Book Reviews

Author(s): J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong

Page 1

G. Bongard-Levin and A. Vigasin, The Image of India. The Study of Ancient 'Indian Civilisation in the USSR. Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1984. 271 pp.
The title of this work is somewhat misleading because it is not limited to the study of ancient Indian civilisation in the USSR, but sketches the image of India as far as the end of the 18th century as well as the history of Indology from its beginnings at the end of the 18th century up to the present. The first chapter is entitled “The Image of India among the peoples of Russia up to the end of the 18th century'. It contains interesting information about the knowledge of India which reached ancient Russia by means of such works as the Physiologus, the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, the Romance of Barlaam and Joasaph, the Story of the Indian Kingdom, the Alexander Romance, etc. In 1471–1474 a merchant from Tver, Afanasij Nikitin, visited India and later described his experiences in his Voyage Beyond the Three Seas (cf. pp. 25–29). Indian merchants from Transcaucasia and the Caspian sea appeared in Astrakhan in the years 1615–1616, and an Indian colony continued to exist there until the middle of the 18th century. Gerasim Lebedev (1749–1817) arrived in India in 1785 and remained there until 1797. In 1801 he published a Grammar of the Pure and Mixed East-Indian Dialects, and in 1805 An Impartial Review of the Systems of the East Indian Brahmins, Their Sacred Rites and National Customs (cf. pp. 42-44). In this same first chapter, the authors point out that a considerable number of books on India were written in Armenia in the 17th and 18th centuries, for instance
Indo-Iranian Journal 30 (1987).