INDIA
A History: From the Earliest Civilisations to the Boom of the Twenty-First Century
JOHN KEAY

COPYRIGHT

HarperPress An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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This updated HarperPress edition published 2010

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2000 Published in paperback by Harper Perennial 2004, reprinted 12 times

Copyright © John Keay 2000 and 2010

Maps and tables by Jillian Luff

John Keay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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DEDICATION

For Tara

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

Charts and Tables

Author’s note to the Second Edition

Introduction

1 The Harappan World: C3000–1700 BC

2 Vedic Values: C1700–900 BC

3 The Epic Age: C900–520 BC

4 Out of the Myth-Smoke: C520–C320 BC

5 Gloria Maurya: C320–200 BC

6 An Age of Paradox: C200 BC–C300 AD

7 Gupta Gold: C300–500 AD

8 Lords of the Universe: C500–700

9 Dharma and Defiance: C700–C900

10 Natraj, the Rule of the Dance: C950–1180

11 The Triumph of the Sultans: C1180–1320

12 Other Indias: 1320–1525

13 The Making of the Mughal Empire: 1500–1605

14 Mughal Pomp, Indian Circumstance: 1605–1682

15 From Taj to Raj: 1682–1750

16 The British Conquest: 1750–1820

17 Pax Britannica: 1820–1880

18 Awake the Nation: 1880–1930

19 At the Stroke of the Midnight Hour: 1930–1948

20 Surgical Procedures: 1948–1965

21 The Spectre of Separatism: 1962–1972

22 ‘Demockery’: 1972–1984

23 Midnight’s Grandchildren: 1984–

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Source Notes

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

MAPS

South Asia – Physical

South Asia Today

The Harappan world C1900 BC

Northern India at the time of the Buddha (C400 BC)

Alexander the Great’s invasion, 327–6 BC

India under Ashoka

The Karakoram route

Peninsular trading stations in the first century AD

Western India C150 AD (with Shatavahana cave-sites)

Gupta conquests

Harsha’s probable empire C640 AD

Chalukyas and Pallavas in the seventh century

India and south-east Asia in the seventh to twelfth centuries

The Arab conquest of Sind in the eighth century

The Kanauj triangle: Rashtrakutas, Palas and Gurjara-Pratiharas

The land of the Shahis C1000 AD

The Ghaznavid empire under Mahmud of Ghazni C1030

The Chola kingdom C1030 and the expeditions of Rajendra I

Avanti/Malwa: the incarnations of a proto-state

Chahamana defeat and Muhammad of Ghor’s conquests 1192–1200

Eastern India C1200

The peninsular incursions of Ala-ud-din and Malik Kafur, 1296–1312

Delhi old and new

The stillborn states: India in the fifteenth century

The campaigns of Babur, Humayun and Sher Shah

The Bahmanid kingdom and its successor sultanates

Expansion of the Mughal empire, 1530–1707

Rajasthan under the Mughals

The Deccan and the south in the reign of Aurangzeb

Successor states of the Mughal empire

European trading stations C1740

The peninsula in the eighteenth century (the Anglo – French and Anglo – Mysore Wars)

The British in Bengal, 1756–65

British India in 1792, after the Third Mysore War;

British India in 1804, after Wellesley’s acquisitions

The Anglo-Maratha Wars 1775–1818

British India in 1820, after the Maratha Wars

British India in 1856, after Dalhousie’s annexations

The north-west in the nineteenth century: British expansion into Panjab, Sind and Afghanistan

Northern India during the Great Rebellion 1857–8

The partition of the Panjab, 1947

CHARTS AND TABLES

The peaks and troughs of dominion

The Mauryas: probable succession 321–181 BC

The imperial Guptas: probable succession

The Chalukyas and the Pallavas: the rival successions

The rise and fall of the Cholas of Tanjore

Avanti/Malwa: the incarnations of a proto-state

The Delhi sultanates. 1: The ‘Slave’ Dynasty, 1206–90

The Delhi sultanates. 2: The Khalji Dynasty, 1290–1320

Muslim conquest to Mughal empire: the dynasties of the Delhi sultanate

The Delhi sultanates. 3: The Tughluq dynasty, 1320–1413

The Great Mughals

Intermarriage of Great Mughals with the family of Itimad-ud-Daula

The Sikh Gurus: the chosen successors of Guru Nanak

The royal house of Shivaji (Bhonsle Chatrapatis)

The later Mughals

Succession of the Peshwas of Pune

British governors-general

British viceroys

Countdown to Independence

The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty

Political Succession in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh 1947–2009

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION

When this book was first published in 2000 I had it in mind to write a sequel that would recount the events of the last fifty years in greater detail than was possible in a 5000-year history of the subcontinent. That project is at last under way. But working on it has made me even more aware of the cursory and selective nature of the final chapters in the first edition of India.

Ten years on, therefore, this new edition endeavours to make amends. As well as some updates and corrections to the original text, it contains an extensively rewritten chapter 19, a replacement chapter 20 and completely new chapters 21, 22 and 23. The narrative has been extended into the twenty-first century and an attempt made to compare the fortunes and explore the fraught relationships of all three of the post-Partition states – Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as India.

To anyone over sixty this will be more current affairs than history. It deals with events and personalities that may be familiar and it invites a more engaged and subjective treatment. Sadly it also lacks the authority that stems from a longer scholarly perspective. Much vital documentation remains unavailable for reasons of confidentiality or national security. Access to Pakistan’s national archive, for instance, is so restricted that most histories of that country rely heavily on such documentation as can be consulted elsewhere, notably in the UK and the USA. Yet over-dependence on the reports and correspondence of foreign diplomats and observers may give a very false impression of decision-making within Pakistan’s ruling establishment. Contemporary history is partial – in every sense. The new chapters at the end of this book are no exception.

I am grateful to Arabella Pike and Martin Redfern for making the new edition possible and to Essie Cousins, Georgia Mason, Peter James and others at HarperCollins for processing it. Many readers were kind enough to comment on the original edition. Though it has not been possible to do justice to all their suggestions, I thank everyone and look forward to more of the same.

John Keay

Argyll

January 2010

INTRODUCTION

HISTORIES OF INDIA often begin with a gripe about the poverty of the available sources. These sources were once thought so inadequate as to make what is certainly one of the world’s longest histories also one of its more patchy. ‘Prior to the thirteenth century AD,’ wrote Professor R.C. Majumdar in the 1950s, ‘we possess no historical text of any kind, much less such a detailed narrative as we possess in the case of Greece, Rome or China.’¹ Majumdar cited the thirteenth century because that was when northern India, succumbing to Muslim rule, attracted the attention of partisan writers keen to chronicle the triumphs of Islam. But given a good four thousand years of earlier pre-Islamic civilisation, it followed that for more than 80 per cent of attestable Indian history there were no histories.

‘It is difficult to give a rational explanation for this deficiency,’ continued Majumdar, ‘but the fact admits of no doubt.’ Rational explanations apart – and there have been many, most supposing an Indian indifference to treating antiquity as an academic discipline – this dearth of ready-made chronicles and memoirs weighed heavily on the historian. It handicapped his reconstruction of past events and hobbled his presentation of them in an acceptable narrative. His gentle readers were forewarned. A rough ride was in prospect.

Happily the situation has improved considerably over the last half-century. No unsuspected ancient chronicles have come to light but much new research has been undertaken and other disciplines have made important contributions. I have therefore stressed in the pages which follow those feats of discovery and deduction, the fortuitous finds and the painstaking analysis, whereby the documentational void has been gradually filled. While spiking the narrative with some lively debate, this explorational approach also has the advantage of mitigating my presumption in venturing, gownless, onto the campus sward. History based on histories looks to be the province of professionals; but where so much of the past, even its chronology, has to be teased from less articulate objects like coins and charters, or pieced together from random inscriptions, titbits of oral tradition, literary compositions and religious texts, and where such researches are then usually consigned to specialist publications and obscure monographs, there surely must be need for an overview.

Reconstructing the past from such reluctant materials can be intensely exciting, but it is not easy. The ingenuity of those scholars who from rocks and runes, bricks and rubrics, have wrested one of the oldest and richest civilisations constitutes something of an epic in itself. It deserved to be told, and in a previous book I had endeavoured to do so in respect of mainly nineteenth-century scholarship.² But this is an ongoing epic of research which is itself part of India’s history. As well as being directly responsible for revealing those distant personalities and events by way of which, like stepping stones, the historical narrative progresses, it also betrays much about the age to which the stepping stones supposedly led. More personally, since what we know has been derived so largely from research and so little from testimony, it seemed perverse not to credit the discoverers while appropriating their discoveries. What follows, therefore, is both a history of India and to some extent a history of Indian history

I liked the idea that the variety of disciplines involved in this work of discovery – archaeology, philology, numismatics, phonetics, art history, etc. – seemed to admit the need for a generalist, and I hoped that the heavy ideological and religious distortions to which the findings have sometimes been subject might be countered by the reticence of a confirmed sceptic. Better still, thirty years of intermittent wandering about the subcontinent, reading about it and writing about it, could now be construed as other than pure indulgence. D.D. Kosambi, the most inspirational of India’s historians, reckoned that for the restoration and interpretation of India’s past the main qualification was a willingness to cover the ground on foot. He called it ‘field work’; and so it is.

The fields which Kosambi mainly quartered, and the inhabitants whom he questioned, belonged to a very small area around Pune (Poona) in Maharashtra. Freer to travel and drawn to more spectacular sites, I wanted to construct a history which took particular account of the country’s extraordinary architectural heritage. Lord Curzon, the most incisive of British India’s Viceroys, hailed India’s antiquities as ‘the greatest galaxy of monuments in the world’. To all but scholars steeped in the glories of Sanskrit literature it is the architectural and sculptural wonders of India which provide the most eloquent testimony to its history. They stimulated its first investigation by foreign antiquarians, and they continue to whet the curiosity of millions of visitors. A history which acknowledged the prominence of India’s buildings and provided a political, economic and ideological context for them looked to be useful.

Monuments also go some way towards compensating for that deficiency of historical texts. Of the Chola kings of Tamil Nadu, for instance, we would be poorly informed but for the great Rajarajeshwara temple, sublimely moored amidst acres of cloistered paving, which they built and maintained in eleventh-century Tanjore. From its inscriptions we learn of the Cholas’ remarkable expeditions and of their lavish endowments; we even gain some insights into the organisation of their kingdom. But equally instructive is the sheer scale of their monument and the grandeur of its conception. Here, clearly, was a dynasty and a kingdom of some significance. To construct and endow India’s largest temple, the Cholas must have commanded resources beyond those of their traditional wet-rice patrimony in the delta of the Kaveri river. In fact, were the temple devoid of inscriptions and were there no other clues as to its provenance, historians would surely have coined a name for its builders and have awarded them a dominion of either trade or conquest.

Buildings and sculptures so magnificent have done more than stimulate history-writing; they have sometimes hijacked it. Political and economic certainties being scarce while artefacts and literature, mostly of a religious nature, are plentiful, Indian history has acquired something of a religio-cultural bias. Whole chapters devoted to the teachings of the Buddha, the mathematical and musical theories of ancient India, or Hindu devotional movements are standard fare in most Indian histories. They are not without interest or relevance, and they conveniently bridge centuries for which the political record is deemed deficient or unbearably repetitive. But it might be hard to justify comparable digressions into, say, Greek drama or scholastic exegesis in a history of Europe.

The implication seems to be that Indian history, indeed India itself, has always been a place apart in which culture and religion often outdid armies and administrations in influencing the course of events. I remain unconvinced. Religious and cultural identities are important; but as a source of political differentiation and conflict they are not much in evidence in pre-Islamic India, were often exaggerated thereafter, and only became paramount during the last decades of British rule. Historically it was Europe, not India, which consistently made religion grounds for war and the state an instrument of persecution.

Whilst paying homage to architecture in particular, this is not, then, a cultural history of India, let alone a history of Indian cults. If it has a bias, it is in favour of chronology, of presenting such information as is available in a moderately consistent time sequence. This might seem rather elementary; but chronology is often a casualty of the interpretative urge which underlies much Indian history-writing. Whole centuries of no obvious distinction are cheerfully concertinaed into oblivion, while their few ascertainable productions are either anticipated in an earlier context or reserved for inclusion under some later heading. If, as many authorities now concede, the Arthasastra of Kautilya, a manual of statecraft by the Indian Machiavelli, was not compiled in the fourth – third centuries BC, then our whole idea of the nature of authority during the great ‘imperial age’ of the Maurya kings (C320–180 BC) needs revision. Likewise if Kalidasa, ‘the Indian Shakespeare’, did not coincide with the next ‘imperial flowering’ – and only circumstantial evidence suggests that he did – then the ‘golden age of the Guptas’ (C320–500 AD) begins to look somewhat tarnished.

Analysis thrives on a synchronism of evidence which, in such cases, is often hypothetical or contrived. Indeed Indian history is altogether perverse when it comes to clustering. A curious feature of that ‘galaxy of monuments’ is that comparatively few are located around major power centres. Nor can many certainly be credited to pan-Indian dynasties like the Mauryas and the Guptas. The exceptions are the newer cities of Delhi and Agra on which Sultans, Mughals and British all lavished their patronage. But at earlier power centres like Pataliputra (at Patna in Bihar) or ‘imperial’ Kanauj (near Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh), tangible evidence of the great empires which their Maurya, Gupta or Vardhana rulers claimed to control is scarce. Instead, for the earliest temples one must travel more ambitiously to Sanchi or Ellora, Kanchi or Badami, places hundreds of kilometres away in central India, the Deccan and the south.

The traditional explanation for this poor correlation between dominion and architectural extravagance held that Muslim iconoclasts demolished whatever temples and palaces adorned the earlier capitals of northern India. This may have been the case, especially with richly endowed religious centres like Varanasi (Benares) and Mathura (Muttra), but the fact remains that those temple clusters which do survive, as also the great palaces and forts of a later date, are attributable not to high-profile and supposedly all-India rulers like the Guptas or Harsha-vardhana but to lesser (because more localised) dynasties and to the merchants and craftsmen who lived under their protection.

These lesser dynasties, which flourished throughout India during the first and much of the second millennium AD, we know mainly from inscriptions. Unfortunately the inscriptions are couched in such oblique language, the claims they advance contain so much repetition and poetic exaggeration, and the kings and dynasties they mention are so numerous and so confusing, that most histories pay them scant attention. With perhaps twenty to forty dynasties co-existing within the subcontinent at any one time, it would be an act of intellectual sado-masochism to insinuate this royal multitude into a tender narrative, and I have not attempted to do so. But trusting to the reader’s indulgence, I have tried to convey the flavour of their inscriptions and to isolate those dynasts whose claims on our attention are substantiated by other sources or by still gloriously extant memorials.

Without some treatment of this long dynastic fray, gaping holes appear in the record. Compression and selection are the historian’s prerogative, but it is not self-evident, as per several current histories of India, that remote centuries may be ignored because ‘recency has a decided priority’.³ My own experience as an intermittent correspondent and political analyst suggests exactly the opposite. Since most of today’s headlines will be on tomorrow’s midden, ‘recency’ is a deceptive commodity which the historian might do well to approach with caution. In this book, far from sharpening the focus as history blends into the foreground of current affairs, I have intentionally blurred it. Affairs still current are affairs still unresolved.

In contriving maximum resolution for the present, there is also a danger of losing focus on the past. A history which reserves half its narrative for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may seem more relevant, but it can scarcely do justice to India’s extraordinary antiquity. Nor, simply because the British and post-colonial periods are better documented and more familiar, are they more instructive. There lurks in contemporary-centrism an arrogance no less objectionable than that in Euro-centrism, Occidento-centrism or Christo-centrism. To my mind such selective editing diminishes history. In pillaging the past for fashionable perspectives on the present we deny the delightful inconsequence, the freak occurrences and the human eccentricities which enliven what is otherwise a somewhat sombre record. Honest dealing with the time-scale, as with the spatial environment, is not without its rewards.

If time is the locomotion of history, place could be the gradient against which it is pitted. Dynamic, the one hurtles forward; inert, the other holds it back. Not for nothing are unspoilt landscapes invariably billed as ‘timeless’. Boarding at random an overnight train, and awaking twelve hours later to a cup of sweet brown tea and a dawn of dun-grey fields, the traveller – even the Indian traveller – may have difficulty in immediately identifying his whereabouts. India’s countryside is surprisingly uniform. It is also mostly flat. A distant hill serves only to emphasise its flatness. Distinctive features are lacking; the same mauve-flowered convolvulus straggles shamelessly on trackside wasteland and the same sleek drongos – long-tailed blackbirds – festoon the telegraph wires like a musical annotation. It could be Bihar or it could be Karnataka, equally it could be Bengal or Gujarat. Major continental gradations, like west Africa’s strata of Sahara, sahel and forest or the North American progression from plains to deserts to mountain divide, do not apply. The subcontinent looks all of a muchness.

THE PEAKS AND TROUGHS OF DOMINION

There are, of course, exceptions; in India there are always exceptions, mostly big ones. The Himalayas, the most prominent feature on the face of the earth, grandly shield the subcontinent from the rest of Asia; likewise the Western Ghats form a long and craggy rampart against the Arabian Sea. Both are very much part of India, the Himalayas as the abode of its gods, the Ghats as the homeland of the martial Marathas, and both as the source of most of India’s rivers. But it is as if these ranges have been pushed to the side, marginalised and then regimented like the plunging V of the south Asian coastline, so as to clear, define and contain the vast internal arena on which Indian history has been staged.

An instructive comparison might be with one of Eurasia’s other subcontinents – like Europe. Europe minus the erstwhile Soviet Union comprises about the same area as the Indian subcontinent (over four million square kilometres). But uniform and homogeneous it is not. Mountain chains like the Alps and the Pyrenees, plus a heavily indented coastline and a half-submerged continental shelf, partition the landmass into a tangle of semi-detached peninsulas (Iberia, Scandinavia), offshore islands (Britain, Ireland) and mountain enclaves (Switzerland, Scotland). The geographical configuration favours separation, isolation and regional identity. Corralled into such natural compartments, tribes could become nations and nations become states, confident of their territorial distinction.

A diagrammatic chronology for the major dynasties giving approximate indication of their territorial reach

But if for Europe geography decreed fragmentation, for India it intended integrity. Here were no readily defensible peninsulas, no snowy barriers to internal communication and few waterways which were not readily crossable for much of the year. The forests, once much more widespread than today, were mostly of dry woodland which afforded, besides shelter and sanctuary to reclusive tribes and assorted renunciates, a larder of exotic products (game, honey, timbers, resins) for the plains dwellers. Only in some peripheral regions like Kerala and Assam did this sylvan canopy become compacted into impenetrable rainforest. Wetlands also were once much more extensive. In what are now Bangladesh and Indian West Bengal, the Ganga (Ganges) and the Brahmaputra rivers enmesh to filter seawards in a maze of channels which forms the world’s most extensive delta. Semi-submerged as well as densely wooded, most of Bengal made a late entry onto the stage of history. But wetlands, too, supplied a variety of desirable products, and during the dry summer months they contracted dramatically. Different ecological zones complemented one another, encouraging symbiosis and exchange. Nomads and graziers, seers and pilgrims, traders and troops might pass freely across the face of such a congenial land. It seemed ready-made for integration and empire.

Climate decided otherwise. ‘India is an amalgam of areas, and also of disparate experiences, which never quite succeeded in forming a single whole;’⁴ only the British, according to Fernand Braudel, ever ruled the entire subcontinent; integration proved elusive because the landmass was too large and the population too numerous and diverse. But surprisingly, considering Braudel’s emphasis on environments, he ignores a more obvious explanation. Settlement was not uniform and integration not easily achieved because what geography had so obligingly joined together, hydrography put asunder.

India enjoys tropical temperatures, yet during most of the year over most of the country there is no rain. Growth therefore depends on short seasonal precipitations, as epitomised by the south-west monsoon which sweeps unevenly across nearly the whole country between June and September. The pattern of rainfall, and the extent to which particular landscapes can benefit from it by slowing and conserving its run-off, were the decisive factors in determining patterns of settlement. Where water was readily available for longest, there agriculture could prosper, populations grow, and societies develop. Where not, stubby fingers of scrub, broad belts of desert and bulging plateaux of rock obtruded, cutting off the favoured areas of settlement one from the other.

Like lakes, long rivers with little fall, especially if their flood is prolonged by snow-melt as with the Ganga and the Indus, serve the purpose of conserving water well. Much of northern India relies on its rivers, although the lands they best serve, as also their braided courses and even their number, have changed over the centuries. Depending on one’s chosen date, Indian history begins somewhere on the banks of north India’s litany of great rivers – either along the lower Indus or amongst the ‘five rivers’ (panj-ab, hence Panjab, or Punjab) which are its tributaries, or in the ‘two rivers’ (do-ab, hence Doab) region between the Jamuna (Jumna) and the Ganga, or along the middle Ganga in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

North India’s mighty river systems ordained much the most extensive of these well-watered zones of agricultural settlement; and though these zones were several, in the course of the first millennium BC they tended to become contiguous, thus creating a corridor of patchy cultivation and settlement from the north-west in what is now Pakistan to Bihar in the east. Here commercial exchange, cultural uniformity and political rivalry got off to an early start. The corridor became a broad swathe of competing states, cherishing similar ideals, revering common traditions and inviting claims of paramountcy. For empire-builders like the Mauryas, Guptas and Vardhanas, this was where the idea of Indian dominion began.

Elsewhere surface reservoirs supplemented rivers as a useful means of water conservation if the terrain permitted. In the deep south, weeks after Tamil Nadu’s November rains have ceased, what looks from the air like chronic flooding proves to be a cunningly designed patchwork of fields with their sides so embanked as to form reservoirs, or ‘tanks’. When, after carefully managed use and the inevitable evaporation, the water is nearly exhausted, the tank can itself be planted with a late rice crop. Since the peninsula lacks the vast alluvial plains of the north and has to accommodate hills like the Western Ghats, zones favourable to agricultural settlement were here smaller although numerous and, in cases like the Kerala coast, exceptionally well watered.

In other regions geology did its best for moisture conservation by trapping water underground. From wells it could then be laboriously hauled to the surface for limited irrigation. For the intervening zones of greatest aridity, this sub-surface water was the only source available during most of the year. And since about half the subcontinent receives less than eighty centimetres of rain per year, these arid zones were large. By supposing a continuity between the western deserts of Sind/Rajasthan and the drier parts of central India plus the great Deccan plateau of the peninsula, a broad north – south divide has sometimes been inferred. In fact the terminology here is too vague (even the Deccan is more a designation of convenience than a natural feature). Moreover, considerable rivers traverse this divide: the Chambal and Betwa, tributaries of the Jamuna, afford north – south corridors between the Gangetic plain and the peninsula. And slicing across the waist of India, the west-flowing Narmada forms a much more obvious north – south divide; indeed it figures historically as something of an Indian Rubicon between the north and the peninsula. Micro-zones with excellent water conservation also dot both Rajasthan and the Deccan; in historical times they would sustain a succession of the most formidable dynasties.

As with the forests and wetlands, the dry-lands were not without their own sparser populations, typically herdsmen and warriors. As barriers, dry regions are hardly as formidable as the seas and mountains of Europe. But as boundaries and frontier zones they did have something of the same effect, encouraging separation, fostering distinction and, in time, confronting ambitious rulers with the great Indian paradox of a land that invited dominion full of lesser rulers who felt bound to resist it.

The socio-cultural dimension to this climate-induced paradox would be even more enduring. Indeed it largely accounts for the strength of ‘regional’ sentiment in the subcontinent today. In those favoured, because well-watered, zones where settlement became concentrated, surplus agricultural production encouraged the development of non-agricultural activities. Archaeologists are alerted to this process by the distribution of more standardised implements, weapons and styles of pottery. These things also help in the identification of the favoured areas – most notably, and at different times, that great trail across the north from the Indus to the Gangetic basin, plus Gujarat, Malwa and the Orissan littoral in mid-India. In the south a similar diversification is inferred, although here the archaeological display-case remains somewhat empty. Save for a few Stone Age productions, south India’s history has to wait until jump-started by a remarkable literary outpouring at the very end of the first millennium BC.

As crafts and trades prospered, specialisation encouraged congregation, and congregation urbanisation. Within the same favoured enclaves, ideological conformity, social stratification and political formation followed. The models for each – for an effective religion, a harmonious society and a legitimate state – married local elements and imperatives with a set of norms derived from the propagandised traditions of an Indo-Aryan people who had emerged in north India by 1000 BC. These Indo-Aryans were probably outsiders and, as well as a strong sense of community centred on elaborate rites of sacrifice, they possessed in the Sanskrit language an exceptionally versatile and persuasive medium of communication. Had India been as open and uniform a land as geography suggests, no doubt Sanskrit and its speakers would speedily have prevailed. They did do so over much of north India, but not speedily and not without compromise. Further afield, in west, east and central India and the Deccan, the process somewhat misleadingly known as ‘Aryanisation’ took even longer and involved so much compromise with local elements that hybridisation seems a fairer description. From it emerged most of the different languages and different social conformations which, heightened by different historical experiences, have given India its regional diversity, and which still distinguish the Bengali from the Gujarati or the Panjabi from the Maratha.

The pantheon of spirits and deities worshipped in each zone, or region, typified this process of hybridisation, with Indo-Aryan gods forsaking their original personae to accommodate a host of local cults. Thus did Lord Vishnu acquire his long list of avatars or ‘incarnations’. In parts of India this process of divine hybridisation is still continuing. Every year each village in the vicinity of Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu commissions from the local potter a large terracotta horse for the use of Lord Ayanar. Astride his splendid new mount, Ayanar will ride the village bounds at night, protecting the crops and warding off smallpox. But who is this Ayanar? None other than Lord Shiva, they tell you. The pan-Indian Shiva, himself an amalgam of various cults, looks to be only now in the process of usurping the Tamil Lord Ayanar. But it could be the other way round. To the people of Pudukottai it is Ayanar who is assuming the attributes of Shiva.

As with gods, so with the different languages spoken in India’s zonal regions. In its earliest form Marathi, the language now mainly spoken in Maharashtra, betrayed Dravidian as well as Sanskrit features. At some point a local form of early Dravidian, a language family now represented only in the south, is thought to have been overlain by the more prestigious and universal Sanskrit. But the precedence as between local indigenous elements and Sanskritic or Aryan influences is not clear. Did Sanskrit speakers domiciled in Maharashtra slowly absorb proto-Dravidian inflexions? Or was that too the other way round?

A more clear-cut example of Aryanisation/Sanskritisation is provided by the many attempts to replicate the topography featured in the Sanskrit epics. By word of mouth core elements of the Mahabharata and Ramayana had early penetrated to most of India. By the late centuries of the first millennium BC, even deep in the Tamil south they knew of the Pandava heroes who had fought the great Bharata war for hegemony in the Ganga-Jamuna Doab and of Rama and Lakshmana’s expedition from Ayodhya to rescue the Lady Sita. Clearly these stories had a universal appeal, and in a trail of still recognisable place-names their hallowed topography was faithfully adopted by far-flung rulers anxious to garner prestige. The trail of ‘Ayodhyas’, ‘Mathuras’, ‘Kosalas’, ‘Kambojas’ and so on would stretch way beyond India itself, most notably into areas of Indian influence in south-east Asia. And like that hybridisation of deities, it continues. In Karnataka a Kannada writer complained to me that, despite the best efforts of the state government in Bangalore to promote the Kannada language, villagers still persisted in Sanskritising the names of their villages in a bid for greater respectability, then lobbying the Post Office to recognise the change.

As well as renaming local sites and features, some kings actually tried to refashion them in accordance with the idealised models and layouts of Sanskrit literary tradition. The Rashtrakuta rulers of eighth- to tenth-century Maharashtra evidently conceived their sculpted temple-colossus at Ellora as a replica of the Himalayas. It was named for Shiva as Lord of Mount Kailas (a peak now in Tibet) and was provided with a complement of Himalayan rivers in the form of voluptuous river deities like the Ladies Ganga and Jamuna. In a bid to appropriate the same sacred geography the great Cholas went one better, and actually hauled quantities of water all the way from the Ganga, a good two thousand kilometres distant, to fill their temple tanks and waterways around Tanjore. Thus was authenticated their claim to have recreated the north Indian ‘holy land’ in the heart of Tamil Nadu.

Geography, like history, was seen as something which might be made to repeat itself. In tableaux like that of the Taj Mahal the Mughal emperors strove to realise the Islamic ideal of a paradise composed of scented verdure, running water and white marble. Later, in leafy hill-stations, the British aimed at recreating their own idealised environment of green gables and lych-gated churchyards connected by perilous pathways and fuchsia hedges; new names like ‘Annandale’ and ‘Wellington’ were added to the map; existing nomenclatures were bowdlerised and anglicised.

Now they are being vernacularised. This is a confusing time for both visitors to India and those who write about it. With the process of revision far from complete, the chances of finding spellings and appellations which are recognisable and acceptable to all are slim. At the risk of offending some, I have continued to call Mumbai ‘Bombay’, Kolkota ‘Calcutta’ and Chennai ‘Madras’; to non-Indians these names are still the more familiar. On the other hand I have adopted several spellings – for instance ‘Pune’ for Poona, ‘Awadh’ for Oudh, ‘Ganga’ for Ganges, ‘Panjab’ for Punjab – which may not be familiar to non-Indians; they are, however, in general use in India and have become standard in South Asian studies.

For anyone ignorant of both Sanskrit and Persian, transliteration poses another major problem. Again, I lay no claim to consistency. For the most part I have kept the terminal ‘a’ of many Sanskrit words (Rama for Ram, Ramayana for Ramayan, etc.) and used ‘ch’ for ‘c’ (as in Chola) and ‘sh’ for most of the many Sanskrit ‘s’s (Vishnu for Visnu, Shiva for Siva, Shatavahana and Shaka for Satavahana and Saka). The knowledgeable reader will doubtless find many lapses for which the author, not the typesetter, is almost certainly responsible – as indeed he is for all the errors and omissions, the generalisations and over-simplifications, to which five thousand years of tumultuous history is liable.

1 The Harappan World C3000–1700 BC
THE BREAKING OF THE WATERS

IN HINDU TRADITION, as in Jewish and Christian tradition, history of a manageable antiquity is sometimes said to start with the Flood. Flushing away the obscurities of an old order, the Flood serves a universal purpose in that it establishes its sole survivor as the founder of a new and homogeneous society in which all share descent from a common ancestor. A new beginning is signalled; a lot of begetting follows.

In the Bible the Flood is the result of divine displeasure. Enraged by man’s disobedience and wickedness, God decides to cancel his noblest creation; only the righteous Noah and his dependants are deemed worthy of survival and so of giving mankind a second chance. Very different, on the face of it, is the Indian deluge. According to the earliest of several accounts, the Flood which afflicted India’s people was a natural occurrence. Manu, Noah’s equivalent, survived it thanks to a simple act of kindness. And, amazingly for a society that worshipped gods of wind and storm, no deity receives a mention.

When Manu was washing his hands one morning, a small fish came into his hands along with the water. The fish begged protection from Manu saying ‘Rear me. I will save thee.’ The reason stated was that the small fish was liable to be devoured by the larger ones, and it required protection till it grew up. It asked to be kept in a jar, and later on, when it outgrew that, in a pond, and finally in the sea. Manu acted accordingly.

[One day] the fish forewarned Manu of a forthcoming flood, and advised him to prepare a ship and enter into it when the flood came. The flood began to rise at the appointed hour, and Manu entered the ship. The fish then swam up to him, and he tied the rope of the ship to its horn [perhaps it was a swordfish], and thus passed swiftly to the yonder northern mountain. There Manu was directed to ascend the mountain after fastening the ship to a tree, and to disembark only after the water had subsided.

Accordingly he gradually descended, and hence the slope of the northern mountain is called Manoravataranam, or Manu’s descent. The waters swept away all the three heavens, and Manu alone was saved.¹

Such is the earliest version of the Flood as recorded in the Satapatha Brahmana, one of several wordy appendices to the sacred hymns known as the Vedas which are themselves amongst the oldest religious compositions in the world. Couched in the classical language of Sanskrit, some of the Vedas date from before the first millennium BC. Together with later works like the Brahmanas, plus the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, they comprise a glorious literary heritage whence all knowledge of India’s history prior to C500 BC has traditionally been derived.

Brief and to the point, the story of Manu and the Flood served its purpose of introducing a new progenitor of the human race and, incidentally, explaining the name of a mountain. Such, however, was too modest an interpretation for later generations. Myth, the smoke of history, is seen to signal new and more relevant meanings when espied from the distance of later millennia. In time the predicament of the small fish liable to be devoured by larger fish became a Sanskrit metaphor for an anarchic state of affairs (matsya-nyaya) equivalent to ‘the law of the jungle’ in English. Manu’s flood, like Noah’s, came to be seen as the means of putting a stop to this chaos. And who better to orchestrate matters and so save mankind than Lord Vishnu? A minor deity when the Vedas were composed, Vishnu had since soared to prominence as the great preserver of the world in the Hindu pantheon and the second member of its trinity. Thus, in due course, the Flood became a symbol of order-out-of-chaos through divine intervention, and the fish (matsya) came to be recognised as the first of the nine incarnations (avatara) of Lord Vishnu. Myth, howsoever remote, serves the needs of the moment. So does history, in India as elsewhere.

Some historians have dated the Flood very precisely to 3102 BC, this being the year when, by elaborate computation, they conclude that our current era, the Kali Yug in Indian cosmology, began and when Manu became the progenitor of a new people as well as their first great king and law-giver. It is also the first credible date in India’s history and, being one of such improbable exactitude, it deserves respect.

Other historians, while conceding the importance of 3102 BC, have declared it to be not the date of the Flood but of the great Bharata war. A Trojan-style conflict fought in the vicinity of Delhi, the war involved both gods and men and was immortalised in the Sanskrit verse epic known as the Mahabharata, the composition of whose roughly 100,000 stanzas constituted something of an epic in itself. This war, not the flood, was the event that marked the beginning of our present era and must, it is argued, therefore belong to the year 3102 BC. Complex astronomical calculations are deployed in support of this dating, and an inscription carved on a stone temple at Aihole in the south Indian state of Karnataka is said to confirm it.

But the Aihole memorialist, endowing his temple 1600 kilometres from Delhi and nearly four thousand years later, may have got it wrong. According to the genealogical listings in the Puranas, a later collection of ‘ancient legends’, ninety-five generations passed away between the Flood and the war; other evidence based on sterner, more recent, scholarship agrees that the war was much later than the fourth millennium BC. This greatest single event in India’s ancient history, and the inspiration for the world’s longest poem, did not occur until ‘C1400 BC’ according to the History and Culture of the Indian People, a standard work of many volumes commissioned in the 1950s to celebrate India’s liberation from foreign rule and foreign scholarship.

Nevertheless, 3102 BC sticks in the historical gullet. Such are the dismal uncertainties of early Indian chronology that no slip of the chisel is going to deny the historian the luxury of a real date. Corroboration of the idea that it may, after all, apply to a Flood has since come from the excavations in distant Iraq of one of Mesopotamia’s ancient civilisations. There too archaeologists have found evidence of an appalling inundation. It submerged the Sumerian city of Shuruppak, and has been dated with some confidence to the late fourth millennium BC. In fact, 3102 BC would suit it very well.

This Sumerian inundation, and the local Genesis story in the Epic of Gilgamesh which probably derived from it, is taken to be the origin of the legend of the Flood which eventually found its way into Jewish and Christian tradition. Yet in many respects the Sumerian account is more closely echoed in the Indian version than in the Semitic. For instance, just as in later Hindu tradition Manu’s fish becomes an incarnation of the great god Vishnu, so the Sumerian deity responsible for saving mankind is often represented in the form of a fish. ‘It is the agreement in details which is so striking,’ according to Romila Thapar.² The details argue strongly for some common source for this most popular of Genesis myths, and scholars like Thapar, ever ready to expose cultural plagiarism, see both Manu and Noah as relocated manifestations of a Sumerian prototype.

The tendency to synchronise and subordinate things Indian to parallel events and achievements in the history of countries to the west of India is a recurrent theme in Indian historiography and has rightly incurred the wrath of some Indian historians. So much so that they sometimes go to the other extreme of denying that any creative impetus, any technological invention, even any stylistic convention, ever reached India from the west – or, indeed, the West. And in the case of the Flood they may have a point. Subject to the annual deluge of the monsoon and living for the most part on the flat alluvial plains created by notoriously errant river systems, the people of north India have always had far more experience of floods, and far more reason to fear them, than their neighbours in the typically more arid lands of western Asia.

