Q1.
What was it about the culture of India that enabled society to weather that stormy time, and for multiple diverse groups of people to continue to coexist in the subcontinent?
Answer
Four features of the culture, which the chapter goes on to demonstrate one by one.
- It was already everywhere. The Purāṇas and the two epics were embedded in poetry, drama, puppetry, painting, dance and sculpture, and in daily life through temple visits and festivals. A culture spread that thinly across that many households cannot be removed by capturing a capital.
- It had more than one path. Indian belief already contained “several schools of thought and no single holy book”. The bhakti mārga was one of the multiple paths to mokṣha, and it needed no rituals and no priests. A tradition with many doors is very hard to shut.
- It could absorb. India had long received merchants, scholars, diplomats and the persecuted from Greece, Persia, Central Asia and East Asia, and had assimilated them “benefiting both”. The habit of taking in what was useful was old practice, not a new emergency measure.
- It found a shared idea. Some bhajans reinforced the oneness of god — a concept the Upaniṣhads discussed — which connected with the idea of one god espoused by Islam. Where a shared idea exists, coexistence has somewhere to stand.
Why this is the chapter’s hinge: the question is asked at the end of a paragraph about destruction, and the very next heading is “The power of the bhakti tradition”. That placement is the argument. The chapter is claiming that the strongest thing India had in that century was not an army but a form of devotion that ordinary people could join without permission from anyone.