Hisar: “The day of massacre at Nalanda. Bakhtiyar and his men play buzkashi in my alleys today. Monks are being burnt alive; and those who try to escape are beheaded… The light of the world is fading today to face the ravages of time alone, abandoned, scorned, forgotten. Or perhaps to be reborn into many Nalandas…”
With this electrifying quote, poet-turned-historian Abhay K. began the discussion on his book, Nalanda: How it changed the world, on the final day of Jindal Literature Festival.
As a child, when Abhay visited the ruins of Nalanda with his family, he had no idea what the site was like in its hey-day. What had happened there? What made Nalanda the great institution that it was? These curiosities, as a writer, led him to answers that manifested in this book.
He recounted how the Prince Gautama Siddhartha—now known as Gautam Buddha—left the palatial halls in search for enlightenment, setting the stage for Nalanda’s rise as a centre of knowledge, a cosmopolitan site that took into its folds all curious beings.
“Nalanda, for the first time in the history of the world, brought together an international community of scholars. It laid the foundations of the idea of the university itself,” the author said, in a session moderated by Chhavi Rajawat, an MBA graduate who became the first woman with this qualification to become a sarpanch in India.
On Nalanda’s enduring influence, Abhay quoted the example of Chinese scholar Xuanzang, who took great personal risk by defying his nation’s ban on travelling abroad, just to copy a sutra from the library of the Indian institution.
“In the first millennium CE, Nalanda has the world’s best library, and it is known as Dharmaganj. It is nine-storey tall. There are three buildings, and it has millions of manuscripts,” Abhay told the audience.
Xuanzang, the author added, carried with him 576 Sanskrit texts back home.
Today, the contributions that Nalanda has made to the world can be seen around us, he said. Directing the audience’s attention to the space where the session was being held, the author pointed out that it resembled a particular architectural trait that most educational institutions today possess – a courtyard where students could gather, engage, discuss and debate.
This “courtyard plan” dates to Nalanda, Abhay said.
Other contributions, he went on, were in the realm of mathematics – algorithm, sine functions and algebra among them.
“Which is the world’s first printed book,” he asked the audience. Receiving the ‘Bible’ as a common answer, he said it was the Diamond Sutra, written at Nalanda.
Abhay said the first and the only empress to rule China, Wu Zetian, had a court of advisors filled by philosophers and mathematicians from Nalanda. “So, you can read in this book how Nalanda has shaped our modern world – from university campuses to the universal language of numbers the world uses today, or the algorithm used by artificial intelligence… all thanks to Nalanda,” he said.
But how did a poet come to write a book on Nalanda. “The publisher told me that poetry doesn’t sell, so you have to write a prose to publish poetry,” the poet-turned-historian chuckled.
ThePrint is the official media partner for the Jindal Literature Festival.