Ancient India and Indian Civilization

P. Masson-Ousel, P. Stern, H. Willman-Grabowska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136200724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally published between 1920-70, The History of Civilization was a landmark in early twentieth century publishing. It was published at a formative time within the social sciences, and during a period of decisive historical discovery. The aim of the general editor, C.K. Ogden, was to summarize the most up to date findings and theories of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists. This reprinted material is available as a set, in the following groupings, or as individual volumes:
* Prehistory and Historical Ethnography
Set of 12: 0-415-15611-4: £800.00
* Greek Civilization
Set of 7: 0-415-15612-2: £450.00
* Roman Civilization
Set of 6: 0-415-15613-0: £400.00
* Eastern Civilizations
Set of 10: 0-415-15614-9: £650.00
* Judaeo-Christian Civilization
Set of 4: 0-415-15615-7: £250.00
* European Civilization
Set of 11: 0-415-15616-5: £700.00

Part One
History

Chapter I
The Prehistoric Period

INDIA hardly has a history, and such written documents as we have for retracing the chief factors in that history do not even go back to the time of Alexander. That means that the uncertainties of prehistory continue in this land to a late period.

The most backward peoples of modern India, such as the Gonds, who are still in the Stone Age, may tell us something of the way in which the early inhabitants of the Deccan lived, when that most ancient part of Indian soil belonged not so much to Asia as to Austronesia. They provide for their needs by hunting, using bows and arrows. R. B. Foote has discovered in the district of Bellary (Madras Presidency) a potter's workshop dating from Neolithic times, which already shows an advance upon the men of the Quartzite period, who used only stone vessels. The tombs discovered by Cockburn in the district of Mirzapur are evidence of the Neolithic Age. The megalithic tombs erected later contain the first metal objects; they belong to a civilization which practised the mining industry, and also fishing for pearls, of which there are many traces in the cemeteries in the district of Tinnevelly. Nowhere in India does bronze appear before the Iron Age; E. J. Rapson holds that the Rigveda means copper by the word ayas (Latin aes), and that "black copper", śyāma ayas, or iron, first appears in the Yajurveda and Atharvaveda.¹ It was the Aryans who introduced iron into the Deccan. The shapes of metal objects were at first copied from those of objects of stone and earthenware; thus progress must have been continuous in the use of one material after another and in the nature of the articles manufactured. No doubt the metal weapons and tools of the Aryans gave them an advantage over foemen who were still in the Stone Age. The fact is that in Southern India iron appears immediately after stone, whereas in the north a Copper Age comes between the two periods. The discoveries made at Chota Nagpur and at Cawnpore are evidence of this. The absence of a Bronze Age between those of stone and iron is a special feature of Indian prehistory; and we should add that the bronze objects found in the tombs of Tinnevelly are never weapons.

What I have said about human geography entails a hypothetical reconstruction of prehistory. We shall not return here to the subjection of the Munda-speaking peoples by the Dravidians, nor to the later conquest of the Dravidian nations by the Aryans, although these were the decisive events of Indian prehistory. Whether the aborigines are or are not of the Malayo-Polynesian family; whether the Dravidians are related to the Australians or to the Samoyeds; whether the Aryans came from the plains of the Danube or from the steppes of Siberia; in any case, the population resulting from their crossing is a chaos of races, and one can understand that India is to-day still looking for her unity.

Since 1924 a new factor has had to be considered by historians—the discovery of a pre-Aryan civilization, apparently akin to that of Mesopotamia, in the basin of the Indus. The excavations were conducted at Mohenjo-Daro, in the district of Larkana, Province of Sind, by Rakhal Das Banerji, and at Harappa, in the district of Montgomery, Punjab, by Daya Ram Sahni. Buildings were unearthed, in which were found jewels, knives, seals covered with a script not yet deciphered, and figures of bulls remarkably like Sumerian objects of the beginning of the third millennium before Christ (C. J. Gadd and Sidney Smith). When Sir John Marshall published these results obtained by the Archaeological Survey,¹ he met with an immediate and sympathetic response from A. J. Sayce, who was struck by the similarity of the bulls to those of Susiana. It would be unwise to conclude too much from these affinities; we seem, however, to have here a Sumero-Dravidian culture, which built in brick with remarkable skill and adorned its dwellings with real works of art. In any case, we can safely say that even before the Aryan conquest north-western India was in contact with the Mesopotamian powers.¹ It is not impossible that copper, which was introduced late into the Punjab civilization revealed by the finds at Mohenjo-Daro, was imported from Babylonia. On the other hand, Sir John Marshall is alone in connecting this civilization with that of the Ægean, on the strength of similarities in the pottery, which, moreover, have likewise caused a parallel to be drawn between pre-Aryan India and Memphite Egypt.

