Historiographical change incorporates new evidence and new ways of looking at existing evidence. The inclusion of perspectives from other human sciences such as studies of societies, economies and religions has led to some important reformulations in explaining the past, resulting primarily from asking different questions from the sources than had been asked before. If earlier historical writing was concerned largely with politics, today it includes virtually all human activities and their interconnections. These are crucial to the argument that the image of reality, as reflected in the human sciences, is socially and culturally controlled and that actions have multiple causes. Advances in knowledge would inevitably change some of these perspectives. Historical explanation therefore creates an awareness of how the past impinges on the present, as well as the reverse.
Among the new sources of evidence, quite apart from the occasional coin, inscription or sculpture, have been data provided by archaeology, evidence on the links between environment and history, and the insights provided by historical and socio-linguistics. Aspects of the oral tradition, when used in a comparative manner, have often illustrated the methods that are used to preserve information, either by societies that are not literate or by those that chose to use the oral form in preference to the literate. The possibility of applying these methods to an earlier oral tradition has been revealing.
In recent years the early history of India has increasingly drawn on evidence from archaeology, which has provided tangible, three-dimensional data in the artefacts and material remains discovered through survey and excavation. These were once used to corroborate the evidence from literary and textual sources (and in some theories about ancient India they continue to be thus used). But archaeological data may or may not corroborate literary evidence, and, where they do not, they provide an alternative view. In the absence of written evidence, or where the written evidence remains undeciphered, artefacts can fill lacunae. The corroboration is not one-to-one since archaeological data are substantially in the form of artefacts, whereas textual information is abstract, and both are subject to the intervention of the historian’s interpretation. The relationship of archaeological data with literary evidence is complicated and requires expertise in each category. Reacting against the earlier tyranny of the text, some archaeologists today would deny the use of texts, even in a comparative way.
Sophisticated methods of excavation and the reading of excavated data are far more complex than in the days when an archaeologist had merely to dig and to discover. Various techniques from scientific disciplines are being used in the analyses of archaeological data, and the scope of the information provided by these has expanded enormously to include data on climate, ecology, settlement patterns, palaeo-pathology, flora and fauna. Palaeo-botany – the study of plant and seed remains from an excavation – relates to flora and environmental conditions, and therefore adds another dimension to the understanding of human settlements. Some of this data can lend itself to a modicum of statistical analysis.
India still sustains an extensive range of societies, some even suggesting a stone age condition. This ‘living prehistory’, as it has been called, underlines the continuity of cultural survivals. Attempts are now being made in the cross-discipline of ethno-archaeology to correlate ethnographic studies with the excavations of human settlements. The correlating may raise some doubts, but the usefulness of such studies lies in the asking of questions, for instance, on forms of social organization or on the functions of artefacts. In areas where there are some cultural survivals, these procedures can endorse the assistance occasionally provided by fieldwork as an adjunct to textual studies, and, as has been rightly argued, this is particularly pertinent to the study of religion in India. Fieldwork provides insights that can enhance the meaning of the text. The changes that occur, for instance, in rituals incorporate elements of history, particularly in societies where for many people ritual activity or orthopraxy is more important than theology or orthodoxy. The entirely text-based studies of religions are now being supplemented by comparative studies of the practice of various religions.
Impressive evidence, both in quality and quantity, has come from sites dating to the second and first millennia BC excavated during the past half-century. It is now possible to map the settlements of the period subsequent to the decline of the first urban civilization in north-western India and this provides some clues to the successor cultures. This raises questions of whether there were continuities from the earlier cultures. Equally significant is the identifying of the nature of successor cultures. There is also evidence on some of the precursor settlements in the Ganges Plain and its fringes in central India, providing clues to the nature of the second urbanization of the mid-first millennium in the Ganges Plain. However, these questions can only be answered after there have been horizontal excavations of the major sites, an activity that awaits attention. Megalithic burials of various kinds, dating from the late second millennium DC, are especially characteristic of the peninsula. Their origins and relationships to settlements remain somewhat enigmatic, but at least they provide evidence of cultural levels and networks prior to the information from inscriptions, coins and texts.
Recent studies of archaeological data have led to an interest in the environment as a factor in the making of history. This began with the long debate on whether the decline of the Indus cities was substandally due to environmental degradation. To this has been added the evidence of the drying up of the Ghaggar-Hakra River in northern India, with related hydraulic changes and their historical implications. Archaeological evidence has also been used to suggest a decline in urban centres during the Gupta period, thus questioning its claim to being an age of considerable urban prosperity. Artefacts can be examined as pointers to technology, leading to the examination of the role of technological change in history. There has been an extended discussion, for example, on the role of iron technology – particularly in the clearing of forests and the use of the iron ploughshare as processes related to urbanization in the Ganges Plain.
