India

A Short History

Andrew Robinson

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780500771945
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Indische & südasiatische Geschichte

An incisive distillation of India's uniquely diverse history, from the the early Indus Valley to today with India as the world's largest democracy. The book places emphasis on individuals, ideas and cultures rather than on the rise and fall of kingdoms, political parties and economies. Anyone curious about a great civilization, and its future, will find this an ideal introduction, at times controversial, written by an author who has been intimately engaged with the subcontinent for almost four decades.

ONE

The Indus Valley Civilization

THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION

When the first Hindu nationalist government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, came to power around the beginning of the new millennium, it set about rewriting India’s history. Revised school textbooks, by biddable historians, were required, essentially to promote the antiquity, dominance and independence from foreign influence of Hinduism.

Indian history was now claimed to have started in the third or fourth millennium BC with the beginnings of Hinduism among people indigenous to the subcontinent – in deliberate contradiction of the scholarly consensus since the 19th century that Aryan ‘invaders’ of the subcontinent migrating from the northwest in the mid-second millennium BC were the originators of the Indo-Aryan, Vedic religion that gave rise to Hinduism in the first millennium. For the most extreme of Hindu fundamentalists, all so-called Muslim structures in India are really the work of Hindus. Even the Taj Mahal is believed once to have been ‘Tejo-Mahalaya’, a Shiva temple, by ‘many a visitor, who is at pains to put his foreign fellow visitors right about the origin of the building’, writes the leading scholar of the history of the Taj, Ebba Koch.

One of the controversial textbook revisions introduced by the National Council of Educational Research and Training at this time was to rename India’s earliest urban culture, the Indus Valley civilization, as the ‘Indus-Saraswati’ civilization. There is some support among reputable archaeologists and scholars for such a change. The ancient Saraswati River apparently dried up in the second millennium and its course no longer exists above ground – unlike, evidently, the Indus River – but part of the Saraswati’s course has been identified by some scientific surveys with an existing river (Ghaggar-Hakra), east of the Indus, which flows intermittently during the monsoon through the desert on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, and is densely lined by ancient sites of the Indus Valley civilization. However, for Hindu nationalists, the Saraswati River is important not so much for its disputed geography as for the fact that it is prominently mythologized in the Vedas, the oldest and most sacred of the Hindu scriptures. ‘Foremost mother, foremost of rivers, foremost of goddesses, Saraswati. In thee, Saraswati, all generations have their stars’, proclaims one of the hymns of the Rigveda, the oldest of the Vedas. Long after the period of the Vedas, Saraswati became the name of the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, arts and science. Thus, renamed the Indus-Saraswati civilization, the Indus Valley civilization might conceivably be trumpeted as the forerunner of the Vedic civilization, which is the indisputable fountainhead of the Hindu religion and also, according to the nationalists, of ancient Indian mathematics and science. Over the past century and more, some of them have claimed to discern in the Vedas calculations of the speed of light, allusions to high-energy physics and even the outlines of advanced technology of our own times, such as aeroplanes.

However, this new theory immediately stumbled against serious historical obstacles. The most obvious characteristics of the archaeological remains of ancient cities and towns in the Indus Valley and surrounding areas, which we shall describe shortly, bear no evident relationship to the pastoral, semi-nomadic society described in the Vedas. The language of the Indus Valley civilization, so far as it can be understood from analysis of the undeciphered Indus script, seems to have little in common with Sanskrit, the unquestioned language of the Vedas. Moreover, to unbiased eyes, the Vedas contain no sophisticated mathematics – unlike certain elements of the Indus Valley civilization – and precious little in the way of scientific knowledge.

In need of bolstering evidence, Hindu nationalist historians appealed to a new book, The Deciphered Indus Script, written by two Indians with some linguistic and scientific credentials. The book’s authors, N. Jha and N. S. Rajaram, made astounding claims, announced to the Indian press with a fanfare in 1999 and published in 2000. The Indus script was apparently even older than had been thought (the mid-third millennium BC), dating back to the mid-fourth millennium, which would make it the world’s oldest readable writing, predating Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. It employed some kind of alphabet, two millennia older than the world’s earliest-known alphabets from the Middle East. Perhaps most sensationally of all, at least for Indians, its inscriptions could be read in Vedic Sanskrit; one of them was found to mention the Saraswati River, albeit obliquely (‘Ila surrounds the blessed land’).

