Grand Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor, Academician A.N. Iezuitov.
Strong and long-lasting, diverse and multi-level ties unite India and Russia as the interaction, material and spiritual, of the great peoples of the two great countries, contributing to their organic convergence, and thereby contributing to the consolidation of social progress, justice and peace without violence in the world. The diverse interaction between India and Russia is rooted in centuries, in the depths of multinational history, in the process of their historical and cultural development – regional and global. The most diverse facts vividly confirm this.
Back in the 15th century, in his travelling notes ‘A Passage Across Three Seas’ (1466-1472), the Russian merchant Afanasy Nikitin, truthfully describing the life of the Bahmanid state, made a true discovery of real India with its hard-working, talented, benevolent and freedom-loving people.
In 1469 Nikitin landed on the shores of India. The three seas were the Caspian Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Black Sea. All the seas were connected through the Volga by a set of various rivers and canals. In India Nikitin lived almost three years.
Nikitin’s predecessors, the Italian travellers Marco Polo (XIII century) and Niccolo Conti (XV century) created a legendary and fairy-tale image of India, penetrating into it across the Atlantic Ocean and describing in detail its opulence and splendour, abundance and wealth, various kinds of oriental exoticism.
Russian traveller Nikitin saw in India both the beauty created by the hands of people and sharp social contrasts, deeply and perceptively revealed the moral and psychological features of Indians.
Passing on his impressions of the Ran Mahal Palace in Bidar, the capital of the Bahmanids, Nikitin notes that it is ‘very beautiful, carvings and gold everywhere, and the last stone is carved and very beautifully painted with gold; and there are different vessels in the palace’. At the same time Nikitin clearly saw that in India ‘rural people are very poor, but the boyars are rich and luxurious’.
In Bidar Nikitin, as he writes ‘got acquainted with many Indians’ and when he announced to them that he was a Christian, they did not ‘hide from him in anything, neither in food, nor in trade, nor in prayer, nor in other things’, they showed him, as a Russian man, religious tolerance and their sincere friendliness, although they were hiding from ‘Basurmans’ and ‘do not drink or eat with Basurmans’.
Christians were not considered ‘basurmans’ by the Indians. The point is that Buddhism and Christianity as philosophical and moral teachings had much in common. These are, first of all, the basic ‘Commandments’: do not kill, do not lie, do not steal, do not commit adultery.
It was in India – a country of contrasts, where at every turn, richness and poverty, the brotherhood of poor people and ruthless oppression of their feudal lords – Nikitin directly felt the diversity and ‘great abundance’ of other lands (Turkish, Georgian, Greek, Romanian, Indian) and with a special sense of patriot and a true internationalist recalled his native – Russian land. ‘There is no country like it in this world, though the nobles (boyars) of the Russian land are unjust (unkind). Let the Russian land become favourable, and let there be justice in it’. Nikitin dreamed of the same justice in the second half of the XV century in the Indian land.
It is indicative that A.S. Pushkin, whom M. Gorky rightly called ‘the best man in the world’. Gorky rightly called ‘the beginning of all beginnings’, showed a lively and unchanging creative interest in the history and culture of India. Even in the lyceum poem ‘The Triumph of Bacchus’ (1818) Pushkin exclaimed: ‘Here is Bacchus peaceful, eternally young! Here he is, here is India’s hero! O joy.’ There was another variant: ‘Happy India’s hero’. Pushkin is referring to the myth of the journey of the Greek god Bacchus, or Bacchus, to India and thus the peaceful, benevolent and responsive nature of the Indian people, embodied after this journey and in Bacchus, who became his own essence.
In the notes to the poem ‘Gypsies’ (1824) Pushkin, relying on the science of his time, draws attention to the fact that the Gypsies come from one of the Indian castes, characterised, above all, by an ineradicable attachment to freedom and freedom-loving, moral purity. Thus, at the heart of ‘Gypsy’ is essentially a conflict between two civilisations: the historically ancient, but morally higher, freethinking and simultaneously tolerant of the freethinking of others, and the comparatively new, voluntarist-egoistic in essence, and therefore immoral. ‘You only want will for yourself,’ is the sentence of the old gypsy addressed to Aleko.
