India: The Ancient Past

A History of the Indian Subcontinent from c. 7000 BCE to CE 1200

Burjor Avari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317236726
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

India: The Ancient Past provides a clear and systematic introduction to the cultural, political, economic, social and geographical history of ancient India from the time of the pre-Harappan culture nine thousand years ago up until the beginning of the second millennium of the Common Era. The book engages with methodological and controversial issues by examining key themes such as the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, the Aryan controversy, the development of Vedic and heterodox religions, and the political economy and social life of ancient Indian kingdoms.

This fully revised and updated second edition includes:

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• Three new chapters examining the differences and commonalities between the north and south of India;

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• Extended discussion on contested issues, such as the origins of the Aryans and the role of feudalism in ancient India;

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• New source excerpts to introduce students to the most significant works in the historiography of India, and questions for discussion;

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• Study guides, including a list of key issues, suggested readings and a selection of internet sources for each chapter;

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• Specially designed maps to illustrate different time periods and geographical regions

This richly illustrated guide provides a fascinating account of the early development of Indian culture and civilization that will appeal to all students of Indian history.

1 Introduction

Defining terms

Modern India came into existence in 1947 on the eve of the partition of British India. This is the Republic of India, the largest democracy in the world today and an increasingly powerful economic force in the globalised twenty-first century. Before 1947, and well into the ancient period, however, India geographically embraced the entire Indian subcontinent, including the areas of modern Pakistan and Bangladesh. In fact, the earliest roots of Indian civilisation can only be understood through studying what has been recovered from archaeological excavations and field-work, mainly inside Pakistan. Nepal and Sri Lanka, too, have always had close links with the Indian cultural world. And, during varied periods of ancient history, Afghanistan and India have had a lasting symbiotic relationship.

The etymological roots of the term ‘India’ lie in a Sanskrit word, sindhu, meaning river frontier. The earliest sacred text of India, the Rig-Veda, speaks of a land called Sapta-Sindhava, which can be identified as the province of Punjab, formerly the land of seven rivers. Today, five rivers flow through it – the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi and Sutlej/Beas – but some 4,000 years ago there were two other rivers, called the Sarasvati and the Drasadvati, which have long since dried up. When the Persians began to penetrate Indian lands in the sixth century BCE, they referred to the modern River Indus, the most westerly of the seven rivers, and the peoples living in the region, by the Old Persian term Hindhu, the cognate of the Indic sindhu (Basham 1954: 1). When the Macedonians, under Alexander the Great, invaded the same region in the fourth century BCE, they used the Greek Indos to refer to the river, and India to refer to the land around and beyond the river. So ‘India’ is actually a Greek expression; no native in ancient India would have thought of using this term. They used Sanskritic proper nouns such as Bharat (a descendant of the ancient Puru clan), Madhyadesha (the Middle Country), Aryavarta (the land of the Aryans) and Jambudvipa (the shape of a Jambu tree, broad at the top and narrowing at its base, like the map of India) to describe the vast terrain with which they became familiar. Even today, the constitution of the Republic of India recognises the official name of the country as ‘India that is Bharat’.

The term ‘ancient’ refers to times long past. But how long ago? And at what point does ‘ancient’ turn to modern or pre-modern? This book begins with our remotest ancestors in the Stone Age period, but places the starting point for ancient Indian culture and civilisation at approximately 7000 BCE with the emergence of the first farming community at Mehrgarh in Baluchistan. The history of farming is perhaps the most objective criterion to determine the antiquity of a civilisation. The date of 7000 BCE has been arrived at through systematic archaeological research (Jarrige and Meadow 1980: 102–10). It is not based on an interpretation drawn from an ancient text or mythology. We end the story at around CE 1200. This book is therefore a broad survey of 8,200 years of ancient Indian history. The choice of CE 1200 as the end point may be legitimately contested, because it can be argued that the ancient period came to an end with the rise of feudalism from CE 600 onwards. The preference in this book for CE 1200 as the terminal date is based on the fact that after it the Indian civilisation came under intense pressure from two other major world civilisations: Islam and Western Europe. Before CE 1200, India had, to be sure, faced attacks by outside forces and absorbed many foreign influences; but – apart from relatively minor Persian and Greek control on the periphery of north-west India for a few centuries, the occasional Central Asian conquerors such as the Kushans or the Hunas, and Arab and Turkish intruders – the Indian rulers, whether imperial or regional, had managed to remain the masters of their own lands. After CE 1200, however, their autonomy and capacity for independent action came to be increasingly compromised, first by the Turco-Afghan and Mogul rulers who, in due course, came to consider India as their only home, and then by the British, for most of whom India existed essentially for enriching Britain’s wealth and prestige. Before CE 1200, the Indian civilisation was already a composite civilisation, but one that was deeply anchored in its native soil; after CE 1200, foreign concepts and practices profoundly modified its character. Fortunately, the ultimate fusion – whether Indo-Islamic or Indo-Western – helped to enhance, not diminish, the cultures of the subcontinent. Nevertheless, the date of CE 1200 was a turning point in India’s political and cultural fortunes and, in this sense only, the period before that date may be described as ‘ancient’.

