global studies paper

5 SOUTH AND CENTRAL ASIA

Global Labor and Asian Culture

Like the Middle East, South Asia has been at the crossroads of civilizations over the centuries. Outsiders came from the West, transforming Indian culture and bringing Islam, Christianity, and ancient Indo-European cultures and languages to the subcontinent. Some of Asia’s most important cultural traditions have flowed out of South Asia. Buddhism was born in India, and it spread from there around the world. Hinduism and Sikhism, which also had their origins in India, have had a global reach as well. The current interaction of South Asia with the world culturally, economically, and demographically has historical precedents. When we talk about South Asia, we are talking about a region that is, in

a narrow sense, easy to define—it is the subcontinent extending south from the huge continental mass of Eurasia, a wedge of land surrounded by the Indian Ocean to the southeast and southwest, by the world’s highest mountain range to the north, by deserts to the west, and by jungles to the east. It is the land of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; the island nations of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; and the mountain nations of Bhutan and Nepal. It is so self-contained that for centuries the region had no name; indeed, a name was not necessary, since this region’s inhabitants were scarcely aware that other people existed. However, from ancient times to the present, there have been busy trade routes both overland and over sea, and it was outsiders, in fact, who gave a name to the people living beyond the Indus River. They named them for the river—they were Indoos, or Hindus, and their land was Indu-land, or India. Outsiders indeed discovered India. But, perhaps because it was so

isolated, each incursion into the region—by ancient Aryans, medieval Mughals, colonial British, and contemporary globalization—has had a

significant impact. At the same time, culture and trade has flowed out of the subcontinent to other parts of the world. The trails led over water to Southeast Asia and over land to Central Asia and beyond. Because of the land connection through Central Asia’s Silk Road, Central Asia has been linked to South Asia, culturally as well as economically, for most of the world’s history. During the colonial period, British India was an entity unto itself, and in the twentieth century, Central Asia was dominated by the Soviet Union and thus was cut off from the subcontinent. But there has always been a South Asian–Central Asian connection. South Asia is, like the Middle East, the spawning ground for great

religious cultures. In the case of South Asia, these religious cultures are Hinduism and Buddhism, along with the religious traditions of Jains and Sikhs. Hence, it is culturally a region of global-out impact. From the very beginning, however, the global-in influences of other cultures have challenged and changed the region. One of the first of these global flows of influence from the outside came

around 1500 BCE from peoples and cultures from the West. This is the Indo- European culture often referred to as Aryan, though scholars debate who these people were and the actual nature of the incursion, whether it was a gradual intermingling or a series of sudden occupations. These people came from what is now Central Asia and Iran and were part of a large cultural interchange thousands of years ago that spread from Europe to South Asia. The Aryans brought with them the linguistic structure of Indo- European languages that, merged with indigenous languages, became ancient Sanskrit. Their gods also traveled to South Asia and became, in a somewhat different form, the gods of the ancient Vedic religion. In the fourth century BCE, the Greek warrior Alexander the Great

conquered the lands from the Mediterranean to the Indus River. Much of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indian Punjab were under Alexander’s influence. Some scholars think the name of the Afghan city, Kandahar, is etymologically linked to the name of Alexander. In any event, there were cultural interchanges from this meeting of Europe and South Asia, including influences on Buddhist iconography. Some of the earliest representations of the Buddha in the Greek-dominated South Asian region of Gandhara portray him in robes and with physical features that look distinctively Greek. Buddhist religious images and ideas traveled up the trade routes from

India to the region of Bactria, in what is now Afghanistan, which was ruled by Alexander’s generals and descendants, and then to the great cities of Bukhara and Samarkhand, in what is present-day Uzbekistan. These were hubs in the overland commercial trails that comprised the Silk Road,

uniting regions of the Middle East and the Middle East with India and China. It was the route that Mahayana Buddhism followed in spreading throughout Asia, making South Asian religious and philosophical ideas the dominant cultural stratum of the whole Asian region. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Central Asia was almost

literally at the center of the world. Through extraordinary horse-mounted military conquests, the great Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan ruled over an empire that stretched from Europe to China. It was the largest land empire in history, and for a time it united Eurasia politically. But the union was not a cultural one, since the Khans did not impose their own indigenous religion or customs on the areas they conquered. Later the ties established by Mongol rule allowed Tibetan Buddhism to become the religion of Genghis Khan’s old homeland, Mongolia, and the political networks created by the Mongols facilitated the spread of Islam throughout much of Central and South Asia. Beginning in the tenth century CE, Muslim rulers came to the Indian

