Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (27 page)

Mahatma Gandhi was originally from Gujarat, on the western coast of India. But many other regular and distinguished visitors to Burma were from Bengal itself. The great poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore came in 1916, three years after he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The editor of the
Rangoon Mail
at the time was also a Bengali, Nripendra Chandra Banerjee, and he acted as Rabindranath Tagore’s host in Burma, organizing meetings for the visiting dignitary with Burmese
swaraj
activists and many other city notables, Burmese, British, Indian and Chinese. Tagore too would come back, in 1924, on his way to China, and came to see Burma as a bridge between India and China. On both occasions there were discussions on Buddhism, and more generally on religion and philosophy, and on the very old ties that once linked India and Burma, and India, through Burma, to the Far East.

Aeons ago, most of what is today India was part of a super-continent called Gondwana, separated from Eurasia by an immense sea called the Tethys Sea. And over millions of years, what became India gradually peeled itself away from the rest of Gondwana, then slid northwards, eventually colliding into Asia, lifting up the shoreline into the Himalayas and creating the Tibetan plateau. What was the Tethys Sea disappeared and in its place below the Himalayas is the vast floodplain of the Indus and Ganges Rivers. This was once grassland, much like the African savannah, home to elephants, lions and hippos; it is now a mix of urban and rural areas, a little bigger than Burma or Texas, incorporating parts of modern-day Pakistan, northern India and Bangladesh, and home to a billion people or more. Other than China’s eastern provinces, the greatest concentration of people in the world lives in the Indus–Ganges floodplain.

Though there were times of imperial consolidation, for most of its history this great floodplain was divided up into several kingdoms. Bengal was one of them. And Bengal’s geographical position–at the end of the Ganges as well as at the top of the Bay of Bengal–meant that it was connected westward to the regions around Delhi that had come under successive foreign invaders, Greek, Turkish, Afghan and Mughal, and in other directions to the rest of Asia.

In ancient times, people speaking an Indo-European language (very distantly related to most European languages) lived at the other end of the Ganges and along the Indus River. This language would give rise to modern Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, and the many other languages of the north and west of the subcontinent as well as Singhalese on the island of Ceylon. The more refined version of this language was developed by ancient grammarians as Sanskrit, which became the liturgical language of Hinduism as well as some schools of Buddhism. The relationship between Sanskrit, the vernacular tongues on which it was based, and modern Indian languages like Hindi or Bengali, is very similar to the relationship between Latin, vulgar Latin and modern French or Italian. They are all often referred to as the Aryan or ‘noble’ languages, after the self-style of the people who first spoke them millennia ago.

It was the eighteenth-century polymath Sir William Jones, founder of Bengal’s Asiatic Society, who first concluded that these Aryan languages were (ultimately) related to Greek and Latin and postulated the existence of an ‘Indo-European’ family of languages, giving rise to the science of comparative linguistics. These ideas, now well established, were followed by theories of ancient invasions and of heroic migrations by Aryan-speaking peoples from some more northerly realm, with their Vedic gods (so similar to the gods of Greece and Rome), defeating and overwhelming the darker-skinned natives of the subcontinent. The caste system of India, it was said, was born from this primeval conflict, with the Aryan invaders organizing themselves into the top castes, and the darker natives finding themselves locked into lower-caste servitude or forced into separation as ‘untouchables’. Colonial-era racial theorists were not unhappy to discover an ancient system of race- and colour-based discrimination.

More recent scholarship challenges some of this. There is little evidence of an actual migration of people from a purer Aryan homeland to the north. As in Europe, the spread of Indo-European languages (which in Europe displaced all but outliers like Basque and Finnish) may have been as much the result of cultural changes linked to the spread of farming as a physical movement of people. The caste system is now considered less fixed through time than previously thought, and in general there is now a more complex understanding of the interplay of genes, language and culture through history.