Astonishing further support for the Hindu nationalist view seemed to come in the form of an excavation photograph from the 1920s showing a broken Indus seal inscription depicting the hindquarters of an animal, accompanied by four signs. The book’s authors claimed that the animal was a horse, as shown in a ‘computer enhanced’ drawing published by them; and that the signs could be read, in Vedic Sanskrit, as ‘arko ha as va’, which they translated as ‘Sun indeed like the horse’. Another Indus inscription – the longest inscription so far discovered (as recently as 1990) – they translated as: ‘I was a thousand times victorious over avaricious raiders desirous of my wealth of horses!’

But horses were unknown to the Indus Valley civilization, almost all scholars had long maintained, since horses were not depicted among the many animals (including buffaloes) shown on its seals and in its art, and no horse bones had been discovered by excavators – or at least no bones that convinced zooarchaeologists specializing in horse identification. Horses are generally thought to have arrived in northwestern India only with the horse-drawn chariots of the Aryans; certainly, in later history, Indian armies imported their horses from outside India. Horses are, however, abundantly mentioned in the Vedas. If, after all, horses did feature in the Indus inscriptions, was this not important evidence that the creators of the inscriptions and of the Vedas were one and the same – indigenous – people?

The arguments in The Deciphered Indus Script would probably have been ignored by most people, as had happened with literally dozens of failed Indus script decipherments announced since the 1920s by both Indian and non-Indian scholars, including eminent figures in their field like the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie. But on this occasion, because of their potentially explosive educational and political implications, the book attracted widespread attention, both in India and internationally.

Within months, the authors’ claims of a successful decipherment were easily demonstrated to be nonsense in articles for national news magazines in India written by scholars, notably Iravatham Mahadevan, the leading Indian expert on the Indus script, Asko Parpola, the leading non-Indian expert, and Michael Witzel, a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, with his collaborator Steve Farmer. Mahadevan termed the so-called decipherment ‘completely invalid … a non-starter’. Witzel and Farmer’s chief article was entitled ‘Horseplay in Harappa’, in reference to Harappa, the best-known city of the Indus Valley civilization. They demonstrated beyond question, even for non-specialists, that the supposed Indus alphabet was so absurdly flexible that it could be manipulated to produce almost any translation that the authors might desire. Furthermore, the supposed Indus Valley horse – after comparison of the broken seal photograph with photographs of various similar-looking, but more complete, Indus seals – was shown to be a ‘unicorn’ bull of a type commonly depicted in the inscriptions. The horse image had to be a hoax created by one of the book’s authors, an Indian-born, US-trained engineer with experience of computer drawing (and a taste for Hindu nationalist propaganda), as he more or less admitted under questioning by Indian journalists.

The entire, farcical, episode might seem too trivial to dwell on here. Yet, as Witzel and Farmer presciently concluded in 2000: ‘If reactionary trends in Indian history find further political support, we risk seeing violent repeats in the coming decades of the fascist extremes of the past.’ Despite theirs and other scholars’ exposure of this particular book’s intellectual bankruptcy, the new Indian school textbooks introduced in 2002 referred to ‘terracotta figurines’ of horses in the ‘Indus-Saraswati civilization’, and continued to do so until the fall of the BJP-led government in 2004, when the textbooks were withdrawn by the incoming Congress-led government. More important, the idea that the language of the Indus Valley civilization is Sanskrit or Indo-Aryan, and of local origin, continues to enjoy wide support in India, to the consternation of most scholars trained in Indo-European linguistics.