The Dravidians of Baluchistan (a vestige of whom survives in the Brahui linguistic island) and those of the Indus were the first to be submerged by the Aryan wave. Vedic literature mentions black men, the Dasyus or "brigands", frequently transformed into devils by legend, whom the Indo-Europeans conquered. The latter brought various instruments of domination—a metal, which was iron, an animal, the helper of man in work and war, which was the horse, and, above all, aristocratic institutions favourable to hegemony, to which I have already alluded and about which I shall speak more fully. The destruction of the Dravidian civilization in the East seems to have formed a pendant to the destruction of the Ægean civilization, also by Indo-Europeans, in the West. It was not complete destruction, and doubtless it allowed much of importance to survive.

Although the Aryan conquest of the valley of the Indus and of the tract connecting it with the basin of the Ganges belongs to prehistory, we have evidence regarding it which is of quite capital importance, since it is the very foundation of Indian culture. First, the Vedas, which are revealed scriptures, tell us of the institutions of the Aryans of India. Secondly, the Epics, which are traditional works, followed by the Purāṇas, which are collections of legends about the "old time", contain many allusions to the wars in which the Aryans gradually invaded Hindustan from west to east, and then the Deccan from north to south. But the most ancient of these documents, the Ṛigveda, is composed of hymns in honour of various deities, and its priestly origin and its entirely religious object make it anything but a historical narrative. It must have been, not indeed written, but composed, at a time when the Aryans, whether they were still in Iran or had just come down into the Indus valley, were approaching the Punjab and establishing themselves there; it reflects a proto-Indian age and a culture which was not so much Hindu as Aryan. The Epics, on the other hand, which seem to have been composed about a thousand years after that ancient Veda, contain the story of the wars by which the conquest was accomplished only in the form of heroic memories and, one might say, chansons de geste. They are full of non-Aryan elements, and even furnish a corpus of Hinduism. The historical value of the Purāṇas is necessarily still more dubious, since they are poetic and philosophical compilations of a yet later date. The history which lies in these various sources cannot be separated from the legend and theory until archaeology has confirmed or corrected traditional information.

Without agreeing with native tradition that the Mahābhārata describes the very origins of Indian society, Western criticism does not deny that the story told in that epic may be a magnified echo of some historical event. The scene of the conflict lies further east than the country in which the Ṛigveda came into being; this proves that the Aryans had advanced eastwards in the interval. Kurukshetra, the "Field of the Kurus", lies on the edge of the Ganges basin, near the west bank of the Jumna, in that district north of Delhi, the ancient Indraprastha, where many decisive battles have been fought. The Kauravas, the champions of the Kuru cause, the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra, led by Duryodhana, fight the five Pandavas, the sons of Dhritarashtra's brother Pandu, led by Yudhishthira, for eighteen days near Thanesar. The former army comprises troops from eastern Bihar, Bengal, the Himalaya, and the Punjab; in the second are warriors from regions which are now western Bihar, Agra, Oudh, Rajputana, Gujarat, and the Dravidian states of the south. Although the whole of ancient India is thus represented as embroiled in this war, it is plain that the conflict centres on the rivalry of two closely related Aryan clans, fighting for the possession of the Doab.¹ The Rāmāyaṇa, a work in which still greater freedom is given to poetic fancy, shows the Deccan and Ceylon as integral parts of Aryan India.

¹ LXXIII, p. 56.

¹ Illustrated London News, 20th and 27th September, 4th Oetober, 1924, and 6th March, 1926; Sayce, ibid., 27th September, 1924. Arrian (Indica, i, 1-3, quoted in LXXIII, 332) had already said that before the peoples living on the Indus were ruled by the Medes they had been subject to the Assyrians, Cf. Marshall, in IX, 1923-4, p. 49, and Times, 26th February, 1926; C. Autran, L'Illustration, 28th March, 1925; E. Mackay, Sumerian Connexions with Ancient India, in XXI, October, 1925. In 1931, the principal work of Sir J. Marshall and his collaborators on the subject appeared: Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization, London, 3 vols.

¹ A disturbing suggestion, which may have much in it, is coming to the fore in the comparisons which Guillaume de Hervey draws between the civilization of Mohenjo-Daro and that of Easter Island (1932).

¹ A kind of "Mesopotamia" lying between the Ganges and Jumna.

Chapter II
The Beginnings of History. The Sixth and Fifth Centuries Before Christ

THE darkness enveloping the past of India is partly due to our ignorance, and archaeology will gradually dispel it to some extent. But it is also due to the nature of the Indian world. In that amalgam of diverse races and tongues, the most heterogeneous traditions arose and endured, and were never brought into unity. History is impossible except for united peoples. In India history is reduced to unconnected genealogies. Each caste, each sect or racial stock, each literature has or may have its independent tradition, the lucidity of which depends on the degree of culture to which it has risen. The highest culture belongs to the priestly caste, but that caste, which has for its heritage the understanding and religious exploitation of the Vedas, devotes itself to speculation on abstract technicalities, and only very reluctantly reflects all the confusion of the life around it. Political power lies with another caste, the nobles; but history is usually subservient to the political power, preserving the memory of its great achievements in order to glorify it. It is only by chance that the other elements of the population have their history, and it is the history which one would expect from a minority cast back on itself and making itself the centre of the world.

