Tradition and Modernity in Postcolonial Asian Literature

Literary works can be given different readings, depending on which layer of their multiple
meanings we choose to focus on. Roland Barthes1 and other semioticians have convinced us ever
since the 1970-ies to conceive literature not as a set of works sanctioned and frozen by a cultural
and interpretive tradition, but rather as texts which are constantly recreated and enriched by their
readers’ analytic capabilities. Traditionally, folkloric, or old literature used to be subject to this
dual interpretation, a literary as well as cultural reading, sometimes called mythological
hermeneutics. On the other hand, cultural studies, when they have as object literary texts, also tend
to minimize a literary point of view in favor of a conceptual analysis, linking the text to society,
history, politics, etc.
In this course I have chosen to look at contemporary South Asian literature from this
cultural hermeneutic point of view, setting it against the historical context of its colonial past as
well as against its several millenia old traditions – be they philosophical, religious or social.
I have chosen the concepts of self, family, history and law as the guiding theoretical frame
for exploring the content of postcolonial South East Asian literature. The question which has
guided my reading is how much of the ancient, pre-colonial traditions is still reflected in the works
of contemporary, mainly Indian authors writing in English, and to what extent they conceptualize
their work within the framework of eastern literary concepts and traditions. Therefore, the course
will have a first part introducing the theoretical concepts related to colonialism, post-colonialism
and to the background of Indian and near-Eastern history and traditions, and an applicative part,
i.e. an analysis of each author. The authors and their selected works will constitute the chapters of
part two.
Postcolonial studies view the relationship between the Western powers and the colonized
territories of Africa, India, South-East Asia, etc, as one of opposition, a conquest driven by the
greed of Western men, and the subsequent colonized and later decolonized populations as naive
and in need of guidance. Generally, such a view is correct, but very few scholars look at the matter
from a different angle: India, China, had civilizations much older than the European one, older
than the classical Greek and Latin world, and superior in wisdom and the Europeans failed to
understand the importance and rigor of these traditions. The cliché of the greedy colonizer is more
pervasive than the image of the obtuse traveler and researcher who fails to understand the peoples
he just discovered. 17th and 18th century Europe, while making the geographical discoveries and
building colonial empires was equally forming a national spirit at home, and specific stereotypes
related to peoples and national characters. These have made the subject of imagology in twentieth
century France and Belgium, particularly. So, Europeans were discovering others and at the same
time fictionalizing themselves. Was this fictionalization process applied to the newly discovered
peoples of Asia and Africa? Most certainly, as le bon sauvage stereotype or the Japanese being
the best people yet discovered stereotype, created by Francis Xavier, prove it. This aspect is less

1
From Work to Text, Sarrasine
researched. Also, the way in which the colonized ones saw themselves is also less researched.
What was the self-image of Indian kingdoms who were fighting British troops during the 18th
century? The Japanese self image had evolved from that of a marginal, petty kingdom in medieval
times to one of centrality, as offspring of the Sun Goddess living in the Land of Gods, in particular,
in the 18th century, when also they shut their borders to avoid colonization.
The above abstract of my course contains the word postcolonial, but I would like to start
by revisiting the meaning of “colonialism”. In the Encyclopedie Larousse online we find that
“three forces which concurred to the establishment of a colonial domination [are]: military and
administrative action, economic enterprises and missionary activity.” The implantation of an
administrative structure on a foreign territory is a first step that paves the way for businesses, be
they import-export companies (like the Dutch trading offices in the far east, from Indonesia,
Malaysia up to Japan, Nagasaki, Deshima in the 17th and 18th centuries) or agricultural plantations
(like the French colonies in Africa) to follow. Forced labor and expropriation of land was widely
practiced in Africa during the French economic expansion, while missionary “evangelization”
followed colonization (the spreading of Catholicism in Central and South America into the Aztec,
Inca and other Amazonian populations) or preceded it, as in China or Japan where mainly Jesuit,
and sometimes Franciscan and Dominican fathers tried to spread Catholicism in the 16th, 17th and
18th centuries. Evangelization contributed, by the different values that it propagated, to the
destruction of the traditional societies where it penetrated. The strictly regulated, highly traditional
Japanese administration of the 17th century eventually repelled Christianity and ultimately
terminated all the missionaries and believers in a blood bath around 1638, while China was more
tolerant with Christians, being a vaster territory with a more complex structure. It eventually gave
in to the British in the South (Hong Kong, Singapore since 1800), to the German in the 1890ies
and finally Japanese invasion in the north after 1926.
The Encyclopedia Britannica online gives a broader definition, one that is not so critical
of colonial expansion as the French one. According to it, Western colonialism is “a political-
economic phenomenon, whereby various European nations explored, conquered, settled, and
exploited large areas of the world.” It introduces the idea of exploration and scientific discovery
as a first impetus/impulse of the movement. The British definition continues: “The age of modern
colonialism began about 1500, following the European discoveries of a sea route around Africa’s
southern coast (1488) and of America (1492). With these events sea power shifted from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic and to the emerging nation-states of Portugal, Spain, the Dutch
Republic, France, and England. By discovery, conquest, and settlement, these nations expanded
and colonized throughout the world, spreading European institutions and culture.” (my underline).

Europe’s Encounter with the East – a way to creating its own identity
For the imaginary of the 13-th to 15-th century Europeans (the pre-geographical
discoveries Europeans, so to speak), the unmapped territories of the far East, or those of the
mysterious Egypt or Ethiopia, were peopled by the essential Other, the monster – the strange
creatures or the fabulously rich monarchs far away kingdoms.
European imaginary connected to Colonialism.
From the good savage (le bon sauvage), to “the best people yet discovered in the world” (the
Japanese or even the South American native tribes as seen by Portuguese and Spanish
missionaries)
Lucian Boia, Pentru o istorie a imaginarului, Humanitas 2006
Lucian Boia, Intre înger și fiară – mitul omului diferit din antichitate până în zilele noastre,
Humanitas 2011

Creation of the Colonial Myths

The age of the great geographical discoveries opened by Christopher Columbus and Vasco
da Gama was concluded by Captain James Cook (1728-1779) who mapped and discovered the last
uncharted territories of the Earth, in the Pacific Ocean. But it can also be said that “the first steps
of colonialism were put into practice through the voyages of Captain Cook”, whose aim was not
“only to carry out a geographical discovery, but also to spread the British culture to other nations,
to impose the social, political, economic and cultural power of the British over these
communities”2. If it is accepted now that “another reason of these voyages was to observe the
distinctive characteristics of the natives in order to take advantage of these aspects in accordance
with the self-interest of the British”3, as a critique of Colonialism, this view of Colonialism as a
negative phenomenon, with mainly economic purposes, is a quantitative one.
As a Conclusion, however, we would like to add that although Colonialism can be viewed
economically, from a quantitative perspective, it can also be viewed culturally, or psychologically,
as an encounter with otherness and a path for constructing the European identity and sense of
superiority. Which is easiest way to construct identities? By comparison with the other, which was
represented (for the Europeans of the 17-th or 18-th centuries) by the newly discovered peoples of
Africa, Asia and South America.
One of the worst consequences of colonialism was the creation of an ideology of European
cultural hegemony. British writers from the first half of the 20th century could not divorce
themselves from the ideology of Eurocentrism, which is well expressed in their works.
Eurocentrism= British are superior and white men have the duty to help the inferior races such as
the Indians.
E.M. Forster wrote in a letter to his mother from India in
1921, “ I n d i a i s a p l a c e w h e r e w e h a v e d o n e m u c h good and have rights, an
d where our sudden withdrawal would be a disaster” (Forster 1953:343). Through
Fielding’s mouth he declares in A Passage to India that

2
Metin Toprak and Berna Köseoğlu, Captain Cook’s Voyage around the World – the First Steps of Globalization
and the First Problems, Kocaeli University, Department of Western Languages and Literatures (Turkey), Intech,
http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/45836, p. 21
3
ibidem
“the British Empire really cannot be abolished ”since“ a w a y f r o m u s , Indians go t
o seed at once”

The echoes of this relationship of mutual misunderstanding appear in many European

novels written before the Second World War. E.M. Forster’s famous A Passage to India (1924),
or Mircea Eliade’s equally famous, in its own place and time, Maytreyi (1933)4 are two good
examples for this case. Forster’s novel shows not only the prejudices of the British towards the
Indians (Ronnie Heaslop, Adela Quested and even Mrs. Moore) but also the Indians’ mistrust that
there can be any understanding (and friendship) between people of so different backgrounds
(despite Cyril Fielding’s openness to friendship with Aziz, this cannot last because of the latter’s
attitude). On the other hand, Mircea Eliade’s novel shows yet another side of the impossible
relationship between East and West. The young student of Indian philosophy, Mircea Eliade (Allan
in the novel), falls in love with his master’s daughter, Maytreyi, but is thrown out of the house
when master Dasgupta finds out. He will spend the next six months in the Himalayas, trying to
become a Hindu and to convince the philosopher Dasgupta that his feelings go beyond religious
limitations. Professor Dasgupta remains inflexible and the young scholar returns to Romania and
converts his impossible love story into a best seller in 1932, upon hearing that the National Culture
Publishing House opened a contest for the best debut novel, with a prize of 20,000 lei and free of
cost publishing.

If in the colonial period the Western perception of India, for example, was based on
misunderstandings, as we see from E. M. Forster and M. Eliade’s novels, a second period, coming
after WW II, the Post-colonial era, saw both a migration of the ex-colonized “other” to Europe and
America, and a major shift in the way these cultures were seen in America and Europe. Thus we
have a new perception of a respected traditional culture in India, but also we have a new type of
literature, written in English mainly by Indian, but also African, Arab, Turkish, or even Japanese
writers, who are faced each with different dramas. As Anita Rau Badami, an Indian writer living
in Canada and writing in English has put it in an interview “I think Indian writers have been writing
marvellous fiction for many years, but it hasn't been in English, so the West hasn't always heard
of it. But a new generation of Indian writers born here [the West] or in India, writing confidently
in English, has opened new doors to fiction about being Indian anywhere in the world.”
This new generation of writers who can be Indian “anywhere in the world”, as Badami
says, could be considered as a third wave, in a new world that emerges after post-colonialism.

