Light from eastern windows
Michael Wharton
THE BUDDHA AND THE SAHIBS by Charles Allen John Murray, £25, pp. 322, ISBN 071955425X If the popular idea of the men who founded the British Raj as a lot of brutish pig-stickers and greedy nabobs who despised the Indians they exploited and thought their civilisation of no account still persists, this fascinating, well-researched book should be enough to dispel it. At the end of the 18th century, when the East India Company was consolidating its power and extending its possessions, a number of its officials, civil and military, struck by the splendours and mysteries about them, impressive even in their day, began to seek for knowledge of India's past.
One of the first and most notable of these 'Orientalists' (the word had not acquired its present modish disrepute) was Sir William Jones, a judge of the Supreme Court in Bengal, whose ambition it was to 'know India better than any European ever knew it'. An Arabic and Persian scholar, he was one of the first to break through the Brahmin ban on outsiders learning the sacred language, Sanskrit. He soon realised that it was cognate with Greek and Latin, which gave him the first intimation of what came to be known as the Indo-European family of languages. A man of his time as well as a scholar, he could not resist 'plausible conjectures' about the links between ancient India and prehistoric Britain. Was Stonehenge an Indian temple?
However that might be, a vista of Indian history was now opening up, stretching back to remote antiquity. It soon appeared, from inscriptions on pillars and rocks in India, as well as from evidence in Burma, Ceylon and Tibet, where Buddhism still prevailed, that a religion quite distinct from Hinduism had flourished in India for centuries until it was virtually extirpated by Muslim invaders and orthodox Hindus.
Throughout the 19th century, Jones was followed by a line of amateur archaeologists and philologists, men remarkable for their energy, persistence and in some cases eccentricity: Francis Buchanan, a naturalist who investigated the Buddhism of Burma; Alexander Cunningham, a soldier turned archaeologist; Alexander Csoma de Koros, a wandering Hungarian scholar who, while searching for links between Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, lived for months in a remote Himalayan monastery gladly sharing its squalor and discomfort.
The most brilliant of these amateur scholars was James Prinsep, a civil servant, scientist and engineer, who put these studies on a sound basis. His decipherment of the mysterious inscription on the Great Stupa at Sanchi led indirectly to the discovery of the true locations of the holy places of Buddhism, long buried under the rubble of history: his birthplace, his father's palace and the sites of his travels and teaching. It also revealed the true history of the legendary Emperor Ashoka, who from being an ordinary, run-of-the-mill conqueror came to embrace the Buddha's doctrine of Dharma, with its message of peace and mercy for all mankind.
A wave of enthusiasm for Indian and Buddhist studies followed in Britain and Europe. This was not necessarily shared by the authorities in the Raj. In his notorious 'Minute on Education', published in Calcutta in 1838, Macaulay, then a high official of the Raj, argued that Indian civilisation was degenerate, Sanskrit 'barren of useful knowledge' and 'fruitful of monstrous superstitions'. It was in India's best interests, he maintained, to adopt a system of education based on the English language, creating 'a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect'. Twenty years later, the shock of the Mutiny must have done much to encourage this view.
Later in the century an instinctive Western revulsion from Hinduism served to make Buddhism, which was seen as a kind of Asiatic Protestantism, more acceptable among the thinking classes and the spiritually inclined. Hence the immense success of the Daily Telegraph editor Edwin Arnold's once celebrated sub-Tennysonian epic The Light of Asia, published in 1879, which went into 80 editions, was dramatised on Broadway and even made into an opera. The image of Buddhism was now established as benign. Kim's Lama was and is a most appealing figure; Madame Blavatsky, who burst onto the scene to expound her 'Secret Doctrines' in partnership with a strange American adventurer, Colonel Olcott, somewhat less so. But the occult side of Buddhism, associated with Tibet, the land of mystery and magic, has proved irresistible. Today Buddhist doctrines, in distorted forms, float indeterminately around the campfires of the New Ageists. The Dalai Lama has become a world-class favourite.
If Buddhism is flourishing in the West, it has also revived wonderfully in the land where it began and was so long forgotten. The sacred sites which the sahibs of Charles Allen's admirable book revealed and placed in the context of Indian history are carefully preserved and tended in ways which would have amazed them. In Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha attained wisdom, a colossal statue of the Buddha, 500 feet high, intended to inspire peace and happiness in all sentient beings, is to be erected at a cost of 200 million dollars.
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