Civilising mission

HUMANITY has produced three great clusters of civilisations that have eventually extended to all the people of the world.

HUMANITY has produced three great clusters of civilisations that have eventually extended to all the people of the world.

Their interactions, although now all transformed by the effect of Western science and technology, will continue to shape our destiny through the next centuries: the European, which spread from the eastern Mediterranean to the north and centre of the continent (and to the Arabs who acquired it by conquest) and then to the Americas, Africa and Australasia; the Indian, which spread to much of Southeast Asia; and the Chinese, which spread to Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Of these clusters, India occupies a special place as the one geographically situated between, and consequently in contact with, Europe and China on either side. Thus the Greeks imagined that Dionysus, the son of Zeus by a mortal woman, had become a god after spending time in India. When Alexander the Great conquered what is now Pakistan, he went to visit the wise men of the country, whom the Greeks called gymnosophists, or "naked philosophers", but we would know as sanyasi. Eventually it was in the Hellenistic-Indian kingdom of Gandhara that Buddha was first represented as a man, based, like early images of Christ, on the model of the youthful and beardless Apollo. When Buddhism spread from India to China along the Silk Road, this anthropomorphic representation made its way to the shores of the Pacific.

Europe had therefore known of India, but as a faraway and almost legendary place, for about two millenniums before the first Westerners were able to sail there after finally rounding the Cape of Good Hope at the end of the 15th century. It was the moment when the new technology of printing was exploding and transforming the diffusion of knowledge, and the newly accessible land was soon amply documented in maps, prints and books.

This is also the starting point of the material in an absorbing exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, devoted to images of India from the early modern period to the 20th century. The works displayed are part of the so-called Portvale Collection; they are the property of Jim Masselos, a specialist in the history of the subcontinent, who has generously promised them to the gallery. It is a shame that there is no accompanying publication, but it is clear that a catalogue will require many years of research into images that vary as much in their media as in their content.

The exhibition begins with maps of the 16th and 17th centuries, including one of the Malabar coast whose Italian inscription refers to the ancient division of the globe into five zones: frozen polar caps, two temperate regions in either hemisphere and a torrid zone around the equator, through which it was long thought that voyagers could not pass on account of the extreme heat; mariners also knew the winds dropped dangerously around the equator, in what were then known as the doldrums.

The inscription reads: "This province is in the East Indies, in the torrid zone, eight degrees from the equator; it is always the same season there, perpetual equinox (that is, spring or autumn), with continual greenery and flowers and new fruit throughout the year . . . it is inhabited and ruled by idolators, but there are more than 60 Christian centres" -- these were traditionally ascribed to the missionary work of St Thomas, the one who had doubted Christ's resurrection and had to put his hand in the wound to believe. The understanding of oriental religions in early modern Europe is in itself a rich and complex topic. Much information was collected by Jesuit missionaries from the late 16th century onwards, and published in important works such as Athanasius Kircher's China illustrata in 1667. Knowledge of oriental iconography could still be very patchy, though, as we see from the fanciful image of Shiva in an engraving by Bernard Picart: multiple arms are arranged in a wheel and his hands hold, among other incongruous things, a violin.

It is important to stress, however, that such books are not at all motivated by a smug sense of Western superiority. On the contrary, Picart's book, The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World, first published in French in 1727-28, helped to establish what we think of as comparative religion, an eminently Enlightenment project that implicitly undermines the claim of any one religion to exclusivity. Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721) also uses the east as a vantage point for a new perspective on the West; the story of Europe's involvement in Asia is not only one of conquest and commercial exploitation but also of assimilating ideas that contributed to self-critical reflection.

The rationalist Enlightenment interest in the various customs of people across the world gives way, in the romantic period, to a fascination with otherness and a concern with the subjective experience of this encounter.

The transition is striking, in the exhibition, as one turns from the delightful but almost folk-art illustrations of everyday life of the so-called Company school, to a selection of plates from Robert Grindlay's Scenery, Costumes and Architecture, Chiefly on the Western Side of India (two volumes, 1826 and 1830).

The change of emphasis is immediately palpable in the use of chiaroscuro. Even before we decipher the images, we are aware of patches of light and pools of deep shadow conveying a sense of moodiness, and of cast shadows that speak of dawn or dusk.

