India DiscoveredOne of the books I treasure most in my collection is
Early Views of India - The Picturesque Journeys of Thomas and William Daniell by Mildred Archer. This book reproduces
The Acquaints of India by the Daniells, who traveled to many places in the Indian subcontinent during 1786-1794 and made sketches of India's monuments. This was a period when the history of pre-Islamic India still remained vague under the weight of centuries, Ashoka the Great was unheard of and Buddha was thought of as a mythological figure. "
The journeys by the artists, under threat from wild animals, bandits and local wars, required courage, resourcefulness and stamina", writes Mildred Archer, who gives detailed commentary about the travels.
There are 258 wonderful illustrations in the book, giving us glimpses of how India looked like towards the end of eighteenth century, when the British were firmly establishing their power in the entire subcontinent. We could see numerous monuments - Some of them have totally disappeared now, some had disintegrated further but later renovated to today's shape, etc. Among these illustrations, we could even see a Taj Mahal with tall trees growing around it. For many of the monuments, the historicity was not completely known when the sketches were made, and they were just inviting curiosity of the artists.
This week I read the book
India Discovered written by John Keay, which is a masterpiece like his another book,
India - A History which I have read earlier. Immensely readable and informative, this book describes the explorations and painstaking study by the Europeans of British India which recovered "India's lost civilization", or almost all of India's ancient history that we know as of today, which perhaps would have otherwise perished along with our numerous monuments and manuscripts. "
No subject people, no conquered land, was ever as exhaustively studied as was India during the period of British rule", Keay writes.
As in a
book on India's discovery which I have read in Time Life Books series, this book also concentrates more on the visionary historians rather than on pure history, and the author too mentions this in his Introduction. Thus, William Jones's discovery of Chandragupta Mourya, Prinsep's decoding of Ashoka's edicts, Alexander Cunningham's excavations at Indus Valley and James Alexander's visit to
Ajantha caves are all presented in a dramatic way, in beautiful language, which makes this book an exciting and pleasurable one to read. Like professor V Raghunathan's
book on the current state of Indian society, I think
India Discovered is also a must-read for every Indian to understand how our glorious past was discovered, studied and protected by foreigners, who didn’t always have great support from their Governments. Their passion, dedication and continuous focus on their study and quest for knowledge should hopefully inspire us.