South Asian Traditions. An Outline of Indian History

4
immensely popular in Romania in the 1930-ies, Maitreyi was translated into Italian in 1945, German in 1948, French
in 1950 as La nuit Bengali, and Spanish in 1952. An English version, however, was not commissioned until 1993,
when Carcanet Press in England assigned a translation from the French, as Bengal Nights.
 It is useful to start a presentation of the evolution of Indian civilization with some
geographical and ecological considerations. India has two main rivers in the North, the Indus and
the Ganges, along which some of the oldest known civilization developed.

The Indus river springs near the Mansarovar lake in Tibet, flows through Pakistan and India
for 3200 kilometres, and the debit of its overflow is two times bigger than that of the Nile. It has
five tributary rivers, which gave the name to a region in the north of India, Punjab: pancha meaning
five and aab/ap water in the Sanskrit language.

The Ganges springs from the Western Himalayas and flows for 2525 kilometres through
India and Bangladesh. It is considered to be sacred, and it was symbolically embodied by the
Goddess Ganga in the Hindu religion. It forms a Delta, from the sediments of two rivers, Ganges
and Brahmaputra, which is the biggest delta in the world, with 59.000 square kilometres. It is
called Padma (Lotus) in its final stage in Bangladesh, and its tributary the Meghna forms an
estuary.

It is considered that the cultivation of grain started in South – East Asia, around 7000 B.C.,
in a period of increased rainfalls. The Indus Valley was the first to develop a major civilisation,
Some 60-80 miles to the East of the Indus Valley was another great river valley, namely the
Ghaggar Valley, thought to have been more hospitable to agriculture than the Indus with its big
inundations (twice as big as those of the Nile). It is believed that from 7000 to 3000 B.C. farmers
cultivated alluvial lands in the Ghaggar and Indus basin, but that something like a drying up of the
Ghaggar occurred around 1700 B.C. It is believed that what is now called the Yamuna river flowed
through the Ghaggar basin and it changed its course due to some tectonic upheavals in the foothills
of the Himalayas (as there are less than 40 kilometres between the Yamuna and the Ghaggar dried
valley).

The Indus Valley civilisation developed big cities, the remains of which were discovered
near the Harappa village in Punjab, present day Pakistan and at Mohenjo Daro. These cities,
estimated to have populations of around 25,000 flourished around 2600 BC, and it is considered
that in the period between 1900-1300 BC the Harappan, or Indus Valley civilisation disintegrated
and moved towards the Ganges basin (probably due to the drying up of the more hospitable
Ghaggar Valley). British archaeologists considered that the populations who built the Harappan
civilisation were Dravidian and that their descendants later migrated to the South of India, under
the pressure of a violent invasion by Indo-European people coming from the North West.
However, more recent archaeological discoveries do not support this theory and stress the
continuity between the ancient script discovered in the Harappa civilisation and the later Sanskrit
script (of the Vedic texts), which was attributed by historians to the Indo-European people.
 Priest King of the Indus valley Civilisation
The Indus Valley civilisation was followed by the Iron Age Vedic Civilization, which also
extended over much of the Indo-Gangetic plain.
By 600 BC, the whole of northern India was a highly civilized territory, using iron
implements, and developing commerce and a new urban civilisation. The land was divided in
independent states with fluid boundaries, with an increasing population and abundant agriculture
feeding it. Some of the most powerful kingdoms were those of Magadha, Kosla, Kuru and
Gandhara. In the Kingdom of Magadha, Mahavira and Gautama Buddha propagated a philosophy
of non-violence and detachment from the world during the fifth and sixth century BCE.

The Mahajanapadas (600-300 BCE) were the sixteen most powerful kingdoms and
republics of the era, located mainly across the fertile Indo-Gangetic plains from modern-day
Afghanistan to Bengal and Maharastra. This period saw the second major rise of urbanism in India
after the Indus Valley Civilisation. The educated speech at that time was Sanskrit, while the
languages of the general population of northern India are referred to as Prakrits. Many of the
sixteen kingdoms had coalesced to four major ones by 500/400 BCE, by the time of Gautama
Buddha. These four were Vatsa, Avanti, Kosala, and Magadha. The Life of Gautama Budhha was
mainly associated with these four kingdoms.

From the kingdom of Magadha originated the Maurya dynasty (322–185 BCE), whose
greatest Emperor, Ashoka, ruled a great part of India. Converted to Buddhism, the Emperor spread
Buddhism as a state religion in India (he not only revered it but also considered it to be a good
means of achieving unity) and sponsored the spreading of Buddhist ideals into Sri Lanka,
Southeast Asia, West Asia and even Mediterranean Europe. This has been the foundation of the
reign of social and political peace and non-violence across all of India. Ashoka implemented the
principles of ahimsa (non-violence) by banning hunting and violent sports and ending forced labor.
While he maintained a large and powerful army, to keep the peace and maintain authority, Ashoka
expanded friendly relations with states across Asia and Europe, and he sponsored Buddhist
missions. He also undertook a massive public works building campaign across the country.

Greek influence can be seen in Ashoka’s portraits

 Yakshini, female goddess/fairy of Indian origin discovered in
Pompei, Italy, testifying to the influence of Maurya Empire over the Mediterranean
 Yakshini, 3rd century BC

The advanced political thought of the Maurya Dynasty can be attributed to Chanakya (350
– 275 BCE), a philosopher, economist, jurist and advisor to two Maurya Emperors. He is
considered to be the author of the ancient Indian political treatise called Arthashastra (Economics),
and as such, the pioneer of political science and economics in India. His works were lost near the
end of the Gupta Empire and were rediscovered around 1915. Originally a professor of economics
and political science at the ancient university of Taxila, Chanakya managed the first Mauryan
emperor Chandragupta's rise to power at a young age, and served as the chief advisor to both
emperors Chandragupta and his son Bindusara.
The Persian and Greek invasions (under Alexander the Great) had important repercussions
on Indian civilisation. The political systems of the Persians were to influence future forms of
governance on the subcontinent, including the administration of the Mauryan dynasty. In addition,
the region of Gandhara, or present-day eastern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan, became a
melting pot of Indian, Persian, Central Asian, and Greek cultures and gave rise to a hybrid
culture, Greco-Buddhism, which lasted until the 5th century CE and influenced the artistic
development of Mahayana Buddhism.
The Silk Road, ancient trade route that linked India with the West and carried goods and ideas
between the two ancient civilizations of Rome and India. The land routes are red, and the water
routes are blue.

Roman trade with India started around 1 CE, during the reign of Augustus and following his
conquest of Egypt, which had been India's biggest trade partner in the West. The maritime (but not
the overland) trade routes, harbours, and trade items are described in detail in the 1st century CE
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

Gupta Empire - Golden Age

The Classical period of Indian history is the Gupta Empire (c. 320–550 CE), when much of the
Indian subcontinent was united under this dynasty. The period has been called the Golden Age of
India and was marked by extensive achievements in science, technology, engineering, art,
dialectic, literature, logic, mathematics, astronomy, religion, and philosophy that crystallized the
elements of what is generally known as Hindu culture. The Hindu-Arabic numerals, a positional
numeral system, originated in India and were later transmitted to the West through the Arabs. Early
Hindu numerals had only nine symbols, until 600 to 800 CE, when a symbol for zero was
developed for the numeral system.
 Unified again under the Gupta Dynasty (flourished 320-550 C.E.), which developed an
advanced administrative system, the north of India achieved a lot of influence over a territory
spanning the modern day Afghanistan to Bangladesh. The 5-th century CE can be considered a
golden age, where universities, hospitals, beautiful cities and a happy people were described by a
Chinese traveler, Fa Xian.
North Western Indian Buddhism weakened in the 6th century after the White Hun invasion,
who followed their own religions such as Tengrism (Celestial God religion of the Tukish peoples),
and Manichaeism (of the Persians). Muhammad bin Qasim's invasion of Sindh (modern Pakistan)
in 711 CE witnessed a further decline of Buddhism. The Shah Nama records many instances of
conversion of stupas to mosques such as at Nerun. Many Indian dynasties followed each other
before the arrival of the Muslim invasions.

The Islamic Invasions

Like other societies in history, South Asia has been attacked by nomadic tribes throughout
its long history. In evaluating the impact of Islam on the sub-continent, one must also note that the
northwestern sub-continent was a frequent target of tribes from Central Asia who arrived from the
North West. In that sense, the Muslim intrusions and later Muslim invasions were not dissimilar
to those of the earlier invasions during the 1st millennium. What does however, make the Muslim
intrusions and later Muslim invasions different is that unlike the preceding invaders who were
assimilated into the prevalent social system, the successful Muslim conquerors retained their
Islamic identity and created new legal and administrative systems that challenged and usually in
many cases superseded the existing systems of social conduct and ethics, even influencing the non-
Muslim rivals and common masses to a large extent. They also introduced new cultural codes very
different from the existing cultural codes. This led to the rise of a new Indian culture which was
mixed in nature, though different from both the ancient Indian culture and later westernized
modern Indian culture. At the same time it must be noted that the majority of Muslims in India
are Indian natives converted to Islam. This factor also played an important role in the synthesis of
cultures.

Gol Gumbaz at Bijapur, has the second largest pre-modern dome in the world after the Byzantine
Hagia Sophia.

Early Islamic intrusions into South Asia (8th–12th Century)

After conquering Persia, the Arab Umayyad Caliphate incorporated parts of what is now
Afghanistan and Pakistan around 720. The Muslim rulers were keen to invade India, a rich region
with a flourishing international trade and the only known diamond mines in the world. In 712,
Arab Muslim general Muhammad bin Qasim conquered most of the Indus region in modern day
Pakistan for the Umayyad empire, incorporating it as the "As-Sindh" province with its capital at
Al-Mansurah, 72 km north of modern Hyderabad in Sindh, Pakistan. After several wars, the Hindu
Rajas defeated the Arabs at the Battle of Rajasthan, halting their expansion and containing them
at Sindh in Pakistan.

