Dr. V.K. Maheshwari, Ph.D

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

My principal object in coming to Hindustan has been to accomplish two things. The first was to war with the infidels, the enemies of the Mohammadan religion; and by this religious warfare to acquire some claim to reward in the life to come. The other was that the army of Islam might gain something by plundering the wealth and valuables of the infidels: plunder in war is as lawful as their mothers milk to Musalmans who war for their faith.

Amir Timur or Tamerlane

The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. The Hindus had allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they had adopted religions like Buddhism and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks of life; they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India’s boundaries and waiting for national weakness to let them in. For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.

Islam spread as a conquering creed both in west and east with amazing rapidity. The Byzantine provinces of Palestine and Syria were conquered by the newly converted Arabs after a campaign of six months in C.E. 636-37. Next  the Sassanid empire of Persia which included Iraq, Iran and Khurasan. By 643 the boundaries of the Caliphate touched the frontiers of India. Egypt had fallen in 640-641. and territories of Inner Mongolia, Bukhara, Tashkand and Samarqand were annexed by 650 and Spain in C.E. 709. Thus within a span of about seventy years (637-709) the Arabs achieved astounding success in their conquests. The people of these conquered lands were quickly converted to Islam and their language and culture Arabicised.

Naturally India, known to early Arabs as Hind / Sind, too could not escape Muslim expansionist designs, and they sent their armies into India both by land and sea. But progress of Muslim arms and religion in India was slow, very slow. For, the declarations of objectives of Muslim invaders had not taken into account the potentialities of Indians stiff and latent resistance. Caliph Umar (634-44 C.E.) had sent an expedition in 636-37 to pillage Thana on the coast of Maharashtra during the reign of the great Hindu monarch Pulakesin II. This was followed by expeditions to Bharuch (Broach) in Gujarat and the gulf of Debal in Sind. These were repulsed and Mughairah, the leader of the latter expedition, was defeated and killed. The next Caliph Usman (644-656)  and refrained from embarking on any venture on Sind. The fourth Caliph, Ali, sent an expedition by land in 660 but the leader of the expedition and most of his troops were slain in the hilly terrain of Kikanan (42 H./662 C.E.). Thus the four pious Caliphs of Islam died without hearing of the conquest of Sind and Hind.

India was never ruled as a whole by any single empire rather was ruled by multiple kingdoms though they were sovereign. This sovereignty was lost with the attack of Muslim invaders. The very first Muslim attack on India had taken place in Sindh in 715 C.E. The Arabs overran the entire kingdom of Raja Dahir and the neighbouring kingdom of Mulasthana (Multan). They even unsuccessfully tried to attack Malwa (Malibah in Arab records).

After this limited invasion of Sindh, all further Muslim attacks were thwarted by Kings like Raja Bhoj and other Gurjara Kings for 300 years. The second surge of the Muslim aggression led by Mahmud of Ghazni began in 980 C.E. and lasted till 1020 C.E during the rule of Shahi Kings of Punjab. By the year 1020 C.E. Muslim rule had been established in Afghanistan, Paktoonistan (NWFP) and West Punjab. The Rajputs ruling North India resisted further Muslim aggression.

Why did Ghenghis Khan avoid India? India, a rich civilization, with massive exports and large gold reserves, was an attractive target. Genghis Khan, whose empire, from Mongolia to Austria, from Central Asia to Russian borders, was larger than Alexander’s – and whose conquests brought Chinese culture to Europe (like abacus, gunpowder, paper, printing) by-passed India completely. Why?

For the same reasons, that Islamic conquerors, by that time, had conquered most of Eastern Europe, had failed in India. By 1000 A.D., Al Beruni’s description of India and its wealth, spread over the Islamic world. For the next 500 years, Islamic territories continued to expand. India was the last significant conquest of the Islam. Islamic raiders targeted India for plunder and loot – but were not able to establish themselves till the 13th century. The first significant Islamic dynasty in India was the Slave dynasty – only in the 13th century, Qutubuddin Aibak in 1206. From the 1206 to 1526, Islamic rulers struggled to consolidate in India.

But the Indian Pagans were far too numerous and never fully surrendered. What some call the Muslim period in Indian history, was in reality a continuous war of occupiers against resisters, in which the Muslim rulers were finally defeated in the 18th century.

The Muslims could not subjugate India with ease. And even after subjugating different parts of the country, they were never able to rule it entirely. The next 400 years from 1328 up to 1720 was marked by a valiant and ceaseless struggle for independence by Hindus.

This struggle was first led in North India by the Rajputs and then by the Jats, Marathas and Sikhs. In the South this struggle was embodied in the Vijayanagar Empire. This struggle for independence culminated when the Marathas began to bring an end to the Muslim domination of India. The Gurkhas came in later in the 18th century against the British, but their activities also played a role in weakening the Muslim power in North India which was on its last legs in the 18th century.

The Muslims aimed to totally destroy the Superstructure associated with the Hindu period and replace with a typical Muslim one. Towards this end the Muslim invaders undertook the desecration of places of worship, destruction of universities like Nalanda, the wholesale slaughter of the monks and priests to wipe out the intellectual bedrock of the people they overran. Such tyrannical polices for 700 years of Muslim rule left a trail of bitterness in the regions which passed under their domination. Hindu tradition survived only in remote corners of the country like in Orissa, Assam and parts of South India as Muslim rulers unleashed a reign of terror the kind of which India had never experienced before in its history.

In K.S. Lal’s 1973 book, Growth of Muslim Population of Medieval India (1000-1800), the author estimated that about 60-80 million people died in India between 1000 and 1525 as a result of Islamic invasions. The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for the Hindus a pure struggle of life and death. Entire cities were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers deported as slaves. Every new invader made (often literally) his hills of Hindus skulls. Thus, the conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the Hindu Kush, (Persian: “Hindu Slaughter”). It is significant that one of the very few place-names on earth that reminds us not of the victory of the winners but rather of the slaughter of the losers, concerns a genocide of Hindus by the Muslims.

The first Moslem attack was a passing raid upon Multan, in the western Punjab (664 A.D.) Similar raids occurred at the convenience of the invaders during the next three centuries, with the result that the Moslems established themselves in the Indus valley about the same time that their Arab co-religionists in the West were fighting the battle of Tours (732 A.D.) for the mastery of Europe. But the real Moslem conquest of India did not come till the turn of the first millennium after Christ.

The day Muhammad bin Qasim, entered Sindh as a conqueror, must rank as the most ominous, odious and outrageous moment in the history of India, whose proud, pious and powerful traditions have been the torch-bearer of world civilisation. The Indians, used to enjoying the warmth of ahimsa, were stunned by the violence that the Arab raiders displayed in robbing the rich and seducing the indigenous damsels. Yet the irony was that they did all this in the name of the Most Compassionate and Just Allah, who counts these felonies as acts of fairness when they are committed to torture the unbelievers.”

In the year 997 a Turkish chieftain by the name of Mahmud became sultan of the little state of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud knew that his throne was young and poor, and saw that India, across the border, was old and rich; the conclusion was obvious. Pretending a holy zeal for destroying Hindu idolatry, he swept across the frontier with a force inspired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries. Returning to Ghazni he astonished the ambassadors of foreign powers by displaying “jewels and unbored pearls and rubies shining like sparks, or like wine congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds in size and weight like pomegranates.”  Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital richer than before. At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied its coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewellery; he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labour of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground.

Six years later In 1024 he defeated the Habbari Dynasty in the Sind and he annexed that area. In 1025 he invaded Somnath and looted its temple on the coast of Saurashtra, killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. ). With his new wealth, Mahmud erected buildings and magnificent mosques in Ghazni. He turned Ghazni into a world center of Islamic culture, and he financed more military campaigns.

In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever known. Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than a few shillings for a slave. Before every important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honours, Moslem historians ranked him as the greatest monarch of his time, and one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.

Seeing the canonization that success had brought to this magnificent thief, other Moslem rulers profited by his example, though none succeeded in bettering his instruction. In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan, invaded India, captured the city of Delhi, destroyed its temples,  confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the Sultanate of Delhi an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan historian tells us, “were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands.” In one victory of this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), “fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.”  Another sultan,Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins, stuffing these with straw, and hanging them from the gates of Delhi. When some Mongol inhabitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to Islam, attempted a rising, Sultan Alau-d-din (the conqucrer of Chitor) had all the males from fifteen to thirty thousand of them slaughtered in one day. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by murdering his father, became a great scholar and an elegant writer, dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy, surpassed his predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew to the rebel’s wife and children, ruined the country with reckless inflation, and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem historian, “there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging” the victims “and putting them to death in crowds.”  In order to found a new capital at Daulatabad he drove every inhabitant from Delhi and left it a desert; and hearing that a blind man had stayed behind in Delhi, he ordered him to be dragged from the old to the new capital, so that only a leg remained of the wretch when his last journey was finished.  The Sultan complained that the people did not love him, or recognize his undeviating justice. He ruled India for a quarter of a century, and died in bed. His successor, Firoz Shah, invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and died at the ripe age of eighty. Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for three days whenever the number of defenceless Hindus slain in his territories in one day reached twenty thousand.

These rulers were often men of ability, and their followers were gifted with fierce courage and industry; only so can we understand how they could have maintained their rule among a hostile people so overwhelmingly outnumbering them. All of them were armed with a religion militaristic in operation, but far superior in its stoical monotheism to any of the popular cults of India; they concealed its attractiveness by making the public exercise of the Hindu religions illegal, and thereby driving them more deeply into the Hindu soul. Some of these thirsty despots had culture as well as ability; they patronized the arts, and engaged artists and artisans usually of Hindu origin to build for them magnificent mosques and tombs; some of them were scholars, and delighted in converse with historians, poets and scientists. One of the greatest scholars of Asia, Alberuni, accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni to India, and wrote a scientific survey of India comparable to Pliny’s Natural History and Humboldt’s Cosmos. The Moslem historians were almost as numerous as the generals, and yielded nothing to them in the enjoyment of bloodshed and war. The Sultans drew from the people every rupee of tribute that could be exacted by the ancient art of taxation, as well as by straight- forward robbery; but they stayed in India, spent their spoils in India, and thereby turned them back into India’s economic life. Nevertheless, their terrorism and exploitation advanced that weakening of Hindu physique and morale which had been begun by an exhausting climate, an inadequate diet, political disunity, and pessimistic religions.

The usual policy of the Sultans was clearly sketched by Alau-d-din, who required his advisers to draw up “rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion.”  Half of the gross produce of the soil was collected by the government; native rulers had taken one- sixth. “No Hindu,” says a Moslem historian, “could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver … or of any superfluity was to be seen. . . . Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains, were all employed to enforce payment.” When one of his own advisers protested against this policy, Alau-d-din answered: “Oh, Doctor, thou art a learned man, but thou hast no experience; I am an unlettered man, but I have a great deal. Be assured, then, that the Hindus will never become submissive and obedient till they are reduced to poverty. I have therefore given orders that just sufficient shall be left to them from year to year of corn, milk and curds, but that they shall not be allowed to accumulate hoards and property.”

Islamic imperialism knew no code of honour. The only rule of war they observed without fail was to fall down the helpless civil population after a decisive victory had been won on the battlefield. They sacked and burnt down villages and towns after the defenders had died fighting or had fled. The cows, the Brahmins and Buddhist Bhikshus invited their special attention in a mass murder of non-combatants. Their temples and shrines were their special targets in an orgy of pillage and destruction. Those that they did not kill, they captured and sold as slaves.  The scene was described by Kanhadde Prabandha (1456 A.D) in the following words: “The conquering army burnt villages, devastated the land, plundered people’s wealth, took Brahmins and children and women of all classes captive, flogged with thongs of raw hide, carried a moving prison with it, and converted the prisoners into obsequious Turks.”

For no other country in the world from east to west, faces the agony that the Hindus in India have to face. They are the injured party; but even today they are crucified by the ‘so called’ secularists—most of them themselves Hindus—at every stage. No country in the world has been so ravaged and raped by outside forces as India has been down the centuries: Not Japan, not China, not Russia, none of the European countries, neither the Arab nations and certainly not the United States of America.

This is the secret of the political history of modern India. Weakened by division, it succumbed to invaders; impoverished by invaders, it lost all power of resistance, and took refuge in supernatural consolations; it argued that both mastery and slavery were superficial delusions, and concluded that freedom of the body or the nation was hardly worth defending in so brief a life. The bitter lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.

“India is yet another major victim of Islam.” “India was a prosperous, peaceful and proud country, which has not only been reduced to extreme poverty and ignorance by the Muslim predators and the Islamic rule, but has also been fragmented into geographical and political units.”

Dr. Anwar Shaikh (1928-2006)

REFERANCES:

ELPHINSTONE, MOUNTSTUART: History of India. London, 1916.

FIRISHTAH, MUHAMMAD QASIM: History of Hindostan. Tr. Alex. Dow. 3V. London, 1803.

HAVELL, E. B.: Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India. London, 1915.

HAVELL, E. B.: History of Aryan Rule in India. Harrap, London, n.d.

HAVELL, E. B.: Ideals of Indian Art. New York, 1920.

MACDONELL, A. A.: India’s Past. Oxford, 1927.

MUKERJI, D. G.: A Son of Mother India Answers. New York, 1928.

MUKERJI, D. G.: Visit India with Me. New York, 1929.

SEWELL, ROBERT: A Forgotten Empire, Vijayanagar. London, 1900.

SMITH, G. ELLIOT: Human History. New York, 1929.

SMITH, W. ROBERTSON: The Religion of the Semites. New York, 1889.

The Babur-nama in English. Tr. by Annette Beveridge. London, 1922.

TOD, LT.-COL. JAS.: Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. 2v. Calcutta, 1894.

WILL DURANT: Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster. New York 1954

 

 

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

The Greek gave a pleasant, perhaps a lenient, account, of Hindu life in his time. Concerning the condition and organization of the vast Maurya empire the Greeks have provided us with a considerable body of valuable information : and, as the Arthashastra furnishes the means of describing the complete polity existing at the time, its land system, its fiscal system, its administrative system, its law, its social system, with some view of literature and religion.

Chandragupta’s capital, Pataliputra

The oldest of the two thousand cities  of northern India in Chandragupta’s time was Taxila, twenty miles northwest of the modern Rawalpindi. The imperial capital Pataliputra or Kusumapura, the Palibothra of the Greeks, which was situated on the south side of the Ganges, to the east of its confluence with the Sun, is described by Megasthenes. Its ruins lie for the most part under the modern city of Patna-Bankipore; and part of its ancient rampart has been found in situ. Arrian describes it as “a large and prosperous city”; Strabo saysRoads were constructed by the royal officers, and at intervals of ‘ten stades’ were sign-boards noting turnings and distances. The Greeks make special mention of the ‘royal route’ from the N.W. frontier to Pataliputra. Communications were maintained by couriers, while in the woods roamed trappers and forest-rangers. Towns were numerous, in so much that the Greeks report as many as two thousand placed under the rule of Porus, and Megasthenes ascribes some thirty to the Andhra country alone. They ranged from the market town (samgrahana), serving the uses of ten villages, through the county towns (kharvataka and dronamukha at a river’s mouth) for 200 or 400 villages, the provincial capital (sthaniya, or Thana), the great city (nagara, pura) or port (pattana) to the royal capital (rajadhani), all provided with defences of varying solidity. There were also forts on the frontiers or in special situations, such as in the middle of lakes or swamps, hidden in forests, or perched on heights.

Megasthenes describes Chandragupta’s capital, Pataliputra, as nine miles in length and almost two miles in width.  The palace of the King was of timber, but the Greek ambassador ranked it as excelling the royal residences of Susa and Ecbatana, being surpassed only by those at Persepolis. Its pillars were plated with gold, and ornamented with designs of bird- life and foliage; its interior was sumptuously furnished and adorned with precious metals and stones.  There was a certain Oriental ostentation in this culture, as in the use of gold vessels six feet in diameter;” but an

English historian concludes, from the testimony of the literary, pictorial and material remains, that “in the fourth and third centuries before Christ the command of the Maurya monarch over luxuries of all kinds and skilled craftsmanship in all the manual arts was not inferior to that enjoyed by the Mogul emperors eighteen centuries later.”

It was both a military and a university town, strategically situated on the main road to Western Asia, and containing the most famous of the several universities possessed by India at that time. Students flocked to Taxila as in the Middle Ages they flocked to Paris; there all the arts and sciences could be studied under eminent professors, and the medical school especially was held in high repute throughout the Oriental world.( The excavations of Sir John Marshall on the site of Taxila have unearthed delicately carved stones, highly polished statuary, coins as old as 600 B.C., and glassware of a fine quality never bettered in later India.  ”It is manifest,” says Vincent Smith, “that a high degree of material civilization had been attained, and that all the arts and crafts incident to the life of a wealthy, cultured city were familiar.’)

The Palace of Chandragupta

The palace is a walled building, with the women’s apartments, gardens, and tanks in the rear. In front of these is the innermost court, where the king on awakening is saluted by the various domestic officials, and, according to Aelian also by an elephant. The next is the station of a sham body-guard of dwarfs, hunchbacks, wild men, etc.; while the outermost of all, communicating with the exterior, is occupied by an armed retinue, and by ministers and connexions.

Everything bespeaks precaution. The structure of the palace itself includes mazes, secret and underground passages, hollow pillars, hidden staircases, collapsible floors. Against fire, poisonous animals, and other poisons there is diverse provision, including trees which snakes avoid, parrots and sharika birds which cry out on seeing a serpent, other birds which are variously affected by the sight of poison. Everyone has his own apartments, and none of the interior officials are allowed to communicate with the outside. The women are carefully watched by attendants, male and female; not even their relatives are admitted to them, except in time of childbirth or illness. All employees coming from without, such as nautch women, undergo bath and massage and change their dress before admission. Material objects, as they pass in and out, are placed on record and under seal. According to Megasthenes, the king changes his apartment every night.

The kitchen is in a secret place, and there is a multitude of tasters. The signs of poison in the viands and in the demeanour of the persons are carefully noted. Medicaments must pass similar tests. The instruments of the shampooer and others must be handled by the body-guard, and the persons themselves bathed, etc.: articles of ornament and apparel are inspected by female slaves; cosmetics, etc., are first tried on those who apply them. If actors are admitted, the orchestra and other appurtenances separate them from the spectator. The king rides or drives in the company of high officials. When he embarks upon a ship, the same is the case; no other vessel must be near, and troops are stationed on the shore. Similar precautions attend the hunt. Foreign emissaries are received in durbar, and the king inspects his troops armed and mounted on elephant or horse. In his progresses the roads are lined on both sides by police who keep away all armed persons, ascetics, and cripples: he never enters a crowd. Should he take part in a procession, banquet, festival, or wedding, it is in full retinue.

A day in the life of Chandragupta

In this palace Chandragupta, having won the throne by violence, lived for twenty-four years as in a gilded jail. Occasionally he appeared in public, clad in fine muslin embroidered with purple and gold, and carried in a golden palanquin or on a gorgeously accoutred elephant. Except when he rode out to the hunt, or otherwise amused himself, he found his time crowded with the business of his growing realm. His days were divided into sixteen periods of ninety minutes each. In the first he arose, and prepared himself by meditation; in the second he studied the reports of his agents, and issued secret instructions; the third he spent with his councillors in the Hall of Private Audience; in the fourth he attended to state finances and national defence; in the fifth he heard the petitions and suits of his subjects; in the sixth he bathed and dined, and read religious literature; in the seventh he received taxes and tribute, and made official appointments; in the eighth he again met his Council, and heard the reports of his spies, including the courtesans whom he used for this purpose;  the ninth he devoted to relaxation and prayer, the tenth and eleventh to military matters, the twelfth again to secret reports, the thirteenth to the evening bath and repast, the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth to sleep.  Perhaps the historian tells us what Chandragupta might have been, or how Kautilya wished the people to picture him, rather than what he really was. Truth does not often escape from palaces.

Administration

The actual direction of government was in the hands of the crafty vizier. Kautilya was a Brahman who knew the political value of religion, but took no moral guidance from it; like our modern dictators he believed that every means was justifiable if used in the service of the state. He was unscrupulous and treacherous, but never to his King; he served Chandragupta through exile, defeat, adventure, intrigue, murder and victory, and by his wily wisdom made the empire of his master the greatest that India had ever known. Like the author of The Prince, Kautilya saw fit to preserve in writing his formulas for warfare and diplomacy; tradition ascribes to him the Arthashastra, the oldest book in extant Sanskrit literature.” As an example of its delicate realism we may take its list of means for capturing a fort: “Intrigue, spies, winning over the enemy’s people, siege, and assault”  a wise economy of physical effort.

In principle the towns were of rectangular shape and divided into four regions, each under a special official and composed of wards. The houses were generally of wood, and of two or three storeys, the more splendid ones including several courts, one behind the other. There were royal palaces, workshops, storehouses, arsenals, and prisons. The streets were provided with watercourses draining the houses and issuing into the moat : against misuse of them, or of the cemeteries outside, by deposit of rubbish or dead bodies, by loosing animals, by conveyances not under proper charge, by funerals conducted through irregular ways or at unlawful hours, penalties are laid down. The houses were forbidden to have windows overlooking each other, except across the street. The precautions against fire included the provision of vessels of water ‘in thousands’ in the streets : every householder must sleep in the forepart of his dwelling, and he is under the obligation of rendering assistance in case of fire, while arson is punished by burning alive. The trumpet sounds the beginning and end of the nocturnal interval, during which, except on special occasions, none must stir abroad. Approach to the guard-houses and palaces is prohibited, as also is music at unseasonable times. The city chief reports all incidents, and takes charge of lost and ownerless property.

Transport and roads

The Department of Navigation regulated water transport, and protected travellers on rivers and seas; it maintained bridges and harbours, and provided government ferries in addition to those that were privately managed and owned ” an admirable arrangement whereby public competition could check private plunder, and private competition could discourage official extravagance. The Department of Communications built and repaired roads throughout the empire, from the narrow wagon-tracks of the villages to trade routes thirty-two feet, and royal roads sixty-four feet, wide. One of these imperial highways extended twelve hundred miles from Pataliputra to the north-western frontier a distance equal to half the transcontinental spread of the United States. At approximately every mile, says Alegasthenes, these roads were marked with pillars indicating directions and distances to various destinations.” Shade-trees, wells, police-stations and hotels were provided at regular intervals along the route.  Transport was by chariots, palanquins, bullock-carts, horses, camels, elephants, asses and men.

The Army

Coming now to the army, we find that the native Indian accounts present a view of the case rather less simple than does Megasthenes. According to these accounts the army might consist of troops of different kinds, namely hereditary or feudatory troops, hired troops, gild levies, and forest tribes. In the first named, which were regarded as the most trustworthy, we may doubtless recognize the old Kshatriya division of society, connected by caste, and ultimately by race, with the king himself, such as in later times we find them in the quasi-feudal states of Rajputana.

In the second class also the Kshatriya element would probably predominate, though here there would be, no doubt, a career for any bold adventurer with a strong arm and a soldierly bent As concerns the gild troops, which are plainly regarded as having a chiefly defensive character, there is some room for doubt : were they merely the ordinary trade gilds, as an organization for calling out the people for service in time of invasion, a sort of militia or landler? Or were they quasi-military corporations, such as the modern Brinjaras, whose business was to supply merchants and others with armed protection of a quasi-professional character? While refraining from a decisive pronunciation, we cannot but incline in the circumstances to the former alternative, for which the gilds of medieval Europe supply a fair analogy, and which is supported by the defensive character of the force. In any case the gild troops were regarded as in military value inferior to the men-at-arms.

