‘Ancient cosmopolitanism’ and the South Asian diaspora

Raminder Kaur∗

Department of Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK

When considering the South Asian diaspora in Britain, attention is more often thannot drawn to migration and settlement patterns in the country from the mid-twentiethcentury. A more extended scope has been provided in terms of consideringmovements between the two regions in the colonial period, particularly from thenineteenth century with a couple of studies focusing on the period since the1600s. This article considers a frame further back in time when European citieslike London first became a site of ‘ancient cosmopolitanism’ open to migrationfrom regions including South Asia during the period of the Roman Empire. Theapproach adopted in this article is critical of colonial, regional and nationalistblinkers on the tracts of history, and enables a means of considering ancientconnections between Europe and South Asia as well as other modes ofinterpretation of the cultural and material legacy of the Roman era.

Keywords: cosmopolitanism; heritage; religion; Roman Empire; British Asian;interpretation of myth

Introduction

When the Roman emperors, Julius Caesar and Claudius, visited ancient Britain in the years54 BCE and 43 CE respectively, they introduced a multitude of people, goods, technol-ogies and animals such as the elephant from far flung regions of their empire andbeyond. The Roman period was the earliest instance of cultural diversity as a result ofthe impact of globalisation in Britain (Hingley 2005). From the first century CE, Britainbecame a province of the Roman Empire, and part of a hybridised culture that hadexisted for hundreds of years and spread over Europe, West Asia and North Africawhile contributing to it with its own localised traditions. Every time residents handled acoin, they saw the portrait of a Roman emperor and, more often than not, the image ofa deity who had been selected to represent imperial values. Every time they watched theunveiling of a new public monument, or attended a sacrifice in the precinct of a publictemple, they were drawn into a world of religious symbolism and practice that had itsroots in Greek mythology and tradition which itself owed a debt to cultures further east.

In this article, I look to the evidence of South Asian presence and influence inRoman Britain, a scope which has remained outside the span of literature on SouthAsia and its diaspora, as well as predominant conventions of Roman history and archae-ology. Historical studies on migration from South Asia have concentrated on the colo-nial period, particularly the nineteenth century;1 with a couple of studies, namely byVisram (2002) and Fisher (2004), that begin their story of Indians in Britain furtherback in time from 1600 focusing on the lives of sailors (lascar), servants and elites

ISSN 1943-8192 print/ISSN 1943-8184 online

# 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/19438192.2011.579458http://www.informaworld.com

∗Email: rk39@sussex.ac.uk

South Asian DiasporaVol. 3, No. 2, September 2011, 197–213

who had settled in Britain. Here I consider a frame further back in time when cities likeLondon first became a site of ‘ancient cosmopolitanism’ open to the migration oftraders, land speculators, slaves, artists, soldiers and individuals with specialist skillssuch as mahout, fortune-tellers and cooks from outside of Europe during the periodof the Roman Empire.2

The term, cosmopolitanism, is conventionally used to describe European liberal andelitist ideas about global consciousness. It is assumed that the more affluent are mostlikely to be cosmopolitan (Hannerz 1996), but recent theorisation has brought to light‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’ (Clifford 1992), ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ (Bhabha1996) and ‘demotic cosmopolitanism’ (Parry 2008). In the process, the concept hasbeen broadened to consider factors such as class, caste, gender, region and race/ethnicity(Cheah and Robbins 1998, Werbner 2008). Werbner refers to ‘situated cosmopolitanism’(2008, p. 1) which implies that it is not simply an individual orientation, but also ‘collec-tive, relational and thus historically located’ (2008, p. 2). However, even though it isacknowledged that the term has its etymological roots in the Greek cosmos (world)and polis (city), in Werbner’s edited volume on the subject, historical perspectives areonly discussed as far back as the Enlightenment, a period consonant with the rise ofglobal capitalism and travel around a new conception of the world. The Greek under-standing of the term was differently conceived in terms of a citizen of a particular poliscontributing to the city’s common good, but not to anyone outside the city. Nonetheless,there were challenges to this relatively narrow view of cosmopolitanism, most notably bythe Cynics and Stoics who identified more positively with human beings in general, andthe term was to undergo much transformation throughout later centuries.

