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A History of Sanskrit Literature c14.s1: 1. Indian Historical Writing

A History of Sanskrit Literature c14.s1

Language
English

1. Indian Historical Writing

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TO the old complaint that India has no historians and no historical sense it has recently been objected, doubtless with a measure of truth, that there is a certain amount of writing and a number of facts attesting a degree of sense for history. In view of the antiquity and the developed character of Indian civilization it would indeed be ridiculous to expect to find India destitute of historical sense, but what is really essential is the fact that, despite the abundance of its literature, history is so miserably represented, and that in the whole of the great period of Sanskrit literature there is not one writer who can be seriously regarded as a critical historian. We have as the nearest approach to a true historian a poet of no mean ability, much industry, and a desire to tell the truth, who had for recent history very fair sources of information, but the most ardent admirer of Kalhaṇa would not for a moment claim for him that he could be matched even with Herodotos, and it must be remembered that no other writer approaches even remotely the achievement of Kalhaṇa.

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The causes of this phenomenon must lie in peculiarities of Indian psychology aided by environment and the course of events, and it is idle to hope to give any explanation which will be entirely satisfying. We may remember that India produced no oratory, despite the distinct power often displayed both in the epics and in Classical Kāvya of the rhetorical presentment of a case by opposing disputants. Oratory doubtless, as history proves, has flourished best where there has been political freedom; Athens is as celebrated for oratory as Sparta was deficient in it, and Rome produced its best orators when there still was a Republic in which certain classes at least had effective political rights. It may be that India failed to produce historians because the great political events which affected her during the period up to A. D. 1200 did not call forth popular action in the sense in which the repulse of the Persian attacks on Greece evoked the history of Herodotos.¹ The national feeling, which is at least a powerful aid to the writing of history, was not evoked in India in the same manner as it was when democratic states formed the most serious element of resistance to the Persian attack at a time when more oligarchic governments were apparently far less deeply moved by any sentiment of nationalism.²

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¹ Another side of Greek mentality, the criticism of tradition, is seen in Hekataios of Miletos, whose patriotism, like his history, was marked by caution and weighing of evidence. Cf. J. B. Bury, *Ancient Greek Historians* (1909).

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² Stein, *Rājataraṅgiṇī*, i. 28 ff.; Oldenberg, *Aus dem alten Indien*, pp. 65 ff.

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It may be admitted that the foreign attacks on India in the period of the first four centuries B. C. were probably not such as to excite deep national feeling. Alexander's invasion was followed by the early loss of the most Indian of the territories won to Candragupta, apparently without any such struggle as would induce a sense of national danger and national triumph. The Greek, Parthian, Çaka, and Kuṣaṇa successes were possible in large measure because such a sentiment did not exist, and the process of assimilation went on so steadily that, when the Gupta revival came, it can hardly have been felt as a national revival, however much it seems so to us *ex post facto*. Thereafter, until the eleventh century, the wars of India were merely struggles between rival dynasties, wars of crows and kites, in which no deep signification could lie.³ The Mahomedan invaders found India without any real national feeling; their successes were rendered possible largely because the chiefs disliked one another far more than they did the Mleccha. It is characteristic that even in the ballads evoked by the struggle the sense of nationality is only in process of development.

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³ Contrast Lucan's prophetic words (vii. 432 f.):

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From the standpoint of psychology it is not difficult to understand that the view that history had any meaning or value was one unlikely to receive acceptance in India. The prevailing doctrines told distinctly against any such estimate of events. In

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quod fugiens civile nefas redituraque nunquam
Libertas ultra Tigrim Rhenumque recessit.

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the strict logical sense of the doctrine of Karman all men's actions were the outcome of actions done in previous births; they were, therefore, wholly uncalculable, for no one could tell what deed in the remotest past might not spring up to work out its inevitable end. Beside this belief, and evidently in full strength in many minds, was the view that all things were brought about by fate, working in a manner wholly unintelligible and beyond all foresight. To these more rational views, which might be combined and even reconciled by exercise of a little ingenuity, was added the acceptance by the Indian mind of the miraculous in the shape of divine intervention, magic, and witchcraft.¹ The scientific attitude of mind which seeks to find natural causes for events of nature is not normal in India, and the conception that nature is not capable of being affected by divine or demoniac instrumentalities would have seemed ludicrous to the vast majority of its people; Buddhists and Jains were as little inclined to abandon popular superstitions as were Brahmins. Nay, all three religions favoured the belief in the habit of sages by asceticism to attain magic powers; the doctrine that these powers can be acquired by regular forms of process is inculcated in their philosophies, and persons who were able to achieve these results were capable of affecting the processes of nature, so that to ascribe similar powers to superhuman beings was perfectly natural. Moreover, the philosophies of every kind taught that there was no progress in our sense in the world; things had happened age after age in precisely the same way; the doctrine of the periodical creation and destruction of the world of the Brahmanical post-Vedic texts is on the same plane as the theory of the Buddhists of the existence of innumerable earlier Buddhas and the long line of Jain Tīrthakaras.

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¹ Cf. Lucan on the Thessalian witches, vi. 415 ff.

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Nor were the Indians without what seemed to them an excellent substitute for history in our sense. To the average Indian now, and doubtless of centuries ago, the heroes of the past and those historical kings who had been converted by their imagination into heroic figures were quite as real as, if not more real than, their local princes of the present time. Nor was it merely that they were as real; they possessed the great advantage of being recognized and admired over wide areas of India. It is hardly wonderful, therefore, that even those chronicles and panegyrics which were composed in honour of contemporary princes were soon no longer copied by scribes or studied, preference being accorded in lieu to works like the epics, which were certain to be of abiding interest. It has been well remarked¹ that, while the Paṇḍits have copied and commented with eagerness on the *Naiṣadhīya* of Çrīharṣa, they have allowed to sink into oblivion the *Navasāhasāṅkacarita*, which he wrote to celebrate the deeds of his patron.

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¹ Bühler, *Vikramāṅkadevacarita*, p. 2. His other panegyrics are lost, and we are not certain of his patron.

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Something too must be allowed for the tendency of the Indian mind to prefer the general to the particular, which is shown in widely different spheres of knowledge. We hear, for instance, in Buddhist texts of certain definite heresies, but we are equally faced with schematic lists of unsound philosophical views which are asserted to have been held by others, but which in large measure are obviously mere inventions. Throughout the history of Indian philosophy the same thing is seen; no one seems to be in the least interested in the history of doctrines, no one writes a history of philosophy as contrasted with summaries of opposing doctrines; no one even attempts a real history of politics or medicine. What interests writers is not questions of the opinions of predecessors as individuals, but the discussion of divergencies of doctrine all imagined as having arisen *ex initio*. The names of some great authorities may be preserved, as in the case of the schools of philosophy, but nothing whatever with any taint of actuality is recorded regarding their personalities, and we are left to grope for dates. This indifference to chronology is seen everywhere in India, and must be definitely connected, in the ultimate issue, with the quite secondary character ascribed to time by the philosophies.

Cites (3)