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  The India that Alexander briefly encountered when he reached the banks of the Indus had many kingdoms, including tribal republics (jana-padas), the most powerful of which were located in the Gangetic plains. It was a world where there was tension between the world-affirming householders (yajamanas) and the world-renouncing hermits (shramanas).

  Shortly after Alexander left, India saw its first great imperial empire, that of the Mauryans, built on the Persian principle of central control, with its capital in Pataliputra in Magadha (modern-day Bihar). The first Mauryan emperor, Chandragupta, eventually renounced his throne and became a Jain monk. His grandson, Ashoka, played a key role in popularizing the Buddhist monastic order.

  Buddhism, based on renunciation, meditation and pacifism, spread from India to Central Asia and South East Asia and eventually East Asia. Even the idea of liberation from the trap of unending rebirths reached Europe through trade routes. They influenced the monastic mystery cults of the Near East and Europe such as Orphism, Mithraism and eventually Christianity.

  Scholars believe that the Greeks introduced stone sculptures to India, however, the difference between Greek and Indian imagery is stark. Greek images are highly individualistic, asymmetrical, muscular, masculine, and the gods look imperious. Indian images are representational, symmetrical, soft, almost feminine and the gods smile and seem playful.

  From Roman Empire to Holy Roman Empire

  Interestingly, it was the Romans who took Greek thought to the next level. More realistic in its outlook, Rome was a city state in Italy that believed in democracy during peacetime and dictatorship during wartime. Like the Greeks, the Romans were contemptuous of the barbarians. Two thousand years ago, they established an empire that controlled the entire Mediterranean with a network of roads that allowed for the effective movement of troops to conquered lands and an efficient flow of wealth back to Rome.

  Unlike the Greeks who frowned on the idea of central control and empire, the Romans sought consolidation and singularity. This happened in three phases.

  In the first phase, which began nearly 2300 years ago, the Roman republic was made the centre of their world, and the idea of Rome deemed greater than any Roman citizen.

  In the second phase, the Caesars made themselves permanent dictators of Rome, bypassing the democratic Roman senate, and functioned like the God-kings of yore. This happened 2000 years ago.

  In the third phase that took place around 1700 years ago, when attacks from the wild Germanic tribes of the north forced the Caesars to move east to Byzantium (the ‘new’ Rome), the Caesar Constantine embraced Christian monotheism, wiping out all rival ‘pagan’ faiths.

  The rise of the Holy Roman Empire, or Christendom, marked the end of a thousand years of Graeco-Roman civilization. The God of Abraham eclipsed both Greek mythos and Greek logos. The world was believed to be controlled by a personal deity, not impersonal meddlesome quarrelsome gods. Independent thinking was considered arrogant, and humility was demanded. The church became the controller and gatekeeper of all knowledge. Faith was seen as the sunlight and reason as the shadows. Later historians would call this period the Dark Ages. It would last a thousand years.

  As Christianity tightened its grip over Imperial Rome, India saw the rise of what is now called classical—Puranic—Hinduism, patronized by the Gupta kings of north India. In other words, as Greek mythology was replaced by Christian mythology in Europe, Vedic mythology transformed into Puranic mythology in India.

  The rise of Puranic Hinduism had a negative impact on the spread of Buddhism within the Indian subcontinent. As a monastic order, Buddhism did not see great value in worldly things. Puranic Hinduism, however, favoured the householder’s life over the hermit’s. Buddhist monasteries and caves gradually gave way to vast Hindu temple complexes, where art and culture flourished. Here, indulgence (bhoga) was as valued as restraint (yoga).

  India was known as the land of the golden sparrow because Indian merchants sought only gold from the rest of the world, which seemed to have an insatiable appetite for Indian textiles and spices.

  It is significant to note that around the same time that the Roman emperors turned Christian to prevent fragmentation of their empire, the Chinese emperors of the Sui dynasty turned to Buddhism to unify China.

  From the Crusades to Enlightenment

  Then, 1400 years ago, a new religion rose in Arabia—Islam. Like Christianity, it spoke of one God, Original Sin and redemption. But unlike Christianity, it saw Jesus not as the son of God, but as one of God’s many prophets (another one allegedly being Alexander). The final prophet according to Islam was Muhammad, through whom the will of God was expressed and compiled in the holy book known as the Quran.

  Islam spread rapidly across Persia, India, China, Africa and soon stood at the gates of Europe, via Spain. Here its march was halted and eventually reversed by the Christian leaders of Europe, who became part of what came to be known as the Western Roman Empire led by the Pope in Rome, distinct from the Eastern Roman Empire led by the emperor at Byzantium.

  What followed were the Crusades, a war between the Christian and Muslim worlds, which came to a bloody end 500 years ago with the Muslims conquering Byzantium and putting an end to the Holy Roman Empire, and with it the Dark Ages.

  The fall of Byzantium saw hordes of scholars and philosophers move westwards to Rome, bringing back with them the lost Greek knowledge along with revolutionary new Arab sciences. This led to the Renaissance or rediscovery of Greek ideas, and the Age of Enlightenment, which would change the world forever.

  Now science was sunlight, and faith became the shadow. The authority of the church, the Pope and the Roman emperor was questioned. A single united Christendom gave way to the empires of the English, the French, the Germans and the Russians. By the eighteenth century, the idea of monarchy was being completely rejected, at first by the French Revolution and later by the formation of the United States of America.

  Political change was accompanied by technological, and economic, change. European philosophers, inspired by early Arab thinkers, took Greek philosophy beyond matters of politics and society. Thus the sciences blossomed: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, botany, zoology and astronomy. A whole series of discoveries and inventions resulted in the Industrial Revolution. The printing press liberated knowledge from the control of the clergy. Sea routes were discovered. Factories were set up. Colonies were acquired. Old trading partners, such as India, gradually became the source of raw materials for the factories in Europe. Kings and their armies no longer controlled the world. Industrialists and business houses were now a force to reckon with.

  From about 1000, warlords from Central Asia who had converted to Islam overran India, destroying what remained of Buddhism and shaking up Hinduism at its very foundations.

  Indians became increasingly more inward-looking: traders no longer travelled by seas to faraway lands, preferring to outsource all travel to Arabs; the status of women declined; the jati (caste) system became increasingly rigid and draconian, with some professions being considered ‘purer’ than others.

  Sanskrit, the language of the elite, found a strong rival in royal courts in Farsi, the language of the Persian aristocracy. This intermingling spurred an intellectual revolution: the rise of regional literature such as Hindi, Marathi, Odia, Assamese, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, and the amplification of bhakti, the discourse of passionate devotion that binds devotee to deity.

  When the Age of Enlightenment was dawning in Europe, the Mughals established their empire in India. While Europe became industrial, India remained agricultural.

  After the British overthrew the Mughals in the eighteenth century, they brought in railways and education. The railways served the same purpose as roads in the Roman Empire: enabling the colonizers to control the geography. The schools and colleges, besides creating clerks for their vast network of administrative offices, established a Western gaze in the minds of Indians, overshadowing the native gaze. The colon