What we do know is that, from about 3,000 years ago, a society speaking the earliest Aryan languages and worshipping the Vedic gods began to spread eastward along the Ganges, into what is now the state of Uttar Pradesh and then to Bihar. It was clearly a hierarchical society, with a priesthood near the top and a belief in ritual purity and pollution. The Aryans and Aryan society of the northwest was pure, whilst the new peoples discovered towards the east were stigmatized.

There were gradations, including areas seen as mixed as well as those that were clearly beyond the pale. But despite these restrictions, people and ideas continued to move eastward, towards the lower Ganges, retroactively shifting forward the frontier between the ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’, perhaps absorbing, perhaps displacing earlier inhabitants. By the late first millennium
BC
, Aryan-speaking civilization had diversified: what was originally a mixed society of pastoralists and farmers of wheat and barley, led by patrilineal chiefs and Vedic priests, was transformed in the east into a society of rice farmers, organized into kingdoms and republics. It was in one of these little republics, Kapilavastu, that Siddhartha Gautama was born and it was in this region that he, as the Buddha, would teach his path to Enlightenment.

In the centuries that followed, Bengal, at the edge of the Indian world, grew into a great centre of Buddhism, with an influence that swept across a considerable part of Asia, from Tibet and Yunnan to Java. Buddhism likely arrived in Bengal at a very early date. The kingdom of Magadha, where the Buddha had lived and taught, was just to the west of Bengal. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who travelled around India in the seventh century
AD
, noted that nearly a millennium earlier, the Emperor Asoka had erected stupas in Bengal to commemorate the Buddha’s visits there, noting the monasteries he saw, monasteries that were home to thousands of Buddhist monks.

Bengal remained a stronghold of Buddhism at a time when the religion was losing ground further to the west, first to revived and new Hindu faiths, and later to Islam. The Pala kings, who ruled Bengal from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, were devout Buddhists who routinely invoked the Buddha and his teachings at the beginning of their official records. At a time when Buddhism was dying in other parts of India, in Bengal it not only survived for hundreds of years longer but gave rise to a new and enduring interpretation of the original teachings. It is known alternatively as Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism and emphasizes esoteric rituals and practices. Its various schools spread from Bengal throughout the Far East, including from Burma to Yunnan in China, where it was long entrenched.

The great Buddhist universities of this part of India, the universities of Nalanda and Vikramshila, were famous throughout the east. Nalanda was a very old university, founded in the fifth century, and was actively patronized by the Pala court. At its peak, it attracted scholars and students from as far afield as China, Japan, Persia and the eastern Mediterranean, and was one of the world’s first residential universities, with more than 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers living in its vast thirty-acre campus, complete with dormitories, classrooms and meditation halls, Buddhist temples and carefully designed gardens and artificial lakes. Xuanzang wrote that its ‘observatories seem to be lost in the vapour of the morning and the upper rooms tower above the sky’. Nalanda was said to have been an architectural masterpiece. Its library, filled with Tantric texts, was nine storeys high and served as well as a scriptorium where ancient texts were carefully copied. The curriculum covered every field of learning, from Sanskrit grammar to mathematics, and much of what today comprises Tibetan Buddhism derives from the teachings and traditions first conceived at Nalanda.

Bengal’s links to Tibet and nearby Nepal were extensive during this heyday of Tantric Buddhism. They also stretched across the sea to the empire of Sri Vijaya whose kings ruled over much of Sumatra and Java as well as the Malay Peninsula, dominating the Straits of Malacca and the trade in spices from east to west. For hundreds of years this maritime kingdom was the hub of Bengal-derived Buddhism, hosting Chinese pilgrims on their way to Nalanda, as well as scholars from India, like Atisha, who afterwards played a decisive role in the spread of Buddhism in Tibet.

At the same time, control by Bengal’s Pala kings over Magadha, the birthplace of Buddhism, served to enhance that dynasty’s prestige as the supreme patron of the Buddhist religion. They were the gatekeepers of the sacred land. Envoys came from Burma and Sri Vijaya and elsewhere to seek permission to endow monasteries, sending jewelled treasures by ship to help restore the ancient temples.

