Romila Thapar belongs to a Punjabi family and spent her early years in various parts of India. She took her first degree from the Punjab University and her doctorate at London University in 1958. She was a Lecturer in the Ancient History of South Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, subsequently a Reader at Delhi University, and in 1970 was appointed to the Chair in Ancient Indian History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where she is now Emeritus Professor of History. She is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell University and at the University of Pennsylvania and has frequently lectured at the Collège de France. In 1983 she was elected General President of the Indian History Congress. In 1999 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Field research linked to a project in Buddhist cave sites took her to China in 1957, and this included the site of Tun Huang in the Gobi Desert. Since then she has travelled extensively, visiting sites in South Asia. She has lectured on early South Asian history at a large number of universities in various parts of the world.

Among her other publications are a study of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas; a collection of papers, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations; three others, From Lineage to State, Time as a Metaphor of History: Early India and Interpreting Early India, published in an omnibus edition entitled History and Beyond; an essay in literature and history, Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories; two lectures published as The Mauryas Revisited and another two as Narratives and the Making of History; a further collection of papers, Cultural Pasts; and a children’s book, Indian Tales.

A HISTORY OF INDIA

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The discovery of India – Changing approaches to Indian history – The archaeological background

Sources of evidence – The political organization of the Aryan tribes – Caste and other social institutions – Vedic religion

Evolving political patterns – The rise of the kingdom of Magadha – The rule of the Nandas – North-western India and contacts with Persia – The growth of towns – The rise of heterodox sects – Jainism and Buddhism

The Mauryan kings – Mauryan contacts with neighbouring states – Society and economic activity – Mauryan administration – Ashoka and his policy of Dhamma – The decline of the Mauryan empire

The political fragmentation of the sub-continent: The Shunga dynasty, King Kharavela of Kalinga, The Indo-Greek kings, The Shakas, The Kushanas, The Satavahana dynasty, South Indian kingdoms – Trade routes and communications

Guilds – Roman trade with south India – Interaction of Indian and Hellenic ideas in northern India – India’s contacts with China and south-east Asia – Changes in society – Education and literature – Buddhist art and architecture – Mahayana Buddhism – Developments in Hinduism – The coming of Christianity

The rule of the Guptas – Hun invasions – Some post-Gupta dynasties – The reign of Harsha – Changing agrarian relations – Trade – The pattern of living – Education and learning – Hindu art and architecture – Development in Buddhism – Changes in Hinduism – Philosophical schools – Indian contacts with China and south-east Asia

The Chalukya, Pallava and Pandya conflicts – Political organization and administration – The Agrarian system – The status of the brahman – The philosophy of Shankara – The growth of Tamil literature – The Tamil devotional cult – Mural painting in the Deccan – Temple architecture

The rise of the Cholas – Chola administration – The village in the Chola economy – Trade – The role of the temple in Chola society – The development of the languages of the peninsula – Popular cults and sects – The philosophy of Ramanuja and Madhva – Architecture and sculpture

Political struggle between the Rashtrakutas, Pratiharas, and Palas – The arrival of the Arabs in Sind – Rise of new kingdoms – Growth of Rajput power – Campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni – The Afghan army – Muhammad Ghuri

Beginnings of regional loyalty – Emerging pattern of agrarian relations – Social structure – Literature in Sanskrit and in the newly developing languages – Temples and sculpture – Changes in Hinduism, the devotional cult, and the Tantric sects – Decline of Buddhism – The arrival of the Sufis

Source material on the Delhi Sultanate – The Slave dynasty and the Khalji dynasty – Political organization – The Tughluq dynasty – Relations between the rulers and the ruled – The Sayyid and Lodi dynasties – The kingdoms of Gujarat, Mewar, Marwar, and Bengal

Trends in the impact of Islam on India – Balance of power between king and theologian – Administrative structure of the Sultanate – The economy – The social framework – Religious expression as seen in the Bhakti movement and the Sufis – New languages and literatures – Miniature painting – Islamic architecture

The rise of the Vijayanagara and Bahmani kingdoms in the Deccan – Changes in the socio-economic background – Trade – Religion

MAPS

LINE DRAWINGS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the following for permission to print quotations: the Archaeological Survey of India, for quotations from Epigraphia Indica, South Indian Inscriptions, and Archaeological Survey of India Report; Kitab Mahal (Wholesale Division) Private Ltd, for quotations from History of India as Told by its own Historians – Eliot and Dowson; Allen & Unwin Ltd, for quotation from A Forgotten Empire – Sewell.