The north Indian Emperor Nagabhata of the Pratihara Dynasty and the south Indian Emperor
Vikramaditya II of the Chalukya dynasty defeated the Arab invaders in the early 8th century. Many
short-lived Islamic kingdoms (sultanates) under foreign rulers were established across the north
western subcontinent (Afghanistan and Pakistan) over a period of a few centuries. Additionally,
Muslim trading communities flourished throughout coastal south India, particularly on the western
coast where Muslim traders arrived in small numbers, mainly from the Arabian peninsula. This
marked the introduction of a third Abrahamic Middle Eastern religion, following Judaism and
Christianity, often in puritanical form. Mahmud of Ghazni of Afghanistan in the early 11th century
raided mainly the north-western parts of the Indian sub-continent 17 times, but he did not seek to
establish “permanent dominion” in those areas.[176]

Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526)

Qutub Minar is the world's tallest brick minaret, commenced by Qutb-ud-din Aybak of the Slave
dynasty.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, Turks and Afghans invaded parts of northern India and established
the Delhi Sultanate in the former Hindu holdings. The subsequent Slave dynasty of Delhi managed
to conquer large areas of northern India, approximately equal in extent to the ancient Gupta Empire,
while the Khilji dynasty conquered most of central India but were ultimately unsuccessful in
conquering and uniting the subcontinent. The Sultanate ushered in a period of Indian cultural
renaissance. The resulting "Indo-Muslim" fusion of cultures left lasting syncretic monuments in
architecture, music, literature, religion, and clothing. It is surmised that the language of Urdu
(literally meaning "horde" or "camp" in various Turkic dialects) was born during the Delhi
Sultanate period as a result of the intermingling of the local speakers of Sanskritic Prakrits with
immigrants speaking Persian, Turkic, and Arabic under the Muslim rulers. The Delhi Sultanate is
the only Indo-Islamic empire to enthrone one of the few female rulers in India, Razia Sultana
(1236–1240).

Timur defeats the Sultan of Delhi, Nasir Al-Din Mahmum Tughluq, in the winter of 1397–1398

A Turco-Mongol conqueror in Central Asia, Timur (Tamerlane), attacked the reigning Sultan
Nasir-u Din Mehmud of the Tughlaq Dynasty in the north Indian city of Delhi. The Sultan's army
was defeated on 17 December 1398. Timur entered Delhi and the city was sacked, destroyed, and
left in ruins, after Timur's army had killed and plundered for three days and nights. He ordered the
whole city to be sacked except for the sayyids (scholars), and the "other Muslims"(artists); 100,000
war prisoners were put to death in one day. The Sultanate suffered significantly from the sacking
of Delhi, and revived briefly under the Lodi Dynasty.

Mughal Empire

In 1526, Babur, a Timurid descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan from Fergana Valley (modern
day Uzbekistan), swept across the Khyber Pass and established the Mughal Empire, which at its
zenith covered modern day Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. However, his son
Humayun was defeated by the Afghan warrior Sher Shah Suri in the year 1540, and forced to
retreat to Kabul. Akbar the Great restored the Mughal domination over Afghanistan and India.

Expansion of the Mughal Empire from 1526 to 1700.

The Mughal dynasty ruled most of the Indian subcontinent by the year 1600; it went into a slow
decline after 1707. The Mughals suffered several blows due to invasions from Marathas and
Afghans, causing the Mughal dynasty to be reduced to puppet rulers by 1757. The remnants of the
Mughal dynasty were finally defeated during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, also called the 1857
War of Independence. This period marked vast social change in the subcontinent as the Hindu
majority were ruled over by the Mughal emperors, most of whom showed religious tolerance,
liberally patronising Hindu culture. The famous emperor Akbar, who was the grandson of Babar,
tried to establish a good relationship with the Hindus. However, later emperors such as Aurangazeb
tried to establish complete Muslim dominance, and as a result several historical temples were
destroyed during this period and taxes imposed on non-Muslims. During the decline of the Mughal
Empire, several smaller states rose to fill the power vacuum and themselves were contributing
factors to the decline. In 1737, the Maratha general Bajirao of the Maratha Empire invaded and
plundered Delhi. Under the general Amir Khan Umrao Al Udat, the Mughal Emperor sent 8,000
troops to drive away the 5,000 Maratha cavalry soldiers. Baji Rao, however, easily routed the
novice Mughal general and the rest of the imperial Mughal army fled. In 1737, in the final defeat
of Mughal Empire, the commander-in-chief of the Mughal Army, Nizam-ul-mulk, was routed at
Bhopal by the Maratha army. This essentially brought an end to the Mughal Empire. In 1739,
Nader Shah, emperor of Iran, defeated the Mughal army at the Battle of Karnal. After this victory,
Nader captured and sacked Delhi, carrying away many treasures, including the Peacock Throne.

The Mughals were perhaps the richest single dynasty to have ever existed. Although they often
employed brutal tactics to subjugate their empire, they had a policy of integration with Indian
culture, which made them successful where the short-lived Sultanates of Delhi had failed. Akbar
the Great was particularly famed for this. Akbar declared "Amari" or non-killing of animals in the
holy days of Jainism. He rolled back the jizya tax for non-Muslims. The Mughal emperors married
local royalty, allied themselves with local maharajas, and attempted to fuse their Turko-Persian
culture with ancient Indian styles, creating a unique Indo-Saracenic architecture. It was the erosion
of this tradition coupled with increased brutality and centralization that played a large part in the
dynasty's downfall after Aurangzeb, who unlike previous emperors, imposed relatively non-
pluralistic policies on the general population, which often inflamed the majority Hindu population.

Maratha Empire (1674–1818)

Political map of Indian subcontinent in 1758. The Maratha Empire (orange) was the last Hindu
empire of India.

The post-Mughal era was dominated by the rise of the Maratha suzerainty as other small regional
states emerged, and also by the increasing activities of European powers. There is no doubt that
the single most important power to emerge in the long twilight of the Mughal dynasty was the
Maratha confederacy. The Maratha kingdom was founded and consolidated by Shivaji, a Maratha
aristocrat of the Bhonsle clan who was determined to establish Hindavi Swarajya (self-rule of
Hindu people). By the 18th century, it had transformed itself into the Maratha Empire under the
rule of the Peshwas (prime ministers). Gordon explains how the Maratha systematically took
control over the Malwa plateau in 1720–1760. They started with annual raids, collecting ransom
from villages and towns while the declining Mughal Empire retained nominal control. However,
in 1737, the Marathas defeated a Mughal army in their capital, Delhi itself, and as a result, the
Mughal emperor ceded Malwa to them. The Marathas continued their military campaigns against
Mughals, Nizam, Nawab of Bengal and Durrani Empire to further extend their boundaries. They
built an efficient system of public administration known for its attention to detail. It succeeded in
raising revenue in districts that recovered from years of raids, up to levels previously enjoyed by
the Mughals. The cornerstone of the Maratha rule in Malwa rested on the 60 or so local tax
collectors (kamavisdars) who advanced the Maratha ruler '(Peshwa)' a portion of their district
revenues at interest. By 1760, the domain of the Marathas stretched across practically the entire
subcontinent. The north-western expansion of the Marathas was stopped after the Third Battle of
Panipat (1761). However, the Maratha authority in the north was re-established within a decade
under Peshwa Madhavrao I. The defeat of Marathas by British in third Anglo-Maratha Wars
brought end to the empire by 1820. The last peshwa, Baji Rao II, was defeated by the British in
the Third Anglo-Maratha War.

Sikh Empire (North-west)

Harmandir Sahib or The Golden Temple is culturally the most significant place of worship for the
Sikhs.

The Punjabi kingdom, ruled by members of the Sikh religion, was a political entity that governed
the region of modern-day Punjab. The empire, based around the Punjab region, existed from 1799
to 1849. It was forged, on the foundations of the Khalsa, under the leadership of Maharaja Ranjit
Singh (1780–1839) from an array of autonomous Punjabi Misls. He consolidated many parts of
northern India into a kingdom. He primarily used his highly disciplined Sikh army that he trained
and equipped to be the equal of a European force. Ranjit Singh proved himself to be a master
strategist and selected well qualified generals for his army. In stages, he added the central Punjab,
the provinces of Multan and Kashmir, the Peshawar Valley, and the Derajat to his kingdom. This
came in the face of the powerful British East India Company. At its peak, in the 19th century, the
empire extended from the Khyber Pass in the west, to Kashmir in the north, to Sindh in the south,
running along Sutlej river to Himachal in the east. This was among the last areas of the
subcontinent to be conquered by the British. The first Anglo-Sikh war and second Anglo-Sikh war
marked the downfall of the Sikh Empire.

Other kingdoms

There were several other kingdoms which ruled over parts of India in the later medieval period
prior to the British occupation. However, most of them were bound to pay regular tribute to the
Marathas. The rule of Wodeyar dynasty which established the Kingdom of Mysore in southern
India in around 1400 CE by was interrupted by Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan in the later half
of 18th century. Under their rule, Mysore fought a series of wars sometimes against the combined
forces of the British and Marathas, but mostly against the British, with Mysore receiving some aid
or promise of aid from the French.

The Nawabs of Bengal had become the de facto rulers of Bengal following the decline of Mughal
Empire. However, their rule was interrupted by Marathas who carried six expeditions in Bengal
from 1741 to 1748 as a result of which Bengal became a vassal state of Marathas.

Hyderabad was founded by the Qutb Shahi dynasty of Golconda in 1591. Following a brief Mughal
rule, Asif Jah, a Mughal official, seized control of Hyderabad and declared himself Nizam-al-Mulk
of Hyderabad in 1724. It was ruled by a hereditary Nizam from 1724 until 1948. Both Kingdom
of Mysore and Hyderabad State became princely states in British India in 1799 and 1798
respectively.

After the First Anglo-Sikh War in 1846, under the terms of the Treaty of Amritsar, the British
government sold Kashmir to Maharaja Gulab Singh and the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir,
the second largest princely state in British India, was created by the Dogra dynasty.

Around the 18th century, the modern state of Nepal was formed by Gurkha rulers.

