Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński Read Free Book Online Page B

cities or the peasants in the villages I passed. We were in the same boat—I and half a billion of India’s inhabitants!
    While this thought gave me comfort, it also troubled me—why, I wondered, am I embarrassed that I don’t know English but not that I don’t know Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Telugu, Urdu, Tamil, Punjabi, or any of the many other languages spoken in this country? The argument of accessibility was irrelevant: the study of English was at the time as rare a thing as that of Hindi or Bengali. So was this Eurocentrism on my part? Did I believe a European language to be more important than those languages of this country in which I was then a guest? Deeming English superior was an offense to the dignity of Hindus, for whom the relationship to their native languages was a delicate and important matter. They were prepared to give up their lives in the defense of their language, to burn on a pyre. This fervor and resolve stemmed from the fact that identity here is determined by the language one speaks. A Bengali, for example, is someone whose mother tongue is Bengali. Language is one’s identity card, one’s face and soul, even.Which is why conflicts about something else entirely—about social and religious issues, for instance—can assume the form of language wars.
    Searching for books on India, I would ask if there was anything about Herodotus. Herodotus had started to interest me—I took a downright fancy to him, in fact. I was grateful for his being by my side in India during moments of uncertainty and confusion, for helping me with his book. Judging by how he wrote, he seemed a man kindly disposed toward others and curious about the world. Someone who always had many questions and was ready to wander thousands of kilometers to find an answer to any one of them.
    When I immersed myself in various sources, however, I learned that we know little about Herodotus’s life, and that even the few facts we do have are not entirely reliable. For in contrast to Rabindranath Tagore—or, for instance, his contemporary Marcel Proust, both of whom meticulously parsed every detail of their childhoods—Herodotus, like the other great men of this epoch—Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles—tells us next to nothing about his. Was it not customary? Was childhood considered irrelevant? Herodotus says only that he came from Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus lies above a calm bay shaped like an amphitheater, in a beautiful part of the world, where the western shore of Asia meets the Mediterranean Sea. It is a land of sun, warmth, and light, of olive trees and vineyards. One instinctively feels that someone born here must naturally have a good heart, an open mind, a healthy body, a consistently cheerful disposition.
    Biographers tend to agree that Herodotus was born between 490 and 480 B.C.E. , perhaps in 485. These are greatly important years in the history of world culture. Around 480 B.C.E. , Buddha departs for the other world; a year later, in the Lu principality, Confuciusdies; Plato will be born fifty years later. Asia is the center of the world; even insofar as the Greeks are concerned, the most creative members of their society—the Ionians—also live in Asia. There is no Europe yet; it exists as myth only, in the name of a beautiful girl, Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, whom Zeus, transformed into a white bull, will carry off to Crete to have his way with her.
    The parents of Herodotus? His siblings? His house? All of this is in deep shadowland uncertainty. Halicarnassus was a Greek colony on land subject to the Persians, with a non-Greek native population—the Carians. His father was called Lyxes, which is not a Greek name, so perhaps he was a Carian. It was his mother who most probably was Greek. Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border,