Sylvan Levi (1863-1935), the French indologist visited Kathmandu Valley – then capital of a truly forbidden kingdom at turn of century, seeking long-lost Buddhist texts that may have been preserved in mountain isolation. He wrote a three volume report and memoir, Le Nepal: Etude historique d'un royaume hindou (1905-1908), based on his trip. The unpublished manuscript of the work's flamboyant English translation will be published by Himal Books in 1999. We print here an excerpt from Levi's work, where he discusses the Subcontinents lack of history in general, and then highlights the 'countries' of Ceylon, Cashmere and Nepal and how they differ from 'India'.
India , in her Whole, is a world without history: she created herself, gods, doctrines, laws, sciences, arts, but she has not divulged the secret of their formation or of their metamorphosis. One must be well initiated in Indian ways to know at the expense of what patient toil, the learned men of Europe have established far distant connecting links in the obscurity of an almost impenetrable past; what strange combinations of heteroclitic date have enabled to edify a tottering chronology, even now thoroughly incomplete.
History
Civilised nations have preoccupied themselves in general, by conveying a durable remembrance to posterity; organised in community, they have directly extended to the group the instinctive sentiments of the individual. They have desired to decipher the mystery of their origin and to survive in the future. The priests, the poets, the erudites have offered themselves to this very powerful need. The Chinese have their annals, as the Greek have Herodote and the Jews their Bible. India has nothing.
The exception is so singular that it has, at the very outset, caused surprise and given rise to interpretations. One has especially alleged as a decisive argument, the transcendental indifference of the Hindu feeling penetrated by universal vanity, the Hindu surveys with superb disdain the illusive course of phenomena; to better humble the human smallness, his legends and his cosmogonies drown the years and the centuries into incommensurable periods that involve the imagination in the throes of a vertigo. The sentiment is exact; but in India as elsewhere, the highest doctrines have had to adapt themselves to the incurable failings of humanity. The commemorative inscriptions and panegyrics carved out of stone that are strewn over India, prove that from an early date, kings and other distinguished individuals have safeguarded themselves against being forgotten. The long and pompous genealogies that frequently serve as a preliminary to royal deeds even show that the chanceries were setting up in their archives an official history of the dynasty. But the political administration of India condemned these crude materials as they were most likely to disappear and with fatal results. If contented peoples had no history, then anarchy also had none, and India had exhausted herself in perpetual anarchy. Foreign invasions and internal rivalry have never ceased to overthrow the order of things.