Quick Take: India, the Country with no Religious Wars
Much of mankind belongs to religious communities created in India, a country where indigenous religious competition didn't result in any religious wars
When I was a teenager, I was crazy about history and my parents bought me a big series of UNESCO world history tomes, huge hardcover books with big pictures and many chapters written by various specialists. Some of those, as far as I remember, were excellent and thought-provoking. The ones on India were absolute bullshit.
I can recall the shock that I felt on reading one particular volume about the history of South Asia. I must have been fifteen, and I already knew the basics of Roman and Greek history, as well as that of Mesopotamia — my first love, via comic books — so I expected something along those lines for India, a land about which I knew nothing at all.
Instead, what I got was a very, very long introduction by some sort of specialist writing in the late 1970s, which boiled down to: “well, the documentation for Indian history is sparse, I don’t really know anything about Indian archeology if it even exists, and Indians tell a lot of stories and myths and their books are all unreliable religious mumbo-jumbo, so we’re going to skip straight to that time in the early 2nd millennium AD when the Muslims invade India and we get some sort of clarity on what the heck is going on.”
Versions of this are still repeated in general history books purporting to narrate the history of the ancient world, of Eurasia, or whatever. Even histories of India often hurry through the first Indian empires (Mauryas and Guptas) explaining that it’s all rather confusing and contradictory and they were Buddhist and also Jain and also Hindu, and anyway caste perhaps was invented by the British in the 19th century.
(That’s a totally inane idea, by the way, and perhaps the most Orientalist notion ever devised. See below
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I find this amazing because, after all, much of mankind belongs to religious communities created in India, a huge country where religious competition didn't result in religious wars. As I write, Richard Gere Buddhism is the unofficial religion of the West’s Elite Human Capital. Have you met a person who claims to be “spiritual” who doesn’t have a deep interest in Buddhism? Because I haven’t. Not one. They’re all Richard Gere Buddhists.
This is a fundamental reason why the history of India matters. But there are others.
Take the traditional narrative, repeated ad nauseam by atheists the world over — I should know: I am one myself — that religions purport to bring peace and harmony while in reality they bring war and division. That’s not true anywhere, at least until the arrival of Abrahamic religions with inbuilt tendencies inherited from the ancient Jews, some of the dumbest and most violent people ever. And that narrative is particularly not true in India.
In Europe, one can always argue that, yes, Christianity imposed itself in the absence of true religious wars — at least until late in the 1st millennium — because paganism was such a spent force that it wasn’t even an alternative religion anymore: Christianity in effect competed with elite atheism and traditional cults in the countryside associated with low status and illiteracy (that’s where the word “pagan” comes from, from the Latin word for “hillbilly.”) Yes, I have written about that too:
In China, where the traditional folk religion — Taoism/Daoism — survives to this day, Buddhism superimposed itself over a pre-existing religious landscape slowly, in a sort of mostly unopposed encroachment. This was at least partly because Chinese elites for the most part have always been rather lukewarm regarding religion. And, since you ask, well, yes:
It’s only in the Middle East that Islam came out from the desert sword in hand, and never left its militant roots behind. But, by the time Muhammad was born, in India Buddhism, Jainism and the Aryan Vedic tradition from which Hinduism would emerge had been locked in a contest to win hearts and minds for about a millennium.
It never ceases to amaze me that this contest lacked foul play for such a long time and even later. There are many reasons why Hinduism eventually won the day and became India’s dominant religion, but none of them has to do with wars, forced conversions and coercive policies, the basis of Islamic expansion always and everywhere, and of Christian expansion more often than some would care to admit.
Shockingly, Indian religions mostly competed in artistic and literary fields, trying to gain the support of both members of the literate elites and, with festivals, public events and the spread of tales with religious undertones, that of the lower classes. This makes India rather unique. For the longest time, I’ve been mulling the idea that all art or most art ever created anywhere is propaganda of one kind or another: and India is exhibit A for that theory.
If there’s one country in the world with a history where propaganda wars in the end have been more meaningful, more relevant to the actual creation of a society than actual wars, that is India. That fact alone makes Indian history fascinating. I’ve looked closely at this process in many pieces, like these for example:
I keep going, because my History of Mankind is about writing the history of everything and everybody and because I remain fascinated by Indian history. That readers seem to love posts about India — they all do very very well — is an additional incentive.
India’s history is very long. I recently looked in detail how the then-powerful Buddhist clergy helped alleviate some of the discrimination intrinsic to the caste system, and also made sure to let people know about its efforts:
As I wrote:
Thus, the Buddhist Bhaddasala Jataka tells the story of how Prasenajit, king of the long-gone northern kingdom of Kosala, repudiated his wife and son when he found that she was the daughter of a slave, but repented after the Buddha explained to him that it`s only the male line that counts, and that the female line can’t taint a family.
With social mobility and roles hardened into place by the caste system, Indian society was remarkably conservative and a great emphasis on chastity indicates, as in other periods in history, that women’s sphere of freedom was curtailed. Women withdrew from public life and were given only limited education at best; they were often married, particularly in upper-caste families, before puberty, and had limited claims to inheritance; they wore the “tilaka” on their forehead, a mark symbolizing their husband’s blood, as a mark of belonging.
In such a society, the circulation of Buddhist Jataka tales functioned as a sort of reluctantly tolerated dissent. Aesop-style stories with animals as protagonists voicing human frustrations and acting out human dramas were particularly favored, and those with weaker animals triumphing over superior ones were very popular.
The Setaketu Jataka has a straightforward human story about a Chandala subverting the Brahmanical notion of pollution. In the story, a proud Brahmin student happens to come near a Chandala, and is horrified at the thought that the wind might strike the Chandala’s body and then strike him, thereby polluting him. He therefore orders the Chandala to move to the leeward side of the road so that he did not stand in the wind’s path, but the Chandala says that he will only oblige if the Brahmin will answer a question – having accepted the challenge, the arrogant Brahmin fails to answer, and has to humiliatingly accept that the Chandala-infested air gets in contact with his body.
In a similar manner, the Jatakas subverted ideas about caste and women. While the Vedic tradition frequently described lower-caste women as filthy, Jatakas depict them as humble, reserved and full of merit; women of the upper classes (often Hindu), meanwhile, are presented as innately fickle, untrustworthy and adulterous. In theory, at least, Buddhists kept the path of renunciation open to women, although texts frequently focus on women within the household and warn of the impact of women leaving their household to become nuns; some Sutras declare that a woman could not enter the monastic path until she was re-born as a man, and others contain stories of miraculous sex changes making that possible.
Over centuries, the Hindus — with their wonderful, colorful deities, their musical festivals and their celebration of everything weird about India — won and Buddhism has practically disappeared from the subcontinent.
However, Buddhism has never been eradicated from India because there never was an attempt to eradicate it.
I can’t stand Richard Gere Buddhism, and I’m not so keen on other types either. This is not about praising some religions and criticizing others. This is simply to make the point that Indian history has a confusingly long number of dynasties and states rising and falling and one is tempted to say “you know what, who cares what’s the never-ending name of the dynasty that ruled Kerala in the 9th century.” But Indian history is not about that, it’s about so much more.