Daniel Rivera

Mackenzie Frazier

November/December 2012

    India: World Unexplored

     I see the word and I see the name. I hear the sounds and I see the map, but very little connection is made. The other side of the world is so rich in culture and yet enshrouded in mystery, like a veil of unknown spreading over an entire side of the world map. This not knowing is like a dark cloud obscuring the region from the rest of the world. I see the map and I see a big missing piece, perhaps the most important one, all integral to the unified vision of seeing the world in an entirely new light; what some may call global consciousness. This is my personal challenge when I see the outline of the map of Asia, curving dangerously the ridges of the Indian Ocean and tracing the shape of Southern India, stretching north toward the mountain-range of the Himalayas. What world is this? It is a mystery to me entirely.
     This feeling sparked within me a desire, an intuitive search, seeking to understand a culture and world far older than our own. It is the land of India, looming at the foot of the Himalayan mountain range and bordering the lands of the Arabic kingdoms of the Ancient World. I find on this side of the world an entire, aching gap of missing knowledge, and I almost cannot accept that I have nothing to connect to. But it's true. And then I realize. You ask any kid in fifth grade about Colonial America or Europe and they'll tell you wonders, be ready to be surprised. You ask a high school student about the United States, and they'll respond with a strong background on the American Revolution, or the Civil War. Even World War II. (If I was that fifth grader or high school student theoretically, I would be able to). But you ask that same theoretical student of his/her respective age group about India, and they may give you a blank stare. Bengali tigers may come to mind, or elephants. But there is so much to culture than the present wildlife. Why the gap of knowledge? Because that is what we are taught. The more I think it, the more I realize that, even now in the University, the mainstream primary knowledge taught in America gives focus to the Western World in depth, but when it comes to the East, it is almost as if the education systems do not want to bother covering such subjects. Or is it because they do not dare? Are we that far worlds apart? Needless to say, the more I ponder it, the more enticing I find it.
     Then I think again, and I recall my middle school history teacher, who took the time to teach us about the Ottoman Empire and the Chinese dynasties of the Han and Zhang Dynasties, and the old conqueror Genghis Khan. Why the conquerors, why are they important? Well the conquerors of old are highly responsible for the blending of cultures, and for someone who might be interested in tracing the lineage of the world through history, the conquerors are the key to understanding certain realities of the modern world. This is why Alexander the Great is important, because through the conquest of a single Greek leader, the worlds of Greece collided and merged with the falling Persian Empire, Zoroastrian based, note the symbols. This is why modern Turkey bears such strong Greek remains, and Pakistan and modern day Iran seem almost brothers of the Greeks and anyone who looks Arab might as well look Greek as well. This is why I pondered long ago on that day that set me on this search, when I listened to the beautifully culturally rich "World music" of some Arabic ensemble. This is why, through listening to that music I felt the connection of so many cultures merged into a single sound, that I could not deem simply Arabic, or Mediterranean or Greek, or Flamenco and Spanish influenced. What this music was to this day intrigues me, and because of those beautifully blended cultural sounds I still seek a better consciousness of the world. As I listened to this Turkish artist, I tried to trace in my head the conquest of the peoples, or the migration, or the friendly embrace and welcoming of their neighboring culture; but we know in history mankind is not best known for the latter. So it is indeed conquest that traces this legacy...from the Spanish to the Arabs to the Mediterranean to the Greek and back to the Spanish...and back to the Arabic sounds of semitones and a completely different world of music devoid of musical notation and Western harmony. Any rules of the Western tonal scale do not apply in the Eastern world music, and for a musician developing a growing understanding of this art, the latter is mind-blowing.
     Through the conquerors we can trace many things, and paradoxically the machine of warfare driven by the Greeks in the Ancient World may ultimately lead to a more peaceful civilization. It is again Alexander the young Macedonian conqueror that offers historical link. Alexander did not stop his conquest at the defeat of the Persian Empire (Aechemenid civilization, modern day Iran). Ambitious as any conqueror with a vision, he pushed the conquest past the mountain ranges of Bactria (Eastern Europe) all the way to the desolate, snow peaks of the Hindu Kush mountain range, where even he saw no way through. This is how the Greeks found themselves exploring the jungles of India, lands that the conqueror always aspired to rule since his youth, but was warned to not pursue. Eventually even the undefeatable Alexander found his match outnumbered by Indian forces, and for the first time...defeated. But he succeeded in unifying a world from West to East and back, providing some background to begin lifting this veil of unknown of the Eastern world.
     But to imagine, I must confess, the madness of discovering this desire to know a new world when in the middle of deep research of the Greek civilization and seeking to coalesce Western civilization, vast enough an endeavor already as it is. This was for me, I confess now, the greatest challenge I overcame in the semester, to find that my mind had moved on and sought new knowledge faster than it should, continuing to an older civilization when the Greek myth is yet so much to be grasped. But the Greek deities portrayed in Hesiod...they were all but divine and mortally flawed, yet the Greeks accepted them. And here I stood upon the beginning of a new scholarly endeavor, one that perhaps should have waited, but no longer could. I had one foot in Greece and one foot at the gates of India, at a most crucial point in time. This is why I looked forward to whatever insight Jhumpa Lahiri would provide as a Bengali of descent, and indeed she contributed.
     It is a fulfilling thing to unravel the past of the world, because there is so much to see, so much to remember and so much to know. So much connection, so much diversity, and yet always, like the sun shining above every day undeniably, a simple unifying connection that binds all worlds together. You look into India and eventually you find, after recovering from the awe of its beautiful mountains and sacred snowy peaked cliffs that give birth to their rivers of the Ganges and the high meadows of the Bhyander Valley, that here too stand tall very old monuments of the Ancient world, an entirely different side of humanity. And you look far back enough that eventually you come across the most ancient of languages encompassing poetry and philosophy, even science: the language of Sanskrit. Then eventually you may realize it is extremely accurate as the Mayans were in their mathematics and irrigation and astronomy, and it truly is fascinating. The Indian civilizations of old had a deep understanding of their own being as humans, and like the Buddhists north of their land in the mountains and any other peoples of history that have pursued a greater understanding of things...they all found themselves in the common epiphany that the light they were searching was deeply within them already, deep beyond any physical temple that any king or sultan or emperor or tyrant could ever erect. And that is enough to know and to dare to confess from a scholarly deviation into something much greater and older than even the Greeks, which I was greatly mistaken to praise as the root of all Western civilization. The truth is no single empire in history, Ancient or in the Modern world, can be deemed as the pinnacle of mankind because they are all part of the mosaic of the world. But every single one should be remembered and taken the time to uncover in our consciousness of a world in entirety.