by Will Durant
We must conceive it, then, not as a nation, like Egypt, Babylonia, or England, but as a continent as populous and polyglot as Europe, and almost as varied in climate and race, in literature, philosophy and art. The north is harassed by cold blasts from the Himalayas, and by the fogs that form when these blasts meet the southern sun. In the Punjab the rivers have created great alluvial plains of unsurpassed fertility;4 but south of the river-valleys the sun rules as an unchecked despot, the plains are dry and bare, and require for their fruitful tillage no mere husbandry but an almost stupefying slavery.5 Englishmen do not stay in India more than five years at a time; and if a hundred thousand of them rule three thousand times their number of Hindus it is because they have not stayed there long enough.
Here and there, constituting one-fifth of the land, the primitive jungle remains, a breeding-place of tigers, leopards, wolves and snakes. In the southern third, or Deccan,* the heat is drier, or is tempered with breezes from the sea. But from Delhi to Ceylon the dominating fact in India is heat: heat that has weakened the physique, shortened the youth, and affected the quietist religion and philosophy of the inhabitants. The only relief from this heat is to sit still, to do nothing, to desire nothing; or in the summer months the monsoon wind may bring cooling moisture and fertilizing rain from the sea. When the monsoon fails to blow, India starves, and dreams of Nirvana.
II. THE OLDEST CIVILIZATION?
Prehistoric India—Mohenjo-daro—Its antiquity
In the days when historians supposed that history had begun with Greece, Europe gladly believed that India had been a hotbed of barbarism until the “Aryan” cousins of the European peoples had migrated from the shores of the Caspian to bring the arts and sciences to a savage and benighted peninsula. Recent researches have marred this comforting picture—as future researches will change the perspective of these pages. In India, as elsewhere, the beginnings of civilization are buried in the earth, and not all the spades of archeology will ever quite exhume them. Remains of an Old Stone Age fill many cases in the museums of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay; and neolithic objects have been found in nearly every state.6 These, however, were cultures, not yet a civilization.
In 1924 the world of scholarship was again aroused by news from India: Sir John Marshall announced that his Indian aides, R. D. Banerji in particular, had discovered at Mohenjo-daro, on the western bank of the lower Indus, remains of what seemed to be an older civilization than any yet known to historians. There, and at Harappa, a few hundred miles to the north, four or five superimposed cities were excavated, with hundreds of solidly-built brick houses and shops, ranged along wide streets as well as narrow lanes, and rising in many cases to several stories. Let Sir John estimate the age of these remains:
These discoveries establish the existence in Sind (the northernmost province of the Bombay Presidency) and the Punjab, during the fourth and third millennium B.C., of a highly developed city life; and the presence, in many of the houses, of wells and bathrooms as well as an elaborate drainage-system, betoken a social condition of the citizens at least equal to that found in Sumer, and superior to that prevailing in contemporary Babylonia and Egypt. . . . Even at Ur the houses are by no means equal in point of construction to those of Mohenjo-daro.7
Among the finds at these sites were household utensils and toilet outfits; pottery painted and plain, hand-turned and turned on the wheel; terracottas, dice and chess-men; coins older than any previously known; over a thousand seals, most of them engraved, and inscribed in an unknown pictographic script; faïence work of excellent quality; stone carving superior to that of the Sumerians;8 copper weapons and implements, and a copper model of a two-wheeled cart (one of our oldest examples of a wheeled vehicle); gold and silver bangles, ear-ornaments, necklaces, and other jewelry “so well finished and so highly polished,” says Marshall, “that they might have come out of a Bond Street jeweler’s of today rather than from a prehistoric house of 5,000 years ago.”9
Strange to say, the lowest strata of these remains showed a more developed art than the upper layers—as if even the most ancient deposits were from a civilization already hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years old. Some of the implements were of stone, some of copper, some of bronze, suggesting that this Indus culture had arisen in a Chalcolithic Age—i.e., in a transition from stone to bronze as the material of tools.10 The indications are that Mohenjo-daro was at its height when Cheops built the first great pyramid; that it had commercial, religious and artistic connections with Sumeria and Babylonia;* and that it survived over three thousand years, until the third century before Christ.†13 We cannot tell yet whether, as Marshall believes, Mohenjo-daro represents the oldest of all civilizations known. But the exhuming of prehistoric India has just begun; only in our time has archeology turned from Egypt across Mesopotamia to India. When the soil of India has been turned up like that of Egypt we shall probably find there a civilization older than that which flowered out of the mud of the Nile.*
