Chapter
One
Inventing
Ancient Civilization
South Asian history has no one
beginning, no one chronology, no single plot or narrative. It is not a singular
history, but rather many histories, with indefinite, contested origins and with
countless separate trajectories that multiply the more we learn. In recent decades, history's multiplicity,
antiquity, and ambiguity have become more complicated as scholars have opened
new perspectives on the past and made new discoveries.
Not long ago, it seemed that South
Asian history began at a singular moment in the second millennium BCE, when the
oldest known texts, the Vedas, were composed.
A clear, continuous stream of cultural tradition once seemed to flow
From Vedic to modern times, allowing modern scholars to dip into ancient texts
to savour the original essence of a culture that we can still see alive all
around us today. The early flow of culture
seemed to swell into a fully developed classical civilization under the ancient
empires of the Mauryas (321 - 181 BCE) and Guptas (320 - 520 CE), which arose on the banks of the
sacred river Ganga. Following Vedic norms, classical societies
seemed to follow sacred traditions preserved in Sanskrit texts, which
prescribed the division of caste society into ritual strata, called varna,
containing social groups called jati. When ancient empires collapsed, apparently
under the impact of foreign invasions, political fragmentation was seen to have
characterized medieval times; but despite a long series of foreign conquests,
the clear stream of culture seemed to flow continuously in the heart of
civilization. History after the ancient
empires was filled with political turmoil and with social and economic change
that challenged tradition and sparked political responses and cultural
adaptations for historians to document.
In this now antiquated view of
ancient history, we hear echoes of modern nationalism resounding in the idea
that indigenous resistance to foreign invasion spurred the early formation of
ancient empires. It is indeed true that in the wake of victories by Darius,
king of Persia, who conquered Sind and Gandhara in the six century BCE, and after several early
efforts at empire-building by rulers along the banks of the Ganga,
the Maurya empire rose at the same time as Alexander
the Great entered Punjab from Persia in 327 BCE. But now we can see that modern national
identities had projected themselves into the distant past to imagine that Mauryan armies were defending their homeland against
foreign invaders from Greece and
Persian. This same idea of defensive response was also used to explain the
later rise of the Guptas, who finally managed to
unify the Ganga basin
once again after centuries of conquest by Indo-Greeks, Sakas,
Indo-Parthians, and Kushanas,
who came from Central Asia and
marched down the Hindu Kush into
the Indus Valley
lowlands. The same idea was used again to show how invading Hunas
from Central Asia broke up the Gupta empire, in the fifth century. But then, political fragmentation inside India was
seen to have prevented imperial unity against them; and internal fragmentation
continued to prevent unity against many later invaders. In the eighth century,
Arabs came by sea to conquer Sind. From the twelfth century onward, invading
conquerors included Afghans, Turks, Mongols, Persians, and, finally,
Europeans. From 1290 until 1947, Muslims
and Christians ruled most of the land of Indic
civilization. The British were the last
foreign rulers, from 1757 to 1947. Thus it fell to nationalism that arose from
indigenous culture in the nineteenth century to unifying native peoples against
foreign control, in the manner of the ancient Mauryas
and Guptas.
This grand narrative of history in South
Asia -- based on the idea of an original, indigenous culture facing
foreign invasions -- provided the first framework for modern historical
studies. It informed national cultures
and national identities. It perpetuated the idea that Hindus, Buddhists,
Muslims, and Christians represent different civilizations, each with their own
ancient, native territories. Thus it
helped to bolster the modern association of national polities with separate
domains of world history in Europe, the Middle
East, and South Asia.
New discoveries and new
perspectives now provide many different avenues for exploring South
Asia's ancient, medieval, and modern history. We now see that rather than having one
singular origin, South Asia has
always included many peoples and cultures, which had different points of
departure and followed distinctive historical trajectories. What once seemed like a single tree of Indic
culture, rooted in the Vedas, with many branches spreading out over centuries,
has come to look more like a vast forest of many cultures filled with countless
trees of various sizes, ages, and types, constantly cross-breeding to fertilize
one another. The profusion of cultures
blurs the boundaries of the forest.
Cultural boundaries drawn by modern scholars in and around South
Asia have come to be seen more as artefacts of modern national
cultures than as an accurate reflection of pre-modern conditions. Pre-historic cities in the Indus river
valley much older than the Vedas participated in a vast pre-history of urbanism
that ran across southern Eurasia and
they also participated in the indigenous evolution of agro-pastoral societies
in South Asia.
Pre-Vedic cultures should not need be assigned to the pre-history of
modern South Asia, West
Asia, India, or Pakistan: they participates in all of these at the same time. The singers of the Vedas also moved among
pre-historic pastoral cultures of Central and West
Asia as they informed cultures in ancient South
Asia. A mingling and fusion of
cultures has always crossed the boundaries that today divide national states in
and around South Asia.
With all this in view, it becomes
obvious that we must now separate the academic study of pre-modern history from
contemporary efforts to construct modern cultural boundaries. We need to separate the study of collective
identities and everyday experience in the distant past from our current
cultural politics of national identity.
As we will see, pre-modern history does indeed help us to understand the
present, not by its immanent foreshadowing of the present or by its revelation
of classical truths to guide modern life, but rather by its indication that
distinctively modern modes of social existence came into being in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, setting them apart from medieval and
ancient histories that came before.
Using ancient and medieval evidence to validate modern boundaries,
identities, and cultures obscures more than it reveals about pre-modern
histories in South Asia, which
moved across all the regions of southern Eurasia and
were unique to their own time. South
Asia was a radically different world during the millennia before it
took on its modern character. The basic lesson of this book is that travelling
back into the distant past reveals cultures, identities, and environments that
are as distant from today as their physical surroundings. The landscapes within which pre-modern
populations lived would be very unfamiliar to people today. For most of its history South
Asia was very thinly populated.
Its small communities were widely scattered. In ancient and medieval times, more land was
covered by forests filled with wild animals than by farms, villages, towns, and
urban centres, which came to cover the land only after 1800.
1. Land and Water
(see also “Environment and History”)
South Asia lies
at the south-western edge of monsoon Asia. Embracing the Himalayas and Sri
Lanka, it stretches
from Afghanistan to Burma,
between five and forty degrees north latitude.
It is hot at mid-day all year 'round, but temperatures do vary between
winter and summer, especially in the north, where winters are quite cold, even
severe at high altitudes, and peak summer heat is brutally extreme. Yet the seasons are marked more by rainfall
than by temperature. When Central
Asia heats up each spring, rising hot dry air draws in wet cooler air
from oceans and generates barometric disparities that spark storms of varying
scope and ferocity all across Asia, from Baluchistan to Korea. These rainstorms are called monsoons.
Rain is always the big weather news
in South Asia and there is little to report from
January to June. At the peak of the hot
season in May, the mid-day sun can fry an egg.
Then the monsoon hits. Its starting date varies but its arrival normally
falls at the beginning of June. First,
the monsoon rains soak the coast and the east, which comprise South
Asia's wet half, where rainfall normally exceeds eighty centimetres
per year and peaks in Assam, Bangladesh, and
northeast mountains at three metres per year.
In these wet regions, cyclones and floods normally bring the worst
weather news. On the east coast, from Madras to Chittagong, killer cyclones
strike every few years. A "super
cyclone" hit Orissa in 1999, washing away
villages hundreds of miles inland. In Bengal, storms
from the sea often combine with flooding down from mountains. In the eastern Ganga basin and all along the Brahmaputra, severe flooding
is a constant threat. In Bangladesh, much
of the land floods annually; the area covered by water exceeds that covered by
land in the live delta regions; and fish are as essential in the diet as
waterways are in transport. The meaning of flooding has changed dramatically
over centuries. In the eighteenth
century, sea-going ships were built in Sylhet mountains above Bengal plains
and floated out to sea across a hundred miles of flooded forest; but now that
same land is full of farms, villages, towns, and cities, including Dhaka, with
ten million people, so flooding causes mass death and destruction.
