The Geopolitics of South Asia

From Early Empires to the Nuclear Age

Graham P. Chapman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317030423
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Anyone who is planning on carrying out research in South Asia or indeed anyone who simply wishes to understand more about this cultural heartland should read this book. It shows how geological movements moulded the land of this unique cradle and how they still impact on it. Discussions are woven around the three major forces of integration. These are 'identitive' forces - bonds of language, ethnicity, religion or ideology; 'utilitarian' forces - bonds of common material interest, and 'coercion' - the institutional use or threat of physical violence. By studying these forces, Professor Chapman shows how the organization of territory has been central to the region's historic, cultural, linguistic and economic development. In addition to the material on the Northwest frontier, Afghanistan and Kashmir which was added for the second edition, the Northeastern borderlands are also now examined in this fully revised third edition. The current geopolitical state of the region is completely updated and greatly enhanced.

PART I
Introduction

Chapter 1
Brahma and Manu: Of Mountains and Rivers, Gods and Men

The Land

Our understanding of the formation of the continents has been revolutionised over the last few decades. The Earth’s outer crust is now thought to be made up of fairly rigid plates – of differing sizes and irregular shapes – which have been moving relative to each other for at least 1,000 million years. About 400 million years ago these were grouped together in one piece – a super-continent called Pangea. This split into two parts – a Northern part known as Laurasia, and a Southern part called Gondwanaland. Between the two lay what is known as the Tethys Sea – which remains now in the remnant string of ‘middle earth’ seas – the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Caspian and the trough of the Ganges Valley. Both the Northern Laurasian part and the Southern Gondwanaland part then split. One split common to both runs down the middle of the two Atlantic oceans – so the fact that the eastern coastline of the Americas ‘fits’ the western coastline of Europe and Africa is not an accident. The Atlantic split is not the only split that occurred in the Southern part – Gondwanaland. The Antarctic broke off and drifted towards the south pole, Australia drifted Eastwards (relatively) and about 200 million years ago what was to become the Deccan block broke off, and began to drift across the Indian ocean (Figure 1.1). For more than 100 million years it was isolated – hence its flora and fauna could evolve in a distinctive manner similar to that of Madagascar and Australia. Then about 80 MA (million years ago), it struck into the Southern flank of Laurasia (Figure 1.2), and began to push the edge up – lifting the Tibetan plateau and beginning the process – which has not ended – of pushing up the Himalayas, partly from the sea-bed rocks of the Tethys Sea. So what had been a fairly straight line from the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf to Malaysia became severely dented. The Deccan Block is still pushing north at about 6 cms a year – so the Himalayas are also continuing to rise – at an average of between 1 and 9 cms a year. The front ranges, the Mahabharat that separates Kathmandu from the Indian plains and the Siwaliks, began their uplift 200,000 years ago – well within the time period of human settlement – and so recent in terms of Earth history that if the earth has lasted for one year, then this event started in the last 23 minutes.

Figure 1.1 Pangaea

Source: Lapidus (1987)

Figure 1.2 The Dented Southern Flank of Asia

Source: Tapponnier (1986)

The raising of the Himalayas has meant that the northward seasonal march of the meteorological equator known as ‘the zone of tropical convergence’ gets delayed through the long, dry and very hot summer, until it suddenly bursts at the beginning of what we call the monsoon. Because the mountains have been raised so high, the monsoon no longer reaches across the mountains into Tibet – which has become an arid as well as a high plateau. But the amount of water that the monsoon releases on the mountains and plains is exceptional even by equatorial standards. The depth of moisture bearing air is about 6,000 metres – three times as deep as in the other Asian monsoons. South Asia boasts the world’s wettest place – Mawsynram, just north of Bangladesh on the southern flank of Meghalaya block. This amount of water falling on the world’s highest and youngest mountains inevitably means that natural rates of erosion are extremely high, and the volume of silt brought down to the plains by the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra are amongst the highest river-borne loads on earth. The Indo-Gangetic plains are the world’s largest riverine lowland deposits – in places perhaps up to 5 kms thick – and they result in two massive deltas – the Indus and the Ganges-Brahmaputra. The latter is – one almost feels like saying ‘of course’ – the world’s largest, with sediments up to 22 kms deep – and deposition which continues 2,000 nautical miles into the Bay of Bengal. Other massive rivers, tributaries of these river systems, show equally dynamic behaviour. The Kosi in north Bihar has migrated 100 kms west across its own fan of deposits in the last 250 years: the Beas, one of the five rivers of the Punjab, was captured by another, the Chenab, in 1790. In the Bengal delta the flow of water has shifted over the last few centuries from the western distributaries to the eastern, reducing the water flow past Calcutta – a fact which will be seen to be important in later chapters of this book.