European travels to India

In 1498, a Portuguese fleet under Vasco da Gama successfully discovered a new sea route from
Europe to India, which paved the way for direct Indo-European commerce. The Portuguese soon
set up trading posts in Goa, Daman, Diu and Bombay. Goa became the main Portuguese base until
it was seized by India in 1961.

The next to arrive were the Dutch, with their main base in Ceylon. The British—who set up a
trading post in the west coast port of Surat in 1619—and the French. The internal conflicts among
Indian kingdoms gave opportunities to the European traders to gradually establish political
influence and appropriate lands. Although these continental European powers controlled various
coastal regions of southern and eastern India during the ensuing century, they eventually lost all
their territories in India to the British islanders, with the exception of the French outposts of
Pondichéry and Chandernagore, the Dutch port of Travancore, and the Portuguese colonies of Goa,
Daman and Diu.

Expansion of the British East India Company rule in India (1757–1857)

In 1617 the British East India Company was given permission by Mughal Emperor Jahangir to
trade in India. Gradually their increasing influence led the de jure Mughal emperor Farrukh Siyar
to grant them dastaks or permits for duty-free trade in Bengal in 1717.

The Nawab of Bengal Siraj Ud Daulah, the de facto ruler of the Bengal province, opposed British
attempts to use these permits.This led to the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, in which the Bengal
Army of the East India Company, led by Robert Clive, defeated the French-supported Nawab's
forces. This was the first real political foothold with territorial implications that the British
acquired in India. Clive was appointed by the company as its first 'Governor of Bengal' in 1757.[208]
This was combined with British victories over the French at Madras, Wandiwash and Pondichéry
that, along with wider British successes during the Seven Years' War, reduced French influence in
India.The British East India Company extended its control over the whole of Bengal. After the
Battle of Buxar in 1764, the company acquired the rights of administration in Bengal from de jure
Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II; this marked the beginning of its formal rule, which within the next
century engulfed most of India.[209] The East India Company monopolized the trade of Bengal.
They introduced a land taxation system called the Permanent Settlement which introduced a
feudal-like structure in Bengal, often with zamindars set in place. The Company soon expanded
its territories around its bases in Bombay and Madras; the Anglo-Mysore Wars (1766–1799) and
later the Anglo-Maratha Wars (1772–1818) led to control of the vast regions of India. Ahom
Kingdom of North-east India first fell to Burmese invasion and then to British after Treaty of
Yandabo in 1826. Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir were annexed after the
Second Anglo-Sikh War in 1849; however, Kashmir was immediately sold under the Treaty of
Amritsar to the Dogra Dynasty of Jammu and thereby became a princely state. The border dispute
between Nepal and British India, which sharpened after 1801, had caused the Anglo-Nepalese War
of 1814–16 and brought the defeated Gurkhas under British influence. In 1854, Berar was annexed,
and the state of Oudh was added two years later.

After the turn of the 19th century, Governor-General Wellesley began what became two decades
of accelerated expansion of Company territories. This was achieved either by subsidiary alliances
between the Company and local rulers or by direct military annexation. The subsidiary alliances
created the princely states or native states of the Hindu maharajas and the Muslim nawabs.

By the 1850s, the East India Company controlled most of the Indian sub-continent, which included
present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh also. Their policy was sometimes summed up as Divide and
Rule, taking advantage of the enmity festering between various princely states and social and
religious groups.
Modern period and Independence (after c.1850)
The rebellion of 1857 and its consequences

The Indian rebellion of 1857 was a large-scale rebellion by soldiers employed by the British East
India in northern and central India against the Company's rule. The rebels were disorganized, had
differing goals, and were poorly equipped, led, and trained, and had no outside support or funding.
They were brutally suppressed and the British government took control of the Company and
eliminated many of the grievances that caused it. The government also was determined to keep
full control so that no rebellion of such size would ever happen again.[213]

In the aftermath, all power was transferred from the East India Company to the British Crown,
which began to administer most of India as a number of provinces. The Crown controlled the
Company's lands directly and had considerable indirect influence over the rest of India, which
consisted of the Princely states ruled by local royal families. There were officially 565 princely
states in 1947, but only 21 had actual state governments, and only three were large (Mysore,
Hyderabad and Kashmir). They were absorbed into the independent nation in 1947–48.[214]

British Raj (1858–1947)

Main article: British Raj

The British Indian Empire at its greatest extent (in a map of 1909). The princely states under British
suzerainty are in yellow.

Reforms

After 1857, the colonial government strengthened and expanded its infrastructure via the court
system, legal procedures, and statutes. The Indian Penal Code came into being.[215] In education,
Thomas Babington Macaulay had made schooling a priority for the Raj in his famous minute
of February 1835 and succeeded in implementing the use of English as the medium of
instruction. By 1890 some 60,000 Indians had matriculated. The Indian economy grew at about
1% per year from 1880 to 1920, and the population also grew at 1%. However, from 1910s Indian
private industry began to grow significantly. India built a modern railway system in the late 19th
century which was the fourth largest in the world. The British Raj invested heavily in infrastructure,
including canals and irrigation systems in addition to railways, telegraphy, roads and ports.
However, historians have been bitterly divided on issues of economic history, with the Nationalist
school arguing that India was poorer at the end of British rule than at the beginning and that
impoverishment occurred because of the British.

In 1905, Lord Curzon split the large province of Bengal into a largely Hindu western half and
"Eastern Bengal and Assam," a largely Muslim eastern half. The British goal was said to be for
efficient administration but the people of Bengal were outraged at the apparent "divide and rule"
strategy. It also marked the beginning of the organized anti-colonial movement. When the Liberal
party in Britain came to power in 1906, he was removed. Bengal was reunified in 1911. The new
Viceroy Gilbert Minto and the new Secretary of State for India John Morley consulted with
Congress leaders on political reforms. The Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 provided for Indian
membership of the provincial executive councils as well as the Viceroy's executive council. The
Imperial Legislative Council was enlarged from 25 to 60 members and separate communal
representation for Muslims was established in a dramatic step towards representative and
responsible government.[220] Several socio-religious organizations came into being at that time.
Muslims set up the All India Muslim League in 1906. It was not a mass party but was designed to
protect the interests of the aristocratic Muslims. It was internally divided by conflicting loyalties
to Islam, the British, and India, and by distrust of Hindus.[221] The Akhil Bharatiya Hindu
Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sought to represent Hindu interests though
the later always claimed it to be a "cultural" organization.[222] Sikhs founded the Shiromani Akali
Dal in 1920.[223] However, the largest and oldest political party Indian National Congress, founded
in 1885, is perceived to have attempted to keep a distance from the socio-religious movements and
identity politics.[224]

Rabindranath Tagore is Asia's first Nobel laureate and composer of India's national anthem
Swami Vivekananda was a key figure in introducing Vedanta and Yoga in Europe and USA,[225]
raising interfaith awareness and making Hinduism a world religion.[226]

Famines

During the British Raj, famines in India, often attributed to failed government policies, were some
of the worst ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–78 in which 6.1 million to 10.3
million people died[227] and the Indian famine of 1899–1900 in which 1.25 to 10 million people
died.[227] The Third Plague Pandemic in the mid-19th century killed 10 million people in India.[228]
Despite persistent diseases and famines, the population of the Indian subcontinent, which stood at
about 125 million in 1750, had reached 389 million by 1941.[229]

The Indian independence movement

Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Bombay, 1944.

The numbers of British in India were small, yet they were able to rule two-thirds of the
subcontinent directly and exercise considerable leverage over the princely states that accounted
for the remaining one-third of the area.

The first step toward Indian self-rule was the appointment of councillors to advise the British
viceroy, in 1861; the first Indian was appointed in 1909. Provincial Councils with Indian members
were also set up. The councillors' participation was subsequently widened into legislative councils.
The British built a large British Indian Army, with the senior officers all British, and many of the
troops from small minority groups such as Gurkhas from Nepal and Sikhs.[230] The civil service
was increasingly filled with natives at the lower levels, with the British holding the more senior
positions.[231]

From 1920 leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi began highly popular mass movements to campaign
against the British Raj using largely peaceful methods. However, revolutionary activities against
the British rule took place also throughout the Indian sub-continent and some others adopted a
militant approach like the Indian National Army that sought to overthrow British rule by armed
struggle and. The Gandhi-led independence movement opposed the British rule using non-violent
methods like non-cooperation, civil disobedience and economic resistance. These movements
succeeded in bringing independence to the new dominions of India and Pakistan in 15 August
1947.

Independence and partition (1947–present)

Along with the desire for independence, tensions between Hindus and Muslims had also been
developing over the years. The Muslims had always been a minority within the subcontinent, and
the prospect of an exclusively Hindu government made them wary of independence; they were as
inclined to mistrust Hindu rule as they were to resist the foreign Raj, although Gandhi called for
unity between the two groups in an astonishing display of leadership. The British, extremely
weakened by the Second World War, promised that they would leave and participated in the
formation of an interim government. The British Indian territories gained independence in 1947,
after being partitioned into the Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan. Following the
controversial division of pre-partition Punjab and Bengal, rioting broke out between Sikhs, Hindus
and Muslims in these provinces and spread to several other parts of India, leaving some 500,000
dead.[232] Also, this period saw one of the largest mass migrations ever recorded in modern history,
with a total of 12 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims moving between the newly created nations
of India and Pakistan (which gained independence on 15 and 14 August 1947 respectively).[232] In
1971, Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan and East Bengal, seceded from Pakistan.