Floods, though now associated more with the eastern seaboard of the Indian subcontinent and Bangladesh, still annually inundate vast areas of the Ganga and Indus basins. They have always done so. One such Gangetic flood, dated by archaeologists to about 800 BC, destroyed the town of Hastinapura which, after the great Bharata war, had become the capital of the descendants of Arjuna, one of the war’s main protagonists. Since the flooding of Hastinapura is also recorded in Sanskrit textual tradition, and since the same tradition says that the town was then under its seventh ruler since the war, an approximate date for the war itself of about 975 BC has been postulated.

Thus, for the titanic struggle recorded in the Mahabharata, we already have three dates: 3102 BC, C1400 BC and C950 BC. A couple of millennia one way or the other is a long time even in prehistoric terms. India’s history, though undoubtedly ancient, leaves much room for manoeuvre. A mistranslated word from one of the many voluminous, difficult and defective texts wherein, long after their composition, the Vedic verses were eventually written down, can create havoc. Similarly a chance discovery of no obvious provenance can prompt major revisions.

Another flood, later than the Sumerian one but much earlier than that at Hastinapura and so perhaps a serious contender for the one which Manu survived, is thought by some to have once inundated the plains of the lower Indus in what is now Pakistan. Geologists date it to some time soon after 2000 BC, and believe that it may in fact have been a succession of inundations. Whether they were the result of climate change, of tectonic action lower down the river resulting in damming and the formation of inland lakes, or simply the cumulative effect of annual siltation is not clear. But whatever the cause, the floods were bad news for those agriculturalists who had pioneered a highly productive economy based on growing cereals in the fine soil alongside the river. Managing the river’s seasonal rise so as to enrich and irrigate their fields was the key to their success. An annual surplus had generated wealth, encouraged craft industries and fostered trade. Settlements had become cities. Along the lower Indus and its tributaries had grown up one of the world’s first urban societies, a contemporary of those on the Nile and the Euphrates and a rival for the tag of ‘the cradle of civilisation’.

Then, soon after 2000 BC according to the archaeologists, came the floods. If they did not actually overwhelm this precocious civilisation, they certainly obliterated it. In time, layer after layer of Indus mud, possibly wind-blown as well as water-borne, choked the streets, rotted the timbers, and piled high above the rooftops. The ground level rose by ten metres and the water table followed it. Meanwhile the river resumed its regular flow and found new channels down which to flood. On top of the cities, now consigned to oblivion beneath tons of alluvium, other peoples grazed their goats, sowed their seeds and spun their myths. A great civilisation was lost to memory.

Not until nearly four thousand years later, in fact in the early 1920s, was its existence even suspected. It was pure chance that Indian and British archaeologists, while investigating later more visible ruins at Mohenjo-daro in Sind and at Harappa in the Panjab, made the prehistoric discovery of the twentieth century. They called their find the ‘Indus valley civilisation’, and drew the obvious comparisons with those of Egypt and Sumeria. Indeed they thought that it might be an offshoot of the latter. Later, as its sophisticated and surprisingly uniform culture became more apparent, the Indus valley civilisation was accorded distinct status. And when the extent of its cultural reach was found to embrace a host of other sites, many of them well beyond the valley of the Indus, it was renamed after one of these sites as the Harappan civilisation.

Suddenly India’s history had acquired a rich prehistoric pedigree of archaeologically verifiable antiquity. Here, it seemed, was a worthy companion to that Sanskrit literary heritage of equally impressive, though maddeningly uncertain, antiquity as comprised by the Vedas and associated texts – the Brahmanas and Puranas as well as epics such as the Mahabharata. Perhaps these two very different sources, the one purely archaeological and the other purely literary, would complement one another. An ancient and immensely distinguished civilisation would thus be revealed in multidimensional detail.

The Harappan finds included buildings, tools, artefacts, jewellery and some sculpture. Intimate details about Harappan housing, diet, dentistry and waste disposal came to light. Maritime trade with Sumeria was attested and led to some cross-dating. The Carbon 14 process produced comparative dates accurate to plus or minus a century or so. Amongst the Harappans there was even what looked like a system of writing: some four hundred characters were identified, each, it was deduced, representing a single word; and they read from right to left. Sanskritists were soon clear that this was not Sanskrit, the language of the Vedic heritage. But it might be some kind of proto-Dravidian, the parent of south India’s languages, while the script did suggest similarities with Brahmi, the earliest Indian script hitherto identified and read. It seemed only a matter of painstaking study before the Harappan language would be understood and the secrets of its civilisation revealed.

Unfortunately this script, despite the best endeavours of international scholarship and despite the code-cracking potential of computers, remains undeciphered. Totally lacking, therefore, is any intelligible record of the Harappans written by themselves. Who were they? What did they worship? Had they established a recognisable state or states? They tell us nothing. How did they come to be there? And what became of them in the end? We don’t know. Here was history complete with approximate dates, cities, industries and arts, but absolutely no recorded events. Here too was a society with a distinct and extensive culture but, barring some not very helpful bones, no people, indeed without a single name.

Names, on the other hand, were precisely what that Sanskrit literary tradition of the Vedas provided – in mind-boggling abundance. Kings and heroes, gods and demons, places and peoples, tumble from the Vedas, Brahmanas, Puranas and epics as if ready-made for the compilation of a historical index. Although no single site, no potsherd or artefact, can certainly be identified with the people who composed these verses, and although their chronology remains shrouded in that maddening uncertainty, we know that they called themselves arya – hence ‘Aryan’ – and we know of their lifestyle, their social organisation, their beliefs and their innumerable antecedents and descendants. Here, in short, was a people proudly obsessed with the past, who defined themselves in terms of lineages reaching back through the generations to Manu, and whose records might therefore provide for the enigmatic Harappan civilisation precisely the human detail that it so notably lacked.

Would that it were so. In fact, as will be seen, though the two civilisations – the Harappan and the Aryan – overlapped in geography and possibly also in chronology, no shred of coincidence certainly connects them. India’s history starts with the apparently irreconcilable. Only in the last few years have sustainable connections between its Harappan and Aryan constituents been tentatively proposed. These connections, though tantalising, remain few and far from conclusive. India’s history as currently understood must be seen as beginning with two woefully unconnected cultures.

This state of affairs may, however, serve as a warning. Despite the pick-and-preach approach of many nationalist historians, geographical India is not now, and never has been, a single politico-cultural entity. In fact, its current three-way division between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, far from denying some intrinsic unity, is a notable simplification of its traditional plurality. Analogies should be drawn, if at all, not with Egypt or with Greece but with regional constructs of a similar size like the Middle East or Europe. And just as in the Middle East those early civilisations in Egypt and Mesopotamia flourished simultaneously yet quite independently, or just as later in Europe the Byzantine and Carolingian empires could both claim pre-eminence without necessarily coming into conflict, so it is in India.

Sadly, though, this is not a situation which makes for fluent narrative history. In a global landmass as vast and varied as the South Asian subcontinent an orderly linear progression from one cultural flowering to another, one dynasty to another, or one empire-builder to another will prove elusive. Only a still far from certain chronology, and not any sequential progression, demands that the Harappans and their archaeology take precedence ahead of the Aryans and their literature.

A VERITABLE EMPIRE

To anyone familiar with the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the warren of dun diggings which is an excavated Harappan site may seem unimpressive. It is hard not to sympathise with the first archaeologist to survey Mohenjo-daro. ‘I was greatly disappointed,’ wrote Mr D.R. Bhandarkar in his report. He was visiting the largely desert province of Sind in the winter of 1911–12 as Superintending Archaeologist of the Western Circle of the Archaeological Survey of India. ‘Mohenjo-daro’, he noted, meant ‘the Mound of the Dead Men’. There was one big mound and six smaller ones. And in words that must subsequently have haunted him, the Superintending Archaeologist dismissed the lot as ‘not representing the remains of … any ancient monument’.

According to local tradition, these are the ruins of a town only two hundred years old … This seems not incorrect, because the bricks here found are of the modern type, and there is a total lack of carved terra-cottas amidst the whole ruins.³

Wrong in every detail, this statement must rank amongst archaeology’s greatest gaffes.

Today’s less qualified visitors, though willing to forgive the absence of ‘carved terra-cottas’, tend to bemoan that of more obvious features. For at Mohenjo-daro no pyramids or ziggurats, no sculpted towers or mighty henges frown over the deep and dusty thoroughfares. On first acquaintance it is as if the most extensive of the Harappan sites was never really a city at all, merely the footings and foundations of one.

This, though, is decidedly not the case. Deep in ‘the Mound of the Dead Men’ there was once activity and industry. Behind the extant façades of blank featureless wall families lived, craftsmen plied their trades and vendors sold their wares. If there was an absence of eye-catching memorials it was not, as will appear, through any lack of civic pride or direction. It may tell us something about the nature of authority in the Harappan state and the organisation of its society; more certainly it indicates the limited materials available to the city’s builders.

Four thousand years ago stone was as scarce in the lower Indus region as it is today. Even the local timber, though more plentiful than now, and possibly able to meet the need for roof joists, seems not to have been sufficiently well-grown for major construction purposes. Instead, it was used as fuel to fire brick kilns. The Harappans built almost entirely in brick, both sun-baked and kiln-fired, and the excellence of their firing is well attested by the survival, albeit underground, of so many structures in such a comparatively friable material. In assuming their bricks to be ‘of a modern type’, Bhandarkar was unwittingly paying the Harappan brickmakers a generous compliment.

Brickwork, however, has its limitations, as the Harappans were no doubt aware. Large areas can be easily enclosed and conveniently partitioned; groundplans of some of the Mohenjo-daro houses compare favourably with those of today, while larger individual structures, presumably public buildings, cover areas equivalent to half a football pitch; some walls, obviously for defence, are as thick as thirteen metres. On the other hand bricks, unlike dressed stone, must be kept small for good firing and are therefore less suitable for towering elevations and long-lasting monuments. Sun, salt and wind play havoc with a mortar of mud; weight stresses cause bowing and buckling. Few if any buildings at Mohenjo-daro were of more than two storeys. Even supposing the Harappans had aspired to the monumental extravagances of their Egyptian contemporaries, it is hard to see how they could have achieved them.

Of unremarkable profile, then, the mud-and-rubble mounds of the Harappan cities and settlements nevertheless made an impression on Bhandarkar’s successors in the Archaeological Survey. Happily ignoring his report, R.D. Banerji and Sir John Marshall resumed explorations at Mohenjo-daro in the late 1920s. Ernest Mackay and Sir Mortimer Wheeler continued their work and also re-examined Harappa, a collection of mounds in the Panjab whence in the nineteenth century bricks similar to those at Mohenjo-daro had been removed by the wagonload as ballast for a 160-kilometre section of the Lahore – Multan railway line. After Independence and the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947 B.B. Lal, J.P. Joshi, S.R. Rao, M. Rafique Mughal and a host of others extended operations to numerous other sites with outstanding results. What amazed all these pioneers, and what remains the distinctive characteristic of the several hundred Harappan sites now known, is their apparent similarity: ‘Our overwhelming impression is of cultural uniformity, both throughout the several centuries during which the Harappan civilisation flourished, and over the vast area it occupied.’⁴

The ubiquitous bricks, for instance, are all of standardised dimensions, just as the stone cubes used by the Harappans to measure weights are also standard and based on a modular system. Road widths conform to a similar module; thus streets are typically twice the width of side lanes, while the main arteries are twice or one and a half times the width of streets. Most of the streets so far excavated are straight and run either north – south or east – west. City plans therefore conform to a regular grid pattern and appear to have retained this layout through several phases of rebuilding. In most cases the ground plan consists of two quite separate settlements, one apparently residential and commercial (‘the lower town’), and the other elevated on a massive brick platform (‘the citadel’) and endowed with more ambitious structures. ‘The citadel’ invariably lay to the west of ‘the lower town’. Clearly Harappan settlements were not just India’s first cities and townships but its first, indeed the world’s first, planned cities and townships. Town-planning not being conspicuous in the subcontinent’s subsequent urban development, they have been hailed as the only such examples until, in the eighteenth century AD, Maharajah Jai Singh decided to lay out his ‘pink city’ of Jaipur in Rajasthan.

Harappan tools, utensils and materials confirm this impression of obsessive uniformity. Unfamiliar with iron – which was nowhere known in the third millennium BC – the Harappans sliced, scraped, bevelled and bored with ‘effortless competence’ using a standardised kit of tools made from chert, a kind of quartz, or from copper and bronze. These last, along with gold and silver, were the only metals available. They were also used for casting vessels and statuettes and for fashioning a variety of knives, fish-hooks, arrowheads, saws, chisels, sickles, pins and bangles. As for the potters’ production of dishes, bowls, jars, flasks and figurines, it was all that one would expect of master brickmakers – well made, competent if restrained as to decoration, and predictably uniform as to design. In short, the uniformity in technology ‘is as strong as in the town-planning, and so marked that it is possible to typify each craft with a single set of examples drawn from one site alone’.⁵

What made all this consistency even more remarkable was the area throughout which the Harappans sustained it. With Mohenjo-daro and Harappa nearly six hundred kilometres apart, it was immediately obvious that the ‘Indus valley’ civilisation was more extensive than its contemporaries – Egypt’s Old Kingdom and Mesopotamia’s Sumeria. The Indus valley, however, has proved to be only the core area. Subsequent to the discovery of its two principal sites (Mohenjo-daro in Sind and Harappa in the Panjab) the Harappan civilisation has been steadily expanding by more than a province a decade. In Pakistan further sites have been found, not only in Sind and Panjab (where at Fort Derawar on the desert frontier with India a third major city stood), but as far away as the Iranian frontier in Baluchistan and in the North-West Frontier Province. India itself, not to be outdone, now boasts an important cluster of sites in Gujarat, another in Rajasthan, and more scattered settlements in the states of Panjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir. Subsequently, hundreds of kilometres away to the north-west, what seems to be a Harappan settlement, or ‘colony’, was identified at Shortughai near the river Oxus (Amu Darya) on Afghanistan’s Russian frontier. From Lothal, a small but important settlement in Gujarat which may have been a port, to Shortughai in the mountains of Badakshan, where the Harappans probably obtained supplies of lapis lazuli, is a distance of over sixteen hundred kilometres; and east – west from Alamgirpur on the upper Ganga to Sutkagen-dor on the Makran coast is hardly less.

Naturally such a bonanza of new sites has prompted some revisionism. The uniformity of Harappan culture, necessarily dented by local adaptations to the desert, upland and maritime extremities of such a vast area, is no longer taken for granted. Theories based upon it about the existence of a strong central authority, a pervasive administration and a heavily regulated and stratified society have also suffered. The easy assumptions made on the basis of a few partially and imperfectly excavated sites are dubbed ‘old platitudes’ as a new generation of scholars and field workers gingerly sifts the incontrovertible from the fanciful.

One mystery has certainly been solved. Pioneers like Marshall were puzzled how such a sophisticated culture could have sprung up from nowhere. Unaware of any other Bronze Age cultures in the region, not impressed by the Indian characteristics of Harappan architecture and artefacts, and wrongly assuming dates of about 3500–3000 BC, they duly looked to the west for an explanation, and suggested that the Indus valley civilisation must be a colony or offshoot of Mesopotamian or even Mycenaean civilisation. This idea is now quite untenable. At numerous sites to the west of the Indus in Baluchistan and Afghanistan, as well as in the Indus valley itself, sufficient pre-Harappan and Early Harappan settlements have been found to establish a local progression from hunter-gatherer to urban dweller by way of all the various stages of pastoralism, agricultural settlement, technological advance and cultural refinement. No such consensus exists about the Late Harappan and post-Harappan periods, but it is now possible to assign most Chalcolithic (Bronze/Stone) Age sites in the region to one of these categories and to give approximate dates for each.

Designated by their find sites and principally distinguished by their pottery styles, the pre-Harappan peoples of C3000 BC had already progressed to building houses and tilling the land. They had some knowledge of metals and had access, through trading links, to other precious materials and manufactures. Some time around 2600 BC – the dating varies from site to site – the appearance of typically Harappan styles in pottery and tools announces the Early Harappan phase. Brick-built houses assume a regular design with a courtyard and rooms off it. Figurines anticipate later Harappan styles. Towards the end of the millennium, say 2300 BC, this Early Harappan style gives way to the Mature Harappan phase, in which appears the full inventory of Harappan artefacts – standardised bricks and pots; regular streets above a network of well-made sewerage ducts; typical terracottas; a notable production of decorative artefacts including beads, faïence and shell work; more copper and bronze hardware; and a plenitude of the mysterious seals (as well as the impressions made by them) whereon that enigmatic script features prominently. In some cases, to produce the typical grid layout of streets, sites were apparently cleared and then rebuilt. Other sites were briefly deserted before being rebuilt. Still others suggest a continuance of non-Harappan or pre-Harappan styles, particularly in ceramics, side by side with the Mature Harappan. It is thus far from clear what relationships – of tribute, migration, conquest, intermarriage or cultural attraction – underlay the transition to greater standardisation.

Even worse inconsistency characterises the Late Harappan phase. Around 1900 BC Mohenjo-daro was gradually abandoned, possibly because of those floods and the associated salination of the soil. Kalibangan, an important town in Rajasthan, suffered a similar fate, but probably from desertification and the drying-up of the Ghaggar river. Elsewhere there is evidence of declining authority and of population decrease, possibly as a result of migration from the central settlements. Yet in some peripheral areas like Gujarat, Haryana and the Panjab, the decline is less marked and there may even have been an increase in activity and population.

Dispersal or dilution are evident from the prevalence of non-Harappan pottery styles, impoverishment and disruption from the gradual disuse of the script and from the disappearance of the more fanciful manifestations of Harappan culture, including that obsessive standardisation. On the other hand, craft skills and agricultural expertise survived. The spinning and weaving of cotton, for instance, in which the Harappans seem to have been the world’s pioneers, must have been gradually disseminated throughout India, since by the mid-first millennium BC it was commonplace. The finer textiles were by then an important item of trade and would remain so ever after, enticing to India Roman, Arab and eventually European merchants.

A similar case might be made for the ox-drawn wagon, which was as much a cliché of the Harappan world as it is of the Indian subcontinent today. Again, the Harappans may have been the first in the world to use wheeled transport. Numerous toy carts in terracotta and bronze testify to their pride in this technological breakthrough, and the generous street widths of their cities were presumably dictated by the consequent traffic.

Provisioning cities the size of Mohenjo-daro, with its estimated thirty to fifty thousand inhabitants, necessitated not only effective transport, both by river and road, but also a reliable rural surplus, a large labour force, and some means of crop storage. It has been conjectured that the largest structures at Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Kalibangan and possibly Lothal may have been granaries, although their internal arrangements, consisting of carefully aligned brick plinths, await a satisfactory explanation.

The only public building whose function is beyond dispute is the great bath at Mohenjo-daro. The size of a modest municipal swimming pool, carefully sealed with bitumen, and with steps down at each end, it was clearly designed to hold water and to be used for bathing. Quite probably the ablutions, or immersion, were of some ritual significance. The bath forms the inner sanctum of an elaborate building, although there is no clear evidence that, as with later temple tanks, it was a place of worship. In fact, we have no idea what part religion played in the lives of the Harappan people. No site has certainly been identified as a temple, and most suppositions about sacrificial fires, cult objects and deities rest on doubtful retrospective reference from the Hindu practices of many centuries later. Such inferences may be as futile as, say, looking to Islamic astronomy for an explanation of the orientation of the pyramids. In short, ‘these theories are all fanciful and do not bear scrutiny.’⁶

A much-cited example, depicted on some of the Harappan seals, is that of a big-nosed gentleman wearing a horned head-dress who sits in the lotus position with an erect penis, an air of abstraction and an audience of animals. He may indeed be an early manifestation of Lord Shiva as Pashupati, ‘Lord of the Beasts’. But myth, as has been noted, is subject to frequent revision. The chances of a deity remaining closely associated with the same specific powers – in this case, fertility, asceticism and familiarity with the animal kingdom – for all of two thousand years must raise serious doubts, especially since, during the interval, there is little evidence for the currency of this myth. Rudra, a Vedic deity later identified with Shiva, is indeed referred to as pasupati because of his association with cattle; but asceticism and meditation were not Rudra’s specialities, nor is he usually credited with an empathy for animals other than kine. More plausibly, it has been suggested that the Harappan figure’s heavily horned headgear bespeaks a bull cult, to which numerous other representations of bulls lend substance.

Similar doubts surround the female terracotta figurines which are often described as mother-goddesses. Pop-eyed, bat-eared, belted and sometimes mini-skirted, they are usually of crude workmanship and grotesque mien. Only a dusty-eyed archaeologist could describe them as ‘pleasing little things’.⁷ The bat-ears, on closer inspection, appear to be elaborate head-dresses or hairstyles. If, as the prominent and clumsily applied breasts suggest, they were fertility symbols, why bother with millinery? Or indeed mini-skirts?

These and other ‘folk’ products, including numerous toys, scarcely merit comparison with the finest of Harappan sculptures. Indeed the latter are so fine and so exquisitely modelled that, ‘for pure simplicity and feeling’ nothing comparable was produced ‘until the great age of Hellas’.⁸ They are, however, extremely few: Sir Mortimer Wheeler records just eleven ‘more or less fragmentary’ stone statuettes and one bronze figure. They are also extremely small, indeed just a few centimetres high. This combination of rarity and pocket-size invites doubts as to their provenance. They could easily have come from somewhere further afield. Two perfectly modelled miniature torsos were found at Harappa – one decidedly male, the other probably female; both have socket holes by which their missing arms were attached. On this evidence they have been convincingly related to a similar technique used by artists of the contemporary Namazga culture which was discovered by Soviet archaeologists in the Ashkabad region of Turkmenistan. Namazga equivalents have also been cited for the formidable bearded figure in an embroidered toga, of which there are two examples, and even for the most famous of all Harappan works of art, the bronze ‘dancing girl’.

Although probably not dancing, the ‘dancing girl’ is unquestionably ‘a pleasing little thing’. Naked save for a chunky necklace and an assortment of bangles, this minuscule statuette is not of the usual Indian sex symbol, full of breast and wide of hip, but of a slender nymphet happily flaunting her puberty with delightful insouciance. Her pose is studiously casual, one spindly arm bent with the hand resting on a déhanché hip, the other dangling so as to brush a slightly raised knee. Slim and attenuated, the legs are slightly parted, and one foot – both are now missing – must have been pointed. She could be absent-mindedly surveying her wardrobe, except that her head is thrown back as if challenging a suitor, and her hair is somehow dressed into a heavy plaited chignon of perilous but intentionally dramatic construction. Decidedly, she wants to be admired; and she might be gratified to know that, four thousand years later, she still is. If there is one piece of Harappan fine art that one is reluctant to yield to the Namazga culture it is the ‘dancing girl’.

Happily her local credentials are not insignificant. For one thing her features, including full lips and broad nose, are distinctly proto-Australoid, a type not usually associated with the Central Asian culture of Namazga. Skeletons unearthed in the Indus valley, however, attest that the Harappan people were of several different racial types, amongst them that, related to Australia’s native people and still represented in parts of India, of proto-Australoid cast. Furthermore, although most of the surviving Harappan stone sculptures were found at Harappa itself, whence contacts with Namazga seem to have been closest, the ‘dancing girl’ was found at Mohenjo-daro, whose external trade was more orientated to the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia. A better case will need to be made before the Harappans are robbed of their most celebrated representative.

Trade, both within the sprawling Harappan world and without, was clearly essential to the development of its culture. Bronze or tin (for making bronze), silver and certain precious stones like lapis lazuli and soapstone are not found within easy reach of the Indus valley, and must therefore have been imported from elsewhere. Likewise it is clear that the Mesopotamian cultures obtained numerous commodities from the Harappans, including copper, gold, timber, ivory and probably cotton textiles. Harappan sealings and seals have been found in Sumerian sites, and Sumerian documentation makes frequent reference to relations with the distant lands of ‘Dilmun’, ‘Magan’ and ‘Meluhha’. The first seems to have been in the Persian Gulf, possibly Bahrain, and to have been something of an entrepôt. ‘Magan’ is usually identified with the coastal regions of Iran and Baluchistan, the modern Makran coast. And ‘Meluhha’, by a process of deduction from the trade items associated with it, looks to have been the Harappan civilisation. There are objections to this hypothesis. The Mesopotamians claim to have once conquered ‘Meluhha’, for which there is no archaeological evidence. And a later ‘Meluhha’ was usually associated with the African coast. Notwithstanding, opinion still favours the idea that in Sumerian references to ‘the ships from Meluhha’ which King Sargon the Great ‘made tie up alongside the quay of Agade’ we have a positive identification of the Harappan world.

The importance of Harappan, or ‘Meluhhan’, trade, and the recent speculation about it, rests heavily on the evidence provided by the Harappan seals. Usually of soapstone, or steatite, the face of each is carved intaglio and in reverse so as to leave a legible impression on soft clay. Most are rectangular and about the size of a postage stamp; and typically they include an average of five characters, or word symbols, in that unintelligible script, plus one or more images. The latter are often of animals and, in the famous examples of a humped bull with pendulous dewlap, the Harappan genius for vivid depiction from life in the minutest and most demanding of mediums has been universally acknowledged.

Several thousand seals and sealings have now been found. The seals appear to have been distributed throughout the Harappan world, not simply in its major population centres, and to have been carried about or worn, each having a boss or hole by which they could be threaded on a string. The distribution of the sealings suggests that seals may have been used to facilitate the exchange of goods over long distances. Thus the stamped image, attached to a consignment of goods, might have identified their owner, provenance, destination or contents, and so have served somewhat the role of a waybill or even a bar-code. Clearly, if this was indeed their purpose, their multiplicity and far-flung distribution argues for a vast and buzzing commercial network. Perhaps, instead of conspicuous expenditure on monuments and memorials, the Harappans pumped their surplus into commodity exchange. It has even been suggested that the Harappans were so dependent on this exchange that its apparent decline in the early second millennium BC was a cause, rather than an effect, of the disintegration of urban life.

Although the script remains indecipherable, interesting conclusions have been drawn from the images which usually accompany it on the seals. These are often single animals, as with the humped bull, the elephant, the tiger and a magnificent rhino. Commonest of all, however, is a stocky creature unknown to zoology with the body of a bull and the head of a zebra, from which head a single horn curls majestically upwards and then forwards. In fact, ‘the “unicorn” occurs on 1156 seals and sealings out of a total of 1755 found at Mature Harappan sites, that is on 60 per cent of all seals and sealings.’⁹ Shireen Ratnagar, an authority on Harappan trade, also notes that, since the word symbols which accompany these images vary from seal to seal, image and text must have conveyed different information; and that, since the images recur frequently and look like totemic subjects, they may be the identifying symbols of different social groups. Assuming such groups were based on descent, as with the Vedic Aryans, Ratnagar calls them ‘lineages’ or clans.

… we would therefore infer that the ‘unicorn’ was the symbol of the dominant lineage which had expanded, or was expanding, by assimilation or alliance at the expense of other lineages, and administrative office and lineage affiliation would be closely connected. In other words, we may interpret the unicorn as the religious expression of a system of political control operating through lineage connexions.¹⁰

How this political control operated, and whether oppressively or consensually, it is impossible to say. Likewise, as noted, we have no clear idea what religious practices the Harappans subscribed to. Here, and in other researches, there is, though, a gradually emerging notion of a Harappan state. Ratnagar conjectures that it began to emerge when numerous ethnic and/or cultural groups were drawn together by alliance, intermarriage and agricultural or industrial specialisation. By the time of the Mature Harappan phase these groups formed not a federation but a single state. In fact ‘at this stage of knowledge it appears to me that we are dealing with a veritable Harappan “empire”.’

This being the case, the total, albeit gradual, eclipse of Harappan civilisation is all the more mystifying. Sumerian civilisation led on to that of Babylon, Egypt’s Old Kingdom was succeeded by the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, China’s dynastic succession scarcely faltered. But in the Indian subcontinent the first great experiment in urban living, in political organisation and in commercial enterprise disappeared without trace beneath the sand and the silt. In the land of reincarnation there was to be no rebirth for the bustling and ingenious world of the Harappans. History would have to begin again with a very different group of people.

2 Vedic Values C1700–900 BC
THE MYTHIFIED ARYAN

THE HARAPPANS, winkled out of oblivion by the archaeologist’s trowel and scrutinised by scholars from every conceivable discipline, have lately been attracting funds and advancing on all fronts, just like their ‘empire’. The Aryans, on the other hand, they of that rich Sanskrit literary heritage whence all knowledge of India’s ancient past was traditionally derived, are in retreat. Badly discredited by over-zealous championship in the nineteenth century and then by Teutonic adoption in the 1930s, the mighty Aryans have fallen from academic favour. Questions tantamount to heresy amongst an earlier generation of historians are now routinely raised as to who the arya were, where they came from, and even whether they were really a distinct people.

‘It is doubtful whether the term arya was ever used in an ethnic sense,’ writes Romila Thapar, doyenne of ancient India’s historians.¹ What she calls the ‘Aryan problem’, or ‘myth’, is now to be regarded as ‘perhaps the biggest red herring that was dragged across the path of India’s historians’.² The authenticity of all those Sanskrit literary compositions remains undisputed. So does their seminal importance in India’s social, cultural and religious development. But whether those who composed them were anything more than a proud minority self-consciously endeavouring to retain their mainly linguistic identity amongst a diverse, industrious, and probably indifferent local population is questionable.

For Hindus, of course, the traditions of Sanskrit literature are still sacrosanct. Vedic prayers are still said; televised serialisations of the Sanskrit epics can bring the entire Indian nation to a hushed standstill. The compositions of the ancient arya are not just history; they are the nearest thing to revelation. The arya themselves, though, are not revered and never have been. In no sense are they seen as a divinely ‘chosen people’. Individual priests, heroes, sages and deities are cherished but their ethnic affinity is neither emphasised nor invariable. This is unsurprising since in Sanskrit the word arya is usually adjectival. Certain people or classes once used it to distinguish themselves from others; it was clearly a good thing to be. But like many words, its meaning changed over the centuries and the original is now hard to pin down. In English it is variously rendered as ‘pure’, ‘respectable’, ‘moral’, ‘noble’ or ‘wealthy’. By the time it had travelled to south India and thence on to what is now Indonesia it had simply become a respectful term of address, like ‘Sahib’ or ‘Mister’.

‘Aryans’, on the other hand, as the generic title of a distinct race of people to which this arya adjective exclusively applied, nowhere feature in Sanskrit literature. They only appeared when Europeans got to work on Sanskrit. And it was not the literature which so inspired Europe’s scholars, but the language itself.

That some words in Sanskrit bore a strange similarity to their Greek and Latin equivalents had long been noted. Then in 1785 Sir William Jones, an English polymath and truly ‘one of the most enlightened sons of men’ (as an admiring Dr Johnson described him), began studying Sanskrit. A year later he announced his preliminary verdict on the language. It was ‘of a wonderful structure’, he declared, ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin …’,

… yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than can possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.³

This being the case, most north Indian languages, which derive from Sanskrit, were related to most of Europe’s, which derive from Latin. Jones rightly added that the Germanic and Celtic languages also probably belonged to this linguistic family, and likewise ancient Persian (Avestan). But, personally more enamoured of Sanskrit’s literature than its language, he did not pursue the search for that ‘common source’. This was left to others who recognised in Jones’s insights not only a specific challenge – to discover the ‘common source’ and chart its distribution – but also the means by which to do so. For Jones had shown that the study of language, or philology, could serve the historian much as does archaeology. Given a reasonable mound of literature, the philologist could delve in the syntax and sift through the syllables so as to record the changing forms of words and grammar. Identifying shared roots, typical word forms, new structures and extraneous influences, he could establish rules about how the language had developed and spread, and so formulate, as it were, a sequence of strata whereby tentative dates could be assigned to any particular text purely on the basis of its language.

Using and developing this new discipline, scholars at first called the elusive ‘common source’ language (and the family of languages which derived from it) ‘Indo-Germanic’ or ‘Indo-European’. This changed to ‘Indo-Aryan’, or simply ‘Aryan’, after it was realised that the ancient Persians had indeed used their arya word in an ethnic sense; they called themselves the ‘Ariana’ (whence derives the modern ‘Iran’). Numerous writers continued to warn against the assumption that a shared language necessarily meant a shared ethnicity. Yet the idea of a single race sowing the seeds of civilisation from Bengal to Donegal proved intensely exciting, and ultimately irresistible. To Friedrich Max Muller, the distinguished German Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford in the mid-nineteenth century, it seemed that the Aryans had a ‘mission to link all parts of the world together by chains of civilisation, commerce and religion’. They were ‘the rulers of history’.⁴ Muller, too, warned against drawing any simplistic conclusions about race, but already Aryan descent was popularly seen as the mark, if not yet of a master race, at least of ethnic distinction. Gratified by the discovery of their proud historical pedigree, India’s aspiring nationalists embraced the Aryans as readily as did Europe’s cultural supremacists.

Given the vast spread of the Indo-Aryan languages, an Aryan homeland was soon being sought somewhere in the middle of the Eurasian landmass. Most scholars favoured the steppes of southern Russia and the Ukraine, or the shores of the Caspian. Nomadic pastoralists, the Aryans needed plenty of room. Thence, in a series of sweeping migrations spread over many centuries, they supposedly took their language, plus their gods, their horses and their herds, to Iran and Syria, Anatolia and Greece, eastern Europe and northern India.

India’s Aryans were therefore originally immigrants, and to judge by their exploits as recorded in the Vedas, highly combative ones. Aided and encouraged by deities like the fire-breathing Agni and the thunderbolt-throwing Indra, the Aryan conquistadors were seen as having hurtled down the passes from Afghanistan to career across the plains of the Panjab. Dealing death and destruction from fleets of horse-drawn chariots, they subdued the indigenous peoples and appropriated their herds. As dasa or dasyu, these indigenes or aborigines were characterised as dark, flat-nosed, uncouth, incomprehensible and generally inferior. The Aryans, on the other hand, were finer-featured, fairer, taller, favoured above others in the excellence of their gods, their horses and their ritual magic, and altogether a very superior people.

Nineteenth-century British colonialists, reflecting on this new and unexpected Aryan dimension to India’s history, could draw great comfort. All that was fine and ‘classical’ in ancient India’s history could now be credited to this influx of manly heroes from the west. The Aryans, spreading their superior culture right down the valley of the Ganga and then deep into the peninsula, had conferred on India an unprecedented cultural integrity and an enviably high degree of civilisation. In time, however, the purity of the Aryan race had become hopelessly diluted; manliness, creativity and drive had succumbed to the enervating effects of an intolerable climate and an insidious social system. Hence no serious resistance had been offered either to the thrust of Islam or to the advent of the colonial powers. India had slumped into seemingly irredeemable decadence and degeneracy. Then, in the nick of time, out of the west came the British. No less fair, no less manly and no less confident of their superiority, they were the neo-Aryans, galvanising a naturally lax people into endeavour and industry, showering them with the incomparable benefits of a superior civilisation and a humane religion, and ushering in a new and golden age. Or so some liked to think.

This illusion was rudely shattered in the 1930s. Just when Indian demands for self-government were obliging the British to reconsider their colonial mission, the Aryan thesis became both discredited by Nazi propaganda in Europe and challenged by the archaeological reports coming from Mohenjo-daro and elsewhere in India. Initially, with the chronology even vaguer than now, it was not clear that the Harappans pre-dated the Aryan ‘invasions’. Indeed, there are still some scholars who insist that it was the Aryans who preceded the Harappans and, despite ample testimony to the contrary, that the Harappan civilisation was therefore an Aryan achievement. This means pushing the first Aryan ‘invasions’ back to the fourth or fifth millennium BC, which does not square with that philological stratification, and crediting to cattle-rustling tribesmen a mastery of urban refinement for which there is absolutely no evidence in their copious literature.

