2024-12-18 05:22:00
Is it possible to enclose the five thousand year long history of India in three hundred pages? From Mohenjo-Daro to Modi, from Buddhism to Bollywood, from the oldest civilization to the largest democracy in the world? Australian historian and journalist John Zubrzycki has demonstrated with his book that it is possible to do this. It has the simple but ambitious title “History of India”. The original version is no less boldly called “The Shortest History of India”. Gordon Kerr needed no superlatives for his “A Brief History of India,” just one hundred and eighty pages, and Dietmar Rothermund, the best-known German historian of India, even managed it with one hundred and sixty pages in his “Indian History in Basics “.
The difficulty of a history of India, long or short, is in selecting what is important from the geographical, cultural, religious and linguistic complexity of the South Asian country. Zubrzycki achieved this feat. In ten chapters he deals with the Harappan or Indus Valley culture, the Vedic and classical ages, religious revolutions such as Buddhism or the influence of Islam with the glorious Mughals, the East India Company and the crown colony British with their traders and mercenaries, and the waves of conquest by the Greeks, Muslims, English, French or Portuguese, the plundering of the country, the long struggle for freedom and even the creation of the national state “new India” together with a look towards the future.
Rival dynasties and their great empires
In such a decidedly short story there is little point in highlighting the gaps. They are inevitable. The simple transmission of knowledge about periods of Indian history can now be supplemented by a glance at the Internet. What is more important is to capture an “idea of India” that runs through history and develops within it. This requires readable books and not just reference works.
Zubrzycki then wisely begins with Jawaharlal Nehru’s “The Discovery of India” – the title of one of Nehru’s best books. The former prime minister defines India as “a bundle of contradictions held together by invisible threads” and as “a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision”. The question is therefore whether Zubrzycki managed to find one or more common threads uniting the bizarre image of India in antiquity or that of idealizing romanticism, to the self-confident image of India as a great Hindu nation or leading power spiritual, in a coherent history of India.
At first it seems that the author is rather emphasizing the divergent developments, rightly pointing out that the history of India has long been the history of a subcontinent that includes the countries that are now neighbors and that there was no overall “Indian culture” . Instead, it records the many migrations and rival dynasties and their great empires. Until 1947, the year in which India became independent, the current Indian territory was never unified, even during British rule many principalities maintained their autonomy.
The drift towards a dictatorship of the majority
Zubrzycki’s mostly good analyzes unobtrusively incorporate a theme that could perhaps be one of the common threads: India’s resilience to influences and its perception of other cultures and religions, which oscillates between ignorance and tolerance. The author succeeds in this because he does not portray Islam, dominant from the 12th to the 17th century, as a foreign body, as often happens in Indian historiography, but as belonging to India. And showing the integrative, tolerant and not just iconoclastic side of Islam, which never sought broad religious change and mainly destroyed temples to obtain its wealth. Islamic rulers were more interested in economic expansion than religious conversion. The population knew this approach from Hindu rulers, who largely did not care whether their subjects were Hindu, Buddhist, Jain or Muslim as long as they paid taxes.
According to the author, it was only the English who, starting in the 19th century, characterized Muslim rulers as destructive and despotic, partly to make their rule appear just and benevolent. Despite some blessings, British rule was largely based on racist arrogance and humiliation. In their self-perception, expressed in numerous history books, the English and with them the missionaries civilized India and freed it from barbaric traditions such as widow burning, child marriage and the ruthless and discriminatory caste system. However, they show India as a weak country that had only an elite, but undemocratic, education system, no functioning administrative structures, and no fair justice system. It was therefore necessary to govern it with a strong hand and maintain a bureaucracy that still paralyzes the country today.
In the last chapter Zubrzycki shows that the centuries of colonization have had serious repercussions and gets to the heart of the political and social situation of the “New India”. It sums up the intentions of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to right the wrongs of the past: histories and curricula are being rewritten and the party’s critics, both at home and abroad, are being targeted.
He is open in his criticism of India: political, social and religious tensions and New Delhi’s efforts to reduce the “idea of India” to a Hindu social model have damaged India’s reputation as a secular, democratic and diversified and have prevented or delayed India from exploiting its still dormant potential. These include the Indian education system (by the middle of the next decade the country will have more English-speaking citizens than the USA), the almost inexhaustible job market, natural resources, the still unexplored consumer goods market, which guarantees high rates of growth and much more. Zubrzycki criticizes the drift towards a dictatorship of the majority and agrees with the opinion of Indian political scientist Sumit Ganguly that India will survive as a functioning state only if it maintains its intrinsic diversity.
There are regrettable flaws in this thought-provoking, fluent and sometimes humorously written history of India, which could have been avoided if Indological expertise had been consulted: inconsistencies and spelling errors (Ghandi instead of Gandhi), nonsensical anglicized neologisms (Aryan instead of Aryan), the irregular use of special characters (Gitā instead of Gītā) or the incorrect use of grammatical gender (das instead of Dharma). It is also a pity that the short bibliography contains no references to German-language publications, that there are no references and that the author refrains from using footnotes even when quoting word for word.
John Zubrzycki: “History of India.” Translated from English by Karin Hielscher. Reclam Verlag, Ditzingen 2024. 351 pages, illustrations, hard cover, 30 euros.
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