Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c13.14

c13.14

We now come to the invasion of Alexander. Alexander himself, owing to his untimely death, had no direct influence upon India, and in the great upheaval which followed, the Macedonian power in the Panjāb, with its colonies and wharfs and harbours, was swept away in a moment. But the contact between East and West, once established, was never entirely severed. Alexander’s followers, in their numerous narratives of their great adventure, first informed their countrymen of the beliefs and customs of the East. Greeks heard for the first time of Brahmins and Śramaṇas, people with superstitions and beliefs strangely like their own. Besides considerable bodies of settlers who remained behind in the Panjāb, there was the great Greek colony at Baktra, on the highroad to India. At the same time, the Maurya Emperors, thanks to the extraordinarily enlightened policy of the great founder of their dynasty, kept in close touch with their Greek neighbours. Yet here, again, it is remarkable how little the Greek spirit influenced India. Hellenism, which affected profoundly the whole of Western Asia and even Egypt, stopped short at the Hindu Kush, in spite of the presence of a Greek rāṇī at Pāṭaliputra and of the close and friendly relations existing between the Mauryas and their brother monarchs of Syria and Egypt. Chandragupta, who had spent his early days as an exile in the Panjāb, where Persian civilization had taken a strong hold on the country was imbued with Persian ideas. Of Greek culture he and his successors exhibit hardly a trace.