Despite the more general belief that the Harappan civilisation came first, the Aryan ‘myth’ was not immediately dumped, even by Harappanists. Thus another theory, championed by Sir Mortimer Wheeler – ‘Mr Indus Valley’ himself – was that, if the Aryans could not possibly have created the Harappan cities, they might have been responsible for destroying them. This, of course, assumed that the Harappan cities had succumbed to conquest. Wheeler cited evidence at both Harappa and Mohenjo-daro of ‘massacres’. Skeletons of men, women and children, some incomplete, one or two with cranial damage, had been found scattered in the streets, presumably struck down where they still lay. There were other suggestions of a hasty evacuation. And in the Vedas Wheeler found numerous references to cities, or rather ‘pur meaning a “rampart”, “fort”, or “stronghold”’. Moreover Indra, the bellicose and bloodthirsty Mars of the Aryan pantheon, was specifically referred to as ‘the destroyer of forts’, or purandara, he who ‘rends forts as age consumes a garment’. Why, asked Wheeler, would he be so described if there had not been forts to rend? And what were these forts if not the Harappan ‘citadels’? Thus the Late Harappans could now be numbered amongst those dark and wretched dasa over whom the Aryans habitually lorded it; and the mystery of what fate had overtaken their cities was solved. ‘On circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused,’ declared Wheeler in 1947.⁵

Indra stood accused throughout the 1950s, but in 1964 the case against him collapsed. The American George F. Dales took a long, hard look at all those skeletons, and could find only two that might have been massacred where they lay. Most of the others appeared to have been casually interred centuries later, when the ground had risen well above street level. ‘There is no destruction level covering the latest period of the city [Mohenjo-daro], no sign of extensive burning, no bodies of warriors clad in armour and surrounded by the weapons of war, [and] the citadel, the only fortified part of the city, yielded no evidence of a final defence.’⁶ There was also no proof that pur meant either a city or a fort. Current placenames like Kanpur, Nagpur and so on preserve the word in exactly that sense, but in the Rig Veda, the earliest of Sanskrit compositions, it seems to have implied little more than a well-fenced village or settlement. Nor is it clear that Aryan chariots and catapults could have made much impression on Harappan walls thirteen metres thick, according to the archaeologists, and every bit as high.

The possibility of some contact between Aryans and Harappans can never, of course, be totally dismissed. As the dates for the Late Harappan phase have been slowly pushed forward to around 1700 BC, the gap, if there is one, between Harappan and Aryan has closed to perhaps a couple of centuries. Across such a timespan, some web of collective memory could well have spread. At Harappa and elsewhere in the Panjab, where the Aryans initially settled, there is some largely ceramic evidence of comparatively sophisticated post-Harappan cultures. They could represent a revival of Harappan skills under some kind of Aryan patronage or stimulus.

In the Vedas there is even mention of ‘Hariyupiya’ as a placename. It could be the Harappan site itself, although most scholars take its context to indicate a river, probably west of the Indus. Finally, there is the intriguing possibility that the word ‘Meluhha’, the name by which the Sumerians apparently designated their Harappan trading partners, eventually resurfaced in Sanskrit as mleccha. The latter was a term of contempt used by the arya to disparage those whom they regarded as non-arya. It thus meant much the same as dasa and dasyu, words which unfortunately predate its appearance. Philologists, however, insist that mleccha cannot possibly be Sanskrit in origin. The reflexive consonants clearly show the word to have been borrowed from some local tongue. Perhaps it was just an onomatopoeic word derived from the uncouth gobbledygook in which, to arya ears, the dasa spoke. But if it was derived from the term by which the dasa peoples described themselves, then coincidence can scarcely deny that the mleccha people must have been the Harappans, or rather the ‘Meluhhans’.

INVASIONS OR MIGRATIONS?

Other examples of loanwords in the Sanskrit of the Vedas can be equally revealing. The word for ‘plough’, for instance, is said to be non-Sanskritic. If the arya, when they arrived in India, did not have a word for a plough – and so had to borrow someone else’s – it is safe to assume that they did not have a plough. The Harappans, however, did. It therefore follows that the arya probably learned about ploughs and their use from the indigenous successors of the Harappans. These may have been the despised dasa of the Vedic texts, although there are now grounds to suppose that the dasa were in fact survivors of an earlier wave of the Indo-European diaspora and were not therefore indigenous. It has also been suggested that arya – dasa contact may have taken place in Afghanistan before the arya reached India.

Similar conclusions may be drawn about the arya’s words for ‘furrow’ and for ‘threshing floor’. They too appear to be non-Sanskritic. Obviously the Aryans were not engaged in arable farming in any big way. Nor, evidently, were they interested in architecture. Whereas it is no surprise that they had to borrow a word for ‘peacock’, a bird then not much known outside India, or that they had to invent one for ‘elephant’ (they called it the ‘beast with a hand’, i.e. a trunk), it is more revealing that they had also to borrow a word for ‘mortar’. Archaeology supports the obvious inference; no buildings have yet been found which can certainly be ascribed to the Vedic arya.

For ‘writing’, ‘record’, ‘scribe’, or ‘letter’ the arya of the Vedas had no words at all, not even borrowed ones. It is therefore almost certain that they brought no knowledge of writing into India with them and that, by the time they arrived, the literacy skills of the Harappans had been forgotten, at least in areas where the arya first settled. When and how later scripts emerged is unknown. The first mention of writing occurs in oral compositions dating from after 500 BC. Inscriptions do not appear until two hundred years later, but they use two comparatively sophisticated scripts which suggest several centuries of prior familiarity. One of these scripts may owe something to the ideograms of the Harappan seals; the other looks to have been derived from the Aramaic script of western Asia.

Illiterate and ignorant of many basic agrarian skills, the arya yet knew all, and more, about livestock. While the Harappans used ox-transport and may have found totemic roles for bulls and many other animals, they do not seem to have had a passion for dairy farming or horse-racing; in fact the horse was probably unknown to them, India’s lack of native bloodstock being then, as ever after, the Achilles heel of its ambitious empire-builders. The arya, though, were veritable cowboys. As well as advertising their prowess in the rustling of cattle and the driving of two-horse chariots, they spattered their verses with metaphors about affectionate cows and fiery steeds. In the Rig Veda storm clouds invariably ‘gallop’ across the heavens; their thunder is as the neigh of a stallion. Rivers rush from the hills like cattle stampeding towards pasture; and when the Beas river is joined by a tributary, ‘one the other licks, like the mother-cow her calf’. Cattle were also currency, value being expressed in so many cows; and go, the Sanskrit root for ‘cow’, also features in the word used to indicate warfare, evidence that strife originally resulted from competition not for land and territory but for cows and wealth.

The arya were therefore originally pastoralists and, assuming a migration into India, plus the herdsman’s need to be forever seeking new pastures, they must have been semi-nomadic. We may infer that, like pastoralists the world over, they lived an itinerant outdoor life. Much exposed to the elements, they may have been inclined to discover divine powers in the forces of nature and to assume a ready communion with these powers. The names of their gods predate arrival in India, many (e.g. Indra, Agni, Varuna) being almost synonymous with their counterparts in Persian, Greek and Latin mythology; but their attributes and achievements relate to the Indian environment. It would seem, also, that the basic unit of human society was initially the small nomadic group rather than the settlement. The word grama, although it soon came to mean a village, was originally indicative of a troupe of wagons and their perhaps three or four related families, plus livestock.

During the monsoon months, when pasture became plentiful and transhumance difficult, the arya must have formed their first temporary settlements. No doubt they then also planted their grain crop which, watered by the rains and fertilised by the manure from their cattle pens, would have been harvested during the winter months. The grain was probably barley. Rice, although apparently cultivated by the Harappans, does not feature in the earliest of the Vedas. Nor is the word used to designate it Sanskritic. It, too, was probably acquired from one of India’s aboriginal peoples. Later, however, after the arya had adopted a settled life, rice receives its first mention, and later still, following their colonisation of the middle Ganga in the early centuries of the first millennium BC, the cultivation of irrigated padi would become crucial to their pattern of settlement.

That they initially settled in the Panjab and astride what is now the Indo–Pakistan frontier is clear from references in the Rig Veda to the Sapta-sindhu, ‘the Land of the Seven Rivers’. Each of these rivers has been identified, and most were tributaries of the Indus. They are mentioned frequently, and must therefore have been familiar to the arya (although the most important, the Saraswati, has since dried up). On the other hand, there is only one mention of the mighty Ganga, and that in what is thought to be the latest of Rig Vedic compositions. Subsequent works, like the Brahmanas and Upanisads (C900–600 BC), confirm a shift in geographical focus to the east and specifically to the Doab, the crescent of land between the Jamuna and the Ganga (immediately east of Delhi). As the setting for the Mahabharata, the Doab became arya-varta, ‘the land of the arya’. If one accepts C950 BC as the probable date of the Bharata war, this migration, or colonisation, may therefore have occurred C1100–1000 BC. It would be followed by a further move into the valley of the Ganga itself before the arya, much changed in the interim, began founding states, building cities and rediscovering the trail of civilisation which the Harappans had trodden two thousand years earlier.

As to when the arya made their initial debut in India there remains grave doubt. Nearly two hundred years ago Mountstuart Elphinstone, one of the most outstanding scholar-administrators in the employ of the English East India Company, headed the first British mission into Afghanistan. He failed to reach Kabul, but from Peshawar in what was then Afghan territory Elphinstone got a look at the Khyber Pass and formed some idea of the harsh lands whence the Aryans supposedly came. Years later, having declined the governor-generalship to concentrate on his studies, he produced a magisterial History of India. In it he devoted much attention to Sanskrit tradition, and recalling that dramatic contrast between the arid Afghan hills and the smiling gardens of Peshawar, he for the first time threw serious doubt on the central Asian provenance of the Aryans.

Neither in the code of Manu [the survivor of the flood, who was later credited with compiling a standard compendium of Hindu law] nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any other book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence, or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology goes no farther than the Himalaya chain, in which is fixed the habitation of the gods.⁷

To Elphinstone it was quite incredible that the Aryans could have made the transition from mountain desert to monsoonal paradise and yet failed to record it. He also noted that, throughout the ages, civilisation had more commonly spread from east to west than vice versa. Perhaps, therefore, the Aryans had originated in India.

Although this idea currently derives no credibility from its aggressive repetition in Hindu nationalist publications, and although it is flatly denied by the arya’s familiarity with horses (typically central Asian) and their ignorance of elephants (typically Indian), it is certainly curious that the Vedas say nothing of life in central Asia, nor of an epic journey thence through the mountains, nor of arriving in the deliciously different environment of the subcontinent. The usual explanation is that, by the time the Vedas were composed, this migration was so remote that all memory of it had faded; and on this basis a tentative chronology is proposed. Allowing, then, first for a major time-lapse (say two hundred years) between the Late Harappan phase and the Aryan arrival in India, and then for a plausible memory gap (say another two hundred years) between arrival and the composition of the earliest Vedas, it looks as if the arya must have entered India some time between 1500 BC and 1300 BC. Most authorities now suppose several waves of migration rather than a single mass movement. These waves probably consisted of different tribes and, on linguistic evidence, may have been spread over centuries. So possibly the entire period was one of Aryan incursion.

As to whether all or any of these incursions constituted invasions rather than migrations it is impossible to say. We may, though, speculate. Considered in the light of later incursions into north-west India by Alexander the Great and a host of other intruders, including those afire with the spirit of Islam, the Aryan coming has traditionally been seen as a full-scale invasion. The indigenous people ‘naturally resisted the newcomers, and a fierce and protracted struggle ensued’. In a standard textbook on ancient India, R.C. Majumdar goes on to identify the indigenous resistance as coming from ‘Dravidians’, the assumption being that the indigenous dasa spoke a Dravidian, as opposed to a Sanskritic, language.

It was not merely a struggle between two nationalities. The Dravidians had to fight for their very existence … But all in vain … The Dravidians put up a brave fight, and laid down their lives in hundreds and thousands on various battlefields, but ultimately had to succumb to the attacks of the invaders. The Aryans destroyed their castles and cities, burnt their houses, and reduced a large number of them to slaves.⁸

Recent theories of multiple migrations have somewhat softened this picture. Perhaps some of the Aryan clans were invited into India as allies, mercenaries or traders; the indigenous dasa may not have been ‘Dravidians’ but earlier Indo-Aryan arrivals; there is nothing to suggest that they ever constructed ‘castles and cities’; and the archaeological evidence, being almost entirely ceramic, gives no hint of the sudden change one would expect from the conquest and suppression of an entire ‘nationality’.

There is, though, another explanation. Seen in the context not of later invasions in the north-west, but of later extensions of arya influence to the rest of India, a rather different and more intriguing picture emerges. Arguably this process of ‘Aryanisation’ by which arya culture spread to non-arya peoples continued throughout the subcontinent’s history, indeed is still going on to this day. In little-frequented enclaves of central and north-eastern India tribal communities of adivasi, or aboriginal, people may even now be found in various transitional stages of Aryanisation (or ‘Sanskritisation’). A similar process is said to have been observable amongst distant peoples, like the Fijians, who were affected by the Indian diaspora of colonial times. In both cases, Aryan ideas and influence were initially carried by work-seekers and traders, not warmongers. More significantly, exactly the same process probably accounted for the gradual Aryanisation of peninsular India plus much of south-east Asia.

An Aryanised society may be defined as one in which primacy is accorded to a particular language (Sanskrit), to an authoritative priesthood (brahmans) and to a hierarchical social structure (caste). To establish these three ‘pillars’ of Aryanisation in, say, Kerala or Java no sizeable relocation of people would have been necessary. As will be seen, the process appears simply to have been one of gradual acculturation requiring neither mass migration nor enforced concurrence. A small admixture of fortune-seekers, traders or teachers who happened to be in possession of a superior technology and of a persuasive ideology could and did, if prepared to compromise with existing custom, create a convincing and lasting veneer of Aryanisation without apparently antagonising anyone.

Admittedly, indeed on their own admission, the arya cattle-rustlers of the Rig Veda did antagonise the dasa. But they also compromised with them, adopting dasa technology, dasa cults and dasa vocabulary, and inducting dasa clans and leaders into their society. Despite the importance attached to the purity of Sanskrit, there is even a hint of dasa-arya bilingualism. With the horse and the chariot by way of a dazzling new technology, and with the subtleties of ritual sacrifice as a mesmerising ideology, the arya may have secured recognition of their superiority by a process no more deliberate and menacing than social attraction and cultural osmosis; thus the Aryan invasion and conquest of India could be as much a ‘myth’ and a ‘red herring’ as the existence of an Aryan race.

It should, however, be emphasised that in the second millennium BC the familiar traits of Aryanisation, those three pillars of language, priesthood and social hierarchy, were only just beginning to emerge. All are evident in the earliest Vedas, but they are undeveloped. They only assume definition and primacy in the context of contact between the arya and the various indigenous peoples. Quite possibly the latter contributed to, or participated in, the formulation of these ‘pillars’. Arya culture may itself have been a hybrid, and ‘Aryanisation’ may therefore be a misnomer.

NO BAD HYMNS

Such speculation is justifiable because of the unsatisfactory nature of Vedic literature as historical source material. The Rig Veda, earliest (perhaps C1100 BC) of the Vedic compositions, comprises ten mandala or ‘cycles’ of ritual hymns and liturgical directives. Although generally considered the most informative of the Vedic texts, its clues as to the lifestyle, organisation and aspirations of the arya are ‘submerged under a stupendous mass of dry and stereotyped hymnology dating back to the Indo-Iranian era [i.e. before the Aryans reached India], and held as a close preserve by a number of priestly families whose sole object in cherishing those hymns was to utilise them in their sacrificial cult’. Dr B.K. Ghosh of Calcutta University then goes on to cite an example from Mandala I. He calls it ‘the worst in the Rig Veda’; even its brahman composer seems to have had a premonition of failure. Yet in terms of content it is not untypical.

No bad hymns am I offering by exerting my intellect

In praise of Bhavya ruling on the Indus

Who assigned to me a thousand sacrifices,

That incomparable king desirous of fame.

A hundred gold pieces from the fame-seeking king,

Together with a hundred horses as a present have I received,

I, Kakshivant, obtained also a hundred cows from my master

Who exalted thereby his fame immortal up to heaven.

‘This dismal hymn,’ writes Dr Ghosh, ‘ends with two verses notable only for their extreme obscenity.’⁹ In translation the obscurity is more evident than the obscenity but, by substituting sexual terms for words like ‘bliss’ and ‘creation’, it is just possible to grasp the nub of his objection.

O resplendent lord, with brilliant radiance may you be delighted.

May your own bliss be consummated. Your delightful creation,

The holder of your bliss, is as exhilarating as the bliss itself.

For you, the vigour, equally envigorating is the bliss,

O mighty, giver of a thousand pleasures.¹⁰

Later Vedic collections (Samaveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda) reiterate and supplement such verses from the Rig Veda, but they rarely illuminate them. As for the Brahmanas and Upanisads, the latter explore the mystical and metaphysical meaning of the Vedas and are important for the development of Indian philosophy, but they contain little historical information, while the former, ‘an arid desert of puerile speculation on ritual ceremonies’, again fail to measure up to Dr Ghosh’s exacting standards. Elsewhere he calls them ‘filthy’, ‘repulsive’, ‘of interest only to students of abnormal psychology’ and ‘of sickening prolixity’.

There are also, though, especially in the Rig Veda, some hymns of dazzling lyricism. Most often cited are those dedicated to the delectable Ushas, the goddess of dawn who reveals herself each morning, upright and naked, her body ‘bright from bathing’; or those to Ratri, the spirit of the night, who from the stars that are her eyes keeps watch when men, like birds to roost, go home to rest. Even in excessively literal translations, these pearls of descriptive verse from poetry’s remotest past suggest that there was more to the arya than the earthy obsessions of the stockman and the swagger of the charioteering oppressor. The prerequisites of civilisation – economic surplus, social and functional specialisation, political authority, urbanisation – were still lacking, but already the people of the Vedas had acquired a linguistic mastery of their environment and were beginning to deploy that same remarkable language to explore its logic.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the conduct and elaboration of those sacrificial rites with which the Vedas are directly concerned. If Vedic translations tend to be literal it is because of the obscurity of the allusions and the language. Both were probably just as obscure to those who first committed these hymns to writing in a number of different recensions, none of which is older than C500 BC. In other words, for at least five hundred years the ten thousand verses of the Rig Veda were learned by heart and handed down by word of mouth. This, however, does not mean that they underwent significant change. Quite the contrary. As the recited accompaniment to the performance of sacrifices, their actual wording, even their intonation and their pronunciation, had to be perfect for the sacrifice to be effective. Conversely, a mangled syllable or an improvised coda could be fatal. Like the magician who forgets the magic formula, the supplicant could then find the sacrifice redounding to his disadvantage and condemning him to the very disaster he was trying to avert.

Such, at least, was the theory inculcated by those who made it their responsibility to shoulder this burden of memorised knowledge and so to serve as intermediaries in the communion of men and gods. Probably even they no longer used the elaborate constructions of Vedic Sanskrit in their everyday speech, and were therefore unsure of the meaning of some of their hymns. Obfuscation was, after all, in their interest; like specialists the world over, they found that the jargon and ritual deemed essential to their arcane science were also well calculated to impress the layman. Originally these intermediaries may have been no more than tribal bards, seers (risis) and shamans, and were not necessarily of arya descent. They became more influential possibly as a result of their pastoralist patrons adopting a more settled way of life, which involved grappling with new techniques of cultivation and discovering their vulnerability to the depredations of climate and pestilence. More elaborate sacrifices were needed, and so was a more specialised band of sacrificiants. Thus eventually, and perhaps with popular encouragement, the bards and shamans of old developed into a hereditary class of priests or brahmana (brahmans).

Handling the gods could be even more demanding of arya prowess than handling their enemies. Sacrifices and the elaborate rituals which accompanied them were mandatory and reciprocal. The gods depended on them for their strength; and the arya depended on the strength of their gods. Without effective intervention by their gods, their leaders would fall, their cattle would die, their enemies would triumph and their crops would fail. It was not just a question of propitiating remote but powerful supernaturals. Gods and men were equally engaged in the ticklish business of maintaining a cosmic equilibrium. Each had a legitimate and vital interest in the other’s affairs. A close liaison between the two was essential.

In the Rig Veda brahmans, like the unctuous Kakshivant quoted above, extol the prowess and generosity of their patrons as well as the power and might of their deities. Initially it would seem that it was these patrons, the rajanya or clan leaders, who comprised the elite of arya society, not the brahmans. This situation may have reflected the leadership’s role in warfare and in directing the seasonal migrations. But with the switch to a more settled and secure way of life, the rajanya’s role was diminished. Increasingly the clan leader looked to the brahman rather than the battlefield for the legitimation of his authority. The risks and the expenditure inherent in combat were replaced by the risks and expenditure inherent in sacrifice. Both could reveal the extent of divine favour enjoyed by the raja and so reinforce his right to rule. The great sacrificial gatherings became exhibitions of conspicuous consumption in which the munificent raja, besides indulging his kinsmen with orgies induced by soma, a hallucinogenic drink, was expected to donate herds of cattle and of horses, buckets of gold and bevies of slave-girls by way of compelling divine favour and rewarding brahmanical support. The gambling with dice so often referred to in Sanskrit literature formed part of the ritual (as well as of the fun) and symbolised the element of risk implicit in the sacrifice itself, as well as affording a further opportunity for divine favour to reveal itself.

Although the arya occasionally practised human sacrifice, the sacrificial offerings mentioned in the Vedas are predominantly of cattle, representing wealth, and of horses, symbolic of power and virility. Both were also associated with fertility. In the aswamedha, or horse sacrifice, a somewhat problematic injunction about the sexual coupling of the sacrificial stallion with the raja’s bride was meant to symbolise the endowment of his lineage with exceptional strength. The horse, in other words, represented the power of the chief, and would continue to do so in later aswamedha. But these later aswamedha reveal an important transition in the nature of arya authority. As will be seen, their intention became less that of boosting a chief’s leadership credentials in respect of his clansmen and more that of legitimising kingship and territorial sovereignty, notions that were both novel and progressive in a semi-nomadic, clan-based society.

Thus in the later aswamedha, the horse seems to have been excused romantic duties. Instead it was first set free to roam at will for a year while a band of retainers followed its progress and laid claim in the putative king’s name to all territory through which it chanced to pass. Only after this peregrination, and after the successful prosecution of the conflicts to which it inevitably gave rise, was the horse actually sacrificed.

A particularly elaborate version of such an aswamedha is commemorated in the heart of Varanasi (Benares), otherwise the City of Lord Shiva and the holiest place of pilgrimage in northern India. Legend has it that Shiva, while temporarily dispossessed of his beloved city, hit on the idea of regaining it by imposing on its incumbent king a quite impossible ritual challenge, namely the performance of ten simultaneous horse-sacrifices. The chances of all ten passing off without mishap could be safely discounted and thus the king, disgraced in the eyes of both gods and men, would be obliged to relinquish the city. So Lord Shiva reasoned and, just to make sure, he also arranged for Lord Brahma, a stickler for the niceties of ceremonial performance, to referee the challenge. Shiva failed, however, to take account of King Divodasa’s quite exceptional piety and punctiliousness. All ten aswamedha were faultlessly performed. The king thereby gained untold merit and favour; Brahma was so impressed that he decided to stay on in the city; and Shiva slunk away to fume and fret and dream up ever more ambitious schemes to recover his capital. Thus to this day, when approaching the celebrated river-front at Varanasi, pilgrims and tourists alike get their first glimpse of the Ganga and of the steep ghats (terracing) which front it from ‘Dashashwamedh’ ghat, the place of ‘the ten horse-sacrifices’. And the merit of this extraordinary feat, it is said, continues to attend all who here bathe in the sacred river.

This story, though obviously of much later provenance (Shiva was not one of the Vedic gods), well illustrates the importance attached to ritual exactitude. In the Vedas this preoccupation with the precise performance of sacrificial rites extended to minutiae like the orientation of the sacrificial altar and the surgical dissection of the sacrificial victim. Both had scientific repercussions: the positioning of the altar stimulated the study of astronomy and geometry, while dissection encouraged familiarity with anatomy. Similarly that obsession with the ‘word perfect’ recitation of the liturgy would inspire the codification of language and the study of phonetics and versification for which ancient India is justly famed. To anxieties about the impeccable conduct and the sacred siting of such rituals may also be ascribed early notions about the purity, or polluting effect, of those present. Participants had first to undergo purificatory rites which were more rigorous for those who might, because of their dubious descent or profession, prejudice the occasion. A scheme of graded ritual status thereby arose which, as will be seen, contributed to that hierarchical stratification of society known as caste. Thus to the Vedic rituals may be traced the genesis of some of the most distinctive traits of ancient Indian society, culture and science.

PASTORAL PEOPLES

All this, however, scarcely adds up to a convincing picture of the Vedic world, let alone to any kind of understanding of the historical processes at work within it. Somehow this primitive, or pre-modern, society of tribal herdsmen gradually learned about arable farming, assimilated or repulsed neighbours, discovered new resources, developed better technologies, adopted a settled life, organised itself into functional groups, opened trade links, endorsed frontiers, built cities, and eventually subscribed to the organised structures of authority which we associate with statehood. It all took perhaps a thousand years (1500–500BC), but as to the processes involved and the determining factors, let alone the critical events, the sources are silent. They provide a few cryptic clues but no ready answers; and the historian has first to ask the right questions.

The better to identify these questions, scholars have turned to other disciplines, and particularly to comparative anthropology and the study of pre-modern societies that are less remote from our own experience. Thus tribal structures in Polynesia and South America have provided clues about how kin-based societies may become socially stratified and about how notions of land as property may emerge. From the customs of pastoralist peoples in Africa conclusions have been drawn about the importance of cattle-offerings and gifts as a prestige-generating activity. And from native American customs much has been learned about the economic role of sacrifice. Thus the great Vedic sacrifices have been likened to the potlatch, in which the indigenous inhabitants of north-west America indulged in an extravaganza of consumption designed to burn off any surplus and at the same time enhance the status of the leading kin groups. Indeed the central action of the Mahabharata has been likened to one massive potlatch.

All these examples draw on tribal, or lineage, societies united by a shared ethnicity. If the Vedic arya are to be regarded as united principally by language rather than ethnicity, a comparison might also be made with the pre-modern society of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. The Vedic jana is often translated as the Gaelic ‘clan’ since, like the Highland clan, each jana acknowledged descent from a single ancestor. Thus, just as all MacDonalds claim descent from a Donald of Isla who was a distant descendant of the Irish king ‘Conn of the Hundred Battles’, so the Bharatas, the most prominent of the Rig Vedic jana, claimed descent from Bharata, a distant descendant of Pururavas, grandson of Manu. The jana, like the clan, was further divided into smaller descent groups, or septs, which might break away from the parent clan and adopt the name of their own common ancestor as a patronymic. Real or mythical, these ancestral figures were not, however, necessarily of the same race. Some of the Highland clans were of Norse (Viking) origin and others of Pictish or Irish origin; similarly some of the Vedic jana, like the Yadavas, are thought to have been of dasa origin. Hence too the clearly -dasa names of Su-dasa, a Bharata chief who scored a notable victory over ten rival ‘kings’, and Divo-dasa of the ten horse-sacrifices at Varanasi. All, though, whatever their ethnic origin, and whether Indians or Scots, shared a language (Gaelic/Sanskrit), a social system in which precedence was dictated by birth, and a way of life in which both wealth and prestige were computed in cattle.

In Scotland as in India, the rustling of other clans’ herds constituted both pastime and ritual, with success being an indicator of leadership credentials as well as of divine favour. As with the Vedic rajanya, each Highland chief had his bard whose business it was, like Kakshivant, to extol the might and generosity of his chiefly patron and to harness the forces of magic. His, too, was the job of memorising the clan’s genealogy and recording its achievements in verses that might be easily handed down by word of mouth. In Vedic society the bard was originally the chief’s charioteer. His function was not necessarily hereditary nor exclusively reserved to a particular social group. The author of the Mandala IX of the Rig Veda frankly avows humble origins which would have been anathema in a later caste-ridden society.

A bard am I, my father a leech,

And my mother a grinder of corn,

Diverse in means, but all wishing wealth,

Alike for cattle we strive.

In north-west Scotland as in north-west India, cattle were currency; but land was a common resource, not subject to individual rights of ownership and enjoyed in common by the whole clan and its herds. In Scotland this situation changed only under the pressure of a growing population and after the discovery of the land’s greater potential under a different farming regime – namely wool production. Previously, annual migrations to traditional areas of seasonal pasturage had rendered notions of territory and of frontiers fluid and often meaningless. Allegiance focused not on a geographical region nor on a political institution but exclusively on the descent group of the clan chief. This too changed under the new regime, and the chiefs had to find a new role. Perhaps similar pressures confronted the Vedic jana, and similar adaptations to a new farming regime – namely crop-growing – demanded of the rajanya a more possessive attitude to territory and property.

Such comparisons can, of course, be misleading. Technologies and markets not available to the arya in the second millennium BC had ensured a ready demand for Highland beef in the second millennium AD. Hence burning off the year’s surplus in an orgy of sacrifice, gift-exchange and gargantuan consumption was not a Scottish tradition. Conversely, climatic and geographical factors which made livestock farming the only surplus-creating occupation available to upland agriculturalists in Scotland made it a less suitable occupation in the tropical flood-plains of northern India. Although pastoralism would continue in areas like the west bank of the Jamuna and along the skirts of the Himalayas, the environment of the Ganga plain invited more intensive farming and a more sedentary lifestyle. Reference to other pre-modern societies merely helps to clarify the norms which may have characterised Vedic society, and perhaps to render it more intelligible than does that ‘stupendous mass’ of Vedic hymns.

3 The Epic Age C900–520 BC
FROM WEST TO EAST

WHILE TOILING in the two-thousand-kilometre patchwork of fields which is the Gangetic plain today, farmers have occasionally unearthed substantial hoards of copper implements and even copper bars. Associated with them at some sites are poorly fired and ‘unspeakably crude’¹ bits of ochre-coloured pottery (OCP) which tend to disintegrate at the touch. Unworthy of the Late Harappans and distributed too widely and too far east to be credited to the arya of the Vedas, these copper hoards remain a mystery. They are assumed to have been the property of itinerant smiths or traders who, for reasons unknown, stashed away their wares some time before 1000 BC. But the trouble with copper, or indeed iron, which first appears soon after this date, is that one can never be sure that the form in which it survives is that in which it was first cast. The harpoons and axes of this ‘copper hoard culture’ could have been made from the melted-down pins and arrowheads of an earlier people, while the presence of copper bars strongly suggests that the metal was already being widely traded.

Like metals, myths too get recycled. Reworked and so richly embellished as to be almost unrecognisable, stories which may once have reflected genuine historical events are liable to be re-used by later generations in a totally different context and for purposes quite other than that for which they were originally intended. This is not the case with the corpus of Vedic literature; the form and content of its sacrificial formulae were, as has been noted, too ritually crucial to be tampered with. Less sacred compositions, like the two great Sanskrit epics, were a different matter.

Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana survive in several versions, the earliest of which are at least five hundred years later than the Vedas. Yet their core narratives seem to relate to events from a period prior to all but the Rig Veda. As with the Greek epics attributed to Homer, this extraordinary antiquity justifies the attention accorded them in traditional histories. The wildly different dates adduced for the Mahabharata war – or for the Trojan war – scarcely matter if the events themselves can be verified. Sadly, though, in both cases so heavily have these tales been reworked for propaganda purposes, and so crammed and padded have they become with edifying sermons and other extraneous additions, that their original core stories are as hard to isolate as their dates.

Theoretically the Puranas, another group of Sanskrit texts, should be able to resolve this problem for the Indian historian. The most important collection of the Puranas, or ‘ancient legends’, is even later, dating only from C500 AD; yet it contains myths and genealogies which purport to go back to Manu (and beyond). Sure enough, here figure the names of protagonists from the epics as well as of Vedic chiefs and arya tribes. No doubt these lists were compiled from an ancient oral tradition which originated with the arya bards and would have been carefully memorised by their successors. But, like the epics, the Puranic compositions show signs of having been reworked. When finally they were written down, it was not in a spirit of disinterested scholarship but to elevate the pedigree of later dynasts and to enhance the repute of their brahmanical backers.

In their present form [the Puranas] are only religious fables and cant, with whatever historical content the works once possessed heavily encrusted by myth, diluted with semi-religious legends, and effaced during successive redactions copied by innumerable careless scribes; so that one finds great difficulty in restoring as much as the king-lists.²

This does not mean that they are worthless. Despite what D.D. Kosambi, himself a brahman, called ‘the deplorable brahman habit’³ of organising and categorising unrelated traditions into a convenient pattern, large chunks of the Puranic genealogies may be as authentic as the central characters and events in the epics. Moreover, just as the copper hoards, whatever their original provenance, reveal something about the uses, smelting techniques and distribution of copper, so these literary hoards can reveal something about the changes at work within north Indian society. The period between the events they describe and their being finally written down, roughly the first millennium BC, is of crucial importance. It is ‘the real formative period of Indian civilisation …: henceforth we can trace the continuity of civilisation through the succeeding ages.’⁴ Thus scholars like Kosambi and Romila Thapar, anxious to understand how, for instance, tribal structures crumbled and states emerged, focus less on the stirring events described in the epics and more on the contexts – geographical, social, environmental and economic – in which they occurred.

Like a self-denying ordinance, this stern approach deprives the historian of many a gallant hero plus whole chapters of rip-roaring narrative. More agreeably, it also diverts attention from that nagging problem of Indian history being so light on dates.

Because of the difficulty in assigning an exact chronology to the sources [i.e. the epics] it is impossible to be precise or dogmatic as to when particular changes took place … Consequently the major significance of these sources lies more in their indication of the nature of the trend of change which they delineate rather than in the precise dating of the change.⁵

The historicity of a hero demands that his place and dates be established; no such figure graces Indian history until the Buddha illumines the scene after 500 BC. But ‘the nature of a trend of change’ can reasonably be assigned to an entire river basin and a timespan of centuries.

The ‘trends’ which emerge from such studies are numerous and important though seldom explicit. For instance, central to both of the great epics is the question of succession. The Pandava heroes of the Mahabharata (Yudhisthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Draupadi, etc.), like their counterparts in the Ramayana (Rama, Sita and Lakshmana), are initially denied ‘kingdoms’ which would seem to be theirs by birthright and are forced into exile. Primogeniture evidently influenced succession and there are hints about the divine sanction of kingship; both of these ideas would become cardinal features of later monarchies. Yet Puranic references can be highly ambiguous about kingship as an institution, although one should not perhaps read too much in its oft-repeated adage: ‘As bad as ten slaughter houses is one oil-presser’s wheel, as bad as ten oil-pressers’ wheels is one inn sign, as bad as ten inn signs is a harlot, and as bad as ten harlots is a king.’⁶

But it is also clear that society at the time, though now settled and familiar with agriculture, was still clan-based. Kingship was subordinate to kinship and probably amounted to no more than chieftainship-among-equals. Succession by primogeniture was thus heavily qualified; much depended on the physical and moral perfection of the candidate, on the approval of his peers, and on his successful avoidance of fortuitous mishaps and curses. Ideas of a kingship which transcended clan affiliation and of automatic succession by right of birth, though obviously important to those who reworked the original stories, would only become the norm towards the middle of the millennium and then only among certain tribes.

As for the retreat into exile, the other central theme in both epics, this is taken to indicate the process by which clan society resolved its conflicts and at the same time encroached ever deeper into the subcontinent. Eventually population pressures on land and other resources would encourage greater social specialisation and the assertion of a central authority, two of the prerequisites of a state. But during the first centuries of the first millennium BC, these same pressures seem merely to have encouraged a traditional solution whereby clans segmented and split away to explore new territories.

Exile meant withdrawing from settled society not into the desert (which even renunciates seem to have shunned) but into the aranya, the forest. Here life was challenging though full of possibilities; numerous venerable sages and barely-clad nymphs could even make it idyllic. Something of the later antithesis between the safely settled, caste-based society of the village and the dangerously peripatetic and egalitarian society associated with the forest is already apparent. But for every agreeable sylvan experience there also lurked amongst the trees a monstrous demon or some other species of hostile primitive. These creatures, even if recognisably human, possessed no houses and subsisted as hunter-gatherers. To exiles who prided themselves on being settled agriculturalists, the nomadic ways and uncouth habits of the forest were anathema. The monsters had therefore to be exterminated, while harmless savages, like the snake-worshipping ‘Nagas’, could be enlisted as allies or tributaries, usually through marriage and through inventing acceptable pedigrees for them. In effect the relationship between the epic heroes and their forest foes mirrored the presumed pattern of Aryan ‘colonisation’ and settlement.