III. THE INDO-ARYANS
The natives—The invaders—The village community—Caste—Warriors—Priests—Merchants—Workers—Outcastes
Despite the continuity of the remains in Sind and Mysore, we feel that between the heyday of Mohenjo-daro and the advent of the Aryans a great gap stands in our knowledge; or rather that our knowledge of the past is an occasional gap in our ignorance. Among the Indus relics is a peculiar seal, composed of two serpent heads, which was the characteristic symbol of the oldest historic people of India—those serpent-worshiping Nagas whom the invading Aryans found in possession of the northern provinces, and whose descendants still linger in the remoter hills.20 Farther south the land was occupied by a dark-skinned, broad-nosed people whom, without knowing the origin of the word, we call Dravidians. They were already a civilized people when the Aryans broke down upon them; their adventurous merchants sailed the sea even to Sumeria and Babylon, and their cities knew many refinements and luxuries.21 It was from them, apparently, that the Aryans took their village community and their systems of land-tenure and taxation.22 To this day the Deccan is still essentially Dravidian in stock and customs, in language, literature and arts.
The invasion and conquest of these flourishing tribes by the Aryans was part of that ancient process whereby, periodically, the north has swept down violently upon the settled and pacified south; this has been one of the main streams of history, on which civilizations have risen and fallen like epochal undulations. The Aryans poured down upon the Dravidians, the Achaeans and Dorians upon the Cretans and Ægeans, the Germans upon the Romans, the Lombards upon the Italians, the English upon the world. Forever the north produces rulers and warriors, the south produces artists and saints, and the meek inherit heaven.
Who were these marauding Aryans? They themselves used the term as meaning noblemen (Sanskrit arya, noble), but perhaps this patriotic derivation is one of those after-thoughts which cast scandalous gleams of humor into philology.* Very probably they came from that Caspian region which their Persian cousins called Airyana-vaejo—“The Aryan home.”† About the same time that the Aryan Kassites overran Babylonia, the Vedic Aryans began to enter India.
Like the Germans invading Italy, these Aryans were rather immigrants than conquerors. But they brought with them strong physiques, a hearty appetite in both solids and liquids, a ready brutality, a skill and courage in war, which soon gave them the mastery of northern India. They fought with bows and arrows, led by armored warriors in chariots, who wielded battle-axes and hurled spears. They were too primitive to be hypocrites: they subjugated India without pretending to elevate it. They wanted land, and pasture for their cattle; their word for war said nothing about national honor, but simply meant “a desire for more cows.”26 Slowly they made their way eastward along the Indus and the Ganges, until all Hindustan‡ was under their control.
As they passed from armed warfare to settled tillage their tribes gradually coalesced into petty states. Each state was ruled by a king checked by a council of warriors; e
ach tribe was led by a raja or chieftain limited in his power by a tribal council; each tribe was composed of comparatively independent village communities governed by assemblies of family heads. “Have you heard, Ananda,” Buddha is represented as asking his St. John, “that the Vajjians foregather often, and frequent public meetings of their clans? . . . So long, Ananda, as the Vajjians foregather thus often, and frequent the public meetings of their clan, so long may they be expected not to decline, but to prosper.”27
Like all peoples, the Aryans had rules of endogamy and exogamy-forbidding marriage outside the racial group or within near degrees of kinship. From these rules came the most characteristic of Hindu institutions. Outnumbered by a subject people whom they considered inferior to themselves, the Aryans foresaw that without restrictions on intermarriage they would soon lose their racial identity; in a century or two they would be assimilated and absorbed. The first caste division, therefore, was not by status but by color;* it divided long noses from broad noses, Aryans from Nagas and Dravidians; it was merely the marriage regulation of an endogamous group.28 In its later profusion of hereditary, racial and occupational divisions the caste system hardly existed in Vedic times.29 Among the Aryans themselves marriage (except of near kin) was free, and status was not defined by birth.