The monsoon arrives later in the
western dry half of South Asia, as
late as the end of July in Baluchistan and Multan in what is now Pakistan. In the dry west and in dry central peninsula,
the bad weather news is normally drought, through flash floods do occur when
swollen rivers wash suddenly over hard parched land, as they did in Hyderabad,
Andhra Pradesh in 2000. The monsoon is often late and stingy in dry South
Asia, full of hot air. All of the interior peninsula and western
plains from Gujarat north
to the Khyber Pass and from Baluchistan east to Malwa and Delhi are
parched and dusty most of the year. Most rivers are bone dry in the
summer. Rain rarely measures more than
eighty centimetres annually, often less than twenty, and in the Thar Desert, in
Rajasthan, less than ten. Desert winds
from Rajasthan blow dust storms across Delhi in the
late summer. The long-term climatic
trend seems to be toward aridity. The drying up of the Saraswati River, which
once flowed from into Rajasthan across eastern Punjab, was
one of the major ecological events of prehistoric times. The great pre-historic
Indus Valley cities probably declined in part because they could not get enough
water to survive; as did Fatehpur Sikri,
the first major Mughal fortress capital, which was
built a little too far west, too far into the desert. Modern deforestation has been broadly blamed
for increasing aridity. Current trends
in global warming may make desertification as unstoppable in the driest parts
of South Asia as submersion beneath the sea
appears to be for the wet coastal plains and low-lying Bangladesh.
2. Open Geography
Human living environments span a
wider a range of climatic variation in South Asia than
anywhere else in the world at these latitudes.
Continental environments to the west (in the Middle
East and Africa) are
uniformly dry; and to the east (in Southeast Asia and China),
uniformly wet. South
Asia has both extremes. South
Asia's dry half is climatically part of a vast geographical zone that covers
western Asia and northern Africa: the natural ground cover is thin scrub
forest; nomadic tribes and pastoral economies have been historically prominent;
millet and wheat are ancient staple grains; irrigation is the key to agrarian
wealth; and old oasis towns dot sandy expanses of thinly populated land like
port cities on the sea coast. South
Asia's wet half is instead climatically part of a humid climatic zone
running along the eastern Indian Ocean rim,
from Bombay to Sri
Lanka and through Bangladesh and Burma south
to Indonesia, where
heavy rain, cloudy humid days, dense tropical jungles, slash-and-burn farming,
rice paddy cultivation, fishing, and seafaring have historically been prominent
features of everyday life. The people
who live at high altitudes inhabit other environments altogether, which in the
arid west shade off into Central Asia and in the north resemble Tibet more than
South Asia's wet or dry lowlands. High
mountain rain forests in the northeast resemble interior Southeast
Asia much more than Rajasthan or Gujarat. Places along the coast physically resemble
coastal Indonesia more
than arid inland or high altitude South Asia.
Environmental similarities among
regions that straddle today's political boundaries also articulate ancient
human connections. South
Asia has always been open geographically for movement and
communication across all its current borderlands. To and from its dry half,
routes of migration, trade, and resettlement lead to and from Asia's dry
west and north, into the arid home of the Silk Road. Human cultivation of millet and wheat began
somewhere along these routes; where, exactly, is unknown. Recent carbon dates for pollen found in dry
lakes in Rajasthan indicate that a period of increasing moisture occurred in
Asia's dry zone at the time of the earliest known grain cultivation in the
Middle East, around 7500 BCE; this means that archaeological finds at Mehrgarh and elsewhere may represent a roughly simultaneous
origination of dry grain cultivation in South Asia and the Middle East. In Himalayan localities, settlers, herders,
and migrants have moved regularly across borders with Tibet. Tibetan Buddhism is as deeply entrenched in Nepal as
Hinduism. Borders with Burma are
open with Assam and Bengal even
today. The earliest evidence of rice cultivation in South
Asia is roughly contemporary with evidence from Southeast
Asia. In the eighteenth century, migrants from Arakan
did much of the most arduous new land clearance in southern Bengal. In Shillong, now in
the India's
north-eastern state of Meghalaya, people speaking
Mon-Khmer, Tibeto-Burman, and Indo-European languages. The coastal regions are also intimately
connected: the Sinhala and Bangla
languages are closely related; southern India has sent many waves of migrants
to Sri Lanka; and coast ports have long been their own best trading partners,
including those in Southeast Asia, where a major historical period of so-called
Indianisation occurred during the first millennium,
when merchants from Gujarat arrived regularly in Java. In 1800, fishing ships from many towns along India's east
and west coast brought workers and equipment for digging pearls from the ocean
floor in the Gulf of Manaar off
the coast of Sri Lanka.
From ancient times, cultural
elements of all sorts have spilled historically in all directions across what
are today national borders separating and enclosing state territories. We find
Hindu temples and Sanskrit texts in Cambodia and Indonesia. Buddhism flourished more in East and Southeast
Asia than in its birthplace in northern India. Japanese Buddhists today tour holy sites in India the
way Christians visit Jerusalem. Christians and Jews came by sea to settle on
the Kerala coast in the early centuries of the Common
Era. Islam spread across southern Asia by
land among inland regions, and by sea among Indian Ocean ports,
until the majority of the world's Muslims lived east of Iran. The definitive linguistic components of South
Asian languages are found in languages that are spread all across Central,
Northern, and West Asia. Examples are endless of cultural mobility and
dispersion along the inland and coastal routes of southern Eurasia. In
addition, as we will see, the boundaries of historical activity and networks of
interaction that determined the character of change in everyday life in South
Asia have never corresponded to the boundaries constructed by modern
cultural authorities or by modern states.
To understand history inside South
Asia, we must escape the boundaries of civilizations to explore a
wider world within which these boundaries have been invented, contested,
defended, and redrawn historically. As
we will see, the political boundaries of South Asia have
changed dramatically at various points in time, so it is most appropriate to
study South Asia as a huge open geographical space
in southern Eurasia,
rather than imagining it to be a fixed historical region with a single
territorial definition.
3. Prehistoric
Societies
Humans seem to have lived in South
Asia for half a million years.
Relics of their activity for much of that time are preserved in so many
places that we can surmise that the earliest humans
settlers lived in virtually every feasible ecological niche. They all would have migrated from somewhere
else at some point in time, but some places have been continuously occupied
since the eighth millennium BCE, when agro-pastoral settlements were
established. Mehrgarh,
in central Baluchistan, is
now oldest site where archaeology can show that a microlithic
tool-using people produced a complex farming society; it is in the dry,
mountainous borderlands between the Indus Valley and Afghanistan, where
physical remains survive much better than they do in wet lands. From the seventh to the fourth millennium
BCE, Mehrgarh underwent an indigenous process of
technological development that was connected to but apparently not dependent on
migratory trade with western and central Asia.