PREFACE

THIS book is not intended for the specialist in Indian history. It is intended for those who have a general interest in India and might wish to acquaint themselves with the major developments in India’s early history.

The history of India in the first volume begins with the culture of the Indo-Aryans and not with the prehistoric cultures of India. There is already a useful study of Indian prehistory and proto-history in the Pelican series (Stuart Piggott, Prehistoric India), and there is no point in repeating the same material. The present volume covers the history of the sub-continent until the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century. Hence the choice of the date 1526 as the terminal. From the perspective of historical evolution within the sub-continent, this is perhaps an awkward date at which to stop, since the momentum of the preceding period was continued into subsequent centuries. But 1526 marks the arrival of the Mughuls in northern India and they were (amongst other things) actively involved in the future of Europe in India.

To those who took the trouble to read the manuscript and offer their comments I am most grateful. I would like particularly to thank Professor A. L. Basham, Mr A. Ghosh, Mr S. Mahdi, and my father. I would also like to thank the Archaeological Survey of India for the maps.

THE ANTECEDENTS

FOR many Europeans, India evoked a picture of Maharajas, snake-charmers, and the rope-trick. This has lent both allure and romanticism to things Indian. But in the last couple of decades, with the increasing reference to India as an economically underdeveloped country, the image of India as a vital, pulsating land has begun to emerge from the fog of Maharajas, snake-charmers, and the rope-trick. The Maharajas are now fast disappearing and the rope-trick was at best a hallucination. Only the snake-charmer remains: generally an ill-fed man who risks his life to catch a snake, remove its poisonous fangs, and make it sway to the movement of the gourd pipe; and all this in the hope of the occasional coin to feed him, his family, and the snake.

In the imagination of Europe, India had always been the fabulous land of untold wealth and mystical happenings, with more than just a normal share of wise men. From the gold-digging ants to the philosophers who lived naked in the forests, these were all part of the picture which the ancient Greeks had of the Indians and this image persisted throughout many centuries. It might be more charitable not to destroy it, but to preserve it would mean the perpetuation of a myth.

Wealth in India, as in every other ancient culture, was limited to the few. Mystical activities were also the preoccupation of but a handful of people. It is true, however, that acceptance of such activities was characteristic of the majority. Whereas in some other cultures the rope-trick would have been ascribed to the promptings of the devil and all reference to it suppressed, in India it was regarded with amused benevolence. The fundamental sanity of Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.

The association of India with wealth, magic, and wisdom remained current for many centuries. But this attitude began to change in the nineteenth century when Europe entered the modern age, and the lack of enthusiasm for Indian culture in certain circles became almost proportionate to the earlier over-enthusiasm. It was now discovered that India had none of the qualities which the new Europe admired. There was apparently no stress on the values of rational thought and individualism. India’s culture was a stagnant culture and was regarded with supreme disdain, an attitude perhaps best typified in Macaulay’s contempt for things Indian. The political institutions of India, visualized largely as the rule of the Maharajas and Sultans, were dismissed as despotic and totally unrepresentative of public opinion. And this, in an age of democratic revolutions, was about the worst of sins.

Yet, a contrary attitude emerged from amongst a small section of European scholars who had discovered India largely through its ancient philosophy and its literature in Sanskrit. This attitude deliberately stressed the non-modern, non-utilitarian aspects of Indian culture, where the existence of a continuity of religion of over three thousand years was acclaimed; and where it was believed that the Indian pattern of life was so concerned with metaphysics and the subtleties of religious belief that there was no time for the mundane things of life. German romanticism was the most vehement in its support of this image of India: a vehemence which was to do as much damage to India as Macaulay’s rejection of Indian culture. India now became the mystic land for many Europeans, where even the most ordinary actions were imbued with symbolism. India was the genesis of the spiritual East, and also, incidentally, the refuge of European intellectuals seeking escape from their own pattern of life. A dichotomy in values was maintained, Indian values being described as ‘spiritual’ and European values as ‘materialistic’, with little attempt at placing these supposedly spiritual values in the context of Indian society (which might have led to some rather disturbing results). This theme was taken up by a section of Indian thinkers during the last hundred years and became a consolation to the Indian intelligentsia for its inability to compete with the technical superiority of Britain.

The discovery of the Indian past, and its revelation to Europe in the eighteenth century, was largely the work of Jesuits in India and of Europeans employed by the East India Company, such as Sir William Jones and Charles Wilkins. Soon the numbers of those interested in studying the classical languages and literatures of India grew, and the early nineteenth century saw considerable achievements in linguistics, ethnography, and other fields of Indology. Scholars in Europe expressed a keen interest in this new field of inquiry as is evident from the number of persons who took to Indology and of one of whom at least mention must be made – F. Max Muller.

