The Passage to India

By Panos Kessaris

The origins of this book of contemplation spring from the long and arduous tour around India undertaken by the author's father back in 1965. The more he began to experience this great country, the more he wanted to move beyond merely describing its landscape and the treasures from its glorious past. His aim was to expand his interpretation of the world of India into a wholly new mode of thinking and thereby to understand humanity as a whole.
The author has now completed the book by adding his own contemporary thoughts and comparisons about the soul of India as a complement to his father's work.
A message to you all from a simple man: this book does not fit neatly into any existing categories. This is INDIA. And nothing else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781528967495

Panos Kessaris

PANOS KESSARIS was born in Athens, Greece, in 1968. He graduated from a local high school for gifted children. After his university programme, he took a scholarship to follow a full residency training in oral and maxillofacial surgery in USA. As a teenager, he followed his parents over their trips around Europe many times, visiting museums and monuments. He was an athlete of the National Equestrian Team. He was inspired by his father’s philosophy of life: learn and teach as much as you can. He has worked in his field in UK, France, Germany and China. He lives with his wife, Jenny, who makes him a better person every day. Together, they raise three wonderful boys. THANOS KESSARIS was born in Athens, Greece, in 2004. Currently, he is a studious member of the University of Nebraska High School and a certified PADI rescue diver. He loves the ocean and its creatures.

Book preview

The Passage to India

Panos Kessaris and Thanos Kessaris

Austin Macauley Publishers

The Passage to India

About the Authors

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Part One

Through the Centuries: A Short Historical Flashback

Writings And Prophets

The Art of India

The Historic Years

Architecture

The Muslim Buildings

Sculpture

Painting

Part Two

The Face and Soul of India: the Tour Today: The West

Heading up

Descending East

The South

The Indian

About the Authors

Panos Kessaris was born in Athens, Greece, in 1968. He graduated from a local high school for gifted children. After his university programme, he took a scholarship to follow a full residency training in oral and maxillofacial surgery in USA. As a teenager, he followed his parents over their trips around Europe many times, visiting museums and monuments. He was an athlete of the National Equestrian Team. He was inspired by his father’s philosophy of life: learn and teach as much as you can. He has worked in his field in UK, France, Germany and China. He lives with his wife, Jenny, who makes him a better person every day. Together, they raise three wonderful boys.

***

Capture

Thanos Kessaris was born in Athens, Greece, in 2004. Currently, he is a studious member of the University of Nebraska High School and a certified PADI rescue diver. He loves the ocean and its creatures.

Dedication

Dedicated to my beloved wife, Jenny, who helps me become a better person every day.

Copyright Information ©

Panos Kessaris and Thanos Kessaris 2022

The right of Panos Kessaris and Thanos Kessaris to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528966436 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528967051 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781528967495 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Canary Wharf

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E14 5AA

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my youngest son, Thanos (co-author), who has helped me a lot for constructing better the thoughts of his grandfather, Periklis, as a pure, English-speaking scholar.

The main author of this book, our father, Periklis (or Pericles if you wish), was born in Arcadia of Greece, graduated from Athens University School of Philosophy and after that, he taught history of arts and literature at the Tinos School of Fine Arts for almost 10 years. He took a scholarship from the State Foundation (Idryma Kratikon Ypotrofion) back in the mid-sixties for a year-long trip to India to study the philosophy of India and the fine arts of the east (University of New Delhi). His love for India was as great as his love for his own country. And through his writings, he tried to make it known.

The aim of his contemplation and an arduous tour around the country (mostly by walking!) was not just to describe this great country and its treasures from its glorious past. After making all these his own life, he tried to interpret them as much as he could and, more than anything else, he tried to make them a human problem—a way of thinking—meaning life at its best!

A message to you all from a simple man: do not try to categorise this book into any of the known types of words. This is INDIA. And nothing else.

UNIVERSITY OF DELHI

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

FACULTY OF ARTS

DELHI-7

November 11. 1965

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

I have pleasure in certifying that Mr. Perikles Panagiotou Kessaris has been doing research work as casual student in our Department for the last nine months. He has been studying History of Indian Fine Arts. He has impressed me as a serious scholar of his subject. During his research work here and his visits to other places in India, he has gathered a lot of material which will be of real use to him for his project in Indology.

He is now leaving for his country. I wish him a very prosperous and long life.

S.S. BARLINGAY

Head of the Department of Philosophy

University of Delhi

DELHI

Prologue

The mother of Asian culture—India—so far never had, in writing works, the luck of the other countries of the far east, even though it is the closest to us, the Greeks, as a tribe and in creativity. So many good books were published lately about China and Japan, and very few about India. Is the latter less known to us? I don’t think so. Perhaps we contended ourselves with the handiest ideas for it and we got reassured that we didn’t need much more. The written works for this country are few as it is hard to walk it and talk it. It doesn’t offer too many exclamation marks like the other two mentioned countries if you don’t seek to read the Indian himself, from his past glory till today’s misery; if you don’t arrest—through its amazing promotions, glares, delays and retreats—the universe to its evolutionary course, from the stone and the beast to the perfect and oneness.

This book aspires to fill these missing parts. In the first part, you’ll find its legacy, from the Vedic texts and the caves to the years of marasmus. In the second part, the travelling—tasty for those who like something juicier—I present the country and the people of India as it is today, up close and personal.

If my reader, by closing this book, feels like something new was transfused inside him, something that creates a new dimension that starts a dialogue with his inner world, then not in vain are my bitterness and hardships and the dangers you watered me, distant land! And I will tell everything, the way I lived them, without passion and prejudice, as I loved you too much, damned paradise of earth and of our soul!