Similar sites dating to about 3000
BCE also indicate a cultural complex named after the later Indus valley
site at Harappa that
included large, solid buildings, pottery, wool and cotton textiles, copper
ware, seals, and female figurines. Along
the Indus valley, large cities were built by about
2500 BCE at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa; but five hundred
years later, they were being depopulated; and a few centuries later, they were
abandoned completely. As they and other Indus urban
settlements declined, other smaller sites containing similar cultural material
multiplied in adjacent Gujarat and Punjab. Recent findings suggest that Harappan cultural production may have continued into the
first millennium BCE alongside settlements that are distinguished by later
archaeological finds of Painted Grey Ware pottery. The famous prehistoric cities along the Indus
emerged within a very old, resilient cultural complex that covered a vast area
of dry land and river valleys stretching from Afghanistan to Sind, Punjab, and
the western Gangetic Plain. These cities engaged in
long distance trade and their material culture was at the same time indigenous
to South Asia.
If we toured South
Asia around 2000 BCE, we would certainly want to begin with its
impressive cities along the Indus, with
their advanced hydrology and architecture.
But we would soon find that most of the scant pre-historic human
population of hunters, gatherers, herders, and farmers lived in small mobile
settlements. Wild animals -- including
elephants, tigers, deer, and buffalos -- outnumbered humans many times
over. Dry, wet, high altitude,
and coastal climates offered different kinds of opportunities for human
communities.
In the wet regions, dense tropical
jungles were naturally endowed with food supplies for humans but also with wild
animals (notably snakes and tigers) and micro-organisms (notably water borne
parasites) that killed humans. To create stable living environments in tropical
settings, people had to clear jungles to create farming communities, arduous
work that needed to be done repeatedly because the jungle growth was
tenacious. Before the advent of iron
tools around 1200 BCE, jungles constantly defeated human efforts to create
permanent farming settlements; shifting cultivation was the only agrarian
option, and combined with hunting, gathering, and fishing provided ample human
diets. Rice, originally a swamp grass, was first domesticated on temporary
fields. Slash-and-burn farming remained the norm long after agrarian societies
began to cut, burnt, and built permanent fields and settlements to produce
expansive landscape of settled agriculture in the plains. This agrarian
transformation of the wet lowlands began in the first millennium BCE.
In dry lands, migratory life
typically moved over wider spaces. Where
water failed to come to the land, people and animals moved to water. Animal herding and nomadism
combined naturally with extensive hunting, warfare, and trade; these all
developed productive but often conflict-ridden synergies with sedentary
farming. Nomads bred animals that
settled farming communities used for manure and ploughing, for edible meat and
milk, and for skins, fur, and wool.
Pastoral nomads also engaged in trade and transported craft products and
implements among settled communities far from one another. Animal-herding pastoral peoples exchanged
goods with farmers who provided them staple grains (millets and wheat), fruits,
vegetables, and manufactures, including metal tools and weapons. Herders often also needed water and grass for
grazing that lay in localities controlled by farmers. Farmers and herders were also hunters and
hunting skills were often turned toward human competitors for land and
water. Nomads herding and riding horses
became the most successful warriors ranging over wide distances. Agro-pastoral communities combining the human
skills and resources of herders, farmers, and craft workers people built the
small pre-historic homelands that we see scattered in archaeological remains in
dry regions from Baluchistan to Punjab and
the Deccan.
Mixtures of hunting, gathering,
herding, farming, manufacturing, and trade supported pre-historic communities
that combined sedentary and migratory ways of life and whose human geography
was thus both intensely local and extensively widespread. Archaeological remains from Gujarat in the
second millennium BCE indicate that pastoral circuits of animal grazing and nomadic
migration ran through sedentary farming communities like thread through beads
on a necklace.
Elements of sedentary cultures
moved along circuits of migration and trade that connected and sustained small,
separate communities. Cultural assemblages thus emerged that were composed of
various symbolic and material elements which we can see in archaeological
evidence. As elements dispersed
geographically they formed distinct cultural areas that changed shape overlapped
one another. The cultural complex that
includes Mehrgarh and Harappa is now the oldest
we know. Physical remains indicate that
a different but perhaps related Banas culture
characterized by white painted Black-and Red pottery developed in Rajasthan and
Malwa in the millennium after 2500 BCE. At the same time, another Malwa
culture was spreading south in Central India, a Savalda
complex formed in Maharashtra, and other areas of
settlement marked by distinctive pottery and metal tools developed in the
eastern Vindhyas and southern Deccan.
Other cultural areas of comparable antiquity are also visible in the southern
peninsula that contained megalithic tombs, urns, cists, rock-cut caves, cairns,
sarcophagi, and stone tombs that resemble hats called topi kals. Especially in the wetter regions, evidence of
cultural activity in pre-history returned invisibly to nature and is invisible
today, though later evidence indicates many cultural contributions from
pre-historical forest dwellers.
In Punjab, a dry region with
grasslands watered by five rivers draining the western Himalayas (hence the
name: panch-ab), in
the northernmost area occupied by Harappan remains,
one prehistoric culture left no material remains but did leave oral records of
its elite's self-consciousness, ritual texts that were preserved for their
sanctity over the millennia ever since. This culture is called Aryan and the
evidence in its texts indicates that it slowly spread southeast, following the
course of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers. Its elite called itself Arya ("pure") and distinguished themselves
sharply from others. Aryans led kin
groups organized as nomadic horse-herding tribes. Their ritual texts are called
Vedas and its language, Sanskrit. Vedic Sanskrit is recorded only in hymns that
were part of Vedic rituals to Aryan gods. To be Aryan apparently meant to be a
member of a self-proclaimed cultural elite among
pastoral tribes. Texts that record Aryan
culture are not precisely datable, but they seem to begins
around 1200 BCE with four collections of Vedic hymns (Rg, Sama, Yajur, and Artharva).
The textual evidence of the
expanding use of Sanskrit and Vedic rituals is spread unevenly across the
subsequent millennium. Six hundred years
after the first Vedas, ritual texts called Brahmanas and
numerous mystical and philosophical Aranyakas and Upanishads appear that
describe activity farther and farther east in the Ganga basin. Two epic poems, Ramayana and Mahabharata, probably refer
to wars among tribes in the first half of the first millennium BCE in the
watershed between the Indus and Ganga and in the
western part of the Ganga basin; but these epics were
composed many centuries after the wars they recount and they were added to and
revised many times over the centuries that followed. The major ancient grammatical text of the
Sanskrit language, Pannini's Astadhyayi (with
a geographical appendix, Ganapatha) is
datable to the late fourth century BCE by references to contemporary events and
personalities. By this time, the corpus
of ancient Sanskrit texts comprised a culture of Vedic Brahmanism. In this textual culture, social rituals
prescribed that the rulers protect and enforce stratified ranks among four varnas:
Brahman (priest), Kshatriya (warrior), Vaisya (merchant), and Sudra
(workers). Ritual texts also describe the
territory of Aryan
culture, called Madhyama Dis or Madhya Desh,
"the central country." By
about 500 BCE, Aryan cultural evidence is spread east from Gandhara
(in the hills above Punjab, where
Pannini composed is grammar) and Kurukshetra
(near Delhi, where
the Mahabharata
occurred) as far east as the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna
at Pratisthana/Prayaga (Allahabad). Sanskrit geographical knowledge was wider
than this, however. Rama,
the hero of the Ramayana,
travelled south across the peninsula and over the water to Lanka (Sri
Lanka) to save his
wife, Sita, from her captor, Ravana. But as Pannini
indicates in a detailed list of peoples and places, ancient Sanskrit authors
were at home in Punjab, Haryana, and the Ganga-Yamuna Doab. Here, their
culture was one among many, though we know much less about others.
4. Ancient
Transformation
Pre-history
shades into history as ancient documentation becomes firmly
datable. This begins to occur in the
sixth century BCE, during the reign of Magadha kings
in the eastern Ganga basin,
when Buddhist texts cane be dated along with recorded
activity by Achaemenid Greek rulers in Persia and Afghanistan. Early historical texts come into being during
major changes in the human landscape that become more visible over the next
millennium as documentary evidence becomes ever richer in descriptive detail
and chronological specificity.