Indian Religion and Philosophy

Hinduism – a Religion, a Philosophy and a Way of Life of the Indian Area

It can be said that Hinduism has:

1. A religious component, embodied in Brahmanism

2. A philosophical component expressed in the many schools of thought (yoga, samkhya,
nyaya/logic, vaisheshika, mimasana, and Vedanta) which offered philosophical
interpretations of the Veddas. There were six orthodox schools of thought, accepting
the Veddas, and two non-orthodox
3. A practical, educational component, or body of knowledge, defining life and being,
whose main concept is dharma
(1) Brahmanism, religion of the Aryans, who worshiped nature gods, which represented such
things as rain, the ocean, and the sun. Their most important gods were Shiva (the Supreme
god, the destroyer, or transformer in the Hindu trimity of the primary aspects of the divine),
 Indra (the god of war and the storm god), Varuna (a god of water, the celestial ocean,
associated with night), and Surya (the supreme light, or the Sun; Surya had three wives:
Saranyu, Ragyi and Prabha. Saranyu was the mother of Manu and the twins Yama, the
Lord of Death, and his sister Yami). Sacrifice to the gods was an important part of this
religion – the priests, called Brahmins, were responsible for conducting the religious rituals
correctly. If they failed to do so, the Aryans believed their gods would not answer their
prayers. Then there might be floods, famine, disease, or other natural disasters. People paid
the Brahmans to make these sacrifices and to conduct rituals. Brahmans also taught the
idea of an afterlife.
The concept of class, or caste – the people already living in the Indus Valley, like the
Aryans, believed that people were born into a particular social class, or caste. Unlike the
Aryans they also believed in reincarnation, and that people in lower castes were being
punished for sins they had committed in earlier lives. If people accepted their position in
life and lived correctly, they would be reborn in a higher caste in their next life. Hindus
believed in many different gods, but the chief god was Brahman. The other gods were the
different faces of Brahman. For example, Shiva was the face of Brahman the destroyer.
Hindus believed Brahman’s major powers were to create, preserve, and destroy.
(Aryans, speakers of Sanskrit, indo-european language ↔ Hindus, i.e., inhabitants of the
Indus valley, over which Aryans overlapped around 1500 B.C.)

2. Hindu Philosophy: God and Self: Brahman (God), in Hindu philosophy, is the universal,
supreme Spirit, which is at the origin of the universe, of the phenomenal world. It is also called
the Eternal Absolute, or God, or the divine ground5 for the seed of all ulterior creations.

Atman (Self), coming from a Sanskrit root meaning breathing (eth-men, asthma in Greek), is a
principle that pervades everything, the supreme consciousness, or a “body” in which all else is
united. Older Upanishads (such as Brihadaranyaka), explain the Self as an essence obtained by
denying everything (it is neither the physical, mental or energetic body, but a “witness” beyond all
these, which cannot be identified with any manifested reality). Later Upanishads (such as Maitri
Upahishad) define Atman as representing only the individual Self, in opposition to the universal
self (Brahman, God as Being and Nonbeing)

Vedanta schools (veda meaning “knowledge” in Sanskrit and anta meaning “appendix, ending”)
originally referred to the Upanishads, the last appendix, or final layer of the Vedic canon. There
are 10 schools of Vedanta, of which Advaita Vedanta may be the most important, in contrast with
Dvaita Vedanta.

5
The phrase 'Divine Ground' was in modern times coined by Aldous Huxley in his widely read comparative study of
mysticism The Perennial Philosophy. Divine Ground is a neutral term to express the common experience of mystics
in diverse religious traditions of an Absolute Ground in which phenomena appear to have their root and origin. Theistic
religions refer to this ground as God or Godhead whereas Eastern transtheistic religions use terms such as Tao,
Dharmakaya or Clear Light. Among modern authors who use the expression 'Ground' is Tibetan Buddhist teacher
Sogyal Rinpoche (in his book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying)
Advaita Vedanta (skr. non-two) is the monistic conclusion to the Vedas. It states the identity of
Atman (the true self, pure consciousness) with Brahman, which is also pure consciousness. It is a
non-dual philosophy which gives primacy to universal consciousness, Brahman.
A follower of Vedanta seeks liberation by acquiring knowledge (vidya) of the identity of Atman
and Brahman, and needs the guidance of a guru to attain this. Historically, Advaita Vedanta
developed in interaction with other traditions like Buddhism, Shivaism. However, the main
founder of Advaita is Shankara, who lived in the 8-th century C.E.
Dvaita Vedanta, founded by Shri Madvachariya (1238-1317), makes a distinction between God,
the supreme soul (para-atman) and individual souls (jiv-atman). The jivatman are not created by
God but depend on him for their existence. Dvaita Vedanta represents the dualistic conclusions
to the Vedas. It theorizes the existence of two separate realities (much like Christianity), (1)
Brahman, the supreme self, independent reality or supreme truth of the universe, and (2) a
dependent, but real universe, that exists with its own separate essence. The second reality, jiva,
individual soul, exists as matter. God is seen as real and eternal entity which controls the universe,
and takes a personal role.

3. The body of practical knowledge, and the ethical, socially concerned aspect of Hinduism:
concepts such as dharma, or the four ages (ashrama) of man, or the concept of ethical
duty, or destiny of man, embodied in terma6.
Dharma = a. in Hinduism refers to the behaviours in accordance with rta (Tao in Chinese
civilization), the order that makes the universe possible, the right way of living, and even laws,
duties;
b. in Buddhism it means cosmic law/order, depicted iconographically as the wheel
that turns, but also the teachings of Buddha, the Law (fa in Chinese, ho in Japanese, 法).
The stages (Ashrama) of a dutiful life. Hindu lore and wisdom considered that man passes
through four main stages during his life (such ideas exist even in Western cultures, however they
are much simpler, as possibly synthesized in the riddle posed by the Sphinx to Oedipus). This idea
of four stages is combined with four ethical goals of man’s life, which is another idea specific to
Hinduism. According to the ethical theories in Indian philosophy, the proper goals of human life
are fulfillment of the individual and duty toward family, happiness and spiritual liberation 9they
are called Purusartha in sanskrit).
The four stages of life are: Brahmacharya (student), Grihastha (householder),
Vanaprastha (retired) and Sannyasa (renunciation). These too are an aspect of dharma, as they
represent an ideal and a model of life.

6
terma, or gter’ma in Tibetan, could be translated as “hidden treasure”, and were teachings revealed to chosen
persons (called terton in Tibetan), creating a tradition of continuous revelation in Tibetan Buddhism. They existed
also in Indian tradition, but especially in Buddhism where the transmission of dharma could be made in two ways,
the so-called "long oral transmission" from teacher to student in unbroken lineages and the "short transmission"
through terma. For example in the 2-nd century C.E. Nagarjuna, founder of the Madhyamika school of Mahayana
Buddhism, is also credited for developing the philosophy of the Prajnaparamita sutras by direct revelation of the
final part of these scriptures from the naga (serpent deities).
 While some Indian texts present these as sequential stages of human life and recommend
age when one enters each stage, many texts state the Ashramas as four alternative ways of life and
options available, but not as sequential stage that any individual must follow, nor do they place
any age limits.
In the stage of education (till 24 or 25 years old), the young man would seek education
with a guru, remain celibate, and learn to live a life of dharma (righteousness, duty, morality).
The householder stage (25-50) refers to married life, when man has the duty to raise a
family, educate children, produce food and wealth that could support other people in other stages
of life, thus being the most important socially.
The retirement stage (50-75), where a person handed over household responsibilities to the
next generation, took an advisory role, and gradually withdrew from the world was a transition
phase from a householder's life with its greater emphasis on wealth, security, pleasure, to to one
with greater emphasis on Moksha (spiritual liberation).
The stage of renounced life was marked by renunciation of material desires and prejudices,
represented by a state of disinterest and detachment from material life, living without any property
or home (as an ascetic), and focussed on liberation, peace and simple spiritual life. Anyone could
enter this stage after completing the Brahmacharya (student) stage of life.

Neither ancient nor medieval texts of India state that any of the first three Ashramas must devote
itself solely to a specific goal of life. The fourth stage of Sannyasa is different, and the
overwhelming consensus in ancient and medieval texts is that Sannyasa stage of life must entirely
be devoted to Moksha (liberation) aided by Dharma.
Dharma is held primary for all stages. Moksha is the ultimate noble goal, recommended for
everyone, to be sought at any stage of life. On the other two, the texts are unclear. With the
exception of Kamasutra, most texts make no recommendation on the relative preference on Artha
or Kama, that an individual must emphasize in what stage of life. The Kamasutra states: “The life
span of a man is one hundred years. Dividing that time, he should attend to the three aims of life
in such a way that they support, rather than hinder each other. In his youth he should attend to
profitable aims (artha) such as learning, in his prime to pleasure (kama), and in his old age to
dharma and moksha.”