‘The people move from west to east and conquer land,’ says the Satapatha Brahmana. By the time of the Mahabharata they had evidently reached the upper Ganga, for there stood Hastinapura, the story’s disputed capital. Forest exile in this geographical context could only mean that, in their eastward spread, the pioneers of Aryanisation were entering the main Gangetic basin. Decidedly different from today’s dusty chequerboard where tufts of trees survive only as shade for huddled villages, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were then a moist green wilderness of forest and swamp, a tropical taiga of near-Siberian extent. Here, unlike in the drier Panjab, land clearance posed a formidable challenge. The soils were heavier and the jungle thicker; even fire-breathing Agni’s work must have been quickly undone as smoke-blackened stumps burst back into leaf. On the other hand the forest was rich in resources. The exiles invariably used their sojourn in the wilderness to re-arm with a formidable arsenal of new weapons. Though ascribed to divine provenance, these unbreakable swords, bows with unerring arrows, and devastating missiles may more plausibly have been fashioned from the exotic timbers and minerals only to be found in the terra incognita beyond the then confines of the western settlements.

Although copper from Rajasthan had been used by the Harappans, the best-quality deposits lie much further east in what is now southern Bihar. Thence too came iron. Whether its use was first learned from indigenous smiths in peninsular India or whether through trade contacts with west Asia is uncertain. Likewise the revolution it eventually effected. After 500 BC iron axes and probably ploughshares were indeed helping to solve the problem of clearing the land and working heavier soils; but until that time the ‘black metal’ seems to have been reserved almost exclusively for weapons and knives. Access to the new metallurgy may not, then, have eased the settler’s lot, but it could at least have given the exiled Pandavas a military edge – literally – over their enemies. Adopted by the other clans, iron represented a major technological advantage, comparable to the horse-drawn chariots of their arya ancestors and perhaps of more utility in the closer confines of the new environment.

Unfortunately, charting the eastward progress of Sanskritic but still tribal intruders was not germane to the purposes of those who retold the epics for the edification of later generations. Indeed surviving versions of the Mahabharata would have us believe that the Pandavas and their Kaurava rivals were not only far from primitive but that they already monopolised the resources of the subcontinent. When not in exile, they are described as living in pillared pavilions and marble halls, their interiors opulently furnished and their floors so highly polished that visitors hitched up their robes in the belief that across such glimmering expanses they must needs wade. The Kuru ‘kingdom’, centred on Hastinapura, is projected as being of vast extent and untold wealth, its armies feared throughout the subcontinent and its potential allies extending from coast to coast.

Such descriptions served solely to legitimise the grandiose ambitions of later empire-builders. (And if one may judge by the television serialisations of the 1980s, they still serve to underpin conceits about a pan-Indian prehistory of spectacular sophistication.) In reality, though, the core geography of the Mahabharata is limited to a small area of the Ganga-Jamuna Doab which was the maximum extent of Kuru territory. This is self-evident from an early episode in the story when, the territory having been divided, the Pandavas set out to the ends of the ‘kingdom’ to found a new capital. They choose Indraprastra, just sixty kilometres away and still so named – indeed still fortified; its crumbling walls, although not those of the Pandavas, served the British designers of New Delhi as a suitable feature with which to terminate the vista from their own marbled halls of Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhawan).

Further detail on the Indo-Aryan drang nach osten may be gleaned from the archaeological evidence for the first half of the first millennium BC. At Hastinapura and other sites that ‘unspeakably crude’ ochre-coloured pottery which is sometimes found with the copper hoards is succeeded by a very superior painted grey ware. ‘PGW’ was evidently produced on a wheel, and was confidently decorated with geometric and floral motifs. It is found principally throughout the Ganga-Jamuna Doab and in adjacent areas of the Panjab, Rajasthan and the western Gangetic valley, a distribution which tallies nicely with the geographical context of the Mahabharata. Often it occurs in quantities which imply a greater population density than previously, and thus ‘it marks an assertive society, richer than its immediate predecessors’.⁷ It was also a society which, judging by associated finds, worked the land as well as keeping both cattle and horses. Finally, the dating of this PGW also tallies well with that of the C950 BC date for the great war. If not the pottery from which Vedic chieftains once quaffed their psychedelic soma, it may well have been off PGW dishes that Bhima, trencherman par excellence amongst the Pandavas, prodigiously fed. In short, the PGW looks to have been the distinctive pottery style of the Kuru and associated clans on the north-west fringes of the Gangetic plain.

Another pottery style known as black and red ware (BRW) seems to have been contemporary with PGW but to have had a wider and patchier distribution which included much of western and central India. This has suggested an association with the Yadava clan, a sept or segment of which is said to have migrated south from its base at Mathura (between Delhi and Agra). In the process it seems to have established an important corridor of Aryanisation to Avanti (later called Malwa), where the city of Ujjain would soon arise, and further still into Gujarat and possibly down the west coast. The Yadava dimension has to be pieced together from scattered references in the Puranas, since it lacks the detailed documentation provided for the Kuru by the Mahabharata. Nevertheless into the latter epic as the Pandavas’ mentor and guardian is worked the legend of Lord Krishna, the scion and hero of the Yadava lineage. Krishna, although used as a mouthpiece for the revered but later Bhagavad Gita (and although later still to become the frolicsome toddler and pastoral heart-throb so dear to Indian sentiment), is here an aloof and awesome figure whose no-nonsense approach is partly an indictment of human frailty but also stems from an insistence on the centrality of clan loyalty and arya tradition. The Yadavas were evidently a conservative lot. In Gujarat as in Mathura pastoralism and dairy farming would retain their economic importance long after arable farming had become the mainstay of life and the source of surplus in the Gangetic basin. Likewise the western clans would cling to their traditional hierarchies long after their eastern cousins had adopted state formations.

Another salient of black and red ware suggests a south-east movement from Mathura along the edge of the Vindhya hills. These form the southern perimeter of the Gangetic basin whence, in Bihar, the BRW descends again into the plain. It there re-meets the painted grey ware, a parallel arm of which is discernible extending east along the skirts of the Himalayas. The impression gained is therefore that of a pincer movement, possibly dictated by the problems of clearing the dense forest and draining the swamps which blocked progress along the banks of the Ganga itself. Instead the tide of migration and acculturation seems to have worked its way round the edges, and especially round the top edge. Thus the principal chain of janapada, or clan territories (literally ‘clan-feet’), lay well to the north of the main river, on the banks of the Ganga’s tributaries as they flow down from what is now Nepal. In the Satapatha Brahmana there is even a detailed description of Agni burning a trail eastwards and eventually leapfrogging what is thought to have been the Gandak river so as to ignite the forest beyond and clear its land for settlement and tillage by the Videha clan.

This northerly route of east – west transit and trade, extending from the Panjab and the upper Indus to Bihar and the lower Ganga, now became as much the main axis of Aryanisation as it would subsequently of Buddhist proselytisation and even Magadhan imperialism. It was known as the Uttarapatha, the Northern Route, as distinct from the Daksinapatha (whence the term ‘Deccan’) or Southern Route. The latter, largely the Yadava trail from the Gangetic settlements to Avanti (Malwa) and Gujarat, would also become a much-travelled link giving access to the ports of the west coast and the riches of the as yet un-Aryanised and historically inarticulate peninsula. But it was along the Uttarapatha that the Aryanised territories would first begin to assume the trappings of statehood. Initially those at the western end in the Panjab and the Doab tended to look down on those on the eastern frontier in Bihar and Bengal; the latter were mleccha, uncouth in their arya speech and negligent in their sacrificial observance. By mid-first millennium BC it would be the other way round. As the eastern settlements grew into a network of thriving proto-states, many laid claim to exalted pedigrees and, assuming the mantle of Aryanised orthodoxy, would be happy to disparage their Panjabi cousins as vratya or ‘degenerate’.

THE MAHABHARATA VERSUS THE RAMAYANA

The Ramayana, second of the great Sanskrit epics, has been subjected to the same sort of revision processes as the Mahabharata. So much so that attempting to tease India’s past from such doubtful material has been likened to trying to reconstruct the history of ancient Greece from the fables of Aesop, or that of the Baghdad caliphate from The Thousand and One Nights. The Ramayana’s story is, however, simpler than the Mahabharata’s and its purpose is clearer. No one under Lord Rama’s sway would swap a king for ten harlots, let alone for a thousand slaughterhouses. For in the form we now know it, the Ramayana may be seen as ‘an epic legitimising the monarchical state’.⁸

When it took this form is uncertain. A condensed version of the story is told in the Mahabharata, but it would appear to be an interpolation. It is certainly no proof that the characters in the Ramayana preceded those in the Mahabharata. The opposite seems more probable, in that Lord Rama’s capital of Ayodhya lay astride the Uttarapatha and five hundred kilometres east of the Kuru/Pandavas’ Hastinapura. That, in its final form, the Ramayana is definitely later than the Mahabharata is shown by the prominence given to regions which are unheard of in the latter. Indeed, while the main wanderings of the exiled Pandavas seem to have been restricted to the immediate neighbourhood of the Doab, those of Lord Rama and his associates are made to extend deep into central and southern India. No doubt much of this was a gloss by later redactors, but it is still precious evidence of the continuing spread of Aryanisation during the first millennium BC. If the Mahabharata hints at the pattern of settlement in the north and west, the Ramayana continues the story eastwards.

Thus while the Mahabharata belongs to the Ganga-Jamuna Doab, the Ramayana is firmly rooted in the middle Ganga region. Rama’s Ayodhya was the capital of an important janapada called Koshala, roughly north-eastern Uttar Pradesh, which some time in mid-millennium would absorb its southern neighbour. The latter was Kashi, which is the old name for Varanasi (Benares). In a popular Buddhist version of the epic, Varanasi rather than Ayodhya actually becomes the locus of the story. And much later, in Lord Shiva’s city, in a quiet whitewashed house overlooking the Ganga and well away from the crowds thronging Dashashwamedh Ghat, the seventeenth-century poet Tulsi Das would pen for the delight of future generations the definitive Hindi version of the epic. Varanasi would make the Ramayana its own, and to this day slightly further upstream, on rolling parkland beside the ex-Maharaja of Varanasi’s palace, the annual week-long performance of the Ram Lila (a dramatised version of the epic) remains one of the greatest spectacles in India.

This suggests that whereas the Mahabharata survives in the popular imagination as a hoard of cherished but disjointed segments, like the scattered skeleton of a fossilised dinosaur, the Ramayana is still alive – indeed kicking, if one may judge by the events of the early 1990s. Casting about for an evocative issue around which to rally Hindu opinion, it was to the sanctity of Ayodhya and its supposed defilement by the presence of a mosque that fundamentalist Hindu opinion turned. Loudly invoking Lord Rama, in 1992 saffron-clad activists duly assailed the Ayodhya mosque and so plunged the proud secularism of post-Independence India into its deepest crisis of conscience.

That Ayodhya/Varanasi score higher in the sacral stakes than Hastinapura/Indraprastra may also have something to do with the different cosmic perspectives of the two epics. A clue is provided by the language of the Puranas, whose genealogies undergo an unexpected change of tense when they reach the Bharata war. From one of Sanskrit’s innumerable past tenses the verb suddenly switches to the future; in effect, subsequent generations as recorded in these genealogies are being prophesied. Given that the lists were not written down until centuries later, the succession of future descendants may be just as authentic as that of past antecedents, indeed rather more so since later names extend into historic times and can be verified from other sources. But the point that the authors of these lists were trying to register was that the great war marked a watershed in time. It was literally the end of an era. The Dvapara Yug, the ‘Third Age’ of Hindu cosmology, came to a close as Pandavas slew Kauravas in the great Bharata holocaust at Kurukshetra, ‘the field of the Kuru’; thereafter the dreaded Kali Yug, the still current ‘Black Age’, began.

Although the battle does not mark the end of the epic, the impression gained is that the Mahabharata is essentially retrospective. It celebrates a vanishing past and may be read as the swansong of an old order in which the primacy of clan kinship, and the martial ethic associated with it, is being slowly laid to rest. In the eighteen-day battle nearly all the Kauravas, plus a whole generation of Pandavas, are wiped out. Yudhisthira, ostensibly the principal victor, surveys the carnage and is overcome with remorse; the rivalry and conflicts endemic in the clan system are repudiated; with the intention of returning to the forest, Yudhisthira asks his followers to accept his abdication. Krishna will have none of it: the ruler must rule just as the warrior must fight; release depends on following one’s dharma, not indulging one’s grief. Reluctantly Yudhisthira concurs, performing the royal sacrifices of rajasuya and aswamedha. But regrets continue, and when Krishna himself dies, it is as if the last remaining pillar of the old order has been removed. All five Pandavas, plus their shared wife Draupadi, can then gratefully withdraw from public life to wander off into the Himalayas.

By way of contrast, the Ramayana may be considered as decidedly forward-looking. It opens new frontiers and it formulates a new ideal. Although nothing is said about a new era or a system of governance specifically designed for it, the implication is clear. When Rama eventually regains his capital, it is not to indulge in remorse or even to reaffirm Vedic values but to usher in a dazzling utopia of order, justice and prosperity under his personal rule. The resultant Rama-rajya (or Ram-raj in Hindi, ‘the rule of Rama’) quickly became, and is still, the Indian political ideal, invoked by countless dynasts and pledged by countless politicians, secularist as well as Hindu nationalist. Likewise Ayodhya itself would come to represent the model of a royal capital and as such would feature in many subsequent Aryanised state systems. In this guise it would travel far, making landfalls in Thailand where Ayuthia, the pre-Bangkok capital of the Thai monarchs, supposedly replicated Rama’s city, and even in central Java where the most senior sultanate is still that of Jogjakarta, or Ngajodya-karta, the first part of which is a Javanese rendering of ‘Ayodhya’.

MONARCHIES AND REPUBLICS

Legitimising monarchical rule, in India as in south-east Asia, was the Ramayana’s prime function. But in both places its use for this purpose was dictated as much by current challenges as by residual loyalties to a past order. For in north India of the mid-first millennium BC other experiments in the organising of a state were already well underway. Monarchical authority was not, it seems, essential to state-formation. Nor was its absolutism, as heavily promoted by its brahman supporters, congenial to all. Other sources suggest dissent and bear copious testimony to alternative state systems with very different constitutions.

The textual sources concerned are all either Buddhist or Jain. Nataputta, otherwise Mahavira (‘Great Hero’), would formulate the Jain code of conduct in the sixth-to-fifth centuries BC, just when Siddhartha Gautama, otherwise the Buddha (‘Enlightened One’), was preaching the Middle Way. This was a coincidence of profound moment. It would make the history of the mid-Gangetic plain in the first millennium BC a subject of abiding and even international interest; more immediately, it directs the historian’s attention to aspects of contemporary Indian society that would otherwise be ignored. For the lives and teachings of the great founding fathers of Buddhism and Jainism quickly inspired a host of didactic and narrative compositions which supplement and sometimes contradict orthodox sources like the Puranas. Moreover, both men were born into distinguished clans which belonged not to kingdoms modelled on Rama’s Ayodhya but to one of these alternative, non-monarchical state systems. Jain and Buddhist versions of the Ramayana story, or of episodes within it, thus show a rather different emphasis. They also incorporate significant information on places other than Ayodhya and on state systems other than monarchies.

These alternative state systems have been variously interpreted as oligarchical, republican or even democratic. The term now used for them is gana-sangha, evidently a compromise reached after some early-twentieth-century scholarly sniping, since we are told that ‘in the years 1914–16 a great controversy raged [presumably amongst blissfully bunkered academics] about the term gana.’⁹ A variant of jana, basically it means a ‘clan’ or ‘horde’ which, qualified by sangha, an ‘organisation’ or ‘government’, supposedly gives a meaning of ‘government by discussion’. Such ‘governments by discussion’, or more commonly ‘republics’, could of course take many forms. The extent to which all or only some of their constituents participated in decision-making, the institutions and assemblies through which they did so, and the degree to which they elected or merely endorsed a leadership are not clear. Nevertheless, all these matters are currently the subject of debate, partly because of obvious parallels with the contemporary republics and democracies of ancient Greece, and partly because modern India itself has a republican and democratic constitution whose pedigree occasionally generates some warmth.

That a clan-based society should opt for a constitution which was more egalitarian and less autocratic than monarchy seems perfectly logical. In a sense the republics merely institutionalised traditions of consultation amongst the leading clansmen which go back to Vedic times. These took the form of assemblages which ranged from the open samiti to the more restricted and specialised sabha and parisad. As consultative groups the latter would develop into ministerial councils in the monarchical states, while the former seems to have retained its sovereign status in the republics.

Most of the mid-millennium republics of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (UP) – those of the Licchavis, Sakyas, Koliyas, Videhas, etc. – came into being as a result of the usual process of segmenting off from a parent clan. In due course the breakaways claimed their own janapada, their territory, and perhaps intentionally, perhaps through neglect or penury, they skimped on performing the full programme of Vedic sacrifices and paid scant attention to brahmanical authority. Surplus produce and booty, when they materialised, would not therefore have necessarily been ‘burned off’ in ritual orgies designed to impress the gods and enhance the sacrificer’s prestige. Instead they would have become available for other purposes, like administration, urbanisation, industry and trade.

This, however, is a simplistic explanation for the emergence of states, and would certainly not have encouraged the formation of monarchies. In brahmanic tradition kingship is said to have been pioneered by the gods. Facing defeat by their supernatural enemies, the gods put their heads together and decided to choose a leader; Indra got the job. A raja, in other words, should be chosen by his peers, his role was principally military, and his raj had the sanction of divine precedent. Other myths reformulated the concept. One, already noticed, promoted kingship as the only insurance against anarchy. In the evil times ushered in by the Kali Yug, men found themselves obliged to compete with one another for wealth, women and favour. Society was thus reduced to the free-for-all of matsya-nyaya (‘the law of the fishes’, i.e. of the jungle); and men were accordingly obliged to formulate rules of conduct and to seek a means of enforcing them. The gods, or Lord Vishnu in the shape of that rapidly growing fish, proposed a raja; and they selected Manu. He agreed, but only on four nicely judged conditions – that he receive a tenth of his subjects’ harvest, one in every fifty of their cows, a quarter of all the merit they earned, and the pick of their choicest maidens. In other words, authority and law-enforcement were the now raja’s main responsibilities; he was chosen by the gods rather than men; and under an advantageous reciprocal arrangement he had a right to a substantial contribution of the good things his subjects produced.

Here, then, was a firm ideological basis for kingship. But while the element of contract implicit in the Manu myth was much emphasised by Buddhist sources, brahmanic sources focused on the element of divine sanction. Either way, a monarch was theoretically subject to constraints, human or divine, and should not be regarded as an outright despot. Conversely, all theories of kingship provided ample justification for the administrative and coercive structures which would constitute a state system.

But as with the more spontaneous evolution of the gana-sanghas (republics), state-formation was prompted not simply by the appeal or logic of a particular constitution. Just as important were the challenges and opportunities created by new technologies and new social and economic conditions. It seems fairly certain from the abundance of artefacts unearthed by archaeology that, by mid-millennium, population densities had increased, and that migration had slowed as the more easily worked tracts became settled. The population increase owed as much to the incorporation, or Aryanisation, of indigenous peoples as to a soaring birth-rate amongst the immigrants; and both processes would heighten social awareness and caste/class distinctions.

On the other hand, agricultural production seems to have more than kept pace with the growing population. The use of heavy ploughs drawn by eight oxen or more, the widespread adoption of rice and the development of irrigation are all well attested by 500 BC: ‘Buddhist texts describe rice and its varieties with as much detail as the Rig Vedic hymns refer to cows.’¹⁰ It has been suggested that the wetter soils of northern Bihar were so unsuitable for barley that only some understanding of wet rice-cultivation would have made them worth settling. The effort of clearing such lands and building embankments for water retention would still have been arduous; yet it paid off. By the sixth-fifth centuries BC the Lichhavi and other republics north of the Ganga would together represent a formidable power well capable of meeting a challenge from their monarchical neighbours, notably the Koshala/Kashi kingdom in the south-west and, south-east across the Ganga, the aggressive new dynasty of Magadha.

More intensive farming regimes also made for new attitudes towards the land. The grazier’s seasonal parameters had given way to the fixed dimensions of the ploughman’s field. Anchored to a dependable supply of water and labour, the grama grew into a village of mud-brick housing which was home both to families of clan descent and to a growing band of socially differentiated dependants and subordinates. From the village there now spread a quilt of carefully supervised plots within a network of ditchings. The common rights of ownership typical of a pastoral society were being edged out by local initiative and the use of subject labour. Quick to claim the fields which they had reclaimed, the grhpatis, or heads of households, pressed for title to land, labour and water as the best way to meet their obligation of supplying the livestock and, increasingly, the grain needed for the leadership’s ritual sacrifices. Imperceptibly terms like bali, which originally meant an offering intended for the clan-chief’s sacrificial disposal, came to denote a fixed and regular contribution which, when subject to record and assessment, duly became a tax. Similarly bhaga, originally a ‘share’ of the spoils of war exacted by the chief, came to signify a tax on produce, usually of one sixth.

As cultivable land came to be considered as familial property, so the wider but ill-defined janapada, the ancestral territory of a particular clan, assumed fixed boundaries. The Gangetic basin’s abundant rivers and riverbeds made convenient frontiers for the newer janapada in the east. Buddhist texts list sixteen maha-janapada, or major janapada, as having been extant in the sixth century BC. They extended from Gandhara and Kamboja in the north-west of what is now Pakistan to Avanti and Chedi in central India and Anga and Kalinga in Bengal and Orissa. Soon to be known as rashtra, or ‘kingdoms’, many still retained their tribal names; Kuru was still the land of the Kuru, and Malla of the Malla. But allegiance was now dictated less by the horizontal bonds of kinship and more by the vertical ties of economic and social dependency. Instead of being focused on tribe or clan, loyalty was increasingly to the territory itself, to the individual or body which had sovereignty over it, and to the town or city where that power resided.

CITY AND CASTE

India’s second urbanisation (the first being that of the long-forgotten Harappans) may be attributed partly to this process of state-formation and to the institutions it engendered, and partly to the surplus generated by the new agricultural regime pioneered in the east. The post-Vedic texts, of course, would have us believe that towns and cities had dotted the land for aeons. But it is only from C600 BC that archaeology lends any weight to their optimistic imagery. Earthen ramparts of about this period have been uncovered at Ujjain (in Malwa), Varanasi and Kaushambi (the post-Hastinapura capital of the Kuru, west of Allahabad). These ramparts have ‘civic dimensions and must have enclosed real cities’.¹¹ Other sites like that of Sravasti, the post-Ayodhya capital of Koshala, and Rajgir, the Magadha capital, seem soon to have followed suit. In the west, Taxila and Charsadda may have preceded them; but that was under a different impetus if not a different dispensation. In the north-west, with stone plentiful, there is also evidence of monumental structures.

Nothing comparable is found in the city sites of the Gangetic basin; even kiln-fired brickwork, the Harappans’ speciality, does not reappear until the last centuries BC. Buildings, including state edifices and royal residences, were evidently of timber and mud. The first Buddhist stupas (commemorative mounds, often erected over relics of the Buddha) were of just such perishable materials, although it was precisely these sacred structures which would be amongst the earliest to be clad, then gloriously cloistered, in stone. Of architecture and sculpture, the signposts to so much of later Indian history, nothing remains.

Although unused, the technology for kiln-fired bricks was familiar enough, for what distinguishes this period of urbanisation is a new and invasive ceramic ware. Known as the northern black polished (NBP), it first appears after 500 BC, rapidly supersedes the earlier styles (PGW, BRW) in Bihar and UP, and eventually extends west across the Doab and deep into Panjab, east to Bengal and south to Maharashtra. Were there no other evidence for urbanisation, the concentrated finds of this high-quality ware would prompt the idea of city life. Similarly, were there no other evidence than its widespread distribution, one might yet guess that such standardisation amongst the numerous kingdoms and gana-sanghas of north India during the last half of the first millennium BC must presage some major new integrational influence. Sure enough, within two centuries of the NBP ware’s first appearance, all of north India (plus much more besides) would be conspicuously linked by the first and the most extended of India’s home-grown empires.

Trade, of course, also played its part. The first coins are datable to the mid-millennium and are found mostly in an urban context. Of silver or copper, they were punch-marked (rather than minted) with symbols thought to be those of particular professional groups, markets and cities. They ‘were therefore a transitional form between traders’ tokens as units of value and legal tender issued by royalty’.¹² The cash economy had evidently arrived, and with references to money-lending, banking and commodity speculation becoming commonplace in Buddhist literature it is clear that venture capital was readily available. Items traded included metals, fine textiles, salt, horses and pottery. Roads linked the major cities, although river transport seems to have been favoured for bulky consignments.

All of which presupposes the existence of specialised professions: artisans and cultivators, carters and boatmen, merchants and financiers. It was all a far cry from the clan communities of the Vedas. North Indian society had been undergoing structural changes every bit as radical as those affecting its agricultural base and its political organisation. These changes are usually interpreted in terms of the emerging caste system. They have to be extracted, with some difficulty, from the changing terms used to designate individuals and social groups in the different texts. And it would appear that the process of change was gradual, uneven and complex.

Basically the Vedas and the epics portray the concerns, and celebrate the exploits, of a society consisting almost entirely of well-born clansmen. Known as ksatriya and rajanya, these warrior families acknowledged a chief with whom they shared a common ancestor. The chief was their raja, a term rich in potential for misunderstanding in that it later came to mean a king in the monarchical states and an elector, or a participant in government, in the republics. Thus Vaisali, the capital of the Licchavi gana-sangha in northern Bihar, is said to have housed 7707 rajas, or in another account ‘twice 84,000 rajas’. As well as the leadership of their rajas, the ksatriya also acknowledged the ritual insights and sacerdotal authority of a non-ksatriya priesthood, the brahmans. The latter, their profession becoming hereditary and exclusive through emphasis on their descent from certain ancient risis or seers, assumed the status of a parallel caste with well advertised rights and taboos derived from their monopoly of sacrificial lore, of religious orthodoxy and of academic jargon.

To these two castes was appended a third, possibly to differentiate clansmen of less distinguished descent who had forsaken their warrior past for agriculture and other wealth-generating pursuits. Vaisya, the term used to describe this caste, derives from vis, which originally meant the entire tribal community. They were thus considered to be of arya descent and, like the brahman and ksatriya, were dvija or ‘twice born’ (once physically, a second time through initiation rituals). As the ksatriya, literally ‘the empowered ones’, assumed military, political and administrative powers within the new state structures, the unempowered remainder of the erstwhile vis, that is the vaisya, continued as gramini and grhpati, villagers and household heads. Their role was that of creating the wealth on which the ksatriya and brahman depended or, as the texts have it, on which ksatriya and brahman might ‘graze’. In pursuit of this productive ideal many vaisya accumulated land holdings while others invested in trade and industry. Much later, just as the ksatriya in recognition of their martial status would be equated with ‘rajputs’, so the vaisya would be identified with the essentially mercantile ‘bania’.

Beyond the pale of the arya were a variety of indigenous peoples like the despised dasa of the Vedas. All were, nevertheless, subject to varying degrees of Aryanisation. Some, perhaps in recognition of their numerical superiority in regions newly penetrated by the clans, were actually co-opted into the three dvija castes while their cults and deities were accommodated in the growing pantheon of what we now call Hinduism. Others obstinately retained forms of speech and conduct which disqualified them from co-option and, perhaps as a result of conquest, they were relegated to functional roles considered menial and impure. Dasa came to denote a household slave or rural helot and dasi a female domestic or slave-concubine. Slavery was not, however, practised on a scale comparable to that in Greece or Rome, perhaps because most of these indigenous peoples were in fact assigned an intermediate status as sudra. The term is of uncertain origin and seems also to have embraced those born of mixed-caste parentage. Its functional connotation is clear enough, however. Just as the vaisya was expected to furnish wealth, the sudra was expected to furnish labour.

These then were the four earliest castes, and a much-quoted passage from the latest mandala (X) of the Rig Veda clearly shows their relative status. When, in the course of a gory creation myth, the gods were carving up the sacrificial figure who represented mankind, they chose to chop him into four bits, each of which prefigured a caste. ‘The brahman was his mouth, of both arms was the rajanya (ksatriya) made, his thighs became the vaisya, from his feet the sudra was produced.’¹³ Thus organised into a stratified hierarchy, each caste was theoretically immutable and exclusive; the purity taboos which derived from sacrificial ritual provided barriers to physical contact, while the lineage obsessions of clan society provided barriers to intermarriage.

The term used for caste in the Vedas is varna, ‘colour’, which, in the context of the arya’s disparaging comments about the ‘black’ dasa, is often taken to mean that the higher castes also considered themselves the fairer-skinned. This is now disputed. According to the Mahabharata the ‘colours’ associated with the four castes were white, red, yellow and black; they sound more like symbolic shades meted out by those category-conscious brahmanical minds than skin pigments. Similarly the excessive rigidity of the caste system should not be taken for granted. Then as now, caste was not necessarily an indicator of economic worth; even the four-tier hierarchy was variable, with ksatriya more dominant than brahmans in the republics; and entry into the system – indeed progression within it – was never impossible. It may be precisely because alien cults, tribes and professions could in time, if willing to conform, be slotted into its open-ended shelving that the system proved so pervasive and durable: ‘Varna was a mechanism for assimilation.’¹⁴ Though undoubtedly a form of systematised oppression, it should also be seen as an ingenious schema for harnessing the loyalties of a more numerous and possibly more skilled indigenous population. Certainly, like the NBP ware, its acceptance from one end of northern India to the other hinted at a social, cultural and linguistic cohesion which belied the multiplicity of states and could – indeed imminently would – transcend them.

In Buddhist texts, and in common parlance even today, the more usual word for caste is not varna but jati. Jati derives from a verb meaning ‘to be born’, the emphasis being less on the degree of ritual purity, as in the four-tier varna, and more on caste determination as a result of being born into a particular kinship group. If varna provided the theoretical framework, jati came to represent the practical reality. With society assuming a complexity undreamed of in Vedic times, caste formation was veering away from ritual status to take greater account of the proliferation of localised and specialised activities. Geographical, tribal, sectarian and, above all, economic and professional specialisations determined a group’s jati.

Specialisation plumbed the depths of the social hierarchy, with tasks like disposing of the dead keeping the lowly candala as outcastes, irredeemably degraded by the nature of their work. It also cleft the pinnacles of the system, with some brahman groups artfully deploying their expertise as kingmakers and dynastic-legitimisers, while others had to rest content with handling ritual requirements at domestic and village level.

In the monarchical states leading associates of the ruling lineage assumed quasi-bureaucratic functions within the royal retinue. As the ratnins, or ‘treasures’, of ancient ritual, their designations date back to Vedic times and include such functionaries as the charioteer, the huntsman and the bard. Out of their ranks arose the senapati, or senani, who became commander of the army, and the purohita, or high priest. The charioteer seems to have become a treasurer, and the messenger ‘an official who looked after the state horses and was responsible for the maintenance of dynastic tradition’.¹⁵ A similar process whereby household officials became officers of state would apply in Europe: in the Norman kingdoms the master of the royal stables (comes stabuli) became the ‘constable’ of the realm, and the keeper of the royal mares (mareschal) the ‘marshal’ of the realm.

But it is in trade and manufacturing that specialisation is most apparent. The carpenter, once one of the royal retinue, or ratnins, by reason of his skill in building chariots, was now joined by a host of other craftsmen – ironsmiths and goldsmiths, potters, weavers, herbalists, ivory-carvers. Some were tied to a particular locality or village by their source of raw materials; others were encouraged to settle in designated areas of the new cities and towns by their predominantly royal patrons. Physically segregated and learning their skills by hereditary association, such groups were readily accorded jati status which, in the context of their specialisation, bore a close affinity to a professional fraternity or guild. Besides being more numerous and capable of endless proliferation, each jati was firmly based on an economic community. They contained an element of mutual support, and they may be seen as extending caste organisation deep into the burgeoning economies of the new states.

Similar changes may have been underway in peninsular India. Since neither Mahavira nor the Buddha ventured south, their followers had little to record of the area and there are no textual sources for it before the end of the first millennium BC. But it is clear that by then proto-states were well established in the extreme south and that they were already engaged in maritime trade. How much they owed to Aryanising influences is debatable. Although the epics were evidently known and brahmans respected, social stratification took a rather un-Aryan form, with different taboos and no place for two of the four varnas. In fact to this day indigenous vaisya and ksatriya castes are practically unknown in peninsular India.

4 Out of the Myth-Smoke C520–C320 BC
INDUS AND INDIA

MAPS PRINTED AFTER 1947 sometimes show the republic of India not as ‘India’ but as ‘Bharat’. The word derives from Bharata-varsha, ‘the land of the Bharatas’, these Bharatas being the most prominent and distinguished of the early Vedic clans. By adopting this term the new republic in Delhi could, it was argued, lay claim to a revered arya heritage which was geographically vague enough not to provoke regional jealousies, and doctrinally vague enough not to jeopardise the republic’s avowed secularism.

In the first flush of independence ‘Bharat’ would seem preferable, because the word ‘India’ was too redolent of colonial disparagement. It also lacked a respectable indigenous pedigree. For although British claims to have incubated an ‘India consciousness’ were bitterly contested, there was no gainsaying the fact that in the whole colossal corpus of Sanskrit literature nowhere called ‘India’ is ever mentioned; nor does the term occur in Buddhist or Jain texts; nor was it current in any of South Asia’s numerous other languages. Worse still, if etymologically ‘India’ belonged anywhere, it was not to the republic proclaimed in Delhi by Jawaharlal Nehru but to its rival headed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Pakistan.

Partition would have a way of dividing the subcontinent’s spoils with scant reference to history. Pakistan inherited the majority of the main Harappan sites, so depriving India of the most tangible proof of its vaunted antiquity. Conversely, India inherited most of the subcontinent’s finest Islamic architecture, so depriving Muslim Pakistanis of what they regard as their own glorious heritage. No tussle over the word ‘India’ is reported because Jinnah preferred the newly coined and very Islamic-sounding acronym that is ‘Pakistan’ (see p. 496). Additionally, he was under the impression that neither state would want to adopt the British title of ‘India’. He only discovered his mistake after Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, had already acceded to Nehru’s demand that his state remain ‘India’. Jinnah, according to Mountbatten, ‘was absolutely furious when he found out that they [Nehru and the Congress Party] were going to call themselves India’.¹ The use of the word implied a subcontinental primacy which Pakistan would never accept. It also flew in the face of history, since ‘India’ originally referred exclusively to territory in the vicinity of the Indus river (with which the word is cognate). Hence it was largely outside the republic of India but largely within Pakistan.

The reservations about the word ‘India’, which had convinced Jinnah that neither side would use it, stemmed from its historical currency amongst outsiders, especially outsiders who had designs on the place. Something similar could, of course, be said about terms like ‘Britain’, ‘Germany’ or ‘America’; when first these words were recorded, all were objects of conquest. But in the case of ‘India’ this demeaning connotation had lasted until modern times. ‘Hindustan’, ‘India’ or ‘the Indies’ (its more generalised derivative) had come, as if by definition, to denote an acquisition rather than a territory. Geographically imprecise, indeed moveable if one took account of all the ‘Indians’ in the Americas, ‘India’ was yet conceptually concrete: it was somewhere to be coveted – as an intellectual curiosity, a military pushover and an economic bonanza. To Alexander the Great as to Mahmud of Ghazni, to Timur the Lame as to his Mughal descendants, and to Nadir Shah of Persia as to Robert Clive of Plassey, ‘India’ was a place worth the taking.

The first occurrence of the word sets the trend. It makes its debut in an inscription found at Persepolis in Iran, which was the capital of the Persian or Achaemenid empire of Darius I, he whose far-flung battles included defeat at Marathon by the Athenians in 490 BC. Before this, Darius had evidently enjoyed greater success on his eastern frontier, for the Persepolis inscription, dated to C518 BC, lists amongst his numerous domains that of ‘Hi(n)du’.