The ancient transformation of South
Asia produced entirely new social environments. Pre-historic societies were many but small
and they had no institutions holding them together. In the sixth century BCE,
history’s curtain rises on a dramatic scene of political invention as powerful
people begin to make powerful states. By 300 BCE, societies along the Ganga basin were part of vast networks
of politics, economy and culture; settlements stretching from Afghanistan to Bengal were
connected to one another by regular flows of ideas and goods that ran through
cities that became central sites for imperial society. By 100CE, competing imperial armies ranged
from Central Asia to Sri
Lanka. By 500CE, complex regions of social change
all across South Asia were
connected intricately to one another and to the wider world.
The vast epoch of ancient
transformation from circa 500
BCE to circa 500CE
produced a new order that would be called "classical" in later times.
These epochal changes are so complex and poorly documented that no single
explanation will ever suffice. Clearly,
however, iron-making technologies that appear soon after the Vedas accelerated
change significantly. Chopping and
digging with iron tools gave new advantages to the people who struggled against
the forest; for they could now burn trees to make farms and keep new jungle growth
away with arduous manual labour. In the Ganga basin,
land clearance to make permanent farms spread from west to east and created a
new productive landscape that spanned wet and dry regions of monsoon Asia for
the first time. Rice-growing societies in
the eastern basin could sustain larger populations with their more productive
agriculture; and they also had closer access to iron ores and other minerals in
mountains south of the Ganga in Jharkhand. River
routes into and out of the eastern mountains provided rapid entry into the Gangetic transport system for people working the uplands
north and south of the Ganga. Iron tools increased agricultural output
everywhere but made a much bigger difference in the east, where iron weapons
also strengthened armies. People with
iron tools made the boats that travelled the highway of the Ganga and the carts that plied roads
along the Ganga basin.
It was thus in the east that early states arose.
Major trading routes ran along the
river basins from Bihar to Gujarat and
the Hindu Kush. People living in the western dry regions had
superior access to most of the length of these routes and they took full
advantage of trading opportunities. Kautilya's Arthasastra
indicates that by the start of the Common Era, long-distance trade sustained
widely known sites of commodity specialization from Central
Asia and Sind to Assam. Horses came from Punjab;
pearls from Sind;
cotton and sandalwood from Malwa; elephants, stones,
and minerals from southern mountains; cotton and silk from Bengal; and
sandalwood from Assam. Cotton, silk, and wool cloth came from many
places along the Ganga. Iron and silver came from mines in Jharkhand.
A vast triangle-shaped area
stretching from Kabul to Gujarat and Assam became
perhaps the largest integrated economic region in the ancient world. By 300 BCE, production and trade in this
region was generating enough profit, taxation, tribute, and consumption to
sustain a burst of social invention, most visibly along the highway of the Ganga, especially in the east. The first big cities built after the fall of Harappa arose around Pataliputra (now Patna in Bihar). They
had a distinctive urban culture, elites, and expressive arts. Social
stratification became more complex.
Initially, it social strata had been based on elite control of
agricultural land and farm labour by lineage elders in territories called janapadas and maha (great) janapadas. These small domains were named after their
dominant clans and are described in epics, Pannini's
grammar, Buddhist texts, and other sources.
Pannini indicates that in 300 BCE they were
the most prominent political features of the Indo-Gangetic
flatlands from Punjab to Bengal. By this time, however, new ruling elite
strata and institutions had also appeared as rulers of states whose political
rules and roles rose above kinship. Some
of these states are called “republics” because of the sharing of power among
ruling lineages inside them, and others are called “kingdoms” because of the
supremacy of single rulers. What
distinguished the new state territories most of all was the rise of urban
capital cities located at strategic military and commercial sites, where elite
groups of various kinds concentrated their social activity.
5. Inventing
Empire
Chandragupta Maurya was born into this changing ancient world, near Pataliputra, where, in the sixth century BCE, local in Magadha rulers
had raised armies to conquer widely and create the first large state in the
region. From the obscure Moriya clan, Chandragupta may have owned some land around Magadha before
he led Magadha armies
to conquer janapadas as far
west as Punjab and Sind. In doing so, he had crossed a cultural
divide. Agro-pastoral warrior lineages
controlling the various janapadas had
many cultural identities, but later Vedic sources indicate that they had
embraced Aryan culture as far east as Prayaga (Allahabad). Magadha lay
further east on the outer fringe of Aryan culture, and was here, in the east,
that the Buddha composed an alternative ethical system opposed to Aryan
Brahmanism. Having conquered local
competitors, the armies of Magadha
expanded west. Its victorious commanders
subordinated janapadas under
an imperial authority whose main work was to maintain its own military
strength. This rudimentary imperial
scaffolding was a framework for Chandragupta's
ambition.
In the far west, Magadha troops faced Achaemenid Greek armies marching across Persia. As Greek
soldiers marched east and Magadha troops marched
west, they both knew they were following old routes of long-distance travel,
but they did not know that they were creating a new world of politics that
would stretch from Greece to Assam.
Routes from Europe to the Orient and from Magadha to Persia met in Punjab; thus the Indus became the symbolic
western border of a region that Greeks called “India.” The original division of Asia and Europe, East and West,
Orient and Occident derived from military competition over routes and resources
flowing across ancient Eurasia. Ancient empires thus invented cultural
boundaries that we still live with today; how these territorial identities came
down to the present is a long story that we will follow in the coming chapters.
Chandragupta won
wars for Magadha in Sind and may have fought Alexander the
Great in Punjab before Alexander's army mutinied to force
a Greek retreat down the Indus in 327
BCE. Alexander then sailed to Mesopotamia and
died in Babylon at age
thirty-four. Chandragupta
marched east, conquered his overlords, and became South
Asia's first emperor. He
launched his Maurya imperial dynasty by building on Magadha
victories to incorporate janapadas in a
structure of military command that eventually deployed 9,000 elephants, 30,000
cavalry, 8,000 chariots, and 600,000 infantry on its many battlefields. Supporting its war machine with taxes,
troops, provisions, commanders, and victories preoccupied the Maurya state that sustained an official elite which was the
first of its kind. Elite intellectuals
became the brains of empire. One
legendary figure was Kautilya, known as the author of
the Arthasastra, a
manual of statecraft and administration. This text was not completed until the
Gupta age, six hundred years later, and thus it constitutes one of many links
between the two classical empires of the Ganga
basin.
Mauryan armies
conquered widely from 321 until 260 BCE.
Chandragupta marched west to the Hindu Kush and Kashmir. His son, Bindusara
turned south to the Deccan. After a four-year war of succession, the
emperor Ashoka conquered Kalinga,
on the Orissa coast, where imperial conquest finally
outstripped its resources. Subduing Kalinga cost 100,000 lives and displaced twice as many
people. This suffering apparently
stunned Ashoka into embracing Buddhism. Ashoka's
intellectual elite inventing a new, ethical imperialism. By Ashoka's time,
the teachings of Gautama Buddha and Mahavira had defined distinctive strains of cultural
activity that we know under the names of Buddhism and Jainism; they shared many
elements with Aryan Brahmanism but opposed its sacred division of caste society
and established another of values for rulers, including universal ethical norms
that made salvation a moral quest. Rulers could support this righteous vision
by becoming great alms-givers for the learned monks who preached harmonious
moral order and showed the way to enlightenment in their piety and
learning. Buddhist righteousness (dhamma)
became a moral compass for Ashoka's empire. Ashoka used his
vast winnings at war to support Buddhist monks, ritual centres (stupas), preachers, and schools. Rather than conquering kingdoms south of Kalinga, Ashoka brought them
under his spiritual patronage, supporting Buddhist kings in Sri
Lanka and Buddhist
centres in Andhra, Karnataka, and the Tamil country. Jain missions also prospered in his
domain.
