Edward Pococke and the Lost Theory of an Indian Greece

Long before the ‘Out of India’ theory, a forgotten Victorian orientalist turned the foundations of Western civilization upside down by audaciously making India the cradle of Greece.

What if Greece, the pride of Western civilization, the birthplace of Homer, Plato and Aristotle, was actually Hindu in origin? What if the first inhabitants of Hellas had first spoken a form of Sanskrit? What if the Pelasgians, the mysterious people who inhabited Greece before the Greeks themselves, had come from Bihar? And what if Achilles, the greatest warrior of Homer’s Iliad, sprang from “splendid Rajpoot stock”?

No, this is not the fevered dream of a modern-day Indian nationalist but that of a now-forgotten British Orientalist Edward Pococke (not to be confused with his more famous 17th-century namesake), whose 1852 treatise, India in Greece; or, Truth in Mythology proposed a mind-bending and radical revision of antiquity.

Pococke’s argument was not merely that India ‘influenced’ Greece. He audaciously proposed that Ancient Greece prior to Hellas had itself been, in large measure, an Indian colony - something forgotten and eventually distorted by Greek and later European scholars.

The mid-19^th century was a golden age for speculative philology, a period when the discovery of Sanskrit’s structural relationship to European languages intoxicated Western scholars. In the wake of Sir William Jones’s pioneering declarations, the intellectual elite of Europe began to look eastward for the roots of human civilization. Yet, while mainstream Orientalism sought a common ancestral ‘Aryan’ node located somewhere in Central Asia or the Caucasus, independent scholars like Pococke took this thesis to a radical extreme.

For Pococke, the gods of Olympus were displaced Indian princes; and the heroes who fought on the windy plains of Troy were clans whose martial exploits were first recorded in the ancient chronicles of Northwestern India.

To modern readers, ‘India in Greece’ feels less like a work of scholarship than a lost Jorge Luis Borges story - a veritable labyrinth constructed from etymologies, epics and maps. Pococke’s work is by turns ingenious and audacious. One follows him from Rajasthan to Troy, from Kashmir to Epirus, from the Yamuna to the Cyclades, never quite certain where the next revelation will appear.

Viewed through the lens of modern historiography, Pococke’s work is an undeniably fascinating, if wildly exuberant, artifact of colonial-era romanticism. But given that debates between the Out of India Theory (OIT) and the Indo-Aryan Migration/Invasion Theory (AIT) remain fiercely contested markers of cultural identity, India in Greece stands as an early, Western-authored precursor to the idea of India as the ultimate cradle of global civilization. While European Orientalists had looked eastward through Greek eyes, Pococke proposed looking westward through Indian eyes.

He begins his treatise with a sweeping, polemical assault on classical Greek historians and geographers, accusing them of an insular attitude that had compromised the foundations of Western knowledge.

Achilles in his chariot rides over the body of the slain Hector, by Raffaele Calliano.

Very much like the French of his own nineteenth century, the Greeks had made their language the dominant idiom of the civilized world. Because of this cultural hegemony, they possessed little incentive to study foreign tongues or trace the external roots of their own vocabulary. Consequently, when Indian settlers named European features after their eastern homelands, later Greek writers invented creative etymologies to explain these foreign words.

To Pococke, the ancient Greeks were fundamentally ignorant of their own pre-history and the true origins of the Pelasgians, the enigmatic pre-Hellenic inhabitants of the Aegean.

In his introduction, Pococke declared with a flourish: “The picture is Indian. The curtain is Grecian; and that curtain is now withdrawn.” The sentence was aimed at the celebrated historian George Grote, who had confessed that the realities behind Greek myth were inaccessible to historians. Pococke disagreed. The myths, as far as he was concerned, could indeed be deciphered.

He claimed that the Greeks had turned history into mythology because they no longer understood the language of their ancestors. This conviction gave Pococke’s book the character of a detective story. (for much of its length, it indeed resembles one)

Pococke fiercely censured the “...confidence of the antiquarians of Greece, who attempted to explain their ancient world through a language that had not yet evolved.” In his view, Greek writers from Homer to Strabo had “unwittingly originated a gigantic system of absurdities and a tissue of tales.”

The relationship between Sanskrit and Greek had already fascinated European scholars since the late eighteenth century. Sir William Jones and others had demonstrated affinities between the classical languages of Europe and the ancient language of India. Most scholars accepted that these similarities pointed to some distant ancestral connection.

Going much further, Pococke argued that the Greek language was not an autonomous creation but a direct, albeit corrupted, derivation from Sanskrit. If the linguistic bedrock of Greece was Sanskrit, it logically follows that a Sanskrit-speaking people must have settled the region at some point. He further claimed that the Ionic dialect was derived from the Pali forms of Sanskrit while the Doric dialect was a survival of rough northern Sanskrit once spoken near Tibet.

