An Indian Legacy

Mohandas Gandhi - In the early 20th century, Britain ruled India as a colony. Gandhi was one of the men who led the fight against foreign rule, but he practiced.
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A contemporary of Buddha was Mahavira: Like the Buddha, Mahavira is not considered a god but an exemplar to his followers. When depicted in art, he and the other 24 jinas appear as highly perfected humans. Unlike Buddhism and Jainism, India's third major indigenous religion, Hinduism, did not have a human teacher to whom the beliefs and practices of the tradition may be traced.

Instead, it is centred around devotion to specific deities, both supreme and minor, who are numbered among a vast pantheon of gods and goddesses.

The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer

Shiva destroys the universe with his cosmic dance when it has deteriorated to the degree that it needs to be reborn; Vishnu is the protector and preserver of the world as it struggles to maintain stasis. Archaeological evidence for Hinduism appears later in India's material record than those of Buddhism and Jainism, and stone and metal artefacts portraying the host of deities are rare before the fifth century AD. All three of these Indic religions share the belief that every living being is subject to a cycle of birth and rebirth over countless aeons. Known as samsara , this cycle of transmigration is not limited to humans but includes all sentient beings.

The form one will take in a future birth is determined by one's karma — a term that in modern parlance has come to mean little more than "luck", but the original Indic use of the word specifically refers to one's actions, which are the result of choice, not chance.


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The escape from samsara, called nirvana by Buddhists and moksa by Hindus and Jains, is the ultimate goal of each of the three religious traditions, and all human activity should, ideally, be directed towards improving one's karma to achieve this end. Although today we assign different names to these three religious traditions, in many ways they are considered different paths, or margs , toward a similar objective.

Within Indic culture, and indeed even within families, individuals have been free to choose their own marg, and we have no evidence of religious conflict among these traditions. Around the third century BC, a mix of internal cultural evolution and stimulating contact with ancient western Asia and the Mediterranean worlds brought change to the Indic regions.

The arrival of Alexander the Great in the northwestern region of south Asia in BC, and the collapse of the ancient Persian Empire, introduced new ideas — including the development of the concept of kingship, and technologies such as the tools and knowledge necessary for large-scale stone carving. Had Alexander succeeded in conquering the Indian subcontinent — mutiny and fatigue among his troops is said to have caused a retreat — one can only imagine how Indian history might have evolved.

As it stands, his legacy is mainly cultural, not political, as the pathways across western Asia that he forged remained open for trade and economic exchange for centuries after his death. One thing to pass through this gateway was a system of rule by kingship, which took hold of northern India in the rich lands fertilised by the life-giving Ganges river. The most renowned of India's first kings was Ashoka, who even today is admired by India's leaders as a paradigm of the benevolent ruler. After years engaged in waging war to aggrandise his empire, Ashoka, having seen some , people carried away as captives, , more slain, and many more dead after his final conquest, was struck with remorse at the suffering he had caused.

The story of Mother India

Converting to Buddhism, Ashoka spent the remainder of his life in righteous, peaceful activities. His benevolent kingship was adopted as a model throughout Asia as Buddhism moved beyond its Indic homeland. The set of four lions portrayed on one of his most famous monuments — the stone pillar he erected at Sarnath, where the Buddha taught his first sermon — has become a ubiquitous symbol of India's modern democracy, and is used on coins, stamps, government stationery, and elsewhere to laud the modern nation's roots in enlightened rulership.

As suggested by the artefacts that have survived and what we know about the religious and philosophical beliefs of the people, the period BC-AD in ancient India was one of extraordinary cultural brilliance, with innovations and traditions that still leave their mark on the world today.

Furthermore, the cultural continuity between India's past and present is unmatched in the other regions of the world.


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  4. Custerology!
  5. For These Souls: A trip to Haiti.

    6. The modern societies in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Americas and China for the most part bear little resemblance to their ancient counterparts. Indeed, what is striking from an overview of the early phases of India's long and rich cultural development is the fact that so many of the features in evidence through the material record have had a persistent and lasting effect on Indic society and the world.

    Ancient India's legacy in the fields of science and mathematics is significant. Mathematics was important to the layout of religious buildings and the philosophical comprehension of the cosmos. The fifth century AD astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata is credited with originating the modern decimal system, which is predicated on an understanding of the concept of zero. Evidence of the Indic origin of the idea of zero, including the use of a small circle to denote the numeral, is found in Sanskrit texts and inscriptions.