Thus Maurya
dynastic elites invented imperial culture, including new social identities that
were attached to imperial expansion, integration, and authority. In addition to supporting its war machine,
the empire constituted an ethical ideology and infrastructure. In addition to commanding armies and
gathering wealth for war, generals announced the arrival of good governance
wherever they conquered. In addition to
collecting tribute, imperial officers established a local presence to keep
roads open, to adjudicate disputes, and to supersede the local authority of janapadas. Building on the legacy of Magadha and
initially travelling the same routes, the Maurya
regime protected merchants who were major patrons of Buddhism and Jainism. Empire increased the concentration of wealth
at central places of imperial authority.
It attracted ambitious lineage leaders and their disgruntled local
competitors who allied with imperial officers and identified themselves with
imperial authority. Imperial culture
fostered a new elite cosmopolitanism, which elevated its own people and ideas
and also reduced localities and local identities to the status of rustic
parochialism. Empire institutionalized
high and low culture at the same time.
6. Inventing Civilization
In new territories of empire and
elite formation, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism represented three solutions
to fundamental problems of human existence and political order. Their
proponents obtained royal patronage in the circuits of urbane
cosmopolitanism. All three became more
prominent in dispersed localities on the tracks of imperial expansion. They had
much in common, including their vast cosmology and complex ideas about reincarnation
and karma (the
affect of acts in past lives on future lives). They all emerged in the Ganga basin from the mixing of Aryan
culture with other cultures during social changes underway in the first
millennium BCE. Their intellectuals also
shared the creative spirit of the Upanishads,
later Vedic texts that elaborated the nature of power in the fires of Vedic
sacrifice, which could be internalised by humans through spiritual discipline,
renunciation, contemplation, and mysticism.
By the sixth century BCE, elements
of Aryan ideology were adapted to local conditions by elites in diverse
agrarian societies. The Brahmanas
codified Vedic ritual in the changing contexts where learned Brahmans embodied
and translated Aryan tradition. Newly
emerging social elites found valuable assets in Sanskrit texts, Vedic rituals,
and learned Brahmans for elevating themselves above others and for marking
ranks of privilege in their domains. One
hymn from the Rg Veda became
particularly useful. It describes the origin of the world in the sacrificial
dismemberment of the Lord of Being, Prajapati, into
four varna or
human essences: his mouth became the Brahman priest; his arms became the
warrior (Rajanya or Kshatriya);
his thighs became the Vaisya (farmer and merchant);
and his feet became the Sudra (servant). Ancient landowners, merchants, warriors, army
commanders, rulers, kings, and emperors used Brahmanical
interpretations of varna to
raise and validate their social status.
Thus many elites became at least partially Aryanized by patronizing Brahman knowledge and
rituals. Various aspiring groups
collaborated with Brahmans to create higher status for themselves. Brahmanism allowed kin groups to form caste
groups (jati) by
assigning each kin group to a varna. Among the dharmasastra texts
that defined the emerging Brahmanical social order, The Laws of Manu,
composed circa 100
BCE, explained in great detail how every marriage that mixed jatis
produced a new jati with a
definite status in the varna
scheme. This was a recipe for taking the infinite complexity of ancient society
and reducing it to a single schematic ideological order in which everyone knew
their place.
Jain and Buddhist opposed the fixed
social stratification of Vedic Brahmanism, the authority of Brahmans, and the
all-pervasive power of Vedic ritual.
Both arose east of Prayaga, around Magadha, where
Mahavira (born circa 550)
and Gautama Buddha (born circa 480)
both originally preached. It is
reasonable to surmise that these schools of thought and personal piety
represented restless spiritual aspirations among new elites who challenged
Vedic ideas about social rank. Merchants
relegated to lower varna ranks
were clearly influential patrons for Buddhist and Jain monks, who propagated
the spiritual power of learning, piety, merit, discipline, and ethical values,
and who rejected the idea that the highest spiritual purity is attainable by
Brahmans. Their path of liberation was
open to anyone who learned the way.
Supporters of Brahmanism, Buddhism,
and Jainism moved along routes of physical mobility and communication that
extended their scope under Mauryan authority. Imperial cultural activists circulated among
localities and settled locally to become local representatives of imperial
authority and high culture. Locally,
their elite status could attract patronage from aspiring donors who sought
prized intermediary roles in imperial society.
Locally, too, most people could only appreciate high culture when it was
translated into local terms, in the local vernacular. Most local religious feelings, practices, and
ideas could never attain wide currency; they remained local until they were
translated into terms that could travel.
A three-tiered cultural hierarchy thus developed. At the top, high culture emerged among
imperial elites who communicated with one another across great distances at the
apex of political authority.
Intermediary elites arose in regions of political power as they
translated and mixed imperial and local cultures. But many local cultural elements remained
purely local, out of imperial circuits of power though incorporated by and
subordinated to them. Thus the idea of
"great" and “little" traditions came into being with the
expansion of empire and with efforts by aspiring local elites to lift
themselves out of their local status. The
interaction of these three levels of culture became a basic feature of social
life. They are visible even today,
though the centuries have changed their significance. In ancient times, local cultures were
overwhelmingly predominant for people in everyday life. Very few people had access to high culture or
elite traditions. Elite culture made its
impact locally in proportion to the power of patrons in local society.
Buddhism exemplifies ancient high
culture. It spread widely as elite
cultural elements sank local roots from town to town in the ambit of Mauryan power and along routes of mobility running into Central
Asia, the southern peninsula, and Sri
Lanka. Buddhists always
confronted proponents of Jainism and Brahmanism, and everywhere, patronage from
various sources decided the outcome. Ashoka’s patronage indicates that rulers in his day devised
ingenious means for making empire into civilization. Giving financial and moral support to high
culture ideas, practices, and intellectuals like Buddhist monks enabled rulers
to attract literate elites to their service and to bring cosmopolitan cultural
activists into localities of ethical empire.
At the same time, this strategy enabled conquerors to tribute extracted
from vanquished local warriors into pious generosity. Religious patronage enhanced political
supremacy and incorporation. Instead of
suffering humiliating military defeat, a weaker rival could embrace imperial
subordination by negotiating an acceptable contribution to charitable cultural
projects endorsed by the emperor.
Such ingenious cultural politics
suffused social struggles for power and rank.
For rulers, patronizing religious leaders and institutions became
indispensable for gaining local support that turned coercive force into public
spirit. In everyday life, religious institutions that shaped social identities
thrived in competitions for imperial patronage.
Spiritual leaders became socially prominent as they cultivated patronage
and turned wealth into moral authority.
In local society, financing cultural institutions and religious
activities like festivals and rituals became an indicator of social status.
Social ranks thus took aesthetic, spiritual forms. The highest status people were those who
participated in imperial rituals and commanded the language and culture of the
imperial religion. The lowest status
people were those who spoke only local tongues and worshipped local
deities. Social mobility moved among
tiers of culture as local people moved up in regional societies by
incorporating themselves into elite culture, giving it local roots.