Whereas ancient Greek understandings of the terms cosmos and polis are not centralto this analysis and may indeed constitute a dominant understanding of the concept ren-dered through the available archival material and not through the grounded nature ofmaterial culture (Kaur 2004), I invoke ‘ancient cosmopolitanism’ to describe an open-ness to difference, be it to other ethnicities and cultures (including those outside of thefrontiers of the Roman Empire) and their hybridised consequences. In discrepant ways,cosmopolitanism applies as much to elite constituencies, such as wealthy patricians whoconsumed foreign goods and lifestyles, as it does to those lower down in the social hier-archy, such as soldiers who engaged with hybridised religious practices. Related to thistheme is the arena of cultural diversity in which people from different parts of the thenknown world interacted. I am wary of applying a modern theorisation to a distant histori-cal context, but I am also conscious of the need to deconstruct legacies of colonialismand nationalism on contemporary interpretations of the Roman Empire (Webster andCooper 1996, Mattingly 1997, Hingley 2005) which have obfuscated other modes ofinterpretation of the Roman era as well as ancient connections between Britain andSouth Asia. Even though the debate on hybridity has primarily focused on postcolonialcontexts (Bhabha 1994, Werbner and Modood 1997, Kalra et al. 2005), this is not to thenpropose that the ideas could not be applicable to earlier historical junctures wherepeople, goods and practices interacted in a manner which created new identities,spaces and socio-cultural phenomena: in Bhabha’s words, a ‘third space’ characterisedby ambivalence, mimicry and cultural translation out of which ‘newness enters theworld’ (1994, p. 227). The cultural components out of which hybridity emerged werenot themselves ‘pure’ and holistic. The Romans were heavily indebted to Greekculture, which in itself arose out of a blend of Greek, Middle Eastern and Asian cultures.As Turcan observes: ‘Greek civilization was a daughter of the East, as Roman civiliza-tion was the product of Greek education’ (1996, p. 2).

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The main focus of this article is the part South Asia played in the hybridised culturesof Roman Britain. Considering Roman connections further east has been the focus of ahandful of studies;3 but less has been said about how these cultural encounters thenimpacted upon the outlying area of the Roman Empire to the west. The article is alsoin part a deconstruction of the colonial legacy of interpretation of the Roman worldin order to posit other forms of identification forged by contemporary South Asian dia-sporic communities. First, I consider the evidence and histories of interaction betweenthe Roman Empire, Britain and ‘Asia Major’ (that is, South Asia) in terms of the travelof people and commodities, and religio-cultural exchanges. This focus forms a backdropto a consideration of current practice and discourse among diasporic communities,raising questions as to how creative ventures flesh out Roman and South Asian legaciesin contemporary Britain; how the artefacts and cultures of the Roman era conventionallyseen as ‘western’ can be made relevant to people from a South Asian background; andhow the polytheistic aspects of Roman religion may be interpreted by individuals from aBritish Hindu background? Here I make connections laterally across preset categoriesand regions and develop open and diverse interpretative frameworks of the Romanperiod to do justice to its complex history and even more intricate reception among dia-sporic audiences today. These lines of enquiry will enable the use of fragments ofhistory to create new worlds and relationships that posit a continuum of movementbetween South Asia and Britain in antiquity, albeit indirect, which was fragmented inlater centuries to be resumed with more effective sea navigation, intensive trade andthe seeds of colonialism from the seventeenth century onwards.

Ancient cosmopolitanism

Where the data fails us with regards to tangible proof about South Asian presence inRoman Britain, it is necessary to turn to the fragments of textual and material evidence,and make reasonable suppositions based on a number of factors: (i) a re-reading ofRoman history decolonised from its imputed imperial parallels with British colonialism(ii) the relative ease of travel and communication for people within the Roman realm;(iii) the diverse nature of Roman settlements overseas; (iv) the demand for expertise andgoods from South Asia particularly by the elites; and (v) the absorption of religiousideas and deities from the east into Roman religious practice that transcended socialhierarchies.

Conventionally studies of Roman Britain have been subsumed into the traditions ofthe archaeology of Britain, placing fairly narrow parameters on the interpretation of anera which otherwise was renowned for much travel and exchange within the ever-changing contours of the Roman Empire and beyond. This latterday interpretation ofRoman Britain has its roots in Victorian and Edwardian colonialism (Mattingly 1997,2007): a consequence of the parochial politics of the times, of a singular nationalismand heritage virulent in Britain, than it was in sympathy to the ‘spirit of the ancients’.The colonial British were enamoured by the Graeco-Roman classical era – not onlydid they look towards the period for its political and civilisational outlook, but also forits art and philosophy – but the image the colonial British had of the classical periodwas of a deracinated one, where Roman culture was stripped off its diverse characterand its material legacy was literally ‘whitewashed’. This was in an emergent contextof a separatist and hierarchical theory of race and ethnicity from the mid-nineteenthcentury. By contrast, in the Roman world, it was not so much race that was an indexof hierarchy, but genealogy.

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Contemporary critics have highlighted how Roman archaeology served the interestsof the British state particularly during its colonising years (Hingley 2000). Appeals tothe past were made in order to legitimise the present in terms of British identity and itsimperial destiny. The two powers could not have had a shared imperial mission butBritish imperialism borrowed extensively from Roman republicanism so that itappeared that both powers were equivalent. Both the Roman and British Empireswere held to have an expansive ‘civilising mission’, much of it initiating in eithertrade or warfare and then extending to technological, administrative and military supre-macy which led to the ever-widening territories of their dominions (Bryce 2001). Intheir particular ways, the two empires revered order, administration, law and some sem-blance of civil rights for their citizens, yet they held firm and contentious views aboutthe ‘civilised’ and the ‘barbaric’ differently conceived.

