How the Ancient West saw India

India has always been a land that has fascinated travellers, explorers and conquerors alike, and made news all across the ancient world. Its boundless natural reserves, the wisdom and knowledge of its sages, and ‘exotic’ culture have attracted travellers, philosophers and historians since ancient times to study and write about it. Why, even the word ‘India’ was first used by the ancient Greeks to describe the land beyond the river Indus. In today’s hyper-connected age, it is difficult to imagine how ancient scholars and writers from the West managed to glean so much information about a land so far away. Yet they did, thanks to trade routes, word-of-mouth and by referring to the works of their predecessors. Imagine being in Rome around 2,000 years ago and writing about places like Pataliputra, Madurai, Kalyan and Bharuch. The earliest Greek explorer to visit India and write about it is a man named Scylax of Caryanda, who sailed to India down the Indus River in 519-516 BCE, on the orders of the Persian emperor Darius I. His text has, however, been lost and what we know of it is from the works of later Greek writers. Interestingly, ‘India’ finds mention in the works of Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE) through his reading of Scylax. The first ancient Greek text mentioning ‘India’ that survives to this day is Histories, written in 440 BCE by a man named Herodotus. Herodotus’s concept of India was limited to the region on the banks of the Indus River (Punjab and Sindh), then under the Persian Empire. He writes of the great wealth of India and that it is “the most populous nation in the world”. A Greek ambassador in the court of Chandragupta Maurya named Megasthenes (c. 350 – c. 290 BC) wrote a text called Indika, which also gives us an interesting account of the land. He writes of the great city of ‘Patlibothra’ (Pataliputra) made mostly of wood and surrounded by a moat. He wrote of the river Ganga, and claimed it was larger than the Indus and a great road that stretched right from Indus to Patlibothra (the Uttarapatha). The three most significant texts that give us great perspectives on India are Strabo’s Geography, Ptolemy’s A Guide To Geography and a text called Periplus of the Erythrean Sea. These were Greco-Roman texts written in Ionian Greek, which was spoken in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. ...