The India that Alexander briefly encountered when he reached the banks of the Indus had many kingdoms, including tribal republics (jana-padas), the most powerful of which were located in the Gangetic plains. It was a world where there was tension between the world-affirming householders (yajamanas) and the world-renouncing hermits (shramanas).
Shortly after Alexander left, India saw its first great imperial empire, that of the Mauryans, built on the Persian principle of central control, with its capital in Pataliputra in Magadha (modern-day Bihar). The first Mauryan emperor, Chandragupta, eventually renounced his throne and became a Jain monk. His grandson, Ashoka, played a key role in popularizing the Buddhist monastic order.
Buddhism, based on renunciation, meditation and pacifism, spread from India to Central Asia and South East Asia and eventually East Asia. Even the idea of liberation from the trap of unending rebirths reached Europe through trade routes. They influenced the monastic mystery cults of the Near East and Europe such as Orphism, Mithraism and eventually Christianity.
Scholars believe that the Greeks introduced stone sculptures to India, however, the difference between Greek and Indian imagery is stark. Greek images are highly individualistic, asymmetrical, muscular, masculine, and the gods look imperious. Indian images are representational, symmetrical, soft, almost feminine and the gods smile and seem playful.
From Roman Empire to Holy Roman Empire
Interestingly, it was the Romans who took Greek thought to the next level. More realistic in its outlook, Rome was a city state in Italy that believed in democracy during peacetime and dictatorship during wartime. Like the Greeks, the Romans were contemptuous of the barbarians. Two thousand years ago, they established an empire that controlled the entire Mediterranean with a network of roads that allowed for the effective movement of troops to conquered lands and an efficient flow of wealth back to Rome.
Unlike the Greeks who frowned on the idea of central control and empire, the Romans sought consolidation and singularity. This happened in three phases.
In the first phase, which began nearly 2300 years ago, the Roman republic was made the centre of their world, and the idea of Rome deemed greater than any Roman citizen.
In the second phase, the Caesars made themselves permanent dictators of Rome, bypassing the democratic Roman senate, and functioned like the God-kings of yore. This happened 2000 years ago.
In the third phase that took place around 1700 years ago, when attacks from the wild Germanic tribes of the north forced the Caesars to move east to Byzantium (the ‘new’ Rome), the Caesar Constantine embraced Christian monotheism, wiping out all rival ‘pagan’ faiths.
The rise of the Holy Roman Empire, or Christendom, marked the end of a thousand years of Graeco-Roman civilization. The God of Abraham eclipsed both Greek mythos and Greek logos. The world was believed to be controlled by a personal deity, not impersonal meddlesome quarrelsome gods. Independent thinking was considered arrogant, and humility was demanded. The church became the controller and gatekeeper of all knowledge. Faith was seen as the sunlight and reason as the shadows. Later historians would call this period the Dark Ages. It would last a thousand years.
As Christianity tightened its grip over Imperial Rome, India saw the rise of what is now called classical—Puranic—Hinduism, patronized by the Gupta kings of north India. In other words, as Greek mythology was replaced by Christian mythology in Europe, Vedic mythology transformed into Puranic mythology in India.
The rise of Puranic Hinduism had a negative impact on the spread of Buddhism within the Indian subcontinent. As a monastic order, Buddhism did not see great value in worldly things. Puranic Hinduism, however, favoured the householder’s life over the hermit’s. Buddhist monasteries and caves gradually gave way to vast Hindu temple complexes, where art and culture flourished. Here, indulgence (bhoga) was as valued as restraint (yoga).
India was known as the land of the golden sparrow because Indian merchants sought only gold from the rest of the world, which seemed to have an insatiable appetite for Indian textiles and spices.
It is significant to note that around the same time that the Roman emperors turned Christian to prevent fragmentation of their empire, the Chinese emperors of the Sui dynasty turned to Buddhism to unify China.
From the Crusades to Enlightenment
Then, 1400 years ago, a new religion rose in Arabia—Islam. Like Christianity, it spoke of one God, Original Sin and redemption. But unlike Christianity, it saw Jesus not as the son of God, but as one of God’s many prophets (another one allegedly being Alexander). The final prophet according to Islam was Muhammad, through whom the will of God was expressed and compiled in the holy book known as the Quran.
Islam spread rapidly across Persia, India, China, Africa and soon stood at the gates of Europe, via Spain. Here its march was halted and eventually reversed by the Christian leaders of Europe, who became part of what came to be known as the Western Roman Empire led by the Pope in Rome, distinct from the Eastern Roman Empire led by the emperor at Byzantium.
What followed were the Crusades, a war between the Christian and Muslim worlds, which came to a bloody end 500 years ago with the Muslims conquering Byzantium and putting an end to the Holy Roman Empire, and with it the Dark Ages.