The main divisions of the army were the elephant corps, the cavalry, and the foot : to which should be added the foragers and camp-followers. There was a scientific distinction of vanguard, centre, rear, wings, reserve, and camp, with elaborate discussions of formations on the march and in battle, attack and defence, and the value and employment of the several arms. Equipment was in considerable variety, including fixed and mobile engines, such as ‘hundred-slayers’. Such instruments were, of course, familiar even to the early nations of Mesopotamia, as were also the construction and siege of forts.

The art of fortification was well understood. As we can learn from the Greek and native descriptions, and as we can see depicted on the monuments of Sanchi and Bharhut, the great cities were provided with ditches, ramparts, and walls of earth, wood or brick, having battlements, towers, covered ways, salient angles, water-gates, and portcullises, with a wide street running round the interior face. There were guard-houses for troops (gulma) in the different quarters. The Indian forts were, as we have seen, systematically designed, with ditches, ramparts, battlements, covered ways, portcullises, and water-gates; and in the assault the arts of mining, countermining, flooding mines were employed no less than the devices of diplomacy. In short, the Indians possessed the art of war. If all their science failed them against invaders, we may conjecture, in accordance with other aspects of Indian thought, the reason that there was too much of it. In the formation adopted by Porus, the elephants and chariots in front and the infantry in the rear, we may perhaps detect an agreement with the precepts of the books. As regards the ethics of fighting, the Greeks received an impression of something not un-chivalrous; and here too we may recall the written precepts as to fair fighting, not attacking the wounded or those already engaged or the disarmed, and sparing those who surrendered.

The government made no pretence to democracy, and was probably the most efficient that India has ever had.” Akbar, greatest of the Moguls, “had nothing like it, and it may be doubted if any of the ancient Greek cities were better organized.” ” It was based frankly upon military power. Chandragupta, if we may trust Megasthenes (who should be as suspect as any foreign correspondent) kept an army of 600,000 foot, 30,000 horse, 9,000 elephants, and an unnamed number of chariots.” The peasantry and the Brahmans were exempt from military service; and Strabo describes the farmers tilling the soil in peace and security in the midst of war.  The power of the King was theoretically unlimited, but in practice it was restricted by a Council which sometimes with the King, sometimes in his absence initiated legislation, regulated national finances and foreign affairs, and appointed all the more important officers of state. Megasthenes testifies to the “high character and wisdom” of Chandragupta’s councillors, and to their effective power.”

Municipal government

The same method of departmental administration was applied to the government of the cities. Pataliputra was ruled by a commission of thirty men, divided into six groups. One group regulated industry; another supervised strangers, assigning to them lodgings and attendants, and watching their movements; another kept a record of births and deaths; another licensed merchants, regulated the sale of produce, and tested measures and weights; another controlled the sale of manufactured articles; another collected a tax of ten per cent on all sales. “In short,” says Havcll, “Pataliputra in the fourth century B.C. seems to have been a thoroughly well-organized city, and administered according to the best principles of social science.”  “The perfection of the arrangements thus indicated,” says Vincent Smith, “is astonishing, even when exhibited in outline. Examination of the depart- mental details increases our wonder that such an organization could have been planned and efficiently operated in India in 300 B.c.”

The government was organized into departments with well-defined duties and a carefully graded hierarchy of officials, managing respectively revenue, customs, frontiers, passports,communications, excise, mines, agriculture, cattle, commerce, warehouses, navigation, forests, public games, prostitution, and the mint. The Superintendent of Excise controlled the sale of drugs and intoxicating drinks, restricted the number and location of taverns, and the quantity of liquors which they might sell. The Superintendent of Mines leased mining areas to private persons, who paid a fixed rent and a share of the profits to the government; a similar system applied to agriculture, for all the land was owned by the state. The Superintendent of Public Games supervised the gambling halls, supplied dice, charged a fee for their use, and gathered in for the treasury five per cent of all money taken in by the “bank.” The Superintendent of Prostitution looked after public women, con- trolled their charges and expenditures, appropriated their earnings for two days of each month, and kept two of them in the royal palace for entertainment and intelligence service. Taxes fell upon every profession, occupation and industry; and in addition rich men were from time to time persuaded to make “benevolences” to the King. The government regulated prices and periodically assayed weights and measures; it carried on some manufactures in state factories, sold vegetables, and kept a monopoly of mines, salt, timber, fine fabrics, horses and elephants.

“This is a great thing in India,” says Arrian, “that all the inhabitants are free, not a single Indian being a slave.”  It struck him as a favorable contrast with his own nation that there was no slavery in India;tIn totally denying slavery Megasthenes went too far : in fact seven kinds of slaves are enumerated : but it is laid down that no Arya (‘freeman’, here including the Shudra) could be enslaved. A man might sell himself into slavery, and in times of distress children might be so provided for : also there were captives in war. In all cases the slave may purchase his freedom by any earnings acquired irrespective of his master’s service, and ransom from outside cannot be refused. The slave woman who is taken to her master’s bed thereby acquires freedom, as also do her children.

It is to this period, no doubt, that we must ascribe the great complexity of the caste system, and the beginning of the association of caste with craft.  Though the population was divided into castes according to occupations, it accepted these divisions as natural and tolerable. “They live happily enough,” the ambassador reported, being simple in their manners, and frugal. In another respect the old system of caste had received a shock. To the contemporaries of Buddha and Mahavira the conception of a king who was not of the Kshatriya order would have seemed preposterous. But the Mauryas were of low extraction, as were the Nandas whom they succeeded. Henceforth the spectacle of the low-born man in power was never a rarity in India; and soon it was the foreigner. The vast empire, with its army of officials and spies, introduced a bureaucratic rule in place of the old quasi-feudal system.

The people

As regards daily life, we find the public side of it sufficiently gay. The people were frugal in their diet, and sober, except on occasion of festivals. The chief display of luxury was in dress. The inns, hostelries, eating-houses, serais, and gaming-houses are evidently numerous; sects and crafts have perhaps their meeting places and the latter their public dinners. The business of entertainment provides a livelihood for various classes of dancers, singers, and actors. Even the villages are visited by them, and the author of the Arthashastra is inclined to discourage the existence of a common hall used for their shows as too great a distraction from the life of the home and the fields. At the same time there are penalties for refusal to assist in organising public entertainment. The king provides in amphitheatres constructed for the occasion dramatic, boxing, and other contests of men and animals, and also spectacles with displays of pictured objects of curiosity no doubt the private showman with his pictures of Hades, etc., was also active; and not seldom the streets were lighted up for festivals and it was not penal to stir abroad. Then there were also the royal processions, when His Majesty went forth to view his city or to hunt. They never drink wine except at sacrifice. . . . The simplicity of their laws and their contracts is proved by the fact that they seldom go to law. They have no suits about pledges and deposits, nor do they require either seals or witnesses, but make their deposits and confide in each other. . . .

Truth and virtue they hold alike in esteem. . . . The greater part of the soil is under irrigation, and consequently bears two crops in the course of the year. … It is accordingly affirmed that famine has never visited India, and that there has never been a general scarcity in the supply of nourishing food.

The bulk of the population consisted of actual cultivators, and Megasthenes remarks that their avocation was to such a degree defined (by the rule of caste) that they might be seen peacefully pursuing it in the sight of contending armies. The higher classes in the country had not a landowning, but an official, qualification, being entitled for their maintenance to a defined portion of the revenue. This corresponds to the jagir system of Musalman times. The assignment might be the revenue of an estate, a village, a town, or according to circumstances. On a minor scale the same principle was applied to the ranching class, which received for maintenance a proportion of the stock.

The domestic life

In domestic life the joint-family system prevails : but it can be dissolved. Boy and girl attain their majority at the age of sixteen and of twelve respectively. Adoption legitimated by the king is common. There are the four regular and four irregular forms of marriage, which is dissoluble by mutual consent or prolonged absence. The wife has her dowry and her ornaments, sometimes also her bride-gift, which are her private property and to a certain extent at her disposal in case of widowhood. Ill-usage on either side is punishable. Upon failure of male issue the husband may after a certain period take other wives (of any class); but he is required to render justice to all : on the other hand, a widow is at liberty to marry again. Orphans are under the guardianship of their relatives. The poor and helpless old, and in particular the families of soldiers and workmen dyingduring their employment, are regarded as deserving the king’s care. Concerning the ganikas, or public women, who were the king’s servants, and whose practice and rights were subject to minute regulation, the Greek writers- have told us enough. Offences against women of all kinds are severely visited, including the actions of officials in charge of workshops and prisons; and their various imprudences and lapses are subject to a gradation of fines and penalties. Refractory wives may be beaten (Manu, vin, 299).Elephants were a luxury usually confined to royalty and officialdom, and so highly valued that a woman’s virtue was thought a moderate price to pay for one of them. (“Their women, who arc very chaste, and would not go astray for any other reason, on the receipt of an elephant have communion with the donor. The Indians do not think it disgraceful to prostitute themselves for an elephant, and to the women it even seems a honor that their beauty should appear equal in value to an elephant.” Arrian, Indica, xvii.)

Law and public health

Law was administered in the village by local headmen, or by pancbayats village councils of five men; in towns, districts and provinces by inferior and superior courts; at the capital by the royal council as a supreme court, and by the King as a court of last appeal. Penalties were severe, and included mutilation, torture and death, usually on the principle of  equivalent retaliation. But the government was no mere engine of repression; it attended to sanitation and public health, maintained hospitals and poor-relief stations, distributed in famine years the food kept in state ware- houses for such emergencies, forced the rich to contribute to the assistance of the destitute, and organized great public works to care for the unemployed in depression years.

Religion

Among the Brahman deities the greatest share of popular adoration accrued to Shiva and Vishnu (under the form of Krishna), whom the Greeks report to us as Dionysus and Heracles respectively. With the former was associated Skanda or Vishakha, the god of war. The Buddhist books and sculptures, which give the preference to Brahma and Indra, are in this respect archaizing.

Shiva was specially worshipped in the hill regions; of the Vishnu cult the great centre was Mathura, the second home of the Krishna legend, which first arose in Western India. The Jains were probably still mostly to be found in Bihar and Ujjain, while the Buddhist expansion had perhaps even in the lifetime of the founder attained a far wider range.

Of law the bases are defined as, in ascending order of validity, sacred precept (dharma), agreement (vyavahara), custom (charitra), and royal edicts (rajashasana), and the subject is expounded rationally, not theologically. Civil law is treated under the heads of marriage and dowry, inheritance, housing and neighborhood (including trespass), debt, deposit, slaves, labor and contract, sale, violence and abuse, gaming, and miscellanea.

Cases were heard in the morning before a triad of officials together with three Brahman exponents of law; and there were rules as to the circumstances in which agreements were valid, and as to procedure in court, with plea, counterplea, and rejoinder. We learn from various sources that cases were commonly disposed of locally by reference to a body of arbitrators (pañchayat), permanent or constituted ad hoc, or by the officials of various grades; and there was a system of appeals as far as the king, who was regularly present in court or represented by a minister (pradvivaka). Offences against caste or religion were tried by committees entitled parishads. Trials by wager or ordeal were also common. The penalties, reasonably graduated and executed by royal authority, include fines (these, and also debts, often cornmutable for forced labor), whipping, mutilation, and death with or without torture. In cases of assault the principle familiar in the modern proverb ‘first at the Thana’ is already known, but disputed.

Industry/ Trade

The crafts are numerous, especially those dealing with the precious metals and with textiles. The professions include the doctor, the actor, singer and rhapsodist, the dancer, and the soothsayer. The traders are partly state officials in charge of royal merchandise, or in superintendence of matters connected with prices and sales, partly actual shopkeepers or travelling merchants; and not rare among both classes was the rich shreshthin, or seth, who was an important social factor, and, if a leader in his guild, received official recognition. In the workshops and the prisons (the latter periodically emptied) artisans were engaged on contract or in penal tasks; and there is a ‘spinning house’ for the labour of widows and other helpless or unfortunate women.

Permanent associations in civil life include trader and merchant guilds (shreni) and clubs (puga). I but there were also temporary combinations of workmen and others engaged under corporate responsibility for the execution of contracts. Collective obstruction was known and penalised.

Trade was active, various, and minutely regulated. The precious wares comprise many species of gold, silver, spices, and cosmetics from all parts of India; jewels, including pearls from Southern India, Ceylon, and beyond the sea; skins from Central Asia and China; muslin, cotton, and silk from China and Further India. The best horses came, as now, from the Indus countries and beyond. The merchant was mulcted in dues at the frontier, by road-taxes and tolls, and by octroi at the gates of the cities, where the royal officials maintained a douane and watch-house : he was required to be armed with a passport, and severe penalties were attached to malpractices in connection therewith. The officials record in writing ‘who the merchants are, whence they come, with what merchandise, and where it has been vised’. The country produce also was subject to octroi upon entry, and, to ensure that nothing might escape, there were prohibitions of purchase in part or in bulk at the place of origin in farms, orchards, and gardens. The amount and price of all goods was declared, and the sale was by auction, any enhancement accruing to the treasury. Combinations to affect prices were punishable; an army of spies was engaged on the routes in order to detect false declarations. The prices of ordinary goods were fixed and proclaimed daily by the officials. Similarly all weights and measures were subject to inspection. There were export, as well as import duties and octrois, and certain classes of goods were forbidden to be introduced or sent abroad respectively. The king himself was a great trader, disposing of the output of his factories, workshops, and prisons, and the produce of his lands, forests, and mines, for which he maintained store-houses (koshthdgdra) through the country. In particular he reserved the right of coining and other work in silver and gold, which was executed by his officials on behalf of those who brought their raw metal.

Literature and language

The progress of literature during the Maurya period is unfortunately for the most part matter for inference. Only three works, all in their way important, can with certainty be dated in or near it : these are the Arthashastra of Chanakya, the Mahabhashya, Patanjali’s commentary on the grammatical Sutras of Panini, and the Pali Kathavatthu. The Vedic period, including the Brahmanas and the early Upanishads, was prior to Buddha, and the same may be said in principle of the Sutras, or manuals of rites, public and domestic, the Vedangas, treatises on grammar, phonetics, prosody, astronomy, etymology, ritual, whatever may be the date of the treatises which have come down to us. Nor can the like be denied regarding the various forms of quasi-secular literature which are named in works of about this period, the Purana, or myth, the Itivritta, or legend, Akhyayika, or tale, Vakovakya, or dialogue. Some form of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the former of which we infer from Megasthenes to have been current during this period, belongs also to an earlier epoch. One philosophical system, the Sankhya, seems to be prior to Buddhism : a second, the Vaiheshika, may have arisen in our period. Finally, the canon of the Pali Buddhism and also that of the Jains, which is said to have been fixed at Pataliputra in 313 (312) BC, and the system of the Lokayatas or Ajivikas, are also in substance pre-Maurya.

If we may conjecturally assign to this period any definite literary forms, these would be theshastra and the artificial poetry, or kavya. The former, the most characteristic product of the Indian mind, is the formal exposition of a particular science in dogmatic enunciations accompanied by a discussion (bhashya). Such are the grammatical work of Patanjali, the Arthashastra of Chanakya, the Kamashastra of Vatsyayana : the Dharma Shastra, or Law, followed an older model, that of the metrical treatise, and the Nyaya Shastra, or Logic, is a later creation. We cannot doubt also that many of the minor sciences (vidyas) and arts (kalas), which were from earlier times a subject of instruction, had already attained some systematic literary form. As regards the artificial epic, it is true that we have no positive evidence of its existence in Maurya times. But the Buddhacharita of Ashvaghosha, which dates from the first century A.D., presents a perfect and stereotyped form, indicating a long preparation.

That writing was in common use not only for literary purposes, but also in public business, the edicts of Ashoka exist to prove. But this is by no means all. Epistolary correspondence was perfectly usual, and written documents were employed in the courts of law : moreover, the administration was versed in bookkeeping and registration on a large scale and systematically arranged. And we have already the beginnings of a study of style and a vocabulary of exegesis.

Sanskrit remained the language of the Brahman schools, of public and private ritual, and also of secular literature, except perhaps in the case of folk poesy. In the life of every day and also in administration, furthermore in the sectarian books of the Buddhists and Jains, a vernacular was employed; and from the Edicts of As oka three such vernaculars are known, one of which, that of Magadha, probably profited by its central position at the headquarters of the empire to encroach upon the others. The Sanskrit was perhaps favored in cultured circles, and especially in the cities; and social ambition, hampered by insufficient training, began to foster a hybrid form of speech, now known as ‘mixed Sanskrit’, which subsequently established itself as a literary medium in certain Buddhist schools, when the canonical vernaculars, themselves by no means dialectically pure, had already become stereotyped.

The one defect of this government was autocracy, and therefore continual dependence upon force and spies. Like every autocrat, Chandragupta held his power precariously, always fearing revolt and assassination. Every night he used a different bedroom, and always he was surrounded by guards. Hindu tradition, accepted by European historians, tells how, when a long famine (pace Megasthenes) came upon his kingdom, Chandragupta, in despair at his helplessness, abdicated his throne, lived for twelve years thereafter as a Jain ascetic, and then starved himself to death. “All things considered,” said Voltaire, “the life of a gondolier is preferable to that of a doge; but I believe the difference is so trifling that it is not worth the trouble of examining.”

REFERANCES

ARRIAN: Anabasis of Alexander, and Indica. London, 1893.

BARNETT, L. D.: Antiquities of India. New York, 1914.

BARNETT, L. D.: The Heart of India. London, 1924.

CHILDE, V. GORDON: The Most Ancient East. London, 1928.

HAVELL, E. B.: Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India. London, 1915.

HAVELL, E. B.: Ideals of Indian Art. New York, 1920.

HAVELL, E. B.: History of Aryan Rule in India. Harrap, London,

KOIIN, HANS: History of Nationalism in the East. New York, 1929.

SMITH, G. ELLIOT: Human History. New York, 1929.

SMITH, W. ROBERTSON: The Religion of the Semites. New York, 1889.

SMITH, V. A.: Akbar. Oxford, 1919.

SMITH,V. A.: Asoka. Oxford, 1920.

SMITH, V. A.: Oxford History of India. Oxford, 1923.

WILL DURANT. : Our oriental heritage. Simon and Schuster.New York 1954

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Indian armies had two great military advantages over Alexander’s armies. War elephants and a cavalry which had invented the stirrup. Could Alexander have defeated such armies?

Almost all accounts of Alexander’s campaigns in India have been based on modern European translations of ancient texts. Unless Indian universities and think tanks look at the original Greek, Roman, Ethiopian and Egyptian manuscripts, a clear picture will not emerge. European translations are mostly slanted for obvious reasons. The Greek and Roman civilisations are the wellspring of western thought, science, culture, religion and philosophy; a defeat for Alexander ‘the Great’, would be a blow for all that he represents – especially the triumph of the West over the East.

The Greek invasion of India was a popular subject in Greece and Rome for many centuries. The Alexander romance even entered medieval European literature and religion. Much later it became the fountainhead of inspiration for the colonisation of the East, especially India.

The conquest of India, a super power then, by Alexander was seen as major victory. Alexander’s ‘conquest of India’ was the seminal point in Western history.

“Arrian and other writers clearly recount the special significance to Alexander of the victory in India. Later authors in the West continued to dwell upon the commemoration of this battle. Some of the accounts are quite unbelievable, but their very existence proves that the battle against Porus remained a popular subject in Greece and Rome for many centuries.”

Western Colonial historians implied that after the Battle at Hydaspes, India became a Greek colony, due to the the loss in that one battle! Anyone in the world can have their lucky day – including Alexander! The one important question which is ignored was “Were the Greeks able to retain their Indian conquests?”

Accounting for the Porus Red Herring, further analysis of Alexander’s actions, Alexander aimed at patching up alliances with Indian rulers to secure his borders.

Enigmatically, Indian archaeology, writers and history do not know of any Porus or much of Alexander’s Indian campaign. Under the onslaught of a ‘defeatist’ version of Indian history by colonial historians, Indian nationalistic historians admit that at best, Alexander may have conquered some border districts of India.

The Persians advise to Alexander

After defeating Persia in the year 334 BCE, Alexander of Macedon was irresistibly drawn towards the great Indian landmass. However, the Persians warned him the country was no easy target; that several famous conquerors had fallen at the gates of India.

The Persians told him how their greatest king, Cyrus, who had conquered much of the civilised world, had been killed in a battle with Indian soldiers exactly two centuries before Alexander.

And in an earlier antiquity, the Assyrian queen Semiramis, who had crossed the Indus with 400,000 highly trained troops, escaped with just 20 troops, the rest being slaughtered by the Indians.

In his book, Foreign Influence on Ancient India, Krishna Chandra Sagar says 150 years before Alexander, Indian archers and cavalry formed a significant component of the Persian army and played a key role in subduing Thebes in central Greece.

Alexander, however, knew no fear. More than anything else, he wanted to invade India. It would prove to be a strategic blunder.

Alexander’s newly inducted  Persian advisors would have filled him in, on how a few centuries ago,  Semiramis, Queen of Assyria, and Cyrus the Great, two significant historical figures of the Levant, had failed against the Indians.

Alexander in fact is said to be eager to capture India precisely because two earlier conquerors-Semiramis and Cyrus-had failed to do so. Here it is worth noting, Alexander apparently views the legendary Assyrian queen as an historical figure, the equal of Cyrus the Great, and strives to outdo them both. (from Warrior Women By Deborah Levine Gera).

The Assyrians, whose trans-Asia Minor Empire and their legendary Queen Semiramis too, had failed in the Indian campaign with faux elephants. Cyrus The Great, too had met his nemesis, trying to conquer India (or an army with significant Indian component). A modernized version of Strabo’s The Geography of Strabo reads, Alexander … heard that no one had hitherto passed that way with an army and emerged in safety, except Semiramis, when she fled from India. The natives said that even she emerged with only twenty men of her army; and that Cyrus son of Cambyses, escaped with only seven of his men … When Alexander received this information he is said to have been seized with a desire of excelling Cyrus and Semiramis … What credence can we place in these accounts of India … Megasthenes virtually agrees. (from Alexander the Great By Ian Worthington – ellipsis mine).

Alexander invasion in India

In reality Alexander invaded India expecting a heroic entry but in the end it turned into a humiliating retreat.

In 326 BC the formidable Greek-Macedonian army entered India. It was the first time Europeans and Indians first looked into one another’s faces; the first meeting of the two halves of the Aryan people since their forefathers had parted centuries before.

In his first encounter, Alexander fought for four days against the warlike people of the city of Massaga in Swat valley. On the first day of this battle, Alexander was injured and forced to retreat. The same fate awaited him on the second and third days. When Alexander lost men and was on the verge of defeat, he called for a truce. Clearly, the Indians weren’t aware of the Trojan horse episode, for the Greeks slaughtered the unaware and unarmed citizens of Massaga as they slept in the night of the fourth day believing that the battle was over.

In the second and third battles at Bazira and Ora, Alexander faced a similar fate and again resorted to treachery to defeat those fortresses. But the fierce resistance put up by the Indian defenders had reduced the strength – and perhaps the will – of the until then all-conquering Macedonian-led army.

If the Porus Red Herring is ignored, we can see that an important success of Alexander was his alliance with Ambhi – the ruler of Taxila. To cement this alliance, Alexander ‘gifted’ Ambhi with ‘a wardrobe of Persian robes, gold and silver ornaments, and 30 horses, 1000 talents in cash’. 1000 talents is anywhere between 25,000-60,000 kg of gold – 25-60 tons of gold !