Archaeological evidence has also underlined the significance of geography to history, particularly in understanding the location of settlements, the movements of peoples and the creation of states. Large unitary kingdoms were more easily hosted in the northern Indo-Gangetic Plains. The southern half of the subcontinent, the peninsula, was divided into smaller regions by mountains, plateaus and river valleys – a topography that made the functioning of expansive kingdoms more difficult. In an age of empires, as the nineteenth century was, the large kingdoms of the north attracted the attention of historians. Periods when such kingdoms flourished were described as ‘Golden Ages’ and those that saw the growth of smaller and more localized states were viewed as the ‘Dark Ages’. The history of the peninsula received far less attention, except when it too could boast of large kingdoms. It suffered further from the fact that political strategy in the peninsula and its economic potential differed from that of the north. This is particularly noticeable in the deployment of maritime commerce as part of the economy in some states.
Among the more interesting departures from earlier views has been the realization that particular geographical regions do not remain pivotal to historical activity permanently. They can and do change, as do the regions that are their peripheries. Sometimes multiple centres share the same history and at other times the centres have diverse histories. Why such regions change and how this affects historical evolution is in itself a worthwhile exploration. The recognition of the region and its links with geomorphology and ecology is drawing the attention of historians. However, a region in the Indian subcontinent cannot become an isolated historical entity, and regional histories inevitably have to be related to larger wholes. Detailed studies of regions have inducted an interest in landscape and how it has changed. The agencies of change are dependent on geology, geomorphology and human activity, but what needs to be looked at more closely is the effect of a change in landscape on history. The most obvious examples
of this are changes in river courses or deforestation. We still tend to presume that the landscape of today was also the landscape of yesterday.
Associated with fieldwork is the study of oral traditions, which has been used by anthropologists in deriving material for analysing myths and for kinship patterns. Although myths need not go back to earlier times, they can in some cases carry forward earlier ideas. But because of their fluid chronology, and the fact that they are generally not records of actual happenings, myths can only be used in a limited way. Mythology and history are often counterposed and myth cannot be treated as a factual account. Yet the prizing out of the social assumptions implicit in a myth can be helpful to reconstructing some kinds of history. The interpretation of myths, if handled with caution, can invoke some of the fantasies and subconscious beliefs of their authors, while the structure of the myth can hint at the connections and confrontations in a society of those sustaining the myths. Since history now reflects many voices, some from sources other than those from the courts of rulers, the oral tradition or the more popular traditions are no longer dismissed as unimportant. Obviously the survival of the oral tradition is from a recent period, but a familiarity with the techniques of assessing an oral tradition has been helpful in re-examining texts that were once part of an early oral tradition. Oral sources were sometimes preserved through being so carefully memorized that the text almost came to be frozen, as in some of the Vedic ritual compositions. Alternatively, the memorization was less frozen and more open, with a composition such as the epic poetry of the Mahabharata, and many interpolations became possible. The ways in which oral traditions work provide a variety of approaches to such texts.
Linguistics is another field that is proving helpful to historians of early India. Analysing a word helps to explain its meaning and, if it can be seen in a historical context, much is added to the meaning. Words such as raja – initially meaning chief and subsequently king – constitute a history of their own and have a bearing on historical readings. Sociolinguistics provides evidence of how words can point to social relationships through the way in which they are used. Given the connection between languages and the fact that languages change, both through use and through communication between speakers of different languages, such change becomes a significant adjunct to other historical evidence. The study of a language from the perspective of linguistics is not limited to similarities of sound or meaning, but involves a familiarity with the essential structure of the language – grammar, morphology, phonetics – and this is more demanding that just being able to read and write a language.
Linguistic diversity may well have been registered in the Indian subcontinent from earliest times, which might explain pan of the problem in attempting to decipher the Indus script. Among the many languages used in India, Tibeto-Burman, for example, has been associated with the north-eastern and Himalayan fringes. The Austro-Asiatic group of languages, particularly Munda, clusters in parts of central and eastern India. It could have been more widespread if one believes the mythology of its speakers or, for that matter, the evidence of some of the linguistic elements which occur as a substratum in the earliest Indo-Aryan compositions. Dravidian is likely to have been more extensively used than it is now, with groups of speakers in central India and with four major languages derived from it in the peninsula, not to mention the pocket of Brahui in the north-west of the subcontinent. The reason why, or the way in which, a language either spreads or becomes restricted, has historical explanations.
Indo-Aryan spread gradually over northern India, incorporating some elements of Austro-Asiatic and Dravidian. It bears repeating that Indo-Aryan is in fact a language label, indicating a speech-group of the Indo-European family, and is not a racial term. To refer to ‘the Aryans’ as a race is therefore inaccurate. The racial identities of speakers of Indo-Aryan languages are not known. When textual sources refer to arya the reference is generally to an identity that involves language, social status and associated rituals and custom. It is in this sense that the term is used in this book.
