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4. Buddhist Civilisation
The orgotten Past
The sense of history in India has always been a tenuous one. Today
the government in power sponsors programmes hailing the
Sanskritic, Vedic past, while ‘Hindutva’ intellectuals depict Indian
history as a seamless thread, originated by peoples who built both
the Indus civilisation and Vedic culture, and flowing from there
until today. Their primary opponents describe India as a tolerant,
multicultural society whose tolerance is also thought to flow from
the same roots and whose ‘national’ unity was built mainly during
the colonial period. In both cases the sense of the past dates mainly
from the 19th century.
Historiographical traditions of the dominant Brahmanic culture
have always been weak, built as they were on legends and linked
to myths. The sense of the ‘Aryans’ as a people itself comes from
19th century Orientalism. The Vedas were propagated as a symbol of
wisdom for thousands of years, but were little known to the people.
Asoka’s empire, the greatest in extent before British colonial rule,
remained forgotten in India until the British discovered the various
Asokan inscriptions on pillars and stones throughout the country and
linked the ‘Devanampiya Piyadasi’ of these with the ‘Asoka’ of the
Ceylonese Buddhist chronicles. The Indus civilisation was not known
until the discovery of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in the 1920s. The
earliest empire south of the Vindhyas, that of the Satavahanas,
remained unknown in Maharashtra at the time of the ‘rise of the
Marathas’ and means little to people today. While India uses a tradi-
tional dating from the Saka era (beginning 78 CE), there is little
popular consciousness of what this refers to and few associate it with
the historically most viable candidate, the Kusana king Kanishka.