Originally coined by the Persians to refer to the people who lived beyond the River Indus, the term ‘Hindu’ actually came into popular usage with the arrival of the Arabs and the Turks (Thapar 2002: 439–40). At first they called all the people of India ‘Hindu’, but later, with their increased understanding of Indian social structures, they became discerning enough to distinguish the Hindus from the non-Hindu Buddhist or Jain religious groups. It was even later in history that the Hindus called themselves by that name. In ancient India they had used the names of their particular sects or castes for self-description. They were always a highly diverse group, although their caste system, along with certain ritual practices and the teachings of their religious texts, legends and epics, provided them with the resource of an underlying unity. Despite their numerical preponderance, it would be a mistake to regard the ancient period as the ‘Hindu period’. There is very little archaeological evidence of Hindu culture during the first 4,000 years of ancient Indian history, from 7000 BCE to 3000 BCE. Some precocious signs of this culture are traceable, in the north-west, through the artefacts of the following thousand years. What is generally known as Vedic Hindu culture began at around 2000 BCE and flourished for some 1,500 years, until about 500 BCE. This culture came to be influenced during the next eight centuries or so by dissenting groups such as the Buddhists and Jains. From about CE 300 onwards, however, we find evidence of a resurgent, and rebranded, Hinduism known as the Puranic and devotional Hinduism, which has endured ever since. The greatest and the finest monuments of India nevertheless testify to the fact that the classical civilisation of India was the result of a partnership of architects, designers, craftsmen, masons and labourers who could have been Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, dissenters or atheists. This also holds true for the intellectual progress of India in the ancient period.

Why study ancient India?

A most unsatisfactory reason for studying ancient India would be for the purpose of glorifying India and proclaiming the quite unproven achievements of ancient Indians. This unfortunate tendency, prevalent among some modern Indians, is a defensive reaction to Western progress during the last two centuries. It has also been encouraged by excessively lavish praises showered on India by some foreign intellectuals and philosophers, as in Excerpt 1.1 below.

Another dubious reason for studying ancient India is for the purpose of drawing attention to the so-called decline of India after the arrival of Islam in the country and of comparing negatively the course of post-CE 1200 events in India with the achievements of the pre-CE 1200 period. Third, for a large number of people in the West, it is religion that seems to have mostly excited their interest in ancient India. This is the result of a great deal of study and popularisation of Hindu and Buddhist traditions by Western scholars. Unfortunately, this has also led to the growth of a number of stereotypes, of which the one repeated most often is that the Indians are a highly spiritual people with a fatalistic outlook. This imbalance in the thinking about India can be corrected by attending to other valuable legacies from ancient India.

Excerpt 1.1 The use of hyperbole in praise of India

The following extract is an example of exaggerated admiration for India as displayed by Will Durant, the eminent American thinker and historian. Some statements in the extract are historically accurate; others are just the writer’s reflections of his love for India.

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

Source: Will Durant, The Case for India, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1931, quoted in Vivekananda Kendra Prakashan, Imprints of Indian Thought and Culture Abroad, Madras, 1980, 9. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc from The Case for India by Will Durant. Copyright © 1930 by Will Durant. Copyright renewed 1957 by Will Durant. All rights reserved.

