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Reflections: Historically challenged

Asoka’s empire extended beyond the frontiers of modern India

A glittering throne in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace recalled Dr Karan Singh’s comment many years ago when he gave me a copy of Sardar Panikkar’s The Founding of the Kashmir State. His ancestor, Maharaja Gulab Singh, he said, was the only Indian ruler to extend the country’s external frontiers. Gulab Singh annexed Ladakh. Muhammad Shah, the hapless 12th Mughal emperor who originally owned the throne which Nadir Shah probably presented to the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud I, also had to cede the territory west of the Indus to the Persian invader.

Sadly, very little of India’s traditional foreign relations impinges on the consciousness of even educated Indians. The impression is that India was isolated in a diplomatic vacuum until the colonial era. “Be careful,” warns my scholarly son, Deep. “There might be a lot of academic work on it. It just hasn’t filtered through into the popular imagination. But that’s probably because today’s educated Indians think the be-all and end-all of everything lies with the British!”

Deep should know. His book, The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism, will soon be published by Hurst in Britain and OUP in New York and Delhi. But despite his warning, I do feel that instead of splitting ideological hairs, our historians should take a factual view of the past when India was not riven by Left-Right and Hindu-Muslim disputes and interacted with other powers. Deep mentions, for instance, a shortlived flicker of contact between Mughals and Ottomans when Humayun took advantage of the chance arrival of an Ottoman admiral, Sidi Ali Reis, to write to Suleiman the Magnificent.

P.V. Narasimha Rao’s Look East policy should have ripped aside many veils in another direction. It didn’t because our diplomats have little interest in anything beyond postings, trips and expense accounts. They may have facilitated a bit of investment but made no effort to awaken Indians to ancestral achievements in the Srivijaya and Majapahit empires. An exhibition in Singapore told of a prince who not only founded a Hindu temple but endowed an estate for its maintenance. The copper charter lay forgotten in an Indian museum’s storehouse until the Singaporean organisers dragged it out. For many well-to-do Indians, Singapore means only Mustafa’s round-the-clock shopping.

Topkapi has another Indian exhibit: a tiny gem-studded figure of a king with his Abyssinian attendant. This may have been an Ottoman import but Nadir Shah’s soldiers took thousands of elephants, horses and camels laden with booty including the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor and Darya-ye Noor diamonds now among the British and Iranian crown jewels. However, the stiff emerald-encrusted chair I was shown in Tehran’s treasury during Shah Reza Pahlevi’s reign didn’t look at all like Shah Jehan’s Peacock Throne.

His plunder from Delhi allowed Nadir Shah to suspend Persian taxes for three years. No wonder the defeated Muhammad Shah readily agreed to help when Mahmud declared war against Persia. His enemy’s enemy being his friend, the Mughal emperor also befriended the Ottoman ambassador, Haji Yusuf.

Deep introduced me to Naimur Rahman Farooqi’s excellent Mughal-Ottoman Relations: A Study of Political & Diplomatic Relations Between Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire, 1556-1748 which describes the fracas when Akbar’s womenfolk went on Haj. “Akbar’s religious attitude seems to have scandalised the whole world of Islam,” Farooqi wrote. So did the ultra-modern Mughal ladies. Deep’s The Making of Indian Diplomacy tells me that incensed at their expulsion, Akbar stopped sending funds, stopped Haj caravans to the Hijaz, broke relations with the Sharif of Mecca, considered a Portuguese alliance against the Ottomans and even had an Ottoman governor put in chains.

“The reason for this is said to have been his resentment at the arrogance of the ambassadors themselves and the king who sent them,” wrote the observer Father Monserrate. Deep adds that Akbar also refused an Uzbek proposal for a triple alliance with the Ottomans against Persia.

One can’t be judgmental about the past. What matters is not whether relations were handled well or badly but that they existed. And not only in the directions mentioned above. “We discovered India before the British,” a Portuguese visitor in Istanbul boasted last week. I had to tell him that it wasn’t clear who discovered whom but that India was hardly terra incognita, an unknown land. Nor was it, as the British claimed of Australia, terra nullus, which meant in Roman law “land belonging to no one”.

Pre-colonial India was not isolated from the world. Priests and pilgrims, merchants and mariners established global contacts. Asoka’s empire extended beyond the frontiers of modern India. Rajendra Chola sent victorious expeditions to Southeast Asia and conquered Malaya. I am writing this in Greece where I am reminded that Mycenae in the north-eastern Peloponnese, a major centre of Greek civilisation and a military stronghold in the second millennium BC, traded with India. So did Crete’s Minoan rulers.

Indians know so little of what the British historian A.L. Basham called “the wonder that was India”. Protesting Tamils, for example, forced Singapore’s British government to change the name of Kling Street. As recounted in Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew’s Mission India, far from being a disparaging term, “kling” was derived from ancient Kalinga which interacted with Suvarnabhumi, Land of Gold, as the Ramayana called Southeast Asia. But Kling was popularly thought to refer to the clink-clank noise made by the ball and chain of Indian convicts.

Perhaps Kunwar Natwar Singh was right to say Indians have a sense of eternity but not of history. All the more reason, therefore, for school and college syllabuses to give them a proper understanding of their country’s interaction through the ages with the rest of the global community. No matter who rules in Delhi, Young India must know the past to shape the future.

( Source : dc )
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