The expression of Indian philosophy in literature. The Ramayana

Ramayana – composed by the sage Valmiki somewhere around 500 BC, is said to describe
the duties of human relationships (the ideal father, servant, brother, wife and king). It explores
human values and the concept of dharma.
Story:
King Dasarathra of Ayodhya has three wives and the following sons with them: Rama, son
of Kausalya, the twins Lakshman and Shatrughna, sons of Sumitra, and Bharatha, son of Kaikeyi.
When he married his third wife, Kaikeyi, the king had no son by any of the other wives, as yet. He
promised kaikeyi that if she bears him a son, he will be the heir and successor to the throne.
However, the first wife gives birth to Rama before Kaikeyi.
Rama is very obedient (the perfect son) and becomes the king’s favourite. The king actually
crowns him as successor, but wife #3, Kaikeyi is angry and convinces the king to exile Rama for
14 years and crown her own son, Bharatha. Rama takes his wife, Sita, and leaves for exile, but
only six days after his departure, the old king dies. Bhraratha is very angry with his mother and
swears not to take the throne, ever. Lakshman, who is a very good archer, and is married to Sita’s
sister, leaves his wife at home, to follow his brother Rama into exile. So, the middle twin,
Shatrughna, is the one who actually rules the kingdom and comforts the three queens.
In the south of India lives a bad tempered king, called Ravana, and his sister, hearing about
Rama’s qualities, covets him. She persuades her brother Ravana to abduct Sita, who is taken and
hides in Ravana’s fortress in Lanka (the southern island). A war ensues between Rama, helped by
an army of monkeys (the vanaras) and Ravana and his army of monsters, rakshasa. Ravana’s
younger brother is a good man and helps Rama win the battle and retrieve his wife.
The battle for the abducted wife is somehow similar to the motif of the Greek epic, the
Iliad, but the moral attitude of the characters in the two epics is very different, and much in favour
of the Indian heroes. Actually it is interpreted that Rama embodies dharma, while his brother
Bharatha symbolizes the power to nourish the entire world, of the god Vishnu, as well as dharma.
After his father’s death, Bharatha goes to Rama and Lakshman in exile and asks Rama to
come back as king in Ayodhya. But Rama refuses to return earlier than 14 years, as it would be
unfair. Bharatha returns to Ayodhya as a representative of his brother, King Rama, and promises
that if Rama does no come back after 14 years, he will kill himself. During these long years
Bharatha conquers the region of Ghandara, and creates the Kingdom of Takshasila (today’s Punjab,
Pakistan, Afghanistan).
After 14 years of exile Rama had just finished the war with Ravana, and, worried about
what is at home, sends the hero of the vanaras, Hanuman, to Bharatha. Hanuman was devoted to
Rama, and was a vanara, which can be translated as forest dweller, but in later illustrations of
Ramayana, was represented as monkeys. Characters like Hanuman are fundamental to the cultural
consciousness of India, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, and even reached Japan as popular characters.
Rakshasa, are demons also in the old vedic tradition.
India – the Cradle of mankind. Traditional archaeologists and researchers into ancient
life consider that civilization began around 5000 years ago, in Sumer and ancient Egypt. This is
the generally accepted timeline of our civilization, but there is material evidence in India, which
corroborated with legends and epics such as Ramayana proves that a much older civilization may
have existed on earth. Between India and Sri Lanka, in the Palk Straits was discovered a man-
made structure called Adam’s Bridge, from a Muslim legend that says Adam came down to earth
on this bridge when he was expelled from Heaven. The Ramayana epic (Rama, the deity is
considered to have lived in the tredha yuga, 1,700,000 years ago) calls it Rama’s Bridge (rama
Setu) and says that the bridge was built by the vanaras so that Rama’s army may cross into Lanka
to save his wife.
 However, satellite information shows that the 30 kilometres long chain of shoals that
spreads between the continent and the island of Sri Lanka is a continuous structure and Dr.
Badrinarayanan of the Geological Survey Institute of India researched it and confirmed it was

man-made.
They discovered 6 metres below sea sandstone, 45 metres below calciferous stones.
Non-establishment historian Graham Hancock has put up evidence for sustaining that a
high culture was in existence 12.000 years BC on the shores of India. In Tamil Nadu, on the south-
eastern coast of India, the Minashi Temple in Madurai is said to have been established by the
survivors of a flood, belonging to an earlier advanced society. The Sangham myth and the
submerging of Atlantis 11.600 BC.
Mahabalipurum Temple, on the Bengal coast: legend says that the granite temples
commemorate an earlier city, Bal. The city Bali, was so breautiful that the gods were jealous and
destroyed it. In present day Mabalipuram, 3 miles off shore is a sunken structure.
In the N-W of India in 2001 2 huge sunken cities were discovered in the Gulf of Cambay,
120 feet under water. Subwater profiling, sonar shows rectangular structures. Samples were dated
C14 around 7500 BC.
The Dwaka flood myths were confirmed by the ruins discovered in the bay nearby. Dwaka
Krishna temple must have been there. The post-ice age floodings must have submerged the
structures. Manu, the first man of Indian legends is a flood survivor who becomes the father of the
Indian race. A great rishi takes plants in a ship during the flood.
Was India flooded? Glenn Milne of Durham University researches ocean water raising.
In the Indus Valley cities were found along the river banks about the same age as in Egypt.
Dhola Vira, in the Kuch saltmarshes, is an Indus valley civilization site, 3000 BC, where
undeciphered hieroglyphs were discovered. In the foothills of the Himalaya are much older sites,
so the question is, how far back does the Indus valley civilization go? Probably survivors of a flood
retreated to the mountains to start again, like Manu, who appears in the Vedas. Vedas memorized
and handed down for 3000 years.

Ancient Culture of the kama Sutra (You Tube), Historical Mughal Era’s 9 century

As Dharma is one of the most important notions in Eastern thought we will devote more
space to it and compare and some notions about Buddhism7.

Dharma (in skr.) means « to hold, to carry », in Pali it becomes dhamma, and with the transfer of
Buddhism to China and Tibet, it was translated in Chinese by fa (meaning “law”) and Jap. Hō (法).

Spreading of Buddhism in Asia: Buddhism had entered Han China via the Silk Road,
beginning in the 1st or 2nd century of the Christian Era.8 The first documented translations of
scriptures, by Buddhist monks who were not Chinese, were in the 2nd century CE, possibly as a
consequence of the expansion of the Greco-Buddhist Kushan Empire into the Chinese territory of
the Tarim Basin.9 From the 4th century onward, with Faxian's pilgrimage to India (395–414),
Chinese pilgrims started to travel by themselves to northern India, their source of Buddhism, in
order to get improved access to original scriptures. Much of the land route connecting northern
India with China at that time was ruled by the Buddhist Kushan Empire, and later the Hephthalite
Empire, see Gandhara. During these centuries, the combination of Indian Buddhism with Western
influences (Greco-Buddhism) gave rise to the various distinct schools of Buddhism in the area.
China was later reached by the Indian form of esoteric Buddhism - Vajrayana in the 7th century.
Buddhism in Tibet was also established as a branch of Vajrayana, in the 8th century. But from
about this time, the Silk Road transmission of Buddhism began to decline with the Muslim
conquest of Transoxiana, resulting in the Uyghur Khaganate by the 740s.

PART TWO - Indians writing in English

Wanting to preserve their traditions, or to transfer to their children born in America or

Canada what they consider to be their real, traditional identity, they are faced with the realization
that they are no longer Indian, Japanese, etc. In Canada – Anita Rau Badami’s very well received
second novel, The Hero’s Walk (2000), or in USA – Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
(1999), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation /Pen Award in

7
A very good article in English is found at the following url:
http://www.academicroom.com/article/dharma-hinduism?1567125920=1
8
Hill John E. (2009) Through the Jade Gate to Rome: A Study of the Silk Routes during the Later Han Dynasty, 1st
to 2nd Centuries CE. Book Surge, Charleston, South Carolina, p. 30
9
Zürcher Erich (2007). The Buddhist Conquest of China, 3rd ed. Leiden. E. J. Brill, p. 23
2000, show Indian Americans caught between their traditions and the new style of life of their
adoptive countries, and the sense of loss and betrayal they face when they realize that traditions
can no longer be met, preserved. In the short story The Interpreter of Maladies, which lends its
title to Lahiri’s first volume, we have a talented, self-taught polyglot Indian who works for a doctor
as translator for pacients of non-Bengali mother tongue, and also works as tourist guide on week-
ends. One summer week-end he drives a family of US born/living Bengalis, Mr. and Mrs. Das,
and their two children. We see our guide bewitched by the American sophistication and luxury of
the young couple, placing himself in a position of inferiority to the foreign visitors. Although Mrs.
Das considers his job as translator very interesting and puts it into a totally different perspective,
as an important work dedicated to his fellow humans, and although they all look in wonder and
admiration at the thousand years old temple they visit as a symbol of Indian values and excellence
and although she gives him a feeling of being important and escaping from his restricted circle
(the Das family symbolize the American freedom of movement which comes when you have
money to go anywhere and a visa-free passport) by taking his address and promising to write and
send photos, at the end everything falls back into the beginning as Mrs Das loses the address w/o
realizing it, under his eyes.

Muslims of Indian Origin: Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie’s most famous novel is Midnight’s Children (1981, wins Booker Prize same
year); it has a complex narrative structure and a unique verbal mixture of orality and eloquence
that established his reputation in the 80-ies as one of the best emerging writers in English. In his
novel we can trace the story of a Moslem family from the Kashmir valley, which starts in 1915
with the marriage of a young doctor educated in Germany to the beautiful daughter of a rich
landowner, who then move to Agra, then to New Delhi and finally Bombay. Significant events in
India’s history from the massacre of 1919, the formation of the Muslim and the murder of its
leader in the late 1930-ies, to the famous Independence Night of 15 august 1947, through the border
warfare with China of 1965, the death of Jawaharlal Nehru and the appointment of his daughter
Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister, the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, the Rule of Emergency in
1975 when censorship and suppression of civil rights surfaced for the first time in India’s modern
history, Sanjay Gandhi’s involvement with his mother’s programme of slum clearance and
compulsory sterilization, her subsequent defeat in a national election and the return to a more
cynical democracy thereafter.
By the Act of Independence of 1947 India is partitioned into two dominions (i.e. still under British
sovereignty, in the Commonwealth), India (Hindu) and Pakistan (Moslem), with Jawaharlal Nehru
as Prime Minister. In 1951 it becomes a Republic within the Commonwealth. The valley of
Kashmir, along the border between India and Pakistan decides in 1960, through a referendum, to
be part of India.
This is the background against which the story of a Moslem family in Kashmir starts to unfold. In
1915, the 25-year old Aadam Aziz has just returned from Germany where he had studied medicine
for five years. Although the valley of his childhood seemed like Paradise, the young doctor realizes
that, after five years’ absence, he already sees things differently: “Now, returning, he saw through
travelled eyes. Instead of the beauty of the tiny valley circled by giant teeth, he noticed the
narrowness, the proximity of the horizon; and felt sad, to be at home and feel so utterly enclosed.
He also felt – inexplicably – as though the old place resented his educated, stethoscoped return.”10
In Europe Aziz had clashed against the Europeans’ ideas on his own country: stereotypes like the
idea that India was discovered by the Europeans, that it was an uncivilized country: “Heidelberg,
in which along with medicine and politics, he learned that India – like radium – had been
‘discovered’ by the Europeans; even Oskar was filled with admiration for Vasco da Gama, and
this was what finally separated Aadam Aziz from his friends, this belief of theirs that he was
somehow the invention of their ancestors” 11 Actually, Salman Rushdie is a destroyer of our
European stereotypes about India, because in his novels he “plunged into” so many layers of Indian
society and showed the high and the low, the educated and the folk, as Anita Desai wrote in her
Introduction to his novel12.
So, the young doctor Aziz returns home, marries the daughter of a rich Moslem land owner and
decides to move to Amritsar in 1919. There he witnesses the Hartal, or Mourning Day of April 7
1919, when, the whole of India paused, at Gandhi’s injunction, stopped working, to mourn the
presence of the British on its territory. Dr. Aziz saw realizes that, as the Indians fought for the
British in WW I, “so many of them have seen the world by now and have been tainted by Abroad.
They will not easily go back to the old world. The British are wrong to try to turn back the clock”
(i.e., the Rowland Act against political agitation). But Gandhi’s design is distorted as mobs riot
the shops. On the 13th of April, a peaceful protest meeting is turned into a blood bath as R. E. Dyer,
the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar ordered the shooting of 1500 peaceful demonstrators.
Dr. Aziz survives only because he had accidentally fallen and is covered and sheltered by the dead
bodies of the people around him. With this occasion, he got a severe blue mark on his chest, where
the handle of his doctor’s bag had pressed against him. For the next twenty years, the doctor will
settle in Agra, where, in 1942 he witnessed another surge of the Indian spirit: the founding of the
Free Islam Convocation by Mian Abdullah, a Moslem magician from the Delhi ghetto, become
the “hope of India’s hundred million Muslims” 13 . It is this Abdullah who makes Dr. Aziz to
meditate that: ”I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the
chest that turned me into an Indian. I’m still not much of a Muslim, but I’m all for Abdullah. He’s
fighting my fight.”14. This is the truly tolerant attitude, yet acknowledging the right to preserve
one’s own tradition too.
The doctor’s daughters get married and one of them – Amina Sinai - moves to New Delhi with her
husband Ahmed. Their son Selim, born on the very night of India’s Independence, is the actual
narrator of the novel, and appears also as a character in the story. This character-narrator formula
was greatly used in oriental tale literature and also in Europe in novels like ….XXX