Does this look like Ambhi accepted Alexander as the conqueror of the world – or was Alexander ‘persuading’ Ambhi to seal an alliance – at a huge price? Portrayed as traitor, a sell out, by Colonial historians, Ambhi’s case was a simple case of providing neutrality and supplies (at a fabulous price) to a travelling army, which was securing its own borders.

The payment of 1000 talents in gold to Ambhi aroused much envy and outrage in Alexander’s camp. It prompted Meleager, to sarcastically congratulate Alexander for ‘having at least found in India a man worth 1000 talents.’ What seals this incident is Alexander’s retort to Meleager, “that envious men only torment themselves.”.

In the year 518 BC, a few years after the defeat and death of Cyrus the Great, by a joint force of the Massagetae and the Indians, and more than 200 years before the death of Alexander, Darius-I re-organized his inherited empire into 20 satrapies.

To put these figures in perspective, Babylon and Syria, the richest provinces, paid 1000 talents, while Egypt paid 700 talents. (from Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire By David Christian).

At least, Darius-I, did not pay anything to the satrapies – unlike Alexander. If Ambhi wanted Alexander to wage a war against Porus, would it not be more logical that Ambhi, the (supposed) feudatory should have paid Alexander? Allegedly, Alexander bribed Ambhi (bribe a satrapy?) to join him and wage war against Porus.

War against Porus.

Greek histories record that Alexander’s hardest battle was the Battle of Hydaspes (Jhelum) in which he faced King Puru, the Yaduvanshi king of the Paurava kingdom of Punjab. It is said that in the year 327 B.C . Alexander the Great, pushing on from Persia, marched over the Hindu Kush and descended upon India. For a year he campaigned among the northwestern states that had formed one of the Persian Empire’s richest provinces, exacting supplies for his troops and gold for his treasury. Early in 326 B.C. he crossed the Indus, fought his way slowly through Taxila and Rawalpindi to the south and east, en- countered the army of King Porus, defeated 30,000 infantry, 4,000 cav- alry, 300 chariots and 200 elephants, and slew 12,000 men. When Porus, having fought to the last, surrendered, Alexander, admiring his courage, stature and fine features, bade him say what treatment he wished to receive. “Treat me, Alexander,” he answered, “in a kingly way.” “For my own sake,” said Alexander, “thou shalt be so treated; for thine own sake do thou demand what is pleasing to thee.” But Porus said that every- thing was included in what he had asked. Alexander was much pleased with this reply; he made Porus king of all conquered India as a Macedonion tributary, and found him thereafter a faithful and energetic ally.

Paurava was a prosperous Indian kingdom on the banks of the river Jhelum, and Puru – described in Greek accounts as Porus and standing over seven feet tall – was a generous monarch.

Perhaps, he was generous to a fault. Legend has it that ahead of Alexander’s entry into India, his Persian wife Roxana, the daughter of the defeated Persian king Darius, arrived in Paurava to meet King Puru (porus)   , who was preparing for war against the foreign invader.

Roxana gained access to Puru, and through the bond of rakhi, declared herself his sister. She then begged Puru (porus) to spare her husband’s life if he encountered the Macedonian king in battle. The large-hearted Indian king agreed to this bizarre request.

In the autumn of 326BC, the Greek and Paurava(porus)   armies faced each other across the banks of the river Jhelum in Punjab. By all accounts it was an awe-inspiring spectacle. The Greeks had 34,000 infantry and 7000 cavalry. This number was boosted further by their Persian allies.

Facing this tumultuous force led by the genius of Alexander was the Paurava (porus)   army of 20,000 infantry, 2000 cavalry and 200 war elephants. Being a comparatively small kingdom by Indian standards, Paurava (porus)   couldn’t have had such a large standing army, so it’s likely many of its defenders were hastily armed civilians.

According to Greek sources, for several days the armies eyeballed each other across the river. They write Alexander could not move his army across the river because it was swollen from the rains.

A lamer excuse is not found in history! Alexander’s army had crossed the Hellespont, a 1-8 km wide strip of sea that divides Asia and Europe, and which was well defended by the Persians. In comparison, crossing the narrower Jhelum against a much smaller adversary should have been a far easier task.

According to Greek sources, for several days the armies eyeballed each other across the river. The Greek-Macedonian force after having lost several thousand soldiers fighting the Indian mountain cities, were terrified at the prospect of fighting the fierce Paurava (porus) army. They had heard about the havoc Indian war elephants created among enemy ranks. The modern equivalent of battle tanks, the elephants also scared the wits out of the horses in the Greek cavalry.

Another terrible weapon in the Indians’ armoury was the two-meter bow. As tall as a man it could launch massive arrows able to transfix more than one enemy soldier.

The Battle with Porus

The battle was savagely fought. As the volleys of heavy arrows from the long Indian bows scythed into the enemy’s formations, the first wave of war elephants waded into the Macedonian phalanx that was bristling with 17-feet long sarissas. Some of the animals got impaled in the process. Then a second wave of these mighty beasts rushed into the gap created by the first, either trampling the Macedonian soldiers or grabbing them by their trunks and presenting them up for the mounted Indian soldiers to cut or spear them. It was a nightmarish scenario for the invaders. As the terrified Macedonians pushed back, the Indian infantry charged into the gap.

In the first charge, by the Indians, Porus’s brother Amar killed Alexander’s favourite horse Bucephalus, forcing Alexander to dismount., they also killed Nicaea, one of his leading commanders.

According to the Roman historian Marcus Justinus, Porus challenged Alexander, who charged him on horseback. In the ensuing duel, Alexander fell off his horse and was at the mercy of the Indian king’s spear. But Porus dithered for a second and Alexander’s bodyguards rushed in to save their king.

Plutarch, the Greek historian and biographer, says there seems to have been nothing wrong with Indian morale. Despite initial setbacks, when their vaunted chariots got stuck in the mud, Porus’s army “rallied and kept resisting the Macedonians with unsurpassable bravery”.

Two millennia later, British historians latched on to the Alexander legend and described the campaign as the triumph of the organised West against the chaotic East. Although Alexander defeated only a few minor kingdoms in India’s northwest, in the view of many gleeful colonial writers the conquest of India was complete. Western historians depict the Battle of Hydaspes as a clash of the organised West and the muddling East. That one battle is portrayed as the Greek conquest of India, while the fact is that Alexander merely probed the north-western extremity of India. Puru was by any reckoning a minor king and doesn’t even merit a mention in Indian accounts.

This statement by Russia’s Marshal Gregory Zhukov on the Macedonian invasion of India in 326 BCE is significant because unlike the prejudiced colonial and Western historians, the Greeks and later Romans viewed Indians differently. For instance, Arrian writes in Alexander Anabasis that the Indians were the noblest among all Asians.

In fact, Arrian and other Greeks say the Indians were relentless in their attacks on the invaders. They say if the people of Punjab and Sindh were fierce, then in the eastern part of India “the men were superior in stature and courage”. All this is glossed over by Western historians, in whose view the one victory over king Porus amounted to the “conquest of India”. But the Greeks made no such claim.

In 1957, while addressing the cadets of the Indian Military Academy, Dehra Dun, Zhukov said Alexander’s actions after the Battle of Hydaspes suggest he had suffered an outright defeat. In Zhukov’s view, Alexander had suffered a greater setback in India than Napoleon in Russia. Napoleon had invaded Russia with 600,000 troops; of these only 30,000 survived, and of that number fewer than 1,000 were ever able to return to duty.

In reality much of the country was not even known to the Greeks. So handing victory to Alexander is like describing Hitler as the conqueror of Russia because the Germans advanced up to Stalingrad.

So if Zhukov was comparing Alexander’s campaign in India to Napoleon’s disaster, the Macedonians and Greeks must have retreated in an equally ignominious fashion. Zhukov would know a fleeing force if he saw one; he had chased the German Army over 2000 km from Stalingrad to Berlin.

Reward to Porus

If Porus lost, why reward him? According to the Greeks, Alexander was apparently so impressed by Porus he gave back his kingdom plus the territories of king Ambhi of Taxila who had fought alongside the Macedonians.This is counterintuitive. Ambhi had become Alexander’s ally on the condition he would be given Porus’ kingdom. So why reward the enemy, whose army had just mauled the Macedonians?

The only possible answer is at the Battle of Hydaspes, the Macedonians realised they were dealing with an enemy of uncommon valour. Sensing defeat they called for a truce, which Porus accepted. The Indian king struck a bargain – in return for Ambhi’s territories, which would secure his frontiers, Porus would assist the Macedonians in leaving India safely.

Actually in the Battle of Hydaspes, the Indians fought with bravery and war skills that no other army had shown against the Greeks. In the first charge by the Indians, Puru’s brother Amar killed Alexander’s favourite horse Bucephalus, forcing Alexander to dismount. In battles outside India the elite Macedonian bodyguards had not allowed a single enemy soldier to deliver so much as a scratch on their king’s body, let alone slay his mount. Yet in this battle with the Paurava army, not only was Alexander injured, the Indians killed Nicaea, one of the leading Greek commanders.

According to the Roman historian Marcus Justinus, the battle was savagely fought. Puru challenged Alexander, who charged him on horseback. In the ensuing duel, Alexander fell off his horse and was at the mercy of the Indian king’s spear (and this is where legend meets history) when Puru perhaps remembered his promise to his rakhi sister (probably a Trojan horse sent in by the Greeks). He spared the Macedonian’s life, and Alexander’s bodyguards quickly carried off their king.

The Greeks may claim victory but if Alexander’s troops were so badly mauled by the petty regional fiefdoms, how could they have crushed the comparatively stronger army of Puru? An unbiased re-examination of contemporary histories suggests the Greeks probably lost the battle and Alexander sued for peace.

In his epic volume, The Life and Exploits of Alexander, a series of translations of the Ethiopic histories of Alexander, E.A.W. Budge, Egyptologist, orientalist and philologist, has given a vivid account of the Macedonian’s misadventure in India.

According to Budge, who worked for the British Museum in the early part of the 20th century, in the Battle of Hydaspes the Indians destroyed the majority of Alexander’s cavalry? Realising that if he were to continue fighting he would be completely ruined, the Macedonian requested Puru to stop fighting. True to Indian traditions, the magnanimous Indian king spared the life of the surrendered enemy. A peace treaty was signed, and Alexander helped Puru in annexing other territories to his kingdom.

The Greek geographer Strabo complains in the Geographika that all who wrote about Alexander preferred the marvellous to the true. Certainly he alludes to Alexander’s original propaganda to glorify his struggle in the East. He created his own mystified version of the campaign, transforming it into a search for divine traces.

Plutarch, the Greek historian and biographer, says of the Battle of Hydaspes: “The combat with Porus took the edge off the Macedonians’ courage, and stayed their further progress into India. For having found it hard enough to defeat an enemy who brought but 20,000 foot and 2000 horse into the field, they thought they had reason to oppose Alexander’s design of leading them on to pass the Ganges, on the further side of which was covered with multitudes of enemies.”

Indeed, on the other side of the Ganges was the mighty kingdom of Magadh, ruled by the ferocious and wily Nandas, who commanded one of the largest standing armies in the world. According to Plutarch, the courage of the Greeks evaporated when they came to know that the Nandas “were awaiting them with 200,000 infantry, 80,000 cavalry, 8000 war chariots, and 6000 fighting elephants”. Undoubtedly, the Greeks would have walked into a slaughterhouse.

Still 400 km from the Ganges, the Indian heartland, Alexander ordered a retreat to great jubilation among his soldiers. The celebrations were premature. On its way south towards the mouth of the Indus river, Alexander’s army was constantly harried by Indian soldiers. When the Greeks pillaged villages, the Indians retaliated. In some kingdoms, the Indian soldiers simply fell upon the Greeks because they wouldn’t tolerate foreigners invading their country.

In a campaign at Sangala in Punjab, the Indian attack was so ferocious that it completely destroyed the Greek cavalry, forcing Alexander the great to attack on foot. However, in the following counterattack, Alexander took the fort and sold the surviving Indians into slavery. (That’s another facet of the Macedonian that is glossed over by western historians; Alexander was far from being a noble king, and on the contrary was a vicious and cruel person.)

His battle with the Malavs of Multan – the most warlike people of Punjab – is perhaps the most recounted. In the hotly contested battle, Alexander was felled by a Malav warrior whose arrow pierced the Macedonian’s breastplate and lodged in his ribs. The Indian warrior seeing the enemy king fall, advanced to take his armour but was checked by Alexander’s bodyguards who rushed into the battle to save their king. The Macedonians later stormed the fort and in revenge killed every one of the 17,000 inhabitants of the fort, including women and children. Alexander never recovered from the wound and died in Babylon (Iraq) at the age of 33.

Arrian, the Roman biographer of Alexander, says the only ‘victory’ celebration by Alexander’s troops was after the battle with Puru. Surprising – that Alexander’s troops did not celebrate any victory, till the very end of the campaign. Was it, instead, a celebration that they had escaped with their lives?

Greek contemporary writers describe the Battle of Hydaspes (Jhelum) as the hardest fought of all Alexander’s battles. Frank Lee Holt, a professor of ancient history at the University of Houston, writes in his book, Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elephant Medallions: “The only reference in Arrian’s history to a victory celebration by Alexander’s army was after the battle with Porus.” Alexander’s army did not indulge in celebrations after the Battle of Gaugamela where they defeated 200,000 Persians. No wild festivities were announced after the Battle of Issus where they defeated a mixed force of Persian cavalry and Greek mercenaries. The fact they celebrated after the Battle of Hydaspes suggests they considered themselves extremely lucky to survive after the clash with the Hindu army, with its elephant corps.

The Greek retreat from India shows clear signs of a defeated force. Indeed, if the Greek and Macedonian soldiers were really that tired of fighting, as western historians claim, then the ‘triumphant’ troops should have returned via the same route they arrived. But instead they preferred to trek south through unknown and hostile lands in Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan. The only explanation is that they didn’t want to face the mountain kingdoms again.

Also, it’s a myth that the Greeks and Macedonians were tired of fighting and were hankering to meet their families. Alexander’s army had a system of rotation where large batches of soldiers were released to return home (with sufficient gold, slaves and other spoils of war) after major victories. In their place, fresh troops eager to do battle (and lured by the promise of more loot) were constantly trickling in from Greece.

There is more indirect evidence of the lack of major Greek victories in India. The booty that fell into Greek hands after they defeated the Persians in the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC is estimated at 100,000 talents (more than 2,500,000 kilos) of gold. However, there is no mention of any large booty captured from India – strange because those days India was pretty much swimming in gold and other precious metals and stones. So it can be safely argued that Alexander failed to get his hands on a substantial booty because he never won any substantial victories.

On the contrary, Alexander gave King Ambhi, the ruler of Taxila, 1000 talents (over 25,000 kilos) of gold to fight alongside him in the battle against Puru. That’s even stranger! Because Greek sources say Ambhi voluntarily came over to their side. So why a willing ally was paid such a large amount? If Alexander was really rolling through India, it’s inconceivable he would pay off a minor king to ally with him.

Alexander’s post-Hydaspes charitable behaviour, as per Greek accounts, is uncharacteristic and unlikely. For, in battles before and after, he massacred everyone in the cities he subdued. What was Alexander’s response to a ‘sub-continent occupied by a complex network of peoples and states, who viewed Alexander as a new piece to be played in their complex political chess game.’ He had to return the kingdom of Punjab to Porus – purportedly, after winning the battle. His loot and pickings from India were negligible.

Alexander ‘famous for clemency and liberality’?

To these lean pickings, what was Alexander’s response? Writes a historian, “the Macedonians frequently massacred the defenders of the city, especially in India.” Another modern historian, an expert on Greek history writes that ‘the tale of slaughter told in the ancient sources is unparalleled elsewhere in the campaign.’ ( from Ancient Greece By Sarah B. Pomeroy, Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan)

His other famous ‘victory’ was at Jaxartes, over the Scythians – ‘over a people which had hitherto been deemed by its neighbours invincible’. Of course, the writer goes onto mention that it was Alexander’s illness, which ‘saved the Scythians from extermination.’

But after a few paragraphs, Alexander becomes ‘famous for clemency and liberality.’ After an overnight ride, the next morning, Alexander concluded a friendship pact with the Darvas, the Scythian chieftain with just a handshake – at Alexandria Eschate (“The Furthest”) in modern Tajikistan. He also ‘agreed’ to release all Scythian prisoners – without a ransom. Was the reason for this clemency and liberality, or to isolate Bessus, Spitamenes and Datafernes responsible for ‘two years of savage warfare waged across Sogdiana on a scale unequalled anywhere else in Alexander’s anabasis.’

War elephants that frightened Alexander’s army

326 BC was the year of the battle with Porus. After that battle, what possibly frightened Alexander’s army was the ‘information’ that further from Punjab, lay places “where the inhabitants were skilled in agriculture, where there were elephants in yet greater abundance and men were superior in stature and courage”

And Plutarch tells us how Alexander’s armies were told that the kings of the Ganderites and Praesii were awaiting them with eighty thousand horsemen, two hundred thousand footmen, eight thousand chariots, and six thousand fighting elephants. (from The Life of Alexander, Plutarch, The Parallel Lives).

By 303 BC, less than a 20 years after Alexander’s death (323 BC), Alexander’s greatest general, Seleucos Nicator, sued for peace with Chandragupta Maurya. He ceded large parts of empire, made a marriage alliance with Chandragupta, stationed an ambassador (Megasthenes) in Chandragupta’s court.  – and obtained 500 elephants, which proved invaluable in at the decisive battle of Ipsus.

Where did the much vaunted ‘Greek’ sarrisae and Macedonian phalanxes miss out? On the other hand, the 500 elephants that Seleucos Nicator bought from Chandragupta were decisive in the Battle Of Ippsus – which ended the Daidochi wars .

A hundred years later, terrorized Roman armies lost major battles against Hannibal and Pyrrhus. What about Pyrrhus and Hannibal frightened the Roman armies?Elephants. That is what. War elephants.

Pyrrhus’ army had elephants. That is what. Hannibal’s elephants are better known. If 20 elephants of Pyrrhus, or Hannibal’s 37, frightened the Romans so much, what happened to Alexander’s army, when faced with 100s, if not 1000s of elephants, which were common in Indian armies.

To put that in perspective, Chandragupta Maurya had thousands – figures range between 5,000 to 9,000. And how many elephants did Porus’ army have? 200 of them is the estimate by Greek hagiography.

In the battle against the Massaga, resulting in the defeat and death of Cyrus, against Queen Tomyris, Indian elephants played a crucial role. At this decisive battle of Ipsus, the  army  fielded “the largest number of elephants ever to appear on a Hellenistic battlefield” which turned out to be, as a historian describes as the “greatest achievement of war elephants in Hellenistic military history.” And Pyrrhus learnt his lessons, on using elephants in battle, at Ipsus.

Homesick  or frightened?

“Why did Alexander’s undefeated troops, after the Indian campaign, suddenly feel homesick?”

To the victors go the spoils, so if the Greeks and Macedonians were really victorious, as European accounts narrate, then why did they leave India so soon? After all, over 99 per cent of the country was still unconquered. And why did the retreating army resemble a defeated brood – rather than a triumphant force – trekking across inhospitable areas, losing an estimated 60,000 men in the process?

Greek ‘historians’ tell us that the main reason for Alexander’s turning back was homesick soldiers. The official goal of the invasion, the destruction of the Persian empire in revenge for its attack on Greece, had now been achieved, so the official duties of these troops were fulfilled. (from Alexander the Great By Arrian, James S. Romm, Pamela Mensch)

Greek sources say Alexander retreated from India because his soldiers were weary, homesick and close to mutiny. Imagine if German soldiers had told Hitler they were tired of fighting? They would have been summarily shot. In Alexander’s time, the punishment was crucifixion.

The Macedonian army had a system of rotation where large batches of veteran soldiers were released to return home (with sufficient gold and slaves). In their place, fresh troops eager poured in from Europe. During the (nearly) half-year long siege of Tyre, Alexander received fresh troop reinforcements from Macedonia. At this stage, Alexander also inducted into his army, fresh Persian soldiers, trained in Macedonian style of warfare. Again, after his marriage to Roxanne, a further 10,000 Persian soldiers joined his army. Hence, the troops left with Alexander, were either fresh or those who decided to stay with Alexander.

Before his India ‘campaign’, at Ecbatana, Alexander cashiered thousands of his Greek troops who wished to return home. After the death of Darius, at Ecbatana (330 BC), to all the Greek officers, wishing to return home, Alexander awarded one talent of gold (approx. 25kg-60 kg).

If they were weary of constant warring, it is inexplicable why these soldiers chose to fight their way through obstinately hostile Indian territories. The homesick soldiers would have preferred the garrisoned north-western route they took while coming in. Why would a brilliant commander subject himself and his troops to further violence when all they wanted was a peaceful passage home?

Clearly, the Macedonians were in a mess and not thinking straight. Not the sign of a victorious army.

The pleadings of Coenus, that Alexander’s men, “long to see their parents, wives, and children, and their homeland again.” were patently the cries of frightened soldiers. Once back in the folds of the secure Macedonian Empire, the same soldiers joined the mutiny at Opis. These Macedonian soldiers revolted when they were released by Alexander to return to Macedonia, demonstrates that reason for the revolt in India, was not home-sickness. Although the Greeks claim victory, the fanatical resistance put up by the Indian soldiers and ordinary people everywhere had shaken the nerves of Alexander’s army to the core. They refused to move further east. Nothing Alexander could say or do would spur his men to continue eastward. The army was close to mutiny.

Says Plutarch: “The combat with Porus took the edge off the Macedonians’ courage, and stayed their further progress into India. For having found it hard enough to defeat an enemy who brought but 20,000 foot and 2000 horse into the field, they thought they had reason to oppose Alexander’s design of leading them on to pass the Ganges, on the further side of which was covered with multitudes of enemies.”

Indeed, on the other side of the Ganges was the mighty kingdom of Magadh, ruled by the wily Nandas, who commanded one of the most powerful and largest standing armies in the world. According to Plutarch, the courage of the Macedonians evaporated when they came to know the Nandas “were awaiting them with 200,000 infantry, 80,000 cavalry, 8000 war chariots and 6000 fighting elephants”. Undoubtedly, Alexander’s army would have walked into a slaughterhouse.

The Greek historian says after the battle with the Pauravas, the badly bruised and rattled Macedonians panicked when they received information further from Punjab lay places “where the inhabitants were skilled in agriculture, where there were elephants in yet greater abundance and men were superior in stature and courage”.

As per Arrian, the only ‘victory’ celebration by Alexander’s troops was after the battle with Porus. Surprising – that Alexander’s troops did not celebrate any victory, till the very end of the campaign. Was it, instead, a celebration that they had escaped with their lives? Hundreds of kilometres from the Indian heartland, Alexander ordered a retreat to great jubilation among his soldiers.

The celebrations were premature. On its way south towards the sea, Alexander’s army was constantly harried by Indian partisans, republics and kingdoms.

In a campaign at Sangala in Punjab, the Indian attack was so ferocious it completely destroyed the Greek cavalry, forcing Alexander to attack on foot. In the next battle, against the Malavs of Multan, he was felled by an Indian warrior whose arrow pierced the Macedonian’s breastplate and ribs.  As Alexander retreated from India, a Mallian force attacked the Macedonian army. In this Mallian attack, Alexander was himself injured – and his very life was in balance for the next many weeks.