subcontinent to establish an empire culminating in the Mughal dynasty. They left behind some of the region’s most magnificent architecture— including the elegant Taj Mahal—and the Muslim faith, which was adopted by a quarter of the population. From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, the British came from the West by sea, replacing the Mughal empire with a British one, and it too left its mark, although Indians disagree over whether the impact of British rule was, in the end, more helpful or harmful. Among the positive legacies of British rule in India were political institutions, education, railways, and roads. These, more than architecture and religion, connected the Indian subcontinent to the wider world. In the global era of the twenty-first century, the Indian subcontinent is

very much in a wider world. Through its development of sophisticated information technology systems, India has become a leader in computer technology and systems support. Once again, the subcontinent is linked to the world’s shifting currents, and like its connections through the ancient Silk Road, the ties are both economic and cultural. In the readings in this section, we begin with an excerpt from a book on

the religions of the Silk Road by historian of religion Richard Foltz, an American who has lived in the Central Asian region and currently teaches in Montreal, Canada. Central Asia’s moment of global centrality in the time of the Mongol emperors is described in an excerpt from a book on Kublai Khan by Morris Rossabi, a historian who teaches at City University of New York. The next reading is an essay that explores the global aspects of Hindu

religion and the influence that Hindu ideas have had in America, Europe, and other parts of the world. The author of this essay, Vasudha Narayanan, was born in India, received her Ph.D. from Harvard, and teaches religious studies at the University of Florida. In the next excerpt, two historians, Barbara and Thomas Metcalf, discuss the impact of British colonial rule on India, outlining its positive as well as its negative features. For most of his career, Thomas Metcalf has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and Barbara Metcalf has taught at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Davis. The final reading is an excerpt from a book on the latest aspect of

India’s relationship to the global world, its role in the global information economy. The authors of this excerpt, Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi, are both social anthropologists who specialize in South Asia and globalization and are located at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in India’s technological center, Bangalore.

RELIGIONS OF THE SILK ROAD

Richard Foltz

It is no coincidence that throughout history ideas and technologies have spread along trade routes, and that merchants have been among their prime transmitters. One only has to think about it to realize that traveling businessmen do not simply convey, sell, and acquire goods, and move on. They socialize, interact, and observe while on the road, and they take their impressions home with them. Nor are businessmen the only utilizers of trade routes; many other

kinds of travelers benefit from the networks fostered by commercial activity. In the modern world business travelers are the driving force behind the airline industry, even if the average flier thinks little about that connection. Likewise, the interstate highway system in the United States was devised as a means to encourage trucking—a thought to temper one’s curses when struggling to control the steering wheel in the wake of a passing eighteen-wheeler! Increasing attention has been given in recent years to the role of long-

distance trade in the cross-pollination of cultures and ideas. . . . Religions accompanied merchants and their goods along the overland Asian trade routes of pre-modern times. It is a story of continuous movement, encounters, mutual reactions and responses, adaptation and change. This is part—though, the reader is cautioned, only a part—of a much broader

historical dynamic of cultural interaction, exchange, and cultural conversion. While long-distance trade is not in and of itself an “explanation” of how religions spread across Asia or why Asians converted to them, a case will be made here that it is an important factor. . . . Although some of the religious traditions in this story (Christianity,

Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism) are familiar to us living today, it would be misleading to project too much of what we know of their modern manifestations into the Silk Road context. Religions are not monolithic, fixed institutions existing each in their own realm of dominance, although we often speak of “Christendom,” “the Islamic World,” and so on. In reality, religions are like organisms: They are born into this world at a point in time, they grow, develop, undergo diverse influences, and adapt to their environment. They quibble with their neighbors, experience periods of painful soul-searching, have good days and bad. At some point they may split like cells, each taking on a new life. Over time, having proven themselves, they may settle into the self-confident stasis of maturity. Sometimes, eventually, they die. In China, especially, they are more often simply absorbed. Nothing could better illustrate the organic nature of religious traditions than the example of their experiences along the Silk Road. The Silk Road was more than just a conduit along which religions

hitched rides East; it constituted a formative and transformative rite of passage. No religion emerges unchanged at the end of that arduous journey. Key formative influences on the early development of the Mahayana and Pure Land movements, which became so much a part of East Asian civilization, are to be sought in Buddhism’s earlier encounters along the Silk Road. Manichaeism, driven underground in the West, appears in the eighth century as a powerful political force in East Turkestan, then gradually blends into the amorphous mass of Chinese popular religion. Nestorian Christianity, expelled as a heresy from the Byzantine realm, moves eastward, touches hundreds of thousands among the Eurasian steppe peoples, and appears centuries later like a bad dream to the first Catholic missionaries in China, who find it comfortably entrenched there as the recognized resident Christianity of the East. Islam, carried along by the momentum of the Arabs’ military success,