Those who were most directly concerned with India in the nineteenth century were the British administrators, and the early non-Indian historians of India came largely from this group. Consequently, the early histories were ‘administrator’s histories’, concerned mainly with the rise and fall of dynasties and empires. The protagonists of Indian history were the kings and the narration of events revolved around them. The autocratic king, oppressive and unconcerned with the welfare of his subjects, was the standard image of the Indian ruler, but for exceptions such as Ashoka, Chandragupta II, or Akbar. As for actual governing, the underlying assumption was that British administration was in fact superior to any other known to the history of the sub-continent.

This interpretation of Indian history made its impact on Indian historians writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dynastic histories with a high-lighting of the lives of rulers were the main content of standard works. But the second aspect of the interpretation produced a different reaction. Most of the Indian historians had either participated in the national movement for independence or had been influenced by it. Their contention was that the Golden Age in India had existed prior to the coming of the British and that the ancient past of India was a particularly glorious period of her history. This view was a natural and inevitable adjunct to the national aspirations of the Indian people in the early twentieth century.

In this connexion there was another bête noire which cast its shadow on much of the early writing on ancient India. European historians working on this period had been brought up on the classical tradition of Europe, where it was firmly believed that the greatest human achievement was the civilization of the ancient Greeks – le miracle Grec. Consequently, every newly discovered culture was measured against ancient Greece and invariably found to be lacking. Or, if there were individual features worth admiring, the instinct was to try and connect them with Greek culture. Vincent Smith, for some decades regarded as the pre-eminent historian of early India, was prone to this tendency. When writing of the murals at the famous Buddhist site at Ajanta, and particularly of a painting supposedly depicting the arrival of an embassy from a Sassanian king of Persia in the seventh century A.D., totally unconnected with Greece both artistically and historically, he states:

… The picture, in addition to its interest as a contemporary record of unusual political relations between India and Persia, is one of the highest value as a landmark in the history of art. It not only fixes the date of some of the most important paintings at Ajanta and so establishes a standard by which the date of others can be judged, but also suggests the possibility that the Ajanta school of pictorial art may have been derived from Persia and ultimately from Greece.¹

Not surprisingly Indian historians reacted sharply to such statements. Attempts were made to prove either that India had not derived any part of its culture from Greece or else that the culture of India was a close parallel to that of Greece, manifesting all the qualities which were present in the latter. That every civilization is its own miracle was not as yet recognized either by European or by Indian historians. The idea of assessing a civilization on its own merits was to come at a later stage.

When European scholars first established a relationship with India in the eighteenth century and became curious about its past, their sources of information were the brahman priests – the acknowledged guardians of the ancient tradition, who maintained that this tradition was preserved in the Sanskrit sources with which only they were familiar. Thus, much of the early history of India was reconstructed almost entirely from Sanskrit sources, i.e., from material preserved in the ancient classical language. Many of these works were religious in nature and this naturally coloured the interpretation of the past. Even somewhat more secular literature such as the Dharmashastras (Law Books) had brahman authors and commentators and was therefore biased in favour of those in authority and generally adhered to the brahmanical interpretation of the past, irrespective of its historical validity. For example, the caste system as described in these sources appears to have been a rigid stratification of society, apparently imposed from an early period and thereafter preserved almost intact for many centuries. Yet the actual working of caste in Indian society permitted of much variation, which naturally the authors of the Law Books did not wish to admit.

The use of evidence from a variety of different sources at a later period was both a challenge to certain aspects of brahmanical evidence and a corroboration of others, thus providing a more accurate picture of the past. Evidence from contemporary inscriptions and coins became increasingly important. The descriptions left by foreign travellers and recorded in non-Indian sources – Greek, Latin, Chinese, and Arabic – allowed of new perspectives, as also did the more tangible remains of the past made available through excavations. The corpus of evidence on Buddhism, for instance, was increased with the availability of the Pali Canon as recorded in Ceylon and from Chinese sources. Sources in Arabic and Persian relating to the history of India in the post-thirteenth centuries began to be studied in their own right and ceased being regarded as supplements to Islamic culture in western Asia.

