Negotiating Cultural Identity

Landscapes in Early Medieval South Asian History

Himanshu Prabha Ray

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367443627
• eBook ISBN: 9781000227932
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: History

This volume breaks new ground by conceptualizing physical landscapes as living cultural bodies. It redefines dynamic cultural landscapes as catalysts in which the natural world and human practice are inextricably linked and are constantly interacting.

Drawing on research by eminent archaeologists, numismatists and historians, the essays in this volume

• Provide insights into the ways people in the past, and in the present, imbue places with meanings;

• Examine the social and cultural construction of space in the early medieval period in South Asia;

• Trace complex patterns of historical development of a temple or a town, to understand ways in which such spaces often become a means of constructing the collective past and social traditions.

With a new chapter on continuity and change in the sacred landscape of the Buddhist site at Udayagiri, the second edition of Negotiating Cultural Identity will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers of archaeology, social history, cultural studies, art history and anthropology.

Part 1
The archaeology of space

1
India cartographica

Some Roman sightings

Grant Parker

The British Isles were considered in the west as another world, perfect and complete in itself; but of smaller dimensions: … philosophers of old used to call Britain a microcosm. That is conformable to the notions of the Hindus, who say that it is another Meru, and exactly half of it, in all its dimensions. Divines in Tibet entertain exactly the same idea: for they likewise call the Elysium of Hopameh, in the west, another world. These islands are obviously the Sacred Isles of Hesiod, who represents them as situated an immense way … toward the north-west quarter of the old continent (Theogony 1014). From this most ancient and venerable bard I have borrowed the appellation Sacred Isles, as they are represented as such by the followers both of Brahma and Buddha, by the Chinese, and even by the wild inhabitants of the Philippine Islands.¹

This epigraph from the British Sanskritist Francis Wilford (1761–1822) helps establish the parameters of the current chapter, the aim of which is to take stock of some of the ways in which India has been mapped. In the lengthy essay concluded by this passage, Wilford, an associate of Sir William Jones, sought to find references to the British Isles in the Puranas (‘ancient lore’), the corpus of Sanskrit texts embodying Hindu tradition. That goal was motivated not merely by Wilford’s personal origin but by a desire to show Britain’s antiquity, and indeed cultural priority, in relation to India. This suggests a project that is both a comparative ethnology, looking forward to J. G. Frazer’s Golden Bough a century later, and also obviously ethnocentric in its insistence on Britain as a privileged point of reference. As described here, it has utopian qualities, corresponding with Meru in the Puranic tradition;² with Elysium in the broader Greco-Roman tradition, and in particular with the Sacred Isles of the Theogony by Hesiod, the ‘most ancient and venerable bard’ of ancient Greece, roughly contemporary with Homer. Wilford’s project became something of a cause célèbre in the early years of the 19th century when it became clear that the pandit who worked through the Puranas as his research assistant, in fact, fabricated a number of references by amending and supplementing the Sanskrit texts.³ At the very least, a passage like this illustrates the Greco-Roman orientation of many of these British scholars of India, the New Orientalists, something that was to some degree predetermined by their education.⁴ More fundamentally, it shows that locational projects of different kinds were an important pursuit of these Orientalists amidst their attempts to make sense of the South Asian world that presented new and emphatic challenges to their scholarship.⁵

Today, Wilford is studied for his own times rather than for any insights he might have had into ancient mapping practices.⁶ Nonetheless, the passage suggests that there are at least three ways in which we might meaningfully consider the mapping of India.