In the preparatory texts for ‘The History of Peter the Great’ (1835) Pushkin writes about the persistent desire of the Russian progressive-minded Emperor Peter the Great to establish trade relations between Russia and India, and, consequently, strong and mutually beneficial peaceful relations between the two countries, for trade has always led to the strengthening of peaceful contacts between states and peoples.
Pushkin calls ‘brilliant’ the idea of Peter the Great ‘to find a way to India for our trade’. At the end of his life Peter the Great sent Captain Vitus Bering (1725) on the most difficult sea voyage ‘to open a trade route to Eastern India through the Arctic Ocean’. In 1728 Bering essentially repeats his expedition.
Pushkin emphasises that Peter the Great, by connecting the Baltic and Caspian Seas with canals and rivers (via the Volga), thus opened the way to St. Petersburg for India’.
During the reign of the Russian Empress Anna Ioannovna, the Senate Secretary I.K. Kirillov (1734) intended to establish trade routes from Russia to India. Some Indian merchants had already managed to reach Ufa (Bashkiria) in Russia, trying to establish mutually beneficial trade between the two countries. Some results were achieved. England wanted to pave its trade route to India through Russia. Russia blocked it. A ‘Russian-Indian Company’ was set up in Ufa. Russia planned trade routes to India through the Kalmyk and Kazakh steppes, Bukhara, Siva and across the Caspian Sea (like Afanasy Nikitin).
The great Russian scientist M.V. Lomonosov composes a special treatise on the way from Russia to India by the ‘Siberian Ocean’ (1765). The scientist obtains credits for an experimental expedition and equips it. The expedition leaves Arkhangelsk, however, the ice in the Arctic Ocean stops the expedition, and it did not take place. It is finally terminated by Lomonosov’s death in 1965.
Nowadays (2024), actually following Peter the Great and Lomonosov, both countries, Russia and India, are working hard to develop a Maritime Trade Route through the Arctic Ocean with successful overcoming of ice.
Russian Empress Catherine II undertook the Caucasus-India campaign (across the Caspian Sea) to liberate India from English oppression. Russian Emperor Paul I sent Cossack troops (M. Platov) from Derbent to India to weaken English rule in India. Russian Emperors Nicholas I, Alexander II and Alexander III had a vision to liberate India from English colonialism. All this is historically quite significant. It was Russia that defended India’s sovereignty in many different aspects and never sought its colonial subjugation.
Pushkin in his novel in verse ‘Eugene Onegin’ in the chapter ‘Onegin’s Travels’ (1830), describing a fair in Nizhny Novgorod, standing on the banks of the Volga, while referring to India, remarks: ‘Here pearls were brought by an Indian, fake wines by a European.’ India was indeed famous for pearls and sold them everywhere.
The Volga was a trade route from India to Russia and from Russia to India, paved by Nikitin and approved by Peter the Great, and was intended for trade in the most valuable, beautiful and genuine, and not any fake ‘goods’ between the two countries. This was already the case in the trade of Europe with Russia. And India in this case was excluded as a country of absolute honesty.
It is indicative that in the opera ‘Sadko’ (1897) by the remarkable Russian composer N.S. Rimsky-Korsakov, the aria of the ‘Indian guest’ (a merchant) at the fair in Veliky Novgorod was characterised by national-musical originality and expressiveness conveyed by the composer. It is in India that ‘there are not a few pearls in the noonday sea’. So sings the ‘Indian Guest’ (merchant). It is convincing and precise.
‘Russian Ballet’ S.P. Diaghilev (1911-1917) presented in Paris the ballet “Underwater Kingdom” (1911) to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov in the opera “Sadko”. In the ballet, the role of the ‘Indian Guest’ occupied a prominent place.
Russian ballet also had a favourable influence on the development of Indian national ballet and its improvement.
It is significant that in the USSR together with Indian cinema were staged films: ‘Sadko’ (India as a place of shooting, Indian actors, entourage) in 1953. ‘Walking for Three Seas’, based on Afanasy Nikitin (India as a place of shooting, scriptwriter, actors, artist, cameraman, entourage) in 1957-1958 (India as a place of shooting, scriptwriter, actors, artist, cameraman, entourage) in 1957-1958. In India, the film was called Stranger. Nikitin himself referred to himself in India as a ‘stranger’, who was accepted by the Indian people as a person intrinsically close to them.