Says Military History magazine: “Although there was more fighting, Alexander’s wound put an end to any more personal exploits. Lung tissue never fully recovers, and the thick scarring in its place made every breath cut like a knife.”

Alexander never recovered and died in Babylon (modern Iraq) at the age of 33.

Why will a ruler who entered via Khyber pass, would leave the country via the thar desert, and in a boat to Babylon, where he died.  Normally, a king would go back via the route he came so as to show his triumph. But Alexander left his army, rather his army left him- and fled .He died of gangrene, which most probably was due to a wound inflicted in a fight with an Indian army.

Within the next few years, Western history admits that the Indians kings won back all their losses – quite unlike the rest of Alexander’s conquests. For instance the Sassanians, a true-blue Persian dynasty was able to retake Persia, in 223 AD, 500 years after Alexander, from the phil-hellenistic Parthians, who in turn were able to depose the Seleucids after 250 years – by 63 BC. Egypt, Greece  of course, never recovered.

The Indian elephant contingent had played a significant role in the win of Massaga Queen, Tomyris over Cyrus The Great and the Persians. Were the Massagas from Magadha? The other name for this tribe (referred to by the Greeks) against the Persians was the Derbices or Dahae. Was this name derived from the darbha grass, which Chanakya had used to swear the downfall of the Nanda kings?

When he arrived at Susa, twenty months after turning back from his conquests, his army was but a miserable fragment of that which had crossed into India with him three years before.

Seven years later all trace of Macedonian authority had already disappeared from India. The chief agent of its removal was one of the most romantic figures in Indian history, a lesser warrior but a greater ruler than Alexander. Chandragupta was a young Kshatriya noble exiled from Magadha by the ruling Nanda family, to which he was related. Helped by his subtle Machiavellian adviser, Kautilya Chanakya, the youth organized a small army, overcame the Macedonian garrisons, and declared India free. Then he advanced upon Pataliputra, capital of the Magadha kingdom, fomented a revolution, seized the throne, and established that Mauryan Dynasty which was to rule Hindustan and Afghanistan for one hundred and thirty-seven years. Subordinating his courage to Kautilya’s unscrupulous wisdom, Chandragupta soon made his government the most powerful then existing in the world. When Mcgasthenes came to Pataliputra as ambassador from Selcncus Nicator, King of Syria, he was amazed to find a civilization which he described to the incredulous Greeks still near their zenith as entirely equal to their own.

Yet within a few years after Alexander’s retreat, the Indians drove the Greeks out of India. Inspired by the master strategist Chanakya, Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Mauryan dynasty, defeated Seleucus Necator, Alexander’s satrap. This was quite unlike the rest of Alexander’s other territorial conquests. It took the Sassanians 500 years to get back Persia from the Greeks. The Parthians were able to depose the Greeks 250 years after Alexander. Egypt never recovered its lost glory.

Our knowledge of Alexander rests on histories produced long after the fact: a late first-century b.c.e. section of a world history written in Greek by  Diodorus of Sicily;

A LatinHistory of Alexander published by the Roman author Quintus Curtius Rufus in the first century c.e.;

A biography in Greek by Plutarch of Chaeronea, also produced in the first century c.e.;

A history written in Greek by Arrian of Nicomedia sometime in the second century c.e.; and Justin’s third-century c.e.

Latin abridgment (Epitome) of a lost Greek secondary account by the first-century author Pompeius Trogus.

Each of these five narrative treatments of Alexander’s reign claims to be a serious work of history or biography, but all five contradict one another on fundamental matters and cannot be considered absolutely reliable unless somehow corroborated by other evidence.

Beyond these texts, we have little except a compilation of legendary material known as the Greek Alexander Romance, a wildly imaginative work filled with talking trees and other wonders that later thrilled the medieval world. (from Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elephant Medallions By Frank Lee Holt).

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

Benjamin Franklin

The Mughal Empire is a fascinating mosaic in the history of India.The children of great emperor Akbar who had waited so impatiently for his death found it difficult to hold together the empire that had been created by his genius. Why is it that great men so often have mediocrities for their offspring? Is it because the gamble of the genes that produced them the commingling of ancestral traits and biological possibilities was but a chance, and could not be expected to recur? Or is it because the genius exhausts in thought and toil the force that might have gone to parentage, and leaves only his diluted blood to his heirs? Or is it that children decay under ease, and early good fortune deprives them of the stimulus to ambition and growth?

Jehangir was not so much a mediocrity as an able degenerate. Nur-ud-din Salim Jahangir (Persian: نورالدین سلیم جهانگیر) (full title: Al-Sultan al-’Azam wal Khaqan al-Mukarram, Khushru-i-Giti Panah, Abu’l-Fath Nur-ud-din Muhammad Jahangir Padshah Ghazi [Jannat-Makaani]) (20 September 1569 – 8 November 1627) (OS 31 August 1569  – NS 8 November 1627) was the ruler of the Mughal Empire from 1605 until his death. The name Jahangir is from Persian جہانگير, meaning “Conqueror of the World”. Nur-ud-din or Nur al-Din is an Arabic name which means ” Light of the Faith.” Born as Prince Muhammad Salim, he was the third and eldest surviving son of Mogul Emperor Akbar. Akbar’s twin sons, Hasan and Hussain, died in infancy. His mother was the Rajput Princess of Amber, Jodhabai (born Rajkumari Hira Kunwari, eldest daughter of Raja Bihar Mal or Bharmal, Raja of Amber, India). Born of a Turkish father and a Hindu princess, Prince Muhammad Salim enjoyed all the opportunities of an heir apparent, indulged himself in alcohol and lechery, and gave full vent to that sadistic joy in cruelty which had been a recessive character in Babur, Humayun and Akbar, but had always lurked in the Tatar blood. He took delight in seeing men flayed alive, impaled, or torn to pieces by elephants. In his Memoirs he tells how, because their careless entrance upon the scene startled his quarry in a hunt, he had a groom killed, and the groom’s servants hamstrung i.e., crippled for life by severing the tendons behind the knees; having attended to this, he says, “I continued hunting.”  When his son Khusru conspired against him he had seven hundred supporters of the rebel impaled in a line along the streets of Lahore; and he remarks with pleasure on the length of time it took these men to die.  His sexual life was attended to by a harem of six thousand women,  and graced by his later attachment to his favorite wife, Nur Jehan whom he acquired by murdering her husband. His administration of justice was impartial as well as severe, but the extravagance of his expenditures laid a heavy burden upon a nation which had become the most prosperous on the globe through the wise leadership of Akbar and many years of peace.

Toward the end of his reign Jehangir took more and more to his cups, and neglected the tasks of government. Inevitably conspiracies arose to replace him; already in 1622 his son Jehan had tried to seize the throne. When Jehangir died Jehan hurried up from the Deccan where he had been hiding, proclaimed himself emperor, and murdered all his brothers to ensure his peace of mind. His father passed on to him his habits of extravagance, intemperance and cruelty. The expenses of Jehan’s court, and the high salaries of his innumerable officials, absorbed more and more of the revenue produced by the thriving industry and commerce of the people. The religious tolerance of Akbar and the indifference of Jehangir were replaced by a return to the Moslem faith, the persecution of Christians, and the ruthless and wholesale destruction of Hindu shrines.

Shahab-ud-din Muhammad Khurram Shah Jahan I (also spelled Shah Jehan, Shahjehan, Urdu: شاه جہاں, Persian: شاه جهان) (January 5, 1592 – January 22, 1666) was the emperor of the Mughal Empire in India from 1628 until 1658. The name Shah Jahan comes from Persian meaning “king of the world.” He was the fifth Mughal ruler after Babur, Humayun, Akbar, and Jahangir. While young, he was a favourite of his legendary grandfather Akbar the great. He is also called Shahjahan The Magnificent.Shah Jehan redeemed himself in some measure by his generosity to his friends and the poor, his artistic taste and passion.

The costliness of these palaces, the luxuriousness of the court, the extravagant jewelry of the Peacock Throne,This throne, which required seven years for its completion, consisted entirely of jewels, precious metals and stones. Four legs of gold supported the scat; twelve pillars made of emeralds held up the enameled canopy; each pillar bore two peacocks encrusted with gems; and between each pair of peacocks rose a tree covered with diamonds, emeralds, rubies and pearls. The total cost was over $7,000,000. The throne was captured and carried off to Persia by Nadir Shah (1739), and was gradually dismembered to defray the expenses of Persian royalty.

One of the worst famines in India’s history occurred in Shah Jehan’s reign, his thirty years of government marked the zenith of India’s prosperity and prestige. The lordly Shah was a capable ruler, and though he wasted many lives in foreign war he gave his own land a full generation of peace. As a great British administrator of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, wrote, those who look on India in its present state may be inclined to suspect the native writers of exaggerating its former prosperity; but the deserted cities, ruined palaces and choked-up aqueducts which we still see, with the great reservoirs and embankments in the midst of jungles, and the decayed causeways, wells and caravanserais of the royal roads, concur with the evidence of contemporary travelers in convincing us that those historians had good grounds for their commendation.  ”

Under the Mughals, there was no uniform law of succession. As such, the death of a king resulted in a war of succession. Such fratricidal struggles for the throne had a very demoralizing effect on the stability of the government. The royal palace and court became the centres of intrigues and plots. Confusion reigned everywhere. Many Provinces became independent. Thus, with the loss of money and manpower, every new ruler who ascended the throne had to make a fresh beginning.Jehan had begun his reign by killing his brothers; but he had neglected to kill his sons, one of whom was destined to overthrow him. In 1657 the ablest of these, Aurangzeb, led an insurrection from the Deccan. The Shah, like David, gave instructions to his generals to defeat the rebel army, but to spare, if possible, the life of his son. Aurangzeb overcame all the forces sent against him, captured his father, and imprisoned him in the Fort of Agra. For nine bitter years the deposed king lingered there, never visited by his son, attended only by his faithful daughter Jahanara, and spending his days looking from the Jasmine Tower of his prison across the Jumna.

Abul Muzaffar Muhy-ud-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb Alamgir, more commonly known as Aurangzeb (Persian: اورنگزیب) (full official title Al-Sultan al-Azam wal Khaqan al-Mukarram Hazrat Abul Muzaffar Muhy-ud-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb Bahadur Alamgir I, Badshah Ghazi, Shahanshah-e-Sultanat-ul-Hindiya Wal Mughaliya) (4 November 1618 [O.S. 25 October 1618] – 3 March 1707 [O.S. 20 February 1707]), also known by his chosen imperial title Alamgir (“Conquerer of the World”) (Persian: عالمگیر), was the 6th Mughal Emperor of India whose reign lasted from 1658 until his death in 1707.

The four sons of Shah Jahan all held posts as governors during the lifetime of their father. The emperor favoured the eldest, Dara Shikoh, and this had caused resentment among the younger three, who sought at various times to strengthen alliances between themselves and against Dara. The contest for power was primarily between Dara Shikoh and Auragnzeb because, although all four sons had demonstrated competence in their official roles, it was around these two that the supporting cast of officials and other influential people mostly circulated. There were ideological having made clear that he wanted Dara to succeed him, differences — Dara was an intellectual and a religious liberal in the mould of Akbar, while Aurangzeb was much more conservative

Shah Jahan became ill with stranguary in 1657. Rumours of the death of Shah Jahan abounded and the younger sons took action: Shah Shuja prepared to contest the throne from Bengal, where he had been governor since 1637, while Murad did the same in his governorship of Gujarat and Aurangzeb did so in the Deccan. After regaining some of his health, Shah Jahan moved to Agra and Dara urged him to send forces to challenge Shah Shuja and Murad, who had declared themselves rulers in their respective territories. While Shah Shuja was defeated at Banares in February 1658, the army sent to deal with Murad discovered to their surprise that he and Aurangzeb had combined their forces,the two brothers having agreed to partition the empire once they had gained control of it.  Aurangzeb then broke his arrangement with Murad Baksh, which probably had been his intention all along. Instead of looking to partition the empire between himself and Murad, he had his brother arrested and imprisoned at Gwalior Fort. Murad was executed on 4 December 1661, Shah Shuja then fled to Arakan (in present-day Burma), where he was executed by the local rulers. After a series of battles, defeats and retreats, Dara was betrayed by one of his generals, who arrested and bound him. In 1658, Aurangzeb arranged his formal coronation in Delhi. He had Dara Shikoh openly marched in chains back to Delhi where he had him executed on arrival on 30 August 1659.

Aurangzeb who so ruthlessly deposed his father was one of the greatest saints in the history of Islam, and perhaps the most nearly unique of the Mogul emperors. The wullahs who had educated him had so imbued him with religion that at one time the young prince had thought of renouncing the empire and the world, and becoming a religious recluse. Throughout his life, despite his despotism, his subtle diplomacy, and a conception of morals as applying only to his own sect, he remained a pious Moslem, reading prayers at great length, memorizing the entire Koran, and warring against infidelity. He spent hours in devotion, and days in fasts. For the most part he practised his religion as earnestly as he professed it. It is true that in politics he was cold and calculating, capable of lying cleverly for his country and his god. But he was the least cruel of the Moguls, and the mildest; slaughter abated in his reign, and he made hardly any use of punishment in dealing with crime. He was consistently humble in deportment, patient under provocation, and resigned in misfortune. He abstained scrupulously from all food, drink or luxury forbidden by his faith; though skilled in music, he abandoned it as a sensual pleasure; and apparently he carried out his resolve to spend nothing upon himself save what he had been able to earn by the labor of his hands.  He was a St. Augustine on the throne.

Shah Jehan had given half his revenues to the promotion of architecture and the other arts; Aurangzeb cared nothing for art, destroyed its “heathen” monuments with coarse bigotry, and fought, through a reign of half a century, to eradicate from India almost all religions but his own. He issued orders to the provincial governors, and to his other subordinates, ‘to raze to the ground all the temples of either Hindus or Christians, to smash every idol, and to close every Hindu school. A contemporary historian, Saki Mustai’dd Khan in his Ma’asir-i Alamgiri writes: (The History of  India as told by its own historians, vol. VII, pp. 183)

“On the 17th Zi-l kada 1079 (18th April 1669), it reached the ear of His majesty, the protector of the faith, that in the provinces of Thatta, Multan and Benaras, but specially in the latter, foolish Brahmins were in the habit of expounding frivolous books in their schools, and the students and learners, Mussulmans as well as Hindus, went there, even from long distances, led by desire to become acquainted with the wicked sciences they taught.

“The “Director of the faith” consequently issued orders to all the governors of provinces to destroy with a willing hand the schools and temples of the infidels; and they were strictly enjoined to put an entire stop to the teaching and practicing of idolatrous forms of worship. On the 15th Rabi-ul Akhir it was reported to his religious Majesty, the leader of the unitarians, that, in obedience to the order, the Government officers had destroyed the temple of Bishnath at Benaras.”

Aurangzeb did not just build an isolated mosque on a destroyed temple, he ordered all temples destroyed, among them the Kashi Vishwanath temple, one of the most sacred places of Hinduism, and had mosques built on a number of cleared temple sites. Other Hindu sacred places within his reach equally suffered destruction, with mosques built on them. A few examples: Krishna’s birth temple in Mathura; the rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujarat; the Vishnu temple replaced with the Alamgir mosque now overlooking Benares; and the Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya. The number of temples destroyed by Aurangzeb is counted in four, if not five figures. Aurangzeb did not stop at destroying temples, their users were also wiped out; even his own brother Dara Shikoh was executed for taking an interest in Hindu religion; Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded because he objected to Aurangzeb’s forced conversions.

In one year (1679-80) sixty-six temples were broken to pieces in Amber alone, sixtythree at Chitor, one hundred and twenty-three at Udaipur;  and over the site of a Benares temple especially sacred to the Hindus he built, in deliberate insult, a Mohammedan mosque.  He forbade all public worship of the Hindu faiths, and laid upon every unconverted Hindu a heavy capitation tax.  ” As a result of his fanaticism, thousands of the temples which had represented or housed the art of India through a millennium were laid in ruins. We can never know, from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty she once possessed.

Aurangzeb converted a handful of timid Hindus to Islam, but he wrecked his dynasty and his country. A few Moslems worshiped him as a saint, but the mute and terrorized millions of India looked upon him as a monster, fled from his tax-gatherers, and prayed for his death. During his reign the Mogul empire in India reached its height, extending into the Deccan; but it was a power that had no foundation in the affection of the people, and was doomed to fall at the first hostile and vigorous touch. His hard headed attitude towards the Marathas, Rajputs and the Jats and the refusal to grant them regional autonomy broke the former loyalty that existed between them and the Mughal Empire.

Aurangzeb’s religious policy was largely responsible for the downfall of the Mughal Empire. His policy of religious persecution of the Hindus, who formed the bulk of the population of the country, hastened the fall of his dynasty. Akbar won over the Hindus by a policy of religious toleration. He had enlisted Hindu warrior tribes, chiefly the Rajputs, as reliable defenders of his throne. He re-imposed the hated jiziya on the Hindus. As a consequence, the Rajputs, the Sikhs, the Jats and the Marathas were roused against the Mughal rule. He distrusted the Rajputs and thus deprived himself of the services of these people whose valour and loyalty had been a boon to the empire earlier. Moreover, Aurangzeb turned against the Shias with as much bitterness as the Hindus. He not only discriminated against the Shias in the matter of state employment, but even tried to put down their teachings, their schools and religious practices. The Persian Shias were gifted scholars and administrators of outstanding quality from among whom the ancestors of Aurangzeb recruited some of their ablest administrators. Sadly, Aurangzeb lost the support of a very efficient professional class. This is one of the potent causes of the downfall of the Mughal empire. The Sikhs under Guru Govind Singh vowed vengeance against the Mughals. It was because Emperor Aurangzeb brutally put their ninth Guru, Guru Teg Bahadur to death. He converted his followers into a militant sect by establishing the Khalsa which became a potent factor in the downfall of Aurangzeb’s dynasty.

Aurangzeb’s Deccan policy gave a death blow to the Mughal empire. His Deccan policy caused the destruction of some of their best soldiers and undermined the power and prestige of the empire. Aurangzeb destroyed the Shia kingdom of Bijapur and Golkunda and waged a long war against the Marathas. His long drawn -out campaign against the Marathas ruined the finances of the state and undermined his prestige. Moreover, his prolonged absence from the capital weakened the foundation of his government which rested mainly on close personal supervision.

The Mughal court consisted of four groups of nobles, the Turanis, the Iranis, the Afghans and the Indian born Muslims. The accession of weak rulers at the center made them strong contenders for power. They fought amongst themselves for more jagirs and high offices which were limited in number. They weakened the military by amassing income from the jagirs for themselves and cutting down the number of troops.

Further he made the mistake of imposing the central­ized system of governance in far-flung areas which were beyond his control. Aurangzeb mainly failed to make good alliances to safeguard his empire and went on making more and more enemies. The Emperor himself, in his last years, began to realize that by the very narrowness of his piety he had destroyed the heritage of his fathers. His deathbed letters arc pitiful documents.

“I know not who I am, where I shall go, or what will happen to this sinner full of sins. . . . My years have gone by profitless. God has been in my heart, yet my darkened eyes have not recognized his light. . . . There is no hope for me in the future. The fever is gone, but only the skin is left. … I have greatly sinned, and know not what torments await me. . . . May the peace of God be upon you.”

He left instructions that his funeral should be ascetically simple, and that no money should be spent on his shroud except the four rupees that he had made by sewing caps. The top of his coffin was to be covered with a plain piece of canvas. To the poor he left three hundred rupees earned by copying the Koran . He died at the age of eighty-nine, having long out- stayed his welcome on the earth.

Within seventeen years of his death his empire was broken into fragments. The support of the people, so wisely won by Akbar, had been forfeited by the cruelty of Jehangir, the wastefulness of Jehan, and the intolerance of Aurangzcb. The Moslem minority, already enervated by India’s heat, had lost the military ardour and physical vigor of their prime, and no fresh recruits were coming from the north to buttress their declining power.

One of the most important causes of the downfall of the Mughal empire was the degeneration of the army which by its origin and composition was defective. The Mughal army consisted chiefly of contingents recruited by the high officers and the nobles. They were assigned revenues of large tracts of land for their maintenance. There was no bond of closeness between the emperor and the individual soldiers. As the later Mughal emperors were weak, the powerful nobles began to convert the assignments which they held for maintaining troops into hereditary possessions. As early as the reign of Shah Jahan, the military inefficiency of the Mughals was exposed by the failure of the Qandahar campaigns. The same inefficiency was also revealed in Aurangzeb’s war with the Marathas. This degeneration of the army contributed to its fall.

One of the cause of the fall of the Mughal empire can be ascribed to its economic bankruptcy. Under Akbar’s leadership the country had prospered economically. Akbar had established an excellent financial system under which the government had become rich and the people had led fairly comfortable lives. But after his death, his revenue system which dealt directly with the tillers of the soil began to fall into disuse. Later Mughal rulers spent large sums of money in unproductive works. During Shah Jahan’s time, huge amounts of money was spent on maintaining the splendour of the Durbar and also on building activities. To meet the increasing expenditure, he raised the state demand to one-half of the produce of the soil. Due to such heavy burden of taxation, thousands of cultivators began deserting their fields. Those who remained were compelled by force to carry on their age-old cultivation. Under Aurangzeb the royal treasury became more depleted. His long drawn-out campaign in the Deccan ruined the economy of the country.

Taking advantage of the weakness of the later Mughals, many ambitious provincial governors declared their independence. During Muhammad Shah’s reign, Nizam-ul-Mulk proclaimed himself an independent ruler of the six subas of the Deccan. Sadat Khan established an independent dynasty in Awadh. Ali Vardi Khan became independent in Bengal. The Marathas had won their independence long before this time. Next, they established their supremacy over the Mughal provinces of Malwa, Gujarat and Bundelkhand and sought to bring the entire country under their domination.

Meanwhile, far away in the west, a little island had sent its traders to cull the riches of India. Soon it would send its guns, and take over this immense empire in which Hindu and Moslem had joined to build one of the great civilizations of history.

 

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.-Durkheim

From the Latin religio (respect for what is sacred) and religare (to bind, in the sense of an obligation), the term religion describes various systems of belief and practice concerning what people determine to be sacred or spiritual .Throughout history, and in societies across the world, leaders have used religious narratives, symbols, and traditions in an attempt to give more meaning to life and understand the universe. Some form of religion is found in every known culture, and it is usually practiced in a public way by a group. The practice of religion can include feasts and festivals, God or gods, marriage and funeral services, music and art, meditation or initiation, sacrifice or service, and other aspects of culture.

In studying religion from a sociological perspective, it is not important what one believes about religion. What is important is the ability to examine religion objectively in its social and cultural context.

Durkheim is generally considered the first sociologist who analyzed religion in terms of its societal impact. Above all, Durkheim believed that religion is about community: It binds people together (social cohesion), promotes behavior consistency (social control), and offers strength for people during life’s transitions and tragedies (meaning and purpose. Source of religion and morality is the collective mind-set of society and that the cohesive bonds of social order result from common values in a society.

It is important to look at the starting point of Durkheim’s analysis, his definition of religion: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden–beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” There are, thus, three fundamental elements to every religion: sacred objects, a set of beliefs and practices, and the existence of a moral community. Of the three, perhaps the most important would be the notion of the sacred, which is the point around which any religious system revolves. It is that which inspires great respect and admiration on the part of society and what is set apart and keeps us at a distance.

According to Durkheim, religion is the product of human activity, not divine intervention. He thus treats religion as a sui generis social fact and analyzes it sociologically.

With this definition Durkheim also puts an emphasis on the social element of religion.