1. In a more generalised sense of colonial image-making, the idea of mapping is used today more broadly than it was, say, 50 years ago, so the term could be taken as a sign of Orientalism per se: in other words, the creation of an eastern Other and the power-relations around that other.⁷ With such a focus, a key figure might be Alexander the Great, and indeed the Achaemenid Empire before him, in the creation of this Far East with its pointedly exotic qualities. The key aspect of a map, by this reckoning, would be the explicit and implicit ways in which it formed part of the Orientalist discourse, a visual perspective on the political elements of the relationship between the self and other.
2. If, however, we were to take a more literal approach and focus on visual representations involving scale, there would alternatively be the prospect of a long-term cartographic history.⁸ Such histories typically lead us from the darkness of ancient superstition, via progress, to the real, scientific knowledge made possible by the discovery of a sea-route to India. Pliny is the anti-hero of such versions, with his monsters at the ends of the earth; by contrast, Claudius Ptolemy is the hero, though one whose mistake of enclosing the Indian Ocean required Iberian voyages of discovery to rectify.⁹ Scientific progress, thus, starts with Ptolemy and leads us to Geographic Information System (GIS) and other blessings of the incomparable present. While it is easy and unhelpful to posit straw men here, it is clear that such books are still cited and widely sold, often in a coffee-table format but occasionally with academic heft.¹⁰ The concepts of progress and discovery are not easily wished away in cartographic studies, and receive constant reinforcement from popular publications.
3. A third approach, again taking a long view of history, would shift the focus so as to emphasize the multiple mapping traditions of and involving India. (Indeed, the conjunction in the foregoing phrase will emerge in these pages as a particular problem, methodologically speaking.) A comparative tendency is certainly apparent in the passage quoted earlier. Indigenous thought-worlds, as expressed in Sanskrit and other literatures, have geographic and ethnographic elements that are typically implicit but are nonetheless open to visual representation. In particular, the Hindu tradition of cosmography can indeed be gleaned from the Puranas – through heavily qualified versions of Wilford’s project, deploying greater self-awareness and philological rigour. Whereas such descriptions contain a high degree of verbal visuality, they were not subject to visual representation in ancient times – apparently at no point before Wilford in the New Orientalist period of South Asian scholarship.¹¹

While the Puranas took their current form between the 5th and 9th centuries CE, their geographical parts date from the first two centuries CE. At the risk of oversimplification, the Puranic universe may briefly be described in the following manner.¹² The earth is a flat, horizontal disk within a vertical, egg-shaped cosmos. There are five heavens above and seven underworlds below. At the centre of the earth disk stands Meru, the axial mountain of the universe; around it the earth contains seven concentric circles, separated by oceans. The central continent is Jambudvipa, which is divided into nine subcontinents, separated by mountains. The Himalaya is the southernmost of these mountains, which demarcates the subcontinent, namely the Indian subcontinent, known as Bharatavarsha or Bharata. It is Bharata that is subdivided into nine broad bands of territory in an east – west direction; it is Bharata that is subject to lengthy lists of mountains, hills and especially rivers. This is also the part of the universe that is subject to a detailed ethnography focusing on the four varnas or classes. Social behaviours are ranked in such a way that the most preferable are to be found in the heartlands of ‘Aryan’ India, which also receives the greatest degree of detail by comparison with the margins.

The most important aspect of the Puranic geography is its cosmology: far from being subject to one-to-one topographical analysis, it is part of a much broader plan that focuses on dharma, a central ethical concept of the Puranas.¹³ The environment or any other geographical element is outweighed by the all-important dharma.¹⁴

By no means were the Puranas the only geographical text. An entirely different version is found in the Sanskrit siddhantas (‘treatises’) of the medieval and early modern periods. These match the Greek tradition of Claudius Ptolemy’s astronomy in their geocentricity: the heavenly bodies rotate around a spherical earth, which is at the centre of the celestial sphere. This cosmology differs obviously from the flat-earth version described earlier; yet these, and others besides, largely co-existed from roughly the 5th to 18th centuries.¹⁵ Jain and Buddhist traditions, too, had their own cosmologies.¹⁶ Nonetheless, such implicit ancient geographies have tended not to be incorporated in the overviews of South Asian cartography.¹⁷

If we are to follow Wilford’s lead, adducing not only Chinese but also later Arab maps, the whole business of mapping begins to look very different, involving an insider’s view as well as an outside-in perspective and, if possible, even integrating the two. This third approach has recently been influentially articulated in the multi-volume History of Cartography, founded and initially edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward (1987–). From the start, the editors have sought to accommodate and even combine different mapping traditions. Histories of cartography will never be the same again, even if the original editors’ expressed methodological aims are not as well realised in the first volume compared to more recent ones, several of which have appeared only since their deaths. Such work may generally be thought to reflect the impetus of the History of Cartography both in methodological rigour and in breadth of view; the impact on pre-modern societies is recently seen in collaborative volumes such as that of Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J. A. Talbert.¹⁸

The topographic impulse has, understandably, been a major part in the studies of ancient geography, underlying the major collaborative projects, such as The Barrington Atlas¹⁹ and the Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients (Tübingen Atlas of the Near East, TAVO) in Mediterranean and Near Eastern contexts, respectively; or notably the one by D. C. Sircar in a South Asian setting.²⁰ By modern standards, Wilford took a remarkably narrow purview in trying to uncover the topography of the Puranas. But the urge to connect ancient literary references to particular places that are known otherwise, for example archaeologically, remains a strong one, as is clear in the critical editions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1 The archaeology of space
• PART 2 Defining cultural landscapes
• Index