Other than archaeological data, there have been no major sources of new evidence that would radically change our understanding of the period. The recent discovery of important inscriptions and coins has clarified some ambiguities. The exploration of textual data has led to evidence being gathered from texts of historical importance, but in languages other than Sanskrit. Perhaps the most significant change with regard to textual sources is a greater recognition that important authoritative, didactic texts, or even the epics, as we have them today, were not necessarily written at a precise point in time. They have been edited over long time periods and interpolations have been incorporated. A single authorship for a text is not insisted upon. The tradition of writing and using texts in the early past was different from the way in which we view authorship and texts today. It was recognized that a succession of authors, generally of the same persuasion, could edit the same text. The authorship, audience and purpose of a text are also now receiving attention when data is gathered.
The problems of the chronology of these texts remains as complicated as before, and this prevents their being closely related to a particular period. A large number of texts of other genres, for instance creative literature, are of single authorship, even if their chronology is sometimes uncertain. These have been used in making comparative linguistic analyses. Some attempts have also been made in sifting linguistic style and usage to ascertain the history of the compilation of a text. Such sifting has been facilitated on a few occasions through the use of computers, although this technique is not entirely without hassles.
One of the current debates relating to the beginnings of Indian history involves both archaeology and linguistics, and attempts to differentiate between indigenous and alien peoples. But history has shown that communities and their identities are neither permanent nor static. Their composition changes either with the arrival of new people in an area, and the possible new technologies that are introduced, or by historical changes of a more local but far-reaching kind. Some areas are more prone to change, such as borderlands, mountain passes and fertile plains, whereas densely forested areas or deserts may retain their isolation for a longer period until such time as there is a demand on them for resources. To categorize some people as indigenous and others as alien, to argue about the identity of the first inhabitants of the subcontinent, and to try and sort out these categories for the remote past, is to attempt the impossible. It is precisely in the intermixture of peoples and ideas that the genesis of cultures is to be found. Such arguments arise from the concerns of present-day privilege and power, rather than from the reading of history.
It was not just the landscape that changed, but society also changed and often quite noticeably. But this was a proposition unacceptable to colonial perceptions that insisted on the unchanging character of Indian history and society. The concentration on dynastic histories in the early studies was due to the assumption that in ‘Oriental’ societies the power of the ruler was supreme even in the day-to-day functioning of the government. Yet authority for routine functions was rarely entirely concentrated at the centre in the Indian political systems. Much that was seen as essentially centralized in theories such as ‘Oriental Despotism’ was in actual fact localized through the functions of caste and of other organizations. The understanding of political power in India involves analyses of caste relationships and institutions, such as the guilds and rural and urban councils, and not merely a survey of dynasties. That the study of institutions did not receive much emphasis was in part due to the belief that they did not undergo much change: an idea derived from the conviction that Indian culture had been static, largely owing to the lethargy of the Indian and his gloomy, fatalistic attitude to life. Yet even a superficial analysis of the changes in social relationships within the caste structure, or the links between politics and economic systems, or the vigorous mercantile activities of Indians throughout the centuries, points to anything but static behavi
our or an unchanging socio-economic pattern. At certain levels there are aspects of cultural traditions in India that can be traced to roots as far back as a few thousand years, but such continuity should not be confused with stagnation. The chanting of the gayatri hymn has a history of three millennia, but its current context can hardly be said to have remained unchanged from earlier times, and for the historian the context is as important as the content of the hymn.
In common with all branches of knowledge, the premium on specialization in the later twentieth century has made it impossible to hold a seriously considered view about a subject without some technical expertise in the discipline. Such expertise enhances both the pleasure and the understanding of what is under study. To be able to read a text or a coin legend or an inscription is the bare minimum of knowledge required: some familiarity with the mathematics of numismatics, the semiotics of symbols and the contextual dimensions of a text make history a far richer discipline than it was thought to be. The interpretation of a text draws on its authorship, intention, audience, historical context and its interface with other texts of its kind. As a result there is a distance between the professional historian and the amateur writing history. The function then of a history such as this is to provide some flavour of the richer taste emerging in historical research.
My attempt in this book is to treat political history as a skeletal framework in order to provide a chronological bearing, even if chronology is not always certain. This also introduces a few names of rulers as a more familiar aspect of early Indian history. However, the major focus of each chapter is the attempt to broadly interrelate the political, economic, social and religious aspects of a period with the intention of showing where and why changes have occurred and how these in turn have had an effect on each aspect. Where there are continuities these will become apparent. The subdivisions in each chapter, therefore, are not meant to suggest separate entities, but are pointers to what is significant in that period. The contents of the chapters do not exactly match the periods listed in the first chapter in my reconsideration of periodization, but the book does follow the pattern suggested.
The Penguin History of Early India Page 2