Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Whenever we write or talk about relations between India and Egypt, we usually concentrate on the political, economic or diplomatic aspect of such relations. In fact, it is the cultural overlap between the two countries that constitutes the more compelling aspect.

A book that has just come out in both Arabic and English deals with this aspect. India and Egypt: Influences and Interactions is published by Marg Publications and sponsored by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. The publishing firm publishes Marg, an art and literary magazine that was for a long time edited by the late famous writer Mulak Raj Anand.

If I remember rightly the articles in this newly published book were research papers presented in a seminar convened in 1993 to discuss historical and cultural relations between the two countries. The Indian delegation was headed by Najma Heptullah, the head of the Indian Council.

Heptullah gave the inaugural speech, in which she underlined the significance of the seminar as a historic landmark and that is expected to result in a scholarly publication, one which will undoubtedly turn out to be a great gateway for better understanding between the great minds and peoples of the two countries.

Apart from the introductory speeches by Heptullah, HE Amr Moussa, and Saryu Doshi, the editor of the book, there are nine articles dealing with diverse aspects of the relations. It would be difficult, indeed impossible to give even a bird's eye view of the content, so I shall concentrate on the speech of Doshi, Influences and Interactions: The Lotus and the Seed by Geeti Sen, an art historian and critic.

Doshi begins his talk with the story of an Indian sailor who, more than 2000 years ago, in the second century before Christ "lay stranded half dead on the shores of the Red Sea. He was taken to Alexandria and produced before the state authorities. In broken Greek he offered to show the short direct sea route to India, in exchange for permission to return to his native land".

In response to the sailor's plea Ptolemy Euergeles (145-116 BC), the ruler of Egypt, directed Eudoxus, a Greek explorer, to set out with the Indian across the high seas to India. That voyage marked "the beginning of direct trade and communication between Egypt and India". But, according to Dosh, India and Egypt had been in contract with each other as far back as the third millennium BC "when river-line civilizations -- that on the Nile in Egypt, that on the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, and that on the Indus in India -- had reached an advanced level of development". The writer believes that spices dominated relations between India and Egypt in those times. Apparently spices from India were familiar to Ancient Egyptians. Another item that Egyptians sought from India seems to be cloth for, in Doshi's words, "it is generally believed that the muslin in which the Egyptian mummies were wrapped was of Indian origin".

Geiti Sen writes about the "unique parallels in the myths and imagery of ancient Egypt and India". Myths, according to her "were created by men, not by gods, to link microcosm to macrocosm, earth to sky." She gives the lotus flower as an example. The flower "sacred to Buddha and to Osiris, has five petals which symbolise the four limbs and the head; the five senses; the five digits; and like the pyramids, the four parts of the compass and the zenith".

In India the lotus is associated with Sri, the goddess of fertility "who is later invoked as Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth and abundance". The lotus is woven into the fantasy of women "as they stitch old cloths together into a kantha, spinning out concentric circles of energy". In Egypt, the blue lotus appears in the earliest wall painting of the Sixth Dynasty at the Pyramids of Saqqara and in all funerary stelae. They are offered to the deceased and held in the hands as though they possess the power to revitalize: to bring the deceased back to life.

Sen concludes that "if one pauses to consider the extraordinary parallel in both myth and imagery these beliefs would be quite natural to the two agricultural societies". Myths, goes on the writer, "both in ancient Egypt and in India become an extraordinary expression of the history of the people, of memory, and of the collective conscience. Given the fact that there exist common threads of thought in the shaping of mythology, it should be no surprise that the current situations are predictably similar in the shaping of these two civilizations".