10
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1981, p. 9
11
ibidem, p. 10
12
ibidem, p. xi
13
op. cit., p. 46
14
ibid., p. 47
In New Delhi the Sinai family lives in a Muslim neighborhood, and has some profitable enterprises.
But the anti-Muslim gang calling themselves the Ravana firebugs sets fire to Muslim-owned
factories, shops, or asks for protection money in order to spare them. Muslims are called “the Jews
of Asia”, and the slogan is “No Partition, or else Perdition!”, meaning the opposition against the
partition between India and Pakistan.
The hatred between Muslims and Hindus is apparent in many respects and episodes in that
neighborhood. A few descriptions of the state of facts are more eloquent than any theoretical
presentation. For example, “One group of three neighbours was known as the ‘fighting cock-
people’, because they comprised one Sindhi and one Bengali householder whose homes were
separated by one of the muhalla’s few Hindu residences. The Sindhi and the Bengali had very little
in common – they didn’t speak the same language or cook the same food; but they were both
Muslims, and they both detested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from
their rooftops. They hurled multilingual abuse at him from their windows. They flung scraps of
meat at his door…while he, in turn paid urchins to throw stones at their windows, stones with
messages wrapped round them: “Wait, your turn will come”15
The fights between Muslims and Hindu are well known, and two Christian missionaries operating
in Bombay, Mary Pereira and Joe d’Costa express, on the eve of Independence, the Christians’
position of non-interference. Joe says that the independence is good only for the rich, as the poor
people will continue to suffer and kill each other for religious (or ethnic) reasons: “…the air comes
from the north now, and it’s full of dying. This independence is for the rich only; the poor are
being made to kill each other like flies. In Punjab. In Bengal. Riots riots, poor against poor. It’s in
the wind.’
…’You talking crazy, Joe, why you worrying with those so bad things? We can live quietly still,
no?’
‘Never mind, you don’t know one thing.’
‘But Joseph, even if it’s true about the killing, they’re Hindu and Muslim people only; why get
good Christian folk mixed up in their fight? Those ones have killed each other for ever and
ever.’”16(my underline)
The family moved to Bombay a few months before Independence, buying a good property from
an Englishman, because they were advised by a business associate that the price of property is
dropping as the British administration are preparing to leave India. It is in Bombay that the son,
Selim, conceived in New Delhi, is born, as the first baby of free India, together with a poor Hindu
family’s child. Mary Pereira, the missionary girl who works at the clinic where the children are
born, takes a – and changes the babies.
Midnight’s Children is not only the huge epic depicting India’s modern history but also, through
its many layers of cultural allusions to various Indian traditions, a hymn of praise for India the
Wise, or India the cradle of civilization. And the vitality that goes hand in hand with India’s
poverty, the power of renewal that India has, is surfacing here and there in the novel.

15
ibid. p. 89
16
idem, p. 130-131
Shalimar the Clown
Significance of the title.
Shalimar, or Shalimar Bagh, is the name of a famous garden built by the Mughal Emperor Jaganhir
(1569-1627), near Srinagar in Kashmir, connected by a channel to Lake Dal. The Emperor built
the garden in 1619 to please his beloved queen, Nur Jahan. The very garden – which was
traditionally the seat of celebrations ... is the scene of important events in the novel: it is actually
the place where the children who represent the peace and harmony that could exist in Kashmir,
were born. What does it symbolize?
Gardens all over the Muslim world are an image of Paradise (the one described in Quran). The
Shalimar Gardens – a place of crucial events in the eponymous novel, is also a symbol of the
Paradisiacal harmony that existed between Hindus and Muslims, involved in their traditional arts,
in the Kashmere village of Pachigam. This is a place of Beauty, but a beauty that is not so much
physical (the descriptions of nature are not as eloquent as those of the little valley where the action
of Midnights’ Children starts) as moral. It is the beauty of the harmony between the Muslim and
Hindu communities, that will gradually be disrupted by political events just as the marriage of the
two children born in the Gardens of Shalimar will be broken by the arrival of the American
ambassador in the peaceful village.

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

A “formula” that many of the good novels use today, is to mix the unfolding of a human,
psychological, and personal conflict, with a background of historical turmoil, or of cosmopolitan
and diverse spaces, where conflict arises from a clash of cultural beliefs (mutually strange beliefs
of Indians and Americans, for example). As Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma noticed, writers now
address a “new cosmopolitan audience“17. This particular readership appreciates literature that
mirrors contemporary aspects of globalisation: “[...] a world of emigration, immigration, travel,
multiple authenticities, of diaspora and its attendants, a kind of self-conscious hybridity, of
language that stretches the borders of nations, communities and ironically, ideas of purity”18.
Writers are after all those people with an acute sense of observing the world, deeply
involved in the problems of contemporary world, who found out that their most efficient weapon
for changing the world is not violence but the words with which they impress the readers and help
change their patterns of thinking.
In building the extraordinary story of The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri sets the story of an
Indian family gradually torn apart by the conflict between its old cultural traditions and the new
conditions of life encountered in the U.S., against the background of a less known yet bloody
period of Indian history. The Naxalbari peasant uprisings, following the postwar famines in Bengal,
led by the Communist youths influenced by Maoism in 1967, followed by the split of India’s

17
Rajan, Gita, and Sharma, Shailja, eds. New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US. Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 159
18
ibidem, p. 161
Communist Party which was Marxist into a Leninist and even Maoist wing and by violent terrorist
attacks on authorities like the Police or even the University. The XX family has two intelligent
sons, who pursue a university education, Subhash and Udayan. But while Subhash goes on to study
in Master and Doctoral Program in the United States, Udayan involves himself in the terrorist
activities of the Naxalites. Apparently selfish towards his family, his parents, wife Gauri and older
brother, Udayan engages in a suicidal activity, sacrificing himself for a higher cause, that of the
poor people of India. He will be finally caught and killed by the police.
Our Western perception of the Indian people as being very poor and submissive, with a
philosophical bent for renouncing the material world, is sharply contradicted by the violence
described in the book, performed by the anarchist Naxalite youths.
The question arises again as to what can be the significance of literature for our society today.
More than entertainment or didactic purposes, more than a philosophical, function of exploring the
meanings of life, it can have a direct, pragmatic impact on us, readers from everywhere: to help us
understand ourselves, our problems, more than just expounding a certain political agenda. The
bestselling authors today are not militants for any particular, political movement, except for this
one, big, contemporary movement of fighting for our own personal freedom, and for human
fulfillment anywhere and everywhere in the world, that is, a new form of humanism.
Thus, Turkish bestselling female writer, Elif Shafak takes as a setting point for her 2005 novel,
The Bastard of Istanbul, the massacre of the Armenian community in Turkey in 1915 and explores
its consequences up to the present, in the animosity still preserved in Armenian communities in
the US and the issues of identity can be built through conflict. Remembering that Turkey today, a
growing nation that still has ethnic problems with a Kurdish minority and a wide social gap
between a poor rural and still feudally minded, Islamic population and the modern, city
population/forces which drive the economic and scientific progress, how can we not feel that her
novel is so deeply relevant for our present society?
In spite of its success, the novel elicited the accusations of slandering the Turkish people and
Turkishness, and Shafak was faced with a trial.
An even better example of the type of relevance that I want to explain here comes from the recent
comments and reinterpretations in a post-colonial key of Mircea Eliade’s 1932 bestseller Maitreyi.
Published after returning from India where he had a scholarship to study Indian philosophy, this
story of a passionate love affair that ended in separation was considered autobiographical and
turned its young author who was a successful professor at the University of Bucharest, into a
sought for bachelor of the elegant society. It would have remained unnoticed in the English
language world, despite its 19…translation (and the translations into French in 194.. and Italian
194) had it not been for the response it received from Maitreyi Devi, the Indian real life prototype
of the character. After reading the English translation Maitreyi Devi wrote her own novel, Love
Never Ends. Her novel triggered a lot of response from American feminist critics, it made them to
read Eliade’s original story and thus a new key of interpretation appeared for Maitreyi. The
Romanian readers of the 1930-ies and later saw in it the passionate love story of one of their most
famous cultural personalities, and failed to see its “colonial” character.
Muslims of Indian Origin: Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie’s most famous novel is Midnight’s Children (1981, wins Booker Prize same
year); it has a complex narrative structure and a unique verbal mixture of orality and eloquence
that established his reputation in the 80-ies as one of the best emerging writers in English. In his
novel we can trace the story of a Moslem family from the Kashmir valley, which starts in 1915
with the marriage of a young doctor educated in Germany to the beautiful daughter of a rich
landowner, who then move to Agra, then to New Delhi and finally Bombay. Significant events in
India’s history from the massacre of 1919, the formation of the Muslim and the murder of its
leader in the late 1930-ies, to the famous Independence Night of 15 august 1947, through the border
warfare with China of 1965, the death of Jawaharlal Nehru and the appointment of his daughter
Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister, the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, the Rule of Emergency in
1975 when censorship and suppression of civil rights surfaced for the first time in India’s modern
history, Sanjay Gandhi’s involvement with his mother’s programme of slum clearance and
compulsory sterilization, her subsequent defeat in a national election and the return to a more
cynical democracy thereafter.
By the Act of Independence of 1947 India is partitioned into two dominions (i.e. still under
British sovereignty, in the Commonwealth), India (Hindu) and Pakistan (Moslem), with Jawaharlal
Nehru as Prime Minister. In 1951 it becomes a Republic within the Commonwealth. The valley of
Kashmir, along the border between India and Pakistan decides in 1960, through a referendum, to
be part of India.
This is the background against which the story of a Moslem family in Kashmir starts to unfold. In
1915, the 25 year old Aadam Aziz had just returned from Germany where he had studied medicine
for five years. Although the valley of his childhood seemed like Paradise, the young doctor realizes
that, after five years’ absence, he already sees things differently: “Now, returning, he saw through
travelled eyes. Instead of the beauty of the tiny valley circled by giant teeth, he noticed the
narrowness, the proximity of the horizon; and felt sad, to be at home and feel so utterly enclosed.
He also felt – inexplicably – as though the old place resented his educated, stethoscoped return.”19
In Europe Aziz had clashed against the Europeans ideas on his own country: stereotypes like the
idea that India was discovered by the Europeans, that it was an uncivilized country: “Heidelberg,
in which along with medicine and politics, he learned that India – like radium – had been
‘discovered’ by the Europeans; even Oskar was filled with admiration for Vasco da Gama, and
this was what finally separated Aadam Aziz from his friends, this belief of theirs that he was
somehow the invention of their ancestors” 20 Actually, Salman Rushdie is a destroyer of our
European stereotypes about India, because in his novels he “plunged into” so many layers of Indian
society and showed the high and the low, the educated and the folk, as Anita Desai wrote in her
Introduction to his novel21.