The Pelasgian Puzzle

Ancient Greek writers frequently described the Pelasgians as the inhabitants of Greece before the arrival of the Hellenes, though their origins were obscure even to the Greeks themselves. In Pococke’s, these Pelasgians were Indians.

The ancient province of Pelasa in Bihar became the ancestor of the Pelasgians. Gaya, the sacred city of eastern India, became transformed into Gaia, the Earth Mother of Greek mythology. The son of Gaya became the mythical Pelasgus.

But he does not rely solely on linguistic assumptions; he points to the material culture of the Homeric “heroic period” as definitive proof of an Asiatic origin.

Pococke observed that the world described in the Iliad and Odyssey seemed strangely different from the Greece of later history. That world was fundamentally “un-European”, bearing instead the distinct hallmarks of ancient Indian civilization. It glittered with gold, possessed magnificent textiles and ivory ornaments and, most crucially, its warriors fought from chariots.

Why, Pococke asked, did this world resemble Asia far more than classical Greece? The war chariot particularly fascinated him. By historical times, Greek warfare depended largely upon infantry. Yet in Homer’s epics, its heroes rode into battle in chariots, much as the warriors of the Mahabharata did. For Pococke, this was no coincidence. These were merely the attendant tokens of an Indian colonisation, with its corresponding religion and language.

To explain how this civilization arrived, Pococke proposed a vast migration. According to him, at some remote period, India had been convulsed by a colossal struggle, triggering waves of migrants who travelled through Bactria, Persia, Asia Minor and Greece.

Toponyms and Dynasties

The core of India in Greece lies in its radical exercises in onomastics and toponymy, with the result that Pococke startlingly maps the geography of Northern India directly onto the Peloponnese and the Aegean.

According to him, the immense antiquity claimed by Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, stretching back to 2448 BCE, should not be treated with scepticism. He positions it alongside the mid-nineteenth-century discoveries of ancient Assyrian monuments as an equally valid pillar of global antiquity.

Concurrently, he challenges the Eurocentric assumption that Indian literacy and historical documentation were late developments in human culture. The oldest of the Vedas, he argues, could never have survived through oral transmission alone and therefore required written preservation from their inception.

To seal this geographic link, Pococke turns to Herodotus. ‘The Father of History’ recorded an ancient city in this migratory corridor as ‘Caspatyros.’ Pococke unmasks this classical orthography as a Greek corruption of ‘Caspa-dwaros’ or ‘Casyapur’ - the “City of Casyapa” (after Sage Kashyapa) or “Gateway of Kashmir.”

Arjuna in Thessaly

Pococke also addresses scepticism toward India’s epic literature, drawing a direct parallel between doubts regarding the historical reality of the Trojan War and contemporary scepticism toward the Mahabharata. He notes that despite the widespread presence of the name Pandu across the subcontinent, mainstream historians continued to dismiss the great Bharata war as a fable.

He asserted that from the snowy peaks of Himachal down to Cape Comorin, nearly every regional tribe and nation preserves a local memorial, monument or geographic feature named after the celebrated Pandu race. Citing Col. James Tod’s analysis of Arrian, Pococke further argues that Greek historians accompanying Alexander possessed direct access to the genealogies of the family ruling the Jumna, a branch of which survived centuries after the Mahabharata conflict.

Pococke then carries this historical Pandu elite directly into the Mediterranean. Pelagonia, a northern district of Thessaly, becomes a preservation of Phalgoonia, derived from Phalgoonus - one of the sacred names of the warrior-prince Arjuna.

One of Pococke’s most provocative deconstructions centres on the identity of the Cyclopes - the gigantic, one-eyed creatures in Greek myth famous for their immense strength. However, scholars struggled to explain both the legendary race and the enormous prehistoric ‘Cyclopean’ walls of Greece based on the Greek language. Some treated the Cyclopes as philosophical archetypes, others as personifications of natural forces, while still others imagined them as miners carrying lamps upon their foreheads.

Dismissing these explanations, Pococke contended that when the walls of Mycenae, Argos and Tiryns were built, the Greek language of Homer had not yet emerged.

His startling thesis was that ‘Cyclopes’ derived from ‘Cuclopes’, which itself was a corruption of ‘Goclopes.’ This was nothing but the Gokla chiefs of Gokula on the banks of the Jumna. Their name derived from their occupation as cattle-herders. Gokula, of course, is famed in the Indian tradition as the residence of Nanda and the youthful Krishna, the setting for the prince’s encounters with the Gopis.