Unfortunately, the Indus Valley civilization has always suffered – and probably always will suffer – from a paucity of evidence and an excess of speculative interpretation, compared with the well-endowed and well-documented ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. It was lost to the world even at the time of Alexander the Great. When Alexander’s emissary, Aristoboulus, visited the area in 326 BC, he found ‘an abandoned country, with more than a thousand towns and villages deserted after the Indus had changed its course’. It was not mentioned again in historical records for over two thousand years. In the early 1920s, an Indian archaeologist, R. D. Banerji, out searching for non-existent victory pillars put up by Alexander on his retreat from India, stumbled across the true significance of the ruin mound at Mohenjo-daro (‘mound of the dead’), which is now in Sindh province of Pakistan. His discovery, and a similar discovery 350 miles away at Harappa (also now in Pakistan), would double the recorded age of Indian civilization from 250 BC (the inscriptions of Asoka) back to about 2600 BC.

Excavation proved to be a challenge from the very beginning; indeed, most of the sites of the Indus Valley civilization are unexcavated today for lack of resources. Even at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, only the central area has been excavated, leaving extensive areas of these cities unknown. At Mohenjo-daro, later structures, including a ruined Buddhist stupa dating from the centuries after Alexander, stood on top of the so-called ‘citadel’ (though it lacks fortifications), while the rest of the city was largely buried by deep alluvial deposits laid down by the floods of the Indus River. At Harappa, a Muslim cemetery and a modern town covered much of the ancient city, which had been quarried for its ancient bricks by the town’s inhabitants and, much more destructively, by 19th-century railway contractors in need of vast quantities of brick rubble.

Notwithstanding, a team under Sir John Marshall, director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, immediately began excavating at both sites in the early 1920s. ‘Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to [Heinrich] Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to [Aurel] Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization,’ Marshall wrote excitedly in 1924 in the Illustrated London News. ‘It looks, however, at this moment, as if we are on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus.’ Since then, over almost a century of study, archaeologists from many countries have identified about a thousand settlements belonging to the Indus Valley civilization in Pakistan and northwest India, covering an area of 300,000 square miles (approximately a quarter the size of Europe), with a population of one million people. This was the most extensive urban culture of its time, larger than either the ancient Mesopotamian or Egyptian empires of the third millennium BC.

Most of the settlements were villages, but five were major cities. Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were comparable with cities like Ur in Mesopotamia and Memphis in Egypt in the mature period of the Indus civilization, that is, between about 2600 and 1900 BC according to radiocarbon dating. (Its beginnings are naturally older; indeed there is impressive evidence of village habitation in northwest India dating as far back as 7000 BC at Mehrgarh.)

The Indus Valley cities cannot boast grand pyramids, palaces, temples, statues and graves, or hordes of gold. But their society, fed by the waters of the Indus, appears to have been remarkably prosperous, storing food in granaries filled by two growing seasons in agriculture: in the winter, they grew barley, wheat, oats, lentils, beans, mustard, jujube and linen; in the summer during the monsoon, millets, cotton, sesamum, melons, jute, hemp, grapes and dates. The civilization certainly traded with Gujarat, northern Maharashtra, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia, where Indus jewelry, weights, seals and other objects have been excavated; and the trade with Mesopotamia seems to have been chiefly in favour of the Indus Valley (which was apparently known as Meluhha in cuneiform records), since very few objects from Mesopotamia have been found in the Indus Valley. Its cities’ well-planned streets, bathrooms and advanced drainage – including what is termed the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro – put to shame all but the town planning of the 20th century AD, as proudly noted by Jawaharlal Nehru in his Discovery of India after he had twice visited Mohenjo-daro in the 1930s. Some of its ornaments, such as the necklaces of long, finely drilled, biconical carnelian beads found as far afield as the royal cemetery of Ur, rival the treasures of the Egyptian pharaohs for loveliness and technical sophistication. Experiments show that each bead could have taken up to two weeks to produce; a necklace might have required a year. Its remarkable system of standardized weights – consisting of stone cubes and truncated spheres – based on a binary system for small quantities and a decimal system for large quantities, was unique in the ancient world; the system provided the weight standards for the earliest Indian coins, issued in the 7th century BC; and it is, amazingly, still used in traditional markets in Pakistan and India. The inspiration seems to have been the weight of a seed of a particular creeper, equivalent to 1/128th part of the basic Indus weight unit: known as the ratti, this is still used by Indian jewellers. In addition, the Indus seals are exquisitely carved miniature works of art: ‘little masterpieces of controlled realism, with a monumental strength in one sense out of all proportion to their size and in another entirely related to it’, enthused the Indus excavator Mortimer Wheeler. And of course the undeciphered Indus script has long been one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the ancient world. Numerous problems of the Indus civilization might be solved at a stroke, if only its script could be read, as can Babylonian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Indus Valley archaeology has come a long way since the 1920s. Yet, it has so many unanswered fundamental questions that the Indus Valley civilization still risks being regarded as the dowdy poor cousin of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, and as a receptacle for speculative theories, some of them motivated by current Indian political agendas, as discussed above.

