The curatorial agenda of the British Museum’s Ancient India show appears harmless enough at first blush. Here we have exhibits from a troika of subcontinental traditions — Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism — covering the period between 200BC and AD600. The conceit is continuity; the content is largely cutesy spirits and snakes.
And no doubt there was an ecumenical interest in nature spirits and serpent divinities. Like all ancient societies, Indians were fascinated by fertility cults; the good life, after all, turned on bountiful harvests and ample sexual reproduction. The perennial preoccupation finds expression here in pneumatic yakshis — female nature spirits — and stone lingas, Shiva’s threateningly girthy member.
Ophidiophilia likewise owed to the supposed life-giving powers of snakes. Buddha sought shelter under a serpentine canopy. On display is a bronze sculpture dating between 1300-1500 of the Jain tirthankara (teacher) Parsvanatha with a snake on his back. The god Shiva, too, loved his snakes; we have a painting here of Shiva sporting a polycephalous Vasuki around his neck, as if the snake were a shawl.
But the exhibition’s emphasis on the common ground shared by the three faiths is misleading — perverse even. It serves only a Hindu agenda, annexing the two dissident religions to the larger and older tradition. But historically, the relationship between Hinduism on the one hand, and Buddhism and Jainism on the other, has been marked by enduring animosity. And how could it be otherwise? Seen instrumentally, Hinduism amounts to no more than a stylised defence of hierarchy, supplying society with a cultural alibi for the practice of untouchability and an injunction against social mobility.
Very simply, Hinduism is the caste system. It was a critique of this very premise that gave rise to Buddhism and Jainism. Small wonder a great many Dalits — ex-Untouchables — elect to convert en masse to Buddhism every year, following in the footsteps of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit architect of India’s Constitution and one of the more eloquent critics of the caste system. The absence of class conflict in the Indian setting, he explained, stemmed from the very nature of the caste system — a system of “graded inequality” that precluded solidarity on account of “an ascending scale of hatred and a downward scale of contempt”. Indians, the French anthropologist Louis Dumont concluded, belonged to an altogether different species as a result of the caste system: homo hierarchicus, as distinct from homo æqualis. Even the idea of equality, let alone its practice, was alien to their temperament.
“The exhibition’s emphasis on the common ground shared by the three faiths is misleading — perverse even.”
Dumont overegged his case a bit, but his point is well-taken. Still, it is worth remembering that the logic of the caste system was not uncontested. For one thing, Buddhism set out explicitly to reject caste hierarchy and untouchability. Buddha himself gave the subject a great deal of thought in the fifth century BC. When asked which of the four castes were the purest, his reply was that all were equally pure. A disillusioned prince — a useful perch from which to reflect on the transience of wealth and fame — he renounced his Nepalese kingdom aged 29 to craft his own belief system counterpointing caste as well as priestly intercession. Discarding the polar opposites of sensualism and asceticism, he plumped instead for a third way, which he called the Middle Path. Nirvana, a state of void achieved through simple living and detachment, held the prospect of liberation from the cycle of births and rebirths.
The philosophy proved a hit. To the lower castes especially, reeling from the stigma of untouchability, Buddhism held the thrill of liberation from Hinduism. To them, of greater importance than “the similarities in the devotional art of these religions” — as the curators of this exhibition have it — was the major difference between them. One regarded them as beyond the pale; the other welcomed them as peers. As the social historian Romila Thapar has shown, caste discrimination also extended to education. Learning, in Hinduism, was a Brahmin monopoly. The lower castes were banned from so much as picking up a book, on pain of punishment. Buddhist monasteries, by contrast, were open to one and all.
It was on the strength of their easy-going pragmatism that Buddhist centres of learning stole a march on their Hindu rivals. Indeed, we have Buddhist viharas to thank for the existence of Western universities. In a dazzling genealogy of education, William Dalrymple has argued that it was no accident that the West’s first universities — Bologna, Salerno, Naples, Montpellier — were established in towns bordering the Muslim world. They were emulating the pedagogic contrivances of Arab institutions — departments, degrees, scholarships, libraries — which in turn derived from South Asian madrassas, which, for their part, modelled themselves on such Buddhist viharas as Naw Bahar, now in northern Afghanistan.
As with education, so with commerce. Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism did not object to usury, and looked kindly upon the accumulation of capital. Wealth in this life was a sign of good karma in the previous one, ran the theological rationale; contrariwise, poverty suggested that your previous avatar had been up to no good. This was a comforting assurance to traders on the run from Hinduism, which — if some of the early Hindu codes of law are to be believed — classed businessmen alongside drunkards, sadists, and lepers. Being itinerant peoples, traders were able to spread the word of Buddhism far and wide. Hindus, of course, explicitly forbade foreign travel; sea travel entailed a loss of caste status.
