The civilisation that taught the world that a single self looks out of every pair of eyes was built and sustained by people it placed below the reach of touch. For more than two thousand years it ranked human beings by birth and bound the lowest to the foulest work — and the philosophy, the temples, and the empires the world still admires could not have stood a day without them.
Lotus and Chain tells India's story with the unfree at its centre. It follows them into the quarries that raised sanctuaries like Thanjavur, whose inscriptions name only the kings who paid for them; into the fields where cultivators were bound to soil that changed hands with the deeds that conveyed it; into the households that freed their masters to sit and wonder about the soul. Here is the child sold to a shrine in a famine year, her freedom traded for the promise of food; the quarryman who split the stone for a monument that would remember everyone but him; and the hundreds of thousands who, in a single ceremony in 1956, followed a man born untouchable out of the religion that had ranked them — abandoning the faith that taught the oneness of all souls without once extending it to them.
It also traces the longer shadow: how the doctrine that a person's birth is the just wage of past lives outlasted every empire that rose and fell above it, and shapes the lives of something approaching a fifth of the people now alive; and how Indian bondage differed — crucially — from the chattel slavery of Greece, Rome, and the Atlantic, in that its lowest were never owned or sold, only fixed in place by birth, and so were never freed, because they were never quite seen as enslaved. This is the story of what it means to inherit the zero, the great temples, and the vision of a single self in all things from a civilisation that raised them on a hierarchy it called sacred — and has still not set it down.
Clear-eyed popular history that never looks away. The third book in the Price of Civilization series.
