For some bizarre and unfathomable reason, you know, reading the article above ⬆️ took me back on memory lane to my school days .
In my history lessons for Class 8 we had a text book which had 2 chapters which we were made to study very thoroughly by our class-teacher (BTW, I studied in an Irish Catholic missionary school in Chennai).
The title of the 2 chapters :
The first was : The Glory that was Greece .
The second one was : The Grandeur that was Rome .
In the first we were made to learn about the cultural greatness of Athens and in the second about the military greatness of the Roman Empire.
I never wondered then why there was no chapter on the civilisation of India in the Class 8 syllabus for world history.
Years later in my university undergraduate days I came upon a history book about India written by the historian A.L.Basham . I was intrigued by its title which to me seemed suggestive of no greatness of any kind… or perhaps only of greatness of a lowly kind . The title was “The Wonder that was India”.
The word “wonder” can be very ambiguous in its connotations. In juvenile, teenybopper emoji language it’s what you might say is the big difference between 🤩and 🙄.
No, seriously, I think the word has more to do with exotic tourism than with either glory or grandeur.
“Wonder” used by a historian like A .L. Basham to describe an ancient, magnificent civilisation like India seemed to me a tad patronising, even condescending. I found myself secretly resenting my beloved India getting somehow relegated by Western Academia to the far fringes of Alice’s Wonderland….
Somehow it made feel that Basham was not being fair at all in not quite bracketing India alongwith the “greatness” of glory or grandeur of that Greece and Rome respectively were. I felt quite peeved and belittled. I’d have rather had Basham choosing a more respectful if not respectable word and title like, say … “The Marvel that was India”.
Today. I know from William Dalrymple’s recent book published, “The Golden Road”, that Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta had worked out all the complex algebra and trigonometry equations and theorems long, long before the Archimedean era or the da Vinci era ever first came close to even understanding the place of zero in modern Numbers Theory or how to calculate the value of Pi accurately to the 7th decimal place …
So, I want to ask now all my fellow countrymen who read the above ⬆️ Op-Ed piece this:
Is Indian greatness “glorious”, “grandiose” or just “wonderful”?
Sudarshan Madabushi