Relocating East and West in Peter Frankopan's the Silk Roads: a New

Relocating East and West in Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Dr. Mallika Tripathi Assoc. Professor & Head Deptt. of Humanities FGIET, Raebareli & Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee Assoc. Professor & Chairperson Dum Dum Motijheel College Kolkata India

Abstract: Writing history of the world is not an easy task. One needs to pay attention to the minute details. Even missing a minor point makes one stand in the queue of birdbrains but Peter Frankopan not only took this herculean task but also proved his worth by forcing the readers to reassess the history of the world. Thus the present paper unfolds the hidden aspects of the Universe with special reference to The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan.

Kewords: Ambition, Religion, Silk, Trade, world

In the words of Gerald DeGroot, ‗Many books have been written which claim to be ―A New History of the World‖. This one fully deserves the title….‘. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World is certainly a dazzling piece of historical writing that offers the roadmap of the epic history of the crossroads of the world—the meeting place of East and West and the birthplace of civilization. It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures and religions. From the

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rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the twentieth century—this book shows how the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East. Peter Frankopan realigns our understanding of the world, pointing us eastward. Historicism yields a certain predictability and explanatory power; this feature is pronounced in the writings of Hegel and Marx. A historian ―operates within the horizon of his own world view, a certain broad set of assumptions and beliefs‖ ( M.A.R. Habib. P. 760). Hence the dilemma of historical interpretation can easily lead to ― a kind of aesthetic formalism on the one hand , which denies history any constitutive role in the formation of texts and on the other hand to a historical view of texts as culturally and socially determined, a view that reduces emphasis on authorial intention and agency.‖ (Habib P.761). The new historicism which arose in 1980‘s reacted against both the formalist view of the literary text as somehow autonomous and Marxist views which ultimately related texts to the economic infrastructure which constituted the basis of Peter Frankopan‘s book. It is a kind of discourse situated within a complex of cultural discoursed in the discovery of the new geographical balance of the world from a sociological point of view. Peter in charting out the past and re-reading biased history written in modern times, vividly re-creates the emergence of the first cities in Mesopotamia and the birth of empires in Persia, Rome and Constantinople, as well as the depredations by the Mongols, the transmission of the Black Death and the violent struggles over Western imperialism. Throughout the millennia, it was the appetite for foreign goods that brought East and West together, driving economies and the growth of nations. Travelling enriches us with experience and the roads lead us to different destination thus fulfilling the hidden desire of the author where he wishes to know about the hidden truths of World, ‗I wanted to know more about Russia and Central Asia, about Persia and Mesopotamia. I wanted to understand the origins of Christianity when viewed from Asia; and how the crusades looked to those living in the great cities of the Middle Ages- Constantinople, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Cairo, for example; I wanted to learn about the great empires of the east, about the Mongols and their conquests; and to understand how two world wars looked when viewed not from Flanders or the eastern front, but from Afghanistan and India.‘ In this 25 Chapter book the first one is about the Creation of the Silk Road. the second chapter deals with The Road of Faiths , the third The Road to a Christian East , the fourth ,The Road to Concord, In the sixth there is the Road of Furs , the seventh The Slave Road, the eighth The Road to Heaven , the ninth The Road to Hell , The tenth The Road of

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Death and Destruction , the eleventh The Road of Gold , the twelfth The Road of Silver , the thirteenth the Road to Northern Europe the fourteenth the Road to Empire, the fifteenth The Road to Crisis , The sixteenth The Road to War, the seventeenth The Road of Black Gold, the eighteenth The Road to Compromise , The nineteenth The Wheat Road, the twentieth The Road to Genocide, The twenty first The Road of Cold Warfare, the twenty second The American Silk Road the twenty third The Road of Superpower Rivalry, the twenty fourth The Road to Catastrophe the last one The Road to Tragedy. This shows the gradual changes and evolution of history. As the writer beautifully says in the Preface: ― As a child one of my most prized possessions was a large map of the world.‖ He was uneasy of about the relentlessly narrow geographic focus of his classes at school during his teenage, because this map concentrated solely on Western Europe and the United States and left most of the rest of the world untouched. It was his boyhood dream that he would enlighten the world about the huge regions that had been passed over in silence. A book by Eric Wolf was an anthropological study that lazily accepted the lazy history of civilization where Ancient Greece begat Rome, and Rome begat Christian Europe , Christian Europe begat the Renaissance and the Renaissance the Enlightenment , the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution .The mantra of the political , cultural and moral triumph of the West prevailed and this historical account was flawed. An alternative way of looking at history was a necessity. He rightly realised that the regions that are not being accommodated in the historical study either got lost or suffocated by the insistent story of the rise of Europe. Again there were the biased views. The Christians located Jerusalem as its focus and midpoint while the Arab geographers put the Caspian Sea at its centre. Again an important Turkish map in Istanbul had at its heart a city called Balasaghun which was once considered the centre of the world. The Silk Road or Silk Route is an ancient network of trade and cultural transmission routes that were central to cultural interaction through regions of the Asian continent connecting the West and East by merchants, pilgrims, monks, soldiers, nomads, and urban dwellers from China and India to the Mediterranean Sea during various periods of time. Extending 10,000 kilometres (6,400 miles), the Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative trade in Chinese silk carried out along its length, beginning during the Han dynasty (207 BCE – 220 CE). The Central Asian sections of the trade routes were expanded around 114 BCE by the Han dynasty, largely through the missions and explorations of Chinese imperial envoy, Zhang Qian. The Chinese took great interest in the safety of their trade products and

