The invader’s triumph, the culture’s survival

Descent of Ganga

“Cultures don't survive, cockroaches do. The second we stopped being cockroaches, the whole species went extinct.”

“Civilization is just a lie we tell ourselves to justify our real purpose. We're not here to transcend. We're here to destroy.”
— William to his host doppelgänger, Westworld, Season 4, Episode 7

William’s words drip with cynicism and nihilism, yet they contain a shard of historical truth. History often appears to vindicate the destroyers rather than the creators. Civilizations that cultivated art, philosophy, and refinement have, more often than not, been overrun by those who knew only the brutal grammar of conquest. The invader’s sword can, in a season, undo the work of centuries; the plunderer’s greed can reduce temples, libraries, and entire cities to dust.

In the seventh century, when Islam arrived in South Asia, the subcontinent was home to some 400 million souls—an astonishing 56 percent of the world’s population. By the eighteenth century, after centuries of invasions, internal upheavals, and the long shadow of the Mughal decline, the number had fallen to around 140 million. These figures, drawn from Wikipedia’s Demographics of India page, speak of a staggering loss—nearly 65 percent of the population gone.

This was not a mere statistical fluctuation; it was a civilizational trauma. Wars and riots, famine and disease, political persecution, lawlessness, and the unrecorded toll of despair and psychological ruin—together, they carved deep wounds into the body of society. And yet, despite the relentless assault, the ancient religious traditions of the land—Hinduism above all—endured. It survived not because its adherents were immune to suffering, but because they refused to surrender their identity, even under the most brutal of trials.

The painting I have chosen to accompany this piece—Raja Ravi Varma’s Descent of Ganga (1890)—is not directly related to the subject. Yet it feels appropriate: a vision of sacred continuity, of a river that flows on, bearing with it the memory of civilizations that may bend but do not break.