In order to describe and explain the most primitive religion known to man, Durkheim observed, we must first define the term “religion” itself: otherwise we risk drawing inferences from beliefs and practices which have nothing “religious” about them, or of leaving many religious facts to one side without understanding their true nature. In fact, Durkheim argued that religion consists of obligatory beliefs united with definite practices which relate to the objects given in the beliefs.”

Durkheim proposed to examine the various religious systems we know in their concrete reality, in order to determine those elements which they have in common; for “religion cannot be defined except by the characteristics which are found wherever religion itself is found.”

So all the prejudicial definitions of religion must be eliminated which govern  our ideas of those things which surpass the limits of our knowledge — the “mysterious,” the “unknowable,” the “supernatural” — whereby religion would be “a sort of speculation upon all that which evades science or distinct thought in general.

Religion as a Social Fact

Durkheim theory of the origin of religion,  postulate that religion is at the basis of all human thought (both sacred and profane), even of all the categories of human thought (e.g. space, time, causality).All of this, it will be shown, is essentially social: religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities. The categories of knowledge, because they are of religious origin, are therefore social too. Within that civilization, therefore, these values must be universal, i.e. they originated within that society .Since society is a reality sui generis, it representations which express it, must be supra-individual, it imposes itself upon the individual mind. Consequently, since these representations are so constraining, have such power over the individual, society is responsible for the necessity of the categories of thought as a reflection of the moral necessity of society. It will be shown that all representations come from religious representations as a social reality sui generis.

Functions of Religion

The structural-functional approach to religion has its roots in Emile Durkheim’s work on religion. Durkheim argued that religion is, in a sense, the celebration and even (self-) worship of human society. Given this approach, Durkheim proposed that religion has three major functions in society: it provides social cohesion to help maintain social solidarity through shared rituals and beliefs, social control to enforce religious-based morals and norms to help maintain conformity and control in society, and it offers meaning and purpose to answer any existential questions.

Stability and cohesion

Religion forms a balanced and cohesive moral community. It is a means of protecting individuals from anomie, alienation and the threats of disruptive mass movements and so maximises the individual’s potential for happiness. Religion binds people together, closely Shared religious experiences provide the social cement for group unity .

Social identity

Religion gives people an identity and social membership. For Durkheim, group solidarity is affirmed and heightened during collective ceremony and ritual. They represent the necessary power of the social group over the otherwise isolated, anomic individual. Religion serves to integrate the person into the society. It is functionally useful for people to grow up identifying with a particular place or nation, to strengthen person’s sense of  commitment.

Collective conscience

The group affirms its belief in the central values through its commitment to thereligious system. These sentiments produce ‘value consensus’. Religion thereby generates and maintains the collective conscience and unites people in moral ways. Durkheim saw society as a moral community, whose members were socialised into accepting appropriate patterns of behaviour over time. This is an unending process since people are always being integrated into new groups, adopting new norms, absorbing new values and adapting new patterns of behaviour.

Religion is a conservative force which contributes to moral and wider social order and stability. Many cultural norms are given sacred legitimacy by religious beliefs. By promoting such values through family, school and church, the process of socialisation occurs. Appropriate modes of thinking and behaving are controlled in ways which will promote the good, orderly society .Religion gives meaning and purpose to people.  Religious beliefs offer people comfort in times of crisis lives and disasters beyond their control.

The Origins of Religion as Social Science

Sociologists typically regarded religion as a system of ideas or beliefs, of which the rituals are an external, material expression; this has naturally led to a concern for whether these ideas and beliefs may or may not be reconciled with those of modern science. The problem in this approach,  is that it does not correspond to the religious believer’s own account of the nature of his experience, which is less one of thought than of action: “The believer who has communicated with his god,” Durkheim observed, “is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger. He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them.” Durkheim thus believe that it is the repeated acts of the cult which give rise to “impressions of joy, of interior peace, of serenity, of enthusiasm which are, for the believer, an experimental proof of his beliefs.”

Like science, ,religion too reflects on nature, man, and society, attempts to classify things, relates them to one another, and explains them; and as we have seen, even the most essential categories of scientific thought are religious in origin. Scientific thought, in short, is but a more perfect form of religious thought; and Durkheim thus felt that the latter would gradually give way before the inexorable advances of the former, including those advances in the social sciences extending to the scientific study of religion itself.

Accordingly science is religious in its origins; but if religion is itself only the apotheosis of society, then all logical, scientific thought originates in society. All logical thought, Durkheim explained, is made up of concepts — generalized ideas which are distinguished from sensations by two important characteristics. First, they are relatively stable — unlike our sensations, which succeed one another in a never-ending flux and cannot repeat themselves, our concepts remain the same for long periods of time. Second, they are impersonal — again unlike our sensations, which are held privately and cannot be communicated, our concepts are not only communicable but provide the necessary means by which all communication becomes possible. These two characteristics in turn reveal the origin of conceptual thought. Since concepts are held in common and bear the mark of no individual mind, they are clearly the products of the collective mind; and if they have greater permanence and stability than our individual sensations, it is because they are collective representations, which respond much more slowly to environmental conditions.

It is only through society, therefore, that men become capable of logical thought — indeed, of stable, impersonal “truth” altogether .In one sense, the “categories of the understanding” are simply concepts so stable and impersonal that they have come to be seen as immutable and universal. How is it that these categories, the pre-eminent concepts by which all of our knowledge is constructed, have been modelled upon and express social things? Durkheim’s answer was that, precisely because the categories must perform this permanent, pre-eminent function, they must be based upon a reality of equally permanent, pre-eminent status — a function for which our shifting, private sensations are clearly inadequate.

Durkheim denied any conflict between science, on the one hand, and morality and religion, on the other; for, , he felt that both were directed toward universal principles, and that both thus implied that, in thought as in action, man can lift himself above the limitations of his private, individual nature to live a rational, impersonal life.

Elementary Forms of Religious Life

This is perhaps Durkheim’s most complex work, as he attempts to provide both a sociology of religion and a theory of knowledge. In this work, Durkheim studies primitive society to demonstrate that an enduring quality of all religions, even the most modern, is the differentiation between the sacred and the profane. The sacred is created through rituals, and what is deemed sacred is what morally binds individuals to society. This moral bond then becomes, according to Durkheim, a cognitive bond that shapes the categories we use to understand the social world

As per his “preliminary definition” of religion, Durkheim set out in search of its most primitive, elementary form. With the help of this definition Durkheim sets about the search for the elementary religion he desires to study

Animism

The theory of animism,  finds in dreams the first beginning of the evolution of religion According to this theory, the idea of the human soul was first suggested by the contrast between the mental representations experienced while asleep (dreams) and those of normal experience. The primitive man grants equal status to both, and is thus led to postulate a “second self” within himself, one resembling the first, but made of an ethereal matter. The transformation of this soul into a spirit is achieved with death, which, to the primitive mind, is not unlike a prolonged sleep; and with the destruction of the body comes the idea of spirits detached from any organism and wandering about freely in space. Henceforth, spirits are assumed to involve themselves, for good or ill, in the affairs of men, and all human events varying slightly from the ordinary are attributed to their influence. As their power grows, men increasingly consider it wise to conciliate their favor or appease them when they are irritated, whence come prayers, offerings, sacrifices — in short, the entire apparatus of religious worship. Reasoning wholly by analogy, the primitive mind also attributes “second selves” to all non-human objects — plants, animals, rivers, trees, stars, etc. — which thus account for the phenomena of the physical world; and in this way, the ancestor cult gives rise to the cult of nature. In the end, Durkheim concluded, “men find themselves the prisoners of this imaginary world of which they are, however, the authors and models.”

The “very heart of the animist doctrine,” however, was its  explanation of how souls become spirits and objects of a cult; but here again Durkheim had serious doubts. Even if the analogy between sleep and death were sufficient to suggest that the soul survives the body, for example, this still fails to explain why the soul would thus become a “sacred” spirit, particularly in light of the tremendous gap which separates the sacred from the profane, and the fact that the approach of death is ordinarily assumed to weaken rather than strengthen the vital energies of the soul. Most important, however, if the first sacred spirits were souls of the dead, then the lower the society under investigation, the greater should be the place given to the ancestor cult; but, on the contrary, the ancestor cult is clearly developed only in relatively advanced societies.

But even if ancestor worship were primitive, Durkheim continued, the third part of the animist theory — the transformation of the ancestor cult into the cult of nature — is indefensible in itself. Not only is there little evidence among primitives of the complicated analogical reasoning upon which the animist hypothesis depends; neither is there evidence among those practicing any form of nature worship of those characteristics — anthropomorphic spirits, or spirits exhibiting at least some of the attributes of a human soul — which their derivation from the ancestor cult would logically suggest.

Naturism

Theory of naturism, finds  certain natural forces, serves the purpose, since the germ of the opposition that separates the profane from the sacred cannot be found in the nature either of man or of the universe.. In sharp contrast to animism, the naturistic theory insisted that religion ultimately rests upon a real experience — that of the principal phenomena of nature (the infinity of time, space, force, etc.) — which is sufficient to directly arouse religious ideas in the mind. But religion itself begins only when these natural forces cease being represented in the mind in an abstract form, and are transformed into personal, conscious spirits or gods, to whom the cult of nature may be addressed; and this transformation is  achieved by language. The roots of their language consisted of very general types of human action (pushing, walking, climbing, running, etc.). When men turned from the naming and classifying of actions to that of natural objects, the very generality and elasticity of these concepts permitted their application to forces for which they were not originally designed. The earliest classes of natural phenomena were thus metaphors for human action — a river was “something that moves steadily,” the wind was “something that sighs or whistles,” etc. — and as these metaphors came to be taken literally, natural forces were quite naturally conceived as the product of powerful, personal agents. Once these agents had received names, the names themselves raised questions of interpretation for succeeding generations, producing the efflorescence of fables, genealogies, and myths characteristic of ancient religions.

Nature is characterized not by phenomena so extraordinary as to produce a religious awe, but by a regularity which borders on monotony. Moreover, even if natural phenomena were sufficient to produce a certain degree of admiration, this still would not be equivalent to those features which characterize the “sacred”, and least of all to that “absolute duality” which typifies its relations with the “profane.” The primitive, does not regard such forces as superior to his own; on the contrary, he thinks he can manipulate them to his own advantage by the exercise of certain religious rites.

Durkheim believes  that the naturistic theory, would reduce religion to little more than a system of hallucinations. he admitted, that primitive peoples reflect upon the forces of nature from an early period, for they depend on these forces for their very survival.

Totemism.

The totem, denotes a common object such as an animal, or a plant, and a symbol representing that it is sacred. Durkheim found that people tend to separate religious symbols, objects, and rituals, which are sacred, from the daily symbols, objects, and routines of existence referred to as the profane. Sacred objects are often believed to have divine properties that separate them from profane objects. Even in more‐advanced cultures, people still view sacred objects with a sense of reverence and awe, even if they do not believe that the objects have some special power.

Then Durkheim proceeds to show that the totemic classifications form the basis for the idea of social class. Men were first organized as men, in clans , and therefore they were able to organize things. The fundamental notions of the intellect are the product of social factors. The notion of class is not an ideal but a defined group of interrelated things. Human classification is based on social hierarchy.

Durkheim asserts that totems have an underlying idea of force. The force of the totem, its symbolic qualities of sacredness, must indeed have a referent (symbols refer to something). There must be something unifying in all that is worshipped in these totemic religions, and this unity lies in what is symbolized and not in the symbol.  Durkheim argues that totems are forceful over and against the individual because they are an instance of the idea of force in general. This force derives from the strength of the clan, so that the totemic principle of force is in fact the clan under an empirically concrete form: if the totem’s symbol is god and society, then god and society are identical.This more fundamental and primitive cult is totemism. The totem has  a religious character. It is the type of sacred things.

Totemic Beliefs

Totemism is  a religion in which three classes of things — the totemic emblem, the animal or plant, and the members of the clan — are recognized as sacred; The most fundamental of these beliefs is that the members of each clan consider themselves bound together by a special kind of kinship, based not on blood, but on the mere fact that they share the same name. This name, moreover, is taken from a determined species of material objects with which the clan members are assumed to enjoy the same relations of kinship. But this “totem” is not simply a name; it is also an emblem, which, like the heraldic coats-of-arms, is carved, engraved, or designed upon the other objects belonging to the clan, and even upon the bodies of the clan members themselves

The same religious sentiments aroused by these designs, of course, are aroused by the members of the totemic species themselves. Clan members are thus forbidden to kill or eat the totemic animal or plant except at certain mystical feasts ,and the violation of this interdiction is assumed to produce death instantaneously. Moreover the clan members themselves are “sacred” in so far as they belong to the totemic species, a belief which gives rise to genealogical myths explaining how men could have had animal and even vegetable ancestors.

Durkheim suggested believes that, while all the things discussed above (emblems, animals, clan members, and all other objects) arc sacred in different degrees, they are all sacred in the same way; thus, their religious character could hardly be due to the special properties of one or the other, but rather is derived from some common principle shared by all. Totemism, in short, is not a religion of emblems or animals or men at all, but rather of an anonymous, impersonal “force,” immanent in the world and diffused among its various material objects.

The individual who is transported from his profane to a sacred existence in a gathering of the clan seeks some explanation for his altered, elevated state. The gathering of the clan itself is the real cause, though one too complex for the primitive mind to comprehend; but all around him, the clan member sees symbols of precisely that cause — the carved engraved images of the totem — and fixes his confused social sentiments on these clear, concrete objects, from which the physical power and moral authority of society thus seem to emanate.

Durkheim insisted that the primitive man does not regard his gods as hostile, malevolent, or fearful in any way whatsoever; on the contrary, his gods are friends and relatives, who inspire a sense of confidence and well-being. The sense thus inspired, moreover, is not an hallucination, but is based on reality; for however misunderstood, there actually is a real moral power, and from which the worshipper derives his strength.

The subsequent evolution of totemic beliefs is one from souls to spirits, spirits to “civilizing heroes,” and heroes to “high gods,” in which the focus of religious worship becomes increasingly powerful, personal, and international. Since the idea of souls is inexplicable without postulating original, “archetypal” souls from which the others are derived, for example, the primitive imagines mythical ancestors or “spirits” at the beginning of time, who are the source of all subsequent religious efficacy. When the clans come together for the tribal initiation ceremonies, the primitive similarly seeks an explanation for the homogeneity and generality of the rites thus performed; and the natural conclusion is that each group of identical ceremonies was founded by one great ancestor, the “civilizing hero” of the clan, who is now venerated by the larger tribe as well. And where the tribe as a whole, gathered at such initiation ceremonies, acquires a particularly powerful sentiment of itself, some symbol of this sentiment is sought; as a result, one of the heroes is elevated into a “high god,” whose authority is recognized not only by the tribe thus inspired, but by many of its neighbours. The result is a truly “international” deity, whose attributes bear a marked similarity to those of the higher religions of more advanced civilizations. But this “great tribal god,” Durkheim emphasized, retracing his evolutionary steps, “is only an ancestral spirit who finally won a pre-eminent place. The ancestral spirits are only entities forged in the image of the individual souls whose origin they are destined to explain. The souls, in their turn, are only the form taken by the impersonal forces which we found at the basis of totemism, as they individualize themselves in the human body. The unity of the system,” Durkheim concluded, “is as great as its complexity.”

Actually Durkheim’s work on religion was purely speculative. His account of the origins of religion could not be accepted by most of the modern sociologists. Goldenweiser, for example, criticized Durkheim’s theory as one-sided and psychologically untenable. He argued that a “society possessing the religious sentiment is capable of accomplishing unusual things, but it can hardly produce that sentiment out of itself.” Some others have stated that “by making the social mind or collective representations the sole source of religion, Durkheim resorted to something quite mysterious in it and, hence failed to give a satisfactory explanation.” But the real merit of his analysis is his recognition of the vital social functions that religion plays in society.

For a long time it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not a cosmology at the same time that it is a speculation upon divine things. If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy.

— Émile Durkheim

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

“When Indian and its arrows were admired in the battlefield my friends disliked it, but this was not proper;

By my life, it is a land where, when rain falls, it turns into pearls and ruby for those who have no ornaments;

From here come musk, camphor, amber and aloe-wood, and various kinds of perfumes for those who require them;

Here grow all kinds of sweet-smelling substances and nutmeg, and andropogonnadus;

Here are found ivory and jaiphal, and aloes-wood, and sandal and here is found in abundance the mineral Tutia;

Here are found the lions, the leopards, the elephants and the bears

And here are found the cranes, and the parrots and the peacocks and the pigeons;

And here grow the coconut tree and the ebony tree and the pepper plant;

And here are made the unparallel swords which need not be polished, and the lances which when wielded, large armies are routed;

Who can deny the excellence of such a land except a fool?”

Abu Dila’ Sindhi (c. 9th cent. AD).

All life forms are afflicted with disease. Disease is the basic problem faced by humans too since prehistoric times.The records of Hindu medicine begin with the Atharva-veda. The Atharva Veda , the fourth Vedic collection and the second oldest Indian text, is distinguished from the trayī vidyā (threefold wisdom) contained in the Rig Veda , Yajur Veda , and Sama Veda  primarily in terms of content. The Atharvaveda lists eight divisions of Ayurveda: internal medicine, surgery of head and neck, ophthalmology, surgery, toxicology, psychiatry, paediatrics, gerontology or science of rejuvenation and the science of fertility. In Ayurvedic medicine, health is defined as soundness of sarira (body), manas (mind) and atman (self). Each of these must be nurtured if the individual is to have good health.

Ayurveda deals with the medical subjects like genetics, gynaecology, aetiology, surgery, physiology, biology, diet, ethics, personal hygiene, social medicine, allied subjects like animal biology, botany, cultivation, pharmacognosy, chemistry, cosmology, etc.

The Atharvaveda  is by all accounts a curious compendium of medicine in its various stages of evolution and contains the most primitive as well as some of the most highly developed stages of therapy. In  Atharvaveda  the word Brahma was used in the sense of Physician. The name Atharvan is almost synonymous with Bhesaja or medicine.  Here, embedded in a mass of magic and incantations, is a list of diseases with their symptoms. Medicine arose as an adjunct to magic: the healer studied and used earthly means of cure to help his spiritual formulas; later he relied more and more upon such secular methods, continuing the magic spell, like our bedside manner, as a psychological aid. The Atharva Veda contains spells for healing various illnesses, spells for removal of demons, love spells, and speculative hymns about particular forces of the cosmos, such as ucchiṣṭa (sacrificial remnant),  odana (porridge),brahmacārin (the Vedic student), and the śataudana cow (the cow with one hundred odanas).

Appended to the Atharva-veda is the Ajur-veda .The term Ayus means duration or span of life, veda means unimpeachable knowledge. The common translation of the Ayurveda is ‘science of life’. In his book Kris Morgan says that literally Ayurveda means ‘science of longevity’, but because of its divine origin, it is also called the ‘medicine of the God’. Tradition says that Brahma (the creator) was the divine source of this science, which was brought into existence before the creation of mankind. The knowledge was passed from him to the god Daksapati, then to the two celestial physicians (the twin Asvina Kumaras), later to Indra the god king, and finally to Bharadvaja, the semi-divine sage. Such traditions need not be taken literally but they only indicate the great antiquity of Ayurveda.

Evidence for the existence of well-organised system of medicine in India can be traced back to the archaeological remains of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, from where even Silajit has been reported.

There is a remarkable theory in Ayurveda to the effect that man is a miniature form of the universe, a ‘microcosm’ of the macrocosm. The material contents of man and universe are constituted of the same five primal elements: prthvi (solid component ), apas (the liquid), tejas (the radient energy), vayu (air), and akasa (the empty spaces inside the body).

In this oldest system of Hindu medicine illness is attributed to disorder in one of the four humors (air, water, phlegm and blood), and treatment is recommended with herbs and charms. Many of its diagnoses and cures are still used in India, with a success that is sometimes the envy of Western physicians. The Rig-Veda names over a thousand such herbs, and advocates water as the best cure for most diseases. Even in Vedic times physicians and surgeons were being differentiated from magic doctors, and were living in houses surrounded by gardens in which they cultivated medicinal plants.”

Anatomy and physiology, like some aspects of chemistry, were by-products of Hindu medicine. As far back as the sixth century B.C. Hindu physicians described ligaments, sutures, lymphatics, nerve plexus, fascia, adipose and vascular tissues, mucous and synovial membranes, and many more muscles than any modern cadaver is able to show.  The doctors of pre-Christian India shared Aristotle’s mistaken conception of the heart as the seat and organ of consciousness, and supposed that the nerves ascended to and descended from the heart. But they understood remarkably well the processes of digestion the different functions of the gastric juices, the conversion of chyme into chyle, and of this into blood.  Anticipating Weismann by 2400 years,

Atreya (ca. 500 B.C.) held that the parental seed is independent of the parent’s body, and contains in itself, in miniature, the whole parental organism.” Examination for virility was recommended as a prerequisite for marriage in men; and the Code of Manu warned against marrying mates affected with tuberculosis, epilepsy, leprosy, chronic dyspepsia, piles, or loquacity.  Birth control in the latest theological fashion was suggested by the Hindu medical schools of 500 B.C. in the theory that during twelve days of the menstrual cycle impregnation is impossible.  Foetal development was described with considerable accuracy; it was noted that the sex of the foetus remains for a time undetermined, and it was claimed that in some cases the sex of the embryo could be influenced by food or drugs.

The great names in Hindu medicine are those of Sushruta in the fifth century before, and Charaka in the second century after Christ. Sushruta, professor of medicine in the University of Benares, wrote down in Sanskrit a system of diagnosis and therapy whose elements had descended to him from his teacher Dhanwantari. His book dealt at length with surgery, obstetrics, diet, bathing, drugs, infant feeding and hygiene, and medical education. 80 Charaka composed a Samhita (or encyclopedia) of medicine, which is still used in India, 81 and gave to his followers an almost

Hippocratic conception of their calling: “Not for self, not for the fulfilment of any earthly desire of gain, but solely for the good of suffering humanity should you treat your patients, and so cxcell all.” Caraka Samhita is an exhaustive work on medicine. It is said that Caraka’s original was the Samhita of Agnivesa, a disciple of the medical sage Atreya. Long passages in the Caraka Samhita are in the form of questions and answers between Atreya and Agnivesa. Caraka is a class title of a school of physicians, existing from Vedic times and also the personal title of a physician in the court of King Kaniska. The subject matter of the Caraka Samhita has been divided into 8 sections and 120 chapters. The total number of chapters (120) probably refers to the maximum life span (120 years) of man because the ultimate object of treatise is to promote longevity.

More than 600 drugs of animal, plant and mineral origins are used in the Caraka and about 650 in the Susruta Samhita. According to Susruta Samhita the purpose of Ayurveda is not only to cure illness and affliction but also to preserve health and ensure a long happy life. Susruta Samhita deals specially with the therapeutic branch of Ayurveda. It contains one hundred and twenty chapters, distributed in five divisions: Sutrasthana (fundamental postulates cover chapters), Nidanasthana (pathology, covers 16 chapters),Sarirasthana (embryology and anatomy cover 10 chapters), Cikitsasthana (medical treatment covers 40 chapters), Kalpasthana (toxicology covers 8 chapters) and Uttaratantra (specialized knowledge covers 66 chapters) respectively.