The concentration on dynastic histories in the early studies was also due to the assumption that in ‘Oriental’ societies the power of the ruler was supreme even in the day-to-day functioning of the government. Yet authority for routine functions was rarely concentrated at the centre in the Indian political systems. The unique feature of Indian society – the caste system – integrated as it was to both politics and professional activity, localized many of the functions which would normally be associated with a truly ‘oriental despotism’. The understanding of the functioning of power in India lies in analyses of the caste and sub-caste relationships and of institutions such as the guilds and village councils, and not merely in the survey of dynastic power. Unfortunately, the significance of such studies has only recently been recognized, and it will probably take, another decade or two of intensive scholarship before historically valid generalizations can be made. For the present, one can at best indicate the possible generators of power.

That the study of institutions did not receive much emphasis was in part due to the belief that they did not undergo much change: an idea which also fostered the theory that Indian culture has been a static, unchanging culture for many centuries, largely owing to the lethargy of the Indian and his gloomy, fatalistic attitude to life. This of course is an exaggeration. Even a superficial analysis of the changing social relationships within the caste structure, or the agrarian systems, or the vigorous mercantile activities of Indians throughout the centuries, points to anything but a static socio-economic pattern. It is true that at certain levels there is in India a continuous cultural tradition extending over three thousand years, but this continuity should not be confused with stagnation. The chanting of the gayatri^* verse by a Hindu has a history of three millenia, but the context in which it is chanted today can hardly be said to have remained unchanged. It is surprising that, whilst work on Europe during the nineteenth century laid tremendous stress on discovering patterns of evolution in the history of Europe, the same approach was never applied to the study of Asian history. Indian history was treated as a series of islands in time each named after a particular dynasty, and the same format was followed in most standard works by Indian historians. This is not to suggest that studies on other aspects were ignored. Some very interesting information was collected throughout the nineteenth century on various aspects of Indian society and religion. But somehow this information was rarely integrated into standard historical works.

Emphasis on dynasties led to the division of Indian history into three major periods, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. The Ancient period frequently begins with the coming of Aryan culture (and in later publications with the Indus Valley Civilization) and concludes with the Turkish raids in northern India in c. A.D. 1000, which in turn inaugurate the Medieval period, lasting until the coming of the British in the mid-eighteenth century. This division was buttressed by the inappropriate equation of Ancient with Hindu and Medieval with Muslim, since most of the dynasties of the first period were Hindu in origin and those of the second Muslim. The Muslim period was imbued with a distinctive character to distinguish it from the earlier period by stressing the separateness of Muslim culture at all levels. Justification for this thesis was sought in the writings of the theologians and court chroniclers of the Muslim rulers. In any case, political trends being what they were in twentieth-century India, the Hindu and Muslim periodization was accepted by both Indian and non-Indian historians of India. But such a periodization of Indian history is misleading in its emphasis apart from being questionable in its assumptions. Religion was by no means the pre-eminent motivating factor of change in Indian history, as these titles would imply: it was one among a number of forces. Recently, attempts have been made at redefining the major periods of Indian history on the basis of changes of a less arbitrary kind than the above. (In order to prevent confusion the use of terms of division has been avoided in the chapters which follow.)

There was yet another factor which up to a point conditioned the emphasis of historical interpretation: the geographical structure of the sub-continent. The vast northern Indo-Gangetic plain lent itself more easily to the emergence of large unitary kingdoms. The southern half of the sub-continent, the peninsula, was cut up into smaller regions by mountains, plateaux, and river valleys – the changing topography permitting of less political uniformity than the northern plain. In an age of empires as was the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the larger kingdoms of the north attracted the attention of historians. Periods when large kingdoms flourished became the ‘Golden Ages’ and those which saw the growth of smaller regional states became the ‘Dark Ages’. The history of the peninsula received far less attention, except during those periods when it too could boast of empires. It suffered further from the fact that political strategy in the peninsula and its economic potential was not identical with that of the north. The northern kingdoms based their strength primarily on acquiring large areas of territory, and their revenue came mainly from the land. This was a simple and easily recognizable pattern for any historian. The structure of the southern kingdoms had also to take into account the more than marginal effects of sea power and the economics of maritime activities, which produced a more complicated pattern than that of the north.

The purpose of indicating the changing outlook of historical writing on India is not to dismiss the work of the early historians as being without value or to denigrate the importance of their scholarship. The inadequacies of their interpretation were often the inadequacies of their times, for a historian is frequently far more representative of his age than he is aware. Despite their shortcomings these studies laid the foundations of the history of India and gave a firm chronological framework, around which fresh interpretations can be constructed which will place the ideas and institutions of Indian civilization in their correct perspective.

