A civilized land, says the tradition, is where the hearth of Agni is ever actively emergent, and full of loving gifts. The translation of the world from its grossness to its true splendour is through Agni’s eyes. But in the process Agni himself becomes a way of knowledge that would burn away every trace of ignorance. The outward act slowly grows inward. ‘Sacrifice thus understood,’ writes Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘is no longer a matter of doing specifically sacred things only on particular occasions but of sacrificing (making sacred) all we do and all we are; a matter of sanctification of whatever is done naturally, by a reduction of all activities to their principles.’ That is, withdrawing the mind and sense organs from their conditioned activities to pure activities, where action becomes an offering, an offering as it were, which is made to Consciousness, which is, ever and ever just—One.

This withdrawal has been compared, in Indian texts, to the drawing in of its limbs by the tortoise. ‘When, as a tortoise,’ says the Mahabharata, ‘withdraws its limbs, one translates all outflowingness into inflowingness, then the light and splendour of the soul becomes manifest within oneself.’ Therefore, has it been said: Even as the Tortoise is shapen India.

This light and splendour then has been the celebration and the history of India. From the earliest times, when the Aryan invaders saw this sacred sacrificial land, up to the contemporary recordings of foreign observers, India has been a bewildering, an enchanting and an unreal country, even in its horrors.

‘They live happily,’ says Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to India about 300 BC, ‘because they are simple in their ways, and because they practise frugality. They never drink wine, except at sacrificial ceremonies. The simplicity of their legislation and of their contracts is proved by the fact that they never go to the court of law . . . They equally esteem sincerity and virtue.’ To which Arrian had added, ‘but indeed no Indian is accused of lying.’ And almost a thousand years later, we come to the famous Chinese traveller, Hsuan-tsang, who visited India in the seventh century. ‘Though,’ he says, ‘the Indians are of a light temperament, they are distinguished by the straightforwardness and honesty of their character. With regard to riches, they never take anything unjustly; with regard to justice, they make even excessive concessions.’

And four centuries later, the Muslim traveller, Idrisi, in his Al Rojari, writes: ‘The Indians are naturally inclined to justice, and never depart from it in their functions. Their good faith, honesty and fidelity to their engagements are well known, and they are so famous for these qualities that people flock to their country from every side.’ Side by side, and because of it rose the ‘Splendour that is India’.

From the descriptions of Chandragupta’s Pataliputra, as described by Megasthenes, to the clever comments of the modern traveller, the magnificence of India is a never-tiring theme.