Mapping the labyrinth

Abraham Jacob delves into the deep vaults of ancient Indian writings on Hinduism and its philosophical experiments, providing an easy-to-read primer on both the country and its civilisation

Understanding India

Author: Abraham Jacob  

Publisher:   The Write Order

Pages: 596

Price: Rs 799

Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath, a book that has influenced generations, “How will we know it’s us without our past?”

His words were as true then as they are today; and as relevant for India today as they were for the American society that he was writing about at the time. The past is everything, and it is everywhere. It shapes the stories that human beings, countries and organisations spin around themselves, sticks to the sinewy coils of collective and individual memory and guides the way people think about culture and identity. In that context, Understanding India by Abraham Jacob captures the moment.

Mr Jacob’s book does not look at the past as an historical account. It does not chronicle the big and momentous events in the life of the nation, the author is instead more interested in discovering its soul.

He does that by looking at the ancient texts, exploring the works of ancient philosophers and modern historians and mythologists. He studies the writings of scholars who have studied Indian society, Hinduism and the country’s philosophical experiments, in an attempt, perhaps, to build an easy-to-read primer on a country and a civilisation.

The four Vedas are a laboratory of ideas that Mr Jacob writes, offering us an insight into early thinking. He believes that to know the country and its people, one must therefore know what the Vedic sages thought. The Rig Veda, for instance, is concerned about the meaning of life, existentialism and the creation of the universe among other things. Its hymns hypothesise about the emergence of the world from a ray of light, about the universe being stitched together after the dismemberment of a giant being and much else.

As many scholars have pointed out, the hymns adopt an animistic approach to creation, conveying divinity to Nature and animals and debating the meaning of life. The hymns are also a bundle of philosophical ideas—the Nasadiya Sukta, one of the creation hymns in the Rig Veda, while talking about the potential sources of creation, also contemplates the state of nothingness, for example. The Purusa Sukta examines chaos and order and so on.

Given the multidimensional and varied perspectives that have gone into their composition, it is impossible to fully unpack the Vedas or contain their ideas within a single discipline, or topic. How does one cover the complex and layered nature of Vedic thought without oversimplifying the ideas or turning them? This is not a problem that is easily resolved and Mr Jacob struggles to find the right balance.

The same is true for other ancient texts that the book looks at: The Shastras and the Puranas are as perplexing as the Vedas. The Arthashastra, for instance, is not just a treatise on economics, it is also a guide to kings and kingship, which Mr Jacob writes that he has not been able to dig into in full. But, the question then is, how do readers reconcile the conclusions being drawn by the author with just a partial reading of the text?

The book also goes into the life and times of early philosophers and poets. Mr Jacob is keen to demonstrate the vastness of the repository that he has had to dig into, to find a coherent image of a country that does not always behave like one. His task has been complicated by the fact that this is a country that has seen the birth of three of the oldest religions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. How does one untangle the web of ideas that underpin the different theological orders?

The task at hand is undoubtedly difficult. Also, it has been attempted before (some have looked at the country’s philosophical legacy while others have tried to map the ancient narrative traditions to the ideas of identity and culture). But as Mr Jacob writes, he saw a gap in the way these texts and ideas have been presented so far—either too dense and obscure or overly facetious in their rendering. And a book that filled the gap was long overdue.

He may be right, but this book does not completely meet its own objective. As Mr Jacob declares at the start, he is no historian or philosopher or Sanskrit scholar and hence, his search for truth is routed through the works of others — writers, philosophers and scholars who have studied the vast library of Indian narrative texts and scriptures. This is why perhaps, he is diligent about relaying the ideas of others, always sticking closely to the hem of their creations. It makes the book less original than it could have been.

There is another aspect that books such as this one often overlook. There is a country that exists outside the ideas vested in the Sanskrit texts. The vast repository of folk and oral literature tells us as much, if not more, about the people of the region. Now, if there is a book that can bring the classical and the folk traditions together, it could finally help readers truly understand India.

The writer is a Mumbai-based journalist and co-founder of The Mythology Project