The historian of India has in the past been regarded primarily as an Orientalist in the days when Orientalists were those who studied the languages and cultures of Asia and whose studies, in the popular mind at any rate, were fragrant with exotica. The nineteenth-century concept of Oriental studies has changed in the present century both in Europe and in India. In the contemporary world history is being increasingly regarded as part of the social sciences and less as the study of classical cultures per se. This newly developing interest seeks to ask a different set of questions from the Indian past: different from those asked by the Orientalist. The difference is largely one of changing historical emphases. Political histories and dynastic studies remain an important aspect of historical interpretation but these are viewed in the light of other features which go into the making of a people and a culture. Changes in the political pattern are inextricably entwined in changes in the economic structure and these in turn have a bearing on social relationships. If a religious movement finds a large following then its attraction must have some relevance to the kind of people who support it. A new language and a new literature can only emerge if they fulfil a need for the society in which they are rooted. It is not enough for the historian of India to present or to analyse the ideas of those who attempted to create the forms and contours of the history of India. It is essential to know why the people of India through the centuries have either accepted or rejected or modified these ideas.

An attempt has been made in this book to anticipate a few of these questions. The purpose of the book has been to indicate the institutions and the events which have contributed to the evolution of Indian culture. But the tendency to evaluate Indian culture and to make categorical value judgements has been avoided, since such an evaluation within the space of a brief history such as this would merely result in meaningless platitudes. This is not primarily a political history. Dynastic chronology has been treated largely as a framework in time. In the course of tracing the evolution of certain aspects of Indian life – the economic structure, changing social relationships, the historical context of religious movements, the emergence and growth of languages, to mention but a few – certain patterns have emerged. It is intended in this book to describe these patterns and interpret the facts along lines which appear to be the most convincing.

In recent years the early history of India has been enriched by the incorporation of evidence provided by two new techniques – the systematic study of society in its various facets, and the extensive use of contemporary evidence from archaeology. The importance of the former lies in the fact that it indicates the possibilities of new ways of approaching the Indian past; and of posing questions, in the answers to which may lie a more real comprehension of the history of India. Such an approach has already been used effectively in certain types of research. The study of society has also stimulated an interest in comparative studies, not along the old lines of declaring one culture to be the norm and judging others by its standards, but rather in terms of a comparative analysis of many cultures. It is this approach which has made historical studies such as Marc Bloch’s work on European feudalism relevant to the intellectual equipment of the historian of India.

Archaeology has provided tangible, three-dimensional facts, in the material remains discovered through survey and excavation. These facts not only corroborate literary evidence and provide statistical data but they also help to fill in the gaps, particularly in the earliest period of Indian history. Evidence on Indian pre-history obtained in the last fifteen years has been of considerable value in suggesting the origins of later patterns of culture. Even a superficial familiarity with the archaeological picture of the sub-continent in the centuries preceding the historical period is helpful in understanding the early history of India.

The earliest traces of human activity in India, so far discovered, go back to the Second Inter-Glacial period between 400,000 and 200,000 B.C. and these show evidence of the use of stone implements. There followed a long period of slow evolution, which gathered momentum towards the end and resulted in the spectacular Indus Valley Civilization (or the Harappa Culture as it has been more recently named) in c. 2300 B.C. The antecedents of the Harappa Culture are the village sites of the Baluchistan hills – the Nal Culture, and of the Makran coast to the west of the Indus delta – the Kulli Culture, and certain of the village communities along the rivers in Rajasthan and Punjab.

The Harappa Culture was the most extensive of the ancient civilizations in area, including not only the Indus plain (the Punjab and Sind), but also northern Rajasthan and the region of Kathiawar in western India. It was essentially a city culture and among the centres of authority were the two cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa.^* These were maintained from the surplus produce of the country, judging by the elaborately constructed granaries found in both cities. Another source of income was the profit from a flourishing trade both within the northern and western areas of the sub-continent and between the people of this culture and those of the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia.

The cities show evidence of an advanced sense of civic planning and organization. Each city was divided into the citadel area, where the essential institutions of civic and religious life were located, and the residential area where the urban population lived.

Amongst the many remains of the Harappa culture perhaps the most puzzling are the seals – small, flat, square, or rectangular objects with a pictorial motif, human or animal, and an inscription. The latter remains undeciphered and holds promise of interesting information when it can be finally read. These seals, numbering about two thousand, appear to have been the tokens of the merchants, or possibly they were connected with the produce of the countryside which was brought into the cities.