As Vedic India (2000-1000 B.C.) passed into the “Heroic” age (1000-500 B.C.)—i.e., as India changed from the conditions pictured in the Vedas into those described in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—occupations became more specialized and hereditary, and caste divisions were more rigidly defined. At the top were the Kshatriyas, or fighters, who held it a sin to die in bed.30 Even the religious ceremonials were in the early days performed by chieftains or kings, in the fashion of Cæsar playing Pontifex; the Brahmans or priests were then mere assistants at the sacrifice.31 In the Ramayana a Kshatriya protests passionately against mating a “proud and peerless bride” of warrior stock to “a prating priest and Brahman”;32 the Jain books take for granted the leadership of the Kshatriyas, and the Buddhist literature goes so far as to call the Brahmans “low-born.”33 Even in India? things change.
But as war gradually gave way to peace—and as religion, being then largely an aide to agriculture in the face of the incalculable elements, grew in social importance and ritual complexity, and required expert intermediaries between men and gods—the Brahmans increased in number, wealth and power. As educators of the young, and oral transmitters of the race’s history, literature and laws, they were able to recreate the past and form the future in their own image, moulding each generation into greater reverence for the priests, and building for their caste a prestige which would, in later centuries, give them the supreme place in Hindu society. Already in Buddha’s days they had begun to challenge the supremacy of the Kshatriyas; they pronounced these warriors inferior, even as the Kshatriyas pronounced the priests inferior;34 and Buddha felt that there was much to be said for both points of view. Even in Buddha’s time, however, the Kshatriyas had not conceded intellectual leadership to the Brahmans; and the Buddhist movement itself, founded by a Kshatriya noble, contested the religious hegemony of India with the Brahmans for a thousand years.
Below these ruling minorities were the Vaisyas, merchants and freemen hardly distinct as a caste before Buddha, the Shudras, or workingmen, who comprised most of the native population; and finally the Outcastes or Pariahs—unconverted native tribes like the Chandalas, war captives, and men reduced to slavery as a punishment.35 Out of this originally small group of casteless men grew the 40,000,000 “Untouchables” of India today.
IV. INDO-ARYAN SOCIETY
Herders—Tillers of the soil—Craftsmen—Traders—Coinage and credit—Morals—Marriage—Woman
How did these Aryan Indians live? At first by war and spoliation; then by herding, tillage and industry in a rural routine not unlike that of medieval Europe; for until the Industrial Revolution in which we live, the basic economic and political life of man had remained essentially the same since neolithic days. The Indo-Aryans raised cattle, used the cow without considering it sacred, and ate meat when they could afford it, having offered a morsel to priests or gods;36 Buddha, after nearly starving himself in his ascetic youth, seems to have died from a hearty meal of pork.37 They planted barley, but apparently knew nothing of rice in Vedic times. The fields were divided by each village community among its constituent families, but were irrigated in common; the land could not be sold to an outsider, and could be bequeathed only to the family heirs in direct male line. The majority of the people were yeomen owning their own soil; the Aryans held it a disgrace to work for hire. There were, we are assured, no landlords and no paupers, no millionaires and no slums.38
In the towns handicrafts flourished among independent artisans and apprentices, organized, half a thousand years before Christ, into powerful guilds of metal-workers, wood-workers, stone-workers, leather-workers, ivory-workers, basket-makers, house-painters, decorators, potters, dyers, fishermen, sailors, hunters, trappers, butchers, confectioners, barbers, shampooers, florists, cooks—the very list reveals the fulness and variety of Indo-Aryan life. The guilds settled intra-guild affairs, even arbitrating difficulties between members and their wives. Prices were determined, as among ourselves, not by supply and demand but by the gullibility of the purchaser; in the palace of the king, however, was an official Valuer who, like our secretive Bureau of Standards, tested goods to be bought, and dictated terms to the makers.39