The project of civilizing conquered
peoples proceeded within empire as influential people established religious
institutions across wide spaces inside local societies. Buddhists and Jains
seem to have been most successful among merchants. The Greek king of Punjab, Menander, adopted Buddhism as he sought to bring more
merchants into his realm. Ashoka made Buddhism a moral compass that made his realm
more attractive for merchants. In Mauryan times, kings, monks, and landed elites on the island of Sri
Lanka came together under the banner of dhamma to
create one of the world's longest lasting Buddhist regional polities.
Elsewhere, too, religious institutions became central in cultural politics by
bringing disparate groups together in new, more extensive regional
communities. Pious donors sanctified
their own wealth with spending on festivals, shrines, temples, stupas, or pious education; and they used public religious
rituals to announce their own beneficence.
Religious communities formed as emerging social elites pursued their
common interests in stability to forged shared identities with public
piety.
Donations to Jains
and Buddhists became increasingly popular among merchants who travelled routes
protected by Mauryan armies. Merchant wealth flowed into religious centres
in market towns where it combined with royal patronage to finance a spiritual
realm of public sentiment that brought together local elites and imperial
officers, itinerants and residents, civilians and army commanders, and many
other people in various professions.
Buddhist and Jains sculpture became public
art. Gigantic stone sculptures and
buildings embodied the physical presence of spiritual and imperial power. Technologies
of artistic beauty became media for the everyday experience of spiritualism,
transcendence and political stability. A
creative explosion in all the arts was a most remarkable feature of the ancient
transformation for later generations. Mauryan territory was marked out visibly on the ground in
its day by awesome armies and dreadful war, but future inhabitants saw instead
its beautiful pillars, inscriptions, coins, sculptures, buildings, ceremonies,
and textual accounts, particularly by Buddhist writers.
Ancient imperialism created a new
kind of social space, an imperial landscape.
But all around it, most people lived in agro-pastoral communities and
lineages like those in janapadas
dominated most localities. The geography
of Mauryan empire resembled
a spider with a small dense body and long spindly legs. The highest echelons of imperial society
lived in the inner circle composed of the ruler, his immediate family, other
relatives, and close allies, who formed a dynastic core. Outside the core, Mauryan
empire ran along stringy routes dotted with armed
cities. Outside the palace, in capital
cities, the highest ranks in the imperial elite were held by military
commanders whose active loyalty and success in war determined imperial
fortunes. Wherever these men failed or rebelled, dynastic power crumbled. In the provincial urban centres of imperial
authority, administrators applied official rules, merchants cherished
law-and-order, elites gathered wealth, and pious people received patronage: all
these groups carried imperial identities into everyday life.
Imperial society flourished where
these elites mingled; they were its backbone; its strength was theirs. Kautilya's Arthasastra
indicates their great power in the imperial core, in old Magadha, where
some key institutions seem to have survived for about seven hundred years, down
to the age of the Guptas. Here, Maurya state
institutions ruled local society. But not elsewhere. In
provincial towns and cities, officials formed a top layer of royalty; under
them, old conquered royal families were not removed, but rather,
subordinated. In most janapadas, the Mauryas' empire consisted of strategic urban sites
connected loosely to vast hinterlands through lineages and local institutions
that were already there when the Mauryas arrived and
were still in control when they left.
7. Aryavarta and Imperial Bharat
The Mauryas
defined ancient Bharat. Following the contours of trade routes, the spidery
empire took the geometrical shape of a tall triangle with a broad base, lying
on its side with its apex in Magadha. One long northern leg ran west up the Ganga, across Punjab, into
the Hindu Kush; and
one long, jagged, leg ran southwest from Pataliputra, up the Son River Valley, down
the Narmada River, into Berar, Maharashtra, and Gujarat. The
broad base of imperial space spanned Punjab, the Indus,
Rajasthan, Gujarat, and
western Maharashtra. The
north-western frontier revolved around Gandhara and Kashmir; the
south-western frontier, around Nasika in Maharashtra. North of Kashmir and west of the Khyber
Pass, Greek dynasties held sway.
South of Nasika, the Mauryan
presence consisted primarily of diplomatic missions. Buddhist activity was particularly prominent
in the east, from Bengal down
the Orissa coast to Amaravati,
Kanchipuram, Madurai, and Sri
Lanka. Buddhism and Jainism both became most deeply
rooted on the outer imperial fringe: Buddhism in east, in the Himalayas, and
on routes into Central Asia;
Jainism in the west, in Rajasthan and Gujarat, and
along trade routes in the southern peninsula
Four hundred years after the last Maurya, in 320CE, the Gupta dynasty reinscribed
the same spaces of ancient Bharat with Brahmanical cultural supremacy. Its founder, Chandragupta,
apparently renamed himself after Chandragupta Maurya. He began his
imperial career by marrying a daughter of the Licchavi
clan, which had controlled the Terai uplands between Magadha and Nepal since before Mauryan
times and which would later go on to form a powerful dynasty in the Kathmandu
Valley. Using this strategic alliance,
he conquered westward along the path of the Mauryas.
In the late fourth century, his son, Samudragupta,
declared himself maharaja adhi raja, “great king of kings,” and boldly
recounted his conquests on a pillar in Prayaga
(Allahabad) that dated back to the Mauryas. The Allahabad
inscription divides Gupta lands into four categories. At the centre is Aryavarta,
including all the Ganga plain,
Naga domains in Bundelkhand
and Malwa, Kota lands
around Delhi, and Pundravardhana and Vanga in Bengal. Inside Aryavarta,
conquered rulers were said to have been brought under direct Gupta
administration. Outside this imperial
territory, in southern regions of Dakshinapatha,
twelve conquered kings were left on their thrones. In the mountains, unconquered rulers paid
tribute. In the north and west, distant Kushanas and Mundas offered their
obeisance, as did Sinhala kings in Sri
Lanka.
Since Pannini’s
time, cultural elites had worked assiduously to describe and mark geographical
space so as to give places identities defined by imperial societies. Places became visible in a wide world etched
with a cultural design that encompassed localities. The region of highest privilege in Gupta
classicism came into being with conscious efforts to create an imperial
heartland with a timeless identity. It
was called Aryavarta. The invention of this region provided an
imperial cultural territory to set the elite high culture standard of
civilization and marks a culmination of classical antiquity.
Samudragupta built
its military framework first by throwing another canopy of conquest over janapadas and
then by displacing them with a more powerful imperial system than Mauryas could have imagined. The Gupta imperial heartland
was like a banyan tree with strong roots in cites,
towns, rituals, and holy places -- a solid structure as awesome as the rivers,
mountains, and heavens among which it formed a mythical and ritual universe. Aryavarta
invoked imperial eternity as cosmic reality.
In addition to Gupta arms, a Brahman
intellectual elite wielding the magic of Sanskrit constructed this classical
domain. India
classicism became by definition Sanskritic and Brahmanical.
Gupta imperial society concentrated
in the Gangetic lowlands. Its core region was much larger than the Mauryas', extending west to Mathura, and its cultural
impact was deeper and more permanent. In
Aryavarta, Samudragupta performed Vedic rituals on a grand scale and
pursued a widely publicized policy of donating land to Brahmans, funding temple
construction, and financing temple rituals.
Gupta power launched imperial Brahmanism. Not surprisingly, Brahman authors saw the
fall of the Guptas in the sixth century as a sign of
cosmic chaos and degradation, Kali
Yuga; and many later generations of Sanskrit authors looked back on
the Guptas' reign as their golden age. The Gupta core region in Uttar Pradesh still
has the highest Brahman population in India and
the most actively Brahmanical politicians.
