BOOK: John Keay, "India"

John Keay: India: a History. London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001 (first ed.: 2000). 0006387845. xxviii + 576 pp.

In principle I am interested in history; it was one of my favourite subjects at school; and back then I felt slightly unsatisfied with the fact that so much of our curriculum was so heavily focused on European history. We briefly mentioned China and India alongside the civilizations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and then heard more or less nothing about them until somewhere in the 19th century. I had a vague idea that it would be good to learn a bit more about the history of the other parts of the world as well, and it was in the spirit of that line of thinking that I bought Keay's India some time ago. It is a history of India from its earliest civilizations down to the 1990s (so it was very up-to-date when it first appeared in 2000), so it seemed like a good one-stop place to remedy some of the deficiency in my knowledge of history that I mentioned earlier.

Well, as I said, that was some times ago — about 15 years ago, in fact (how time flies :S). My interest in the history of distant and exotic parts of the world, which to be honest had never been all *that* ardent to begin with, has grown less ardent still over the years. And now that I finally got around to reading this book, I can't say that reading it has made me any more enthusiastic about the subject either. This is in no way the fault of the book or its author, but simply of the subject matter.

In hindsight, the whole problem seems so obvious, though for some reason it hadn't really occurred to me to think about it in these terms before. The problem is simply that India is a huge place with a long and complex history, nearly all of which was completely new to me. Thus I encountered an interminable procession of names — of rulers, cities, regions, etc. — which, for the most part, seemed long, complicated, hard to read and impossible to remember. And much of the time you can hardly talk about the history of India as a whole, because there were different things going on in different parts of it. There were typically many rulers and dynasties at the same time, each in its own territory, each doing its own thing and maintaining interminable conflicts with its neighbours.

I am in fact enormously impressed by Keay's ability to compress such a large and complex subject into a single volume like this. But despite his efforts, and despite the indisputably excellent quality of his writing, the only way I could cope with the content was by reading it in a shallow and careless manner, and by having, most of the time, only the very vaguest idea as to who the ruler or event that I'm currently reading about is and how he/it fits into the big picture. On second thought, *is* there anything like a big picture here at all? The overall impression I got from this book is that Indian history is little more than one damn random thing after another.

But I don't wish to make it seem that there is something about Indian history that makes it uniquely hard to get into. I don't really doubt that if I tried to read something similar about e.g. Chinese history, I probably couldn't get into that either; and probably European history looks just as much of as hopeless mess to an Indian reader as Indian history does to me. Ultimately all this depends simply on what one is familiar with (or was familiarized with from a sufficiently early and impressionable age).

And in any case, even if the book as a whole wasn't exactly a thrilling read for me, there were nevertheless many things that I liked or found interesting in it. I liked Keay's decision not to ‘compress’ the more ancient parts of history into a handful of short chapters and then spend the majority of time on the last couple of centuries, as is all too often the case in books covering long periods of history. He gives plenty of attention to the earlier periods of Indian history, about which I previously knew next to nothing, except that the Indus valley civilization used to exist and that later the Indo-Europeans invaded from the northwest.

Here I learnt a number of other interesting things, e.g. that the invasions of Alexander the Great had much less of an impact in India than we are perhaps inclined to imagine when we read about them from a Greek perspective (p. 70); that as early as in the 3rd century BC, there was a dynasty, the Mauryas, that managed to get more than half of the territory of India under its rule (a feat that would not be exceeded until the Mughals; p. xxii); and I was fascinated to learn a little of the transition from the ancient Vedic religion into something more like modern Hinduism.

It appears that the Vedic religion caused an enormous amount of livestock to be wasted in sacrifices and the like, which Keay describes in curiously materialist terms as “burning off the surplus” (p. 36). This was OK for the semi-nomadic pastoralists such as the Indo-Europeans had been during their migration into India, but as they became more sedentary, these surpluses came to be put to more productive uses, typically by being seized by some sort of king as taxes (p. 50).