Trade and travel had advanced to the stage of horse and two-wheeled wagon, but were still medievally difficult; caravans were held up by taxes at every petty frontier, and as like as not by highwaymen at any turn. Transport by river and sea was more developed: about 860 B.C. ships with modest sails and hundreds of oars carried to Mesopotamia, Arabia and Egypt such typical Indian products as perfumes and spices, cotton and silk, shawls and muslins, pearls and rubies, ebony and precious stones, and ornate brocades of silver and gold.40
Trade was stunted by clumsy methods of exchange—at first by barter, then by the use of cattle as currency; brides like Homer’s “oxen-bearing maidens” were bought with cows.41 Later a heavy copper coinage was issued, guaranteed, however, only by private individuals. There were no banks; hoarded money was hidden in the house, or buried in the ground, or deposited with a friend. Out of this, in Buddha’s age, grew a credit system: merchants in different towns facilitated trade by giving one another letters of credit; loans could be obtained from such Rothschilds at eighteen per cent,42 and there was much talk of promissory notes. The coinage was not sufficiently inconvenient to discourage gambling; already dice were essential to civilization. In many cases gambling halls were provided for his subjects by the king, in the fashion, if not quite in the style, of Monaco; and a portion of the receipts went to the royal treasury.43 It seems a scandalous arrangement to us, who are not quite accustomed to having our gambling institutions contribute so directly to the support of our public officials.
Commercial morality stood on a high level. The kings of Vedic India, as of Homeric Greece, were not above lifting cattle from their neighbors;44 but the Greek historian of Alexander’s campaigns describes the Hindus as “remarkable for integrity, so reasonable as seldom to have recourse to lawsuits, and so honest as to require neither locks to their doors nor writings to bind their agreements; they are in the highest degree truthful.45 The Rig-veda speaks of incest, seduction, prostitution, abortion and adultery,46 and there are some signs of homosexuality;47 but the general picture that we derive from the Vedas and the epics is one of high standards in the relations of the sexes and the life of the family.
Marriage might be entered into by forcible abduction of the bride, by purchase of her, or by mutual consent. Marriage by consent, however, was considered slightly disreputable; women thought it more honorable to be bought and paid for, and a great compliment to be stolen,48 Polygamy was permitted, and was encouraged among the great; it was an act of merit to support several wives, and to transmit ability.4
9 The story of Draupadi,50 who married five brothers at once, indicates the occasional occurrence, in Epic days, of that strange polyandry—the marriage of one woman to several men, usually brothers—which survived in Ceylon till 1859, and still lingers in the mountain villages of Tibet.51 But polygamy was usually the privilege of the male, who ruled the Aryan household with patriarchal omnipotence. He held the right of ownership over his wives and his children, and might in certain cases sell them or cast them out.52
Nevertheless, woman enjoyed far greater freedom in the Vedic period than in later India. She had more to say in the choice of her mate than the forms of marriage might suggest. She appeared freely at feasts and dances, and joined with men in religious sacrifice. She could study, and might, like Gargi, engage in philosophic disputation.53 If she was left a widow there were no restrictions upon her remarriage.54 In the Heroic Age woman seems to have lost something of this liberty. She was discouraged from mental pursuits, on the ground that “for a woman to study the Vedas indicates confusion in the realm;”55 the remarriage of widows became uncommon; purdah—the seclusion of women—began; and the practice of suttee, almost unknown in Vedic times, increased.56 The ideal woman was now typified in the heroine of the Ramayana—that faithful Sita who follows and obeys her husband humbly, through every test of fidelity and courage, until her death.