Indo-Greek culture and colonial memory, or, was Alexander a European?

Abstract

Alexander's conquest of northwest India in the fourth century BCE was often cited by the British in post-Enlightenment England to trace their own identity as conquerors back to the Greeks. Taking a revisionist approach, this paper endeavours to show that the invocation of Alexander's memory to legitimize European hegemony over the Indians was enmeshed in imperialist ideology and involved a distortion of the past. The contexts and motives of the two types of colonization, the Greek and the British, were fundamentally different. The state of Greek thought in Alexander's time could not have sustained the notional binary between India and Greece, 'reason' and 'unreason', to justify a thoroughly hostile form of colonization. The Greeks engaged constructively with the cultural life of the Indians, and the resultant Indo-Greek civilization involved a rich fusion of Indian and Hellenistic influences. Modern European historiography has been extremely averse to acknowledging any fruitful dialogue between ancient Greece and non-Western cultures. This paper will strive to locate the genesis of Indo-Greek culture in the complex intermingling of ancient peoples and ideas.