Let us return again to Pushkin. In his work ‘Journey from Moscow to Petersburg’, written in 1834, as a kind of repetition in new social and literary conditions of the famous work of the Russian writer-revolutionary of the 18th century A.N. Radishchev ‘Journey from Petersburg to Moscow’ (1790), Pushkin fervently condemned the English ‘tyranny with India’.
Thanks to V.A. Zhukovsky, a remarkable poet and translator, Russian readers first became acquainted in 1844 with the greatest monument of the ancient Indian heroic epic, the Mahabharata. Zhukovsky made a ridiculous translation of a passage from it under the title ‘Nal and Damayanti’. The poet translated not from the Sanskrit original, but from German free translations (Franz Bopp and Friedrich Rückert). In doing so, Zhukovsky endeavoured to penetrate with his artistic flair into the very spirit of the original. It was through Zhukovsky’s translation that many generations of Russian readers, with their minds and hearts, were and still are exposed to the richest poetic world of the Indian people, comprehending and comprehending the sublime tenderness and beauty of their thoughts and feelings.
The special interest in India on the part of prominent figures of Russian culture and the Russian national liberation movement did not weaken in the future.
The Russian revolutionary-democrat V.G. Belinsky sharply criticised the creation of the ‘Monument of Arts’ (1842) for the fact that the section ‘India’ was compiled in it unskilledly, without a table of contents, and it did not contain images of the magnificent monuments of Indian art.
Another Russian revolutionary-democrat, A.I. Herzen, also showed attention to the remarkable and deeply original Indian culture – mighty and majestic.
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, interest in the study of Indian culture intensified in Western Europe under the well-known influence of the German scholar Friedrich Schlegel’s book On the Language and Wisdom of the Hindus (1808). First and foremost, however, the passivity, fatalism and resignation to their fate of the Indian people were emphasised as their leading and in fact only traits.
Herzen, continuing Pushkin, who emphasised the free-loving and active life stance of the Indians, writes about Indian mythology, which received one of the brightest artistic embodiments in the work of Kalidasa (IV-V centuries), in his grandiose poem ‘Urvashi Found by Courage’. Herzen calls it ‘Urvasya.’ Referring to the courage, perseverance and daring of the legendary Pururavas, who found Urvashi (Urvaiya), Ansara – a celestial maiden – as his wife thanks to these qualities, Herzen considers the poem ‘Kalidasa’ as a manifestation of such human ‘madness’ which constitutes ‘the power and glory of history’.
L. Tolstoy showed considerable interest in India as, from his point of view, an example and model of ‘resistance without violence’ (M. Gandhi). Later, it was ‘Civil Nonviolent Resistance as Spiritual and Practical Disobedience’ (D. Nehru) that contributed to India’s liberation from British colonialism (1947). It is now over one billion free people.
As early as the 16th century, England gradually, economically and politically, conquered India, and by the mid-19th century India had become an English colony.
It is significant that at different times Napoleon and German fascism saw for themselves the conquest of India through Russia. It was Russia that spared India from such a threat, which has now been eliminated forever.
The sensitive and benevolent attitude towards India, its people and its culture has been maintained in Russia in subsequent historical periods, including the Soviet period.
Lenin emphasised that the British dominated India through the policy of ‘divide and rule’ and ‘in the struggle against imperialism, first of all, it is necessary to unite all Indian national and social forces’. In uniting these forces, art played and still plays a prominent role.
Lenin’s statement: ‘Of all the arts, cinema is the most important for us’ is well known, and in his ‘Directives for the Film Industry’ (1922), Lenin made it an obligatory film programme for all Soviet film distribution to show ‘under the firm’ ‘from the life of the people of all countries’ – pictures with a specifically propagandistic content, such as England’s colonial policy in India. Particularly propagandistic and effective, internalised and educational, was the demonstration from the screen of films devoted to India.
Lenin strongly recommended: ‘it is necessary to print more Hindu comrades to encourage them and to gather more information about India and its revolutionary movement’.
As we know after the Second World War India was permanently freed from imperialist oppression.
Thus, as we see, stable and equal, truly friendly historical and cultural relations between the two great countries and peoples can serve as a norm and a model for other countries and peoples. They are a stabilising factor in today’s turbulent world, a real and instructive affirmation of a world without violence. India has long been a consistent advocate of a world without violence.
© Academician Andrei N. Iezuitov
19.08.2024 St. Petersburg