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extended the Great Wall of China to ensure the protection of the trade route. Trade on the Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of the civilizations of China, the Indian subcontinent, Persia, Europe, the Horn of Africa and Arabia, opening long-distance, political and economic relations between the civilizations. Though silk was certainly the major trade item from China, many other goods were traded, and religions, syncretic philosophies, and various technologies, as well as diseases, also travelled along the Silk Routes. In addition to economic trade, the Silk Road served as a means of carrying out cultural trade among the civilizations along its network. But this Silk Road seems to have got a new dimension in the new interpretation offered by Peter Frankopan in his book. It shows the eagerness of the author to make the world know more about the Silk Road as the crossroads of civilisation in the past. Anthony Sattin in an article in The Guardian (Sept 15) wrote : ―This ―new history of the world‖ is a strangely myopic one for it starts by ignoring thousands of years of documented human achievement to look at the rise of the Persian empire. But Frankopan is quick to make a point of this apparently arbitrary opening: he wants to recalibrate our view of history, to challenge assumptions about where we come from and what has shaped us.‖ Russia and Central Asia about Persia and Mesopotamia, the book clarifies the confused understanding about the origins of Christianity when viewed from Asia or how the Crusades looked to those living in the great cities of the Middle Ages – Constantinople, Jerusalem , Baghdad and Cairo. We get ideas about the great empires of the East, about the Mongols, and to understand how two world wars looked when viewed from the Flanders or the eastern front but from Afghanistan and India. The author‘s knowledge encompasses a vast area of linguistic diversity from the Russian to Arabic and it helped him to unlock a world waiting to be discovered. The book offers a vantage point to view the world‘s past and its present. In fact for millennia , it was the region lying between east and west , , linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean , that was the axis on which the globe spun , not as the biased study of history presented it . William Dalrymple calls it to be ‗a book of dazzling range, ambition and achievement. In this book the writer focuses that the bridge between east and west is the very crosswords of civilisation. It was here civilisation was born in the pleasant Garden of Eden supposed to be existing between the Tigris and Euphrates. The writer traces the bridge between the east and the west where the great metropolises were established nearly 5000 years ago where the cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro in the Indus valley were wonders of the ancient world. Other great centres of civilisation were Babylon , Nineveh , Uruk and Akkad in

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Mesopotomia One Chinese geographer noted that the inhabitants of Bactria centred on the Oxus river and now located in northern Afghanistan were legendary negotiators and traders , its capital city was to become a market where a huge range of products were bought and sold . From the Middle East and its political instability to China and its economic rise, the vast region stretching eastward from the Balkans across the steppe and South Asia has been thrust into the global spotlight in recent years. Frankopan teaches us that to understand what is at stake for the cities and nations built on these intricate trade routes, we must first understand their astounding pasts. Far more than a history of the Silk Roads, this book is truly a revelatory new history of the world, promising to destabilize notions of where we come from and where we are headed next. Frankopan locates the engine of history in the zone between Constantinople and China, where East and West met and intermingled sometimes bloodily. The writer focuses on the birth of great religions and traces the history of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism jostled with each other. Different language groups competed Indo- European, Semitic and Sino- Tebetan languages wagged alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. The most interesting account is the rise and fall of the empires. In a word, the book opened up new vistas to see the past and we find not a disjointed world as it is shown in the present day world maps, but very much a world profoundly interconnected. What happened on the steppes of Central Asia could be felt in North Africa , where events in Baghdad resonated in Scandinavia, where discoveries in the Americas altered the prices of goods in China and led to a surge in demand in the horse markets of northern India . The writer wonderfully makes it clear that the narrative of the past has become so dominant and well established that there is no place for a region than has long been seen as peripheral to the story of the rise of Europe and of western society. The present historical pictures should not wash away the past. Today they may be forgotten even the place names which once dominated history. For example a place like Merv was rightly described by the tenth century geographer as the ‗delightful, fine, elegant, brilliant extensive and pleasant city‘ or the mother of the world. Rayy was another such place ‗the world‗s most beautiful creation‘ What is still more important is the cultural and commercial connectivity among these region which have gone to oblivion today but still we cannot fully forget the connection between Constantinople and Damascus or Samarkand and Kashgar.. Today all think of Harvard or Yale Oxford or Cambridge but once the intellectual centres of excellence of the world were