When the tide recedes from a sandy beach, the many small rivulets that form and drain the small springs and rock pools shift their courses many times in an afternoon, capturing each other, forming braided patterns and deltas, and leaving abandoned courses etched on the flat surface. Indra, the God of the rains, from his loftier vision of time, must have watched such a ceaseless patterning of the plains of India. In the mythology of India the Holy River Sarasvati ran to the sea, and there is little doubt that once there was a river that left the Punjab and reached the sea at the Rann of Kutch. The divide between the Indus and the Ganges is so slight that it may well have been the Yamuna (Jumna), which was later captured by a tributary of the Ganges. At any rate, there are marks left on the landscape, and the dry bed of the misfit Ghaggar peters out after it has left the Punjab, now in places reinvigorated by the canals of modern man, like streams on the beach reinvigorated by scheming children with spades and buckets. In Pakistan the Hakra marks a continuation of the old course. The rivers soak into the plains, and provide the ground water for the wells of time immemorial. Upon the rivers and their waters and their silt, so much of life depends and has so long depended, but always subject to their wanton floods and shifting moods, that it is no wonder that they have become revered and holy in themselves. And the land whence they originate is truly the abode of the Gods. That so many of them issue from sources so close to each other must surely show where heaven reaches down and touches the earth. Could this be the centre of the world?

Figure 1.3 The Natural Vegetation of South Asia and the Principal Mountain Ranges

Thus it is quite clear that the sub-continent is aptly named. It is part of Asia, and yet it is not – it is a geological and climatic region in its own right, cutoff from mainland Asia on its landward sides by high and difficult mountains. These form one of the three major elements of the sub-continent’s geology. They together with the second zone – the great riverine lowlands – constitute one of the most dynamic physical regions on earth. The last major element is the old Deccan block, peninsular India, thought to be rigid and stable – though there have been some major and unexpected earthquakes within the block itself. This is the fragment of Gondwanaland – which takes its name from the Gond tribe of Madhya Pradesh, where some of the geology was first studied. Even despite the different history of human settlement and the different climate, the Deccan block remains sufficiently like East and South Africa (see Morgan (1993) for an examination of the similarities) for it to be used in hoodwinking the public: when Richard Attenborough produced his film Gandhi he shot all its ‘South Africa’ location scenes in India.

The physical regionalisation of South Asia (Figure 1.3) is not quite completed by the demarcation of these three geological zones. Although the monsoon may give the East of the country and parts of the south extremely heavy precipitation, this is not true of the north-western parts of the Deccan, where rainfall is unreliable, and least of all of the north-west of the subcontinent – in the middle and lower Indus valley (Sind) and Rajasthan in India – regions straddled by the shifting sands of the Thar desert.

The obvious physical distinctiveness of South Asia is partly the cause of its equally distinctive culture. The physical geography has created barriers that surround the sub-continent, defending it against all but the most determined invaders. West of the Himalayas are the adjacent great mountain systems of the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, stretching over the nexus of boundaries separating Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Central Asian republics, India and China. And south from the Hindu Kush run the mountain ranges that skirt the west flank of the Indus Basin in the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan. It is a wall around India’s fertile garden, but not quite as impenetrable as the Himalayas. Beyond the wall there lie two great cradles of the human race and their civilisations – the Iranian Plateau and the foreland that is now in the republics of Central Asia. The Europeans can recoil even now from their long historical memory of the latter, the hearth of the invading Huns and Gengis Khan, and the many other waves of invasion that have emanated from its core, almost absorbing western Europe into the Eurasian Heartland. But in learning our history thus we tend to overlook the fact that these same hordes could also have twisted south and then east, to penetrate the fabled fertile garden beyond the jagged dry mountains of India’s northwest. Like a badly-thatched roof, they can inhibit average rainfall, but not downpours and deluges.

In the north-east in Assam, beyond Bengal, the border with Burma is defended by young mountains that are often covered in a nearly impenetrable jungle. Here the thatched roof is even better proof than that in the northwest – although in this century it was nearly breached by the Japanese whose invasion of India in the Second World War was finally stalled at Kohima and Imphal.

