Alexander the Great in India

The marvellous exploits of Alexander the Great startled and thrilled the world. East and West vied with each other in paying him divine honours during his life and after his death. Myths and legends woven around him, embroidered with all the glowing colours of imagination spread through the Continents. The lands he conquered and those beyond them told his tales in diverse tongues. Greek and Latin, Syriac and Arabic, 1 Ethiopic, Hebrew, Samaritan, Armenian, Persian, English and French, German and Italian, and even Scandinavian languages of Europe, Asia, and Africa enshrined in prose and verse the immortal romance of the Macedonian Prince. Those were the days when religion held sway over the minds of men. His tolerance of faiths other than his own, his cosmopolitan outlook in matters religious, inspired as it was by a deep vein of mysticism helped him 2 “wherever he went to treat with respect the local religion.” His attitude towards the religion of the Persians, his greatest adversaries, the destruction of their sacred books at Persepolis is one of the rare exceptions to the rule of his general tolerance. The Arabs worshipped him as Iskandar 3 Dhu’lquarnein (two horned Alexander) and even Islam 4 adopted Iskandar among her prophets, and carried his forgotten fame back into India. He was the first Aryan monarch to become a God. 5 When these various nations with whom he came into contact have preserved various accounts of his life and conquests, have elevated him to the position of a Superman and God, it is strange, if it be a fact, that Ancient Indian Literature alone is oblivious of him. Great scholars and historians have noted this phenomenon of apparent silence. 6 But they are not surprised. Indians are a peculiar race. India ignores and forgets. 7 “It is a conspiracy of silence.” “India remained unchanged. The wounds of battle were quickly healed: the ravaged fields smile again. 8 “No Indian author, Hindu or Jain or Buddhist makes even the faintest allusion to Alexander or his deeds,” asserted V.A. Smith, and he quotes with approval the lines by Matthew Arnold:

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