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located in Baghdad, Balkh, Bukhara and Samarkand. The titular significance is gradually clear when the writer beautifully focuses on the cultures of the people who lived along the Silk Roads. It is quite interesting that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic paving the way for two great continents hitherto untouched to connect to Europe and beyond and then Vasco da Gama navigated the southern tip of Africa sailing on to India opening new sea routes in the process. Western Europe suddenly was transformed from its position as a regional backwater into the fulcrum of sprawling communication, transportation and trading system. This became the modern midpoint between the East and the West. Not so long ago, the Europeans divided Asia into three broad zones – the Near, Middle and Far East the Mediterranean is regarded the centre of the world but it was not a sea separating Europe and North Africa but right in the heart of Asia. This book opens up new questions and new areas of research prompting questions to be asked about the past for unravelling the true history of the geographical location and the discovery of the real centre of the world. The book opens with a beautiful description of Persia which presented itself as a beacon of stability and fairness (P.3). The focus on the commercial commonwealth in this chapter is wonderful. Alexander‘s victories and the fall of Persia encouraged the programme of Hellensation. Trade between China and the world beyond made the silk routes important since the Han Dynasty and silk became international currency. Rome‘s transition into empire was another reason behind the development of the wrong focus on historical importance particularly after the capture of Egypt. The beautiful explanation given as to how silk is forgotten makes the story of the Silk Road connectivity more interesting. The concern about the prevalence of silk was due to the fact that philosophers like Seneca too regarded silk as ‗cipher for exoticism and eroticism‘ (P.18). In the second chapter the writer so logically focused on the goods that flowed along the arteries that linked Pacific, Central Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean in antiquity. Historical accounts of the expansion of Christianity across the Mediterranean region are well established but in this book it is established that the its earlier progress in the Asia Minor was far more spectacular and more promising than it was in the Mediterranean basin though Jerusalem was the geographical focal point. In this way the writer proves in chapter wise details the importance of the unknown regions which like the silk roads have gone to oblivion in modern times. But Anthony Sattin in his review of the book in The Guardian September 15 wrote that it is an ambitious Persian- centric rewrite of world history which is full of insight yet it is let down by factual

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error.‖(The Guardian, Sept 15.2015) Inevitably with such a massive panorama, there are a few places where Homer nods: in the Indian sections, Frankopan confuses The Mahabharata and The Ramayana, and he thinks the great Ellora caves were built by the Marathas in north India when they were actually 1,000 years older, and can be found inland from Bombay. But these are small quibbles. This is a remarkable creation on many levels, a proper historical epic of dazzling range and achievements.

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References: For e-text the following link may be accessed:  https://books.google.co.in/books?id=M1FFCQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Si lk+Road&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj_xYnkwczJAhXLGY4KHXgdBFUQ6AEIIj AB#v=onepage&q=Silk%20Road&f=false  Anthony, Sattin . ‗The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan Review – a Frustrating trail‘ The Guardian Sept. 15, 2015 (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/29/silk- roads-peter-frankopan-review)  Di Cosmo, Nicola ed. The Cambridge History of Inner Asia – The Chinggisid Age, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.  Edwardes, M. East West Passage: The Travel of Ideas, Arts and Inventions between Asia and the Western World. New York: Taplinger, 1971  Forbes, Richard. Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century. New York: St. Martin‘s Griffin, 1999.  Hansen. Valerie. The Silk Road: A New History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.  Hobson, John M. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.  M.A.R. Habib. A History of Literary Criticism and Theory. New Delhi: Wiley India Pvt. Ltd.2005 in print.  William Dalrymple. The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan Review – History on a Grand Scale‘ The Guradian, November 6,2015 (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/06/silk-roads-peter-frankopan-review)