Methods of government and administration were devised and executed by colonialofficials, the bedrock of whose education was the study of classical civilisation. Wit-tingly, sometimes unwittingly, they applied cultural and administrative strategiesderived from their knowledge of the Roman Empire. European scholars too consideredIndian culture through the prism of very particular intellectual traditions. On the onehand, Indologists were keen to compare Hindu religion and sculptures with Europeanclassical forebears seeing these as travesties of a more rational outlook. On the otherhand, they imbued too much significance to Hinduism viewing it as the origin of Euro-pean religions (Mitter 1992, p. 73). Bias was inherent in their treatment of aspects of theso-called ‘heathen’ religions, and prior to the eighteenth century, some preferred thearts of Islamic religion in India, deeming them as comparable to their own Christianculture. In comparison, Hinduism was seen as idolatrous and gods were even inter-preted as demonic where sacrifice to a Hindu deity, for instance, was interpreted as‘devil worship’, the signature goat horns being placed on the god in their etchings(Mitter 1992, p. 14). Hindu religions along with their devotees were viewed as inferiorand even uncivilised. This disposition saw the development of much distortion ofIndian religions and people which persisted well after the formal dismantlement ofcolonialism in the subcontinent.

North Africa and West Asia are already included as part of the Roman Empire in itsfamiliar territory including Europe and the Mediterranean basin, otherwise known as‘cursus publicus’ – a region that has been demarcated based on the Roman govern-ment’s postal services. However, the Roman Empire did not stop dead at its easternboundary. Wheeler observes: ‘The boundaries of the Empire, particularly in the East,were sufficiently fluid to ensure a constant awareness of more distant horizons, ofgreater riches, more marvels, fresh menaces’ (1954, p. 15). It was even suggested bycertain poets that Rome could conquer the Indian subcontinent. Propertius stated inhis Elegies that the ‘divine Caesar meditates an expedition against the opulent India’(III, 4:1–22), and Virgil in his Aeneid dreamt of Augustus’ empire expanding: ‘PastGaramants [Africans] and Indians to a land beyond the zodiac; And the sun’s yearlypath, where Atlas the sky-bearer pivots; The wheeling heavens embossed with fierystars, on his shoulder’ (VI, 785–787). Yet, for a number of reasons, these ambitionswere never realised at that point in history.

Unlike the prevailing Roman view of Britain seen for the most part as primitive andunsophisticated, India was much admired for its history, culture and philosophy.Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) was a powerful model for succeeding Romanemperors: the fact that he had been to India and brought back fantastic tales of itspeople and products heightened the Roman desire to emulate him and continue the

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association with India (Tomber 2008, p. 28). The Greek geographer, Strabo, mentionedIndia in his Geography as ‘the greatest of all nations and the happiest in its lot, whose con-fines reach both to the Eastern Sea and to the southern sea of the Atlantic’ (II, 5:32). TheGreeks and the Romans particularly appreciated the Indian ‘philosophers’ described asgymnosophists (naked philosophers), a reference to the numerous yogi they encounteredin their travels in India (Balsdon 1980). Among some incredible accounts on the ‘Indianrace of men’, the Roman writer, Pliny the Elder, in his The Natural History of Pliny,marvelled at how, in what could only be described as early instances of Orientalism(Said 1978), they ‘remain in one posture with their eyes immovably fixed upon thesun, from its rising to its setting, and during the whole of the day, they are accustomedto stand in the burning sands on one foot first, and then the other’ (VII, 2).

It is reputed that the Greek navigator, Hippalus, studied the position of the ports andlearnt about the monsoon wind, such that sea trade between the southern coastline ofArabia and the Malabar coast in south India became commonplace. The annexationof Egypt with the backing of wealthy individuals and state involvement provided theRomans with embarkation ports by which to take advantage of extant knowledgeabout sea trade. A Tamil poet of the day wrote of ‘the beautifully built ships of theYavanas [the westerners] which come with gold and return with pepper’ (cited inMiller 1998, p. viii). Recently, archaeologists led by K.P. Shajan and V. Selvakumarcame across remnants of a major ancient port in Kerala in what is now the smalltown of Pattanam (Selvakumar et al. 2004).4 Judging by the numerous Romanamphora pieces, beads, glass and precious stones, the site is believed to be theancient port of Muziris, important for trade between India, the horn of Africa andEurope, particularly between the first century BCE to the first century CE.

While colonies of Roman traders developed in the main ports of India, the motiv-ation of trade also led Indian merchants to station themselves in the cosmopolitan andthriving port cities of Alexandria and Naples (Gysens 1994) and conceivably furtherafield in other ports of Europe. The Roman regime made for diverse locales, wheremigrants mixed with indigenous inhabitants under the mantle of an inclusive andabsorbing Roman administration which led to a vigorous exchange of cultural ideasbetween the overlapping regions of Europe, the Mediterranean basin, Africa, WestAsia and beyond. Dress, language, public bathing, entertainment and the taste forforeign foods also played a role in uniting people of many cultures. The extensivereach of trade in new food products and commodities resulted in the increasedconsumption of exotica in Britain while developing taste and an allure for the east,particularly among the elites. Indeed, Roman Britain was a key period for ‘the creationof new consumers . . . [and] the first sizeable delineation of social hierarchies’ (van derVeen et al. 2008, p. 13, see also Bourdieu 1987).