So we find in India a multitude of annals but not the materials of a history, for it was only at intervals that unity, religious, political, or social, was imposed on some vast portion of the Indian world. But there is a further difficulty: thought in this country seems to have a distaste for history. The exact details of human happenings interest it no more than the laws of nature; later we shall have to determine some of the causes which have produced this bent of mind. Lacking any notion of historical objectivity comparable to our own, the Hindus blend imagination with facts, and their historians are usually poets. The result is a bewildering uncertainty about the period in which one should place the really important milestones of the last three thousand years. The dates of Asoka and Kanishka, though no longer as uncertain as they were twenty-five years ago, are still suspect or approximative, and we should never be able to determine them exactly if we had to rely on evidence of Indian origin. Religious books, great deeds, and the origin of traditions are placed by the natives of India in a far distant and accordingly impressive past. European criticism places most of the dates late, for, in virtue of a wise principle, which, however, is likewise apt to beget errors, it refuses to admit the truth of any fact until the oldest dated document vouching for it has come to light. The truth must often lie somewhere between these extreme interpretations, one of which is very arbitrary while the other errs from excess of caution. But the most baffling thing is that in this Indian world, apart from events properly so called—a reign or a battle—most factors, such as institutions, doctrines, or the development of literary works, hardly allow of strict dating. Everything is older than the first instance in which its existence is observed, and everything lasts long after the time when it appears to come to an end. We must accept the fact that among peoples which had not the same rhythm of life as ourselves, which had infinitely less desire to innovate unceasingly and had not our pre-established sense of a constant and universal evolution, distinctions of time are of less importance than they are in our own civilization.

At all events, it is to the West that India will owe the reconstruction of her history. It could never have been done without the impartiality which European scholarship brings to such a subject and the objective knowledge, so important to us, supplied by the non-Indian sources for Indian history. These foreign sources are chiefly Greek and Chinese, but the archaeological and linguistic exploration of Central Asia has brought to light unexpected information, thanks to which the historical as well as the geographical unity of Eurasia is revealed.

The first definite date in Indian history is that of the Macedonian descent on the Indus in 826 B.C. We know, however, that the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus (558-529) on the ruins of the Semitic empire of Assyria had extended to the Punjab in the reign of Darius (521-485). This was hardly a foreign conquest, so much did the two branches of the Aryans still have fundamentally in common. Yet the event had very great consequences, some religious, if it is true, as one feels, that there was some connection between the development of Buddhism and Jainism and the Iranian reformation of Zoroaster, and others cultural, since it gave the country a writing, namely Kharoshthi, the Aramaic script used by the scribes of the Great King.

Two early events of a purely Indian character to which we should try to give dates are the beginnings of Buddhism and of Jainism. Let us see why their dates cannot be fixed exactly, but how they can be established approximately. If we take the two traditions separately, we find that Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, died in 528 B.C.; but in that case he could not have preached at the same time as Buddha, who, according to the writings of his sect, died about 480. The date of the Nirvana of Buddha is placed by the Ceylon Chronicles in the year 218 before Asoka, but the exact date of the Asoka's accession (in the third century) is not known. European scholars have proposed 487 or 477 for the Nirvana and 477 or 467 for the death of Mahavira. An inscription of Kharavela, King of Kalinga (middle of the second century B.C.), discovered in the cave of Hathigumpha, was held by Vincent Smith ¹ to imply earlier dates, and so to justify the Jain tradition mentioned above, on the ground that it makes Mahavira and Buddha contemporaries of Kings Bimbisara and Ajatasatru, the latter of whom reigned from 554 to 527. But the inscription is badly damaged and its interpretation is very doubtful. We have no strong grounds for denying that Buddha, who lived eighty years, was born about 560 and died about 480.

The sixth century before our era, in the course of which the two anti-Brahrnanical "heresies" arose almost simultaneously, at the time when the Persian Empire was stretching out towards India,² was without any doubt a decisive epoch. Without going so far as to say, with Sir George Grierson, that the Kauravas of the epic represent orthodoxy while the Pañchalas stand for tendencies outside the priesthood, we can take it for certain that Brahmanism was at the time passing through a crisis, and that in particular the Pandavas with their roughness and the Kauravas with their diplomacy bear witness to cultures of unequal refinement or to different mentalities.¹ The crisis seems to have been due both to foreign influence and to the spread of the Aryans further and further eastwards down the Ganges. The centre of the Indian world, passing from the Punjab to Kurukshetra, the region contained between the Sarasvati and the Drishadvati, grew until it embraced the whole of Madhyadesa, the "Middle Country" of the immense river-basin, corresponding to the modern United Provinces, from Delhi to Benares. Kosala (Oudh), Videha, Magadha, and the country of the Angas (northern, southern, and eastern Bihar respectively) assume an increasing importance, and it is there that the torch of Buddhism will be lit, as against the Ku...