The word for a ‘river’ in Sanskrit is sindhu. Hence sapta-sindhu meant ‘[the land of] the seven rivers’, which was what the Vedic arya called the Panjab. The Indus, to which most of these seven rivers were tributary, was the sindhu par excellence; and in the language of ancient Persian, a near relative of Sanskrit, the initial ‘s’ of a Sanskrit word was invariably rendered as an aspirate – ‘h’. Soma, the mysterious hallucinogen distilled, deified and drunk to excess by the Vedic arya, is thus homa or haoma in old Persian; and sindhu is thus Hind[h]u. When, from Persian, the word found its way into Greek, the initial aspirate was dropped, and it started to appear as the route ‘Ind’ (as in ‘India’, ‘Indus’, etc.). In this form it reached Latin and most other European languages. However, in Arabic and related languages it retained the initial ‘h’, giving ‘Hindustan’ as the name by which Turks and Mughals would know India. That word also passed on to Europe to give ‘Hindu’ as the name of the country’s indigenous people and of what, by Muslims and Christians alike, was regarded as their infidel religion.

On the strength of a slightly earlier Iranian inscription which makes no mention of Hindu, it is assumed that the region was added to Darius’ Achaemenid empire in or soon after 520 BC. This earlier inscription does, however, refer to ‘Gadara’, which looks like Gandhara, a maha-janapada or ‘state’ mentioned in both Sanskrit and Buddhist sources and located in an arc reaching from the western Panjab through the north-west frontier to Kabul and perhaps into southern Afghanistan (where ‘Kandahar’ is the same word). According to Xenophon and Herodotus, Gandhara had been conquered by Cyrus, one of Darius’ predecessors. The first Achaemenid or Persian invasion may therefore have taken place as early as the mid-sixth century BC. That it was an invasion, rather than a migration or even perhaps a last belated influx of charioteering arya, seems likely from a reference to Cyrus dying of a wound inflicted by the enemy. The enemy were the ‘Derbikes’; they enjoyed the support of the Hindu people and were supplied by them with war-elephants. In Persian and Greek minds alike, the association of Hindu with elephants was thereafter almost as significant as its connection with the mighty Indus. To Alexander of Macedon, following in the Achaemenids’ footsteps two centuries later, the river would be a geographical curiosity, but the elephants were a military obsession.

If Gandhara was already under Achaemenid rule, Darius’ Hindu must have lain beyond it, and so to the south or the east. Later Iranian records refer to Sindhu, presumably an adoption of the Sanskrit spelling, whence derives the word ‘Sind’, now Pakistan’s southernmost province. It seems unlikely, though, that Sindhu was Sind in the late sixth century BC, since Darius subsequently found it necessary to send a naval expedition to explore the Indus. Flowing through the middle of Sind, the river would surely have been familiar to any suzerain of the region. More probably, then, Hindu lay east of Gandhara, perhaps as a wedge of territory between it, the janapadas of eastern Panjab, and the deserts of Rajasthan. It thus occupied much of what is now the Panjab province of Pakistan.

Under Xerxes, Darius’ successor, troops from what had become the Achaemenids’ combined ‘satrapy’ of Gandhara and Hindu reportedly served in the Achaemenid forces. These Indians were mostly archers, although cavalry and chariots are also mentioned; they fought as far afield as eastern Europe; and some were present at the Persians’ bloody victory over Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae, and then at the decisive defeat by the Greeks at Plataea. Through these and other less fraught contacts between Greeks and Persians, Greek writers like Herodotus gleaned some idea of ‘India’. Compared to the intervening lands of Anatolia and Iran, it appeared a veritable paradise of exotic plenty. Herodotus told of an immense population and of the richest soil imaginable from which kindly ants, smaller than dogs but bigger than foxes, threw up hillocks of pure gold-dust. The ants may have intrigued entomologists, but the gold was what registered in political circles. With rivers to rival the Nile and behemoths from which to give battle, it was clearly a land of fantasy as well as wealth.

Herodotus, of course, knew only of the Indus region, and that by hearsay. Hence he did not report that the land of Hindu was of sensational extent, nor did he deny the popular belief that beyond its furthest desert, where in reality the Gangetic plain interminably spreads, lay the great ocean which supposedly encircled the world; Hindu or ‘India’ (but in fact Pakistan) was therefore believed to be the end of terra firma, a worthy culmination to any emperor’s ambitions as well as a fabulous addition to his portfolio of conquests. In abbreviated form, Herodotus’ History circulated widely. A hundred years after his death it was still avidly read by northern Greeks in Macedonia, where a teenage Alexander ‘knew it well enough to quote and follow its stories’.²

The traffic that resulted from the Achaemenid incursion into India was not all one-way. It may well have been from contacts between Indian troops and the enemies of the Achaemenid empire that Sanskrit acquired a name for the Greeks. Long before Alexander’s arrival on the scene, they became known in India as Yona or Yavana, words derived from a Persian spelling of ‘Ionian’ but which would thereafter serve to designate almost any people belonging to the lands west of the Indus who were alien to India’s traditions. Such peoples were also by definition mleccha (foreign and unable to speak properly), and hence despicably casteless. But caste being assimilative as well as exclusive, they might, as overlords, aspire to the status of vratya ksatriya, or ‘degenerate’ ksatriya. Macedonians, Bactrians, Kushans, Scythians and Arabs would all at some time be called Yavanas, and many would eventually be awarded vratya caste status.

WHERE WEST MEETS EAST

On the frontier of the Achaemenids’ Indian satrapy lay the city of Taxila (Takashila). Some thirty kilometres from what is now Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, it was not agriculturally disadvantaged, although in the absence of major irrigation schemes the Panjab was scarcely the land of wheat, sugarcane and canals which it is today. Indeed, Taxila seems to have owed its early urbanisation more to its economically strategic location. Here, by way of rugged trails like that of the Khyber from Afghanistan, passed all trade – horses, gold, precious stones and luxury textiles – between the Achaemenid world and the emerging Gangetic states. The city prospered as did the satrapy. According to Herodotus, the latter yielded to the Achaemenids a tribute of ‘ant-gold’ which was nearly five times more than the tribute extracted from Babylon and seven times that from Egypt.

Such wealth attracted to Taxila artisans and scholars as well as merchants. Sir John Marshall, who excavated the site in the 1940s, found three cities, the oldest of which lay beneath the Bhir Mound. There rubble walls indicated several levels of occupation, beginning with one which certainly belonged to the Iron Age and probably to ‘the close of the sixth century BC’.

… it would follow that this, the earliest settlement on the Bhir Mound, was little, if at all earlier than the invasion of Darius I; and it may even be plausibly conjectured, though there is no tangible evidence to support the conjecture, that Taxila owed its foundation to the Persian conqueror.³

Amongst Taxila’s imports from the west came the Aramaic script, which may have been the first script to be used in India since that of the Harappans. Whether or not the city was founded by the Achaemenids, it began heavily in debt to its western contacts, and would later become something of a showcase for imported western and even Mediterranean ideas and artefacts.

Yet it was also revered as a citadel of orthodoxy by the janapadas in the east. In the Ramayana it is claimed that Taxila was founded by one of Lord Rama’s nephews; in the Mahabharata it is said that it was actually at Taxila that the story of the great Bharata war was first told. Clearly the place was highly regarded throughout northern India. Students went there to learn the purest Sanskrit. Kautilya, whose Arthasastra is the classic Indian treatise on statecraft, is said to have been born there in the third century BC. It was also in Taxila that, in the previous century, Panini compiled a grammar more comprehensive and scientific than any dreamed of by Greek grammarians. ‘One of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilisation’,⁴ it so refined the literary usage of the day that the language became permanently ‘frozen’ and was ever after known as Samskrta (‘perfected’, hence ‘Sanskrit’). Given the defining role of language in arya identity, ritual observance and social differentiation, the importance of Panini’s work and of Taxila’s patronage can scarcely be exaggerated.

From Panini’s examples of different grammatical forms some historical information may also be garnered. ‘Eastern Bharatas’, for instance, is Panini’s example of tautology and verbosity; the ‘eastern’, he implies, is a superfluous qualification since everyone knows that Bharatas live in the east. It follows that by the fourth century BC all clans claiming Bharata descent must long have been located to the east of Taxila – like the Kuru in the Doab. Incidentally, by this chance example Panini also hinted at a definition of Bharata-varsha which, as ‘Bharat’, would nicely serve the purposes of twentieth-century nationalists in a Pakistan-less India.

Legitimacy as conferred by descent from the Bharatas, or one of the other arya clans, was yet more critical to emerging dynasties of dubious origin in the late first millennium BC. It accounts for the emphasis on genealogy in the much-revised epics and for the manipulation of descent lines in the Puranas; it may also account, along with trade, for the primacy accorded to Taxila located in the heartland of the arya’s original ‘land of the seven rivers’.

Nowhere was this need for legitimacy more acutely felt than amongst the thrusting new states and cities far away to the east in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. By way of the uttarapatha, the ‘Northern Route’ along the base of the Himalayas, they maintained close contacts with Taxila and, judging by the punch-marked coins found in the Bhir Mound, were soon financing much of its trade. To them the city owed its prominence quite as much as to Achaemenid enterprise. For while Gandhara and ‘India’ remained under Achaemenid suzerainty well into the fourth century BC, another would-be imperium, India’s first and much its proudest, had begun flexing its muscles in the distant plains of southern Bihar.

Here, in the kingdom of Magadha, between the south bank of the sprawling Ganga and the rolling forests of Chota Nagpur, in a region today of the bleakest rural poverty with cities of almost unendurable squalor, the historian’s patience is finally rewarded. From a pre-historic dawn as shrouded in myth as any, the smoke of burnt offerings and ancient obscurities begins at last to lift. A sparsely featured but genuinely historical landscape is briefly revealed.

At the easternmost extremity of the uttarapatha, the kingdom of Magadha, with its capital at Rajagriha (Rajgir), occupied the region between today’s unlovely cities of Patna and Gaya. Its location coincided with that of the sacred trails trodden by the Buddha and Mahavira; and its rise coincided with their followers’ concern for an accurate record of the masters’ lives and teachings. In consequence, a succession of authentic historical figures, together with a chain of related events, at last looms dimly from the myth-smoke.

THE MARCH OF MAGADHA

Only the dates remain problematic. Buddhist sources show a healthy respect for chronology, and usually disdain the mathematical symmetries and astronomical exaggerations found in Vedic and Jain texts. Like Christians, they count the years to, and then from, a major event in the life of their founder. Thus, just as Christians measure time from the birth of Christ, so do Buddhists from the death, or parinirvana (achievement of nirvana), of the Buddha. Neither of these benchmarks can be determined with absolute precision. But because the Christian BC/AD system has become something of an international convention, it matters little that Christ may in fact have been born, not in zero AD, but several years later. On the other hand, it matters much that, depending on the tradition endorsed, the Buddha may have died either 350 to 400, 483 to 486, or even 544 years ‘Before Christ’.

Obviously, if the Buddhist chronology had commanded international regard, an agreed date for the parinirvana would long since have emerged, and it would then be the uncertainties about when Christ was born in terms of the Buddhist reckoning which would be considered unsettling. Euro-centric, or Christo-centric, assumptions about the measurement of time should be viewed with caution. Like those map projections which give mid-sheet prominence to Europe or the Americas, they carry an inherent distortion.

Nevertheless, the widely divergent dates adduced for the Buddha’s parinirvana do pose serious problems. That of 544 BC derives from a much later Sri Lankan tradition and is usually discarded. As between the 486 BC of Indian tradition and the 483 BC of a Chinese record, the difference is slight and not too important. Indeed, it was the near congruence of these two dates which led the majority of scholars to accept their validity; one or other was used to deduce a date for the Buddha’s birth of C566–3 BC, which thus became ‘the earliest certain date in Indian history’. Recently, however, opinion has swung towards a much later dating for the parinirvana, in fact ‘about eighty to 130 years before Ashoka’s coronation [in 268 BC], i.e. not a very long time before Alexander’s Indian campaign [327–5BC], i.e. between C400 BC and C350 BC’.⁵ This reappraisal of the evidence, mainly by German scholars, shunts the Buddha forward by around a century. Besides promoting the Achaemenid conquest of Hindu in C520 BC to the status of India’s first (more or less) certain date, it carries potentially devastating consequences for the chronology of just about every development in India of the first millennium BC. The Vedic period may have to be extended into the sixth century, state-formation and urbanisation brought forward to the fifth century, and the chronology of Magadha before the appearance of Ashoka condensed into a hundred years.

Alternatively, it may be taken to suggest a much longer time-lapse between the India of later Vedic texts, like the Upanisads, and that of the earliest Buddhist and Jain texts. Even a cursory acquaintance with these sources leaves the reader wondering whether they can possibly refer to the same society. The Sanskrit texts evoke a mostly agrarian way of life in which states play a minor part and status is governed by lineage and ritual observance. Buddhist and Jain texts, on the other hand, portray a network of functioning states, each with an urban nucleus heavily engaged in trade and production. Here wealth as much as lineage confers status. Indeed, the Buddhist concept of ‘merit’ as something to be earned, accumulated, occasionally transferred and eventually realised seems inconceivable without a close acquaintance with the moneyed economy. By interleaving between these two societies a further century, Buddhism’s newly revised or ‘short chronology’ allows for a more gradual and credible evolution of state and city without unduly taxing the archaeological record.

Similarly, it allows room for the evolution of a tradition of heterodoxy and dissent. Buddhist texts in particular portray a society that was already in religious ferment when the Buddha was born. Rival holy-men swarm across the countryside performing feats of endurance, disputing one another’s spiritual credentials and vying with one another for followers and patronage. That this was not simply the impression of partisan hotheads is shown by the dispassionate Kautilya whose compendium on statecraft, the Arthasastra, recognises such renunciates as an important constituent of any state; they are to be given legal protection and free passage; special forest areas are to be allotted to them for meditation, and special lodging-houses in the city. Saints or charlatans, they evidently mirrored a society to which the paranormal, the supernatural and the metaphysical had a strong appeal. Many of them went naked or unwashed and they cheerfully flouted the taboos of caste status. Defying social convention, they yet enjoyed society’s indulgence. Renunciation had become an accepted way of life in which asceticism was seen as a prerequisite to spiritual enlightenment.

The philosophies on offer from this rag-tag army of reformers ranged from mind-boggling mysticism to defiant nihilism and blank agnosticism, from the outright materialism of the Lokayats to the heavy determinism of the Ajivikas, and from the rationalism of the Buddha to the esotericism of Mahavira. Most, however, agreed in condemning the extravagance of Vedic sacrifice, in sidelining the Vedic pantheon, and in ignoring brahmanical authority. Moreover many, including the Jains, Buddhists and Ajivikas, recognised an assortment of antecedents whose teachings or experiences had in some sense anticipated their own. In other words, Mahavira, the Buddha, and Gosala of the Ajivikas acknowledged well established traditions of heterodoxy; and as one might infer from their own reception, they were able to capitalise on an already existing thirst for spiritual and moral guidance, as well as on an abiding credulity. Clearly the new sources of wealth and authority associated with state-formation and urbanisation had plunged society into a crisis which the rigidities of the varnasramadharma (the organisation of society into caste varnas and into social vocations based on age) could scarcely accommodate, and to which the ritual oblations of the Vedas seemed irrelevant as well as wildly extravagant.

Adopting, then, not the conventional 486–3BC for the parinirvana but some date between 400 and 350 BC, one may place the birth of Siddhartha Gautama, the ‘Buddha’, some time in the mid-fifth century. Like his contemporary, Mahavira Nataputta of the Jains, he was a ksatriya, the son of Suddhodana, raja of the Sakyas. The Sakya state being one of those republican gana-sanghas, it had many rajas. And since their chief was elected, the ‘Prince’ Siddhartha of later legend must be considered a fabrication. Moreover, Kapilavastu, the Sakya capital, was not a major political centre. Just within the southern border of present-day Nepal, it may have served as a staging post on the uttarapatha. Trade and craftsmanship were more the Buddha’s milieu than royal ceremonial. The affluence against which he eventually reacted by renouncing his wife and family to begin an enquiry into the human condition may have been real; equally it may have been the perceived luxury of more celebrated urban centres like Vaisali, capital of the Licchavis, or the Koshalan metropolis of Sravasti, or Rajagriha in Magadha.

In the course of his quest, Siddhartha visited all of these places and studied under a variety of distinguished but ultimately unconvincing teachers. On one occasion, while traversing Magadha, he met its king. His name was Bimbisara and the date (given the Buddhist ‘short chronology’) must have been around 400 BC. Bimbisara’s origins are uncertain, but he is said to have lived for over fifty years. He was now in the middle of his reign, and had already added to his domain the important kingdom of Anga.

Anga lay to the east, with its famed capital at Champa in west Bengal. Thence Magadha gained access by river to the Bay of Bengal, where Tamluk (Tamralipti, near Calcutta) would become a thriving port for trade with the peninsula, Burma and Sri Lanka. Having inherited access to the rich copper and iron deposits of southern Bihar, Bimbisara had thus in effect laid another of the foundations of Magadhan supremacy. Seemingly a just and practical ruler, he married much but not always wisely. Dealings with Koshala, Avanti (Malwa), Taxila and the Licchhavis are recorded and, with the exception of the last, they were generally amicable. A rudimentary administrative system is evident and, possessed of a ready source of both elephants and metals, it has been suggested that Magadha’s military establishment was well equipped and professionally organised. Whether Bimbisara worried about manpower being drained off by the ferment of heterodox sects is not recorded. But he did advise the wandering Siddhartha to return to his proper ksatriya station, and offered to provide him with a suitable establishment.

The advice was rejected. For the next few years Siddhartha remained in Magadha but was much on the move. Like those earlier exiles in the epics, he had forsaken the security of a settled, civilised life for the uncertainties of the vagrant and the outcaste. Austerities, whether unavoidable or self-imposed, cowed the appetites, cleared the mind, and let the spirit soar. After prolonged meditation beneath a tree at the place henceforth called Buddh Gaya, the now thirty-five-year-old Siddhartha Gautama at last isolated the nature of suffering and transience, formulated a scheme for overcoming it, and so attained Enlightenment. As the Buddha, the ‘Enlightened One’, he hastened to Varanasi, and in the Deer Park at nearby Sarnath, evidently one of those forest areas reserved for ascetics, he propounded his reasoning to five erstwhile companions in what is known as the First Sermon.

The imagery of the Buddha’s ‘Middle Way’ (between the extremes of indulgence and asceticism) with its ‘Noble Eightfold Path’, as also that of the ‘Wheel of Dharma’ and of the ‘Three Refuges’ (the Buddha, the dharma or teaching, and the sangha or monastic community), clearly reflected the itinerant’s experience. Buddhism began as a code for the road, a set of rationalised precepts designed to direct and smooth man’s progress along life’s unhappy highway. Suffering came from within, from desire and indulgence. By mastering desire, restraining indulgence and yet eschewing extreme asceticism, the human condition became bearable, and merit might be accumulated whereby release (nirvana) might eventually be attained. The notion of continuous rebirths and the challenge of escaping from their endless cycle were common to both orthodox teachings derived from the Upanisads and to the Buddha’s teaching. Buddhism was not a belief system, not a rival faith to the post-Vedic cults and practices which prevailed under brahmanical direction, but more a complementary discipline. About gods, worship, offerings, prayers, priests and ritual, the Buddha claimed no special knowledge. He offered merely heightened insight, not divine revelation. It was his followers in the generations to come who would elevate the Buddha and other semi-enlightened ones (Boddhisatvas) into deities, thus claiming for Buddhism the authority and the supernatural paraphernalia of a religion.

For the remaining forty-four years of his long life the Buddha continued as a wandering ascetic, criss-crossing the states bordering the middle Ganga. Teaching and elaborating his ideas to an ever-growing band of followers, especially merchants and artisans, he also won the support of kings, this being a prerequisite for the establishment of the communities of followers and the monastic institutions which would continue his mission after his parinirvana.

Amongst the kings who patronised the new teaching were Prasenajit, king of Koshala, and Magadha’s Bimbisara. In the Koshalan capital of Sravasti the Buddha delivered numerous discourses and, since his own Sakya republic had been overrun by Koshala and remained under its suzerainty, he may have felt some allegiance to Prasenajit. But it was Bimbisara’s patronage that would prove crucial. When the Buddha died (at Kushinara in the Malla republic), it was Bimbisara’s Magadha which made good its claim to most of his hotly contested relics and, immediately afterwards, it was in the Magadhan capital of Rajagriha that the first Buddhist council was convened. Magadha’s economic expansion provided a social ambience particularly favourable to Buddhism. In the wake of Magadha’s political expansion Buddhism would prevail over most of the other heterodox sects (although not brahmanical orthodoxy) and spread throughout the subcontinent.

Meanwhile, Bimbisara had predeceased the Buddha. His long reign came to an end when Ajatashatru, one of his sons, either seized the throne and starved his father to death or was nominated his successor so that the aged Bimbisara, having renounced the throne, could starve himself to death. Both practices appear to have been standard. But Ajatashatru’s elevation was not uncontested and his conduct not unchallenged. He was soon involved in warfare with both Koshala and a powerful coalition of republics headed by the Licchavis. Magadha was about to take another giant stride towards hegemony in the middle Ganga region.

The trouble with Koshala seems to have arisen over a piece of land in the vicinity of Varanasi. It had passed to Bimbisara as the dowry of his Koshalan bride. When she died of grief over Bimbisara’s death, Prasenajit of Koshala, her father, revoked the grant of this land and resumed control of it. Ajatashatru endeavoured to retake it but seems at first to have been defeated. His claim to the disputed enclave was, however, enhanced when the aged Prasenajit, falling prey to the usurpation of his own son, headed for Magadha as a supplicant. Alone but for a devoted servant, the old king reached the walls of Rajagriha and there, while waiting overnight for the gates to open, died of exhaustion and exposure. Despite their past differences, Ajatashatru of Magadha promptly honoured the memory of this Indian Lear and vowed to avenge his treatment by the Koshalans. But he bided his time, first dealing with another major threat to his kingdom and then benefiting from the chance annihilation of the Koshalan army; encamped in the dry bed of the river Rapti, it had been suddenly overwhelmed by a flash flood. Thereafter, although the sources are silent on the details, Ajatashatru seems to have overrun Koshala, which promptly disappears from the record.

This important conquest was made possible by a decisive Magadhan victory in the protracted struggle with its other principal neighbour, namely the Licchavi republic. The Licchavis, with their capital at Vaisali wherein lived those innumerable Licchavi rajas, headed a confederation of republics to the north of Magadha. As with the defeated Sakyas, their defiance has been seen as part of a last stand by the ‘knights-raja’ of the republican gana-sanghas of the east against the professional armies of the centralised monarchies of the Ganga valley. Here again, though, Magadha’s problem seems to have started back in the reign of Bimbisara and to have been greatly complicated by an affair of the heart.

As one might expect in a republic, the beautiful Amrapali (or Ambarapali) was not a princess. In fact she was a courtesan whose physical perfection and outstanding skills had secured her elevation to the status of a national asset. In other republics an elaborate beauty contest was held to select the principal courtesan, and this may also have been the case in Vaisali. But Amrapali, as befitted one of the Buddha’s most devoted future followers, was shrewd as well as comely. Though her favours were supposedly reserved exclusively for those 7707 (or ‘twice 84,000’) Licchavi ‘knights-raja’, she also wielded great political influence and became, in effect, Vaisali’s ‘first lady’. It was therefore a crushing blow to Licchavi self-esteem when it was discovered that, in the midst of desultory fighting with Magadha, the Magadhan king had entered Vaisali in disguise and, undetected, had there enjoyed a week’s dalliance in Amrapali’s delectable company. Bimbisara had to be made to pay for his indiscretion, and the Licchavis had duly multiplied their attacks on Magadhan territory.

Admittedly the detail of this story survives only in a later Tibetan source. Better known, it would surely have inspired poignant verse and operatic libretti. But from other Buddhist texts it is clear that Bimbisara did indeed incur the wrath of the Licchavis and that ‘something really harmful and injurious’⁶ provoked his son Ajatashatru to seek revenge. The subsequent war seems to have lasted on and off for at least twelve years. Initially it was compounded by a succession struggle between Ajatashatru and one of his brothers. The brother, who was domiciled in Anga (presumably as its governor), refused to surrender a priceless necklace. He also withheld an even more priceless elephant which had been trained to act as a shower-hose, sprinkling the ladies of the Magadhan household with a deliciously scented spray when they were bathing. No doubt both necklace and elephant were seen as in the nature of regalia. Ajatashatru’s acquisition of them was therefore essential to the legitimacy of his rule. But his brother remained defiant and, fearing attack, eventually fled to Vaisali where he secured the support of the hated Licchavis.

Another account makes the item of dispute a mountain from which oozed a highly prized, because highly scented, unguent; yet another seems to indicate a disputed island in, or port on, the Ganga, which formed the Magadha-Licchavi frontier. We know of such details because Ajatashatru saw fit to consult the Buddha about the impending hostilities and because later Buddhist commentators therefore saw fit to record them, albeit variously. Buddhist sculptors followed suit. In a relief panel from the second-century BC stupa at Bharhut (now in the Calcutta Museum) a demure and most unwarlike Ajatashatru is depicted arriving on elephant-back with a retinue of wives and then making obeisance before the throne of the Buddha. Well preserved in the hard russet sandstone of Bharhut, this eloquent scene may rate as the earliest depiction in Indian art of a genuine historical figure. Buddhist texts also mention that on his last journey north the Buddha, after his meeting with the king but before crossing the Ganga, passed a building site where a new Magadhan fort was being erected. The place was called Pataligrama. To it the Magadhan court would remove under Ajatashatru’s successor and, greatly extended and beautified, the city by the Ganga at what is now Patna would become, as Pataliputra, the metropolis of the Magadhan empire under the Mauryas.

In its infancy the fort at Pataligrama failed to overawe the Licchavis. Initially the war seems to have gone badly for Ajatashatru, who may even have been forced to seek terms. Further hostilities, as recorded in Jain sources, produced two epic battles with echoes of the great Bharata war, except that Ajatashatru eventually won both thanks to some precocious mechanisation. A new catapult capable of firing massive rocks was developed, and then a heavily armoured robot equipped with club-wielding arms and powered by some invisible means of propulsion – ‘It has been compared to the tanks used in the two great world wars.’⁷ Before this veritable blitzkrieg the Licchavis withdrew to their capital and prepared for a siege. Evidently even the tank made no impression on Vaisali’s fortifications. The siege dragged on, and Ajatashatru was obliged to try psychological warfare. Insinuating into the Licchavi counsels a particularly wily brahman, or suborning the city’s tutelary ascetic with an irresistible prostitute, he either reduced his enemies to discord or duped them into surrender. Magadhan forces occupied Vaisali unopposed, the Licchavi republic was finally reduced, and the 7707 rajas were dispersed, although not eliminated. When the Second Buddhist Council was convened in Vaisali some time in the latter half of the fourth century BC the city was under Magadhan control.

Thus, in the space of two reigns which conveniently straddled the long life of the Buddha, Magadha had emerged from comparative inconsequence to dominate the lower Ganga with a territorial reach that extended from the Bay of Bengal to the Nepal Himalayas. Further up the Ganga, the kingdom of Vatsya, possibly the successor state to that of the Kuru of Hastinapura, still flourished with its capital at Kaushambi (near Allahabad). So did the kingdom of Avanti, based on Ujjain (near Indore) far to the south on the banks of the Narmada river. Kaushambi and Ujjain were engaged in their own power struggle. Into it Magadha seems occasionally to have been drawn, and from it Ajatashatru’s successors were able to profit, although it is unclear when Magadhan supremacy was recognised in these distant regions.

In fact the grave uncertainty which surrounds the history of Magadha immediately after Ajatashatru extends even to the succession. Between Ajatashatru’s death some time between C380 BC and C330 BC (according to the ‘short chronology’) and the accession of Chandragupta Maurya in C320 BC the sources speak mainly of court intrigues and murders. Evidently the throne changed hands frequently, perhaps with more than one incumbent claiming to occupy it at the same time. Eventually it was secured by Mahapadma Nanda, the son of a barber and therefore not only a usurper but also a low-caste sudra. According to the orthodox Puranas, he invoked his caste status to conduct a vendetta against all ksatriyas. Since most existing kings were, or claimed to be, ksatriyas, this represented a declaration of war on the entire political order. Remarkable conquests resulted. By 326 BC the Nanda family was ruling over a greatly extended kingdom which included the whole of the Ganga valley plus Orissa and parts of central India.

Mahapadma Nanda himself may have been responsible for these conquests. He is the first to be described as a ‘one-umbrella sovereign’, a concept closely related to the Buddhist idea of a pan-Indian cakravartin or ‘world ruler’ and implying the association of all existing polities under a single sovereign. Patriotic Indian historians tend to pounce on this early evidence of national integration and to hail Mahapadma Nanda as ‘the first great historical emperor of Northern India’. The wealth of the Nandas also became legendary, and was supposedly buried in a cave in the bed of the Ganga. Their exactions and unpopularity were remembered too, although this may have been the result of failing to placate either brahmanical or Buddhist opinion with the munificence expected of royal patrons.

The Nanda family undeniably commanded the most formidable standing army yet seen in India. Military statistics readily lend themselves to exaggeration, especially when provided by a disappointed adversary. Yet the Nandas’ army of 200,000 infantry, twenty thousand cavalry, two thousand four-horse chariots and three to six thousand war-elephants would have represented a formidable force even if decimated by roll-call reality. It was certainly enough to strike alarm in stout Greek hearts, to awaken in them fond memories of Thracian wine and olive-rich homesteads beside the northern Aegean, and to send packing the age’s only other contender as a ‘one umbrella’ world ruler.

THE MACEDONIAN INTRUSION

Alexander the Great’s Indian adventure, though a subject of abiding interest to generations of classically-educated European historians, is not generally an episode on which historians of Indian nationality bother to dwell. They rightly note that it ‘made no impression historically or politically on India’, and that ‘not even a mention of Alexander is to be found in any [of the] older Indian sources.’⁸ ‘There was nothing to distinguish his raid in Indian history [except “perfidious massacres” and “wanton cruelty”]… and it can hardly be called a great military success as the only military achievements to his credit were the conquest of some petty tribes and states by instalment.’⁹

Alexander’s great achievement was not invading India but getting there. A military expedition against the Achaemenid empire, originally planned by his father, became more like a geographical exploration as the men from Macedonia triumphantly probed regions hitherto undreamed of. Anatolia, the modern Turkey, was overrun in 334–3 BC. To protect his southern flank before invading Persia, Alexander then swept down through Phoenicia (Syria and Palestine) to claim Egypt and Libya. That was in 333–2. In 331–0 the last Achaemenid ruler was chased from his homeland and Persepolis was sacked. The twenty-five-year-old Alexander was now master of all that had comprised the largest empire the world had yet seen – all, that is, except for its easternmost provinces, including Gandhara and ‘India’.

Although Indian troops still served in the Achaemenid forces, it seems that Gandhara and ‘India’ had probably slipped from direct Achaemenid rule some time in the mid-fourth century BC. For Alexander it was enough that once upon a time these provinces had indeed been Persian; to excel Darius and Xerxes, he must needs take them. First, though, another long detour was necessary, this time along his northern flank. In 329–8 he pushed north-east into Arachosia (Afghanistan) and then crossed in succession the snows of the Hindu Kush, the swirling Oxus river and the parched scrubland of Sogdia (Uzbekistan). He then laid claim to the Achaemenids’ central Asian frontier on the distant Jaxartes (Syr) beyond Samarkand. It was not till late 327 BC that, returned to the vicinity of Kabul, he was ready with a force of fifty thousand to cross India’s north-west frontier.

Determined now to upstage not only the empires of Darius and Xerxes but also the mythical conquests of Heracles and Dionysos, Alexander seems increasingly to have seen his progress in terms of a Grail-like quest for the supposedly unattainable. He sought the ‘ocean’, the ultimate limit of terrestrial empire. Through knowledge of this great ‘beyond’, he aspired to a kind of enlightenment which, although very different from that of the Buddha, would become a cliché of Western exploration. More crudely, he hankered after sheer bloody immortality. ‘His motives need a little imagination,’ writes the best of his biographers, who then quotes one of Alexander’s companions: ‘The truth was that Alexander was always straining after more.’¹⁰

More was precisely what India offered. Like a tidal wave, news of Alexander’s prowess had swept ahead of him, flattening resistance and sucking him forward. Indian defectors from the Achaemenid forces primed his interest and paved the way; local malcontents promised support and provided elephants; judicious potentates sought his friendship. Principal amongst the latter was a king known to the Greeks as ‘Omphis’ or ‘Taxiles’. As the latter name implied, he was the ruler of Taxila, reportedly the largest city between the Indus and the Jhelum; and from a chance mention in an appendix to Panini’s grammar he has since been identified as Ambhi, an otherwise enigmatic figure in Indian tradition.

‘The first recorded instance of an Indian king proving a traitor to his country’¹¹ seems an over-harsh judgement on the ambiguous Ambhi of Taxila. Alexander had divided his forces so that half marched largely unopposed down the Kabul river and across the Khyber Pass, while he himself led the remainder by a northerly route through the wintry hills to Swat. There, up among the pine forests of the supposedly impregnable hill fort of Aornos (Pir-i-Sar), he inflicted one of several vicious and salutary defeats on the mountain tribes. By the spring of 326 BC, when back in the plains he crossed the Indus to join up with the rest of his forces, the Macedonian’s reputation stood high.

A city built on trade and scholarship with little in the way of natural defences stood no chance. Taxila had survived the Achaemenids, indeed was a part-Achaemenid city. It could manage the Greeks in the same way. When Alexander descended to the Indus he found thousands of cattle and sheep, as well as elephants and silver, awaiting him. Ambhi, with nought to gain by resistance except the annihilation of his illustrious city and the applause of a very remote posterity, was playing safe. Alexander confirmed him as his satrap and generously repaid his liberality.

At the time Taxilan territory extended modestly from the Indus to the Jhelum. Beyond, occupying the next sliver of the Panjab between the Jhelum and the Chenab, the kingdom of ‘Porus’ lay across the invaders’ line of march. In Greek as in Indian tradition, Porus is all that Ambhi is not. A giant of a man, proud, fearless and majestic, he may have owed his name to Paurava descent, the Pauravas being only slightly less distinguished than the Bharatas in the pecking order of Vedic clans. Alexander had summoned him, along with other local rulers, to meet him and render tribute. Porus welcomed a meeting, adding casually that an appropriate venue would be the field of battle.

As good as his word, and despite the fact that the monsoon had already broken, Porus massed his forces on the banks of the Jhelum. Normally the monsoon brought all campaigning in India to an end. Indian troops were ill-equipped to fight in the rain, and Porus probably trusted to the flooding Jhelum to halt the enemy. But Alexander, well used to river crossings, organised boats, duped the enemy as to his crossing place, and between torrential downpours gained the further bank. The battle that followed was anything but a formality. Porus’ chariots slithered uncontrollably in the mud and his archers could find no purchase for their massive bows, one end of which had to be planted in the ground. Yet the Indian forces, though outnumbered as more of the enemy crossed the river, fought valiantly. Abristle with spearsmen, the elephant corps trundled across the battlefield like towering bastions on the move. Their repeated charges drove all before them, the Greeks merely peppering them with missiles as they reformed. But Alexander now knew enough of elephants to bide his time. His tactical skills were unmatched, and his cavalry easily outmanoeuvred their rivals. As the battle wore on, the Indians found themselves penned into an ever smaller circumference. Enraged elephants now trampled friend and foe alike. Exhausted, ‘they then fell back like ships backing water, and merely kept trumpeting as they retreated with their face to the enemy’. With shields linked, the Macedonian phalanx then pressed in for the kill. ‘Upon this, all turned to flight wherever a gap could be found in the cordon of Alexander’s cavalry,’ according to the account compiled by Arrian.

Porus, wounded but still conspicuously fighting from the largest of the elephants, was captured. ‘How did he expect to be treated?’ asked Alexander. ‘As befits a king,’ he famously replied. To the Greeks it sounded, under the circumstances, like an extraordinarily noble and fearless request. Alexander responded magnanimously, reinstating him as king and subsequently augmenting his territories. But Porus’ words could as well have been those of Lord Krishna, whose advice to Arjuna in the Mahabharata made much the same point. Each must live according to his dharma; it was the dharma of a ksatriya to fight and to embrace the consequences. Probably Porus was not boldly appealing to Alexander’s clemency, nor presuming on some brotherhood of sovereignty; he was simply stating his dharma.