Susruta mentions more then 300 different operations employing 42 different surgical processes and 121 different types of instruments. The Samhitas divide Ayurveda into 8 different branches: Salyatantra (surgical knowledge), Salakyatantra (treatment of diseases of the ears, nose, eye, tongue, oral cavity and throat),Bhutavidya (knowledge of mental diseases,supernatural origins diseases), Kaumarabhrtya (care of children and infantile disorders), Agadatantra (toxicology), Rasayanatantra (syrup, tonic knowledge) andVajikaranatantra (knowledge of virility).

Comparativly less illustrious than these arc Vagbhata (625 A.D.), who prepared a medical compendium in prose and verse, and Bhava Misra (1550 A.D.), whose voluminous work on anatomy, physiology and medicine mentioned, a hundred years before Harvey, the circulation of the blood, and pre- scribed mercury for that novel disease, syphilis, which had recently been brought in by the Portuguese as part of Europe’s heritage to India.

Sushruta described many surgical operations cataract, hernia, lithotomy, Caesarian section, etc. and 121 surgical instruments, including lancets, sounds, forceps, catheters, and rectal and vaginal speculums.  Despite Brahmanical prohibitions he advocated the dissection of dead bodies as indispensable in the training of surgeons. He was the first to graft upon a torn ear portions of skin taken from another part of the body; and from him and his Hindu successors rhinoplasty the surgical reconstruction of the nose descended into modern medicine.  “The ancient Hindus,” says Garrison, “performed almost every major operation except ligation of the arteries.”  Limbs were amputated, abdominal sections were performed, fractures were set, hemorrhoids and fistulas were removed. Sushruta laid down elaborate rules for preparing an operation, and his suggestion that the wound be sterilized by fumigation is one of the earliest known efforts at antiseptic surgery.  Both Sushruta and Charaka mention the use of medicinal liquors to produce insensibility to pain. In 927 A.D. two surgeons trepanned the skull of a Hindu king, and made him insensitive to the operation by administering a drug called Samohini.

Hypnotism as therapy seems to have originated among the Hindus, who often took their sick to the temples to be cured by hypnotic suggestion or “temple-sleep,” as in Egypt and Greece.  The Englishmen who intro- duced hypnotherapy into England Braid. Fsdaile and Elliotson “undoubtedly got their ideas, and some of their experience, from contact with India.”

Direct observation is the most remarkable feature of Ayurveda but some times it is correlated with metaphysics. Samhitas accept this view and write that of all types of evidence, the most dependable ones are those that are directly observed by the eyes. In the Ayurvedic viewpoint successful medical treatment depends on four factors: the physician, substances (drug or diets), nurse and patient. Samhitas described these four factors properly. These four factors are the main mechanisms of Ayurveda. It describes four essential qualities of medical factors:

Physician.( The qualifications of physician are: clear grasp of the theoretical content of the science, a wide range of experience, practical skill and cleanliness.),

Drugs Qualities of drugs or substances are: abundance, applicability, multiple use and richness in efficacy).

Nursing attendant and patient respectively (Qualifications of the nursing attendant are: knowledge of nursing techniques, practical skill, attachment to the patient and cleanliness).

The essential qualifications of patients are: good memory, obedience to the instructions of the doctors, courage and ability to describe the symptoms.

For the detection of the 1120 diseases that he enumerated, Sushruta recommended diagnosis by inspection, palpation, and auscultation.  Taking of the pulse was described in a treatise dating 1300 A.D. Urinalysis was a favorite method of diagnosis; Tibetan physicians were reputed able to cure any patient without having seen anything more of him than his water. In the time of Yuan Chwang Hindu medical treatment began with a seven-day fast; in this interval the patient often recovered; if the illness continued, drugs were at last employed.  Even then drugs were used very sparingly; reliance was placed largely upon diet, baths, enemas, inhalations, urethral and vaginal injections, and blood-lettings by leeches or cups. Hindu physicians were especially skilled in concocting anti- dotes for poisons; they still excel European physicians in curing snakebites. (Hospitals were erected in Ceylon as early as 427 B.C.. and in northern India as early as 226 B.C. )

Vaccination, unknown to Europe before the eighteenth century, was known in India as early as 550 A.D., if we may judge from a text attributed to Dhanwantari, one of the earliest Hindu physicians: “Take the fluid of the pock on the udder of the cow . . . upon the point of a lancet, and lance with it the arms between the shoulders and elbows until the blood appears; then, mixing the fluid with the blood, the fever of the small-pox will be produced.”  Modern European physicians believe that caste separateness was prescribed because of the Brahman belief in invisible agents transmitting disease; many of the laws of sanitation enjoined by Sushruta and “Manu” seem to take for granted what we moderns, who love new words for old things, call the germ theory of –disease.

The general picture of Indian medicine is one of rapid development in the Vedic and Buddhist periods, followed by centuries of slow and cautious improvement. How much Atreya, Dhanwantari and Sushruta owed to Greece, and how much Greece owed to them, we do not know.

In the time of Alexander, says Garrison, “Hindu physicians and surgeons enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for superior knowledge and skill,” and even Aristotle is believed by some students to have been indebted to them”. So too with the Persians and the Arabs: it is difficult to say how much Indian medicine owed to the physicians of Baghdad, and through them to the heritage of Babylonian medicine in the Near East; on the one hand certain remedies, like opium and mercury, and some modes of diagnosis, like feeling the pulse, appear to have entered India from Persia; on the other we find Persians and Arabs translating into their languages, in the eighth century A.D., the thousand-year-old compendia of Sushruta and Charaka.  The great Caliph ITaroun-al-Rashid accepted the pre-eminence of Indian medicine and scholarship, and imported Hindu physicians to organize hospitals and medical schools in Baghdad.  Lord Ampthill concludes that medieval and modern Europe owes its system of medicine directly to the Arabs, and through them to India.

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics… The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.

— Émile Durkheim,The Rules of Sociological Method (1895),

Durkheim attempted to differentiate sociology from philosophy and psychology.Sociology is empirical (unlike philosophy) Sociology deals with “social facts” (unlike psychology)

Emile Durkheim’s ground breaking article “What is Social Fact?” is one of the better known articulations of the “building blocks” of functionalist and structuralist sociology. The concept of “social facts” assumes importance in Durkheimian sociology. In fact, Durkheim has even defined sociology as a science of social facts. Social facts and events constitute the fundamental bases of his sociology thought.

Durkheim’s views about social facts are extensively dealt with in his second major

treatise namely, “The Rules of Sociological Method”. The subject matter for sociology, is the existence of what Durkheim calls social facts. A social fact, as defined in Rules, is “a category of facts which present very special characteristics: they consist of manners of acting, thinking, and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.” The overall agenda for Durkheim is to explain the process by which individuals socially integrate into society, as well as to provide a model for understanding the relationship between people and their respective societies. Most basically, Durkheim develops a framework for analyzing the construction and constitution of social life.

According to Durkheim, social facts have an objective reality that sociologists can study in a way similar to how other scientists, such as physicists, study the physical world. An important corollary to the above definition is that social facts are also internal to individuals, and it is only through individuals that social facts are able to exist. In this sense, externality means interior to individuals other than the individual subject.

Meaning and Definition of the concept of “Social Fact”:

By a social fact, Durkheim is referring to facts, concepts, expectations that come not from individual responses and preferences, but that come from the social community which socializes each of its members.

Social fact is a term created by Emile Durkheim to indicate social patterns that are external to individuals. Things such as customs and social values exist outside individuals, whereas psychological drives and motivation exist inside individuals. Social facts, therefore, are not to be explained by biology or psychology, but instead by society.

According to Durkheim, Social facts consists of ‘ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him’

1. “A Social fact is a phase of behaviour which is subjective to the observer and which has a coercive nature.”

2. “A category of facts consisting of ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion by means of which they control him.”

Purpose of the “Theory of Social Facts”:

Durkheim was  a positivist and a believer in applying the methods of physical sciences to the study of social facts. His conception of sociology is based on a theory of social fact and his  aim is to demonstrate that there is a science called “sociology” which is an objective science verifying to the model of the other sciences and whose subject is the social fact

Characteristics of Social facts

Durkheim has emphatically stated that social facts must consist of the following characteristics.

Social facts must be regarded as “things”: Social facts must be treated as “things”, as empirical facts from the outside, they be must discovered as one discover physical facts. “Precisely because we have the illusion of knowing social realities, it is important that we realize that they are not immediately known to us. It is in this sense that Durkheim maintains that we must regard social facts as thing because things, he says, are all that is given, all that is offered to – or rather forced upon- our observation.”

Social facts are not reducible to individual facts: “Social facts are inexplicable in terms of and irreducible to either psychological or physiological analysis.” Distinguishing between psychological and social facts Durkheim says: “The former are elaborated in the individual consciousness and

then tend to externalize themselves; the latter are at first external to the individual, whom they tend to fashion in their image from without”. Thus, Durkheim’s orientation towards the study of society requires that economic and psychological reductionism be eschewed in the light of the “sui generis” quality of social facts.

Social Facts are External to the Individuals and Exercise a Constraint on them.

Durkheim has emphatically stated that society is a reality “sui generis” above and apart from the individuals.

Classes of social facts:

Every science is based on classification, and typology. Durkheim observes that a scientific method of classification must, above all, ‘facilitate scientific work by substituting as limited number of types for the indefinite multiplicity of individuals’ The basis of Durkheim’s classification is ‘simplicity’ by which he means ‘a complete absence of parts’.

In Rules, Durkheim gave two different classes of social facts

Social facts of a physiological, or operative, order.

This set of social facts includes a society’s legal code, religious beliefs, concept of beauty, monetary system, ways of dressing, or its language. In these cases it is easy to see how society imposes itself onto the individual from the outside. It also contains currents of opinion, or social phenomena that express themselves through individual cases. These phenomena can be studied with the use of statistics, which accumulate individual cases into an aggregate and express a certain state of the collective mind.

Social facts is of a morphological, or structural, order.

It is often concerned with the demographic and material conditions of life and includes the number, nature, and relation of the composing parts of a society, their geographical distribution, the extent and nature of their channels of communication, the shape and style of their buildings, and so forth.

In the end, Durkheim dismisses the distinction altogether, claiming that the second class of social facts are simply more crystallized forms of the first class of social facts, making the term ‘social fact’ a very flexible concept that comprises basically any and all social phenomena.

Durkheim arrives at this conclusion by studying clans, which are social aggregates which cannot be reduced to a narrower one. Durkheim proposed to classify societies according to the degree of organization they present taking as a basis the perfectly simple society.

Social facts are external and coercive:

External consists of ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him.”

Coercion may not be felt unless social facts are resisted. Successful socialization may lead to a lack of perceived coercion because social facts are internalized.

Social facts may be material or nonmaterial:

Material: technology, housing arrangements, population distribution, etc.

Nonmaterial: norms, values, roles (ways of acting, thinking and feeling), systems (language, currency, professional practices)

Rules for Observing Social Facts

Consider social facts as things. Before having any scientific idea about any social phenomena, one must develop commonsensical notions about these phenomena. This is because reflection comes before science. It is very difficult to discard these notions, because social things are actualized only through men. They are a product of human activity. Yet, one must separate social phenomena from the conscious things which they represent. Only then will scientific objectivity be possible.

All preconceptions must be systematically avoided . But this rule is entirely negative. It does not teach the sociologist to avoid the dominance of popular notions and to turn his attention towards facts. For this reason, Durkheim advocates a formal definition of a social fact based on certain external characteristics. All phenomena, which fit into this definition, must be included.

Set of rules for studying social facts.

The first rule is to treat social facts as things. What Durkheim means by this is that social facts have an existence independent of the knowing subject and that they impose themselves on the observer. Social facts can be recognized by the sign that they resist the action of individual will upon them; as products of the collectivists, changing social facts require laborious effort.

Another rule for studying social facts is that the sociologist must clearly delimit and define the group of phenomena being researched. This structures the research and provides the object of study a condition of verifiability. The sociologist must also strive to be as objective towards the facts they are working on as possible and remove any subjective bias or attachment to what they are investigating. Sociologist must systematically discard any and all preconceptions and closely examine the facts.

Durkheim applied these rules to empirical evidence he drew primarily from statistics, ethnography, and history. Durkheim treated this data in a rational way, which is to say that he applied the law of causality to it. At this, Durkheim introduced an important rationalist component to his sociological method, namely the idea that by using his rules, which work to eliminate subjective bias, human behaviour can be explained through observable cause and effect relationships. Accordingly, he used a comparative-historical approach, to eliminate extraneous causes and find commonalities between different societies and their social facts. In so doing, he strove to find universally applicable general laws.

Evaluation of the Theory of Emile Durkheim:

Durkheim says that there is a difference in the states of mind of an individual and a group. Difference in individual attitudes and behaviour which results from the group situation. This means that a new reality is created by the association of individuals and this reality reacts upon the sentiments and behaviour of the individual.

Many types of social facts show a surprising degree of numerical consistency from year to year. This consistency cannot be explained from personal motives.

Social facts have constraining effect on individual. Social facts so condition human beings that it makes them behave in a particular manner. In a crowd situation an individual feels constrained to behave in a particular manner. Social facts are belief systems, customs and institutions. They are chosen by individuals and cannot be changed at will. A social fact continues to exist because it is useful to society.

Theory of Social Facts completely ignores the importance of the individual and places too much premium on society. It gives the perception of the individual grossly conditioned by social realities that form the boundaries of accepted behaviour.

Durkheim’s attempts to analyse and study “Social facts as things” but Durkheim has not made it clear anywhere as to what he means by the term “things” in the context of social facts. The term has a vague connotation. It could mean a lot many other things to other people, doubting the validity of the theory.

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

There can be as many spiritual paths as there are spiritual aspirants & similarly there can really be as many Gods as there are devotees to suit the moods, feelings, emotions & social background of the devotees.- Sri Ramakrishna

The tendency of Hinduism to absorb rival faiths was evident from the fact that many elements from other faiths had also gone into the making of Hinduism. The “Hinduism” after replacing Buddhism in India was not one religion, nor was it only religion; it was a medley of faiths and ceremonies whose practitioners had only four qualities in common: they recognized the caste system and the leadership of the Brahmans, they reverenced the cow as especially representative of divinity, they accepted the law of Karma and the transmigration of souls, and they replaced with new gods the deities of the Vedas. The Hindu scriptures were eloquent while describing the qualities of God. He is all-knowing & all powerful. He is the very personification of justice, love & beauty. He is ever ready to shower His grace, mercy & blessings on His creation.

These faiths had in part antedated and survived Vedic nature worship; in part they had grown from the connivance of the Brahmans at rites, divinities and beliefs unknown to the Scriptures and largely contrary to the Vedic spirit; they had boiled in the cauldron of Hindu religious thought even while Buddhism maintained a passing intellectual ascendancy.

According to Hindu faith our soul body is slowly evolving. Man has five bodies, each more subtle than the last. Visualize the soul of man as a light bulb and his various bodies or sheaths as colour fabrics covering the pure white light. The physical body is the outermost body. Next comes the Pranic body, then the physical body’s subtle duplicate, the astral body. Then there is the mental or intellectual body in which one can travel instantaneously anywhere. Then comes the body of the soul. This is the body that evolves from birth to birth, that reincarnates into new outer sheaths and does not die when the physical body returns its elements to the earth. The soul body eventually evolves as the body of golden light, the golden body of the soul. This soul body in its final evolution is the most perfect form, the prototype of human form. Once physical births have ceased, this soul body still continues to evolve in subtle realms of existence. This effulgent body of the illumined soul, even after Nirvikalpa Samadhi, God-Realization, continues to evolve in the inner worlds until the final merger into Brahman.

Hinduism views existence as composed of three worlds. The First World is the physical universe; the Second World is the subtle astral or mental plane of existence in which the devas, angels and spirits live; and the Third World is the spiritual universe of the Mahadevas, “great shining beings,” our Hindu Gods. Hinduism is the harmonious working together of these three worlds.

The most prevalent expression of worship for the Hindu comes as devotion to God and the Gods. In the Hindu pantheon there are said to be three hundred and thirty-three million Gods. Hindus believe in one Supreme Being. The pluralities of Gods are perceived as divine creations of that one Being. So, Hinduism has one supreme God, but it has an extensive hierarchy of Gods. Many people look at the Gods as mere symbols, representations of forces or mind strata, or as various Personifications generated as a projection o of man’s mind onto an impersonal pure Beingness.

The gods of Hinduism were characterized by a kind of anatomical superabundance vaguely symbolizing extraordinary knowledge, activity or power. The new Brahma had four faces, Kartikeya six; Shiva had three eyes, Indra a thousand; and nearly every deity had four arms.  At the head of this revised pantheon was Brahma, chivalrously neuter, acknowledged master of the gods, but no more noticed in actual worship than a constitutional monarch in modern Europe. Combined with him and Shiva in a triad not a trinity of dominant deities was Vishnu, a god of love who repeatedly became man in order to help mankind. His greatest incarnation was Krishna; as such he was born in a prison, had accomplished many marvels of heroism and romance, healed the deaf and the blind, helped lepers, championed the poor, and raised men from the grave.

From the Rig Veda, we come to know of the Vedic gods eight Vasus, eleven Rudras, twelve Adityas, Indra & Prajapathi, being the Gods of earth, the heavens & the space.

A unique and all-encompassing characteristic of Hinduism is that one devotee may be worshipping Ganesha while a friend worships Siva or Vishnu or Kali, yet both honour the other’s choice and feel no sense of conflict. The Hindu religion brings us the gift of tolerance that allows for different stages of worship, different and personal expressions of devotion and even different Gods to guide our life on this earth.

Hindus view cosmic activity of the Supreme Being as comprised of three tasks: creation, preservation, and dissolution and recreation. Hindus associate these three cosmic tasks with the three deities, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Lord Brahma brings forth the creation and represents the creative principle of the Supreme Being. Lord Vishnu maintains the universe and represents the eternal principle of preservation. Lord Shiva represents the principle of dissolution and recreation. These three deities together form the Hindu Trinity.

One must clearly understand that Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are not three independent deities. They represent the same power (the Supreme Being), but in three different aspects. Just as a man may be called a doctor, father or husband based upon the tasks he performs, the Supreme Being is called Brahma, Vishnu or Shiva when conceived as performing the three different cosmic tasks of creation, preser-vation, and dissolution/recreation. ” To the Hindu there are three chief processes in life and the universe: creation, preservation and destruction. Hence divinity takes for him three main forms: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer; these are the Trimurti, or “Three Shapes,” which all Hindus but the Jains adore. Popular devotion is divided between Vaishnavism, the religion of Vishnu, and Shivaism, the religion of Shiva. The two cults are peaceful neighbors, and sometimes hold sacrifices in the same temple;” and the wise Brahmans, followed by a majority of the people, pay equal honor to both these gods. Pious Vaishnavites paint upon their foreheads every morning with red clay the trident sign of Vishnu; pious Shivaites trace horizontal lines across their brows with cow-dung ashes, or wear the linga symbol of the male organ fastened on their arms or hung from their necks.

The worship of Shiva is one of the oldest, most profound and most terrible elements in Hinduism. Sir John Marshall reports “unmistakable evidence” of the cult of Shiva at Mohenjo-daro, partly in the form of a three-headed Shiva, partly in the form of little stone columns which he presumes to be as phallic as their modern counterparts. “Shivaism,” he concludes, “is therefore the most ancient living faith in the world.” (t Nevertheless the name of Shiva, like that of Brahman itself, cannot be found in the Rig-Veda. Patanjali the grammarian mentions Shiva images and devotees ca. 150 B.C.)

The name of the god is a euphemism; literally it means “propitious”; whereas Shiva himself is viewed chiefly as a god of cruelty and destruction, the personification of that cosmic force which destroys, one after another, all the forms that reality takes all cells, all organisms, all species, all ideas, all works, all planets and all things. Never has another people dared to face the impermanence of forms, and the impartiality of nature, so frankly, or to recognize so clearly that evil balances good, that destruction goes step by step with creation, and that all birth is a capital crime, punishable with death. The Hindu, tortured with a thousand misfortunes and sufferings, sees in them the handiwork of a vivacious force that appears to find pleasure in breaking down everything that Brahma the creative power in nature has produced. Shiva dances to the tune of a perpetually forming, dissolving and re-forming world.

Just as death is the penalty of birth, so birth is the frustration of death; and the same god who symbolizes destruction represents also, for the Hindu mind, that passion and torrent of reproduction which overrides the death of the individual with the continuance of the race. In some parts of India, particularly Bengal, this creative or reproductive energy (Shakti) of Shiva or nature is personified in the figure of Shiva’s wife, Kali (Parvati, Uma, Durga), and is worshiped in one of the many Shakti cults. Until the last century this worship was a bloody ritual, often involving human sacrifice; latterly the goddess has been content with goats.” The deity is portrayed for the populace by a black figure with gaping mouth and protruding tongue, adorned with snakes and dancing upon a corpse; her earrings are dead men, her necklace is a string of skulls, her face and breasts are smeared with blood.  Two of her four hands carry a sword and a severed head; the other two are extended in blessing and protection. For Kali-Parvati is the goddess of motherhood as well as the bride of destruction and death; she can be tender as well as cruel, and can smile as well as kill; once, perhaps, she was a mother-goddess in Sumeria, and was imported into India before she became so terrible.  Doubtless she and her lord arc made as horrible as possible in order that timid worshipers may be frightened into decency, and perhaps into generosity to the priests.( The priests of Shivaism, however, are seldom Brahmans; and the majority of the Brahmans look with scorn and regret upon the Shakti cult.”)

Hinduism contains many feminine forms of the Divine like Kali, Durga, Lakshmi and Sarasvati. These represent different feminine qualities and functions of the Divine which contains both male and female energies. For example, Kali portrays the destructive energy, Lakshmi the nourishing, and Sarasvati the creative, while Durga is the Divine Mother in her protective role. Hinduism also has many dual male-female forms like Radha-Krishna, Sita-Rama, Uma-Mahesh, and Lakshmi -Narayan in which the female form is usually addressed first. The different masculine forms of the Divine in Hinduism have their feminine counterparts.

As Sanatana Dharma or a universal tradition Hinduism recognizes that the Divine contains both masculine and feminine attributes. Without giving proper honor to the feminine qualities a religion must be incomplete and one-sided, which must result in its teachings having negative consequences. Without recognizing the feminine aspect of Divinity one cannot claim to know God. To recognize the feminine is necessary to restore wholeness, completeness and universality.

“Esoterically, it must be admitted that none of the Gods has a wife. Their consorts are not to be considered as separate from them, but as aspects of their being, as their shakti or power. The Mahadevas who live in the Third World cannot be likened to men and women who live on the earth. They exist in perfectly evolved soul bodies, bodies which are not properly differentiated by sex. They are pure beings made of pure consciousness and light; they are neither male nor female. To better understand these Divine Gods, we sometimes conceive them as being the man if they are strong in expression or the woman if they are gentle and compassionate. There are no husbands and wives in the vast, super conscious realms of the Third World. The husband/wife notion is a puranic myth. The term Goddess can refer to a female perception or depiction of a Third World being (Mahadeva) in its natural state, which is genderless, or to a Second World being residing in a female astral-mental body. For example, Lakshmi and Sarasvati are not wives of Vishnu and Brahma, but personified powers of a sexless Deity who extends abundance and learning through the motherly empathy of a female form. And many of the village deities who protect children and crops are actually souls living close to earth in the astral plane, still functioning through the astral female or male body that is a duplicate of their last physical body.”

