The India They Saw- Foreign Accounts: 5th Century BC-7th Century AD (Volume 1)

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An account of the grandeur of ancient India as perceived by her foreign visitors from hoary times, and their wonder at her rich philosophical efflorescence and material abundance. The foreigners marvelled at the deep spiritual convictions that allowed yogis and widows to ascend a burning pyre without murmur; the social harmony of myriad tribes and castes; and above all, the common culture and love of justice permeating and binding all in seamless unity. Beginning with the Greeks and especially those who accompanied Alexander, these accounts comprise our first records into the social, moral, legal, and economic life of the Indian people, and the early development of the civilisational paradigm of dharma, artha, kama and moksa.

The rise of Christianity pushed Europe into a cocoon. Thereafter, Buddhist pilgrims from China traversed the land between the fourth and the eighth centuries, visiting the major monasteries and sites associated with the Buddha, and left interesting memoirs behind. This uninhibited intellectual and spiritual exploration of India's Sanskritic or Indic culture ended abruptly with the rise of Islam in Arabia in the seventh century, and its outward thrust into Europe, north Africa, Central Asia and the Indian sub-continent, where it fought to establish political and religious supremacy. Possibly the last Buddhist monk to take the land route to India was the Korean pilgrim Hye Ch'O, who arrived as the armies of Islam began cutting through Central Asia.

The idea of a compilation on India through the eyes of incredulous and enchanted foreign observers was mooted by Sir Vidia Naipaul during a conversation in October 2004, with a view to providing contemporary readers with a bird's-eye view of how this ancient land has ever fascinated and attracted the merchant, the student, the curious, the adventurer, and the devout. These accounts by outsiders offer valuable insights into the history and culture of an epoch in which Indian records were generally deficient from the perspective of modern scholars. The classical writers (mainly Greeks and Romans) and Buddhist pilgrims (Chinese, Koreans) who traversed the region in the early historical period bore witness to the sheer abundance of India's material civilisation, the vastness and variety of her landscape, and her well-earned reputation for spiritual and philosophical efflorescence.

For students of Indian history, these testimonies have proved exceptionally helpful in piecing together the political history of the land and gleaning information on a host of worldly matters on which the native Indian literature of the same period was lacking. Indian tradition tended to portray historical persons and events, traditions, social, moral, legal, and economic issues, from a civilisational perspective, with a view to providing instruction on dharma (the Hindu moral paradigm), artha (wealth, prosperity and well-being), kama (worldy desires and aspirations) and moksa (salvation). Rooted in the poetic labours of Sutas and Magadhas, royal eulogists who preserved the genealogies of the gods, sages, kings and heroes, these became the bedrock of our itihasa-purana tradition, the sources for the myriad Puranas, and Itihasas such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which, GP. Singh argues, "include almost all the elements of historical tradition"². By the age of the Imperial Guptas royal archives evolved, though these were prone to destruction during periods of political unrest.