There are irrefutable signs of those of African descent settled in Roman Britain, themore famous of them being Septimius Severus (145–211 CE), the Emperor born inLibya and based in York for the last year of his life, and the nameless ‘ivory banglewoman’ from Africa excavated in York (Eckhardt 2008). There are also signs of WestAsians: Severus’ wife, Julia Domna was from Syria, and the merchant, Barates, whocame from Palmyra in Syria set up a tombstone for his British wife, Regina, outsidethe Roman fort in South Shields. There is much evidence for a cosmopolitan mix of sol-diers from West Asia and Africa (Mattingly 2007, p. 181). Whereas the proof for ident-ifiable people from South Asia is shortcoming, there are considerable signs of an array ofreligious cults and ideas introduced to Britain which originated in the east; and severalexamples of South Asian insignia, practices and commodities such as birds, animals,

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spice and textiles from the east (including India and China) which were woven into thefabric of Roman culture and began to be seen as essential to the imperial way of life thatleft indelible imprints in Britain (Figures 1 and 2). The accompanying figures illustratethe complex dynamics of hybridity between compliance and resistance where, on theone hand, an Indian bird is incorporated into the formal pantheon of Roman deities,and on the other, an Indian animal is incorporated into the Bacchus cult which wasoften seen as anathema to, and subversive of, official religion in the Roman Empire.

Figure 1. ‘The Peacock Pavement’, symbol of the goddess Juno, ca second century CE (JewryWall Museum, Leicester, photograph by the author).

Figure 2. Bacchus with tiger mosaic from Leadenhall Street, London, ca first or secondcentury CE (# The Trustees of the British Museum, London).

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While Rome exported luxury goods such as purple dye, storax, coral, jewels andsweet clover for garlands to India, trade items from India and further east includedpearls, gems, animals, birds and textiles, the prime commodity being spice (Warmington1974). Spices were considered a ‘form of royal treasure’, an article of luxury, compar-able with gems and silks’ (Miller, 1998, p. viii). India was the main supplier of pepper,cardamom, nard, costum, sweet flag, agalochum and narcaphthon. The appeal of spicelay in its uses in food, wine, preservatives, cosmetics, perfumes and incense. It even hadits part to play in rituals: magi would use herbs and spices to invoke the gods and throughtheir pungency, expel evil spirits from the sick. Spices also formed part of the gifts togods as they became an integral part of Roman rituals. The Greek physician,Hippocrates, first prescribed long pepper from the north of India, not as a condimentbut as a cure for disease. It could even be argued that far-flung areas of the RomanEmpire and countries beyond such as India and China provided the raw ingredientsfor the development of early medicine in the Graeco-Roman era.5

Black pepper was considered the ‘king of spices’, so much so that it was often usedas payment for taxes and rent. It found popularity across the Roman Empire includingBritain as testified by literary sources (Mattingly 2007, p. 220), and Romano-Britishfinds such as preserved pepper (van der Veen et al. 2008, p. 13) and pepper pots(Figure 3). Indeed, environmental archaeological studies reveal that the Romanperiod was ‘the first serious diversification of the plant component of the British dietsince the introduction of wheat and barley in the Neolithic’ (van der Veen et al.2008, p. 11) and the consumption of exotic commodities would have played a conspic-uous part in the exercise of political dominance. Pepper became an almost essential partof fine cooking (Ricotti 1994, p. 101). Recipes were published in the De re Coquinariawhich recommended various spices for both flavouring and preservation.6 There werealso exotic dishes such as boiled and spiced parrot and even peacock for regal banquets,birds which would have been imported from South Asia.

Figure 3. ‘Empress pepper pot’ found in Hoxne hoard, England, ca fourth century CE (# TheTrustees of the British Museum, London).

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Spices literally spiced up life as dialogue was peppered with their evocative powers.Plautus, a master of comedies hugely influenced by Greek comedies, would drench hisplays with ‘spicey talk’ as when the aged slave, Laena, sang the praises of her favouritewine: ‘My beauty of Bacchus! You’re old and so am I, and how I need you! . . . You aremy myrrh, my cinnamon, my ointment of roses, my saffron, my cassia, my rarest of per-fumes! Where you are poured, there would I fain be buried!’ (cited in Miller 1998, p. 10).