“They meditate on Her to become immortal. The Lord of immortals blesses you. He who wears the Ganga and contains Her – strive to reach Him.”— ST. TIRUMULAR OF THE NATHA SAMPRADAYA

There are the greater gods of Hinduism; but they are merely five of thirty three million deities in the Hindu pantheon; only to catalogue them would take a hundred volumes. Some of them are more properly angels, some are what we should call devils, some are heavenly bodies like the sun, some are mascots like Lakshmi (goddess of good luck), many of them are beasts of the field or fowl of the air. To the Hindu mind there was no real gap between animals and men; animals as well as men had souls, and souls were perpetually passing from men into animals, and back again; all these species were woven into one infinite web of Karma and reincarnation.

The Western world has prided itself in monotheism, the idea that there is only One God as the highest truth. Western religions have said that only the names and forms which refer to this One God are valid but those which appear to worship another God, or a multiplicity of divinities, must be false. They have restricted the names and forms they use in religious worship, and insist that only one set is true and correct and others are wrong or unholy.

Hinduism is supposed to be ‘apauruseya’, i.e., of impersonal origin & so also are the Gods of Hinduism. They are eternal & though the deities appear to be different & independent, they are really facets of the same Brahman, the Supreme God. As a universal formulation Hinduism accepts all formulations of Truth. According to the universal view there is only One Reality, but it cannot be limited to a particular name or form. Though Truth is One it is also Universal, not an exclusive formulation. It is an inclusive, not an exclusive Oneness – a spiritual reality of Being – Consciousness – Bliss, which could be called God but which transcends all names. The different Gods and Goddesses of Hinduism represent various functions of this One Supreme Divinity, and are not separate Gods.

Having many names for something is not necessarily a sign of ignorance of its real nature. On the contrary, it may indicate an intimate knowledge of it. For example, Eskimos have forty-eight different names for snow in their language because they know snow intimately in its different variations, not because they are ignorant of the fact that all snow is only one. The many different deities of Hinduism reflect such an intimate realization of the Divine on various levels.

Hindu religion is often labelled as a religion of 330 million gods. This misunderstanding arises when people fail to grasp the symbolism of the Hindu pantheon. According to the Hindu scriptures, living beings are not apart from God, since He lives in each and every one of them in the form of atman (BG 10.39). Thus each living being is a unique manifestation of God. In ancient times it was believed that there were 330 million living beings. This gave rise to the idea of 330 million deities or gods.The number 330 million was simply used to give a symbolic expression to the fundamental Hindu doctrine that God lives in the hearts of all living beings.

Just as a single force in space can be mathematically conceived as having various spatial components, the Supreme Being or God, the personal form of the Ultimate Reality, is conceived by Hindus as having various aspects. A Hindu deity (god or goddess; note small g) represents a particular aspect of the Supreme Being. For example, Saraswati represents the learning and knowledge aspect of the Supreme Being. Thus, if a Hindu wants to pray for acquiring knowledge and understanding, he prays to Saraswati. Just as sunlight cannot have a separate and independent existence from the sun itself, a Hindu deity does not have a separate and independent existence from the Supreme Being. Thus, Hindu worship of deities is monotheistic polytheism and not simple polytheism.

The elephant, for example, became the god Ganesha, and was recognized as Shiva’s son; he personified man’s animal nature, and at the same time his image served as a charm against evil fortune. Monkeys and snakes were terrible, and therefore divine. The cobra or naga, whose bite causes almost immediate death, received especial veneration; annually the people of many parts of India celebrated a religious feast in honour of snakes, and made offerings of milk and plantains to the cobras at the entrance to their holes.” Temples have been erected in honour of snakes, as in eastern Mysore; great numbers of reptiles take up their residence in these buildings, and are fed and cared for by the priests. Crocodiles, tigers, peacocks, parrots, even rats, receive their meed of worship.

Most sacred of all animals to a Hindu is the cow. Images of bulls, in every material and size, appear in temples and homes, and in the city squares; the cow itself is the most popular organism in India, and has full freedom of the streets; its dung is used as fuel or a holy ointment; its urine is a sacred wine that will wash away all inner or outer uncleanness. Under no circumstances are these animals to be eaten by a Hindu, nor is their flesh to be worn as clothing headgear or gloves or shoes; and when they die they are to be buried with the pomp of religious ritual.  Perhaps wise statesmanship once decreed this taboo in order to preserve agricultural draft animals for the growing population of India;  today, however, they number almost one-fourth as many as the population.  The Hindu view is that it is no more unreasonable to feel a profound affection for cows, and a profound revulsion at the thought of eating them, than it is to have similar feelings in regard to domestic cats and dogs; the cynical view of the matter is that the Brahmans believed that cows should never be slaughtered, that insects should never be injured. The truth is that the worship of animals occurs in the history of every people, and that if one must deify any animal, the kind and placid cow seems entitled to her measure of devotion. We must not be too haughtily shocked by the menagerie of Hindu gods; we too have had our serpent-devil of Eden, our golden calf of the Old Testament, our sacred fish of the catacombs, and our gracious Lamb of God.

Hindus declare that there is only one Supreme Being and He is the God of all religions. There is no “other God.” Thus the Biblical Commandment “Thou shalt have no other God before me,” really means, “Thou shalt not deny the Ultimate Reality or worship any power other than the Ultimate Reality.”

The secret of polytheism is the inability of the simple mind to think in impersonal terms; it can understand persons more readily than forces, wills more easily than laws. 28 The Hindu suspects that our human senses see only the outside of the events that they report; behind the veil of these phenomena, he thinks, there are countless super physical beings whom, in Kant’s phrase, we can only conceive but never perceive. A certain philosophical tolerance in the Brahmans has added to the teeming pantheon of India; local or tribal gods have been received into the Hindu Valhalla by adoption, usually by interpreting them as aspects or avatars of accepted deities; every faith could get its credentials if it paid its dues. In the end nearly every god became a phase, attribute or incarnation of another god, until all these divinities, to adult Hindu minds, merged into one; poly- theism became pantheism, almost monotheism, almost monism. Just as a good Christian may pray to the Madonna or one of a thousand saints, and yet be a monotheist in the sense that he recognizes one God as supreme, so the Hindu prays to Kali or Rama or Krishma or Ganesha without presuming for a moment that these are supreme deities. Some Hindus recognize Vishnu as supreme, and call Shiva merely a subordinate divinity; some call Shiva supreme, and make Vishnu an angel; if only a few worship Brahma it is because of its impersonality, its intangibility, its distance, and for the same reason that most churches in Christendom were erected to Mary or a saint, while Christianity waited for Voltaire to raise a chapel to God.

As far as the communication with God and gods are concerned, it is in the Hindu temple that the three worlds meet and devotees invoke the Gods of our religion. The temple is built as a palace in which the Gods live. It is the home of the Gods, a sacred place unlike every other place on the earth. The Hindu must associate himself with these Gods in a very sensitive way when he approaches the temple. Though the devotee rarely has the psychic vision of the Deity, he is aware of the God’s divine presence. As he approaches the sanctum sanctorum, the Hindu is fully aware that an intelligent being, greater and more evolved than him, is there. This God is intently aware of him, safeguarding him, fully knowing his inmost thought, fully capable of coping with any situation the devotee may mentally lay at his Holy Feet. It is important that we approach the Deity in this way – conscious and confident that our needs are known in the inner spiritual worlds.

The physical representation of the God, be it a stone or metal image, a yantra or other sacred form, simply marks the place that the God will manifest in or hover over in his etheric body. It can be conceived as an antenna to receive the divine rays of the God or as the material body in or through which the God manifests in this First World. When we perform puja, a religious ritual, we are attracting the attention of the devas and Mahadevas in the inner worlds. That is the purpose of a puja; it is a form of communication. To enhance this communication we establish an altar in the temple or in the home. This becomes charged or magnetized through our devotional thoughts and feelings which radiate out and affect the surrounding environment. You can feel the presence of these divine beings, and this radiation from them is known as shakti.

Shakti is a vibration. It is first experienced in the simple physical glimpse of the form of the Deity in the sanctum. Later that physical sight gives way to a clairvoyant vision or to a refined cognition received through the sensitive ganglia within your nerve system: the chakras. Through these receptors a subtle message is received, often not consciously. Perhaps not immediately, but the message that the shakti carries from the Mahadeva manifests in your life. This is the way the Gods converse. It is a communication more real than the communication of language that you experience each day.

If a temple or shrine is not available for worship, then it is possible to establish a communication with the Deity through visualization. Take for example, Lord Ganesha, the elephant-headed governor of nature, dharma, science and knowledge. Worship of Lord Ganesha is immediate; to think of His form is to contact Him. Close your eyes for a second, visualize His murthi or form and a direct communication has begun. This is like punching in a code on a computer terminal which gives immediate access to a central supercomputer. All information and answers to every question are now available. Wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we can use the computer terminal of our brain and code in the divine image of Lord Ganesha. We have complete access to His grand computer mind which has been programmed over eons of time and naturally encompasses the intricacies of the universe in all its ramifications and simplicities.

Finally, it must be clearly understood that God and the gods are not a psychological product of the Hindu religious mind. They are far older than the universe and are the fountainheads of its galactic energies, shining stars and sunlit planets. They are loving overseers and custodians of the cosmos, earth and mankind.

REFERANCES:

CARPENTER, EDWARD: Pagan and Christian Creeds. New York, 1920.

CHILDE, V. GORDON: The Most Ancient East. London, 1928.

DOANE, T. W.: Bible Myths, and Their Parallels in Other Religions. New York, 1882.

DUBOIS, ABBE J. A.: Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies. Oxford, 1928.

ELIOT, SIR CHARLES: Hinduism and Buddhism. 3V. London, 1921.

LORENZ, D. E.: The ‘Round the World Traveler. New York, 1927.

RAWLINSON, GEO.: Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World.

WILL DURANT. : Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster. New York, 1954

WINTERNITZ, M.: History of Indian Literature. Vol. I. Calcutta, 1927.

WOOD, ERNEST: An Englishman Defends Mother India. Madras, 1929.

ZIMAND, SAVEL: Living India. New York, 1928.

 

 

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

A teleconference is a meeting of three or more people who are separated by distance, using electronic communication. The participants might be in the same city, or could be thousands of miles apart, in different countries on different continents. It is a live exchange and mass articulation of information among several persons and machines remote from one another but linked by a telecommunications system. Terms such as audio conferencing, telephone conferencing and phone conferencing are also sometimes used to refer to teleconferencing.

Meeting conducted by use of telephones or cell phones without requiring attendees to be physically present in the same physical area. Teleconferences are usually of a business nature and may require a facilitator or party leader to lead the meeting. They are useful for institutions operating in multiple locations or in various countries where not all members can be physically present in the same location.

At its simplest, a teleconference can be an audio conference with one or both ends of the conference sharing a speaker phone. With considerably more equipment and special arrangements, a teleconference can be a conference, called a videoconference, in which the participants can see still or motion video images of each other. Because of the high of video and the opportunity for larger and multiple display screens, a videoconference requires special telecommunication arrangements and a special room at each end. As equipment and high-bandwidth cabling become more commonplace, it’s possible that videoconferences can be held from your own computer or even in a mobile setting. One of the special projects of is to explore the possibility of having teleconferences in which all participants actually appear to be in the same room together. Today’s audio teleconferences are sometimes arranged over dial-up phone lines using bridging services that provide the necessary equipment for the call.

Types of teleconference

The three most common types of teleconference are conference calls (voice only), videoconferences (voice and video), and web-based conferences.

Conference calls. Depending on how many people are involved and the purpose of the conference, these may be conference calls like the ones that many Tool Box users have probably been involved in. A conference call is simply a phone call with more than two participants. It usually requires no special equipment besides a telephone, although speaker phones can be used if there is more than one person at a site .Thus, a small conference call requires only the use of equipment to put all the callers together. A large one may require somewhat more complex and sophisticated equipment and services.

Video conferences. A video conference is one in which two or more groups of people, each at a location equipped for videoconferencing, can see one another and interact, or view a presentation (which, in turn, may originate from yet another location) and, in some cases, respond to it. The equipment used here has, until recently, consisted of video cameras and microphones tied to a live TV feed, creating a need for satellite dishes and other transmission equipment, and for specialized technical assistance.

Computer-based conferences. These are, or can be, similar to videoconferences in that groups of people – or a large number of widely separated individuals, for that matter – can have audio and visual contact. They are different in that video transmission takes place over high-speed Internet lines, and requires some basic – and largely programmable – equipment and appropriate software.

There are two ways to conduct a video conference of this type. One is to rely on computers for video and data transmission, while the audio comes through speaker phones via a conference call. The other is to use high-speed Internet lines for audio transmission as well, through VoIP technology (digitized telephone messages that are transmitted over the Internet).

PURPOSE  TO ORGANIZE A TELECONFERENCE

The obvious reason to organize a teleconference is to gather a group of people who might otherwise have to travel long distances and spend large amounts of time to meet in person.

Collaboration on countywide, national programs or initiative: Teleconferences for this purpose may be organized by county, state, or national government agencies for funded programs, by foundations or other funders, or by the collaborating organizations or individuals themselves. Teleconferencing can allow participants in programs in different localities to share experience and ideas, collaborate on community-based participatory research. Extension of the reach of an important speaker, awards ceremony, annual meeting, etc. An important event whose audience would otherwise be limited by time, expense, or the size of the available space can be transmitted to any number of people through electronic communication.

Professional development: Often teleconferences can serve as vehicles for ongoing professional training. Many state agencies – library commissions, departments of education, use teleconferences for the professional development of staff members of organizations that they fund.

Education and distance learning: While online universities are another form of distance learning, their courses usually don’t take place in real time. Individuals work on their own schedules, and interaction is by e-mail or online forum, so that these courses are not examples of teleconference use. In classrooms, teleconferencing can be used to connect students in different schools, or even different countries. Organizations from around the state or country may use a teleconference to pass on practices that have worked for them and get new ideas for their work:

Medical consultation. Increasingly, medical professionals and patients may consult with faraway specialists or interdisciplinary teams of physicians through video- or web-based teleconferencing. Rural health centers and developing-world clinics can thus have access to a level of diagnostic help usually found only in well-staffed hospitals in sophisticated urban centers.

Efficient Electronic delivery possible: Electronic delivery is more efficient than physically moving people to a site, whether it is a faculty member or administrator. Through any origination site in the world. Larger Audiences: More people can attend. The larger the audience, the lower the cost per person.

Enough Time Saving is possible: Content presented by one or many sources is received in many places simultaneously and instantly. Travel is reduced resulting in more productive time. Communication is improved and meetings are more efficient. It adds a competitive edge that face-to-face meetings do not. Costs (travel, meals, lodging) are reduced by keeping employees in the office, speeding up product development cycles, improving performance through frequent meetings with timely information.

Good Security: Signals can be encrypted (scrambled) when it is necessary. Encryption prevents outside viewers. Provides a shared sense of identity. People feel more a part of the group…more often. Individuals or groups at multiple locations can be linked frequently.

Immediate decision possible: As computer files can be viewed and/or manipulated by a number of people as the conference goes on, an immediate decision can be made.

ORGANIZING A TELECONFERENCE

In some ways, organizing a teleconference is similar to organizing a conference, but the inclusion of technology makes the process easier in some ways and harder in others.  Technology has made distance irrelevant .As easy as teleconferencing is, however, it is an art to making make it go smooth.  As we’ve already mentioned, organizing also varies depending on whether you’re doing it at the initiator level or the host-site level.

Determining the objectives and content area(s) of the teleconference. If the conference is one of a regular series – staff meetings, staff/professional development, ongoing training – you might want to ask participants what they want or need. Before a conference-call staff meeting, clarify Your objective: Determine what you will deal with during the teleconference. Each item on the agenda should take you closer to achieving your goal.

Choosing  a date and time for the conference. If possible, try not to get too much input on the schedule – it’s almost impossible to pick a time that’s convenient for everybody. Consider where the participants are located, and pick a time that’s most likely to be convenient for the most people. The teleconference shouldn’t conflict with other events or important dates. It should generally be scheduled during regular working hours.

Identify audience and Issue Invitations Another important step in organizing a successful teleconference is to invite those people who really need to be there…and no one else Especially if space is limited, the host site may place restrictions on eligibility for the conference, accepting only people in certain positions in an organization, for instance, or only people with certain credentials.

When you invite people to a teleconference, it’s crucial to let them know why it’s worth their time. Send out an agenda that includes your purpose statement as well as the names of everyone you’re inviting. Ask participants who are responsible for specific agenda items to come to the meeting prepared to present and answer questions. And fill everyone in on the logistics: Do participants need to call in? Or will someone call them?

Choosing  appropriate technology Skype is one of the easiest tools to use for teleconferencing. Google Hangouts are another. However, there are also services that provide an operator and/or moderator. You might want to consider using one of these services if you’re dealing with executives who are pressed for time, people who are not tech-savvy, or such a large number of people as to be unmanageable without a moderator.

For their part, the hosts have to make sure that they have the necessary equipment on site and properly installed, so that they can receive and send back whatever is necessary.

Organize and prepare host sites: This step covers both technical and physical preparation. In the case of the former, it’s necessary to ensure that all the appropriate technical equipment is either already present and properly hooked up, or to arrange for its installation in time for the teleconference. In the latter case, you’ll need to consider both the number of people, and the nature of the conference.

Preparation applies to both the initiation point and host sites. If a presentation is originating from one site, that site will have to be set up so that the presenter and any presentation aids (whiteboard, charts and graphs, video or audio clips, etc.) are visible and audible. If the presentation is interactive, the presenter should easily be able to see and hear the audience at distant sites.

At host sites (including the initiation point), you’ll want to attend to typical hospitality, including room arrangements, materials, food and drinks, and restroom facilities.

Depending on the nature of the teleconference, you may need one or more host sites. These sites may need no special equipment beyond telephones or a speaker phone, or may need such things as multiple PC’s, large monitors, LCD projectors, cameras and microphones, or document readers. Host sites may also need comfortable chairs and writing surfaces for a group of people.

Assign a Conference Organiser. One person should be given the task of booking the video conference , to co-ordinate the date, attendees, sites, and bridge. The first time a person sets up a videoconference is always the hardest.  Unless you already own all the appropriate hardware and software and need no external technical assistance, you’ll have to rely on a provider to make the connections among sites, to sell or rent you the appropriate equipment, or to help you run it.

Publicizing the teleconference. This may just be a matter of sending internal memos or e-mails to let people know when the conference is scheduled for, its purpose, and at whom it’s directed.

Part of the registration process should be to register participants who want them for available CEU’s. People should know how many CEU’s they’ll get for the teleconference, and if there are any other requirements in order to get them (returning another form, writing a short paper, etc.) In most cases, host sites should have CEU certificates to hand out to those who have registered for them and attended.

Welcome participants and do the paperwork. Depending on the difficulty of the conference, begin setup of the conference and dialling the sites approximately 15 minutes before starting time.It is strongly advised that all participants arrive at least 10 minutes before the start time, so that their video conferencing codec, camera and microphones are setup properly, and have been given our telephone contact number in case of problems.

Host sites should make sure that all participants know where and when it is, how to get there, where to park, and where to go in the building once they get there.

As people arrive, they should get any materials they need (as well as name tags, if appropriate), and either be checked off on a preregistration list or be recorded as attending, along with their affiliation. If there are evaluation forms or other paperwork for participants to complete, they should receive it as they come in.

Depending on the difficulty of the conference,  typically begin setup of the conference and dialling the sites approximately 15 minutes before starting time.

Depending on the number of participants, consider having each participant introduce him or herself .If interaction during the teleconference is desired, consider calling on people to elicit responses from quieter participants. If an online platform is being used, you may ask the participants to document their ideas or share thoughts using the “chat” function of the platform. Online chats can usually be saved to help document the conversation.

Lecturing in Teleconference.This stage allows a single person to speak or lecture for part or all of the conference without interruption. All other participants are placed in listen-only mode, their lines muted so there is no background noise or interruption from them.

Interacting Sessions.This stage is analogous to someone raising his or her hand. During the conference, each participant other than the presenter is placed in listen-only mode. If a participant has a question, they indicate it by pressing a key on the phone, such as the #. The chairperson can then place them into speak mode. The chairperson is usually given the ability to field questions before they are addressed to the group, cutting down on unnecessary interruptions and keeping the meeting running smoothly.

Sub-conferencing. This feature allows participants to break into small groups for discussion, and then rejoin the main conference. Allow participants to respond to, or vote on, questions using their phone’s keypad. These are multiple-choice questions determined by the chairperson and given to the teleconferencing service before the call.

Recording and Rebroadcasting. Phone calls can be recorded to be rebroadcast later, either to clarify what was said during the teleconference or for those who missed the original call completely.

Follow-up and offering Feedback It’s a good practice to give participants a chance to offer feedback on the teleconference. You can fax or mail them a simple form with the date of the teleconference and instructions on how to get the information back to you. If appropriate, you can include your feedback request when you distribute minutes of the meeting.

Your feedback request should include the following inquiries:

1. What additional questions or comments do you have on what was discussed?

2. What topics didn’t we discuss that you would like to see addressed?

3. What suggestions do you have to make future teleconferences more effective?

Some teleconference service providers offer a feature that places a recording of your meeting into a type of voicemail system. Participants, or those who were unable to participate, can call in at any time of day or night to hear the recording. This allows those who were there to clarify anything they have a question or concern about, and those who weren’t there to hear what was discussed.

Follow up on any assignments or activities that participants were to engage in. Make sure people have completed their assignments, received their CEU’s, sent in evaluation forms, etc. You should also be sure to return any borrowed or rented equipment on time.

Evaluating the teleconference. If the teleconference is a training or other presentation, you’ll want feedback on its content and quality – its clarity, usefulness, relevance to the reality of participants’ work, the presenter’s style, etc. Regardless of what kind of teleconference you conduct, however, it’s important to evaluate it in other ways as well. Were technical coordinators able to deal with any problems that came up? Do technical coordinators need specialized training to trouble-shoot this technology, or is a general knowledge of the working of computers and software enough?

•             How difficult was it to arrange and schedule the conference?

•             Was the provider’s service satisfactory? Did the provider make the process easy, or cause problems?

•             Would you continue to conduct/conduct another teleconference?

Analyze the costs, benefits, usefulness, and effectiveness of this teleconference for your purposes. Make whatever changes you can afford in teleconference procedure, format, technology, or use based on evaluation results. And finally, schedule your next teleconference.

Suggestions for a Successful Teleconference

While the service provider you choose will handle the technical aspects of the call, a teleconference doesn’t run smoothly by luck alone. A successful teleconference does require some planning, and the more you organize it, the more seamless it will be. It’s obviously not possible to plan all the details of a teleconference when it’s a last minute or emergency meeting, but here are some things to keep in mind when you do have the time to plan.

Advance Planning

The following  steps will help you organize your teleconference in the weeks and days leading up to the meeting.

1. Make a list of all attendees and check to see if their availability on the date and time planned.

2. If the service provider you choose requires a reservation, check with them to see if the day and time you want is available.

3. Decide on what options you will use for your call. Will it be dial-in or dial-out? Will you want it recorded? Refer to the above descriptions for the most popular options available.

4. Contact all participants and give them the date and time of the teleconference. Be sure to specify which time zone you are referring to- a critical point that is often overlooked!

5. If you opt for a dial-in teleconference, provide participants with the telephone number and access code for the call. Also be certain that they have your name and contact information in case there are any problems.

6. Create an agenda for the teleconference. Creating an agenda for your teleconference will ensure that you cover all important topics, and it will help the meeting run smoothly and on time. It will also keep participants focused on the subject at hand, and will help stop them from “drifting off” during the discussion.

If, during the course of the teleconference, a question or topic arises that is not scheduled on the agenda, it’s a good idea to suggest that it be discussed after all topics that are on the agenda have been covered.

