INTRODUCTION

The genius of India, said Jawaharlal Nehru, consists of synthesis. This book, a broad survey of Indian history and culture from the Third Millennium B. C. to the 17th Century A-D., bears witness to the keenness of Nehru's generalization. The more one studies Indian history, the clearer it becomes that no single basic Indian culture has been developed and elaborated through the ages. Instead, successive cultural influences have fused together to form the fascinating country and intricate way of life we know as India and Hinduism. The wonder of India is that these layers of fused elements have produced not an amorphous collection of hostile groups, but a cohesive Hindu society with a unique social structure, art and world view.

This society is, in fact, one of the most closely knit in world history. For an Indian, all action is ritual, all art is symbolic of religious ideas, all worship is an expression of life, all life is a facet of the Eternal. Underlying these identities is the Indian's sense of a spirit that pervades all things and the Indian's worship of this all-pervading spirit. An Indian must worship; some spend their lives in worshipful meditation, others make do with homage to a stone or a tree. Through a combination of worship, ritual and religion, Indians have succeeded in synthesizing extraordinarily diverse forces and influences.

In words and pictures, this book shows how the synthesizing process flowered into a varied and creative civilization during five millennia. The civilization's creative power was first seen in religion, in which the development of three great creeds—Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism—provides a record that no other culture has ever matched. This creativity was next seen in art, architecture and literature. And in the social order, Indian civilization created elaborate structures of caste and class-structures which can be explained, if not justified, by India's overall world view.

Like all human developments, these are linked to specific events in time, specific fusions and flowering of cultures. The earliest and perhaps the greatest of all Indian fusions took place between the prehistoric Harappan Culture—one of the oldest civilizations known to archeologists—and that of the Aryans, who invaded the subcontinent sometime after 1500 B. C. Later periods represent a great flowering of the Indian spirit. The first was that of the Mauryan Age of the Third Century B. C., dominated by a patron of Buddhism, the Emperor Ashoka. A second occurred during the Fourth and Fifth Centuries A. D., when art, literature and science reached their highest points under the reigns of the Gupta emperors. Finally, the book discusses the 16th and 17th Century Age of the Mughals and Emperor Akbar, who among later Muslim monarchs most nearly approached the Hindu ideal of an all-India ruler.

A warm word of praise should be added for the author of the book, the editors of Time-Life Books and consultant Ainslie T. Embree for the skill and grace with which they have interwoven the many strands of this rich cultural tapestry to form a lucid and fascinating design.

PERCIVAL SPEAR Fellow of Selwyn College University Lecturer in History Cambridge University