The deltas and river lowlands present a different kind of boundary to the outside world. There are fewer easily navigated waterways in the Indus delta than the Bengal delta – and of course the delta leads nowhere except into a desert. On the other hand in Bengal the sea, the rivers and the land inter-digitate with each other over an area of 30,000 square miles. And this land is highly productive too – and the rivers naturally full of fish. Here is an area where sea-borne trade has been known for centuries, and which can admit a naval power of sufficient strength to gain a toe-hold.

For the Europeans, Africa south of the Sahara was the last great unknown continent partly because it is so hard to penetrate into its interior. Most of the continent is a plateau, with steep escarpments near the sea on all sides. It is not possible to navigate up the rivers such as the Congo or the Orange, and even in the railway age the escarpments have presented great difficulties. The Deccan of India is part of the same terrain. It is skirted on the west by the savage escarpment of the Ghats which overlook the Arabian sea. The coastal strip is narrow and does not lead inland easily anywhere. For the most part the drainage of the Deccan is east to the Bay of Bengal, threading through the lower and disjointed Eastern Ghats, sometimes in impressive gorges. Here on the eastern coast there are several bigger coastal plains and productive deltas – of the Mahanadi, Krishna-Godavari and Kaveri – but the peninsular rivers lack water from snow-melt in the hot season which the Himalayan Ganges and Brahmaputra continue to receive. Hence these deltas do not provide the same kind of rivers and the same possibilities for navigation. Further, there are no attractive anchorages on the east coast.

The peninsula is divided from the northern plains not by one but by several boundary lines. In the north, two contrary rivers flow from east to west – the Tapti and the Narmada – which make a line on the map which has been redrawn by many kingdoms and empires, dividing the Northern empires of the Plains from the Deccan Plateaux. Further south, there is another such line along the Krishna, which demarcates the most recalcitrant parts of the southern peninsula.

The People

It seems likely that the earliest still identifiable groups of people in the subcontinent were what are now called Veddoids (a name taken from the Vedda tribe of Sri Lanka and not to be confused with the Vedas (texts) of the Aryans), sometimes termed proto-australoid because of their similarities with the Australoid type. The first major group to invade, settle and to remain important today were the Dravidians, whose descendants in ‘purest’ form are in the south of modern India. The Dravidians are dark-skinned and short – neither factor being without contemporary significance. It is not possible to work out in any detail how different racial groups have migrated into India since then, since there is a continuum of mixing of characteristics throughout the sub-continent, and already by the first millennium BC the population was possibly 100,000,000 strong (somewhere near 10 per cent of the current figure), implying a massive gene pool from which backward extrapolation would be extremely difficult. Attempts by physical anthropologists such as Risley (1915) to use cephalic and nasal indices to distinguish between higher and lower castes are now largely discredited, but there are physical anthropologists who identify visible regional differences. The people of Ladakh and many other mountain areas are Mongoloid. In the north-east in Bengal and Orissa it is thought the original Dravidian type became mixed later with mongoloid blood to form the basis of the Bengali nation. In the north-west (e.g. Punjab) people are on average fairer skinned, and a small proportion have blue eyes.

Our understanding of early Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic cultures in the sub-continent is weak. The archaeological record for this period, for whatever reason, is not as strong as in Africa. Our understanding of prehistoric South Asia improves dramatically from the time of the Indus Civilisation. Recent interest in desertification and the changing margins of many of the world’s deserts has coupled with the explosion of interest in Indian archaeology that followed the discovery after the First World War of the cities of the Harappan civilisation, whose greatest city, Mohenjo Daro by the Indus in modern Pakistan, revealed a magnificence of early urban life in the subcontinent previously undreamt of.

A tentative chronology has been proposed by Goudie, Allchin, Hegde (1973) for this corner of India which suggests that this civilization flourished in a wetter phase than now prevails. The culture at its height extended from the Aravallis and the Punjab (many sites have been found by the course of the Sarasvati/Ghaggar) east to the Ganga – Yamuna Doab, to the seaward end of the Narmada (sometimes Narbada or even Nerbuda), and across the mouths of the Indus far into Baluchistan. It is now evident that throughout the period floods were a recurrent problem at many sites, but despite such vicissitudes the civilisation achieved a high form. In Mohenjo Daro buildings on a regular plan were built of regular baked bricks – and the city was served by proper sanitary drains and public granaries. Huge tanks, skilfully proofed, stored water. In the third millennium BC the population of some cities may have been as much as 35,000. And it is evident that it traded with the Mesopotamian cities by land and sea.

