India and the World Researches In India's Policies, Contacts and Relationships with Other Countries and Peoples of the World (An Old and Rare Book)

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Preface ONE of the most original and significant contributions of India to human civilization is the way of behaving with neighbours. In spite of the prescription of the theorists of diplomacy that one's neighbour is the enemy and the neighbour's neighbour is the friend, it is a well-known fact that India had always friendly relations with her neighbours. Even ancient Greek writers were impressed by the fact that the Indians never attacked their neighbours. Of course, there are some stray instances of Indian kings undertaking expeditions in neighbouring countries. Arjuna's campaigns against the Rsikas and the Paramarsikas somewhere in Central Asta, mentioned in the Mahabharata, and Raghu's march against the Parasikas, Hunas and Kambojas, living along the Oxus in the Pamir-Badakshan region, described in the Raghuvamsa of the poet Kalidasa, may be based on some historical parallels. Likewise, the invasions, launched by the Colas against the Stivijaya empire as a result of the complications in the political and commercial situation of South-East Asia, were serious attempts at interfering in the affairs of other countries. But these exceptions prove the rule that normally the Indians were not interested in the territories of their neighbours. The ideal of digvijaya, adumbrated in old texts, implied mainly the political unification of India as understood in those times. It was clearly laid down in those texts that kings should undertake military campaigns for the sake of glory rather than territorial acquisition. In India herself this view entailed a decentralised administrative system, which told heavily on the political unity of this country. As a result of it, Indian history exhibits a recurrent alternation of unity and division and order and anarchy. But, though we have few instances of Indians coveting the territories of their neighbours, we have abundant evidence of their close commercial and cultural contacts with them. Once upon a time it was believed that the northern mountains and the southern seas isolated India from the rest of the world and converted her into an ivory-tower, where her people dozed into complacency under a superiority and insularity complex. But historical and archaeological researches are daily bringing out enormous materials showing interminable trains of Indian traders, sailors, missionaries, artists and settlers crossing the arid deserts of the north and the high seas of the south and peacefully spreading their culture in the Tarim Basin along the Silk Route upto China, Korea and Japan, and in Indochina and Indonesia and possibly further into the Pacific in the East, and western Asia, Madagascar, Egypt and the Sudan, the Graeco-Roman World, Gaul and Scandinavia in the West. The voluminous outpour of evidence-Buddha image in Scandinavia, summary of the Upanishads in Rome, ivory statuette of Laksmi at Pompeii, silver dish, depicting Mother India, at Lampascus, sheets of the manuscript of Aryaprajñaparamita in Rumania, South Indian finds in the Sudan, bronze image of an Indian danseuse in South Arabia, hall of dark-skinned guards at Toprak Kala and burial of South Indian people at Kalaly-gry-1 in Khorezm, Sanskrit manuscript in three parts in a decorated vase at the site of old Merv in Turkmenia, remains of a silk bale, bearing price etc. in Brähmi, and fragments of the Bower Manuscript and the dramas of Aśvaghosa on the Silk Route in the Tatim Basin, caves of Thousand Buddhas on the frontier of China, Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat in Indo-China, Borodudur and Chandi Mendut in Indonesia, the temples and sculptures of Korea and Japan etc.-attest the global expansion and weltanschauung of Indian culture. For well over one thousand years Indian religions were professed, Indian languages were spoken, Indian scripts were written, Indian poems were sung and Indian social values were acknowledged by large numbers of peoples in many parts of the world. In this process of intense and intimate cultural contacts India received from others as much as she gave to them, This cross-fertilization of ideas, this commingling of values, this interpenetration of strands, produced an organic, synthetic and integrated cultural development, which shaped the patterns of life of considerable sections of the human race. Hence nothing can be more remote from historical truth than to suppose that Indian culture was an isolated growth. The unique feature of India's contacts and relationships with other countries and peoples of the world is that cultural expansion was never confused with colonial domination and commercial dynamism was never identified with economic exploitation. That culture can advance without political motives, trade can proceed without imperialist designs, settlements can take place without colonial excesses, and religion, language, literature, writing and mores can be transported without xenophobia, jingoism and race-complexes is amply borne out by the history of India's contacts with her neighbours. In fact, the association of cultural and commercial expansion with imperialist and acquisitive imperatives has seeped so deep in the thinking of modern man, overwhelmed with centuries of colonial exploitation and racial discrimination, characteristic of the contacts of the White People with their fellows of other complexions, that he is unable to distinguish between them or to disengage their trends from each other. Hence, sometimes, he is unable to appreciate the true character of India's contacts with her neighbours. This is why some modern scholars look askance at the process of the evolution of what is generally called Greater India and fail to penetrate to the core of the cultural tendencies underlying it. It is, in fact, so unique, peerless and unparalleled in human history that it is difficult to understand its real nature without completely purging the mind of the notions of modern colonial and imperial ideologies. The process of India's cultural contacts with the world was conditioned by an upsurge and overflow of the spirit of movement and expansion among the Indian people. It is significant that merchants, mariners, travellers, adventurers, pedlars, jugglers, astrologers, medicine men, mendicants, missionaries and monks immersed themselves in this movement, whereas kings, courtiers, diplomats, generals, administrators and government officials were by and large indifferent to it. In the earlier stages it was carried on by the backward tribes of Austroloid and Dravidoid origins: then, people of higher classes, mostly traders and merchants, began to take interest in it, and afterwards, about the beginning of the Christian era, men of all castes and callings plunged headlong into it and accelerated its sweep and momentum. But these people represented the totality of the population and hardly possessed any royal mandate, imperial charter, political directive or military assistance. They moved by their own inner impulse of advance and adventure rather than the outer pressure of political impetus or military stimulus. They set out of their own accord and not by the order of any government. Naturally, therefore, their outlook was peaceful and their approach co-operative; they used the language of persuasion and followed the methods of winning over the foreigners to their side by the appeal of their arts, crafts and attainments. Thus we observe that though considerable parts of Central and South-Eastern Asia became flourishing centres of Indian culture, they were rarely subject to the régime of any Indian king or conqueror and hardly witnessed the horror and havoc of any Indian military campaign. They were perfectly free, politically and economically, and their people, representing an integration of Indian and indigenous elements, had no links with any Indian state and looked upon India as a holyland rather than a motherland, a region of pilgrimage rather than an area of jurisdiction. To sum up, we may say that the hall-mark of the Indian approach to the world is the realisation that cultural expansion is free from economic exploitation, colonial settlement is different from political bondage and contacts between peoples of different parts of the world are determined by the factors of peaceful co-operation rather than the considerations of military aggrandizement. This approach has become indispensable in the modern age of thermo-nuclear warfare, which has made co-existence the only alternative to the total annihilation of the human race.