Aryans, by a much respected scholar, and inheritor of British colonial agency, Charles Allen, whose works I have revelled reading in the past, among them Asoka and Coromandel, comes across as a deep dive into European ancestry riding a much-derided Nazi word, which, in its original, is rooted in the Veda, as Arya, a person of unquestionable integrity, and seconded as such as Aria in the Avesta, a Persian Zoroastrian law book of later provenance, but nowhere close to the German obssession with Gothic-Saxon racial superiority.
The problem with Allen's work is that while he definitely dug deep to research much of his European ancestry, he did not put together his final manuscript, leaving that job to be completed posthumously by his friend and compatriot David Lyon, about whose credentials we know little about to suss his understanding of India's heritage literature.
Small wonder then, the outcome of this gargantuan effort is an equally gigantic miscalculation at superimposing Caucasian DNA on the 'moral conduct' of South Asian natives, without a shred of textual evidence that the word Arya, and its meaning, may have existed in any other culture outside of India, and eastern Iran, where much of the Indian diasporic influence existed since pre-history, and continues to do so even now in Sistan-Baluchistan.
For want of evidence on the 'Eurasian' origin of the word Arya, the Allen-Lyon authorship, speculates on the second best available evidence, Yamanaya, a territorial approximation somewhere in central Russia, south of Siberia, as the abode of Yam, the Vedic divinity of Death. This appropriation is fallacious for two reasons. One, there is no textual evidence that Yamanaya was called Yamanaya when the Yamanaya people lived in Yamanaya - fossilised bones don't talk, hence reveal no names, in the absence of an accompanying script.
Two, 'Yamalaya' the abode of Yam, of the Vedic scriptures, is always located to the southwest of the Vedic Sindhu-Saraswati-Yamuna-Ganga hinterland. This is also why 'Patal' that other word for netherworld, had been located downstream on the Indus towards its opening into the Samudra, the western sea, i.e. the Arabian Sea - Indian Ocean watermass, at least till Alexander's visit to the region. This makes either Yaman (Yemen) or Yam (Nubia-Sudan), closer approximations of the so-called 'foreign' abode of the 'dark-skinned' Yama of the Vedik-Puranik pantheon.
A third loose end in the Allen-Lyon narrative comes when the duo lose track of Zarathustra's Arias in the desert between Samarkand and Baku, midway through their search for his 16 heavenly abodes. An understanding of Vedik and Avestan geography should have transported them closer to Kailash-Mansorvar in the Tibetan highland as a starting point for the Zarathustra's massive urban enterprise. This is a region abounding in secrets, where Hitler, interestingly, and incidentally, according to Allen-Lyon, had once mounted an expedition to locate his Aryan roots.
In the end, Aryans, 'the history' concludes in a trans-Steppe wild goose chase in a much-anticipated hunt for European DNA markers, in which, we will never know if Allen got anywhere close to his ancestral quarry, leaving Lyon to rummage through the rubble of make-belief Aryan traces.
...
The Golden Road, is a treasure trove, and a pleasure to read, especially considering the master storyteller that William Dalrymple is. His depth of reading and canvas of research is breathtaking. He seeks to restore to Indians a measure of the gigantic dignity from their collective past that educated and civilised the ancient world, once upon a time, in lands far-far away, a millennium-long enterprise that was systematically whistewashed by the Left-Muslim scholarship of Irfan Habib and Romilla Thapar under Maulana Abul Kalam Azad's watch of independent India's education bureaucracy.
There is a lesson to be learnt in Dalrymple's scholarship, for all Indian scholars and history buffs, on how to marshall the world's best scholarly resources, to shape the Idea of India. In traversing Indian history, Dalrymple commands a panoply of textual evidence, to both herald and salute the Indian mind that not only shaped Tibetan, Chinese, Mongol, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Malay, Burmese, Indonesian and Sri Lankan history and civilisations, but actually seems to have provided the philosophical, mathematical and scientific bedrock for early Islam to flourish soon after a pack of illiterate camel-mounted bedouins emerged from desert wilderness riding the passion of conviction. To that end, Dalrymple is brilliant.
Yet, in doing so, Bill is also partly disingenious rather than being absolutely honest with facts, for he too, in the end, rides his inherited British agency.
He paints a 1000-year-wide landscape of India's civilisational influence, Indosphere, over what he possibly considers lesser civilisations; his transcontinental canvas under a superimposing 'western' civilisational arc that commenced with Alexander loitering across the Indus and ended with the British colonial enterpise sailing out of Apollo Bunder.
Why Alexander?
Dalrymple never goes there.
Yet we must ask: Since Alexander conquered the east, did he start his expedition to teach a Persian bully a lesson, as most contemporary western scholars would want the rest of the world to believe, before casually cantering into India?
Conventional Greek narrative has it that Alexander rode into India on the advice of his guru, Aristotle, who pushed him into pilgrimage in the quest for Indian wisdom. It is another matter that he ravaged the Persians en route.
We must also then ask if Alexander really brought Greek sculpture to Gandhara-Afghanistan, riding as he was with a pack of companions on light cavalry comandeering Persian, Scythian and Afghan mercenaries on marauding raids across vast stretches of the west Asian desert? For none of Alex's rituals in India had anything to do with idol worship: they were a series of Vedik-style sacrificial offerings on the banks of rivers.