makes its appearance on the Silk Road in the eighth century but comes to a temporary halt halfway, following the Battle of Talas in 751. Directly and indirectly, Islam would be carried east through trade, just like its predecessors. Nor would the new tradition remain Arab property: It would belong instead to the Persians, the Turks, the Chinese—and it would feed from their cultures. Ideas, after all, like individuals, need to acquire new

tastes and new sponsors if they are to thrive in foreign climes. The existence of trade routes and constant commercial activity linking

diverse cultures from ancient times meant that religious ideas (like technology and other aspects of culture) could spread easily along trade networks which spanned Eurasia. Indeed, like running water finding open channels, this spread was probably inevitable. But the religion-trade relationship was mutually reinforcing. For example, the expansion of Buddhism brought an increased demand for silk, which was used in Buddhist ceremonies, thereby further stimulating the long-distance trading activity that had facilitated the spread of Buddhism in the first place.

THE EARLY MONGOLS

Morris Rossabi

Khubilai Khan lived during the height of Mongol power. He was born at the beginning of the Mongol expansion and grew up as Mongol armies spread far to the north and west. Khubilai and his grandfather Chinggis were the most renowned of the Mongols in this glorious period of their and indeed Eurasian history. Eurasian history begins with the Mongols. Within a few decades in the thirteenth century, they had carved out the most sizable empire in world history, stretching from Korea to Western Russia in the north and from Burma to Iraq in the south. Their armies reached all the way to Poland and to Hungary. In the process, they destroyed some of the most powerful dynasties of their age: the Abbāsid rulers of the Middle East and Persia, the Chin and Southern Sung dynasties of China, the Khwārazmian khanate of Central Asia. For a generation, the Mongols were masters of much of Eurasia and terrorized the rest. Though their empire lasted less than a century, it inextricably linked

Europe to Asia, ushering in an era of frequent and extended contacts between East and West. And, once the Mongols had achieved relative stability and order in their newly acquired domains, they neither discouraged nor impeded relations with foreigners. Though they never abandoned their claims of universal rule, they were hospitable to foreign travelers, even those whose monarchs had not submitted to them. They expedited and encouraged travel in the sizable section of Asia that was under Mongol rule, permitting European merchants, craftsmen, and envoys, the first time, to journey as far as China. Asian goods reached Europe along the caravan trails, and the ensuing European demand for these products eventually inspired the search for a sea route to Asia. Thus,

the Mongol era indirectly led to the European age of exploration of the fifteenth century, which culminated in the discovery of the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope to Asia and in Christopher Columbus’s unsuccessful effort to find a western route to the Indies. The Mongols accomplished much more than simply linking Europe and

Asia. They governed many of the territories they had seized. With the indispensable help of Chinese, Persian, and Turkic advisers and administrators, they progressed from plunderers to rulers. They set up governments and bureaucracies, devised systems of taxation, and promoted the interests of farmers, herdsmen, and merchants. Since most of the Khans were either tolerant of or indifferent to foreign religions, active persecution of any sect in the Mongol realm was rare. Some of the Mongol leaders encouraged the various native cultures, patronizing artists, writers, and historians. Chinese drama, Persian historical writing, and Tibetan Buddhist art and architecture all flourished during the Mongol occupation. Yet the dark side of Mongol rule ought not to be ignored. Their armies

so devastated some of the regions they conquered that recovery took years, even decades. Toward those who dared to resist them, they showed no mercy. A thirteenth-century Persian historian writes of their “massacring, plundering, and ravaging” and adds that in one of their campaigns, “with one stroke a world which billowed with fertility was laid desolate, and the regions thereof became a desert, and the greater part of the living dead, and their skin and bones crumbling dust; and the mighty were humbled and immersed in the calamities of perdition.” Modern writers have often been equally harsh in assessing the Mongols, one implying that the Mongols increased the brutality of Chinese court life, that they “brought violence and destruction to all aspects of China’s civilization,” and that they were “insensitive to Chinese cultural values, distrustful of Chinese influences, and inept heads of Chinese government.” The victorious Mongols have scarcely left us their own versions of their

campaigns and of the rule and administration of their empire, unfortunately, since they did not develop a written language until the time of Chinggis. Thus the Mongol written sources of the thirteenth century are meager, and most of our knowledge of them derives from the chronicles of the peoples they subjugated: the Chinese, the Persians, the Koreans, the Armenians, the Arabs, and various others. It is only natural, then, that they were often depicted as brutal and tyrannical. Certainly some of the more outlandish tales of Mongol cruelty, even monstrousness, must be discounted.