And ‘Cy-cla-des’ was nothing but a corrupt form of ‘Guc-la-des’ or the “land of the Goklas” so named after the homeland of these pastoral immigrants from the Jumna.

Pococke argues that Homer himself had unwittingly preserved a fragment of this reality when he portrayed Polyphemus not as a builder or craftsman but as a rugged shepherd.

The Rajputs of Troy

A brilliant and provocative set-piece of Pococke’s historical reconstruction lay in reshaping the heroic ethos of the Trojan War. He argued that the legendary combatants of the Iliad were nothing but displaced Kshatriya clans of northern and northwestern India.

Col. James Tod (1782-1835)

Relying on the extensive ethnological data compiled by Colonel James Tod in his classic Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829–32), Pococke pointed to the Abantes, a warlike tribe mentioned by Homer as fighting with distinction at Troy.

While the ancient geographer Strabo had unconvincingly derived their name from the city of Aba in Phocis, Pococke noted that he had failed to explain where Aba itself came from. In yet another stunning claim, Pococke said that the Abantes who fought before Troy were none other than the Rajput tribes of Avanti in Malwa.

Pococke argued that the very name of ‘Hellas’ itself derived from Hela, a mountain region in Baluchistan. The Hēlāines were descendants of Rajput sun-worshippers. Thus, the very identity of Greece was rooted in the East.

According to Colonel Tod, the Aswas were a prominent branch of the Hindu race closely linked to the Suryavanshi (Solar) dynasty. Their name reflected their celebrity as master horsemen, while a central feature of their religious life was the Aswamedha - the great horse sacrifice.

For Pococke, however, the significance of the Aswas extended far beyond the plains of Rajasthan. He saw them as representatives of a vast martial tradition that had once stretched across Eurasia. Endorsing the Scottish antiquarian John Pinkerton’s contention that “a great Scythian nation had once ranged from the Caspian to the Ganges,” Pococke argued that the Rajputs’ devotion to the horse, their solar worship and their celebration of the Aswamedha found striking echoes among the Scythian and Saka tribes of antiquity. To him, these were surviving traces of an ancient warrior culture whose migrations had carried its customs across continents and left their imprint upon the history of both Asia and Europe.

Pococke also cited Tacitus’s observations of ancient Germanic tribes practising rigorous morning ablutions, wearing flowing robes and tying their hair in a distinctive top-knot - customs he regarded as vestiges of an eastern ancestry.

The deeply rooted devotion that the Rajput warrior directed toward his weapons provided another point of comparison. Pococke linked this Rajput veneration of arms to Edward Gibbon’s account of Attila the Hun worshipping a sacred sword as the symbol of Mars. For him, both reflected the enduring legacy of an ancient Indian military elite that had settled the Mediterranean.

Durgadas Rathore, by Archibald Hermann Muller. 

He found further evidence in heraldry. While European historians generally maintained that heraldic devices arrived through the Crusades, Col. Tod had demonstrated that Rajput tribes employed distinctive banners long before the Trojan War. The state of Amber (Jaipur) flew the Panchranga - a five-coloured flag, while Chanderi bore a rampant lion on a silver field. To Pococke, the elaborate shields and lineages of Homeric chieftains were simply adaptations of this older Kshatriya tradition. Indeed, these were the very warrior clans whom Pococke believed had crossed into Greece and, in some cases, fought before the walls of Troy.

Nor did the geography escape Pococke’s attention. According to him, ‘Attica’ - the heartland of Athens, derived from ‘Attock’ on the Indus frontier while Mount Kailas, the terrestrial mansion of the Hindu gods, furnished the Greeks with their ‘Koilon’ and the Romans with ‘Coelum.’

Likewise, Mount Kerketius in Thessaly was nothing but an echo of Kartikeya, Shiva’s peacock-mounted son and commander of the celestial armies. By naming mountains, cities and kingdoms after places remembered from India, Pococke believed Indian settlers had left permanent traces of their origins across the European world.

‘India in Greece’ remains one of the most eccentric, deeply learned and methodology-straining artifacts of nineteenth-century Orientalism. There is also profound historiographical irony here. At a time when much colonial scholarship was deployed to argue that India’s sacred languages and high culture derived from an external Aryan source, Pococke inverted the entire framework.

Using the same tools of imperial philology, he stripped Greece of its foundational status and transformed the Mediterranean into a satellite of ancient India, thus created a radical Indocentric ‘alternative’ history.

In today’s intellectual landscape, India in Greece reads like an uncanny nineteenth-century blueprint for the ‘Out of India Theory’ - a mirror image of the colonial narrative in which, rather than Europe civilizing Asia, India “morally fertilizes” a primitive Europe.