The Greeks in India by George Woodcock (review)

HUMANITIES 427 HISTORY George Woodcock's first book on India was a travel book of the best kind, engrossing without being tawdrily "colourful." It could have surpassed Naipaul in traumatic disgust but it chose instead to recognize that India has many faces and that constant staring by Indians at the inescapable face of poverty cannot but result in certain defensive blindnesses. Mr. Woodcock's second book on India, The Greeks in India (London: Faber and Faber [Toronto: Queenswood House], pp. 199, 42s., $9.50), explores a little known chapter of the Indian past and is indeed the first book to present the entire chapter. The thousand years during which the Greeks lingered in India provides fascinating material for the scholar interested in the interpenetration of cultures and Mr. Woodcock's brief book seizes its opportunities well. It is also highly readable, though the tactics adopted to ensure readability stay well on this side of Cottrell and Ceram. Those in India, it is hoped, will contemplate the book wiili sympathy and some degree of self-reproach. It is doubtful if any agency in India would have provided funds for such an undertaking and both Mr. Woodcock and the Canada Council deserve commendation. Scholarship covering iliis period has busied itself largely with the cruder facts of ilie Greek presence in India. Mr. Woodcock is prepared to have his say on dates, On the identity of Demetrius, or on the location of Menander's capital. His differences with Tam and others are difficult to adjudicate, as nO references are provided. Ten centuries cannot be compressed into less than two hundred pages without some forcible exclusions and, in any event, it is clear iliat Mr. Woodcock's book is meant to be informative railier ilian scholarly. Perhaps the loss is not as great as it seems. Immersion in controversy would change the shape of the book and the descent into footnotes might conceivably become the means of ascent into the higher verbiage. Nevertheless a book which is as persuasively addressed as this one to the intelligent layman, railier than ilie embattled expert, requires an apparatus, though of a humbler kind. In particular, a chronological table and maps of the ancient world are needed. It is On cultural interaction that Mr. Woodcock's views are particularly welcome. They are also refreshingly varied. The movement of ideas, he thinks, was largely from East to West: "In every case where a resemblance exists the Indians were the predecessors of the Greeks." On the 428 LETTERS IN CANADA other hand sculpture was influenced in the other direction and though there are deep differences between the resolutely stylized, symbolic art of India and the idealized naturalism typical of Greece, their momentary meeting did provide results that were memorable in their own right and did, in the end, give the Indian imagination some of the technology it needed to find itself. When it comes to literature Mr. Woodcock rightly dismisses the contention that the Greek theatre helped to shape the classical Sanskrit drama as "based on an excessive desire to find the roots of all high culture in the Mediterranean world." Though he does not say so, the relative lack of evidence would seem to suggest that the two literatures had virtually no impact On each other. Thus the map shows us movements in both directions and in neither. We are led to the frustrating but entirely sane conclusion that cultural influence is a difficult thing to talk about. (B. RAJAN) Apart from Frederick G. Heymann (George of Bohemia: King of Heretics [Princeton University Press (Toronto: Saunders of Toronto), 1965, pp. xvi, 671, $15.00]), there are few Canadians who in the course of their centennial examination of Canadian identity and destiny would be aware of some striking parallels between the current problems of this Dominion and those of the Kingdom of Bohemia five centuries ago. Making a generous allowance for oversimplification, one cannot fail to observe the similarities. The central concern of King George's political career was his determined effort to be "a ruler of two peoples" in one kingdom which was divided ethnically and religiously into a Czech Hussite majority and a German Roman Catholic minority. A...