Three particular legacies – in relation to intellect, art and morality – are worth considering. The intellectual heritage of ancient India is immense. The Indians composed learned texts long before the Europeans, they were the first great grammarians and their epics dealt with issues of eternal significance. They produced great mathematicians and astronomers, whose work eventually passed into mainstream studies. Without the ancient Indians we would not have had our number system, upon which all modern science and technologies are based. Some ancient Indians were also great dissenters, and quite disputatious (Melling 1993: 1–16, Sen 2005: 3–33;). They were accustomed to debating issues in both a passionate and an icily logical style long before such experiments evolved within European civilisation. Another major heritage of ancient India is the artistic and aesthetic. The craftsman has a distinct place in Indian society (Kramrisch 1959: 18–24). From the very first civilisation of India, the Harappan, archaeologists have retrieved beautiful and stylistic women’s jewellery and children’s toys, indicating its people’s sophisticated lifestyle. The bronze and copper works of Indian craftsmen have always been in demand throughout the ages. Ancient Indian textile designs are still avidly sought after by international fashion houses and the temples of ancient India draw tourists in their millions. Indian trade and trading skills show a people as concerned as any other with material goods. The third great heritage from ancient India is that of a vision of a morally ordered society (Basham 1964: 57–71), busy at its work and generally at peace with itself. Of course there was violence and disorder at many junctures of her history; but essentially ancient India evolved gradually – and, compared with many other countries, peacefully – over the long period of 8,200 years. Internationally, India did not engage in rapacious warfare or humiliate foreign peoples, as so many ancient and modern nations did to their neighbours and peoples abroad. Indian warfare was always constrained by clear ethical guidelines (Date 1929: 80–1). From the earliest times the Indians have borne the strong moral responsibility of promoting international amity and goodwill. In modern times, such distinguished Indians as Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) have much emphasised this particularly affirmative and attractive feature of India and her peoples.

It is clear that there are many positive reasons why we should study ancient Indian history. At the same time, we need to be critical and comparative in our approach. In certain aspects of public life, ancient India lagged behind such civilisations as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Greece and Rome, and its shortcomings should be recognised. It does not behove modern Indians to boast about ancient Indian technology, when it is manifest that China was far more advanced in this area than any other nation. The Indians were also slower in developing intelligible scripts than the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians were. The early Indians paid scant attention to the precise documentation and systematic recording of events in their country, whereas other ancient civilisations, particularly the Chinese and Romans, were scrupulous with their historiography. The ancient Indians showed abysmal disregard for issues of inequality and poverty that have disfigured the face of India throughout its history (Ramesh 2006: 10–13). Many Indian texts lament the conditions of poverty and inequality, but in none do we find any effusion of outrage or passion. The caste system had much to do with this passivity, and it remains perhaps the greatest moral blot on the record of ancient India.

Time, space and people

Chronological signposts

Although the ancient Indians were great calculators of time, they did not standardise the dates of important events in a uniform manner. This is because ancient India, except for the two relatively brief imperial periods of the Mauryans (321 BCE to 185 BCE) and the Imperial Guptas (CE 320 to 467), was largely both politically and culturally fragmented and regionalised. There were numerous ancient Indian calendars, each with its own commencement year, used by different dynasties or religious communities. The early modern scholars and historians who systematised ancient Indian studies performed a most valuable service in establishing the credibility of certain dates and then synchronising them with the traditional European system of dating events before and after Christ (BC and AD), now updated to BCE and CE (before and during the Common Era). Part of the success of synchronisation is owed to foreign sources or mathematical calculations from ancient India itself, as the following three examples demonstrate. From the Greek sources, for example, we learn that Alexander the Great invaded India in 327 BCE; this, along with the information about the Buddha’s dates from Sanskritic and Pali sources, enabled the scholars to work out the accession date of the first Mauryan emperor, Chandragupta Maurya. Again, the famous astronomer Aryabhatta wrote his definitive mathematical work in CE 499, which was the year that, through his astronomical calculations, he claimed to have completed 3,600 years of the Kali Yuga, the latest of the time-periods of the main Hindu religious calendar that began in 3101 BCE. This means that, when the third Christian millennium began in CE 2000–01, the Hindus had just completed the first century of their sixth millennium. Finally, Islamic historiography, being more systematic in its approach than the ancient Indian, also developed a more reliable dating system; calculating the dates from the start-year of the Islamic lunar calendar (CE 622) against the modern solar reckoning, we are on firm ground with Islamic chronology. That is why we can be confident of the veracity of such a date as CE 1000, when Mahmud of Ghazni attacked India. The modern European system of dating is inaccurate, because Christ was born at least four years before what we consider to be its start-year of CE 1, supposedly the year of his birth, and there have also been both slippages of days and days added artificially by the Church authorities at different times in European history. Nevertheless, it is now a well-established universal dating system; it has also been modernised to take account of the fact that most people in the world are not Christian, and we now use the term Common Era (CE) rather than the Year of Our Lord (AD). We are using this updated system in the present edition of this book. It is, of course, worth bearing in mind that all dates of ancient Indian history are somewhat fluid, and in the dating of some events one has to accept a certain ‘give and take’ of a few years.

Physical geography and its impact on history

Geography plays a crucial part in shaping a country’s history, and so it was with ancient India. The geographical shape of the subcontinent was referred to by early writers, as illustrated in Excerpt 1.2 below.

The physical geography of the subcontinent provides four ...