The fall of Byzantium saw hordes of scholars and philosophers move westwards to Rome, bringing back with them the lost Greek knowledge along with revolutionary new Arab sciences. This led to the Renaissance or rediscovery of Greek ideas, and the Age of Enlightenment, which would change the world forever.
Now science was sunlight, and faith became the shadow. The authority of the church, the Pope and the Roman emperor was questioned. A single united Christendom gave way to the empires of the English, the French, the Germans and the Russians. By the eighteenth century, the idea of monarchy was being completely rejected, at first by the French Revolution and later by the formation of the United States of America.
Political change was accompanied by technological, and economic, change. European philosophers, inspired by early Arab thinkers, took Greek philosophy beyond matters of politics and society. Thus the sciences blossomed: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, botany, zoology and astronomy. A whole series of discoveries and inventions resulted in the Industrial Revolution. The printing press liberated knowledge from the control of the clergy. Sea routes were discovered. Factories were set up. Colonies were acquired. Old trading partners, such as India, gradually became the source of raw materials for the factories in Europe. Kings and their armies no longer controlled the world. Industrialists and business houses were now a force to reckon with.
From about 1000, warlords from Central Asia who had converted to Islam overran India, destroying what remained of Buddhism and shaking up Hinduism at its very foundations.
Indians became increasingly more inward-looking: traders no longer travelled by seas to faraway lands, preferring to outsource all travel to Arabs; the status of women declined; the jati (caste) system became increasingly rigid and draconian, with some professions being considered ‘purer’ than others.
Sanskrit, the language of the elite, found a strong rival in royal courts in Farsi, the language of the Persian aristocracy. This intermingling spurred an intellectual revolution: the rise of regional literature such as Hindi, Marathi, Odia, Assamese, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, and the amplification of bhakti, the discourse of passionate devotion that binds devotee to deity.
When the Age of Enlightenment was dawning in Europe, the Mughals established their empire in India. While Europe became industrial, India remained agricultural.
After the British overthrew the Mughals in the eighteenth century, they brought in railways and education. The railways served the same purpose as roads in the Roman Empire: enabling the colonizers to control the geography. The schools and colleges, besides creating clerks for their vast network of administrative offices, established a Western gaze in the minds of Indians, overshadowing the native gaze. The colon
izers saw this as a noble act of civilizing the savages. India began to be explained using colonial templates.
From Imperialism to Nation States
Science focuses on facts and with more facts and more ways to make sense of them, scientific truth expands. Religious truth, however, remains static. Naturally, with scientific facts challenging fundamental assumptions about the material world, religious truth failed to satisfy. So scientists turned to Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle for answers.
The rediscovery of Greek philosophy in Europe, however, was not accompanied by a resurgence of Greek mythology, except with a sense of nostalgia. People preferred the story of one God to the stories of many gods. This curious mixing of Greek philosophy and Christian theology resulted in a new wave of thinking that gave rise to what we now called secularism.
Secular philosophers, like the ancient Greeks, valued individual thinking, but unlike ancient Greeks, they insisted on equality and liberty of man, which were Christian values. Humanists like Kant, Rousseau and Hegel believed in the power of reason that enabled humans to break free from nature. But anti-humanists like Nietzsche, Marx and Freud questioned the very rationality of humanity, and attributed all actions to unconscious motives. If humanists defined cosmos, anti-humanists saw chaos in cosmos. Everything in life became ‘problematic’, a shadow, intensifying the yearning for sunlight.
In the march towards the twenty-first century, empires collapsed, colonies transformed into nation states, theories such as Evolution and the Big Bang emerged, atheism rose alongside science, technology, industrialization and capitalism, and religion came to be seen as the prime cause of fundamentalist terrorism. But seekers of social justice and human rights still function like evangelical missionaries, determined to convert the world, to drag people into the sunlight. There is talk of the ‘good fight’ for the ‘good life’. But this quest for cosmos seems to be plunging the world further into chaos.
In modern India, the educated elite views itself as a champion of logos and so rejects all things religious in the quest to be scientific and secular. They see the masses much as the Greeks viewed the barbarians: feudal, anti-democratic, favouring the mythos of either Hinduism or Islam. This has resulted in the infamous divide between ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’. Bharat accuses India of being westernized, while India hopes that Bharat will be eventually modernized.
From Nation States to Globalization
Today, the West sees itself in a post-mythic, post-religious, post-structural modern world.
But the mythic eye does not agree.
Modernity firmly clings to the finite linear structure. In journalism as well as Hollywood movies, the hero myth dominates. The political discourse presents authority figures as overbearing Titans who need to be overthrown by young Olympians. Doctors look at disease as pathologies (monsters) to be overcome by medical and surgical intervention. Reaching a target in the world of business is considered an Olympian triumph. Technology is the new ambrosia, meant for all. The clash between humanists and anti-humanists, structuralists and post-structuralists mirrors the conflict between Apollonian clarity and Dionysian mysteries, over whom Zeus has to prevail.