    Another cultural legacy is an ancient branch of medicine known as Ayurveda, still widely practiced in India today. It has also gained popularity in the western world as a "complementary" medicine. Translating literally as "science of life", it conceives basic principles for human health and points to physical and mental balance as the means to wellbeing.

    Perhaps ancient India's most lasting legacy is the belief in non-harm to living beings — a centrepiece of Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism — which was transformed into the passive resistance advocated by Mahatma Gandhi during India's early 20th century struggle for independence from British rule.

    Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer, Elliott

    After Gandhi, many other modern luminaries have been guided by the principle of non-violence in their quests for social justice, most famously Reverend Martin Luther King, who spearheaded the struggle for racial equality in the US during the s. In his autobiography, King notes that "Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of non-violent social change" during the bus boycott in that ended Alabama's transport segregation on the city's buses.

    Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama have also claimed inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi and the ancient Indian principle of non-harm, and the Indic compassion towards all living beings and the corresponding non-violent stance has been adopted by groups that advocate vegetarianism, animal welfare and environmental activism.

    Perhaps there is no greater compliment that can be paid to India's ancient culture than the fact that its sophisticated beliefs and reverence for life can serve as guideposts to the world today. This second fight would be an even more decisive victory for the Indians and would sear this day into the consciousness of the nation that had opposed them. By nightfall, the men who had attacked the village from downstream were all dead in the ravines and hills surrounding the Little Bighorn River.

    Among them was George Armstrong Custer. He was ambitious, which hardly unusual for a career officer who had risen to glory at an early age. If he was no longer as flamboyant in appearance as he had once been—the receding hairline perhaps sobered him a little—he was every bit as confident in his abilities as a leader of troops in combat.

    By all accounts, he was a bold, aggressive, and often inspiring field commander of cavalry. His trademark was not so much tactical brilliance as a combination of self-confidence, daring, and, at least until this day, luck. Custer had no way of receiving news about the Rosebud fight, in which the Indians had succeeded in knocking one of the columns out of commission for the rest of the summer.

    Nor did he have an accurate estimate of the number of Indians who had banded together; all the documents that precede his last battle suggest that he had been led to expect a village no larger than half the size of what he found. Conventional army wisdom held that the principal asset of Plains Indians was their mobility, their ability to disperse instantly into smaller groups that could travel more quickly and easily than army columns burdened by clumsy supply trains and the difficulty of finding suitable forage for their horses.

    Custer also traveled with thirty-five Indian scouts, mostly Arikara but including six Crows and a few Sioux. This was a large force, but it might have even been larger. Custer had refused additional infantry and two Gatling guns, both of which, he thought, would make the Seventh Cavalry less mobile and less able to take its opponents unaware. Nevertheless, he planned for his troops to lie low for the rest of the day and then attack the next morning, when most of the Indians would still be sleeping.

    This plan quickly unraveled as Custer heard reports that his forces had been discovered—both by Indians riding near the scouting party and by others who had found a box of hardtack that had accidentally dropped from one of the pack trains. Fearing that the main village would soon learn of the position of the Seventh Cavalry from these Indians—a fear that, it turns out, was unfounded—he ordered his officers to prepare their companies as quickly as possible to resume the march and attack.

    As they rode westward again, Custer split off two smaller groups: Then, he divided the bulk of the regiment—about five hundred men and officers—one last time. Three companies would charge into the village at its southern end under Major Marcus Reno; the other four would ride with Custer to the north—and to their deaths. Since that day, thousands of pages have been written to describe what happened to the federal troops at the Little Bighorn, but perhaps nothing has been as succinct as the assessment attributed years later to Iron Hawk, a Hunkpapa Lakota who fought in the battle.

    One reason that the Battle of the Little Bighorn has compelled generations of military historians and amateur enthusiasts to sift through the evidence of what occurred there is that little else beyond these bare facts can be established with absolute certainty. The unknown, and seemingly unknowable, facts of the Battle—its so-called mysteries—have been the subjects of passionate debate and bitter dispute. One lieutenant who survived on the hilltop upstream said there were nine thousand Indian warriors—a number that has seemed to historians to be too high—while his comrades said the Native American force was fewer than half that.

    The lower estimates were still notably larger than what several recent studies of the fight have suggested. It has taken more than a hundred years to reach a loose consensus on the number of Indians fighting Custer and his men, and it could take at least a hundred more to reach an agreement on the tactics that they used.