I dedicate this book to the children of India, who helped me get into its soul note by the successors: after 55 years, today, the history, architecture and art of India remain unchanged. Some of the alleys in the suburbs of major cities as well. The ceremonies have domesticated, keeping the essence behind the actions. We narrate all of those that the main author did, in his time, for historical purposes only and not to downgrade or insult the country’s social mores.

After all, he saw the contradictory beauties of the soul of India as a pure way of living. The face of India might be changing with the speed of light, but its soul keeps the divine spirit alive!

Let ‘Thoreau’s truth’ prevail and enjoy!

Our journey: Mumbai, Ajanta, Ellora, Gujarat, Agra, Delhi, Kashmir, Srinagar, Benares, Bihar, Assam, Calcutta, Madras, Madurai, Durga, Comorin and Delhi

Part One

Through the Centuries

A Short Historical Flashback

Roots and seeding

The Indians, through their passage, created undoubtedly a great civilisation. They never made history though because this was the nature of their civilisation. Why should they care for the birthdate of Buddha since he has always existed and is born every day among us? Although they were always looking at the sky, they couldn’t help but mostly touch the Earth as they were always earthly creatures. And this is the reason why we can read their past through every spiritual edging, although generally, they stand to the ‘approx’, as they don’t present the precision of the western epistemology.

The oldest human hoe over the Indian earth approaches the early palaeolithic period, meaning hundreds of thousands of years back. We find two spots back then, one up north and one down south. The former is related to the Sinanthropus (pekinensis) and the latter to the African world. Up to the Neolithic years, when technique and economy changed and the humans bonded to the earth, we find more marks of these cavemen. All these Neolithic regions—north, east and south—look like their neighbours and affirm that the Indian sperm has deep roots.

In one of the deepest mattresses of this Neolithic period, since 2,500 BC, the chalcolithic civilisation of the valley of the Indus river was developed. It was one of the most brilliant and oldest tributary civilisations on earth. We have modern cities from now on. Not old village economy. Wealth, life, motion and art that, although keep in touch with those of Mesopotamia, don’t stop giving growth to the sperms of the upcoming India. Two cities, two great centres—Harappa higher and Mohenjo-Daro lower—create around them the pre-Aryan culture for a thousand of years.

After that (1,500 BC), its first cracks show up. The Aryans, who started earlier as a herd from NW Asia, perceived this first. And they give these cities the final shot. The locals tend to move southern without being certain of their equation with the dark-skinned south Indians known as Dravidians.

A new culture rises now in NW India. It keeps spreading and conquers the valley of the Ganges of the east. New deities, of Nature and Sky and not of Fertility and Earth, like before, dynast the Indian soul. The Vedas are born, the first monuments of speech of the Indian race. The newcomers speak with contempt for the dark-skinned natives. The first sperms of caste are here.

It was impossible to avoid fermentation of races and civilisations together. In the next 1,000 years that followed, until we step on historical ground, dark monuments and parallel documents occurred that deeply influenced the course of the Indian.

We can assume a move of the masses to the jungle of the south following the myth of the Ramayana along with the fermentations that take place up north, emulating Mahabharata. Both epics, although today we deal with their most recent (final) form, configuring from their initial cores, we estimate that they cross the passage from the second to the first millennium BC. Through the centuries that follow, the Vedas of the Aryans subside to the background and a local spirit, the one of the Upanishads, gets on the front stage. Neither outflow nor hymns to nature’s deities or sacrifices anymore, as with time, they standardise and lose every contact with the human soul. An introversion is ignited from now on. The question where the human soul stands and which is its relationship with the eternal worldwide soul, meaning God, will lead for 2-3 centuries until the gigantic personality of Buddha absorbs all the fertile material from this current and also from all the others who ploughed India back in those days, to give a new expression and a new direction to this country. Simpler, more lay, more human, this great teacher enthralled the crowds at the end of the 6th century BC until the beginning of the 5th.

The history itself

Historically speaking, to step on India’s solid ground, we should go over to the period of Alexander the Great. Truly, it looks like India awaited the magic stick of the Greek speech to start becoming starrier as it emerged from its mythological nebula. It was a real pity that the Greek spirit didn’t saturate deeper and wider in the Indian. After Alexander the Great reached NW India, where the Indus river ramifies to five branches, he uprooted the Persian empire and had nothing else but to go back. One of his Diadochi, Nicator Seleukus I, collides with one of the founders of the Maurya dynasty and afterwards, he offers one of his daughters to become Chandragupta’s wife. He sends for his ambassador Megasthenes, who gives us great reports regarding the Indians’ life at that time. Relative contacts continue to happen until they reach the zenith of the flourishing of Greek Art in Gandhara.

Maurya

The most brilliant of that dynasty is Asoka the Great (273-236 BC). He founded the first pan-Indian empire. After the 8th century BC, the jurisdiction was gathered into the hands of a few kings, meaning the second higher class of Indians, who stand behind the Brahmins. Buddha was a prince too. But with Asoka, the whole country was ruled under one sceptre (except the small southern part of India). He has been called the Constantine (the Great) of Buddhism. I think he stands much higher as he chosen religion to be a lesser pillar for him and was guided towards the worldwide humanity salvation. Asoka’s ‘in hoc signo vinces’ (Latin: in this sign, thou shalt conquer) never showed up in the sky to end up on earth and the earthly but started on earth and its hell to elevate the creation much higher. After his war in SW India, he saw his win and defeat at the same time: blood and corpses. He contemplated that man is the worst monster of all. And that he is the one to tame. This was said by Buddha first. It was then when he promised himself to preach Buddhism all around his country and outside of it. We saw his zealots in our country, the Epirus of NW Greece. We don’t see his preaching only over the columns and holy stones of India. We find it through his actions too. Repression of the castes, love to every living creature, justice and victory over the menaced beast that crouches