The emperor Ashoka’s Constantine-like conversion to Buddhism in the third century BC gave the faith a firm bridgehead in the Mauryan Empire, the largest the subcontinent had ever seen. By the first century AD, Buddhism’s worldly monks could be found managing the Mes Aynak copper mine in Afghanistan, these days mined by a Chinese consortium on the Taliban’s behalf. It was around this time that Buddhist aristos of the Kushan Empire began throwing up enormous Buddha statues, turning him into an icon. Their Hephthalite heirs built the Bamiyan Buddhas in the sixth century that the Taliban later dynamited. By then, Buddhism had already made inroads into China. Once suitably Sinicised, Buddhism was made the state religion of the Kingdom of Northern Wei in the fifth century; south China followed suit in the following century.
Hindus reacted to the spread of Buddhism with panic. Strategic emulation, they decided, was needed to ignite a Hindu revival. If there are any similarities between the three faiths, it is because Hindus readily adopted Buddhist and Jain best practices in order to steal their thunder. There was, for example, a turn from extravagant ritualism to renunciatory asceticism, as Brahmins took to emulating the self-denying Buddhist and Jain shramanas, the roving low-caste forest-dwellers who escaped the caste system by embracing poverty.
But emulation was only one half of a two-pronged approach. Violence was the other half. The Shaivite Hindu kings Mihirakula and Sashanka acquired reputations for destroying Buddhist monasteries and killing monks in the sixth and seventh centuries, respectively. The eighth-century Hindu saint Thirumangai Alvar, meanwhile, stole a statue from a Buddhist monastery and then repurposed it in a golden gate. Around the same time, the Nyanmar Shaivite Tamil poets began composing hymns railing against Buddhists and Jains. So much for the eirenic ecumenicism touted by the curators of this show.
To be sure, there were rulers who bridged the traditions. The Guptas, Chandra Gupta II in particular, could be quite open-minded in their patronage. The emperor of Kanauj, Harsha, who moonlit as a playwright, was something of “a religious eclectic” according to the Indologist Wendy Doniger. But these figures were exceptions. Suppression was the norm. So much so that Buddhism all but disappeared from India in the second millennium. As late as the 1850s, it was perfectly reasonable for a Calcutta intellectual to hypothesise that Buddhism was a foreign faith of Norse origin. It took a codicological collaboration between an East India Company official and a Nepali gentleman amateur to return Buddha to India. By piecing together Buddhist texts in Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, they made the case that the Enlightened One had, in fact, lived much closer to home.
If the curators exaggerate the commonalities between the three faiths, they completely ignore the Abrahamic religions. As Peter Frankopan pointed out in the Financial Times, this is a deeply troubling omission. The ever-so-subtle Hindu nationalist message is that Christianity is foreign to the Indian genius — that it never quite belonged to ancient India.
But truth be told, Christianity in India may well be as old as Christianity itself — the “Mar Thoma” Church there maintains a foundation story that goes back to Thomas the Apostle. By the fourth century there was a thriving Christian community along the Malabar Coast. They lived largely in peace with the Hindus, even to the point of internalising their customs; this appalled Iberian Catholics in the 16th century, who pulled gargoyle faces at their “Nestorian” heresies. One would think the inclusion of Christians would have strengthened this exhibition’s message of confessional unity. It’s a shame, then, that the curators only saw the foreignness of Christianity, and excluded it from the show.
More galling still, though of a piece with the Hindu nationalist-lite politics of the exhibition, is a clutch of short films depicting Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists in Britain today. Rather perversely, we are expected to celebrate that Hinduism is “now part of our shared British cultural life”, the import of which is presented in entirely benign tones: Diwali, house shrines, and suchlike. Yet it has by no means been a purely salutary development, introducing into British life the entirely novel prejudice of casteism.
What infuriated me was the lack of any mention of caste in this Panglossian narrative of multiculturalism. Today in Britain, 50,000-200,000 lower-caste Hindus face daily discrimination from their snooty confrères on streets and in schools. Sometimes, this shades into outright exploitation, as in the case of Permila Tirkey, who was brigaded into modern slavery in Milton Keynes by her upper-caste employers, who kept her in domestic servitude, working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for 11p an hour. She was awarded £184,000 compensation in what was “one of the UK’s first claims of caste discrimination”, the Guardian reported in 2015.
Justice, however, is rare. I have it on good authority from a victim of caste discrimination at Cambridge that bigotry is all too common even in such cloistered precincts. At Oxford, too, Dalit students have spoken of cancellation by their coevals. Meanwhile, efforts to include caste as a category of discrimination in the Equality Act have failed thanks to lobbying from the so-called Ghent School, a diasporic drudgery of Hindu nationalist dons based at the University of Ghent who have spuriously convinced unsuspecting lawmakers that the caste system was a “colonial invention”, thought up by the wily Brits. Ambedkar, in a fit of optimism, had hoped that the migration of Hindus to foreign lands would result in the erosion of the caste system. Yet precisely the opposite has transpired. Wherever Hindus have gone, the caste system has followed in tow.