Spices even became associated with a declining morality and vice where wealth wasseen to be squandered on foreign imports. Pliny the Elder was known to have com-plained about the export of gold to the east for such frivolities which reached itsapogee under the reign of Emperor Nero (37–68 CE) (Warmington 1974, p. 183).Leading Romans frequently accused each other of extravagance and sexual immorality.It was a defining feature of the political vocabulary of the day – that individuals werelosing their moral rectitude and squandering their wealth (Edwards 1993). ConservativeRomans frequently associated the importation of ‘foreign goods’ with the decline ofRoman morals although others saw in it a means of exercising imperial dominance.Indeed, the Emperor Vespasian (9–79 CE) aimed to curb public and private extrava-gance that had marked the latter part of Nero’s reign (Miller 1998, p. 223).

Nonetheless, trade between east and west continued unabated. Trade routes pro-vided the backbone for other kinds of interactions. It is stated in the Acts of Thomasthat around 200 CE the apostle travelled to south India (Elliott 1999, pp. 439–511).Whatever the actuality, it is incontestable that his followers did tread the path of themonsoon winds and Christianity spread to India before it did so in Britain.

While goods from India indicated an elite cosmopolis as well as a network of mer-chants spread within and without the Roman Empire, ideas and beliefs that had theirprovenance in South Asia were spread across a larger constituency. The philologist,Georges Dumezil, and linguist, Emile Benveniste, have suggested that there areproto-Indo-European origins to Graeco-Roman and Indian languages and cultures.7

Complicating a flowchart of cultural diffusionism, however, Doniger suggests concep-tualising similarities in terms of ‘analogues, influences, and borrowings than of sourcesand diffusions’ (1999, p. 4). Her proposal is that cultural resemblances could also bedue to later historical contacts between Greece and India through, for instance, Alex-ander the Great’s expeditions or simply the travels of sailors, Buddhist proselytizersand merchants centuries later.

There is a fine line between confirmed historical evidence and conjecture. Whereasthe travel of ideas to do with the epics is as yet unsubstantiated, there is considerableevidence for the travel of deities from the east into the Graeco-Roman world.Eastern deities began to play a prominent part in Roman religious culture around thefirst century CE (Henig 1984, p. 109). They included the ‘wine god’ Bacchus believedin antiquity to have come from India but owing a debt to earlier Greek culture since atleast the fifth century BCE in the form of Dionysus; the ‘mother goddess’, Cybele, withher origins in Phrygia (in modern-day Turkey) or perhaps even with Indo-Europeanorigins; and Mithras with his roots in ancient Persia and Vedic India. Indeed, onanother level, in Pompeii an ivory figurine of what is reputed to be Lakshmi was exca-vated (Figure 4). It is unclear as to how the figurine ended up in Pompeii or whatpurpose the figurine served – whether it was a functional item such as a mirrorhandle, exotica, or perhaps even demonstrated an interest in Indian goddesses canonly be left to the realms of intrigue and speculation.

Instead of the formal patterns of worship of traditional gods, eastern deities enableda more personal relationship with promises of personal salvation. Turcan elaborates: ‘In

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a blase and weary world, eastern religions also offered the attraction of strong feelingsand emotions. Their liturgies excited and aroused the senses of those who were hence-forth left cold by the strictly formalist worship of the Roman gods’ (1996, p. 18).Formal Roman religion became dissatisfactory in an emergent context that privilegedthe individual and where eastern and Graeco-oriental religions began to be seen assuperior in that, not only were they connected to rich and powerful clergy, but alsotheir beliefs were tied up with a cosmology that could explain the state of their lives,society, mortality and immortality, and the universe. Turcan continues:

These gods were simultaneously personal, personally attentive to the fears or aspirationsof individuals, and universal, responsible for the immense terrestrial and supraterrestrialworld, which inexpressibly surpassed them. More intimately and constantly presentthan the gods of the classical pantheon in the heart of their worshippers, but endowedat the same time with a boundless power that was without either geographical or potentialfrontiers, each was all things to all men in the great Everything over which they had sover-eign domination. (1996, p. 26)

The temple of Mithras found along the Walbrook stream in London is a vivid exampleof how traditions that emerged in South Asia in the form of the related proto-Hindusolar gods, Mitra and Varuna, travelled via Persia all the way to the northernmostparts of Europe reaching as far as Hadrian’s Wall and the Germanic Limes (Henig1984, p. 98). How exactly Mithraic rituals evolved along their journeys to becomethe mainspring of a ‘mystery cult’ in the west remains another kind of mystery.

Figure 4. Ivory ‘Lakshmi’ figurine found in Pompeii, ca first century (# National Archaeolo-gical Museum, Naples).

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Almost two thousand years separates the appearance of the Vedic Mitra in Indiathrough its evolution in West Asia to the first known representations of Mithras thebull-slayer in the Roman world. In Vedic literature, Mitra is the one ‘who bringspeople together’. The word, mitra, itself means ‘dear friend’ or ‘friendship’. Thereare several characteristics which Mithras shares with the Vedic Mitra. Mithras was abenevolent god who sustained heaven and earth, was associated with light, honesty,purity and courage, and promised an afterlife to his devotees (Turcan 1996, p. 95).The deity’s connections with astrology also exalted his position among the Romanswho regarded augury and divination with great respect (Ulansey 1991).

