A CULTURE OF CONVERGENCES
To make sense of India, one must understand its relationship with the outside world: its interactions, its analogies, its shifting identity over time and across space. In this essay, author and former director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor writes
What if I were to ask you to look at an inscription? The letters are carved in basalt—it was meant to last— and it comes from an ancient port town near Mumbai.
Written in Prakrit, the words feel intensely local. They are an edict from the Emperor Ashoka for the people of Sopara. They encourage respect for one’s elders, courtesy towards slaves and servants, and gentleness towards all living beings. To read them, you would have had to stop here, in this par- ticular place, in front of this particular stone. Standing before it, as men and women did more than 2,000 years ago, we can try to recapture what the emperor’s suggestions meant for the way of life of this town in western India.
The object alone fascinates— its age, its careful, hand-carved incisions, its soft grey colour. It is one of India’s earliest surviving public proclamations. But does its meaning shift if we cast our gaze more widely? We might discover similar edicts by Ashoka in Af- ghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal or Bangladesh. We can find them addressing their readers not just in a Prakrit, but in any number of scripts and languages, including Brahmi, Kharosthi, Greek and Aramaic. Confronted with several inscriptions, we can see the emperor is trying to foster tolerance among all his people, for Ashoka’s empire spanned five million square miles, and unifying it was no small task. The emperor speaks in a way each community will understand.
More widely still, if we take the time to examine similar inscriptions across the globe, as the world’s first great empires began to spread throughout Asia, we can compare how other rulers strove to consolidate their authority. To understand Ashoka’s power, we might look at an inscription by the Greek general Alexander the Great, or the emperor of China Qin Shi Huangdi. He carved his on the side of a mountain.
India and the World [a recent exhibition, and now an illustrated book published by Penguin] is about the power of individual objects to return us to the past and reveal its fascinating stories. It is also about learning to view such objects in a surprisingly global context: if we know what to look for, we can see how each region of the world inevitably communicates beyond its borders. If you are going to tell the history of a land as vast as India, you cannot do it through texts alone. India and the World grew out of a popular series on BBc Radio 4 called “A History of the World in 100 Objects”. Each of the 100 episodes took an object from one part of the world at a particular moment and asked: What was going on elsewhere at that time? The results told a global story that revealed unexpected connections among the peoples and nations of the world.
India and the World takes a similar approach. The exhibition combines objects from the collections of Chhatra-