In one particular image that sums up the love of romantic wonder, we see a group of men gazing at the enormous and ancient carved reliefs of the Elephanta Caves by torchlight, surrounded by deep darkness.

It may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with Indian history to realise that much of the subcontinent was ruled by the East India Company, established by Elizabeth I in 1600. The company had its own soldiers and eventually its own army, and after defeating the French at Plassey in 1757 it became the dominant foreign power in India. There were still struggles, such as the war against Tippoo Sultan mentioned a few weeks ago, in which the young Lachlan Macquarie took part.

In 1857, the Indian Mutiny effectively brought the company's rule to an end, and in 1858 authority was transferred to the crown. Queen Victoria became the ruler of India, with the title of empress, which appears, from a picture in The Illustrated London News of 1859, to have been used or proposed from the beginning, although it was only officially adopted at the recommendation of prime minister Benjamin Disraeli in 1876 and proclaimed at the great Delhi Durbar of 1877.

British rule in India, evoked in many fascinating and sometimes unidentified photographs, has been much discussed by historians and is an extremely complex subject. Considering that the governing institution for the first half of what can be taken as British dominion was a corporation that existed to profit from trade, its policy appears to have been remarkably enlightened. Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India (1773-85), was particularly concerned to base law and legal structures on Indian tradition.

This was very much like the policy of the Roman Empire, which generally abstained from interference in such matters of local social and political life as did not concern broader imperial interests. Rome, in fact, provided the inevitable paradigm and precedent for the management of a multinational empire and even the impeachment of Hastings on his return from his commission, which ran from 1787 to 1795 and ended in acquittal, echoes Cicero's prosecution of Verres in 70BC for abuses as governor of Sicily.

Whatever else one may say about the British Raj, it left India with several priceless assets: a functioning democracy -- and, importantly, an army that does not interfere in political life -- a legal system and a common language that is also increasingly the common language of the contemporary world. It is an enormous credit to the Indians that they have preserved and developed this heritage despite widespread social and economic strains during the last half-century since independence in 1947. Islamic Pakistan inherited the same advantages but has not managed to maintain them, and is today unstable and corrupt.

The Indian experience suggests some more general reflections. One is that people must be prepared to learn from each other and must take the initiative in doing so if they do not want change to be imposed on them from the outside. India gave civilisation to the less developed people of Southeast Asia -- such as the Javanese and the Khmers -- not by conquering them but simply by showing them a superior cultural model. India in turn has learned important lessons from the West, as have Japan and China in their different ways, although each has the problem of trying to reconcile the consequences of these lessons with their own traditional social values and beliefs.

But a still more fundamental principle is that civilisation and race are different things. The confusion begins in the romantic period, which invented the concept of culture as the traditional way of life and beliefs of a people, largely in opposition to the Enlightenment assumption of universal standards of civilisation. Culture is a local, tribal concept, civilisation a general one that by definition transcends the petty interests of tribes. Tribes and ethnic groups are inherently mutually hostile and those who think of themselves primarily in these terms are inevitably intolerant. And because culture is so closely associated with the idea of race, criticisms of another's culture are mistakenly condemned as racist.

Civilisation, however, has nothing to do with race and transcends cultures without necessarily abolishing them; thus Europe comprises many cultural groups that generally coexist in mutual tolerance. To understand this clearly is the most profound remedy against the tribal obtuseness of racism. In antiquity, after all, most of our European ancestors were illiterate barbarians. The West grew into what it is today when these rude forebears adopted and later strove to resurrect the civilisation of more advanced people.

The heritage of the Greeks and Romans was inevitably modified in the hands of the people who became the Italians, the French, the English and others, even as they tried to emulate or rival the achievements of the past. Civilisation, which was almost extinguished after the fall of Rome, gradually rebuilt itself and the descendants of Germanic barbarians became the most learned philologists the world had known.

As always, tradition lives through change and adaptation.

The ultimate lesson of all this is that civilisation is a matter of ideas, not of race. It is natural for human communities to worry about their ethnic composition being changed, especially when it seems to be happening rapidly.

But in the end, it doesn't matter whether the people reading Homer or Plato, Dante or Shakespeare, or for that matter the Bhagavad Gita or the Confucian Analects, have curly hair or straight, or whether their complexions are olive, pink or brown; what matters is that the great ideas of humanity should be rediscovered and continue to live and inspire civilised communities.