Political continuity between the Harappa culture and the later Aryan culture was prevented by the intrusion of less civilized peoples who occupied the sites of the Indus valley in the first half of the second millenium B.C. By 1700 B.C. the Harappa culture had declined and the migration of the Indo-Aryans from Iran in about 1500 B.C. introduced new features into the cultural background of north-western India. This region of the sub-continent was always to remain in communication with areas to the north and the west of the Indus river and the Hindu Kush mountains. Sometimes it was absorbed into the politics of these regions and became a part of their cultural complex. Similarly, western India retained contact with the maritime areas to the west, those of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. This tended to emphasize the separateness of the developments in the Indus and the Ganges plains.

Further east in the Ganges valley there is evidence of small settlements of people in the transition stage between hunting and agriculture, using a variety of stone and copper implements and an inferior type of ochre-coloured pottery. These were presumably the people whom the Indo-Aryans met when they moved into the Ganges valley, since the Painted-Grey Ware associated (tentatively) with the Indo-Aryans has been found at some sites superimposed on levels containing the earlier ochre-coloured ware.

Painted-Grey Ware sites have been found in the western half of the Ganges valley and range in date from 1100–500 B.C. More recently iron has also been found at some of the earlier sites, which may lead to an earlier date for the use of iron in India than the generally accepted one of c. 800 B.C. The Painted-Grey Ware sites indicate argicultural communities where the breeding of cattle and horses were also known. They were generally familiar with the use of copper. The horse is conspicuously absent at Harappan sites and this evidence is used as one of the bases for tentatively suggesting that the Painted-Grey Ware sites may have been those of the Aryan culture. The evidence so far available from these sites is in broad agreement with the description of Aryan culture in the Vedic sources.

The Deccan shows evidence of a microlithic industry – the making of tiny flint tools – in association later with a chalcolithic culture where bronze and copper were used together with stone. This gave way in the first half of the first millenium B.C. to the superior technology of the Ganges valley, as is apparent from the introduction of iron and subsequently of a special type of pottery – the northern black polished ware – both of which are associated with the Aryan culture of the Ganges valley. Evidently, the Aryans had by now begun to move southwards into the Deccan and communication had been established between the Ganges valley and the Deccan. The Deccan was being prepared for the role it was to play for many centuries in the history of the sub-continent, that of being a bridge between the north and the south. Not only did it receive elements of Aryan culture from the north, but by about 300 B.C. the sites of the lower Deccan were in contact with the Megalithic culture of the extreme south of India.

The Megalithic culture of south India (Madras, Kerala, and Mysore) has close similarities with the Megalithic cultures of the Mediterranean and may have arrived in south India from western Asia, the earliest contact in what was to become a close relationship between the two areas which lasted till well into recent times.

The south Indian megaliths or burial monuments were either rock-cut cave sepulchres or else circular enclosures in the midst of which were rectangular stone cists or pottery sarcophagi containing bones and such grave furnishings as were customary (e.g. a special black-and-red ware). These monuments are generally found in the vicinity of fertile land irrigated from tanks specially built for storing water, which suggests a remarkable degree of cooperative effort on the part of the builders. The Megalithic culture which dates to c. 500 B.C. and A.D. 100 brings us to the historical period in south India.

The ethnic composition of the people involved in these various cultures was not identical. Ethnological studies have revealed six main races in the Indian sub-continent. The earliest was apparently the Negrito and this was followed by the Proto-Australoid, the Mongoloid, the Mediterranean, and later those associated with Aryan culture. There is evidence of the Proto-Australoid, the Mediterranean, Alpine, and Mongoloid in the skeletal remains at Harappan sites. Presumably by this time the first five of the races mentioned above were well settled in India. The Proto-Australoid were the basic element in the Indian population and their speech was of the Austric linguistic group, a specimen of which survives in the Munda speech of certain primitive tribes. The Mediterranean race is generally associated with Dravidian culture. The concentration of the Mongoloid people was in the north-eastern and northern fringes of the sub-continent, and their speech conforms to the Sino-Tibetan group. The last to come were the people commonly referred to as the Aryans. Aryan is in fact a linguistic term indicating a speech-group of Indo-European origin, and is not an ethnic term. To refer to the coming of the Aryans is therefore inaccurate. However, this inaccuracy has become so current in historical studies of early India that it would sound unduly pedantic to refer to the Aryans as ‘the Aryan-speaking peoples’. Their ethnic identity is not known on the basis of the Indian evidence.

