abraham Eraly says was typical of the Golden Age. Business, diplomacy, government and self-government, theatre, literature, science, intimate relations, agriculture, religion: in all these areas the Golden Age was one of openness, growth and advancement.

It has been a long time since any respectable academic historian spoke or wrote of a “golden age” in India. When historians seek to apply theory to history they must “interrogate” the sources from a materialist, postmodernist, subaltern, etc., perspective; they poke about for the hidden motors, like exploitation, feudalism, imperialism, class, or look for the truth behind the big picture and break every group into its components, down to the individual and even beyond. It is difficult to sustain a grand story (a “meta-narrative”) this way. Hence historians’ unwillingness to speak of a “golden age”, even if those years did see remarkable human works and insights.

Eraly is not an academic, he is a college lecturer. Each of the 55 chapters — plus two crucial chapters of “Overview” — reads like a well-polished lecture on an aspect of life and politics in ancient India. There are chapters on kings, dynasties and empires (unfortunately, these are the first few chapters and tedious to get through), on royal courts, tax collection, law and justice, war, village democracies, farming, mining, trade and shipping, caste, the Brahmins, marriage, love and courtesans, fashion and style, scientific writings and research, ayurveda, the various important philosophical systems, the literature of the court and the common man, architecture and sculpture, and religions from that of the vedas to Buddhism, Brahmanism, Christianity, Islam, even Zoroastrianism.

It’s pretty comprehensive, but no part of it is something you’ve never seen before. It is, in essence, the full syllabus of a degree (BA plus MA) in ancient Indian history, beautifully fitted into a single, readable volume. The only thing missing, and it is a big miss, is footnotes. Another big miss is illustrations: there are none.

Eraly’s long story extends from the middle of the first millennium BCE (Before Common Era) to just after the middle of the first millennium CE. These thousand-plus years are the Golden Age, he says. Why was the age golden? Because India was prosperous and open: farming was improving, trade was expanding, “the pollen of different civilizations from across the mountains and the sea blew in to cross-fertilize the native culture”. The times made it possible for Buddhism, a pragmatic religion suited to a liberal, urban ethos, to catch on. “All these — economic prosperity, cultural cross-fertilization, the stimulus of the Buddhist ethic — had a marvellously liberating effect on human spirit and creativity,” Eraly writes. “The season in India then turned to spring, and culture blossomed luxuriantly.”

It has been a long time since historians wrote like that. Such lines show Eraly’s scholarly pedigree. They also help explain lapses like his reference to “Dravidian” and “Aryan” as separate racial as well as linguistic categories — up-to-date scholarship, including genetic research, suggests the picture is not so clear-cut. Also, and unforgivably, the sources Eraly uses are almost all literary, epigraphic (inscriptions) and numismatic (coins). Where are the inputs from archaeology, which deals with the actual material remains of the places and cultures he writes about?

Coins, for instance, are material remains. They tell us a great deal about the rulers whose profiles are stamped on them. They tell us whether a literary source or inscription is lying when it makes a claim about the extent of a king’s territory — if his coins are not found there, or are poorly made with little bullion content, he can’t have been a great ruler. They also offer us priceless information about dynasties. For example, the first significant Gupta king, Chandragupta I of the 4th century CE, would not have won his dynasty its prominence if he had not married a Lichchhavi princess far above his station. His coins, revealingly, show the two of them as equals.

Imagine, then, what a more enlightened use of archaeological evidence could have given Eraly’s story: he might have been able to describe a real city rather than an ideal one, to tell us how and where people actually lived and what their households might have looked like — rather than assembling a general picture split across subject categories from a range of textual sources.

The evidence, however, does add up. There must have been something special about those thousand years. Eraly pays a lot of attention, in fact, to the “classical” era — that is, the late Golden Age and its aftermath, until the arrival of the Turks — when the prosperity, openness and spirit of enquiry of the earlier era had begun to give way to economic failure (among other things, Rome had stopped buying Indian luxuries), rigidity, ritualism, Brahmin domination, caste strictures, oppression of women, and a closing off of liberal thought. In Eraly’s words, from the “rarefied heights” India had slumped into the “fetid swamps”.

This is the third book of Eraly’s ongoing massive series on Indian history from the “beginning” to the 18th century. The first, The Last Spring: The Lives and Times of the Great Mughals, did well in the UK market; the second, Gem in the Lotus: The Seeding of Indian Civilization, stretches from Harappa to the Arthashastra; the next and last one will cover early medieval India.

This is a book worth owning. With all its flaws it offers a very good picture of the centuries it covers. It doesn’t make silly mistakes like pretending that the Gupta empire was the cause of India’s efflorescence (so much for the old, nationalist notion of the Gupta Golden Age). It actually, and most appealingly, describes an era when India was truly independent, because there was none of today’s poisoned history of conquest and European imperialism. Indians really were free to face the world as far more than equals. It sounds like a golden childhood.

THE FIRST SPRING
The Golden Age of India
Author: Abraham Eraly
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: xvi + 936
Price: Rs 1,299