19
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1981, p. 9
20
ibidem, p. 10
21
ibidem, p. xi
So, the young doctor Aziz returns home, marries the daughter of a rich Moslem land owner and
decides to move to Amritsar in 1919. There he witnesses the Hartal, or Mourning Day of April 7
1919, when, the whole of India paused, at Gandhi’s injunction, stopped working, to mourn the
presence of the British on its territory. Dr. Aziz saw realizes that, as the Indians fought for the
British in WW I, “so many of them have seen the world by now and have been tainted by Abroad.
They will not easily go back to the old world. The British are wrong to try to turn back the clock”
(i.e., the Rowland Act against political agitation). But Gandhi’s design is distorted as mobs riot
the shops. On the 13th of April, a peaceful protest meeting is turned into a blood bath as R. E. Dyer,
the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar ordered the shooting of 1500 peaceful demonstrators.
Dr. Aziz survives only because he had accidentally fallen and is covered and sheltered by the dead
bodies of the people around him. With this occasion, he got a severe blue mark on his chest, where
the handle of his doctor’s bag had pressed against him. For the next twenty years, the doctor will
settle in Agra, where, in 1942 he witnessed another surge of the Indian spirit: the founding of the
Free Islam Convocation by Mian Abdullah, a Moslem magician from the Delhi ghetto, become
the “hope of India’s hundred million Muslims” 22 . It is this Abdullah who makes Dr. Aziz to
meditate that:”I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the
chest that turned me into an Indian. I’m still not much of a Muslim, but I’m all for Abdullah. He’s
fighting my fight.”23This is the truly tolerant attitude, yet acknowledging the right to preserve one’s
own tradition too.
The doctor’s daughters get married and one of them – Amina Sinai - moves to New Delhi with her
husband Ahmed. Their son Selim, born on the very night of India’s Independence, is the actual
narrator of the novel, and appearing also as a character in the story. This character-narrator formula
was greatly used in oriental tale literature and also in Europe in novels like ….XXX

In New Delhi the Sinai family lives in a Muslim neighborhood, and has some profitable enterprises.
But the anti-Muslim gang calling themselves the Ravana firebugs sets fire to Muslim-owned
factories, shops, or asks for protection money in order to spare them. Muslims are called “the Jews
of Asia”, and the slogan is “No Partition, or else Perdition!” meaning the opposition against the
partition between India and Pakistan.
The hatred between Muslims and Hindus is apparent in many respects and episodes in that
neighborhood. A few descriptions of the state of facts are more eloquent than any theoretical
presentation. For example, “One group of three neighbours was known as the ‘fighting cock-
people’, because they comprised one Sindhi and one Bengali householder whose homes were
separated by one of the muhalla’s few Hindu residences. The Sindhi and the Bengali had very little
in common – they didn’t speak the same language or cook the same food; but they were both
Muslims, and they both detested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from
their rooftops. They hurled multilingual abuse at him from their windows. They flung scraps of

22
op. cit., p. 46
23
ibid., p. 47
meat at his door…while he, in turn paid urchins to throw stones at their windows, stones with
messages wrapped round them: “Wait, your turn will come”24
The fights between Muslims and Hindu are well known, and two Christian missionaries operating
in Bombay, Mary Pereira and Joe d’Costa express, on the eve of Independence, the Christians’
position of non-interference. Joe says that the independence is good only for the rich, as the poor
people will continue to suffer and kill each other for religious (or ethnic) reasons: “…the air comes
from the north now, and it’s full of dying. This independence is for the rich only; the poor are
being made to kill each other like flies. In Punjab. In Bengal. Riots riots, poor against poor. It’s in
the wind.’
…’You talking crazy, Joe, why you worrying with those so bad things? We can live quietly still,
no?’
‘Never mind, you don’t know one thing.’
‘But Joseph, even if it’s true about the killing, they’re Hindu and Muslim people only; why get
good Christian folk mixed up in their fight? Those ones have killed each other for ever and
ever.’”25(my underline)
The family moved to Bombay a few months before Independence, buying a good property from
an Englishman, because they were advised by a business associate that the price of property is
dropping as the British administration are preparing to leave India. It is in Bombay that the son,
Selim, conceived in New Delhi, is born, as the first baby of free India, together with a poor Hindu
family’s child. Mary Pereira, the missionary girl who works at the clinic where the children are
born, changes the babies.

Satanic Verses
Shalimar the Clown
The novel presents the phenomenon of the so-called “Iron Mullahs” who were spreading through
Cashmiri villages in the nineteen sixties, before the 25 days war with Pakistan, preaching a tough
version of Islam, accusing all the world of being depraved and claiming for a return to faith. The
novel then presents the arrival of such one mullah in the competitor village of Shrimal, a village
that was overwhelmingly Muslim. The mullah attracts the population with his passionate sermons,
convinces them to build him a mosque, but flees in the face of the Hindu army and his church falls
into ruin, as a symbol of the useless and dangerous creed the mullah was preaching.
The “Iron Mullahs” episode is one of the best treatments of Islamic extremism.

Jhumpa Lahiri
The Lowland
The novel is constructed on contrasting views of Indian and American worlds. The points which
amaze Subhash, as a foreign student in America, about Americans’ behaviour are exactly those in
which major differences occur between the two cultures, Indian and American.

24
ibid. p. 89
25
idem, p. 130-131
The Americans can be amiable with their ex-spouse (ex-husband, in this case) or can make a
friendly separation to a love relationship. Indians obviously cannot, as they seem to be more
passional. (pages 96-97, last two paragraphs, and p. 91)
Shubhash’s separation from Holly coincides with Udayan’s death and makes possible his return
home and temporary rupture with America. Once gone to the US, many foreign students are
tempted to remain there, instead of returning home.
P. 91 – Subhash’s defiance of his parents, in choosing his own spouse would be unthinkable in
India, but is possible in America, he feels, due to the distance that separated them.
P. 97-98- Subhash is angry when Holly proposes separation, though he knows that actually she’s
making him a favor. We see here the calm American woman contrasted with the passionate Udayan.
What is the characteristic (psychological) profile of the Hindu, emerging from this novel?
On p. 92 Subhash is troubled that Holly, his American girlfriend, remained on good terms with her
ex-husband.
A “formula” that many of the good novels use today, is to mix the unfolding of a human, psychological
and personal conflict, with a background of historical turmoil, or of cosmopolitan and diverse spaces, where
conflict arises from a clash of cultural beliefs (mutually strange beliefs of Indians and Americans, for
example). As Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma noticed, writers now address a “new cosmopolitan
audience“(Rajan and Sharma 159). This particular readership appreciates literature that mirrors
contemporary aspects of globalisation: “[...] a world of emigration, immigration, travel, multiple
authenticities, of diaspora and its attendants, a kind of self-conscious hybridity, of language that stretches
the borders of nations, communities and ironically, ideas of purity” (Rajan and Sharma 161).
Writers are after all those people with an acute sense of observing the world, deeply involved in the
problems of contemporary world, but, unlike Subash’s brother, found out that their most efficient weapon
for changing the world is not violence but the words with which they impress the readers and help change
their patterns of thinking.

Rajan, Gita, and Sharma, Shailja, eds. New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US. Stanford,
California: Standford University Press, 2006.

Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands, Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London: Granta and Penguin,
1991. The political dimension of literature consists in its ability to offer alternative discourses to
hegemonic truths (Rushdie 14)

As a diaspora Indian woman, Twinkle inhabits a double structure. Westernisation provides her the tools
to deviate from a normative Hindu conception of womanhood.

Her vague connections with both Hindu and Western cultures allow her to fashion a female identity that
is not prescribed by either of them.