Should India study, if at all, solely those aspects of Greece that have a clear Indian connection?
Two decades ago, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), with an endowment from the Government of Greece and additional financial support from the AG Leventis Foundation, instituted a Greek Chair. The Chair is named after Dimitrios Galanos (1760-1833), a Varanasi-based Greek Indologist and translator of Sanskrit texts into Greek.
Its mission pertains to the teaching of the Greek language and civilisation vis-à-vis Indic expositions on politics and ethics in the form of certificate courses. Prof Vasileios Syros, a Greek historian of political thought, has lately been appointed to the Chair. Since 1998, on the lines of Hebrew and Turkish, Greek has been offered at JNU’s School of Language, Literature & Culture Studies as an optional language at BA, MA and PhD levels.
However, there is no full-fledged centre or programme dedicated to it on the lines of Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Spanish, etc.
Despite the fact that two Greek poets, viz. Giorgos Seferis and Odysseas Elytis, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963 and 1979 respectively, and many other Greek writers, including Kostis Palamas, Angelos Sikelianos, Nikos Kazantzakis and Yiannis Ritsos, were unsuccessfully nominated for the same, the appeal of Greek as a modern language has been limited.
Indians came to know about Greece in the 19th century through their exposure to English language and literature. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-1831), the radical Eurasian teacher at Hindu College (later Presidency College) in Kolkata, composed heroic poems like The Greeks at Marathon (1825), Address to the Greeks (1826), and Greece (1827) cheering the Greeks in their war of independence against the Ottoman Turks.
In 1833, Khetramohan Mookerjea, wrote the first textbook on Greek history in any Indian language. Written in Bengali as Greek Desher Itihas, it was an abridgement of Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Greece (1809). Phiroze Vasunia, a rare Indian classicist, who teaches at University College London, describes this phenomenon as Athens in Calcutta in his book The Classics and Colonial India (2013). Apart from Derozio, Vasunia mentions Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–1873), the poet of the Bengal Renaissance, who wrote the Hector-badh (Slaying of Hector) based on the Iliad.
Britain is a recognisable leader in Hellenic/Greek studies. One of the reasons is that they have cultivated that language since the 16th century. It was being taught, alongside Latin, in their grammar schools and universities.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, India created her own classical background. It comprised the Vedic era, 16 Mahajanapadas, the Maurya, Sunga, Gupta, Chola and Vijayanagara empires. It was the age of Indian nationalism, and the historical work complemented this political venture. Porus, who fought against Alexander, and Chandragupta Maurya, who defeated Seleucus I Nicator and founded the first pan-Indian Empire, became inspiring figures.
Thankfully, however, a common ground came to light. It was the lineage of Indo-Greek kings, i.e., the Greeks who had accompanied Alexander to India and subsequently established kingdoms in Bactria (Afghanistan), Punjab and Sindh. The Indo-Greek period (326 BC and 400 AD) witnessed confluence of Indic and Hellenic thoughts in the form of the Greco-Buddhist Gandhara school of art that produced the first series of Buddha statues.
The Pali text Milinda-panha records spiritual conversations between Bactrian king Menander (c 158-138 BC) and Buddhist monk Nagasena. The Garuda Column raised by Heliodorus, who was an ambassador of Antialkidas, the Indo-Greek king of Taxila, and styled himself as a devotee of Krishna in Besnagar, near Vidisha, MP, is a good example of how certain Greeks adopted Hinduism.
More than a century ago, Gauranga Nath Banerjee registered a number of Hellenic influences on India in his book Hellenism in Ancient India (1920). However, this “commonality” mindset also became a hindrance. Serious work on Hellenism in India gets hampered by an obsession with affinities and physical encounters. In the Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies (2009), for which Phiroze Vasunia served as co-editor, there was not a single contributor from South Asia. Should India study, if at all, solely those aspects of Greece that have a clear Indian connection?
The Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Rohilkhand University in Bareilly might not be counted as one of India’s premier institutions. However, during the 1990s, under historian Prof Udai Prakash Arora, it launched a new initiative in historical research on Greece. Prof Arora was subsequently invited to occupy JNU’s Greek Chair, a post he has now retired from. While the Dimitrios Galanos Chair is a laudable and promising project, India should prepare for a more independent scholarship on Greek civilisation.
(The author is an independent researcher based in New Delhi)