What type of authority held together such an evidently organized, uniform and far-flung society, which apparently managed without palaces, royal graves and rulers, temples, icons and priests, fortifications, military weapons and warriors? No unambiguous evidence for any of the above has been found in excavations – unlike, of course, in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. We simply do not know the answer to this question, although most scholars assume that the civilization was a federation with some kind of unifying central administration, rather than consisting of independent ‘village republics’ with a shared culture.

The puzzling absence of evidence for luxurious palaces and powerful rulers, combined with the overwhelming evidence for diverse specialization in sophisticated crafts, and the apparent emphasis on (ritual?) bathing, has led some scholars to attribute the origin of the Hindu caste system to the Indus Valley civilization. However, the Indian concept of caste involves more than simply social class, craft and career specialization and an aristocracy of relatively austere priests; it depends on an underlying philosophy of a cosmic order, expressed in the concept rita in the Rigveda, where the first indisputable hint of the concept of caste appears (as we shall see), which foreshadows the later, better-known concept of dharma, the eternal law of the cosmos. Since the Indus inscriptions cannot be read, nothing definite can be said about Indus philosophy, and whether it had a comparable concept.

Other scholars wonder if the apparent absence of war marks the beginning of the Indian tradition of pacifism and non-violence, inaugurated by the Buddha and epitomized in modern times by Gandhi (who was born in the region covered by the Indus Valley civilization). Here, the archaeological evidence is more decisive, given the lack of evidence for the defensive fortifications, military weapons and mutilated corpses found in other ancient civilizations. Wheeler’s powerful conviction in the 1940s that he had discovered evidence at Mohenjo-daro of a massacre of defenders – perhaps at the hands of attacking Aryans – has now been conclusively disproved by careful analysis of the find spots and conditions of the skeletons; they were not killed in war but may have been victims of a disease, such as malaria. That said, it seems inherently improbable that any civilization could sustain itself for more than half a millennium without the need for coercion and fighting. Certainly, the violent struggles of subsequent Indian history, including that of the Vedas and the early Buddhist period, provide no warrant whatsoever for believing that non-violence is intrinsic to India.

As for the enigmatic Indus religion, there are undoubtedly images on the seals of humanlike figures and animals with clear echoes in later Hinduism. One of these images, showing a ‘yogic’ figure with folded legs wearing a horned headdress surrounded by a tiger, an elephant, a water buffalo and a rhinoceros, was influentially dubbed ‘proto-Shiva’ by its discoverer Marshall. ‘In the religion of the Indus people there is much, of course, that might be paralleled in other countries’, Marshall wrote. ‘But taken as a whole, their religion is so characteristically Indian as hardly to be distinguished from still living Hinduism.’ Nehru, though not personally attracted to religion, eagerly agreed with Marshall. While admitting ‘many gaps and periods about which we know little’, Nehru claimed to see ‘an underlying sense of continuity … It is surprising how much there is in Mohenjo-daro and Harappa which reminds one of persisting traditions and habits – popular ritual, craftsmanship, even some fashions in dress.’ An interesting example is the swastika symbol, first seen on Indus...