This modern/secular/Greek worldview force-fits Hindu mythology into Greek or Christianity templates. Thus Hindu devas become ‘phallic’ like Hermes, and ‘rapists’ like Zeus, and asuras are explained as Christian demons, or Greek Titans. So the worldview establishes that India is in the shadows and in need of sunlight. It dismisses all talk of rebirth as mere superstition, failing to see the impact of this idea on the Indic mind.
Indic mythologies—Hindu, Buddhist and Jain—do not follow the linear structure that Greek storytellers (from chaos to cosmos) or Greek philosophers (from faith to reason) or Christian missionaries (from many gods to one God) or scientists and activists (from unjust feudal faith to fair egalitarian development) prefer. It has its own structure: a cyclical one.
Western mythology propagates the idea that the world is in need of changing, either by Greek heroes, or by Abrahamic prophets and kings, or by scientists, activists and capitalists. Indic mythology presents the idea that the world is constantly changing, human intervention notwithstanding. There are no heroes or villains, no oppressor or oppressed, no saviour or martyr, just different ways of looking at reality. That is why the West sees itself as masculine, active, decisive, violent and straightforward, and qualifies Indic ideas as feminine, passive, ambiguous, non-violent yet cunning.
In terms of the ‘allegory of the cave’, Indian sages valued the sunlight outside as well as the shadows inside. What is sunlight for some people will be shadows for others. If one is in sunlight in one context, one is in the shadows in another. The seeker is therefore encouraged to observe with empathy—rather than argue with—contrary points of view. Here, subjectivity is given as much value as objectivity, and the journey is towards plurality, not singularity. The point is not to replace false knowledge with true knowledge; the point is to expand the mind to accommodate all kinds of knowledge.
The West dismisses the Indic worldview as chaos, thus closing its mind to any new possibility but its own. Not surprisingly, there are many books by Western scholars that ‘explain’ Hindu mythology, but very few by Indian scholars that bother to ‘observe’ Western mythology.
This book is an attempt to bridge that gap.
I do not claim objectivity; I am comfortable with subjectivity and well aware of my Indian gaze. I do not fear the shadows, but I do not claim the sunlight either. I simply present my truth of Greek myths and hope it enriches, and expands, your truth. So read this book keeping in mind:
Within infinite myths lies an eternal truth
Who sees it all?
Varuna has but a thousand eyes
Indra a hundred
You and I, only two.
The common sources of Greek mythology come from a period stretching a thousand years from the rise of the Greek city states until the transformation of the Roman Empire into the Holy Roman Empire. These sources include: The ancient Greek epics of Homer (Iliad and Odyssey) and Hesiod (Theogony), and the Homeric hymns to the gods dating back to the seventh century BCE.
The now-lost Epic Cycle which included Cypria (the story from the marriage of Peleus till the wrath of Achilles), Aethiopis (the story from the death of Hector, through the attack by the Amazons and the Ethiopians, till the funeral games to mark the fall of Achilles), Little Iliad (which tells the story of Philoctetes and ends with the Trojan Horse), Iliupersis (the story of the sack of Troy), Nostoi (the story of the return of the Greek heroes) and Telegony (the story of Telegonus, Odysseus’s son by the witch Circe).
The classical Greek plays of Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles dating back to the fourth century BCE as well as the writings of Greek scholars such as Herodotus, Plutarch, Pausanias and Apollodorus.
Roman writings, in Latin, such as Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Virgil’s Aeneid, Hyginus’s Fabulae and Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca composed circa the first and second centuries CE.
Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna, written in the fourth century ce, tells us many tales of the latter part of the Trojan War.
Greek mythology has been a common source of metaphors and allegories for European, and later American, poets.
Gods of Greek, Roman and Hindu mythologies
Greek name Roman name Closest Indian equivalent
Aphrodite Venus Rati
Apollo Apollo Vishnu
Ares Mars Kartikeya
Artemis Diana Revanta (male)
Athena Minerva Saraswati
Cronus Saturn Shani
Demeter Ceres Bhu-devi
Dionysus Bacchus Shiva
Castor and Pollux Castor and Polydeuces Ashwini Kumar
Eos Aurora Usha or Aruna
Eris Discordia Kalaha (Alakshmi)
Eros Cupid Kama
Gaia Terra Prithvi
Hades Pluto Yama
Hephaestus Vulcan Vishwakarma
H
era Juno Sachi
Heracles Hercules Vasudeva and Baladeva
Hermes Mercury Budh
Hestia Vesta Yogini
Persephone Proserpine Patala-Lakshmi, Shakambari
Poseidon Neptune Varuna
Rhea Ops Aditi
Uranus Uranus Dyaus, Brahma
Zeus Jupiter Indra
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