With the decline of the Palas, Buddhism declined as well, since the new dynasty, the Senas, were orthodox Hindus. Then came the advent of Islam. In the twelfth century, bands of Turkish and Afghan cavalry, already masters of northwest India, galloped their way across the rich Ganges plain. One of these bands was commanded by the Turkish warlord Muhammad Bakhtiyar and raided and plundered many towns and cities all the way to Bengal, ransacking the Buddhist universities they encountered. Bakhtiyar’s conquest was a blitzkrieg and his 10,000 horsemen utterly overwhelmed local kings and communities unaccustomed to mounted warfare. The invaders were apparently unaware of the heritage they were destroying. After one victory, Bakhtiyar’s men put to death many men with shaven heads and found amongst their spoils great libraries of books. According to the distinguished Afghan scholar Minhaju-Siraj, ‘It was discovered that the whole fort and city was a place of study.’ It was in fact the renowned Buddhist university of Odantapuri, reduced to ruins.

For centuries after this conquest, Bengal remained an independent country, but with a Turkish-derived Muslim elite, ruling over a population still mainly Hindu, with perhaps a few pockets of Buddhists remaining. In the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo wrote of Bengal as a region ‘tolerably close’ but distinct from India, and its people not as Muslims but as ‘wretched idolaters’ who spoke a ‘particular language’. The Turkish upper crust came to depend heavily on the existing Bengali Hindu nobility. Even if they had wanted to recruit more people from their original Central Asian base, the option did not really exist as Bengal was too far away. A unique mix of Turkish, Persian and indigenous Bengali and Hindu influences evolved. There were even Abyssinians, slaves imported from East Africa, who managed, briefly during a period of intense intrigue, to seize the throne in the late 1400s.

Bengal remained politically apart from the rest of India, living on its own terms. Islam spread gradually, especially in the swampy eastern areas where the writ of the old Hindu kings was never strong, and eventually became the majority religion. The sultans of Bengal also became regional powers. The nearby kingdoms of Kuch Behar and Kamarupa were annexed, and Orissa and Tripura were at times tributaries. A close relationship developed as well with the kingdom of Arakan. Arakan is today a state on Burma’s western coast, but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was independent and a significant force in its own right, with a cosmopolitan court of Buddhists and Muslims, as well as buccaneers and adventurers from as far afield as Lisbon and Nagasaki. Bengal is an integral part of Indian civilization. But it has also had a long and special history, one linked in a multitude of ways across a vast region, from the Horn of Africa to the Sea of Java and beyond.

With independence from Britain in 1947 and the ending of colonial empires across Asia, there could have been a restoration of old ties, cultural and economic, to Tibet, Burma and Yunnan, and across the Bay of Bengal. But instead there has only been the severing of the links that existed. Three independent countries came into being where there had been a single British empire, the frontiers with Tibet and Yunnan were closed off, and a uniquely tenuous region known today as Northeast India was created, barely connected to anywhere else. It is only now that this separation, an unnatural and unprecedented separation, is beginning to be overcome.

The first slice occurred in 1937 when the British government formally separated Burma from the rest of British India, granting the former province its own constitution and semi-elected government. The days of uncontrolled immigration from India were over. A little over four years later came the Japanese onslaught across southeast Asia and the flight of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Indians over the mountains into Assam, the Japanese army following swiftly behind. At the end of the war, many chose not to return, seeing which way the wind was blowing and hearing the nationalist rhetoric of the young Burmese politicians who were about to come into power. Tens of thousands more ethnic Indians left at independence and approximately 400,000 others were compelled to leave in 1964, after the ultra-nationalist army regime had come to power in 1962. The steamer service that had bound Rangoon to Calcutta was by then long defunct, and few if any Burmese students remained in India’s private schools and universities. The days when Burma was seen by young and adventurous Indians as a land of opportunity were gone, probably forever.