I was amused by the ridiculously bloated titles that some of the Indian rulers affected: we all knows about the rajas and the maharajas, but some of them would “up the stakes to paramaharajadhiraja and even rajarajadhiraja, ‘king of kings-of-kings’ ” (p. 134). This level of vanity would make even the Byzantine emperors blush :)

Ala-ud-Din, the sultan of Delhi in the early 14th century, had an interesting economic policy: “All foodgrains were listed, their prices duly fixed, and markets carefully and ruthlessly supervised. [. . .] all transport was so heavily regulated as to be effectively nationalized [. . .] Hoarding, even by the cultivator, kept a network of spies and torturers busy. [. . .] Grain prices plummeted, and stayed both cheap and unchanged even in years of drought.” (P. 260.) Muahahaha! Take that, libertarians!!! :]

Still, for me the most interesting part of the book was the last third or so, from the time when the British showed up in India. This was just when the Mughal empire had begun to decline, and the Britons managed to badger one of the emperors into signing a farman (decree) endowing them with all sorts of rights and privileges (p. 375), which provided them with many excuses for their early expansion in India.

In the 19th century, British rule brought high levels of deforestation and taxation, leading to such puns as “Axe Britannica” and “Tax Britannica” (p. 415). Speaking of puns, the story about Napier's famous “peccavi” telegram (“I have sinned/Sindh”) is apparently not true and comes from a Punch cartoon (p. 420).

The British were often accused of pursuing a divide-and-conquer policy in India, but Keay points out that this “supposed the pre-existence of an integrated entity”, while India had never been unified before: “Division was an act of life” (p. 464).

It was also interesting to read a little about India's history since independence, about which I knew almost nothing. It seems to have been characterized by a slow but steady decline of the Congress party and by a sort of fragmentation as its constituent states split into smaller pieces (p. 520). Pakistan also split into two, the east part becoming Bangladesh; before this, the western part had the upper hand and treated the eastern part almost like a colony, even though the eastern part had more population and was economically important (pp. 524–6). I was surprised to read that India's nuclear weapons were only developed in the late 90s (p. 533); I must have therefore heard/read of this in the news when it happened, but I evidently forgot all about it as I now vaguely assumed they must have had them for several decades longer.

We have talked about hot man-on-horse action in the pages of this blog before, so I was interested to see a mention of the opposite phenomenon in the present book: “In the aswamedha, or horse sacrifice, a somewhat problematic injunction about the sexual coupling of the sacrificial stallion with the raja's bride was meant to symbolise the endowment of his lineage with exceptional strength. [. . .] in the later aswamedha, the horse seems to have been excused romantic duties.” (P. 32.) I wonder if it ever happened that the rajah's wife, finding that her husband can not... measure up to the horse, would always say neigh to his advances :))

I know that some people like to spell “co-ordinated” with a hyphen, but this book goes a step further and even uses it in “unco-ordinated”. This looks very bizarre; I couldn't help thinking of “unco” in its Scottish sense, ‘very’, and then wondering what the heck “very ordinated” means :)

Anyway, this is no doubt an excellent book for anyone with a real interest in Indian history, and is a pleasant enough read even for someone who, like me, discovers that he isn't really all that interested in the subject after all.

ToRead:

• James Tod: Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1960). “Not beset by niggling scruples about impartiality, he conjured up the heroes of his choice in a language rich in the exaggeration typical of their bardic traditions” (p. 238).
• The Baburnama, a memoir by the founder of the Mughal empire; “amongst the most enthralling and romantic works in the literature of all time” (p. 290; Keay is quoting from the Cambridge History of India).
• John Dryden: Aurang-Zebe (1675). A “highly romanticised verse epic” (p. 326) inspired by the life of Aurangzeb, the last great Mughal emperor.
• Thomas Moore: Lalla Rookh (1826), an “oriental romance” (p. 514).
• John Keay: India Discovered (1988). One of Keay's previous books, about the (re)discovery of India's ancient history by 19th-century scholars (mentioned here on p. xviii).