A Strange Kind of Paradise

Title: A Strange Kind of Paradise – India through Foreign Eyes

Author: Sam Miller

Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 2014)

ISBN: 9780143424024

Pages: 425

Indians have been particularly complacent in recording history or putting down their observations to paper, or palm leaves, or whatever. India boasts of early mathematicians and philosophers who were at par with Greek scholars, but the position of Herodotus remains uncontested. Whatever history the modern historians compiled was from the accounts of visitors and invaders who came here. Early Buddhist texts and a rational analysis of the Puranas supported their findings and the modern Indian historiography was born. This book is the tale of a 2500 year-old engagement between foreigners and India that begins with the ancient Greeks. This book is an excellent survey of the writing from Megasthenes onwards to the twenty-first century movies and cultural interactions. Sam Miller is a journalist who worked with the BBC in Delhi for many years. He has married from India and stays here as an adopted son-in-law of the country.

Miller notes a crucial difference of focus on the accounts of ancient and modern visitors to India. The ancient ones were almost universally of the view that it was a land of untold wealth, rich in resources and jewels. Some accounts talk about gold-digging ants and places where diamonds can simply be picked from the ground. In the modern period, a U-turn is seen in the crux of the narrative where almost all of them present horrific tales of grinding, dehumanizing poverty. Did the rich country gradually fall into misery as a result of countless raids of loot and plunder let loose by the invaders? The author tactfully stops short of asking this pertinent question but instead presents the reasons behind the modern perspective. In between the two eras, there appeared a period in which India remained a misty eminence for most mediaeval Europeans while China surged ahead out of the shadows. This happened as a corollary to the Mongol invasions to Europe in which the glimmer of their sword blades reflected off streams of blood as far away as Hungary and Bulgaria. The stamp of poverty was affixed on India's visage in the early eighteenth century when the first sustained identification of it as a land of great poverty, rather than of great wealth came to pass. This image was largely transmitted through the writings of missionaries, who won most of their converts from the poorest of the poor, upon the supply of food and other items of material support. Some of the converts were in fact derisively called ‘Rice Christians’. Missionaries would send letters back home, begging for money to support the new converts. This picture got etched into the European mind during the colonial days.

Of all the visitors mentioned in this book, that of Tripitaka, variously known as Hiuen Tsang or Xuansang is worthy of remark. He was a Chinese monk who made the long and arduous overland journey from his homeland to India in the seventh century CE. The aim of his visit was to call on the holy sites of Buddhism and to find ancient Buddhist texts. He was the source of the greatest contact between the two countries from the third to the seventh centuries CE. Tripitaka made the first description of the giant rock-cut Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan which were blasted away in 2001 in a mad rush of religious bigotry by the Taleban. For some reason, Miller continues to refer to the Chinese pilgrim by his Indian name, Tripitaka. A part of his skull was gifted to India in 1956 as a piece of goodwill measure by the nascent People's Republic of China and personally handed over by the Dalai Lama, who accompanied the official delegation led by the premier, Zhou Enlai. It still remains under lock and key in the Patna Museum. His narrative contains a detailed description of the theological university at Nalanda which housed 10,000 monks in multi-storeyed chambers. This seat of learning was vandalised and burnt down by a Muslim warlord in the twelfth century when he discovered that there was no copy of the Quran in its library (p.69). A Tibetan pilgrim visited the site soon after in 1235 and what he saw was heart-breaking. He found one aged monk teaching pupils among the charred remains of the once magnificent buildings. It soon went into oblivion and was rediscovered only in the nineteenth century with the help of an English translation of Tripitaka’s work.

Miller dwells at some length on the Orientalist and Anglicist dichotomy in the Western viewpoint on India. We come across some westerners who are starry-eyed on Indian ideals and artefacts while another group treats it with disdain and contempt. The Orientalists is of the persuasion that the West has much to learn from India. Their images of the country was born of its pre-colonial past, an ancient civilization waiting to be discovered, its artefacts collected and categorised. The Anglicists’ image of India was adapted from the colonial period with all its attendant ills. The land they were conquering became a testbed where they could experiment with their ideas on Christianity, progress and education. William Jones, who founded the Asiatic Society, belongs to the former and Wilberforce who preached against slavery, the historian James Mill and Thomas Macaulay belong to the latter group. Macaulay went a step further, jeeringly remarking that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. He also wanted to play with the new education system the British was implementing in India that sought to create a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect. Indeed, it was successful in churning out a group of Anglophone people who have lost touch with the country’s mores and were often disparagingly remarked upon as Macaulay's children.

The constant refrain of all modern visitors to India had been its dirtiness - not of the land, but of the actions of its inhabitants for which poverty is one of the reasons. The wide practice of open defecation made it a foul place even for those who are impressed by its otherwise impeccable attributes. V S Naipaul notes with disgust in An Area of Darkness that ‘Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover’ (p.361). In fact, the euphemistic term for defecation in the Malayalam language is ‘going outside’! However, open defecation is in its final laps with the countrywide coverage of the Swachh Bharat initiative. We hope that future visitors won't have a bone of contention at least on this point.

The chapter titles are a pastiche of old travel books in which the author's exploits are displayed in a brief way. The exceeding number of footnotes somewhat repels the readers from the main narrative. Miller has been very open in handling delicate points that offend puritanical readers. There are some ribald quotes from travel lore on which discretion on the part of faint-hearted readers is advised. He also provides a taste of the imperial erotica in a matter-of-fact way. Miller’s vocabulary is amazingly comprehensive and hints of his rich credentials to his career in journalism. The author’s own biography is also presented through a string of intermissions at the end of each chapter. That way, Miller becomes a part of his own narrative stream by which his experiences enrich the abundant material compiled by foreign eyes.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star