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Upinder Singh’s ‘Ancient India’, meditations on the past

Book Title: Ancient India: Culture Of Contradictions

Author: Upinder Singh

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PK Basant

IT has been said that all nations create their own histories and that all national histories are based on a necessary misreading of the past. Our misreadings had another twist in the tale as it were the Europeans who for the first time formulated an idea of our collective past. Scholars have tried to switch from nation to region to locality in their attempt to create more viable units of study. Others have created imagined communities with disastrous consequences for our present.

Upinder Singh’s work is more in the nature of meditations on our ancient Indian past. She attempts to discover the ideational structure of the Indian world. She hopes to wrest meanings out of our rich traditions of poetry and art, along with a little bit of digging in archaeology.

Singh’s book emerged from what was a series of classroom lectures. The sparkling prose and the attempt to explain as many terms as possible would make it an exceptionally rich experience for students. Each of the five chapters — ‘Inequality and Salvation’, ‘Desire and Detachment’, ‘Goddesses and Misogyny’, ‘Violence and Non-violence’ and ‘Debate and Conflict’— represents a contradictory aspect of Indian civilisation.

History textbooks are frequently crowded with names of poets and dramatists and, sometimes, slightly enriched with quotations from their works, too. However, we rarely get a feel of the beautiful poetry itself. On the other hand, the parallel tradition of scholarship in literary studies seems to have largely banished history from its ambit of enquiry. Upinder Singh brings the two together. A scholarly monograph embedded in the discipline of history, written in engaging prose, swimming in an ocean of poetry and beautiful illustrations (though poorly reproduced).

The author’s deep scholarship is stamped across the volume, which is no patriotic reverie about our nation’s past. She is acutely aware of the contradictions that existed between our ideas of desire and fulfilment on one side and renunciation and release on the other, and the ambiguity about notions of violence and non-violence running through the Upanishads and the Mahabharata. The way Singh has woven her narrative makes for fascinating reading. Even more breathtaking are the parallels drawn between ancient practices and continuities in modern times.

As a reader, I would want the narrative to continue with some examples from the ‘medieval period’. The saints and poets from the Bhakti-Sufi traditions would have enriched the discussion. Minor errors like mentioning Appar as a Vaishnava saint are exceptions to a well-written, informative work of scholarship. ‘Ancient India: Culture of Contradictions’ brings in fresh air.

The volume raises indirectly related issues: is an essay on contradictions justified if we were to say that every civilisation had similar contradictions? Paraphrasing Ramanujan somewhat, is there anything like ‘Indian civilisation’? Is it possible that the contradictions we talk about were simply unrelated experiences divided by time and space? After all, ‘Indian civilisation’ is a recent construct.

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