Brahmanism spread outward from the
Gupta core and evolved into a diverse but coherent Hindu cultural complex that
scattered across South Asia in the
first millennium. Exactly how this occurred is still far from fully understood,
though textual evidence appears in widely dispersed texts in Sanskrit and other
languages. Clearly, Sanskrit and its learned authors were critical cultural
elements wherever Hindu cultures emerged. When Pannini
codified Sanskrit, it was already archaic, and he effectively compiled a
codebook for a Brahman secret tongue, a user’s guide for Brahman cultural
software. Buddhist and Jain authors used
Pali, Prakrits, and other
vernaculars. Local cults expressed
themselves in local vernaculars. The
influence of Sanskrit spread with the influence of learned Brahman men who were
the only people who could officially know the language and convey its
magic. Elements of Sanskrit -- its
sounds, words, grammar, and script -- could be learned, used, and enjoyed by
anyone, however, and over time, entered most languages; and translations out of
Sanskrit conveyed its influence into literature almost everywhere in South
Asia. Until in the seventeenth century, when it was partially displaced by Persian
as the premier elite imperial language, Sanskrit enjoyed a status like that of
Latin in western Europe as an elite language of law, ritual, science,
philosophy, literature, and high culture generally.
Patronage for Brahman literati
spread their influence far and wide and the Gupta classical age emerged
retrospectively in Puranic literature. Puranas form a large corpus of texts that recount “oldness”
or “venerability” in genealogies and tales of the misty past, combining myth,
folklore, history, and historical fiction.
A typical Purana begins with the creation of
the world and narrates a genealogy leading from heavenly gods to earthly kings
and saints in some present time that can be mythical but can also be
historical, as it is in the genre of sthala Purana
accounts of how a particular god came to reside a specific temple. Puranas have
their mundane, factual counterpart in prasasti
introductions to inscriptions that record temple donations, land grants, and
royal proclamations.
Ashokan edicts
and Samudragupta’s inscriptions were prototypes for
millions of texts carved in stone and etched in metal that begin to appear by
Gupta times and proliferate from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. Prasastis
recount genealogies and dynastic chronicles: though they often begin in the
heavens in mythical times, they always come down to earth to the moment of the
activity announced in the inscription. Prasastis, like Puranas, are typically in Sanskrit, though Puranas were also composed in vernaculars, and inscriptions
introduced by Sanskrit prasastis
typically include a vernacular text for the business or contractual portion of
the record. Puranas
and prasastis are
two major textual media for evoking relations among gods, rulers, and everyday
folk, thus between cosmic and mundane power.
The Guptas
invested heavily in Puranic mythology and
inscriptional documentation. Later
rulers all over South Asia
followed their example to produce inscriptional records in all the major
languages, including Arabic and Persian.
These texts provide a clear sense of cultural geography. In the accumulation of Puranic
texts, Aryavarta became
the desa, the
cultured land of civilization where Prayaga (Allahabad) and Kasi (Varanasi/Benares) were the
holiest places in the sacred geography of Bharat. The desa does not include
the high mountains, Indus valley, Punjab, or
western desert. The Puranic
desa of Bharat are Madhya desa (the Ganga lowlands), Purva desa (Bengal and Assam), and Aparanta desa (including Avanti,
Malwa, Gujarat, Konkan, and Nasik). Places outside the desa were frontiers
and peripheries. The western plains, Punjab, high
mountains, central mountains, and coast and interior peninsula outside Nasika-Konkana are not called desa in Puranas, but rather asreya, patha, and pristha.
This Puranic geography travelled widely with
migrating Brahman literati. Sanskrit
cosmopolitanism made Aryavarta its
cultural heartland. With the spread of
Brahman influence in post-Gupta centuries, localities far and wide were named
and located in relation to the Gangetic holy
lands. Kings as far
away as Java and Cambodia traced their genealogies to the Guptas
and even early Aryans.
8. Imperial
Regions
Ancient empires in the Ganga basin were surrounded by
competitors in other regions whose power increased over the centuries. The Mauryas faced
no serious obstacles in their quest for control of major routes and centres
east of the Hindu Kush. But when the last Maurya
fell and Sungas took Pataliputra,
in 185 BCE, new empires on Magadha’s old western frontier foreshadowed a new
future. In the south, in Maharashtra, Satavahanas (55BCE-250CE) conquered the Deccan and the eastern
peninsula south to Kanchipuram. In the western plains, Sakas
(70-409) expanded south and west into Gujarat from
their capital at Ujjaini in Malwa. In the northwest, the Kushanas
(0-250) formed the greatest of the new empires.
They came from Central Asia and
had twin capitals at Purusapura and Mathura. They conquered Afghanistan and
the Ganga basin
east to Pataliputra; and Kanishka,
their most powerful ruler, also conquered Sakas and Satavahanas. Non-Gangetic armies formed a strenuous opposition to Gupta
expansion outside Aryavarta. Hunas, Sakas, and Vakatakas hemmed in
the Guptas throughout their reign, and competitors
tore their realm to bits when Hunas rampaged down the
Ganga to end
the aura of Gupta supremacy.
After the Guptas,
empires ruling Aryavarta came
from Maharashtra, Gujarat,
Rajasthan, Punjab, Afghanistan, and Central
Asia, which were markedly different from the Ganga basin as material and cultural
environments. Agricultural land was not
nearly as rich. Nomadic pastoral
lineages were much more numerous, powerful, and prestigious. Elites were less sedentary and land-based;
they depended more on trade, herds, and war for wealth; and their military
control over routes between Delhi and Kabul and
between Allahabad and Cambay provided a permanent strategic advantage in
struggles for access to markets in Persia, Central
Asia, and Indian Ocean
ports. They often patronized Brahmans
but they were eclectic, less inclined to Vedic ritual, and more respectful of
nomadic warriors and itinerant merchants.
Buddhism and Jainism flourished in their domains. Even Satavahanas,
who were staunch Hindus, also patronized Buddhists. Jainism remained prominent in Gujarat and
adjacent Rajasthan. All along the Indian
Ocean coast, Zoroastrians, Christians, Arabs, and Jews were became well
established. Kushanas
descended from Hsung-nu clans in China; and
like Sakas and Hunas, they
were aliens in Aryavarta. Kushanas
represented a radical ethnic and ideological alternative to the Guptas. Buddhism travelled north along the routes of Kushana power into Central Asia and China.
When Chinese Buddhists toured India in the
fifth and seventh century, they found that Buddhism had virtually disappeared
in its Gangetic homeland, under the imperial force of
Brahmanism, though it still thrived in Afghanistan and Central
Asia. Outside the Ganga basin, however, cultures
flourished across the length and breadth of South Asia that
were markedly less Brahmanical. Culturally distinct regimes based outside the
Brahmanical strongholds in the Gupta heartland
struggled constantly against Gangetic imperialism and for
control over Bharat.
Aryavarta was
one region among others in ancient, medieval, and early modern times. Outside
the geographical confines of imperial Bharat, political
histories and collective identities flowing from them followed different
trajectories. In the south, in the Deccan, in ancient Dakshinapatha, south
of the Vindhyas, dynasties of Satavahanas,
Vakatakas, Kalacuris, Rashtrakutas, and Yadavas
conquered and defined cultural regions in central India; and in the seventeenth
century, the Marathas followed suit, as we will see. In the west, in Rajasthan, Gurjara-Pratihara lineages, launched five hundred years of
military colonization in the ninth century, when Rajput
clans conquered all across the Ganga basin,
into the Himalayas, and into central India, to
form a long-lasting, far-reaching political and cultural force. In the northwest, in the land that straddles Punjab, Kashmir, and Afghanistan, Kushanas and later Turks and Afghans produced imperial
spaces that repeatedly encompassed the Ganga basin
and laid the historic basis for the sixteenth century Mughal
empire, whose land ran from Samakand
to Assam.