After exceptionally elaborate celebrations, the Macedonians moved on, continuing east and south across the grain of the Panjab river system. The rains ended and the land blossomed. They crossed the Chenab, then the Ravi. Countless ‘cities’ capitulated, others, some evidently republican gana-sanghas, offered a short-lived resistance. Even to Alexander it was becoming apparent that ‘there was no end to the war as long as an enemy remained to be encountered’. Rumours of the vast forces commanded by the Nandas of Magadha (the ‘Gangaridae’ and ‘Prasii’ to the Greeks) now began to infiltrate the ranks. ‘This information only whetted Alexander’s eagerness to advance further,’ says Arrian. The Ganga, mightier even than the Indus, must surely carry them to the ocean at the end of the world. Its plain was reported as exceedingly fertile, its peoples excellent farmers as well as doughty fighters, and its governments civilised and well organised. Alexander sniffed the prospect of an even more glorious dominion.

But his men were unimpressed. They crossed what is now the frontier between Pakistan and India somewhere in the vicinity of Lahore. Then, near Amritsar, they reached the Beas, fourth of the Panj-ab, the ‘five rivers’. In this weird and interminable land where the clothes were all white and the complexions all black, it was as good a place as any for a showdown with their commander.

Alexander sensed the mood of mutiny. In a lengthy appeal to his commanders he invoked their past loyalty and stressed the consequences of retreat. Extricating themselves would be difficult. Were the tide of conquests now to ebb, they would find the sands sucked from under their feet. New friends would review their allegiance and old enemies would take their chance. Trumpeting an empty defiance, the Greeks would find themselves backing away amidst a shower of missiles just like Porus’ exhausted elephants.

But to men who had been on the march for eight years, such arguments had little appeal. They had bathed in the Tigris and the Indus, the Nile and the Euphrates, the Oxus and the Jaxartes. Across desert, mountain, steppe and field they had trudged for over twenty-five thousand kilometres. Of victory, booty, glory and novelty they had had their fill. With respect and real affection, they listened to their leader, moved but unpersuaded.

Alexander withdrew to his tent like his hero Achilles. A three-day sulk made no greater impression on the men’s resolve, while a sacrifice for safe passage of the river produced only adverse omens. In the end Alexander had no choice but to announce a withdrawal. The banks of the Beas erupted with cheers of relief; many wept but all rejoiced. As Arrian noted, Alexander was vanquished only once – and that by his own men.

To round off his conquests, complete his explorations, and disguise his failure, Alexander opted to return by sailing down the Jhelum and the Indus to the ocean. Ships were readied and he sailed in late 326 BC. The voyage downriver took six months. Stern opposition came from numerous riverine peoples, some of whom have been tentatively identified, and from sizeable townships which clearly included well established brahman communities. Some of these townships no doubt occupied sites beneath which the Harappan cities had already lain, cocooned in alluvial oblivion, for 1500 years.

In an engagement with the ‘Malloi’ Alexander himself was seriously wounded. An arrow struck him in the chest and may have punctured his lung. He barely recovered. The wisdom of forgoing a contest with the Nandas’ multitudinous cohorts was amply demonstrated; so were the dangers of withdrawal. With few regrets, in September 325 BC the fleet sailed out of the Indus into the Arabian Sea. Meanwhile Alexander led the rest of his men west on what proved to be, for many, a death-march to Babylon along the desert coast of Gedrosia (Makran). There was still some talk of returning to India, of resuming the march with fresh troops, and of consummating the ultimate conquest. But other appetites proved Alexander’s undoing. Within two years he died from hepatoma following a massive banquet in Babylon.

With him from India had gone the wherewithal for a vastly enriched Western image of the land beyond the Indus. He had prised open a window on the East through which emissaries would pass, ideas would shine, and prying eyes would covet. With him too went all those Hellenised personae and places – Omphis, Aornos, Porus, the Malloi and countless others – never to be heard of again in India’s history. The ‘invasion’ had amounted to little more than a hasty intrusion, scuffing a corner of the carpet but neither baring its boards nor troubling its political furniture.

With Alexander there had also gone one ‘Calanus’, a figure worth remembering in that he seems to be the first Indian expatriate to whom a name and a date can confidently be given. One of a group of ascetics encamped near Taxila, Calanus had accepted Alexander’s invitation to join him in that city and subsequently accompanied him back to the west. There, in Persia shortly before his patron’s death, his own death would cause a sensation.

Calanus’ doctrinal persuasion is uncertain. As one of his companions at Taxila had put it, trying to explain one’s philosophy through a wall of interpreters was like ‘asking pure water to flow through mud’. In that Calanus and his friends went naked, a condition in which no Greek could be persuaded to join them, they may have been nigrantha or Jains. Jain nudity was dictated by that sect’s meticulous respect for life in all its forms. Clothes were taboo because the wearer might inadvertently crush any insect concealed in them; similarly death had to be so managed that only the dying would actually die. Jains bent on ending their life, therefore, usually starved themselves to death. Yet Calanus, a man of advanced years, chose to immolate himself on his own funeral pyre. Though an extraordinarily stoical sacrifice in Greek eyes, this was a decidedly careless move for one dedicated to avoiding casual insecticide. Evidently the Persian winter had induced a chill, if not pneumonia, and Calanus had decided it was better to die than be an encumbrance. No one, not even Alexander, could dissuade him from his purpose. He strode to his cremation at the head of an enormous procession and reclined upon the pyre with complete indifference. This composure he maintained even as the flames frazzled his flesh.

Visibly shaken by such an exhibition, the Greeks held a festival in his honour and drowned their sorrows in a Bacchanalian debauch. Calanus, though he had made no converts, had won many friends. He also left a profound impression well worthy of India’s first cultural emissary. ‘Gymnosophists’, or ‘naked philosophers’, henceforth became stock figures in the Western image of India. As ‘Pythagoreans’, they were also identified with Greek traditions of abstinence and the conjectures of Pythagoras about rebirth and the transmigration of the soul. Lucian, Cicero and Ambrose of Milan all wrote of Calanus and his naked companions. Much later, as the epitome of ascetic puritanism, India’s gymnosophists would be revered by, of all people, Cromwellian fundamentalists. And later still, as mystics, gurus and maharishis, they would come again to minister to another spiritually impoverished Western clientele.

5 Gloria Maurya C320–200 BC
FLASHES OF INSPIRATION

ALTHOUGH SEVERAL of those who marched east with Alexander wrote of their travels, and although other contemporaries and near-contemporaries compiled lives of Alexander and geographies based on his exploits, none of these survives. Such accounts were, though, still current in Roman times and were used by authors, including Plutarch, the first-century AD biographer, and Arrian, the second-century AD military historian, to compile their own works on Alexander. These do survive. They do not always agree; scraps of information gleaned from other later sources are included indiscriminately; and when describing India, they often dwell on fantastic hearsay. To the gold-digging ants of Herodotus were now added a gallery of gargoyle men with elephant ears in which they wrapped themselves at night, with one foot big enough to serve as an umbrella, or with one eye, with no mouth and so on.

Allowing for less obvious distortions, these accounts yet provide vital clues to the emergence after Alexander’s departure of a new north Indian dynasty, indeed of an illustrious empire, one to which the word ‘classical’ is as readily applied as to those of Greece and Rome – and with good reason, in that it has since served India as an exemplar of political integration and moral regeneration.

In 326 BC, when Alexander was in the Panjab, ‘Aggrames’ or ‘Xandrames’ ruled over the Gangetic region according to these Graeco-Roman accounts. His was the prodigious army at which Alexander’s men had balked; and his father was the low-born son of a barber and a courtesan who had founded a dynasty with its capital at Pataliputra. ‘Andrames’ was therefore a Nanda, probably the youngest of Mahapadma Nanda’s sons. And since, unusually, these Graeco-Roman accounts agree with the Puranas that Nanda rule lasted only two generations, he was the last of his line. Immensely unpopular as well as dismally documented, the second Nanda was about to be overthrown.

According to Plutarch, Alexander had actually met the man who would usurp the Magadhan throne. His name was ‘Sandrokottos’ (‘Sandracottus’ in Latin) and in 326 BC he was in Taxila, perhaps studying and already enjoying Taxilan sanctuary as he prepared to rebel against Nanda authority. No such person, however, is known to Indian tradition, the voluminous king-lists in the Puranas containing no mention of a ‘Sandrokottos’ sound-alike. Although from other Greek sources, especially the account of Megasthenes, an ambassador who would visit India in C300 BC, it was evident that someone called Sandrokottos had indeed reigned in the Gangetic valley, it was still not clear to which if any of the many listed Indian kings he corresponded, nor whether he ruled from Pataliputra, nor whether he could be the same as Plutarch’s Sandrokottos. Like Porus and Omphis, it looked as if Sandrokottos was either a minor figure or else someone whose name had been so hopelessly scrambled in its transliteration into Greek that it would never be recognisable in its Sanskritic original.

It was Sir William Jones, the charismatic father of Oriental studies and pioneer of Indo-Aryan linguistics, who in another flash of inspiration rescued the reputation of Sandrokottos. ‘I cannot help mentioning a discovery which accident threw my way,’¹ he told members of the Bengal Asiatic Society in his 1793 annual address. In the course of exploratory forays into Sanskrit literature he had earlier worked out that Sandrokottos’ capital could indeed have been the Magadhan city of Pataliputra. He had now come across a mid-first-millennium AD drama, the Rudra-rakshasa, which told of intrigues at the court of a King Chandragupta who had usurped the Magadhan throne and received foreign ambassadors there. The flash of inspiration, the ‘chance discovery’, was that ‘Sandrokottos’ might be a Greek rendering of ‘Chandragupta’. This was later established by the discovery of an alternative Greek spelling of the name as ‘Sandrakoptos’. The ‘Sandrokottos’ of Plutarch and of Megasthenes, and the Chandragupta of this play and of occasional mention in the Puranas, must be the same person. Crucially and for the first time, a figure well known from Graeco-Roman sources had been identified with one well-attested in Indian tradition.

At the time, the late eighteenth century, the excitement generated by this discovery stemmed from its relevance for Indian chronology. Very little was yet known of Chandragupta or the empire he had founded; the latter would only be recognised as an exceptional creation following even more exciting discoveries in the nineteenth century. In Jones’s day his breakthrough was applauded solely because it at last made possible some cross-dating between, on the one hand, kings (with their regnal years) as recorded in the Puranas and, on the other, ascertainable dates in the history of western Asia. Thus, for instance, if Chandragupta was planning his rebellion against the Nandas when Alexander was in the Panjab, if according to Indian tradition he ruled for twenty-four years, and if Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the court of ‘Sandrokottos’, could not have been sent until after 305 BC, it followed that Chandragupta’s revolt must have started soon after 326 BC and have lasted three to four years, so that he then reigned from his many-pillared palace in Pataliputra from approximately 320 to 297 BC. That meant that his successor, Bindusara, ruled from 297 to 272 BC, and that Bindusara’s successor, an enigmatic figure who had yet to be clearly identified (let alone accorded universal recognition as ‘one of the greatest monarchs the world has ever seen’²), must have acceded (after a four-year interregnum) in about 268 BC.

These dates have since been further substantiated by cross-reference with later Buddhist sources. Buddhist and Jain texts have much to say about the dynasty they call ‘Maurya’ and, along with surviving extracts of the report written by ambassador Megasthenes, plus a truly remarkable series of inscriptions, they constitute important sources for the period. But what would make the early Mauryan empire potentially the best-documented period in the entire history of pre-Muslim India was the discovery of that classic of Indian statecraft, the immensely detailed if almost unreadable text known as the Arthasastra. For it would appear that Kautilya, the steely brahman to whom the work is credited, was none other than the instigator, operative, ideologist and chief minister of the self-same Chandragupta. In fact orthodox tradition has it that Kautilya was the kingmaker, and Chandragupta little more than his adopted protégé. Kautilya’s great compendium, therefore – with its exhaustive listing of the qualifications and responsibilities required of innumerable state officials, its schema for the conduct of foreign relations and warfare, its enumeration of the fiscal and military resources available to the state, its ruthless suggestions for law enforcement and the detection of dissent, its advocacy of state intervention in all aspects of social and economic activity, and its rules-of-thumb for just about every conceivable political eventuality – such a work should indeed supply uniquely well informed and authoritative insights into the workings of the Mauryan state.

There are, though, grounds for caution. The full text of the Arthasastra is comparable in size and excruciating detail to the Kamasutra but, though cited ‘sometimes eulogistically and sometimes derisively’³ in other ancient works, it was only discovered in 1904. For Dr R. Shamasastry, the then government of Mysore’s chief librarian, as for Sir William Jones, the discovery was accidental. An anonymous pandit simply handed over the priceless collection of palm leaves on which it was written, and then disappeared. Happily, Shamasastry quickly divined the importance of his acquisition; he was also well qualified to undertake its organisation and elucidation. His English translation was published in 1909, since when other editions have appeared and controversy may be said to have raged.

It now seems fairly certain that the work in its present form dates, at the earliest, only from the second century AD, five hundred years after Chandragupta. Moreover, a computer-generated statistical analysis of the frequency with which certain linguistic particles appear in the text would seem to prove that the work was not written by a single author but is an accretion of earlier texts. It may have been compiled by a single person, but it ‘has no one creator’, writes the American scholar Thomas Trautmann.

I believe it true to say that the ‘author’ of the Arthasastra is his predecessors, and that his personality as inferred from the work is a composite picture to which three or four different individuals have contributed, one a nose, the other the hair, another the eyes.⁴

Who these individuals were and when they lived is unknown; but Kautilya, though not (as the work implies) its compiler, could well have been one of them. A wily master of intrigue and deception who is elsewhere described as physically deformed, he could have been the eyes. Much of the Arthasastra might still be his eye-witness account of the Mauryan state.

But there is another difficulty. Ancient Indian compendia, like the Kamasutra, the Manu-smriti (the legal Code of Manu) or the Arthasastra, none of which was compiled in its present form until the early centuries AD, may not be very reliable guides to actual practice. They were certainly based on observation, but just as it is inconceivable that any swain could have observed all the rules, contrived all the occasions, and mastered all the technical demands of love-making as recorded in the Kamasutra, so it seems unlikely that any state can ever have been so minutely organised, so determinedly interventionist, and so uncomfortably vigilant as that in the Arthasastra. The latter is, as it says, ‘a guide not only for the acquisition of this world but of the next’. Like the Ten Commandments or the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, it was a counsel of perfection. Such works should be seen as exercises in comprehending, rationalising and idealising important human activities which, in practice and by implication, may often have been conducted impromptu with inconsistent and unsatisfactory results. Thus if only parts of the Arthasastra relate to the Mauryan state, only parts of these parts may be taken to be a statement of how government actually operated under Chandragupta Maurya.

‘AN INDIAN JULIUS CAESAR’

Chandragupta Maurya’s origins were probably undistinguished; they certainly remain so. Buddhist texts claim that he was related to the Buddha’s Sakya clan, others that he was related to the Nandas. Both may be taken as fairly transparent attempts to confer lustre and legitimacy on a new dynasty whose founder was of humble caste, possibly a vaisya. If not born in the Panjab, he seems to have spent some time there, as suggested by Plutarch and as confirmed by a legend, found in both Indian and Graeco-Roman sources, associating him with the lion. Tigers were widely distributed throughout India, but the Indian lion, now retaining a clawhold only in a corner of Gujarat, seems never to have roamed further east than Rajasthan and Delhi.

At some point in his youth the self-possessed Chandragupta was adopted as a promising candidate for future glory by Kautilya (otherwise known as Chanakya), a devious and disgruntled brahman who had been slighted at the Nanda court. Kautilya sought his revenge by exploiting the unpopularity of the Nandas; and, disqualified from kingship himself because of deformity (possibly only the loss of his teeth), he championed the ambitions of Chandragupta. An early attempt to overthrow Nanda power in Magadha itself was a failure. Perhaps Kautilya hoped to achieve his ends by a simple coup d’état but failed to win sufficient support. The pair resolved to try again, and took their cue from a small boy who was observed to tackle his chapati by first nibbling round its circumference. This time, instead of striking at the heart of Nanda power, they would work their way in from its crusty periphery, exploiting dissent and enlisting support amongst its dependent kingdoms before storming the centre.

A good starting place may have been the Panjab, where Alexander’s departure had left a potential power vacuum. Settlements founded by the Macedonian seem not to have prospered, and their garrisons to have trailed home or gravitated to older power centres like Taxila. While in western Asia Alexander’s successors disputed his inheritance, the Indian satrapies reverted to local control. Ambhi and Porus, designated governors for the region by Alexander, had no love for the Nandas and may, under the circumstances, have felt themselves entitled to endorse Mauryan ambitions. Troops from the gana-sangha republics, of which there were still many in the north-west, are also said to have joined Chandragupta, along with other local malcontents. So, more certainly, did a powerful hill chief with whom Kautilya negotiated an offensive alliance.

Overrunning the satellite states and outlying provinces of the Nanda kingdom, the allies eventually converged on Magadha. Pataliputra was probably besieged and, aided no doubt by defectors, the allies triumphed. The last Nanda was sent packing, quite literally: he is supposed to have been spared only his life, plus such of his legendary wealth as he could personally crate and carry away. The hill chief, with whom Kautilya seems previously to have agreed on a partition of the spoils, was then poisoned, probably at Kautilya’s instigation, and Chandragupta Maurya ascended the Magadhan throne in, as has been noted, C320 BC.

Of his reign very little is known for certain. There are hints that pockets of Nanda resistance had to be laboriously stamped out, and there is ample information in the Arthasastra that could be used, and usually is, to flesh out the policies and methods on which Mauryan dominion was founded. Firm evidence of the extent of this dominion comes mainly from later sources. But since few named conquests can definitely be credited to his successors, it seems likely that Chandragupta, adding the Nandas’ vast army to his own, found ample employment for it. He may reasonably be considered the creator as well as the founder of the Mauryan empire, indeed ‘an Indian Julius Caesar’ as nationalist historians call him (though chronologically speaking Caesar should, of course, be ‘a Roman Chandragupta’).

The suggestion has also been made that Chandragupta derived the very idea of an empire based on military supremacy from his observation of Alexander’s conceit. Yet unlike Alexander, whose campaigns progress from one victorious encounter to the next, he cannot certainly be credited with winning a single battle. The Mauryan empire was probably the most extensive ever forged by an Indian dynasty; even the Mughals rarely achieved a wider hegemony. Yet we have positive knowledge of only one campaign undertaken by a Mauryan ruler – and we know of that only because the man responsible chose publicly to express his remorse. All of which may say more about relative attitudes to the past and about the variable nature of the source materials than about Mauryan imperialism.

In assessing Chandragupta’s conquests it would be helpful to know the extent of the empire to which he succeeded when he overthrew the Nandas. We can only presume that, as well as Magadha and Anga, it included most of the erstwhile Gangetic states (Koshala, Vatsya, Licchavi, etc.) and reached south across the Vindhya hills to central India and the Narmada river; beyond that river the Deccan preserves only highly doubtful hints of any Nanda presence.

From a later inscription found in Kalinga, the modern Orissa, it is evident that that region had also formed part of the Nanda empire. It may have been retained by Chandragupta, but must subsequently have slipped from Mauryan control since it would have to be reconquered by his grandson. A thousand miles away, on the other side of India at Girnar in Junagadh (Gujarat), another inscription refers to the repair of a local dam which, it says, had originally been built under the direction of Chandragupta’s governor in the region. Nanda power may have reached as far west as Avanti (Malwa), but is unlikely to have reached Gujarat. It is therefore assumed that Chandragupta conducted a successful campaign in western India and probably also reached the Bombay region. The Mauryan empire thus became the first to stretch from sea to sea – from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea. The object, however, may not have been ‘to unite India’, an unlikely ambition at a time when geographical, let alone national, horizons were still hazy. More probably its westward extension was intended to engross that lucrative maritime trade, pioneered by the Harappans, in timbers, textiles, spices, gems and precious metals between the ports of India’s west coast and those of the Persian Gulf.

In the Panjab and the north-west Chandragupta’s successes were no less extensive, as is coyly acknowledged by those Graeco-Roman sources. From these we know that, after a prolonged struggle, Seleucus Nikator, one of Alexander’s generals, succeeded to the eastern half of his empire. Much of it had to be reclaimed, and it was not until 305 BC that Seleucus turned his attention to India. There it seems that Chandragupta had already ‘liberated’ (as one Latin source has it) the Panjab. Seleucus, nevertheless, crossed the Indus, and possibly the Jhelum too, before he came to terms with Chandragupta and retired. It may be inferred that Seleucus, like Alexander, had to fight his way forward and that, like Alexander’s men, he soon thought better of the venture. Perhaps he was roundly defeated. The terms on which he withdrew certainly suggest so. Chandragupta presented him with five hundred war-elephants, which would prove decisive in further struggles with his main rivals in the west, although they can scarcely have dented Mauryan resources. In return Seleucus ceded to Chandragupta not only the Panjab but also Gandhara and all of what is now Afghanistan save Bactria (the northern region between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus). The treaty may have been sealed with a matrimonial alliance by which Chandragupta, or his son, received a daughter of Seleucus as a bride.

To cement their friendship further, Seleucus appointed an ambassador to the Mauryan court at Pataliputra. This was Megasthenes, whose account of ‘Sandrokottos’ and his empire, as viewed from its capital, survives only in fragments quoted or paraphrased by later authors. As a first-hand description of anywhere in fourth/third-century BC India east of the Panjab, these fragments are nevertheless valuable. Indeed Megasthenes, in his emphasis on the bureaucratic and absolute nature of Mauryan rule and on the structure of its standing army, goes some way towards vindicating the utility of the Arthasastra as a possible source material. Back home in Greece, his work was seen as vindicating those who dismissed all descriptions of India as a pack of lies. To the floppy-eared and umbrella-footed monstrosities already on record were added such palpable fantasies as reeds which yielded syrup and trees that grew wool. Rocking, no doubt, with Attic mirth, his readers confidently rubbished such early accounts of sugarcane and cotton production as more tall stories from the impossible East.

Although Chandragupta certainly left his successor an empire which reached from Bengal to Afghanistan and Gujarat, there is no clear indication of how far south it extended. Jain tradition insists that, when he abdicated in favour of his son, Chandragupta retired to a Jain establishment in Karnataka. At Sravana Belgola, a picturesque little town nestling in the cleavage between two steeply swelling hills west of Bangalore, the emperor is said to have passed his final days in austerity and devotions. The pinnacle of one of the hills comprises a massive nude sculpture of Gomateshwara, an important Jain teacher; mostly free-standing and nearly twenty metres high, it is one of the sights of south India – ‘nothing grander or more imposing exists anywhere out of Egypt and even there, no known statue surpasses it in height.’⁵ But it is on the other hill, the less sensational Chandragiri, that Chandragupta is supposed to have resided. Inscriptions and reliefs dating back to the fifth century AD record his presence; and a low cave amidst the granite scarps is said to be where, in the ultimate act of Jain self-denial, the emperor finally starved himself to death.

Scholarly doubts, of course, remain, particularly since the imperial lifestyle as recorded by Megasthenes amidst the splendour and luxury of Pataliputra seems the very antithesis of Jain asceticism. But abnegation was not uncommon in Mauryan society and, in the light of subsequent evidence of Mauryan authority in the south, the story ‘may be accepted as proof of his acquisition of this part of the peninsula’.⁶

That it probably represented the frontier of his empire is evident from the prologue to the story. The emperor had chosen to abdicate (C297 BC) after receiving information about an imminent famine from the revered Bhadrabahu, who was reputedly the last Jain monk to have actually known the Jain founder Mahavira Nataputta. (Just such a famine is anticipated in two very early inscriptions, engraved on copper plates found in Bengal and UP, which have been dated to Chandragupta’s reign; and unless Bhadrabahu was extraordinarily long-lived, his connection with Mahavira, the Buddha’s contemporary, may be further evidence in favour of the Buddhist ‘short chronology’.) As a result of this prophecy not only Chandragupta but an entire Jain congregation is said to have migrated south. In what, judging by remarks in the Arthasastra, was a continuing pattern of settlement in lands newly conquered or on the margins of existing settlement, the Jains journeyed south till they reached Karnataka. There, where a stream slid between the twin hills of Sravana Belgola, they stopped and stayed, nourishing the legends beloved of generations of pilgrims and patrons whose donations would enable them to dig a fine tank, build a dozen neat temples, and whittle their granite surroundings into megalithic images of the starkest abstraction. The Jains have been there ever since; and to this day they tell much the same story of the emperor Chandragupta.

Such continuities are not uncommon in India. Sir William Jones had likened first meeting his brahman informants to discovering an isolated community of Greeks who, two thousand years on, still wore toga and sandals, worshipped Zeus, recited Homer, and stood guard over a written archive reaching back to the Stone Age. Even now historians of India continue to scrutinise their own surroundings and society for clues to the past. In one of the most compelling exercises in modern historical writing D.D. Kosambi, armed with his notebook and a stout stick (‘fitted with a chisel ferrule for prying artefacts out of the surface … it also serves to discourage the more ambitious village dogs’), conducts his reader on a short walk from his home on the outskirts of Pune (Poona). Chance finds, encounters with neighbouring social groups, careful scrutiny of domestic routines and patient enquiries about local images reveal a three-thousand-year panorama of settlement patterns, trade contacts, and Sanskritic acculturation. ‘There is no substitute for such work in the field for the restoration of pre-literate history,’ writes Kosambi.⁷ Most of India’s history prior to the arrival of Islam fits his definition of pre-literate; and no society retains a more rewarding consciousness of the past than India’s. Legend and oral tradition, when credible, may be quite as reliable as authentic contemporary documentation.

THE MAURYAS Probable Succession

THE GREATEST OF KINGS

In 1837, following years of conjecture and study by numerous other ‘Orientalists’, James Prinsep, the assay-master at the British mint in Calcutta, made what remains the single most important discovery in the unravelling of India’s ancient history. From inscriptions in an unknown script found on the stone railings of the great Buddhist stupa at Sanchi, he managed to identify two letters of the alphabet. One was ‘d’, the other ‘n’; when added to other letters already tentatively identified, they suggested words which convinced him that the language being used in these inscriptions was Pali. Pali was a Prakrit, one of several derivatives of Sanskrit, that was popular in Magadha in the Buddha’s time and was subsequently appropriated as the sacred language of much Buddhist scripture. Armed with his insight into the likely language, plus much of the alphabet, Prinsep proceeded to make the first ever translations from the neat ‘pin-man’ script now known as Ashoka Brahmi. He translated the short Sanchi inscriptions – they recorded the donation of the stupa’s individual stones and the names of their donors – and he began to tackle a series of much longer inscriptions.

Copies of these longer inscriptions had come from puzzled antiquarians as far afield as Orissa, Gujarat, Allahabad and Delhi. ‘The memorial in question,’ wrote James Tod in 1822 of the Girnar (Gujarat) inscription, ‘is a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite which, like a wart upon the body, has protruded through the crust of mother earth, without fissure or inequality, and which, by the aid of the iron pen, has been converted into a book’.⁸ Some of the inscriptions were engraved on cliff faces, others on colossal cylindrical pillars; and an odd thing about all of them was that, though found dotted over the length and breadth of the subcontinent, they seemed to contain similar phrasing and even the same message. It was as if, in Europe, chapter-length runes were to be found identically etched, squiggle for squiggle, in the marble of Carrara, the granite of the Grampians, a pillar in the Rhineland and the rock of Gibraltar. Given the obvious antiquity of both script and find-sites, curiosity about their significance was intense. The Harappan civilisation was not as yet even suspected. These looked to be India’s earliest monuments and, whatever their message, they must be of enormous historical importance. Some saw parallels with the Egyptian hieroglyphics; others were reminded of the Ten Commandments as found by Moses on Mount Sinai.

Announcing his translation in 1837, an exhausted and dying Prinsep also saw parallels with Moses: ‘we might easily cite a more ancient and venerable example of thus fixing the law on tablets of stone.’⁹ For, contrary to expectations, these were not obscure Vedic invocations of unfathomable import but hard statements of policy, and so historical documentation of an immediacy as yet unknown in India. Henceforth called Edicts, rather than Commandments, the inscriptions clearly announced themselves as the directives of a single sovereign. ‘Thus speaks Devanampiya Piyadassi’ was how most began. The formula, echoing that of Persian inscriptions (and later popularised by the Nietzschean ‘Thus spake Zarathrustra’), may indeed have been influenced by Achaemenid practice. Some of the pillars carrying the inscriptions still retained fluted, bell-shaped capitals crowned with an animal image, both of which features are anticipated in the monumental sculpture found at Persepolis.

Yet the confident modelling of these animal figures, the incorporation of subsidiary motifs like the Buddhist wheel, and the lustrous finish imparted to the sandstone have no foreign counterparts. Moreover, the restrained use of honorific titles in the Edicts themselves and, when fully comprehended, the extraordinarily humane sentiments expressed in them, could scarcely have been more Indian. ‘Devanampiya Piyadassi’ unmistakably belonged to the land of the Buddha and Mahavira. A Gandhian ring would be detected in his emphasis on human values, non-violence and moral regeneration; and to Nehru it would be self-evident that the exquisite capital of one of these inscribed pillars should serve as the national emblem of the republic of India. As usual it mattered not that, featuring a four-faced lion rather than a tiger, it bespoke the Mauryas’ associations with regions of the subcontinent now largely in Pakistan.

But who was this ‘Devanampiya Piyadassi’? Unfortunately for Prinsep no king called anything like that was to be found in the king-lists in the Puranas. But from Sri Lanka one of Prinsep’s contemporaries, who was working on the Buddhist chronicles preserved in that still Buddhist island, reported that there had been a Sri Lankan king called Piyadassi, and then that the same name had also been that of a famous Indian sovereign. Indeed this Indian king was a figure of gigantic standing and copious legend in Buddhist sources. He had championed Buddhism in India, had sent his own son to convert Sri Lanka, and was otherwise gloriously known as Ashoka.

‘Devanampiya’, meaning ‘The Beloved of the Gods’, is now thought to have been an honorific title, like ‘His Majesty’. ‘Piyadassi’ means something like ‘gracious of mien’ and may have been the name assumed when Ashoka was enthroned in C268 BC. That this man was indeed the third Maurya, the grandson of Chandragupta, who would rule for nearly forty years, became self-evident from his listing as Asoka in the Purana king-lists.

Information on Ashoka’s early life is available neither from the Puranas nor from his inscriptions, and must therefore be sought mainly in those Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicles. Of Bindusara, his father (and Chandragupta’s son), little is known. Greek sources call him Amitrochates and testify to further exchanges of ambassadors and gifts between Pataliputra and Alexander’s successors in Egypt and Syria. The name ‘Amitrochates’ has been identified with a Sanskrit title meaning ‘slayer of enemies’. This could imply that he extended his father’s conquests. Additionally he is thought to have patronised the heterodox Ajivika sect in much the same way as his father did the Jains and his son the Buddhists. Clearly considerations of policy, as well as of conscience, may have dictated Mauryan alignment with the new sects; their lay followers were mainly drawn from the rising mercantile and industrial classes and, statecraft being principally about taxation (Artha-sastra literally means ‘the science of wealth’ or ‘economics’), their support was to be cultivated.

Bindusara ruled for twenty-five years and was probably at least into his late fifties when he died. Ashoka, evidently one of several sons, therefore had the opportunity to become closely involved in imperial affairs during his father’s reign. His first appointment seems to have been to Taxila, where he successfully dealt with a revolt against the local Mauryan administration. Perhaps on the strength of this, he was sent to Ujjain as governor. He stayed there until his father’s death. Ujjain nestled beside the Sipra river, a tributary of the Chambal, in the heart of the rolling and well wooded uplands of west central India. Now a major city of pilgrimage, it was then the capital of one of the five main divisions of the Mauryan empire. As the principal power centre in Avanti, or Malwa, it was also well sited to control traffic and trade moving between Broach, the principal west coast port, and either Pataliputra (by way of the Narmada valley) or the upper Gangetic regions (by way of the Chambal and the old Daksinapatha).

However, of Ashoka’s sojourn there what was thought most worthy of note by Buddhist chroniclers was his love affair with the daughter of a local merchant. The lady in question was Devi or Vidisha-mahadevi, the lovely ‘goddess of Vidisha’. She was not apparently married to Ashoka nor destined to accompany him to Pataliputra and become one of his queens. Yet she bore him a son and a daughter. The son, Mahinda, would head the Buddhist mission to Sri Lanka; and it may be that his mother was already a Buddhist, thus raising the possibility that Ashoka was drawn to the Buddha’s teachings while still in Avanti. In that Vidisa, about 120 kilometres east of Ujjain and near the modern Bhopal, is where stand the glorious monuments of Sanchi (including the great stupa whose inscriptions so enlightened Prinsep), it was clearly home to an important Buddhist community in Mauryan times. But its earliest viharas (monastic halls) and stupas probably date from after 275 BC. It therefore seems just as probable that, instead of Vidisa converting Ashoka, it was Ashoka who converted Vidisa. Mindful of its romantic associations in his youth, he may, in later life as emperor and a lay Buddhist, have retained a soft spot for this peaceful mound in its then sylvan setting near the headwaters of the Betwa river, and by lavish endowment have ensured its religious celebrity.

As with earlier subscribers to the Buddha’s teachings like Ajatashatru of Magadha, Buddhist sources tend to represent Ashoka’s pre-Buddhist lifestyle as one of indulgence steeped in cruelty. Conversion then became all the more remarkable in that by ‘right thinking’ even a monster of wickedness could be transformed into a model of compassion. The formula, if such it was, precluded any admission of Ashoka’s early fascination with Buddhism and may explain the ruthless conduct attributed to him when Bindusara died. Not only is he said to have killed all rival claimants to the throne, notably ninety-nine of his brothers, but also to have paid a visit to hell so that he could construct on earth something similar, equipped with the very latest in instruments of exquisite torture, for all who incurred his displeasure. This ‘Hell-on-Earth’ evidently became quite a curiosity: nine hundred years later a Chinese visitor, while touring the locations associated with early Buddhism, records the site, which was then marked with a pillar.

That Ashoka was not his father’s chosen successor and that there was indeed a succession struggle is certain. It helps to account for the four-year gap between Bindusara’s death and Ashoka’s enthronement as also for the fact that only one brother of many (though surely not a hundred) receives further mention; according to one source, the name of this brother was Vitashoka and he became a Buddhist monk, a career move no doubt dictated as much by self-preservation as self-abnegation. If not a monster, Ashoka undoubtedly evinced the Kautilyan ruthlessness essential to gaining the throne and the Kautilyan cunning essential to retaining it.

Eight years after his enthronement, so in C260 BC, there occurred the only campaign that can certainly be attributed to the Mauryas, one which was nevertheless the outstanding event of the reign and the turning point in the life of the emperor. Ashoka conquered, or reconquered, Kalinga (roughly Orissa). The conquest is recorded in the most important of his Edicts, the thirteenth of the fourteen Major Rock Edicts (as opposed to the eight Minor Rock Edicts and Inscriptions, and the seven Major Pillar Edicts). And though the Edict says nothing of the military arrangements, it tells in detail of the human suffering involved – 100,000 slain, ‘many times that number perished’ (presumably afterwards from wounds and famine) and 150,000 deported. More famously, it also records the emperor’s reaction.

On conquering Kalinga the Beloved of the Gods felt remorse, for, when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death and deportation of the people is extremely grievous to the Beloved of the Gods and weighs heavily on his mind … Even those who are fortunate to have escaped, and whose love is undiminished, suffer from the misfortunes of their friends, acquaintances, colleagues and relatives … Today if a hundredth or a thousandth part of those people who were killed or died or were deported when Kalinga was annexed were to suffer similarly, it would weigh heavily on the mind of the Beloved of the Gods …

This inscription of dhamma has been engraved so that any sons or great-grandsons that I may have should not think of gaining new conquests, and in whatever victories they may gain should be satisfied with patience and light punishment. They should only consider conquest by dhamma to be a true conquest, and delight in dhamma should be their whole delight, for this is of value in both this world and the next.¹⁰

‘Herein lies the greatness of Ashoka,’ writes R.K. Mookerji. ‘Even as a mere pious sentiment this is hard to beat; at least no victorious monarch in the history of the world is known to have ever given expression to anything like it.’¹¹ In just such a ‘History of the World’ H.G. Wells made the same point: ‘He would have no more of it [the cruelty and horror of war]. He adopted the peaceful doctrines of Buddhism and declared that henceforth his conquests would be conquests of religion … Such was Ashoka, greatest of kings.’¹²

Renouncing violence, abjuring war, and advocating the elusive but admirable concept of dhamma, Ashoka turned statecraft on its head. Not the least of those confounded was Kautilya, whose Arthasastra makes the conquest of neighbouring territories one of the sacred duties of a king. It lists several kinds of war, goes into immense logistical detail on armies and battle plans, and includes four handy hints on conquering the world. To a society accustomed to such cynical sentiments, Ashoka’s change of heart must indeed have appeared revolutionary.