The sophistication of the mature Indus civilisation is well attested in the work of Allchin and Allchin (1982). Their concern is more to examine the nature of the civilisation than to document its history. Most people agree that a combination of changing environmental factors – and possibly even tectonic activity that might have caused the rivers to shift – would have weakened the society to the point where it may have been open to external assault. The more colourful view is that the end of Mohenjo Daro was as rapid and sudden as the apocalypse of Judgement Day. Sir Mortimer Wheeler summarised the shock by saying that it ended ‘at four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon.’ But in the view of the Allchins, though the end of the city itself may have been cataclysmic, the civilisation and its technology survived, mostly in rural production and rural areas, to become the seed of the Ganges Civilisation of 500 BC, even if that newer civilisation was dominated by a new people who learnt from the older ways.

In the second millennium BC, or perhaps earlier, the people we call the Aryans began to migrate out of the heartland of Central Asia. They moved north and west towards Europe, and also south and east to India. Some were fair-haired and blue-eyed, they spoke a language which was derived from a lost stem which is the base of all Indo-European languages. In northern Europe some of their descendants became the Scandinavian tribes, whose mythology shares much in common with the mythology of the Aryans of India. Linguistically, in Europe, Lithuanian is closest to Sanskrit. They represent the archetypal Aryan that Hitler wanted to reestablish as a master race – and from India he adopted the ‘swastika’ – a symbol both of ‘luck’ and sometimes of the sun – as the emblem of his hegemonic project.

In Asia Minor (modern Turkey) the Aryans became dominant in the later stages of the Hittite empire (c. 2000–1000 BC), and ultimately their descendants and their languages became the basis for Greek and Roman civilisations. In India their descendants gave India its classical language, Sanskrit, once thought when first encountered by ‘modern’ Europeans to be the original Indo-European stem language, but since proved to be another off-shoot of the lost stem. It took indeed several generations of contact between the ‘modern’ and ‘enlightened’ Europeans and India to realise the extent and depth of these relationships, partly because the ‘orient’ had become associated with barbaric power, which must by definition be alien, and because during Europe’s renaissance the great powers of Islam had driven a wedge between far Asia and Europe. The ‘otherness’ of the East is of course the basis for Said’s (1978) critique of ‘Orientalism’ – the implicit disparagement of the East in much western scholarship.

The Aryans were a pastoral people, and they reached the Indus plains at a time when the Harappan civilisation was waning. Bolstered by the traditions of their oral history as recorded in the Vedas (the ‘Truth’ or the ‘Wisdom’), the sacred hymns of the Aryans (very, very roughly analogous to the Jewish psalms) for a while the view was held that they absorbed little of what was there before them. But it now seems likely that even such important Hindu Gods as Siva and perhaps such common Hindu practice as phallus worship, and certainly the technology of the ox-cart, were adopted from their predecessors. Thapar (1992) has summarised how our knowledge and interpretation of early Indian society is constantly reviewed.

We have some idea of these early times because the priestly caste of the Hindus, the Brahmins, have jealously guarded the Vedas. There are four sets – the oldest known as the Rig-veda, was composed about the time of their first arrival in the Punjab. From it we can get an idea of the geography of the land of the Sapta-Sindhu (they recognised seven (sapta) rivers in the Indus where now we know the Indus and the five of Punjab (Punjab meaning Panch (five) ab (river)). It was a land of cold winters and hot summers, and unreliable rain which could fall in either winter or summer.

South lay the land of Vitra – the land of drought – the present lower Indus Valley and the Thar Desert. To the east lay the land of both Vitra and Indra – drought and rain, or in other words quite clearly the monsoon lands of the Ganges basin.

The Aryans pushed east to this land of Vitra and Indra and intermarried with the indigenous Dasyus (Dravidian people and tribal groups), but also treated them as beneath and below them. So we now come to the highly contentious and charged topic of the origins of caste – whether it is in a sense theological, or functional, or racial. In India sometimes the word varna is used instead of caste, and it means ‘colour’. On average it is probably possible in any region to identify a colour gradient from fairer-skinned higher castes to darker-skinned lower castes. The marriage adverts of present Indian newspapers frequently refer to the ‘wheaten complexion’ (fair-skinned face) of a high caste bride. In other words, the caste may have originated in the limitation of intermarriage between conquerors and conquered who had different racial characteristics. This is a topic to which we will have to return.

The Aryans also began to adopt the ways of the agriculturists of the plains, in the days of the Rig Veda cultivating ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements and a Lament
• PART I INTRODUCTION
• PART II THE BRITISH RAJ
• PART III THE SUCCESSOR STATES
• PART IV CONCLUSIONS
• References and Bibliography
• Index