There is little by way of visual representations of the Vedic Mitra, but it is assumedthat sometimes reference to the war god, Indra, is another way of invoking Mitra(Turcan 1996, p. 197). Records of Mitra/Mithra outside of India are evident in theinscribed peace treaty between Hittites and the Hurrian kingdom of the Mitanni inthe area south east of Lake Van, around 1400 BCE. There the youthful god appearsin the company of the Vedic gods, Varuna, Indra and the twin horsemen (AshvinTwins) as the beings invoked as witnesses and keepers of the pact (Campbell 1964,pp. 260–261 and p. 256). In Zoroastrianism – once the dominant religion of Iranbut since the tenth century, exiled to western India – Mithra became part of thetrinity of ahura, the protectors of asha/arta or, in other words, ‘truth’ or ‘that whichis right’. He retained his aspect of god of light, and protector and keeper of relationshipsbased on friendship and love.

Mitra/Mithra became Hellenized in his adoption in the west. While popular amongthe military and merchants, the Mithras cult had a restricted membership emphasisingonce again the use of exotic beliefs and paraphernalia in the creation of socialhierarchies. A story about an initiation in The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius givesus a brief glimpse into this cult. The initiate recalled how he: ‘approached the verygates of death and set foot on Proserpine’s threshold yet was permitted to return,borne through all the elements’ (II, 23). Mention is also made of the luxurious silkswith eastern designs draped on the deities and used in rituals, probably from China

Figure 5. Mithraeum relief sculpture found in London, ca second or third century CE (#Museum of London, London).

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or India. In this particular episode, the initiate comes out wearing an ‘Olympian stole’:‘a precious cloak [which] hung down from my ankles with sacred animals worked incolour on every part of it; for instance, Indian dragons [snakes] and Hyperborean grif-fins, which are winged birds generated in the more distant parts of the world’ (II, 24).

In the tauroctony (a representation of Mithras killing a sacred bull), Mithras isdepicted as an energetic young man, wearing a Phrygian cap, a short tunic and acloak which furls out behind him. Mithras grasps the bull so as to force it into sub-mission, with his knee on its back and one hand forcing back its head while he stabsit in the neck with a sword (Figure 5). Positioned around him are the torch-bearersCautes and Cautopates, the celestial twins of light and darkness, who recall the dayand night associations of the Vedic Mitra and Varuna. Space precludes me fromfurther analysis of such hybrid artefacts – suffice it to say that the Roman Empirewas not simply ‘western’ in the sense that later advocates of British colonialism hadimagined through the lens of its global ‘civilizing mission’.

The heart of diversity

Once the centre of a British dominion which stretched across three quarters of the worldin the nineteenth century, London has now become a global hub for cosmopolitanlifestyles. This phenomenon is of a variant note to Roman Londinium in that cosmopo-litanism is now underwritten by a history of British colonialism and the discrepantprocesses of global capitalism of a very different scale and order (Robertson 1992).Nonetheless, similar arguments apply in terms of impact where cultural diversity hasgenerated a cornucopia of hybridised activities. Among these, British Asian artisteshave reviewed Graeco-Roman forebears in light of other traditions, but not in thesense of a patronising sense of power-knowledge over a particular historical cultureossified in a misty and mystical past as with early Orientalists (Said 1978, p. 2);rather they do so in a dynamic and variegated manner that relates intimately to theirpersonal and collective sense of hybridised identities, beliefs and practices in contem-porary Britain.

In 1985, the London-based Asian theatre company, Tara Arts, produced Anklets ofFire – an adaptation of the classic Tamil epic, Cilappatikaram. Believed to be writtenaround the fourth century CE, this epic features a Roman merchant arriving in southIndia and falling in love with a local courtesan, with tragic consequences for the city(Figure 6). The drama underlined the long history with India and the Roman Empirefiltered through a diasporic lens. In 2001, Tara Arts staged another production,A Ramayan Odyssey, which drew upon the drama of both ancient epics. Legendand myth from two continents were combined to produce an astonishing blend ofadventurous tales where the heroes, Odysseus and Ram, were brought together onthe same stage in tune to the theatre company’s identification with hybrid histories ina culturally diverse country (Figure 7).

The storyteller, Seema Anand, has been performing at several venues including infront of the temple of Mithras at the Museum of London. Her performance demon-strates a wondrous reinvention of myths: the Vedic gods, Mitra and Varuna, aresitting on a see-saw, going up and down to the rhythm of the universe, when suddenly,the see-saw gets stuck. As Varuna is higher, the whole world falls into a perpetual,watery darkness. Mitra calls upon Vishnu for help who comes to him in the form ofhis first avatar, Matsya, the fish, but to no avail. Then comes Kurma, the turtle, totry his luck at rectifying the fault, followed by the other avatars – Varaha the boar,

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Figure 6. Anklets of Fire, # Tara Arts, 1985 [Credit: Simon Anand. Sudha Bhuchar andNizwar Karanj].