    In fact, the exact movement of the forces during the fight, both the Native American warriors and the cavalry soldiers under Custer, remains one of the most contentious topics among the cadre of professional and amateur historians who study the Little Bighorn. Unanswered questions about numbers, times, and locations, though, are really just echoes of the deeper conflicts that have persisted about the behavior of Custer, his officers, and his men—and about who should take responsibility for a defeat that quickly became more significant as a national mythic spectacle than as an actual military loss.

    It is a matter so enduring that mock courts-martial of a resurrected Custer are still staged regularly by a South Dakota group that assembles for this purpose. In , the Indiana University School of Law even held its own Custer court-martial featuring Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the presiding judge on the panel of three distinguished legal minds hearing the case.

    Yet that same testimony has put into circulation stories about the battle that historians have spent over a century trying to disprove: The most lurid rumor of all, though, did not have an Indian origin. But these controversies surrounding Custer and his fate persist because the fight between the Seventh Cavalry and the village of Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho was, as all military conflicts surely are, a political contest over competing visions of power. The Battle of the Little Bighorn resulted from and participated in a long struggle over questions of territorial governance and conflicting claims of sovereignty, as well as the implementation of solutions to these problems.

    For Custer and the Seventh Cavalry, the campaign had also become entangled with the divisive, never-ending battle between the political parties in the United States. As much as a military leader might want to divide the business of soldiering from the ugly world of partisan bickering, George Armstrong Custer could no more separate the two than his modern-day counterparts are able to do.

    Custer, in fact, nearly had lost the command of the Seventh Cavalry because of his participation in hearings aimed at exposing the corruption of the Ulysses S.

    Grant administration—a political blunder that infuriated the president to such a degree that he was ready to punish Custer by keeping him on the military sidelines. Partisan politics, though, ended up serving Custer well, if only posthumously. The political wrangling of the s played a part in transforming Custer from an historical footnote to a household name, but only a part. In , the nation was simultaneously commemorating its centennial and emerging from an economic depression; it had defeated secession, but the work of reconstruction and reunification still remained incomplete; the United States had spanned the continent yet still appeared to have only the loosest of grips over wide swaths of it.

    Michael A. Elliott

    In other words, the United States in was a nation celebrating the achievement of its Manifest Destiny yet wondering whether that destiny had been achieved at all, and if so, at what price. The Battle of the Little Bighorn gave a country at once confident and doubtful what it needed and would continue to need: Even in the decades after the Civil War, the status of free blacks was still too divisive and unresolved a question—one that could mar the harmony of a newly reunited country—for most white Americans to consider emancipation to be the central act of their national drama.

    On the other hand, whites, particularly those living east of the Mississippi, could look at the conflicts taking place between the U. What they saw had all the elements of a melodrama: Part of the power of this story in the American imagination—at least in the imagination of white Americans—emanated from the ambivalence that it generated. It has often been stated that white Americans of the nineteenth century thought of Indians in one of two ways: For many non-Indian Americans, though, these feelings of sympathy and disdain were not so sharply divided from one another; they were capable of holding both attitudes simultaneously—supporting the violent dispossession of American Indians throughout the continent while still lamenting the fate that they suffered.

    Custer himself understood this ambivalence and even shared it. Here Custer neatly demonstrates the bind in which Americans of his time placed the indigenous peoples of the Plains. They could either submit to the confinement of the reservation—and be disdained for no longer being free read: For many Americans, the fate of Custer and his men at the Little Bighorn fed these same desires.

    Custer was not simply a victim of government corruption or poorly considered policies, in spite of what the Herald argued, but a martyr of the long march of civilization toward its ultimate dominion over the earth. The image of Custer and his men being overwhelmed by hordes of bloodthirsty Indians reminded Americans that this was a genuine struggle with not only triumphs but also epic losses.

    Military victories over the Plains Indians seemed small and even sordid by comparison; the Battle of the Little Bighorn proved that the army had both a worthy foe and a worthy hero in the slain general. One need not feel guilty about the fate of the Indians if they were capable of this kind of carnage. Those whose lives were distant enough from the battle not to be touched directly by its blood and dust could regard the Battle of the Little Bighorn as the grand closing chapter of a book that had been nearly forgotten by the modern age.

    Here were the risks, the sacrifices, the emotions that modernity had sorely neglected. A decade after the tremendous suffering of the Civil War, here was a heroism less complicated and more easily recognizable than anything that could be found in the murky work of national reconstruction.