Tentative calculations have been made of the population of the sub-continent during various periods, but these remain largely conjectural. An estimate suggested for the sub-continent at the end of the fourth century B.C. is 181 million.^* This estimate is based partly on the size of the Indian army as described in Greek sources when referring to the campaign of Alexander of Macedon in northern India. It is possible of course that Greek writers were exaggerating the figures in order to demonstrate to their readers the formidable military strength which Alexander would have had to face had he pursued his campaign into the Ganges valley. The estimate of 181 million appears to be rather high: a figure of about 100 million or less for the early period might be more credible. An estimate for the early seventeenth century is 100 million.^† The first census of the British Indian administration covering the entire sub-continent carried out in 1881 put the population at a little over 253 million.

It was against this background of peoples and cultures of Indian prehistory that the Aryan-speaking tribes arrived in the north and made their contribution to Indian civilization.

^*A hymn from the Rig-Veda dedicated to the solar god Savitri and regarded as the most holy verse in Hindu scripture.

^* Recent excavations have revealed a series of cities – Kot Diji (in Sind), Kalibangan (in Rajasthan), Rupar (in Punjab), and the port-town of Lothal (in Gujarat). But the two earlier cities appear to have been the most important.

^*J. M. Datta, ‘Population of India about 320 B.C.’, Man in India, Vol. 42, No. 4, Oct.–Dec. 1962.

^† W. H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar, (Delhi, 1962) p. 21.

THE IMPACT OF ARYAN CULTURE

IT was once the tradition that the first king of India was Manu Svayambhu (the Self-born Manu). Manu was born directly of the god Brahma, and was a hermaphrodite. From the female half of his body he bore two sons and three daughters, from whom descended a series of Manus. One of them, called Prithu, became the first consecrated king of the earth, and gave to the earth her name, Prithvi. He cleared the forests, cultivated the land, and introduced cattle-breeding, commerce, and other activities associated with a settled life. But the tenth Manu was the most famous of them all. It was when he ruled over the earth that the great flood occurred, when everything was submerged and only Manu survived. The god Vishnu warned Manu of the flood, and Manu built a boat to carry his family and the seven sages of antiquity. Vishnu took the form of a large fish, to which the boat was fastened, swam through the flood, and lodged the boat on a mountain peak. Here Manu, his family, and the seven sages remained, until the water had subsided and they could safely return. The human race sprang from Manu and his family, the survivors of the great flood. Manu had nine sons, the eldest of whom was a hermaphrodite – hence known by a dual name Ila and ã From this son arose the two main lines of royal descent, the Solar dynasty (Suryavamsha) from Ila and the Lunar dynasty (Chandravamsha) from ã

This is the traditional history as recorded in the Puranas and the Brahmanas. The flood supposedly occurred many thousand years ago. The Puranas trace the descent of Manu’s progeny to the kings of the epic period – the royal heroes of the two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – and then continue to chronicle the dynasties of the historical period (3102 B.C. is the traditional date for the war described in the Mahabharata). The sequence of kings is unbroken and follows a pattern which is indicative of much care and thought. Had this literary source been the only one available the basis for discussion of the beginnings of Indian history would have been limited, but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century another type of evidence provided historical material which conflicted with the traditional story, the evidence provided by philology, the study of which in the nineteenth century developed importantly both in Europe and elsewhere. In India, European scholars of Sanskrit realized with some surprise that Sanskrit was related in structure and possibly in sound to Greek and Latin, and that the relationship was a close one. This led to the theory of a common language originally spoken by the Indo-European people, the ancestors of the Aryan-speaking tribes. The Indo-Europeans emerged from the region of the Caspian Sea and the southern Russian steppes, and gradually divided into a number of tribes which spread far afield in search of pasture, to Greece and Asia Minor, to Iran, and to India, by which time they were called ‘Aryans’. Vedic literature (that associated with the Aryans in India) came in for intensive study, and it appeared to be proved that the beginning of Indian history was to be the coming of the ‘Aryans’, some time in the second millennium B.C.

But this carefully constructed picture of the past was again to be disturbed in the twentieth century. In 1921–2 archaeology revealed the existence of a pre-Aryan civilization in the north-west of India, the Indus Valley civilization, with its two urban centres at Mohenjodaro and Harappa. This discovery consigns the early part of the traditional account very firmly to the realms of mythology. The Harappa culture dates from c. 3000 B.C. to c. 1500 B.C. so that the physical coexistence of the Harappa culture with the family of Manus is difficult to imagine, since the cultural patterns of the two were totally different.