Figure 7. A Ramayan Odyssey, # Tara Arts, 2001 [Credit: Mark Douet. Harish Khanna asOdysseus and Ashvin K Joshi as Rama].

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Narasimha, the half-man, half-lion and so forth – until eventually the see-saw iscorrected, the universe is in harmony again, and Mitra and Varuna, light and day,follow on from each other. Here we have an about-turn, when Mitra emerges fromthe Vedic era in front of the Roman salvation god, Mithras, indicating contemporaryevolutions and interpretations of ancient deities in London.

In this climate of cultural and creative diversity, it does not make sense for anyheritage institution to ignore the varied backgrounds of communities it serves withtheir collections. With this in mind, the Museum of London took the progressive stepto review its Roman religion collections in light of more open and diverse interpretiveframeworks. A focus group was arranged to see and discuss the Roman galleries withnine individuals from Hindu backgrounds, male and female, aged between 18 and 60in 2008. One of the most striking revelations from the focus group was that most ofthe participants were unaware of the importance religion played in the Roman worldyet, without intending to entrench essentialist assumptions, showed an almost intuitiveunderstanding of its deities, myths and legends that had developed through theirmundane familiarity with polytheistic Hinduism. Before the focus group even began,one of the women remarked in front of the Roman galleries: ‘Mithras – it’s a veryIndian-sounding name. We have a word, mitra, which means friendship’. In furtherjourneys of family resemblances, links were made with Venus and Lakshmi, bothgoddesses seen as paramours of beauty, and with reference to the iconic representationof Venus Anadyomene (‘Venus Rising from the Sea’), born out of the oceans albeit indiffering circumstances. Connections were also made with the Hindu goddess, Ganga,‘who came out of the water and was eternal’ and ‘never aged and therefore representedendless beauty’. The Roman goddess of good fortune and fate, Fortuna, was comparedwith Lakshmi as well as Gayatri, symbolic of good luck, and the consorts of theelephant-headed god, Ganesh, known as Riddhi and Siddhi, each representative ofsuccess and wealth.

Some participants were astute enough to recognise the changes that Hinduism hasundergone throughout the ages. On the issue of naked representations of Venus, oneperson noted:

In ancient times, depictions of Hindu goddesses were less conservative. There is a mothergoddess image from the thirteenth century where there is a female body, no head, just alotus, legs open as if she is about to give birth. You would not find that kind of represen-tation these days. The BJP, reformist influences and Victorian prudishness [as a result ofcolonialism] put paid to that.

The Roman god of the heavens, Jupiter, and his parallels with Indra, the Vedic king ofthe gods, of sky, storm and thunderbolts were more than obvious, as were the parallelsbetween the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey and the Indian Mahabharata andRamayana. As one participant was quick to point out in the Iliad: ‘In this case theGreeks succeeded in taking the city, so really the devils won. Which is slightly differentto the Mahabharata’.

The founding myth of Rome with Romulus and Remus reminded one participant of:

Luv and Kush who were Sita and Ram’s children. They were twins. Sita was sent toexile and Ram didn’t know that she was pregnant. She gave birth to twins who ulti-mately then killed Ram, but he was really delighted that if anyone killed him it washis children [in remorse for what he had done to his family], and then they took thethrone a lot later.

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Another recalled a tale from the Mahabharata which was also reminiscent of thebiblical tale about Moses’ birth:

Again it’s a young princess (Kunti) who worships the sun god, suddenly she was pregnantand she put her baby (Karna) into a Moses basket and floated him up the river like Moses,who was then found by a charioteer who brought him up. He and his wife couldn’t havechildren and brought this boy up and he then goes back into the army and basically fightswith the baddies, but his brothers are in the opposite camp.

Such (re)interpretations are potentially endless for there are many deities, demons,myths and legends which can prompt comparisons and hypotheses about possibleconnections in the ancient worlds – worlds which remain in the mists of time butwhich continue to inspire and have a potent influence on contemporary lives.Admittedly, a comparison of a living and dynamic religious culture to do withHinduism with one that has long gone has its shortcomings. Nonetheless, therewards outweigh its disadvantages and the focus group provided a valuable exercisein stripping Graeco-Roman cultures of their ‘western’ cloak, while shedding intriguinglight upon the participants’ dual heritage. A more open approach to Roman history hasmassive implications for presentations of ancient history not circumscribed by colonialinfluence and notions to do with nationalist heritage. It could enable people fromdifferent faiths and cultures to connect with Roman artefacts, and stimulate interpret-ations that had previously eluded them simply because these relics had been exhibitedin narrow Eurocentric contexts.