Dalrymple skips that 'civilising' moment of history when Alexander submitted himself to the Naga (naked) yogi Kalanus (the end-sound of time, Kaal). He speculates, instead, that the Romans trading with India at the start of the Christian era in the port of Alexandria, Egypt, may have actually brought the craft of stone carving to Gandhara, 300 years after the death of Alexander.
In guessing who took to digging the Hindu Kush rocks first, to sculpt them into shape, Dalrymple also overlooks an insert in the Avesta that the Kandahar folks took to idol-carving, much to Zarathustra's consternation, long before anyone in Dara's glorious empire struck a boulder with a pickaxe. Further, he ignores the much displayed shawl-choga draped, trim-bearded Harappan 'priest-king' who might have been an early prototype of the carvings that subsequently came out of Kandahar.
True, India has had an ancient connect with Greece, as it did with Egypt, even before the first pyramids went up on the Nile. But that connect, as with Greek accounts, started long before Alexander, with the adventures of the Deo (Deva) of Nysa (in Afghanistan) giving the Greeks their legendary Dionysus, the immortal god of mada (Median wine), song and dance.
In that sense, Dalrymple's readings stop short of the remote, in his descent down the Khyber. In this enterprise, it's not that he is unaware of the available evidence, quoting liberally as he does, from the Veda, the Avesta, and Greek sources that predate the retelling of the Alexander story by Arrian of Rome by centuries. Worse, he is also selective in his reading of the seventh century CE Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang's account of Central Asia.
In stretching his imagination to interpret Roman engagement in shaping Indian civilisation, Dalrymple resorts to the unthinkable that is also unpardonable. True, he walks a very long distance to emphasise that Rome drained its wealth on India, and Indian idols, grafitti, paintings, and mosaic, besides silk and spices, found new home in the pyramids of Misr, and the mansions of Sicily and Pompeii. All that is laudable discovery till he ventures into Miran, on the northwestern frontier of China at the edge of the Taklamakan desert. There he locates Buddhist cave paintings by an Indian 'impersonator' Tita/s who should rather have been named, according to him, as some random Roman-Egyptian expatriate, Titus, plagiarising "Coptic Christian church painting" for a Buddhist manga comic in a remote waystation on the global trade route, busy with what he thinks was "give-and-take' in place of what really might have been a one-way traffic of "I sell, you buy".
Tita, in this case, is ancient Sanskrit for the one who "crosses over" usually a river, but in the case of Miran, also the one who crossed the Tibetan massiff, as many Indian scholars, philosophers, saints, and spiritual wayfarers walked over the Himalayas across millennia. Titas, too, is just another word for river, and might have been a reference to the Sita river around ancient Kashgar, in which case, it had nothing to do with 'Titus', Latin for honour and strength, in an age when humility, frugality, and weakness of body was at the core of Buddhist indoctrination, that navigated the Red Sea to Egypt with its iconography in tact, lending both imagination and imagery to the Coptic Christian Church in question, rather than the other way round, and just as much as it crossed the South China Sea east to, well, China.
To be fair, Dalrymple covers a great stretch of Xuanzang's journey, but in his long strides to the Middle Kingdom, he overlooks the Chinese monk's description of Central Asian cities as far north as Tashkent, as centres of Brahmanik and Baudhik excellence, far removed from the Persosphere that our historian imposes on his readers by way of distraction. For, Xuanzang wrote clearly, and precisely, that the Persians lived at a great distance from the Oxus, far to the southwest; not so India, which pervaded every local mandir and vihara in body and spirit.
Yet, for some unknown reason that has become an obsession with European articulation of Indian history, Dalrymple relies on the 'Persianate' narrative of the western academia, in giving the region a Zoroastrian spin, not laid bare by any historical record other than Darius I's bombast on the walls of Behistun, otherwise Bagastana, the abode of Bhag, the Vedik-Avestan godhead.
In the same breath, he ignores, Xuanzang's dating the reign of Kushan king Kanishka, as much an Indian, as Buddhist, in the words of the pilgrim himself, while lauding Zang's relevance to the Tang dynasty of China.
At the heart of such strategic and civilisational shortsightedness on part of Dalrymple, and Allen-Lyon, is a strange European preoccupation with 'roots' that spreads across the Steppes, into Mongolia, bordering China, while also appropriating the ancient Babylonians, Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Scythians, Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Persians and Turks, into a carefully crafted ancestral myth, curiously stopping short at the Indus (and also north of Aswan on the African Nile, where homo sapiens started their journey into our modern world), the inherited antiquities of which predate all other civilisational narratives of then as now.
To these worthies, The March of Times, (my much-loved Grade Three history book, from the "Senior Cambridge Curricula" back in school, in a quaint Indian town in the Himalayan foothills), had to start from the West, spreading its civilisational reach, with Alexander's cavalry charge to the distant East, from where, then, the Indians sailed onward to East Timor and thence to China, Korea and Japan.
No, Mr Historian, such a narrative doesn't quite add up.
Yet, notwithstanding their 'nearsightedness', it is also true that a legion of British grave-diggers, in a magnificent 200-year-long parade, from William Jones to William Dalrymple (with Henry Colebrook, Charles Wilkins, Horace Hyman, Edward Moore, John Woodroffe, Vincent Smith to the likes of Charles Allen and John Keay, thrown in, in-between), have, both individually and collectively, enriched us with their astounding storytelling, clearing so many beautiful pathways of the cobwebs of time. They have prised open India's timeless civilisational secrets to us Indians again and again, like no others have so far.
And for that, we must be grateful.
Many more diggings remain.