There are thus two separate sources of information on the past; the historical, which consists of the archaeological evidence and that derived from Vedic literature, and the traditional, consisting of the stories in the Puranas, the latter being composed at a later date than the Vedic. The historical sequence of events seemed to have been as follows. The Indus Valley civilization declined in the second millennium B.C. and had almost completely disintegrated when (by 1500 B.C.) the Aryans entered the north-west of India. The Aryans or Indo-Aryans – descendants of the Indo-Europeans – had remained for some time in Bactria and the northern Iranian plateau, but by about 1500 B.C. they migrated into northern India through the passes in the Hindu Kush mountains. At first they wandered across the plains of the Punjab, searching for pastures, as they were mainly a cattle-breeding people. Finally they settled in small village communities in forest clearings and gradually took to agriculture, which had been the main economy of the earlier Indus valley people.^* It was during this period that the hymns of the Rig-Veda^† (the earliest examples of Vedic literature) were memorized and collected.

The traditional accounts in the Puranas were collected many centuries later (between c. 500 B.C. and A.D. 500), hence the discrepancy in the events described. They are not entirely mythical, since they contain references to historical events. The name Manu provided the generic base for manava meaning ‘mankind’. The description of king Prithu clearing the forests and introducing cultivation has echoes of the early Aryan settlements in the Ganges-Yamuna region. The story of the flood immediately brings to mind the Babylonian legend, also borrowed by the Hebrews in the story of Noah’s Ark. In the Indian sources it may have been a memory from the time when the Aryans were still on the Iranian plateau and in contact with the Babylonians, from whom they may have heard of the flood: or else it was the same legend derived from the Indus valley people, who in turn had heard of it from the Babylonians. A further possibility may be a vague memory of the Mesopotamian flood confused with the frequent flooding of the Indus river, and thus the adaptation of the Babylonian story to the Indian scene. At the time when the Puranas were finally revised and edited, royalty in India began tracing its origin to the Solar and Lunar lines, and there would naturally be an attempt to connect these with the earliest known king.

Our earliest literary source is the Rig-Veda, parts of which were originally composed prior to 1000 B.C. The remaining Vedic literature – the Sama, Yajur, and Atharva Vedas – is of later date. The historical reconstruction of Aryan life and institutions is based on this literature. The two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are concerned with events which took place between c. 1000 and 700 B.C., but as the versions which survive date from the first half of the first millennium A.D. they too can hardly be regarded as authentic sources for the study of the period to which they pertain. Incidents from the Epics can be accepted as historically valid if supporting evidence can be found to bear them out.^*

The Mahabharata as it survives today is the longest single poem in the world. The main action of the epic revolves around the famous struggle at Kurukshetra between the Kauravas and the Pandavas over land-rights, and is set in the fertile and strategic region north of Delhi. The Kauravas, with their capital at Hastinapur, were the hundred sons of Dhritrashtra, and the Pandavas (the five sons of Pandu) were their cousins. The Pandavas became the heirs to the Kuru throne, since Dhritrashtra was blind and therefore not eligible to rule. The five brothers were resented by the Kauravas, who plotted against them and finally forced them to leave the country. Dhritrashtra, in the hope of avoiding a conflict, divided the kingdom and gave half to the Pandavas, who ruled from Indraprastha (in the vicinity of Delhi). But this arrangement did not satisfy the Kauravas, who then challenged the Pandavas to a gambling match. The latter lost their half of the kingdom, but as a compromise were permitted to retain the kingdom provided they first went into exile for thirteen years. At the end of this period the Pandavas claimed their kingdom, but the Kauravas were unwilling to allow them to rule, so the Pandavas declared war on the Kauravas. The battle between the two, fought on the plain at Kurukshetra, lasted eighteen days and resulted in the annihilation of the Kauravas. The Pandavas ruled long and peacefully. They finally renounced the kingdom, installed the grandson of one of the original Pandava brothers, and went to the City of the Gods in the Himalayas.

Originally the Mahabharata may have been the description of a local feud, but it caught the imagination of the bards and in its final form we find all the tribes and peoples of the sub-continent participating in the battle. Its composition is traditionally ascribed to a brahman poet, Vyasa, but it is not the work of a single person, since it is no longer the story of the war, but has acquired a number of episodes (some of which are unrelated to the main story) and a variety of interpolations, many of which are important in themselves.

The Ramayana is shorter than the Mahabharata and with fewer interpolations. The original version is attributed to the poet Valmiki. The events described in the Ramayana probably occurred somewhat later, since the scene is set further east than that of the Mahabharata, in eastern Uttar Pradesh.