Quests and questions

In this article, I have explored the actual, possible and imagined territories of commer-cial and cultural exchange between the Roman Empire, South Asia and Britain. In theprocess, other interpretations of the Roman period have been provided enabling aconsideration of how global processes connecting South Asia and Europe impactedupon Britain, a characteristic which was forged way back in time when BCEflowed into CE, not in the contemporary era or even from the seventeenth century.I have shown how dominant histories about the Roman Empire have eclipsed othersmaller but no less significant stories. Even though conclusive data for South Asianpeople in Roman Britain is still forthcoming, evidence exists for their presence inport cities of Naples and Alexandria, and for the fact that Roman presence introducedcosmopolitan settlements and lifestyles, commodities and religio-cultural ideas thatemerged in South Asia which became widely prevalent across the empire includingBritain. In view of the relative ease of travel at the height of Roman imperialism,the diversity of urban and military settlements overseas, and the demand for expertisefor skills available with inhabitants in South Asia, it is highly likely that the earliesthistorical instance of migration to Britain from the subcontinent was during thisperiod. In the process, I have highlighted the need to deconstruct the Eurocentricimage of the Roman Empire to show its debts to, and connections with, other culturesin the world with a focus here on South Asia.

In the reinterpretation of Roman legacy, I have attempted to open up another meansof engaging with the diverse heritage of Roman Britain as well as enable a wider rangeof audiences to relate ancient collections with their own interests and backgrounds. Thefamily resemblances made between Roman and Hindu myths, legends and practices arestriking, not least because they have fuelled the reinvention of Graeco-Roman and

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South Asian classics in the age-old tradition of story-creating and -telling, and demon-strate a transcultural approach to classical legacies away from the myopia of colonial,regional or nationalist blinkers.

An intriguing question to pursue would be what shape Roman religion would havetaken today if it persisted as has Hinduism. One man from the focus group remarkedthat perhaps if Roman religions had continued until the present era, it may also havedeveloped its own philosophical rationale:

It’s difficult to make an assessment because we are heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition at the moment. If the Judeo-Christian tradition wasn’t there and wehad survival of these [Roman] pantheon of gods; it’s very similar to the Hindu multiplegods but they [would have] had to come up with a theory which united all of these godstogether into one ultimate reality.

On this thoughtful note, I end this journey, one of potentially many explorations,which could continue as more and more connections, interpretations, parallels andcreative interventions are made with these divine and mythic enterprises across timeand space.

AcknowledgementsMy thanks to Museum of London staff who enabled the research for this article in 2008 (fundedby the London Museums Hub), particularly to Francis Grew, Jenny Hall, Giles Standing, DarrylMcIntyre and Charlotte Samuels. I would also like to thank Martin Henig, John Manley, RobertaTomber, Nicky Boyd, Jatinder Verma, Seema Anand, Chandan Mahal, the anonymised partici-pants of a focus group, and the anonymous reviewers of this article. Last but not least, thanks toSuraya and Sohana Bains who inspired it all.

Notes1. Examples include Lahiri (2000), Burton (1998) and Tabili (1994).2. See Scullard (1974) and Warmington (1974). Scullard notes that for a long time the Greeks

believed that ‘elephants only understood the language used by Indians’ (1974, p. 131). Suchwas their regional association that even into the Roman era, whatever the individual’s back-ground, mahout were referred to as ‘Indians’.

3. These include Ball (2000), Cimino (1994), Miller (1998) and Parker (2008), and the focuson trade around the Indian Ocean, Red Sea and the Mediterranean as provided by Tomber(2008).

4. Large-scale excavations are on-going at Pattanam by the Kerala Council of HistoricalResearch directed by P.J. Cherian.

5. The Susruta Samhita, one of the earliest collections on medicine (ca 600 CE) informed ofaloe-wood used as a fumigant, a technique which was known to have existed in theGanges Valley in the first millennium BCE. The smoke was used to perfume the bodyas well as an anodyne after surgical wounds, a practice that was deployed by theGreeks and Romans.

6. This cookbook is ascribed to Apicius, a wealthy patrician-gastronome in the first century CEbut was probably compiled by an anonymous cook in the fourth century CE (Ricotti 1994,p. 102).

7. Ancient studies propose that the Romans were originally a small tribe of Indo-Europeanspeakers who migrated from the area north of the Black Sea. One group migrated westwardstowards Europe; the other eastwards to the north west of the Indian subcontinent. Theybrought with them the language of Sanskrit around 1500 BCE which is considered the‘eldest sister’ to Indo-European languages, including Latin, all of which ‘proceeded froma common but nameless and unknown parent’ (Monier-Williams 1999, p. xii).

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Notes on contributorRaminder Kaur is Senior Lecturer in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.She is the author of Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism (2005), co-author ofDiaspora and Hybridity (with Virinder Kalra and John Hutnyk, 2005), and co-editor of Censor-ship in South Asia (with William Mazzarella, 2009), Bollyworld: Indian Cinema through aTransnational Lens (with Ajay Sinha, 2005) and Travel Worlds: Journeys in ContemporaryCultural Politics (with John Hytnyk, 1999).

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