9. Medieval
Transitions
Post-Gupta regimes produced another
new mosaic of social environments; in recognition of this, historians treat the
centuries from circa 550 to
1556, between the empires of the Guptas and Mughals, as a reasonably coherent, though very diverse,
medieval epoch. One dominant feature of this epoch is documentation in dozens
of languages and regions. By comparison
to earlier times, medieval history is very well documented, and its principle
actors are better known, because inscriptions, travel accounts, chronicles,
literature, and other sources multiply with each passing century. In the first millennium, the most visible
actors appear in the texts of inscriptions that were produced by medieval
dynasties. Hundreds of thousands of
inscriptions have been traced, transcribed, stored, translated, and studied by
scholars; but they still have not received the attention they deserve. The medieval millennium needs many more
historians.
Epigraphy indicates that royal Gupta lineages were still
settling in the western frontiers of Aryavarta
in the sixth century, when the empire crumbled.
They carried with them the apparatus of Gupta power. They used royal gifts to finance temples and
Brahmans; and such gifts became a hallmark of medieval dynastic authority. Marking the end of Gupta supremacy, a new Maukhari dynasty made grants in the western edge of the
Gupta heartland, around Kanyakubja (Kanauj), in the Doab (Awadh). Then Pusyabutis did the same farther west along the Yamuna and in Haryana. In the seventh century, the Pusyabuti king Harsha moved his
capital to Kanyakubja and celebrated the event with a
land grant to two Brahmans. The grant
was to be administered personally by one of his commanders under the official
protection of janapadas in his realm. This indicates that janapada lineages were still in business and that Harsha relied for his authority on the wealth and power of
subordinates supported by local community leaders.
Inscriptions announce the formation of more
than forty new dynasties in the sixth and seventh centuries across the length
and breadth of South
Asia. Typical prasastis include
elaborate genealogies that trace dynastic origins to mythical progenitors and
sanctify royal domains by harking back to ancient regional kings. Regional societies become more historically
visible in these centuries and many medieval dynasties laid foundations for
long-lasting regional political cultures.
The complexity of medieval political geography can be rendered by
locating major dynasties in fifteen modern political regions (See Map 2).
1.
Kashmir: Karkotas
(620s-850s) and Loharas (900s-1300s) were based in
the Vale, around Srinagar.
2.
Nepal: Licchavis
(400s-700s) and Mallas (900s-1700s) ruled the Kathmandu valley.
3.
Punjab: a contested terrain where Shahis (900s-1100s) built a major medieval domain.
4.
Rajasthan: Gurjara-Pratiharas gave way
to ruling dynasties of Paramaras (800s-1300s), Cahamanas (900s-1100s), and Rathors
(1200s-1500s), in Ujjaini, Ajayameru
(Ajmer), and Jodhpur, respectively.
5.
Gujarat: Caulukyas
(900s-1200s) were the dominant medieval dynasty.
6.
Uttar
Pradesh: major dynasties included Hunas (500s); Maukharis (500s) at Kanyakubja
and Ayodhya; Pusyabutis
(500s-840s), whose most famous ruler was Harsha of Kanauj; Varmas (700s); and Gurjara-Pratiharas (700s-1150s), who spread from Gujarat to Bengal.
7.
Madhya
Pradesh: Candellas (800s-1300s) spread across a
region including Khajurao, Awadh,
and Gorakpur; and Kalacuris
(500s-1200s) covered land from Kheda and Ujjaini to Tripuri and Bengal.
8.
Maharashtra: divided among Vakatakas
(200s-500s) at Vidarbha (Nagpur), Kalacuris
(500s-1200s) at Nasik, Rashtrakutas
(600s-900s) at Vidarbha, and Yadavas
(800s-1300s) at Devagiri.
9.
Orissa: Gangas at Kataka Bhuvanesvara (300s-1400s)
were the longest lasting dynasties.
10. Bengal: Palas
(750s-1100s) and Senas (100-1200s) define the
medieval epoch.
11. Andhra
Pradesh: Eastern Chalukyas ruled from the Krishna-Godavari
delta (620s-1000s); Kakatiyas ruled from the interior
at Warangal, near Hyderabad (1000s-1300s).
12. Karnataka: Chalukyas
(500s-750s) at Vatapi (Badami)
gave way to the imperial Hoysalas (1000s-1300s) whose
domain stretched to east and west coasts; and later to the greatest southern
empire at Vijayanagar (1336-1672).
13. Tamil
Nadu: the Pallavas (300s-900s), Cholas
(800s-1200s), and Pandyas (600s-1300s) ruled the
northern, central, and southern regions of the coast at Kanchipuram,
Tanjavur, and Madurai, respectively.
14. Kerala: the Cheras and Kulasekaras ruled the region around Trivandrum from the fourth to the twelfth
century.
15. Sri
Lanka: Lambakanna dynasties ruled
from later Mauryan times to the twelfth century.
The establishment of most medieval dynasties appears to represent
emerging concentrations of wealth and power among agrarian warrior elites who
controlled land and people in areas of agricultural expansion. These agrarian
regimes were deeply rooted locally but they were also often politically
expansive and they were all extensively connected to wide realms of trade,
culture, and politics. Each dynasty had
a strong territorial identity that concentrated in a specific core region, and
when military expansion reached its limit, dynasties retreated into their
homeland, unless they were driven out, which when it happened was often
followed by the founding of new homeland elsewhere. Over time, compact regional dynasties spread
widely and they often produced permanent regional traditions preserved in
monuments, literature, mythology, genealogies, and local rights and powers
granted by medieval kings.
Many medieval dynasties emerged on routes from ancient Bharat. Ancient empires based inside and outside Aryavarta had produced networks of conquest, elite circulation,
and cultural communication on long routes of human mobility that ran into and
across the Ganga basin.
Dispersed urban centres of late antiquity developed around army posts,
administrative offices, markets, oases, ports, strategic mountain passes and
river crossings, sacred sites, royal courts, lineage headquarters, stupas, monasteries, and other places valued by imperial
elites. Human habitation and land use
had intensified around cities where agro-pastoralism
and shifting cultivation gave way to permanent farming, manufacturing, and
commerce. When political leaders in
imperial satellite towns challenged imperial elites for local leadership, vying
for local support, new regional polities emerged with political cultures that
combined local parochialism and imperial cosmopolitanism.
The Pallava regime at Kanchipuram
is a good example. It emerged from under
the canopy of empire thrown across the southern peninsula by imperial Guptas, Vakatakas and Chalukyas. Pallava kings rose from vassal status to become imperial
powers in their own right. Kanchipuram had been a centre of Buddhist learning featured
in Manimekalai, a Buddhist epic composed in the Tamil
language in Gupta times, when Pallavas were Vakataka feudatories.
Under the Pallavas, Kanchipuram
became a Hindu sacred site and a royal capital; its seaport, Mahaballipuram, adorned with monumental rock sculpture and
temple carving to popularise the worship of supreme Hindu gods, Siva and
Vishnu. Under the Pallavas, Kanchipuram
became a Hindu pilgrimage site and centre for Sanskrit learning, whose temples
received endowments from dignitaries and gifts from patrons in localities all
across the southern peninsula. On its temple walls, dynastic inscriptions
record the Pallava cosmic genealogy and wars of
imperial expansion that spawned Pandya and Chola regimes farther south. Thus ancient imperial
authority was slowly transformed into numerous independent medieval regimes
across the wide frontiers of late antiquity.