When creating your agenda, include not only the topics you want to cover, but also the amount of time you want to spend on each one. This will keep the call from running over the assigned period.

7. If you’re going to provide handouts and supplementary material to participants, send it early enough so that it arrives before the teleconference, and participants have time to read it and generally prepare for the meeting. Include a written agenda of the teleconference, and short biographical information on the participants is a nice addition, especially when people aren’t familiar with each other.

During the Call

You may or may not be the chairperson of the teleconference, however, your primary function is to make sure everything runs smoothly. Here are a few guidelines to help you accomplish this:

1. Always take a roll call at the beginning of the conference so that everyone knows who is involved and listening. If participants don’t know each other, briefly introduce each. You might also include biographical information on participants (such as, their position in the company and specific area of expertise) with any handouts you send.

2. Begin with enthusiasm, setting the tone for an upbeat and positive meeting. This will, in part, determine how engaged and attentive your audience is.

3. Outline the objectives and the agenda of the meeting. Consider giving participants printed copies of the agenda ahead of time so that they can follow along.

4. Give participants the basic rules and guidelines for the call. Cover speaking time limits, instruct them to pause occasionally so that others have a chance to get a word in, and quickly go over the most important etiquette points outlined below (for example, tell them to say their name before they speak, and address questions to a specific person).

5. Organize your presentation and discussion into clear, concise points. This will help participants follow what is being said, as it is possible for them to lose their place in the conversation during a lengthy discussion without visual clues.

6. Keep an eye on the clock to make sure that you are following the agenda you’ve created.

7. Keep track of who is contributing to the discussion and who is not. To engage those who are too quiet, ask them a question or ask for their opinion on the subject being discussed. This forces them to keep up with the conversation, much like when you were back in school and knew you might be called on in class. You might also ask to hear from two people who haven’t already spoken.

8. Pause periodically throughout the teleconference to get feedback and take questions from the other participants.

9. On long conference calls, schedule a 5-10 minute break every hour. The longest call without a break should be around 90 minutes.

10. Before ending the meeting, go around the virtual room and address each person by name asking for any questions or comments they might have as a result of the discussion.

12. End the teleconference clearly. Briefly go over what was discussed, clarify any action the participants need to take, and finally instruct them to hang up.

Making the conference interesting

There are a few simple things you can do to keep your teleconference from becoming boring for participants. As you can imagine, listening to person after person drone on without interruption or variety can get tedious, and it can encourage participants to tune out what is being said. To avoid this trap, you can stress to speakers that they should do their best to keep their voice from becoming monotonous – have them vary the speed and pitch of their speech.

You can also incorporate one or more of the following elements into the call to keep things interesting:

1. Plan breaks during long conference calls. This allows participants to clear their minds and prepare for more information – teleconferencing can be intensive.

2. Arrange for a guest speaker during the conference, perhaps a high ranking individual in your company or outside expert on a topic of interest. This will encourage participants to attend the meeting and keep them tuned in.

3. Some teleconferencing services allow you to assign different sounds to individual participants. For example, Joe in Accounting is associated with a barking dog, Jill in Marketing with a car horn. Participants can then use their keypad to play the sound to introduce themselves when they begin to speak, or when they enter the call. As the chairperson, you might also have a funny whistle or horn on hand to use when you need to interrupt the discussion or draw attention to yourself. This is fun and humorous, but can be overused and should only be included in the most informal of calls.

International Teleconferences

Teleconferences involving international participants have pitfalls that can be avoided by following a few basic rules. Keep the following in mind:

1. Speak slowly and clearly. Americans usually speak faster than other cultures, making it even more difficult for participants with a language barrier to keep up and comprehend what is being said.

2. Stop occasionally to ask international participants if they understand what is being said, and offer any clarification they might need.

3. Avoid using slang, colloquialisms, jargon and metaphors, especially sporting ones which Americans love to use, such as “in the ball park” or “this deal is a slam dunk.”

4. Watch your humour and sarcasm. International participants might misunderstand and think you are speaking literally, or they might take offense at something said in jest.

5. If necessary, hire an interpreter to ensure clear communication.

6. Consider providing handouts in the various native languages.

Basic Teleconference Etiquette for organizers and participants

1. Be on time, and stress the importance of being on time to other participants. It’s very disruptive and distracting when people arrive late. Not only are they usually accompanied by a beep or other sound to announce their arrival into the call, but it also becomes necessary to introduce them to the rest of the group. When someone does arrive late, don’t immediately cut into the conversation to introduce him or her. Wait until there is a pause, and then simply say, “Sorry for the interruption, but it appears that Mr ….from….. has joined us.”

2. Choose a location where there is little background noise. Phones ringing, fax machines emitting shrieking tones, loud voices in the background – all of these things come through loud and clear over the phone line. A closed office with a “do not disturb” sign on the door is ideal. If some background noise is unavoidable, use the mute button on your phone when you are not speaking. Simply un-mute yourself when you want to contribute to the conversation.

3. Select a phone with the handset attached. Cellular and cordless phones often add annoying static to the call. Speakerphones are a pitfall because they pick up a lot of background noise, and many have technology that can interfere with the call – some don’t allow you to speak and hear at the same time, effectively “clipping off” parts of the conversation. In addition, you sound as if you’re speaking in a tunnel and it adds to the remoteness of this communication medium.

4. Turn off your call waiting. The beep as someone tries to reach you on another line can be heard by everyone on the teleconference. You can switch off this feature on many phones by pressing #70 or *70. Verify with your telephone service provider the particular code that’s applicable to your system.

5. Address people by name when you speak to them. Since there are no visual cues, if you simply ask a question or make a remark without indicating whom you are speaking to, it’s very difficult for other participants to determine who is being addressed.

6. Direct questions to a specific person, instead of posing them to the audience at large. This helps avoid confusion and chaos, and helps ensure that your question is met with an answer rather than just a silence as everyone tries to figure out who is going to respond. If the addressed individual can’t satisfactorily answer your question, he or she can refer it to someone else. Another option is to ask to hear from two people in response to the question/comment.

7. Ask all participants to identify themselves before speaking. Once again, the lack of visual cues makes this essential.

8. Never, ever put your phone on hold during a teleconference. Doing so will force the participants left on the call to listen to the music your telephone system plays to those on hold – effectively ruining the discussion. If it becomes absolutely necessary that you step away from the call, put the phone on mute and set it on your desk instead. Do your very best to avoid stepping away from the call, as it creates a problem when people try to address you without realizing that you’re not there. The most polite thing to do it is to obviously let the other participants know that you need to leave the call momentarily. However, it should be an absolute emergency for you to have to do this.

9. Take detailed notes on the topics discussed, including who said what. Consider having your service provider record the call in case you need to go back and clarify something that was said.

As a point of etiquette, it’s a good idea to introduce anyone who might have wandered into your room during a teleconference. It’s respectful to other participants to let them know that the CEO of your company has stopped by and is eavesdropping on the conversation using your speakerphone. You can handle this tactfully, by simply waiting for a break in the conversation and saying, “It appears that Jim Brown has joined us, please continue.”

10. Never Organise a teleconference without setting a meeting agenda

Teleconferences have always had a bit of a reputation for being a little drab; especially those without an agenda and that go round and round in circles. When organising your teleconference set your agenda, send it to your meeting participants along with the codes and then reinforce it during your call.

11. Always test your equipment

Echoing lines, dead batteries, call waiting beeps… argh!  Always plan ahead and test your equipment before joining teleconferences. Here are some questions you should ask yourself…

             Do you have call waiting activated? If so, turn it off!

             Is there an echo coming through your lines? Chances are you’re probably sitting in a large, empty room

             Are you using a cordless phone? If so, make sure you have enough battery

             How’s the quality? We recommend using a headset and only good quality speakerphones, the ones that are made for teleconferences!

12. Never join from a noisy location

Do you really want to be that person? Be aware of your surroundings and the fact that your noisy dog barking in the background or those annoying horns beeping in peak hour traffic may actually be disruptive to others on the call.

13.       Never join late

You know how everyone turns and looks at you when you walk into a crowded room late? Well don’t think that doesn’t happen on a conference call. In fact, it’s even worse because when you join a teleconference a loud ‘beep’ or a voice over saying your name also joins… it can be very disruptive! Always try and join the call at least 3-5 minutes early to get prepared, look professional and avoid other callers rolling their eyes!

14.     Never take advantage of the commands and functions

Did you know that you can mute all lines on a teleconference? Or that you have the ability to record each call and then send the link onto others? If you didn’t, then don’t worry – you’re not alone! Moderator Touch Tone Commands are designed to make life easier and are a great way to ensure your teleconferences run seamless!

Merits of Teleconferencing:

1. One of the major advantages of teleconferencing is its potential to reduce the cost of group meetings. Savings come primarily from reduced travel costs.

2. Reduce travel time requirements, Saves your time and energy for the same reason , thereby expediting work.

3. Latest applications like Skype allow you to meet up with several parties at once; if the video does not work out, you also have the option to switch to audio-only mode.

4. Allows you to observe the body language of the other person, giving non-verbal clues that can help you manage the conversation better .

5.Attend a business meeting hundreds of miles away without leaving your office

6.Schedule meetings minutes ahead of time instead of days or weeks

Limitations of Teleconferencing:

1. Technical issues like power failure, internet connectivity, the other party not knowing how to use such technology, etc. can act as bottlenecks, sometimes delaying work and causing you to miss deadlines. Technical failures with equipment, including connections that aren’t made

2.Teleconferencing doesn’t let you read other participants’ body language, which can give you clues as to whether you need to change your direction during a meeting.. In a teleconferencing situation, you do not get these cues to make changes in your presentation.

3.Eye contact is another key benefit you lose when teleconferencing. Exchange of information is less dynamic than a face-to-face meeting.

4.People who teleconference do so using landlines, cell phones and voiceover Internet protocol, or VOIP, phones. Many people attend teleconferences while driving, talking on cell phones that can create static or other noise as the user moves in and out of dead zones.

5.Unsatisfactory for complex interpersonal communication. The ability to share graphs, charts, photos, reports, drawings, videos, product samples and other visual messages is important t.

6.Lack of participant familiarity with the equipment, the medium itself, and meeting skills

7.Acoustical problems within the teleconferencing rooms

8.Difficulty in determining participant speaking order; frequently one person monopolizes the meeting .Greater participant preparation and preparation time needed

To minimize some of the potential problems, users should carefully evaluate their meeting needs and goals to determine if teleconferencing is appropriate. Users should also assess their audience. For example, consider the size of the group, the level of experience with teleconferencing, and the extent of familiarity with each other. These precautions won’t eliminate all the problems that could arise, but they should reduce the likelihood of their occurring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

Jawaharlal Nehru quotes Domingo Paes, a Portuguese traveller: “Of the ruler, Krishna Deva Raya, is the most feared and perfect king that could possibly be, cheerful of disposition and very merry; he is one that seeks to honour foreigners, and receives them kindly, asking all their affairs whatever their condition may be” [Discovery of India, p 235].

 

 

 

 

As the Moslems advanced into India native culture receded farther and farther south; and towards the end of these Middle Ages the finest achievements of Hindu civilization were those of the Deccan. For a time the Chalyuka tribe maintained an independent kingdom reaching across central India, and achieved, under Pulakeshin II, sufficient power and glory to defeat Harsha, to attract Yuan Chwang, and to receive a respectful embassy from Khosrou II of Persia. It was in Pulakeshin’s reign and territory that the greatest of Indian paintings the frescoes of Ajanta were completed. In the extreme south, and as early as the first century after Christ, the Pandyas established a realm comprising Madura, Tinnevelly, and parts of Travancore; they made Madura one of the finest of medieval Hindu cities, and adorned it with a gigantic temple and a thousand lesser works of architectural art. The Cholas ruled the region between Madura and Madras, and thence westward to Mysore. They were of great antiquity, being mentioned in the edicts of Ashoka; but we know nothing of them until the ninth century, when they began a long career of conquest that brought them tribute from all southern India, even from Ceylon. Then their power waned, and they passed under the control of the greatest of the southern states, Vijayanagar.

The kingdom of Vijayanagar was founded by Harihara and Bukka, two of five brothers (surnamed Sangama) who had served in the administrations of both Kakatiya and Kampili before those kingdoms were conquered by the armies of the Delhi sultanate in the 1320s. When Kampili fell in 1327, the two brothers are believed to have been captured and taken to Delhi, where they converted to Islam. They were returned to the Deccan as governors of Kampili for the sultanate with the hope that they would be able to deal with the many local revolts and invasions by neighbouring Hindu kings. Their first campaign was against the neighbouring Hoysala king, Ballala III of Dorasamudra, but it stagnated; after the brothers reconverted to Hinduism under the influence of the sage Madhavacarya (Vidyaranya) and proclaimed their independence from the Delhi sultanate. It is said that a sage Madhav Vidyaranya and his brother Sayana were the inspirational source for this empire. The rulers were strict worshipers of the Hindu Gods and Goddess, but also tolerant towards the other religions.

Kings of Vijaynagar Empire:
There were four dynasties ruled over Vijaynagar — Sangama Dynasty, Saluva Dynasty, Tuluva Dynasty and Aravidu Dynasty.
Sangama  Dynasty

Harihara I (1336 – 1356 CE) :

Bukka (1356-1377 CE)

Harihara Raya II (1377-1404 CE)

Virupaksha Raya (1404-1405CE).

Bukka Raya II (1405-1406 CE)

Deva Raya I (1406-1422 CE).

Ramachandra Raya (1422 CE)

Vira Vijaya Bukka Raya (1422-1424 CE)

Deva Raya II (1424-1446 CE)

Mallikarjuna Raya (1446-1465 CE)

Virupaksha Raya II (1465-1485 CE)

Praudha Raya (1485 CE)

Saluva Dynasty

Saluva Narasimha Deva Raya (1485-1491 CE)

Thimma Bhupala (1491CE)

Narasimha Raya II (1491-1505 CE)

Tuluva Dynasty

Tuluva Narasa Nayaka (1491-1503 CE

Viranarasimha Raya (1503-1509 CE)

Krishna Deva Raya (1509-1529 CE)

Achyuta Raya (1529-1542 CE)

Sadashiva Raya (1542-1570)

Aravidu Dynasty

Aliya Rama Raya or Rama Raya, (1542-1565 CE)

Tirumala Deva Raya (1565-1572 CE)

Sriranga I/Sriranga Deva Raya (1572-1586 CE)

Venkata II/Venkatapati Deva Raya(1586-1614 CE

Sriranga II/Sriranga Chika Raya (1614-1614 CE

Ramadeva/ Vira Rama Deva Raya (1617-1632 CE)

Venkata III/Peda Venkata Raya (1632-1642 CE)

Sriranga III (1642-1646 CE) or Sriranga Raya II (1642 – 1652 CE)

Vijayanagar the name both of a kingdom and of its capital is a melancholy instance of forgotten glory. In the years of its grandeur it comprised all the present native states of the lower peninsula, together with Mysore and the entire Presidency of Madras. We may judge of its power and resources by considering that King Krishna Raya led forth to battle at Talikota 703,000 foot, 32,600 horse, 551 elephants, and some hundred thousand merchants, prostitutes and other camp followers such as were then wont to accompany an army in its campaigns.  The autocracy of the king was softened by a measure of village autonomy, and by the occasional appearance of an enlightened and human monarch on the throne. Krishna Raya, who ruled Vijayanagar in the days of Henry VIII, compares favorably with that constant lover. He led a life of justice and courtesy, gave abounding alms, tolerated all Hindu faiths, enjoyed and supported literature and the arts, forgave fallen enemies and spared their cities, and devoted himself sedulously to the chores of administration. A Portuguese missionary, Domingos Pacs (1522), describes him as the most feared and perfect king that could possibly be; cheerful of disposition, and very merry; he is one that seeks to honor foreigners, and receives them kindly. . . . He is a great ruler, and a man of much justice, but subject to sudden fits of rage. … He is by rank a greater lord than any, by reason of what he possesses in armies and territories; but it seems that he has in fact nothing compared to what a man like him ought to have, so gallant and perfect is he in all things.

Vijayanagar the city was a symbol of vast power and wealth. It was a royal ceremonial and administrative centre and the nexus of trade routes. Foreign travelers and visitors were impressed by the variety and quality of commodities that reached the city, by the architectural grandeur of the palace complex and temples, and by the ceremonial significance of the annual Mahanavami celebrations, at which the Nayakas and other chiefs assembled to pay tribute.

The capital, founded in 1336, was probably the richest city that India had yet known. Nicolo Conti, visiting it about 1420, estimated its circumference at sixty miles; Pacs pronounced it “as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight.” There were, he added, “many groves of trees within it, and many conduits of water”; for its engineers had constructed a huge dam in the Tungabadra River, and had formed a reservoir from which water was conveyed to the city by an aqueduct fifteen miles long, cut for several miles out of the solid rock. Abdu-r Razzak, who saw the city in 1443, reported it as “such that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, of any place resembling it upon the whole earth.” Paes considered it “the best-provided city in tne world, . . . ror in this one everything abounds.”

The houses, he tells us, numbered over a hundred thousand implying a population of half a million souls. He marvels at a palace in which one room was built entirely of ivory; “it is so rich and beautiful that you would hardly find anywhere another such.” When Firoz Shah, Sultan of Delhi, married the daughter of Vijayanagar’s king in the latter’s capital, the road was spread for six miles with velvet, satin, cloth of gold and other costly stuffs.

The administration of the kingdom sporadically achieved a relatively high degree of centralization, although centrifugal tendencies regularly appeared. To the original five rajyas (provinces) held by the Sangama brothers, new ones were added as territories were acquired. Within and among these regions, a complex mosaic of great chiefly houses exercised power to varying degrees, though not with the virtual autonomy that some historians have suggested. The central administration had both a revenue and a military side, but the actual business of raising taxes and troops was mostly the responsibility of the provincial governors and their subordinates. The central government maintained a relatively small body of troops, but it assigned a value to the lands held by the provincial governors and determined the number of troops that were to be supplied from the revenues of each province. This administrative plan led to the development of the nayankara system, in which prominent commanders received land grants and privileged status, becoming Nayakas (local lords or governors). The system, which has been characterized as a kind of military feudalism, worked well enough when the central authority was strong but provided territorial bases for the Nayakas to build semi-independent hereditary holdings in times of imperial weakness. The imperial rulers were aware of the power of the provinces and tried to counter it by appointing members of the royal family as governors of the militarily more important provinces.

Although exact figures are unavailable, the evidence suggests that the level of taxation was close to half of the produce in many areas. Much of the revenue collected did not go to the state, however, because various layers of local landholders took their share first. Although most revenue came from agrarian taxes, commercial and artisan taxes and tributary duties from foreign traders were levied as well.

Underneath this wealth a population of serfs and labourers lived in poverty and superstition, subject to a code of laws that preserved some commercial morality by a barbarous severity. Punishment ranged from mutilation of hands or feet to casting a man to the elephants, cutting off his head, impaling him alive by a stake thrust through his belly, or hanging him on a hook under his chin until he died;”  rape as well as large- scale theft was punished in this last way. Prostitution was permitted, regulated, and turned into royal revenue. “Opposite the mint,” says Abdu-r Razzak, “is the office of the prefect of the city, to which it is said twelve thousand policemen are attached; and their pay … is derived from the proceeds of the brothels. The splendour of these houses, the beauty of the heart-ravishers, their blandishments and ogles, are beyond all description.” Women were of subject status, and were expected to kill themselves on the death of their husbands, sometimes by allowing themselves to be buried alive.

Under the Rayas or Kings of Vijayanagar literature prospered, both in classical Sanskrit and in the Telugu dialect of the south. Krishna Raya was himself a poet, as well as a liberal patron of letters; and his poet laureate, Alasani-Peddana, is ranked among the highest of India’s singers. Painting and architecture flourished; enormous temples were built, and almost every foot of their surface was carved into statuary or bas-relief.

Under Vijayanagar rule, temples, which exhibited such singularly imperial features as huge enclosures and entrance gateways (gopuras), emerged as major political arenas. Monastic organizations (mathas) representing various religious traditions also became focal points of local authority, often closely linked with the Nayaka chieftaincies. A fairly elaborate and specialized administrative infrastructure underlay these diverse local and regional religio-political forms.

Buddhism had lost its hold, and a form of Brahmanism that especially honoured Vishnu had become the faith of the people. The cow was holy and was never killed; but many species of cattle and fowl were sacrificed to the gods, and eaten by the people. Religion was brutal, and manners were refined.

In one day all this power and luxury were destroyed. Slowly the conquering Moslems had made their way south; now the sultans of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golkonda and Bidar united their forces to reduce this last stronghold of the native Hindu kings. It is likely that the sultans of Golconda and Ahmadnagar, who had lost much at the hands of Rama Raya, were primarily responsible for the formation of an alliance that destroyed Vijayanagar’s power forever. By 1564 at least four of the five sultans (Berar is questionable) had begun their march on Vijayanagar. Their combined armies met Rama Raja’s half-million men at Talikota; the superior numbers of the attackers prevailed; Rama Raja was captured and beheaded in the sight of his followers, and these, losing courage, fled. Nearly a hundred thousand of them were slain in the retreat, until all the streams were colour with their blood. The conquering troops plundered the wealthy capital, and found the booty so abundant “that every private man in the allied army became rich in gold, jewels, effects, tents, arms, horses and slaves.”

For five months the plunder continued: the victors slaughtered the helpless inhabitants in indiscriminate butchery, emptied the stores and shops, smashed the temples and palaces, and laboured at great pains to destroy all the statuary and painting in the city; then they went through the streets with flaming torches, and set fire to all that would burn. When at last they retired, Vijayanagar was as completely ruined as if an earth-quake had visited it and had left not a stone upon a stone. It was a destruction ferocious and absolute, typifying that terrible Moslem conquest of India which had begun a thousand years before, and was now complete.

After Talikota, the memories of the Empire remained in the minds of thousands but historians of the subsequent period deliberately avoided it from their purview. The writings of medieval travelers such as Abdur-Razzak, Nicolo Conti, Domingo Paes, Fernao Nuniz and the literature in local vernaculars provide crucial information about its history. Above all the archaeological excavations at Vijayanagar have revealed the extent and depth of the empire’s power and wealth. The unfading memories survived in the Hindu social psyche of the subsequent generations gave way to the birth of several patriots. In the opinion of K. A. Nilkanta Sastri, the catastrophic end of Vijayanagar is not the end of the Hindu spirit of nationalism. [A History of South India, p337]. Venkita II, the last ruler of the Aravidu dynasty reigned Vijayanagar until 1614. In 1612 another Hindu kingdom rose to prominence in South India was Mysore, under Raja Oedyar. No doubt, it is sufficient testimony to the idea of an uninterrupted survival of the nationhood feeling among the Hindu social psyche. Similarly powerful Hindu dynasties such as Travancore, Cochin, Madurai, etc were continued over the South India. The coronation of Chatrapti Sivaji in 1674 was, no doubt, an appendix to the great saga of the Vijayanagar experience.

REFERANCES:

HAVELL, E. B.: Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India. London, 1915.

HAVELL, E. B.: Ideals of Indian Art. New York, 1920.

KEYSERLING, COUNT HERMANN: Travel Diary of a Philosopher. 2V. New York, 1925.

SMITH, V. A.: Oxford History of India. Oxford, 1923.

SEWELL, ROBERT: A Forgotten Empire, Vijayanagar. London, 1900.

WILL DURANT. : Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster. New York, 1954