Indian thought through the ages

In our shining array of public intellectuals and popular historians, hardly anyone has a literary inclination — not even GN Devy, whose main concern is with the diversity of our languages and their survival. Pavan K Varma, who can be called a public litterateur, has for many years been fulfilling this need with literary biographies, thematic discussions, and translations relating to figures from Yudhishthir to Chanakya, and from Tulsidas to Ghalib. In his ambitious new anthology, he offers us a compendium of Indian “thought”, which runs from the earliest book composed in India, the ‘Rigveda’, down to a patriotic exhortation to light up the Indian sky by APJ Abdul Kalam, which was published in 1999.

In the opening sentence of his ‘Introduction’, Varma asserts that “India is a civilisation of moulik soch — the power of original thought”, and that is why (in a distinct variation on Iqbal’s dictum) India has survived and flourished while the Greek, Roman, Persian, Assyrian and “even classical Chinese” civilisations have all perished. This has been made possible, he says, due to the “cerebral interrogation” that holds together “antiquity, continuity, diversity, assimilation and peaks of refinement”.

As every synoptic historian or anthologist of India knows, our diversity and assimilation make their own demands and require some nimble footwork on the tightrope of political correctness. Thus, while devoting a large part of his selection to what he calls the foundational “Indic” period, Varma says he has “taken due care to give appropriate space to what happened after the Turkish invasion”. The period of British rule and “our self-discovery”, through the works of Vivekananda, Gandhi, Periyar, Savarkar, Azad, Nehru, Ambedkar, Lohia, Indira Gandhi as also Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Osho and several others, forms the third part of this familiar triptych.

However, Varma is not unduly constrained by the protocols of chronological accuracy or scholarly punctiliousness. He dates the ‘Rigveda’ to 3500 to 3000 BCE while most experts have long ago scaled this down to 1500-1200 BCE. He is oblivious of the fact that even if we accept his dates, it still does not add up to “7,000 years at the very least” as being the length of our “ideational canvas”. It is a vast stretch anyhow, and what are a couple of thousand years this way or that to common readers when we are speaking, as Varma here does, of ‘Echoes of Eternity’.

In his selections, Varma is at his catholic, generous and innovative best. Most chosen texts are represented by not bite-sized snippets of a page or two, but substantial extracts running from 10 to 20 pages each. Some coherent clusters of work, which are so large as to be unwieldy, are given to us not directly but through a secondary discussion of them. The 18 Puranas and the 18 Upapuranas get a summary account of 23 pages written by an old scholar, AD Pusalker, while the Bhakti movement gets a composite survey of 40 pages, featuring over 20 poets from various languages, which is here repurposed from an earlier book by Varma himself. The Din-i-Ilahi, a religion founded by the Emperor Akbar, which nevertheless had hardly any takers, is here expounded by a scholar who wrote a whole book on the subject.

Though this is a collection of “Indian thought”, Varma betrays where his heart lies by admitting about 25 poets, out of a total of 67 authors or works. They begin with the rishis who composed the ‘Rigveda’ and extend through Bhartrihari, Amir Khusrau, Bulle Shah, Mir, Ghalib, Zafar, Tagore, Nirala, Dinkar, Amrita Pritam and Sahir Ludhianvi, right up to Gulzar, the only living author in the book. Varma’s justification is that poetry is “compressed thought”; he could have cited in support TS Eliot, who said that to some poets, a thought is like an experience.

This grand procession of Indian thinkers, both prosaic and poetic, constitutes an anthology with a difference. It offers its potential readers many interesting insights into our multiple traditions. It may also help some of us answer a question that AK Ramanujan once playfully asked: “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” And finally, it is likely to leave us with much food for thought, so to say, over which we may continue to ruminate even after we have shut the book.

— The writer is a former Professor of English, Delhi University

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