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A Forgotten Past
In 1827 an English soldier of the East India Company deserted his regi-
ment, footing it with a friend westward toward the Indus River and Central
Asia. Fearful of being caught and executed, he wore disguises and called him-
self Charles Masson. For a time he claimed to be an American citizen from
Kentucky. Although he wrote extensively about his experiences in the four-vol-
ume Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, the Panjab and Kalat
(1844), he revealed little about his motivations or state of mind. From the
adventures recorded in his memoirs, however, it is clear he was obsessed with
the history and cultures of the Punjab and Afghanistan.
In those days—the early nineteenth century—India’s history was obscure.
Whole civilizations had disappeared from historical memory. India had no tra-
dition of historiography such as China’s, with its vast record-keeping bureau-
cracy. When in 1974 the huge burial army of the First Emperor (r. 221–210
B.C.E.) was rediscovered archaeologically, the finds validated the claims of early
Chinese historians who had written about Qin Shihuang, the unifier of China.
No such early accounts of the doings of kings existed in India. Indian thinkers
were busy interpreting the Vedas, their most ancient and most sacred texts, and
then meditating on the meaning of Vedic rituals and myths in the Brahmanas
(ritual texts on the details of sacrifice, constituting a portion of the Vedas). By
the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., new texts, the Upanishads, were creating
revolutionary new ideas about the soul (atman), human action (karma), renun-
ciation (sanyas), and life after death (samsara, reincarnation). But India had no
Sima Qian, the Grand Historian (died ca. 110 B.C.E.), who pored through old
texts written on strips of bamboo to piece together a lengthy history of China’s
early dynasties, which became the starting point of all subsequent histories.
Therefore, in Masson’s time (1820s–1840s), India’s ancient history was
known only through the Vedas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads. They were writ-
ten in Sanskrit, the earliest known Indo-European language (see chapter 2).
This meant that Indian history began with the Bronze Age people who called
themselves “Aryans” (i.e., the Indo-European speakers), who had established
small kingdoms in the Ganges basin, with names like Kuru, Pancala, Kosala,
and Videha. Nothing was known of any earlier civilization. Likewise, there
was a blank where the Buddha, Buddhism, and the great King Ashoka who
spread Buddhism throughout the subcontinent should have been. Buddhist
texts in East and Southeast Asia claimed the Buddha had lived and died inChapter opener photo: Rajasthani girl.