Whether it was quite as benign as it seems may, though, be questioned. One wonders why, for instance, if the emperor was so overcome with remorse, he did not arrange for the repatriation of all those deportees? Or why the Edict in question is pointedly omitted from the only rock inscriptions in Kalinga itself, inscriptions which otherwise conform with those in the rest of the country. In its stead are two separate Edicts ordering imperial representatives to conciliate the natives with lenient policies and exceptional diligence so that such wayward people may come to think of Ashoka as their father. Policy as much as conscience dictated this approach. Whatever lessons he chose to draw, in reality Ashoka’s treatment of the subjugated Kalingans was exactly as prescribed by the Arthasastra: ‘having acquired new territory the conqueror shall substitute his virtues for the enemy’s vices and where the enemy was good, he shall be twice as good. He shall follow policies that are pleasing and beneficial by acting according to his dharma and by granting favours and exemptions, giving gifts and bestowing honours.’¹³

One wonders, too, about those astronomical casualty figures. Megasthenes describes the Mauryan army as a permanent and professional body, recruited, trained and maintained at state expense, and which scarcely impinged on the agricultural masses. ‘It therefore not unfrequently happens that at the same time, and in the same part of the country, men may be seen drawn up in array of battle, and fighting at the risk of their lives, while other men close at hand are ploughing and digging in perfect security.’¹⁴ But if this was the case, how were so many non-combatants affected by the Kalingan war? Megasthenes actually gives a figure for the Kalingan army. In Chandragupta’s time it was sixty thousand strong. The Mauryan forces were obviously far more numerous but, unless they suffered a disproportionate number of casualties, it is hard to explain how the total of those slain in battle can have come to anything like 100,000.

There was nothing unusual, of course, about conflating enemy losses. Perhaps Ashoka exaggerated so as to make his revulsion more plausible. But equally he may, like most victors, have done so principally to magnify his victory and so discourage others from defying his authority. Contrary to popular opinion, he never specifically abjures warfare, nor is there any mention of his disbanding units of the Mauryan army. This is not to say that his remorse was insincere. The Kalinga war had indeed troubled his conscience, and since, according to the Arthasastra, ‘the king encapsulates the constituents of the state,’ his unease seemed to reflect the wider ills of society as a whole. The cure, though, was not the balm of a disastrous pacifism but the bracing tonic of what he called dhamma.

AS LONG AS SUN AND MOON ENDURE

Few rulers have summed up their life’s work in a single word, but that was obviously how Ashoka wanted it. Not for conquests, prosperity or majesty did he wish to be remembered, only for dhamma. To say the word features prominently in his Edicts is an understatement. Nearly all mention it, some many times, and there are several attempts at defining it:

Thus speaks the Beloved of the Gods, the king Piyadassi: There is no gift comparable to the gift of dhamma, the praise of dhamma, the sharing of dhamma, fellowship in dhamma. And this is: good behaviour towards slaves and servants, obedience to mother and father, generosity towards friends, acquaintances and relatives, and towards sramanas and brahmans, and abstention from killing living beings. Father, son, brother, master, friend, acquaintance, relative, and neighbour should say, ‘this is good, this we should do.’ By doing so, there is gain in this world, and in the next there is infinite merit, through the gift of dhamma. [Eleventh Major Rock Edict]¹⁵

Elsewhere dhamma is equated with ‘mercy, charity, truthfulness and purity’. In English it is variously rendered as ‘piety’, ‘duty’, ‘good conduct’ or ‘decency’. Ashoka clearly thought it anything but anodyne, and practised it, preached it, and legislated for it with missionary zeal. It was a panacea not just for India but for the world – this one and the next. The glad tidings were to be carried beyond his frontiers, even to his fellow rulers in the west. The mention of some of their names – including an Egyptian Ptolemy and an Alexander (of Epirus) – provides vital chronological corroboration.

At home, something like a parallel administration was set up to promote and monitor dhamma’s dissemination. The Edicts embodying it were promulgated, proclaimed, and then encapsulated for all time by that laborious process of gouging them into the very bedrock of India. ‘I have done this,’ Ashoka announced when, after twenty-seven years on the throne, he issued his last Edict, ‘so that among my sons and great grandsons, and as long as the sun and moon shall endure, men may follow dhamma’ [Seventh Pillar Edict].¹⁶

It is the tone as much as the content which sends a shiver down awe-struck spines. Ashoka is not just India’s first defined historical personality but, rarer still for such a remote age, he is an intelligible personality. Quite probably the Beloved of the Gods did indeed speak just thus. The language is personal and intimate, not stilted or formalised as is more usual with official directives, and neither condensed for the purposes of inscription nor artfully organised for easy memorising. Occasionally repetitive, it slips from third person to first and from direct speech to indirect, just as one might expect of something dictated and recorded verbatim.

Almost certainly the Edicts first circulated as palm-leaf texts and were then engraved. Literacy not being a widespread skill in the third century BC, they were meant to be read out aloud to the people. At Shahbazgarhi near Peshawar on the edge of the badlands of the north-west frontier, and at Mansehra in the Himalayan foothills north of Taxila, they were written in Kharosthi, the local script derived from Aramaic in Achaemenid times. Further west beyond the Khyber Pass and at Kandahar in the deserts of southern Afghanistan a shortened Edict is in Aramaic with a translation into Greek; had it been discovered earlier, it could, like a Rosetta Stone, have made Prinsep’s task redundant. Although the many inscriptions found deep in the Deccan betray no knowledge of Tamil, elsewhere the adoption of local scripts and languages shows Ashoka appealing directly not only to his own people but to other peoples beyond his frontiers, and to other generations beyond his times. It is this above all, the directness of his directives, which, transcending the millennia, gives them even now such awesome immediacy.

But if the tone is still arresting, one can hardly say the same for the contents. Why, one wonders, lavish so much love, labour and authority on a set of fairly obvious humanitarian injunctions? Assuming they had no political relevance, many historians have portrayed Ashoka more as a religious reformer, another Buddha or Christ, than as an empire-builder. In religious terms his clear preference, as shown in a number of minor inscriptions, was for the Buddhist community; given ‘the rank growth of legend which has clustered round the name of Ashoka’ in Buddhist tradition, dhamma has often actually been equated with Buddhism. This link appears to be borne out by dhamma’s emphasis on non-violence, on preserving life in all its forms, and on ‘right conduct’ towards one’s fellow human beings. The Third Buddhist Council is supposed to have met under Ashoka’s patronage at Pataliputra. At least one of his dhamma agents, his son Mahinda, was more missionary than emissary. And Ashoka, instead of combining tours of his kingdom with the traditional pastime of a royal hunt, insists that his peregrinations were enlivened only by pilgrimage. Just such a tour, embracing the Buddha’s birthplace and the site of his parinirvana, is commemorated in a series of pillars erected in situ and dated to the twentieth year of his reign, so 248 BC.

However, the tradition that Ashoka actually became a Buddhist monk is now discredited. The inscriptions never mention the Buddha and show no awareness of his ‘Noble Eightfold Path’ or any other Buddhist schema. Even the idea of ‘conversion’ is suspect, since codes like those of the Buddhists and Jains were not seen as exclusive. Religion as creed, doctrine as dogma, and faith as truth are equations with little validity in pre-Islamic India. Most subscribed to the inexorable cycle of rebirth and to the notion that there were various ways of effecting eventual escape from it. The propitiation of a particular deity could help, but was more commonly a means of warding off disease and pestilence. Even brahmanical orthodoxy demanded no profession of faith, merely an acceptance of brahman authority and a high degree of caste conformity. There was indeed competition, especially amongst the heterodox sects, for adherents and for patronage. There was also ferocious debate which, on at least one occasion, required Ashoka’s intervention. But conversion, in the sense of renouncing one set of doctrines for another, was meaningless.

Instead Megasthenes divided India’s ‘philosophers’ not into like-minded sects but into ‘Bramanes and Sarmanes’, a distinction also made by Ashoka when referring, as above, to ‘Sramanas and brahmans’, or elsewhere to ‘Sramanas and householders’. ‘Sramanas’ denoted ‘renunciates’ and included all those who followed the mendicant and monastic habits of the heterodox sects as well as itinerant devotees of traditional deities. In other words, the crucial distinction was not between different belief systems but between different lifestyles. The individual was defined purely by his relationship to the rest of society. Not doctrine but conduct was what mattered.

Just so for Ashoka. He attempted no philosophical justification of dhamma, nor was he much given to rationalising it. It was not a belief system, not a developed ideology, just a set of behavioural exhortations. But because behaviour, conduct, was of such defining importance, any attempt to alter it was indeed revolutionary. Ashoka therefore needed a good reason for introducing his dhamma; and it should perhaps be sought in the need to promote a more united and uniform society.

Unprecedented solutions were required for an empire of unprecedented extent. In addition to the vast area roughly defined by the Rock Inscriptions (extending from Orissa to Mysore, Bombay, Junagadh, Kandahar, Peshawar and Dehra Dun), it seems fairly certain that the Kashmir valley was also included, and probably that of Nepal. The terrain varied from jungle to mountain, desert and flood-plain, and the population from nomadic hunter-gatherers to slash-and-burn tribesmen, pastoral herdsmen, fishing communities, arable and dairy farmers, craft villages, urbanised guilds, maritime and overland traders, and the highly sophisticated hierarchical societies of the major cities. Pataliputra itself, according to Megasthenes, lay within a walled and heavily fortified parallelogram of roughly fifteen kilometres by two and a half; its palace rivalled that of the Achaemenids, and even in decay made such an impression on a Chinese traveller that he thought it the work of spirits.

To preserve this empire intact, the Mauryan administration, if one may judge from what Megasthenes says and the Arthasastra expands, was one of the most elaborate on record. Government was construed as being largely about collecting taxes and administering justice. In each of these spheres the emperor and his mainly advisory council of ministers headed a hierarchy of officials which reached down through divisional and district officers to the toll-collector, the market overseer and the clerk who recorded the measurement and assessment of fields. The entire apparatus was subject to regular checks by a staff of inspectors who reported direct to the emperor, while a more sinister system of undercover informants provided a further check. All were appointed, directly or indirectly, by the emperor and had instant access to him.

This system was replicated by the four provincial administrations based at Suvarnagiri (near Kurnool in what is now Andhra Pradesh), Ujjain (Avanti/Malwa), Taxila (Panjab) and Tosali (thought to have been near Bhubaneshwar in Orissa). Each was headed by a governor, usually a son or brother of the emperor, although how much autonomy these local administrations enjoyed is questionable. Megasthenes paints a picture of a highly centralised, indeed personalised, administration, but he may have been generalising from conditions in Magadha itself. Centralisation was certainly the intention. The Greek ambassador’s enthusiasm for India’s roads is more than matched by Ashoka’s insistence in one of his Edicts that they be lined with shade trees, clearly marked with milestones, and provided with frequent wells, orchards and rest-houses. Communications were vital for trade; like instant access to the emperor, they were also essential to an effective despotism.

Another declared priority was standardisation. An Ashokan directive on ‘uniformity in judicial procedure and punishment’ is echoed in the Arthasastra, where taxes, duties and pay scales are all represented as standard. More generally, the whole structure of the administration and the use of standard proclamations and inscriptions were intended to knit the empire together. Caste, whether as the four-tier varna or the profession-based jati, scarcely receives a mention in the Edicts, but sectarian differences were much on the imperial mind. ‘The Beloved of the Gods,’ according to the twelfth Major Rock Edict, ‘honours all sects and both ascetics and laymen with gifts and various forms of recognition.’ But these benefits, Ashoka says, are unimportant compared to ‘the advancement of the essential doctrine of all sects’. The context here is that of a plea for toleration between the sects. No one is to disparage someone else’s teachings – or only mildly and on certain occasions. Concord is the ideal, and this is best realised by developing a recognition of a doctrinal essence that is common to all.

Although not specifically equated with dhamma, this supposed doctrinal essence seems to be the genesis of Ashoka’s big idea. The word ‘dhamma’ is a Prakrit spelling of the more familiar ‘dharma’, a concept difficult to translate but imbued with positive and idealised connotations in both orthodox Vedic literature and in the heterodox doctrines of Buddhists, Jains and Ajivikas. Invoking a natural order within which all manner of creation had its place and its role, it was something to which no one, be he brahman or Buddhist, emperor or slave, could reasonably take exception.

Dharma did, nevertheless, have different meanings for different sects, and Ashoka’s dhamma seems therefore to have sought common ground, borrowing from one what was least objectionable to the others. The emphasis on a respect for life in all its forms and on providing medical facilities for animals as well as men was clearly derived from Jain teachings. It appears that all live sacrifices were forbidden, and even the killing of animals for food was to be discouraged. The emperor was setting an example, in that his kitchen now required only two peacocks and the occasional deer, and ‘even these three animals will not be killed in future’. Such injunctions have often been taken to imply a ban on sacrificial extravaganzas and so a provocative swipe at those who derived their prestige and income from conducting them, namely brahmans. But, given a list elsewhere of the prohibited species, it seems that this rule may have applied only to wild creatures, not farm animals. Goats, sheep and cattle, the species most obviously in demand for both ritual and culinary purposes, are protected only when nursing their young. They must otherwise, therefore, have been exempt. Similarly, though adamant that ‘it is good not to kill human beings’, Ashoka seems to have retained capital punishment just as he retained the option of warfare. Dhamma was carefully formulated so that essential interests should not be prejudiced while sectarian concerns were being accommodated.

As well as conciliating the Jains, we know from an inscription in a cave in Orissa that Ashoka continued his father’s policy of patronising the Ajivikas. As for his Buddhist sympathies, they have already been mentioned. They found ample expression in dhamma, especially in injunctions about right conduct towards relatives, friends and colleagues. He makes, though, a significant addition by adding to the list of such beneficiaries the brahmans. Ashoka had no intention of slighting orthodox society or its deities. ‘The Beloved of the Gods’ would keep in with the gods, whatever his personal sympathy for the Buddhist sangha (monastic community).

It would appear that Ashoka aimed at creating an attitude of mind among his subjects in which social behaviour had the highest relevance. In the context of conditions during the Mauryan period, this ideology may have been viewed as a focus of loyalty and a point of convergence for the existing diversities of people and activities.¹⁷

‘Yet,’ continues Romila Thapar, ‘the ideology of dhamma died with the death of the emperor [in 231 BC].’ Others have conjectured that dhamma may even have been the undoing of the empire; perhaps it invited defiance, perhaps it provoked defiance. During his last ten years on the throne Ashoka had no further Edicts inscribed, and his empire may already have been falling apart. Mauryas would continue to rule from Pataliputra for another fifty years but their writ seldom ran beyond Magadha. The provinces, centred on Ujjain, Taxila, Suvarnagiri and Tosali, rapidly broke away as Ashoka’s successors proved unworthy of their inheritance and incapable of his vision. If dhamma was supposed to hold the empire together, it was an unmitigated failure.

Yet a policy that failed became an intimation that endured. The Ashokan legacy of an empire which stretched from sea to sea and from the mountains to the peninsula was promptly mislaid and would remain so for a couple of millennia. Likewise Ashoka’s historicity. But tradition cherished his memory; Indian historians insist that the ideal of a pan-Indian empire was never forgotten; and nor, more certainly, was the spirit of humanity embodied in his Edicts. The innovation which he pioneered of appealing across the barriers of sect, caste and kin to the community of India would be revived by a host of other reformers, not least Guru Nanak of the Sikhs and eventually Mahatma Gandhi.

6 An Age of Paradox C200 BC–C300 AD
EBB OF EMPIRE, FLOW OF IDEAS

BETWEEN THE DEATH of Ashoka in 231 BC and the advent of Gupta power in 320 AD, India’s ancient history plummets again to a murky obscurity. ‘Certainties are not many,’ bemoans a writer on the period.¹ Prior to the Mauryas our vision is blurred by the ambiguity of mainly literary sources whose purpose is suspect and whose dates are vague. After the Mauryas the source materials are more varied: coins furnish the names of a host of otherwise forgotten kings; other archaeological finds, plus inscriptions, provide additional information about guilds and religious establishments; and texts – Indian, Graeco-Roman and Chinese – hint at a wider historical context and testify to the importance of trade. Yet the sum total of these sources remains inadequate and, in respect of the successor states of the Mauryan empire, certainties are indeed ‘not many’. How far the writ of these states ran, whence came their rulers and when they reigned, even the order in which their dynasties succeeded one another, are matters of dispute. The Puranas continue to prove tantalisingly unreliable; and the greater variety of sources often serves only to introduce contradictions. A long period of political confusion is deduced and, pre-modern history necessarily being a reflection of such sources, this confusion is taken to indicate instability, fragmentation and turbulence. The five hundred years between the Mauryas and the Guptas become, in fact, ‘India’s Dark Age’.²

While Rome beamed its civilisation into three continents, handsomely documenting its conquests in the process, Pataliputra retreated into insignificance and silence. In India no king or dynasty would either scale the heights of Ashoka’s lofty universalism or cast such long imperial shadows across the subcontinent. Inscriptions claiming otherwise are usually couched in bombastic phrases which should be treated with caution. Ideals of legitimacy and empire would remain: Ayodhya’s utopian Ram-raj (the rule of Lord Rama) would continue to exercise a fascination; so would inclusive concepts of a ‘one umbrella’ sovereignty as claimed by the Nandas and of a world-ruling Cakravartin (literally ‘wheel-turner’) as featured in Buddhist teaching. But the reality was of many jostling umbrellas, of no consensus on legitimacy, and of no universal sovereignty.

Worse still from the viewpoint of latter-day nationalists, many of the dynasties credited with contributing to this turbulence would be of non-Indian origin. In some histories this ‘Dark Age’ thus also becomes an ‘Age of Invasions’ characterised by foreign hordes from Bactria, Parthia, and the wilds of Turkestan pouring across the north-west frontier. They would overrun all of what is now Pakistan and strike deep into the Gangetic heartland and central India. To orthodox minds such disasters were no worse than was to be expected of the dreaded Kali Yug. Vedic values and brahmanic authority had been undermined by the pushy teachings of the Buddha and his rivals. An earlier spirit of metaphysical enquiry had given way to an unnatural and populist egalitarianism. Fickle sources of royal patronage had been diverted; the neglect of ritual obligations had necessarily prejudiced political legitimacy. A disrespectful age got the discredited history it deserved.

Yet, politics apart, the half-millennium which straddles the birth of Christ was not all petty doom and patriotic gloom. On closer inspection the ‘Dark Age’ proves to be softly illuminated by the steady glow of cultural integration, especially in peninsular India. There and elsewhere the gloom was also fitfully dispelled by dazzling shafts of artistic, scientific and commercial innovation. Indeed, if an age be judged in terms of art and literature, the tag of ‘classical’ belongs less to the much-studied decades of the great Mauryas and more to the quickly dismissed centuries of their less distinguished and often non-Indian successors.

The Mauryas, for instance, had done little for India’s artistic heritage. If one excludes his pillars and their Achaemenid-style capitals, Ashoka’s numerous endowments, principally stupas and viharas, seem to have been modest affairs of brick and timber. It was only under his successors that stone became established as the supreme medium of artistic expression. To the first two centuries BC and AD may be attributed the magnificent sculptural reliefs of the Bharhut, Sanchi and Amaravati stupas. Typically crammed with scenes of popular devotion and, judging by their inscriptions, often paid for by commercial and religious benefactors, these were not manifestations of royal prestige nor products of courtly largesse. Ascribing them to a particular dynasty is thus misleading. Rather should they be attributed to a pious merchant class, proud of its skills and increasingly interested in the security and patronage afforded by religious centres in an age of political uncertainty.

Much the same applies to the first of a long succession of ‘rock-cut cathedrals’, now more prosaically known as ‘cave temples’, which date from the last century BC onward. They are found principally in western India, inland from Bombay, where sudden folds and gashes at the edge of the Deccan plateau expose long, snaking strata of sheer rock. No doubt here were already natural caves which, affording secluded shelter and yielding readily to the sculptor’s chisel, inspired the idea of more elaborate excavations. There followed entire monastic establishments with prayer chambers, deep pillared halls, lofty stupas, finely fretted façades, and airy meditation cells, all connected by galleries and staircases and all cut and carved into the solid rock.

The skills involved appear to have derived from a contemporary tradition of working in the hard timbers of India. In the north, in the first centuries AD, similar skills and similar mainly Buddhist patronage gave birth to two distinctive schools of more portable sculpture. One, deeply indebted to the aesthetic of the Graeco-Roman world, depicts figures from Indian tradition as Apollo Belvederes attended by a ‘classical’ repertoire of cherubs and acanthus leaves. Fashioned in stucco or carved from a hard grey-black schist, these figures and motifs are particularly associated with Taxila and the north-west frontier region (hence the ‘Gandhara school’). The other school is very different. A gloriously voluptuous celebration of nature’s mainly female charms, it uses a fleshy pink sandstone flecked with white spots from the region around the city of Mathura where, on the tourist highway from Delhi to Agra, a fine collection of both Gandhara and Mathura figures now languishes largely unseen in the city’s museum.

As for literature, in the second century BC Patanjali, a Sanskrit grammarian who wrote a commentary on Panini, compiled the standard text on yoga. Mighty compendia of other important human activities followed, with the Manusmriti (‘Manu’s code’ of law), the Kamasutra of Vatsyana, and Kautilya’s Arthasastra all datable in their final form to the second century AD. Meanwhile a Buddhist writer, Asvaghosha of Magadha, may be credited with the first Indian drama; he was a contemporary and protégé of King Kanishka, who would be the age’s nearest equivalent to an Ashoka. Subsequently the great tradition of Sanskrit drama got off to a more certain start with Bhasa, whose prolific output of plays probably dates from the third century AD. A debt to his work would be acknowledged by Kalidasa, the Sanskrit Shakespeare, who may have been a near-contemporary although he is usually assigned to the cultural efflorescence that awaited the Guptas after 320. Perhaps the ‘dark’ centuries on either side of the year zero should be seen more as a sprightly preface to this ‘golden age of the Guptas’ than as a dire postscript to that of the Mauryas.

The ‘Dark Age’ looks to have been one of enlightenment and, even more paradoxically, the ‘Age of Invasions’ looks to have been one of expansion. For every incursion by non-Indians from central Asia, there is good evidence for an excursion by Indians into south-east Asia – or even back into central Asia. Hellenised kingdoms on the upper Indus are matched by Indianised kingdoms on the lower Mekong, Roman trading stations on the Indian coast by Indian trading stations on the Malay peninsula. Just as the archaeology of northern India is being invaded by uncompromising images of Greek adventurers and booted warlords from beyond the Oxus, so that of Sumatra and Sinkiang is invaded by serene Buddhas and handsome stupas. That first Indian drama by Asvaghosa came to light not in some Magadhan archive but in a horde of manuscripts found in the oasis city of Turfan, between the Takla Makan and the Gobi desert on China’s silk route. For every inscription in Greek or Sogdian script that is chiselled into India’s rocks another in Brahmi or Kharosthi is etched in the cliffs of Afghanistan or echoed in a stele on the coast of Vietnam.

In short, the diaspora of India’s culture began just as India itself apparently buckled before a succession of intruders. Both processes would continue, with intermissions, for the next two thousand years. Indeed the great paradox of political vulnerability in the midst of commercial and cultural dynamism may be considered one of Indian history’s distinctive features. If for no other reason than to explore the genesis of such a phenomenon, the underrated interlude between the glorious Mauryas and the golden Guptas merits attention.

IN THE DYNASTIC WILDERNESS

Of Ashoka’s Mauryan successors in the third to second centuries BC we know practically nothing except that they lost most of their inheritance. There were at least six of them, and they continued to rule, mostly from Pataliputra, for another fifty years. One, Dasaratha, may have been Ashoka’s grandson and immediate successor. In the only inscription certainly attributable to the later Mauryas, he dedicated some caves to the Ajivikas. Another, Brhadratha, was by common consent the last of the dynasty; a half-wit, he was murdered by his commander-in-chief. There is nothing to suggest that any of them ever exercised authority in the Deccan or in Orissa, and there is reason to suppose that many other Mauryan provinces, including those in Afghanistan, Gandhara, Kashmir, the Panjab and perhaps Malwa, all broke away at an early stage. Reasons suggested for this rapid decline include the economic crisis implied by an adulteration of the coinage, the reluctance to use force which was supposedly inherent in dhamma, and the vulnerability of Ashoka’s personalised authority to the presumed failings of his successors.

It is perhaps also worth reflecting on the nature of an empire which could so rapidly disintegrate. For instance, the scatter of Ashokan inscriptions in Karnataka (Mysore) and Andhra Pradesh (Hyderabad) should probably not be interpreted as evidence that Mauryan authority was ever effective throughout the Deccan. Instead, the empire should be seen as consisting of corridors of authority connecting pockets of agricultural, mineral (many of the southern inscriptions are in a gold-mining area), commercial or strategic importance. Beyond this carefully administered root-structure of nodes and conduits lay wild tracts of hill, forest and desert whose peoples produced no surplus of taxable significance. Here the Mauryan policy of containment, if they proved disruptive, or of neglect, if peaceable, may have been an early casualty of retrenchment. For all the evidence of an elaborate fiscal and judicial system under the Mauryas, we know remarkably little about the sanctions which enforced it. Along the highways, as well as rest houses and shade trees, one might expect some mention of garrisons, forts and escorts; but there is none. Mauryan authority, theoretically so extensive and invasive, may, in practice and beyond the confines of Magadha itself, have always been localised and vulnerable.

The last Maurya was murdered and supplanted by his commander-in-chief in about 180 BC. Pushyamitra, the assassin, was a brahman; his family came from Ujjain, where they had once served in the Mauryan administration. An inscription testifies to his performing two horse-sacrifices, and he is portrayed in Buddhist texts as no friend to the sangha (the monastic community). Perhaps, after a century of Mauryan patronage of the heterodox sects, Pushyamitra headed an orthodox brahmanical backlash. The dynasty he founded is known as the Shunga and his successors presided over a still disintegrating kingdom for about 110 years. The last Shunga, being reportedly ‘overfond of women’s company’,³ was assassinated by the daughter of one of his female companions. Vasudeva, his brahman minister, is said to have instigated the crime and it was he who duly founded a new dynasty. This was the Kanva, which lasted barely fifty years and of which almost nothing is known. Thereafter the kingdom of Magadha virtually disappears from the record for three centuries.

The Shungas and the Kanvas, like the later Mauryas, had been challenged on many fronts. An inscription in Orissa tells of the great king Kharavela of Kalinga who, though apparently a devout Jain, led his forces deep into the Deccan as well as invading Magadha and taking Pataliputra. Immense booty was accumulated, Kharavela’s horses and elephants were watered in the Ganga, and the king was styled a cakravartin, or world-ruler. Perhaps it was by way of a Kalingan revenge for Ashoka’s triumph of 260 BC. But Kharavela’s dates remain a mystery and his inscription is in ‘a rather flowery and pompous style and doubtless much of it was royal panegyric’.⁴ The only obvious inference is that Kalinga had long since broken away from Magadhan rule and now held its neighbour in contempt.

Amongst other adversaries over whom Kharavela was supposedly victorious, the inscription mentions the Shatavahana kings of the Deccan and a confederation of Tamil rulers in the extreme south, plus the Yavanas, or Greeks. As will be seen, the Deccan and the south begin to feature prominently in Indian history from about the last century BC. Slightly earlier the Yavanas had led the procession of intruders who now descended on India from the north-west. They originated in Bactria, or northern Afghanistan, where the Achaemenids had established a Greek colony. Alexander had augmented it, and over it Seleucus had briefly reasserted Macedonian authority before, some time during the reign of Ashoka, one Euthydemus had declared an independent kingdom. His successors, who were not necessarily his descendants, extended Bactrian rule to much of Afghanistan. Then, taking further advantage of the break-up of the Mauryan empire, some of them passed on down the Kabul river to the Indus and the Panjab.

Almost everything that is known of these Bactrian Greeks has been surmised from their splendid coins. Minted and die-cast in imitation of Greek practice, they are mostly circular, of silver, often large, and altogether a great advance on the punch-marked lumps of the Mauryas. Considerable hoards as well as individual examples have been found over a vast area; and coinage design being extraordinarily conservative, they provide somewhat the same information as a modern coin. Thus, we learn of the names of these kings, of their preferred titles, and often of the Greek deity with whom they wished to be associated. From the obverse, or ‘heads’ side of the coins, we also know what they looked like and what headgear they sported. Such personal insights are rare; knowing nothing of, for instance, Ashoka’s mien (other than that it was ‘gracious’), we feel personally acquainted with the bull-necked Eucratides and the big-nosed Heliocles. Some wear a curious cap, modelled on an elephant’s skull, with the trunk serving as a peak; others favoured the kausia, like a shallow upturned bowl, of faintly ecclesiastical look; the chinless Amyntas, whose long nose quests from beneath a sun helmet indistinguishable from the British solar topi, must surely have had knobbly knees and worn knee-length white socks. From such portraits information has been drawn about the likely age of a king when he ascended the throne; and blood relationships, indeed the succession, are sometimes premised on resemblances in their physiognomy and headgear. Lacking much in the way of corroborative sources, scholars have pored over every iota of numismatic detail to ingenious but seldom conclusive effect.

A fundamental problem seems to be that of there being rather too many kings for the, at most, 130 years of their involvement in India. It is as if all these Platos and Stratos, Demetriuses and Diodotuses had got wise to the idea that immortality was theirs provided they could but strike their own coins. Scholars meet this problem by proposing that there was usually more than one king and more than one kingdom. The Yavanas had a reputation for quarrelling amongst themselves, and their territories must therefore have frequently been divided and subdivided. As well as rival kings, it seems that sub-kings, joint-kings, expectant-kings and satraps or governors may all have minted their own coins. Where their various territories lay can be vaguely inferred from the find sites of a particular coin-type.

Many clearly never crossed the north-west frontier from Afghanistan, and those who did may not have come as invaders. Perhaps, like other Greeks in Asia, they came bearing gifts. Bactria had grown rich as a corridor of east – west trade and was also an important source of bloodstock. Indians, ever anxious for horses (but blissfully ignorant of the one gifted to Troy), may have welcomed them as both traders and mercenaries. It could be significant that three centuries later, when the Gandhara school of sculpture popularised Greek themes, the Trojan horse seems to have been a favourite.

First of these Indo-Greeks into India was a Demetrius, probably Demetrius II, who seems to have achieved success in the Panjab and to have established himself at Taxila. He may also have continued down the Indus to its mouth. This is thought to have happened some time soon after 180 BC and, from the fact that the legends on his coins are in Prakrit or Kharosthi as well as in Greek, it is clear that he acquired Indian subjects. A successor, Menander, fared even better with mid-century acquisitions to the north in Swat and possibly Kashmir, as well as to the east. How far east is uncertain. He probably extended his territory to the river Ravi, but may have raided much further afield. In Indian sources a Yavana force that was probably Menander’s is said to have joined the kings of Panchala and Mathura (both in the Ganga-Jamuna Doab) for a raid down the Ganga. Perhaps it was this combination of Greeks and Indians that the all-conquering Kharavela of Kalinga encountered. If so, he failed to stop them since, realising Alexander’s dream, they stormed Pataliputra and routed its presumably Shunga incumbent. Then, typically, they quarrelled; maybe Menander, like Alexander, faced a mutiny. ‘They came, they saw, but India conquered,’ writes one of their biographers.⁵

On his coins Menander does not have the look of a conqueror. His topi-style helmet appears much too big; protruding curls and delicate features suggest effeminacy; and he calls himself ‘Basileos’ and ‘Soter’, ‘King’ and ‘Saviour’, rather then ‘Conqueror’ or ‘Patriot’. With this gentler image his other legacy is more in keeping; for in Buddhist tradition he is remembered as ‘Milinda’, the great king who in a celebrated question-and-answer session with the philosopher Nagasena became the vehicle for an exposition of Buddhist doctrine; he may even himself have adopted Buddhism. The meeting took place in Menander’s capital of Sagala, whose whereabouts are uncertain but which may have been in the boulder-strewn valley of Swat. If this surmise is correct, it must be thanks to Menander that the gentle terraces beside the racing river Swat came to accommodate the pre-eminent centre of Buddhist teaching in the north-west.

Of Menander’s successors we know little. One, Antialcidas, is thought to have briefly reunited the Greeks’ territories on either side of the Hindu Kush in around 110 BC. He is mentioned in an inscription on a pillar erected by one Heliodorus in a village in central India hundreds of miles away to the south-east but just fields from Vidisha and the stupas of Sanchi. Heliodorus was Antialcidas’ emissary to a King Bhagabhadra who is otherwise unknown but who may have been one of the Shungas. Perhaps Antialcidas was seeking some kind of alliance against his ever quarrelsome rivals. The memorial is more revealing about ambassador Heliodorus who, though decidedly a Greek and the son of a certain Dion of Taxila, nevertheless describes himself as a devotee of the god Vasudeva. Accordingly he crowned his pillar with an image of the winged Garuda, Vasudeva’s ‘vehicle’. Already associated with both the Greek Heracles and the Yadavas’ Lord Krishna, the heroic Vasudeva was about to become absorbed into the multiple persona of the great Lord Vishnu. Heliodorus thus provides an early example of the adoption by a non-Indian, not of the generally more accessible and proselytising doctrines of the Buddha, but of an orthodox cult within the so-called ‘Great Tradition’ of what we now call Hinduism.

Such cross-cultural adoptions, for which the word ‘conversion’ is still too strong, become commonplace amongst those who in the first century BC supplanted the Bactrian Greeks. On their coins, modelled on those of the Bactrian Greeks, Greek gods are jumbled up with unmistakably Indian deities, amongst whom Lord Shiva and his consort Uma have been identified. Elephants also appear, and kings are often depicted mounted on horseback. The newcomers have unfamiliar names – Maues, Azes, Spalirises; each is typically designated a ‘king of kings’ and, less proud of their profiles, they eschew the close-up portraits so beloved of the Greeks.

Who these people were, when they reigned and where, is still debated. Most authorities believe that Maues, who first displaced the Greeks in the Taxila region, was a Shaka, others that he was a Pahlava. The Pahlavas, it appears, may or may not be the same as the Parthians of northern Iran, just as the Shakas may or may not be the same as the Scythians of the Caucasus. But if Maues and his immediate successors in the first century BC were Shakas, their immediate successors in the first century AD were probably Parthians.

Of one of these Parthians we know from a source other than his coins and the odd inscription. His name was ‘Gondophares’, which, as the French scholar M. Reinaud noticed in the 1860s, bears a more than coincidental resemblance to ‘Gudnaphar’, an Indian king mentioned in an early Christian text. This text was the Acts of St Thomas, wherein the self-same apostle is said to have actually attended the court of King Gudnaphar. Thomas, it seems, had reached the Panjab under protest. After the death of Christ, when the apostles drew lots as to their respective missions, Thomas had drawn India and, ever the ‘doubting Thomas’, immediately knew that the task was beyond him. ‘Whithersoever thou wilt, O Lord, send me,’ he prayed, ‘only to India I will not go.’ But the prayer was of no avail. Thomas, apparently a skilled carpenter, found himself indentured to a passing Indian merchant who took him back to work on Gondophares’ new palace. In the Panjab he was eventually rewarded with honours and converts. Later, he would undertake a second mission to peninsular India, where his misgivings would prove tragically well-founded.

Whether this Thomas was really Thomas the apostle, and whether he really reached the Panjab, is suitably open to doubt; likewise the ‘converts’ he is supposed to have made there. But at least the tradition implies that Gondophares must have ruled after the death of Christ. This may not seem a great point. It deserves, though, to be greeted as something of a milestone in what is otherwise a trackless wilderness of dynastic uncertainty.

Both Shakas and Parthians had originated beyond the Hindu Kush. There, along the desert routes from China and across the steppes of Turkestan, a major upheaval had been taking place. Chinese sources tell of the construction of the Great Wall in the third century BC and the repulse of various marauding tribes. Forced to head west and eventually south, these tribes displaced others in an ethnic knock-on effect which lasted many decades and spread right across central Asia. The Parthians from Iran and the Bactrian Greeks from Bactria had both been dislodged by the Shakas coming down from somewhere near the Aral Sea. But the Shakas had in turn been dislodged by the Yueh-chi who had themselves been driven west to Sinkiang by the Hiung-nu. The last, otherwise the Huns, would happily not reach India for a long time. But the Yueh-chi continued to press on the Shakas and, having forced them out of Bactria, it was sections or clans of these Yueh-chi who next began to move down into India in the second half of the first century AD.

Once again the ready assumption that the Yueh-chi, or Kushana as they are known in Indian history, actually invaded India should be treated with caution. Little is known either of the circumstances which accounted for the movements of these peoples or of the reception they received in India. They may have come as allies or mercenaries, invited by disaffected Indians like Alexander’s Ambhi; or they may have come as refugees fleeing invasion just like the Tibetans, Afghans and Bangladeshis of the twentieth century. India’s ancient history was first reconstructed largely by British scholars in the nineteenth century who, schooled on the invasions of Aryans, Macedonians and Muslims, readily detected a pattern of incursions. Their own presence conformed to it; indeed this pattern of constant invasion conveniently excused their presence.

The coins and inscriptions of the first few centuries BC/AD certainly testify to alien rulers, but of battles we know nothing, let alone who won them. Marital alliances, economic crises, coups and assassinations have probably triggered more dynastic changes than have successful invasions. Given the crisis of political legitimacy, given too the obscure origins of most indigenous dynasties of the period, plus the absence of anything like a national consciousness, there may have been no fundamental objection to accepting as kings men with strange names, remote origins and unusual headgear.

The Pahlavans/Parthians quickly disappeared from the Indian scene. They would be resurrected only once, and much later, as the doubtful antecedents of the Pallavas of Kanchipuram, a distinguished dynasty but one separated from the Parthians by three centuries and the breadth of the entire subcontinent. The Shakas/Scythians, segmenting into a variety of junior kingdoms, or satrapies, and readily assimilating to Indian society, made a more lasting impression. At one time they penetrated to Mathura and Ujjain but would latterly be penned into Saurashtra (in Gujarat); thence, as the ‘Western Satraps’, they would resurface briefly in the first and second centuries AD. Only the Yueh-chi or Kushanas, and in particular their great king Kanishka, would establish anything like an Indian empire.

Coins, plus an inscription found at Taxila, bear early testimony to the pretensions of the Kushana. ‘Maharajah’, ‘King of Kings’, ‘Son of God’, ‘Saviour’, ‘Great One’, ‘Lord of all Lands’, ‘Caesar’ and other such titles are reeled off as if the incumbent wished to lay claim to every source of sovereignty going. ‘Son of God’ is thought to be a legacy of the Yueh-chi’s familiarity with China and its celestial rulers; ‘King of Kings’ was borrowed from the Shakas, who had imitated the Achaemenids of Iran; ‘Saviour’ came from the Greeks; ‘Caesar’ from the Romans. The coins are of the highest quality and show a switch to Roman weight standards; possibly they were actually recast Roman aurei. But to accommodate such fanfares of majesty in the limited space available, the name of the king in question was often left out. The succession of the Kushana kings is therefore far from certain. It is thought that there was a Kujula Kadphises and then a Wima Kadphises, evidently another devotee of Lord Shiva, who between them added to their Afghan territories those of Gandhara, the Panjab, and the Ganga-Jamuna Doab at least as far south as Mathura.

After these Kadphiseses came, probably, Kanishka. Inscriptions referring to him (or to the era which supposedly began with his accession) are found over a vast area extending from the Oxus frontier of Afghanistan to Varanasi and Sanchi. Tradition further testifies to his conquest of Magadha and to vast responsibilities in and beyond the western Himalayas, including Kashmir and Khotan in Sinkiang. Buddhist sources, to which we are indebted for much of this information, hail him as another Menander or Ashoka; he showered the sangha (the monastic community) with patronage, presided over the fourth Buddhist council and encouraged a new wave of missionary activity. At Purushpura, or Peshawar, his capital still boasts the foundations of a truly colossal stupa. Nearly a hundred metres in diameter and reliably reported to have been two hundred metres high, it must have ranked as one of the then wonders of the world.

Mathura on the Jamuna seems to have served as a subsidiary capital, and nearby have been found suitably massive statues of Wima Kadphises and of Kanishka himself. Unfortunately both have been decapitated. While for the Greeks, thanks to their coins, we have notable heads but few torsos, for the Kushanas we have notable torsos but few heads. Kanishka stands in challenging pose, his outsize feet encased in quilted felt boots and splayed outwards. The full-frontal presentation reveals a belted tunic beneath a stiff ankle-length coat that looks as if it could have been of leather. One hand rests on a grounded sword of skull-splitting potential, the other clutches an elaborate contraption sometimes described as a mace but which could equally be some kind of crossbow. Hopelessly overdressed for the Indian plains and most un-Indian in its angular and uncompromising posture, this statue evokes the harsh landscapes whence the Kushana came and where, while campaigning in Sinkiang, Kanishka is said to have died. Although surely not ‘one of the finest works of art produced on Indian soil’, his statue is indeed ‘unique as the only Indian work of art to show a foreign stylistic influence that has not come from Iran or the Hellenistic or Roman world’.⁶

Kanishka’s successors, many with names also ending in ‘-ishka’, continued Kushana rule for another century or more. As with other august dynasties, their territories are assumed to have shrunk as their memorials became fewer and nearer between; in the course of time the Kushanas dwindled to being just one of many petty kingdoms in the north-west. Unfortunately it is impossible to be precise about their chronology since all inscriptions are dated from the accession of Kanishka, itself a subject of yawning complexity which numerous international gatherings on several continents have failed to resolve. Today’s Republic of India, as well as having two names for the country (India and Bharat), has two systems of dating, one the familiar Gregorian calendar of BC/AD and the other based on the Shaka era which is reckoned to have begun in 78 AD. Although called ‘Shaka’ (rather than ‘Kushana’), this era is supposed by many to correspond with the Kanishka era. Others have tried to match Kanishka with another Indian era, the Vikrama, which began in 58 BC. This seems much too early. On the other hand the latest scholarship, based on numismatic correlations between Kushana and Roman coins, pushes Kanishka’s accession way forward to about 128 AD.

Clearly these variations are significant. Were Kanishka’s dates certain, it might be possible to be a little more dogmatic about his achievements, although the same can hardly be said of his elusive successors. If there has to be a blind summit somewhere along north India’s chronological highway, the second to third centuries AD would seem as good a place as any. Should, however, the controversy be resolved, it could mean whole-scale revision of our understanding of the preceding centuries; upgrading even chronological highways can have dramatic results.

ACROSS THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

When Pakistani and Chinese engineers began construction of a road link between their two countries in the late 1970s, eyebrows were raised in Delhi and elsewhere. The planned ‘Karakoram Highway’ was seen as evidence of a menacing alignment between Mao-tse Tung’s China and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan. As well as being politically sinister and strategically unprecedented, it was thought geographically perverse. For if ever there was a frontier decreed by nature it was the Himalayan chain. This, after all, was India’s Great Wall; behind it the peoples of the subcontinent had traditionally sheltered from the whirlwinds of migration and conquest which ceaselessly swept the arid pastures beyond. Moreover, nowhere was this wall more formidable than at its western bastion where, in the far north of Pakistan, the Great Himalaya becomes entangled in the pinnacles of the Hindu Kush and the glaciers of the mighty Karakoram. Extremes of temperature, colossal natural erosion, frequent seismic activity and recent glacial acceleration also make this the most unstable region on earth. Breaching the rampart with the viaducts, tunnels and easy gradients of an all-weather, two-lane highway looked to be short-sighted, provocative and exceedingly challenging.

Nevertheless, at fearful cost in lives and plant, the road was built. ‘The eighth wonder of the world’ was duly hailed, and convoys of battered trucks and buses began occasionally to emerge at its either end after eventful days of motoring across ‘the roof of the world’. The benefits have been mixed. At five thousand metres above sea-level, the Sino – Pakistan border on the blizzard-swept Khunjerab Pass has witnessed a modest flow of trade but little other intercourse. The road has been more of a boon to the isolated mountain communities of Pakistan’s ‘Northern Areas’, although the discreet charms of their valleys have been prejudiced in the process. Only to archaeologists and historians has the road opened a wholly welcome perspective.

That from India the teachings of the Buddha had originally spread to China via central Asia had long been known. The Han dynasty had opened trade with the West via the so-called Silk Route in the second century BC; the Route ran north of Tibet, on through Sinkiang and then down the Oxus through Bactria to Bukhara, Iran and the Mediterranean. The Han dynasty had also been in diplomatic contact with the Yueh-chi long before the latter, as Kushanas, entered India. Later, when Kushana dominion spread in a great arc from Sinkiang through Afghanistan and across the Indus into India, an obvious India–China conduit was created. Additionally Kanishka had clearly revived Ashoka’s policy of patronising the Buddhist sangha and promoting the spread of Buddhist doctrine. From Chinese sources it was even known that the first Buddhist missionaries to China had set out from India in 65 AD. It was therefore probably under the Parthians or the Kushanas that the monks Dharmaraksa and Kasyapa Matanga had made their way to China, there to found the first monastery and begin their work of preaching and translating the sacred doctrines. In their footsteps would follow the procession of teachers and artists, of icons, texts and relics which over the next three hundred years would nurture the new faith and diffuse new art forms in China and beyond.

Traditionally their route is supposed to have proceeded from Peshawar to Kabul and over the Hindu Kush via Bamiyan, a tight valley above which two gigantic statues of the Buddha were carved high in the vertical cliffs. There they stood for 1500 years until in March 2001 Taliban zealots tested them with anti-tank mines, targeted them with artillery and finally toppled them with dynamite. (Exactly six months later Bamiyan’s twin Buddhas were followed to extinction by New York’s ‘twin towers’; the first outrage inspired the second and has often been attributed to the same agency.) Other remains in Bactria itself still attest the Buddhist presence, and thence north and east across the Pamirs, round the desert of Takla Makan and across Lop Nor a succession of Buddhist sites marks the trail to China. ‘The road is long,’ reported a later Chinese pilgrim who had made the return journey to India; looping laboriously right round that mountain bastion of India’s ‘Great Wall’ it is all of three thousand kilometres. There is no doubt that it was indeed an important route for the traffic of both ideas and commodities; but what the road-builders in the 1970s discovered was that there had been a shorter and better signposted route by way of the upper Indus and Hunza rivers along the line of their Karakoram Highway.

As reconstructed by Dr Ahmad Hasan Dani, Pakistan’s leading archaeologist, the historical trail begins north of Taxila, where the modern highway strikes off into the hills. Suitably enough the first ‘signpost’ is a Kharosthi version of Ashoka’s Major Rock Edict engraved on two badly weathered boulders at Mansehra. The road runs between them and, in view of the incidence of other Ashokan inscriptions at major route intersections, it seems safe to infer that the Indus route into the mountains was in use in the third century BC and here linked with feeder routes from Taxila, Peshawar and Swat. Thence the new road traverses the switchback hills of Kohistan, where innumerable caves and rock drawings continue the Buddhist theme; one drawing is identified by an inscription as being of ‘the monastery of Maharajah Kanishka’. As the roadway wriggles above, and then through, the awesome Indus gorges, more such graffiti on cliffs and rocks – ‘beside the tunnel’, ‘above the petrol station’ – record the passage of individual monks and the presence of stupas and viharas.

West of Chilas, beneath the snowy massif of Nanga Parbat, the Indus valley opens out into a scorching lunar wasteland, devoid of vegetation but garish with rocks of every hue. Here one of many inscriptions mentions the Kushana king Wima Kadphises. Nearer the windswept little town a scene etched on a boulder by the river clearly identifies the Shaka king Maues; it is ‘the first proof of the conquest of this region by the Scythian ruler’⁸ who seems to have actually ‘invaded’ the Panjab by this route. On the other side of Chilas one of many illustrated boulders is known as the Rock of Gondophares; its inscription lauds the Parthian king who was ‘doubting Thomas’s’ patron.

A sculpted Buddha and more stupas lie in the valleys round Gilgit. Thence both highway and Buddhist trail funnel into the Hunza valley for the spectacular climb up to the glaciers. K2 and associated peaks lie to the east with the Khunjerab Pass and the Chinese border dead ahead. The highway terminates at Tashkurgan, an ancient staging post on the main Silk Route. As a final reminder that this vital trail and all the territory through which it passed lay within the Kushana empire, there is a veritable data-bank of ancient kings, cults and passing strangers, including notices of both the first Kadphises and again of Kusana Devaputra [‘son of God’] Maharajah Kaniska, on the so-called Sacred Rock of Hunza.

The new Karakoram Highway which runs along its southern face … led to the discovery of this monument of world importance that had remained hidden for centuries. The Sacred Rock has stood adamantly through the ravages of time and maintained the carvings and writing of men to tell us about the long-forgotten history of the place and of the pathway along which man travelled from Gandhara to China.⁹

So the Karakoram Highway, though defying geography, can scarcely be said to have confounded history. In fact it faithfully follows what is now recognised as the preferred route of Buddhist missionaries carrying their teachings to Sinkiang and China.

It is also clear that the teachings in question were increasingly those of Mahayana Buddhism. At the Fourth Buddhist Council held under Kanishka’s auspices a long-simmering dispute within the sangha had led to schism. Those purists who adhered to the essentially ethical content of the Buddha’s teachings became the Hinayana school, while those who would elevate the Buddha and other potentially ‘enlightened ones’ to the status of deities deserving of worship, and so make of his teachings a conventional religion, became the Mahayana. The former persisted in not representing the Buddha as a human figure; in Hinayana art his presence is traditionally indicated merely by a footprint, a throne, a tree, an umbrella. But the Mahayana introduced the Buddha as icon, depicting the ‘enlightened one’ and a host of other Boddhisatvas, together with their female counterparts, in human form. The idea may have come from the imagery of Graeco-Roman gods introduced by the Bactrian Greeks and from the mainly Roman statuary which was evidently much treasured and traded thereafter. Certainly from this coincidence of Mahayanist demand and Mediterranean supply arose the distinctive style and motifs of Gandhara art.

The Kushana, controlling east – west trade in Bactria as well as vast territories in India, had wealth to lavish on both the new faith and the new art; they may even, like Gondophares, have imported western craftsmen like St Thomas. The style developed rapidly, influencing architecture and painting, and inspiring a narrative art based on Buddhist legend but using Graeco-Roman compositions and mannerisms. Exceptionally, the figure of the Buddha himself proved less susceptible to this ‘forum’ decorum; though draped in classical folds and endowed with a serene Grecian countenance, his posture, gestures and physical features conformed strictly to Indo-Buddhist iconography. Such was the Gandhara tradition, a curious synthesis of Kushana patronage, Graeco-Roman forms and Indian inspiration. In sculpture, stucco, engraving and painting, it was this synthesis which passed on up the Karakoram route, or round via Bamiyan and Bactria, to fill the monasteries along the Silk Route and provide the inspiration for later Buddhist art in China and beyond.

The Karakoram trail would be little trodden after the fourth century, when Buddhism in north-west India would be eclipsed by more intruders from central Asia, this time the Huns. Despite those ravages of time and nature, the Karakoram records have therefore remained comparatively undisturbed. Significantly, they reveal little about the route being used for trade. Chinese silks, in particular, were imported into India for re-export from India’s west coast ports to Egypt and Rome. If such caravans avoided the Karakoram route it was presumably because they found the gradients and the grazing of the Bactrian route more agreeable than the cliff-face ladders of Hunza and the landsliding slopes of the Indus gorges. Lacking commercial potential, the Karakoram route was quietly abandoned.

LOOKING OUTWARDS TO THE SEA

Elsewhere the exchange of ideas matched that of commodities stride for stride, stage for stage. In peninsular India – the region south of the Narmada river comprising the Deccan and the extreme south – the last centuries BC and the first AD witnessed those processes of urbanisation and state-formation which had taken place three centuries earlier in the Gangetic region. But here it was trade which stimulated the transition and trade routes which defined it, especially in the western Deccan (Maharashtra and adjacent regions) and in the extreme south (Tamil Nadu and Kerala). Something of that slow metamorphosis from pastoralism and subsistence agriculture to wet rice-cultivation and an agricultural surplus is also discernible. The construction of irrigation works in the south goes back to the second century BC and was accompanied by a demographic shift from upland settlements to the alluvial and easily watered soils of the deltas. ‘In the Chola country, watered by the Kaveri, it was said that the space in which an elephant could lie down produced enough rice to feed seven’ (people, presumably, rather than elephants).¹⁰ But here a surplus laboriously realised from agriculture, and then partially squandered on oblations designed to ensure its repetition, was second-best to the surplus on offer from the export of marine and forest produce (especially pearls and pepper) and the re-export of luxury items from further afield. Such options, not open to the Gangetic states, propelled the peninsula from Stone Age to statehood in record time.

Before the first century BC the southern extremity of the subcontinent scarcely features in India’s history. Today’s southern states – Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala – correspond to the languages spoken in each, respectively Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. All belong to the Dravidian family, which is quite distinct from the Indo-Aryan whence Sanskrit and most of north India’s contemporary languages derive.

Dravidian-speakers are thought to have preceded Indo-Aryan-speakers in the subcontinent. It has yet to be proved that the Harappans’ language was some form of Dravidian, but the survival of a pocket of proto-Dravidian-speakers in Baluchistan, the Pakistan province which borders with Iran, does suggest that the language was in use west of the Indus and could have emanated from there. It also once enjoyed a wide currency in Gujarat and Maharashtra, though whether in the course of a ‘descent’ to the south, or an ‘ascent’ from it, is uncertain. By the mid-first millennium BC, it was certainly well established in the south, perhaps as a result of dissemination by Dravidian-speakers possessed of the horses and iron weaponry usually associated with the Sanskritic arya, or possibly very much earlier as the language of those responsible for the megalithic sites found in upland regions of the peninsular interior.

The four Dravidian languages must have developed from proto-Dravidian at an early stage since they were already distinct from one another in prehistoric times. Each, too, was already confined to the region represented by today’s states. In fact the continuity of such geo-linguistic entities is the outstanding feature of south Indian history. Here, unusually, definable linguistic units seem to predate the states into which they would become integrated.

Megasthenes in around 300 BC knew of the Pandya kingdom; then, as subsequently, it occupied ‘the portion of India which lies southward and extends to the sea’; and it had 365 villages, a not incidental number in that each was expected to supply the needs of the royal household for one day in the year. Ashoka was even better informed. In the Major Rock Edicts he lists his southern neighbours as the Cholas and Pandyas (respectively the northern and southern Tamil-speaking peoples), the Satiyaputras (whose identity is disputed), the Keralaputras (or the Malayalam-speakers of Kerala), and the people of Sri Lanka. Although none formed part of the Mauryan empire, all, according to the Beloved of the Gods, acknowledged the superiority of dhamma and had imitated the Ashokan provision of roadside shade trees and of medical care for men and animals.

Later the all-conquering Kharavela, king of Kalinga (Orissa), also noticed the southern kingdoms. In his one extant inscription he typically pretends to have defeated a confederacy of Tamil states and to have acquired a large quantity of pearls from the Pandyas. Pearls and shells, along with the fine cottons of Madurai, the Pandya capital, are also mentioned in the Arthasastra. There, in a discussion on how to maximise the state’s revenue, Kautilya’s mentor rashly suggests that north India’s most valuable trade is that with central Asia. The know-all brahman puts him right in no uncertain terms: the trade via the Daksinapatha (the ‘Southern Route’) is the more valuable and, besides, the route is very much safer. Thus trade with the south, albeit in prestige goods, was well-established in Mauryan times; and by way of the secure – and, no doubt, well-shaded – Daksinapatha prestigious ideas also travelled down the peninsula.

Of these and much else about the south we know from anthologies of Tamil poetry and from an early Tamil grammar. The poems, of which the oldest date from about the time of Christ, were composed and first recited at marathon arts festivals, or assemblages (sangam), organised by the Pandyan court. They were collected into the ‘Sangam’ anthologies and committed to writing only very much later. Like the Sanskrit classics, they may therefore contain additions and revisions. On the other hand, unlike the Sanskrit classics, they were not the property of a particular caste and served no obvious ritual purpose. Moreover, they provide much reliable detail about social conditions. ‘It would be difficult to make too much of this fact,’ writes an American authority on Sangam literature. ‘Not only does ancient Tamil literature furnish an accurate picture of widely disparate classes; it also describes the social conditions of Tamil Nadu much as it was before the Aryans arrived in the south.’¹¹

This verdict suggests some future Aryan mass-migration, for which the evidence is scant. Besides, Sangam literature was already aware of Aryan and Sanskritic ideals. The Tamil poets – and poetesses – knew the epics well and were keen to associate their patrons with the heroes of the Mahabharata. Place-names like Madurai, a variant of ‘Mathura’, reflect the early adoption of the sacred geography of the epics; and just as ‘Ayodhya’ travelled on to Thailand and central Java, so ‘Mathura/Madurai’ would make a further landfall in the crowded island of Madura off eastern Java. The Sangam poets also knew of the fabled wealth of the Nandas and of the one-time presence of the Mauryas in Karnataka. Brahmans were already well-established in the south and were the recipients of land grants; Buddhism and Jainism were also familiar; and the script used in the Tamil dedications of their caves was a form of north Indian Brahmi.

Caste distinctions were also observed in the south, but may well predate contact with the Sanskritic north. Certainly they did not conform to the hierarchical four-tier varna system; native ksatriya and vaisya are practically unknown in the south to this day. In caste functions, in hero-worship of the dead, and in the taboos and importance attached to relations between the sexes, there is indeed much that is non-Aryan. Equally unprecedented is the Sangam’s spirit of joyous celebration, which pervades both the endless wars between Cheras (Keralans), Pandyas and Cholas as well as the scenes of peaceful plenty and royal munificence which intervene. The impression given by these poems is not that of a society defying the rigid orthodoxies of inevitable Aryanisation, more of one voluntarily adjusting to prestigious new values and selectively adopting from them.

Patterns of Aryanisation were typically spontaneous and here, as outside India, Sanskritic innovations did not necessarily spread through direct contact with the Gangetic heartland. Thus it seems that the southern kingdoms derived as much from their seaward contacts as from landward intercourse. Literacy, for instance, ‘and indeed incipient civilisation in general’¹² look to have originally spread not southward from the Gangetic valley but northward, from Sri Lanka. Heavily indebted to Ashoka’s missionising, Sri Lanka had stolen a march on the mainland. Its Buddhist chronicles provide the only cross-dating yet established for any of the kings mentioned in the Sangam poems. And from Sri Lanka the Brahmi script is thought to have crossed the straits to neighbouring parts of the Pandya country and thence on to Kerala and the Chola country. By this roundabout route other Aryanising traits may have followed.

The maritime dimension would continue to be crucial; in fact it is from their detailed descriptions of commercial life and foreign trade that the Sangam poems derive much of their authenticity. For in references to busy markets, bulging warehouses, ships from many lands, elaborate import/export procedures, and the Yavanas (not only the Bactrian Greeks, but foreigners in general) ‘whose prosperity never wanes’, there is an impressive convergence of Tamil testimony with what we know of south India in the first century AD from other sources, principally archaeology and copious references in the literature of the Roman empire.

This was the age of Rome’s commercial expansion. The new empire’s demand for exotica was insatiable, and the acquisition of Egypt in 30 BC had opened the maritime route to the East to Roman investors. A text written by a Greek of the first century AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, contains detailed navigational, commercial and even political information on the ports of the Indian Ocean, many of which have been reliably identified with maritime outlets on India’s coast. Ptolemy’s second-century ‘Geography’ adds further details; and the Elder Pliny was already rehearsing an argument, which would become something of a European refrain in the seventeenth century, about Roman bullion being drained away by the purchase of frivolous luxuries from the East. The emperor Augustus claims to have received ‘frequent’ Indian embassies which look to have come from as far afield as Gandhara and the Pandya kingdom; and it was during his reign (31 BC – 14 AD) that Europe’s first concerted bid for the exotic produce of the East saw fleets making annual sailings from the Red Sea. Crewed by Greeks and Egyptians, they were familiar with the monsoon trade winds and headed straight for the steamy ports of India’s Konkan and Malabar coasts.

There numerous examples of Roman pottery, including wine-impregnated amphorae, have been found in both the south and along the west coast; and hoards of Roman coins have been unearthed in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and elsewhere. On the east coast near Pondicherry (south of Madras) what has been described as ‘one of a series of Indo-Roman trading stations’ has been excavated at Arikamedu. ‘To Arikamedu suddenly, from unthought-of lands five thousand miles away, came strange wines, tablewares far beyond the local skill, lamps of a strange sort, glass, cut gems.’¹³

To a neighbouring port at about the same time, there also came the still ‘doubting’ Thomas. Traditionally on this, his second Indian mission, Thomas made more converts but ultimately paid the price of martyrdom. He was killed in Mylapore, now a suburb of Madras where the cave in which he lived, the hill on which he died, and the grave in which he was laid are named after him and still venerated.

Thomas had landed at one of the palm-fringed ports of Kerala’s coconut coast. From converts made there, some sections of Kerala’s still thriving Syrian Christian community claim descent. Thence the apostle had proceeded overland to the east coast. A trail of Roman finds extends across the peninsula from Cranganore, otherwise the Roman port of ‘Musiris’ (near Cochin), to Arikamedu and the mouth of the Kaveri. It would seem, therefore, that Roman shipping did not usually round Cape Comorin. Kerala’s pepper and malabathrum (a kind of cinnamon) were the principal Roman imports, and for these it was unnecessary to risk the contrary winds of the Cape. But clearly some of those amphorae of Tuscan wine, some of that glass and tableware and some Yavana traders must have trundled in oxcarts through the Coimbatore gap (in the Western Ghats) and down the Kaveri. At Arikamedu and elsewhere on the east coast they were needed to sustain a no less important trade – that in the cloves and nutmeg of the Moluccan spice islands and in the gems and resins of Malaya, Burma and the eastern Himalayas.

TRAFFIC AND SETTLEMENTS

A pattern of east – west trade thus emerges. It is one in which the Indian ports served as entrepôts as well as termini and in which the voyage across the Arabian Sea was only one sector of a much more extensive network. Further information on this first global exchange, and on the vital role played in it by Indian shipping and Indian merchants, emerges from two very different sources: inscriptions in the great cave temples of the western Deccan, and scattered archaeological finds in south-east Asia.

Unfortunately neither is as geographically explicit as the data available for the Bactrian and Karakoram routes to China. The archaeological finds in south-east Asia are particularly unimpressive when compared with the region’s later heritage of Indic monuments. In central Burma a town with palace and stupas based on Indian Buddhist models has been excavated and dated to the first centuries AD. In Thailand and Vietnam the odd Roman coin has been found as well as beads, gems, pottery, intaglios and metalwork of Indian provenance. Shards of Indo-Roman ceramics similar to those found at Arikamedu have also turned up in Javanese burial sites. More emphatically, bronze vessels and a carnelian lion found at Don Ta Phet in west-central Thailand are said to be Buddhist and to ‘strongly suggest that Buddhist missionaries were already active, indeed were established, in south-east Asia before the Christian era’. If account also be taken of Indian references to ocean-going ships and missionary and trading ventures to ‘Suvarnabhumi’, and of Roman notices of ‘Chryse’ and ‘Chersonese’ (all three words meaning ‘the land of gold’ and variously identified with Burma, Sumatra, or the Malay peninsula), then ‘enough evidence is now at hand … to show that south-east Asia was already part of a world trading system linking the civilisations of the Mediterranean Basin and Han China.’¹⁴

Thanks to this trade and missionary activity, there are also the first signs of Indianised cultures in south-east Asia. Early Chinese texts have been taken to indicate the existence on the Malay peninsula of ‘petty Indian states from the second century AD’.¹⁵ One such, called Tun-Sun by the Chinese, had five hundred families from India plus a thousand brahmans to whom the native population gave their daughters in marriage. ‘Consequently many of the brahmans do not go away. They do nothing but study the sacred canon, bathe themselves with scents and flowers, and practise piety ceaselessly by day and by night.’¹⁶

It seems that traders, rather than head down to the Malacca Strait, took a short-cut across the Malay peninsula, just as they did the Indian peninsula. Indian settlements in Malaya were presumably engaged in this transshipment activity, and it may well have been from one of these communities that Kaundinya, a brahman, continued east across the Gulf of Thailand to the mouth of the Mekong. There, again according to Chinese sources, he is said to have encountered hostility. The local queen, Liu-ye (‘Willow-Leaf’), wanted to seize his ship. But when Kaundinya fired an arrow which holed her own ship, Willow Leaf changed her mind.

Frightened, she gave herself up, and Kaundinya took her for his wife. But, unhappy to see her naked, he folded a piece of material to make a garment through which he had her pass her head. Then he governed the country and passed power on to his descendants.¹⁷

Thus, according to the Chinese, was founded in about 100 AD the Indic kingdom known as Funan. It would survive for five centuries, providing the impetus for other Hindu-Buddhist trading kingdoms on the Vietnamese coast (Champa, Lin-i), before becoming incorporated into the more famously ‘Hinduised’ kingdom of the Khmers of Angkor.

For the period prior to 300 AD Funan has left few relics. A port-city excavated at Oc-eo in Long-xuyen province in the Mekong delta may date back to the second century AD and has yielded a stone statuette of Vishnu and other Hindu cult objects as well as what may have been a temple. Up the coast at Vo-canh in the Nha Trang region a stele bearing an inscription in Sanskrit may be of the third century. It refers to a ruler who has not been certainly identified; more importantly, it strongly supports the idea that writing was introduced into south-east Asia from India. These are, however, no more than clues to an Aryanising process which, though begun in the first centuries AD, would only assume the character of a cultural diaspora after India’s culture had itself become more clearly defined under the ‘golden’ Guptas.

As for the information to be gleaned from the cave temples of the western Deccan, it not only corroborates Yavana (principally Roman) trading activities but also suggests an important link between religious foundations and commercial pioneering. Excavated and sculpted between about 100 BC and 170 AD, the earliest caves in the western Deccan number nearly a thousand. They include those of Bhaja, Karle, Nasik and some of the Ajanta and Ellora caves. Many incorporate the pillars, stupas, chaitya arches and magnificent façades which triumphantly belie their designation as ‘caves’; and most are Buddhist.

From their numerous inscriptions, plus coins, we learn of Maharashtra’s first dynasty and, by correlation with the listings in the Puranas, a rough order of succession has been constructed for its kings. These were the Shatavahanas, or Andhras. They are said to have deprived Magadha’s Kanva dynasty of its residual authority; and more certainly, they established an extensive if loosely-knit hegemony throughout central India and the Deccan. Its prosperity may be judged not only by the cave temples but also by the magnificent Amaravati stupa, structurally and sculpturally the most elaborate in India. Commissioned mainly by mercantile interests living under the Shatavahana dispensation, it was originally located in Andhra Pradesh but was dismantled in the nineteenth century and is now divided between several museums, including the British where it rightly ranks with the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles as a most cherished possession.

Like the reliefs on the Sanchi and Bharhut stupas, those of Amaravati depict incidents drawn from the mythology which had grown up around the life of the Buddha. Incidentally all these reliefs also provide insights into the busy social life of the period. In scenes crammed with vitality, turbaned crowds fill every panel. Musicians crouch intently over their instruments and wasp-waisted dancers sway provocatively. Above them ladies ajangle with necklaces and bangles lean from a first-floor balcony beneath the fanciful gable of a barrel-vaulted roof. Horses prance in the street, bullocks patiently haul an elaborately decorated carriage, and an elephant goes berserk. One can almost hear the hubbub, smell the dust. Laden ox-carts, and ships with sails and oars, attest the importance of trade. Masons and labourers are seen constructing the very stupa on which their work is depicted. Indeed the ubiquitous standards and fly whisks carried by those who attend on the Buddha may well belong to particular trade and craft guilds (sreni). From literary sources we know of the social, financial and even political weight exercised by guild organisations. We also know that each had its own banner and, from the inscriptions, that these guilds were major patrons of Buddhist institutions.

Similar organisations operated throughout the Shatavahana kingdom and it is no coincidence that Shatavahana ascendancy coincided with the boom in overseas trade with both south-east Asia and the Roman empire. The anonymous author of the Periplus actually mentions some of the Shatavahana kings, and clearly knew their port-cities well: Broach (Bharukaccha, ‘Barygaza’), he reports, had a system of pilot boats to escort ocean-going vessels into its tricky anchorage at the mouth of the Narmada, ‘where nothing can be observed with certainty’; Sopara and Kalyan (Kalliena), both near Bombay, were also major ports although the latter had lately been grabbed by the Shatavahanas’ rivals, the Shaka satraps of Gujarat; its trade was therefore ‘much hindered’. After 170 AD recession throughout the Roman world much hindered the entire Indian Ocean trade, and once again this development was faithfully reflected in the western Deccan; the excavation of cave temples abruptly ceased, not to be resumed for another two hundred years, as the Shatavahanas withdrew to the east.

Moreover, the link between trade and dominion was not just one of timing. ‘The prosperity ushered in by trade and the need to control the trade routes is apparent in the sites chosen by the Shatavahanas for their earliest inscriptions.’¹⁸ Inland trade routes converged on the Shatavahanas’ west coast ports from Ujjain and the Gangetic states as well as from the Shatavahanas’ capital at Paithan in the Deccan. In both cases they had to thread their way down the rocky defiles of the Western Ghats. The Shatavahanas’ earliest inscriptions are at cave sites clearly related to these passes and defiles. Not without reason did one of the earliest Shatavahana kings describe himself as daksinapatha-pati, ‘the lord of the daksinapatha (the “southern route”)’.

The Periplus describes vast wagon trains heading down from Ujjain with the exotic produce of the Kushana domains and beyond – spikenard, saffron and costus (a medicinal root) from the Himalayas, ivory and bdellium (a resin), muslins and silks, agate and carnelian, ebony and teak. The trade may go back to Mauryan times since a fragment of an Ashokan Rock Edict has been found at the port of Sopara. But it was the Shatavahanas who were responsible for developing it. They not only controlled the trade routes but also encouraged the settlement of lands which would supply both the ports and the staging posts. It was to further this programme of settlement and strategic control that the Shatavahana dynasty, though orthodox in its adherence to Vedic sacrifice and deities, patronised and encouraged Buddhist establishments as well as making land grants to brahmans.

Buddhism, as noted, had become identified with commerce and manufacturing. Not only did Buddhist doctrine encourage the investment of resources which would otherwise be wasted on sacrifices; it also denied caste taboos on food and travel which made trade so hazardous for the orthodox. Monastic establishments thus became foci of inland trade. Beside and below the extant cave temples it is thought that there stretched bazaars and lodging houses, stables, holding pens and joinery shops, all of course built in long-since-perished timber. The monasteries thus served the functions of caravanserais. And, though initially recipients of royal grants, they soon attracted private donations and mercantile endowments. As guild-members or as individuals, weavers, grain merchants, basket makers, leather workers, shipping agents, ivory carvers, smiths, salt merchants and a host of other craftsmen and dealers are recorded as donors in the cave temple inscriptions. Many hailed from distant parts of India; some even described themselves as Yavanas; all clearly had a vested interest in the booming commerce and so in the religious establishments which made it possible.

The nature of Aryanisation within the subcontinent is still debated; so is that of India’s growing influence outside the subcontinent. Were Funan and all the later Indianised states in south-east Asia the result of trading links, of missionary activities, of migration, or of conquest? Should they be called ‘colonies’? Or were their Indian credentials simply the result of local elites espousing imported ideas of kingship, cultural sophistication and social differentiation? Conquests like Rome’s contemporary triumphs in Gaul and Britain can be discounted. It is much more likely that the processes responsible for the diaspora of Indian ideas in south-east Asia mirrored those at work in the western Deccan where trade, religious institutions and royal authority operated in consort to promote security, extend agrarian settlement and stimulate state-formation.

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