The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  1 A hymn from the Rig-Veda, evoking the solar deity, and regarded as particularly holy.

  The pattern of change moves from small societies and states with a relatively uncomplicated organization to the emergence of more complex societies, often accompanied by large states and the requirements of such states. In summary form, the latter included a variety of facets, such as: the need to administer extensive territory, literally, in terms of the reality on the ground; agrarian and commercial economies of varying kinds; diverse social forms, some of which were viewed as part of a uniform caste organization, while others were described as deviant forms; the structures of knowledge and the way in which their ideological formulations were linked to other aspects of society and culture; manifold religious sects expressing social concerns, as well as incorporating ideas that ranged from mythology to philosophical notions; creative literature of various kinds; the location of sacred sites that gave a tangible presence to religious sects and their varied forms of worship. Implicit in the listing of these items are the ways in which they are linked, and their forms are either influential or fade away. The discussion of these links and the changes they bring about, in other words the explanation of historical change, will hopefully unfold in the narrative.

  It is assumed that much of the history that is discussed here emerges out of the existence of states, or at least the recognition of forms of political organization. The formation of a state is a recognized historical process, accompanied by concentrations of settlements that can evolve into towns. The presence of the state introduces more complexities into a situation than in societies where states are yet to evolve. This also introduces the notion that there can be varieties of states in early history. The patterns taken by a state can differ in accordance with its constituents. Ascertaining the particular pattern of the state, or the way in which the state functions, also becomes a way of observing the history of the period and place. The emergence of states need not be simultaneous in every area, for this transformation can also occur in other times and places. Periodization therefore tends to describe a significant change over a substantial area, but in earlier periods it need not necessarily have applied to every region. The change gradually becomes more uniform.

  The structure of administration that helped to define the nature of the state began as a rudimentary form of ensuring the functioning of a particular form of government, for instance chiefship or kingship. It tended to become increasingly complex as it had to be adjusted to the environment – forests, pastures, deserts, fields, mountains, seas – and the environment could be diverse in the large states, which sometimes prevented a neat, uniform administration. The notion of governance, therefore, was modified up to a point by local requirements. The balance between the concentration and the distribution of power was another determining factor of administration, as was the control over resources. Theories of governance would both have influenced, and been influenced by, the form of administration. Territory included within a state could be defined by campaigns where a successful campaign brought in more territory, or else the existing territory could be eroded if the campaign failed. Such demarcations derive from politics, but also, although to a lesser extent, from terrain.

  Economies were matched to the patterns of states and to the power that they wielded. Agrarian economies varied in relation to ecology, crop patterns, methods of irrigation and the hierarchy of control over agricultural land. The latter was initially diverse, but slowly evolved into forms that extended over large areas. The forms grew out of matters relating to sources of power, resources for the economies and the diverse methods of obtaining and controlling human labour. The growth of cities is also a pointer to commerce, with trade being the most effective economy in some areas. Histories of India in the past have been essentially land-locked, with maritime trade playing a marginal role. This is now being corrected by the attention given to maritime trade, both in terms of the commercial economy and the creation of new social identities involving traders who settled in India.

  There has been a tendency to treat caste as a uniform social organization in the subcontinent. But there are variations in terms of whether landowning groups or trading groups were dominant, a dominance that could vary regionally. The hierarchical ordering of society became uniform, but there were ways of handling the hierarchy that introduced regional variations. Both agriculture and commerce allow a different set of freedoms to, and restrictions on, castes. This raises the question of whether in some situations wealth, rather than caste-ranking, was not the more effective gauge of patronage and power. The formation of castes is now being explored as a way of understanding how Indian society functioned. Various possibilities include the emergence of castes from clans of forest-dwellers, professional groups or religious sects. Caste is therefore seen as a less rigid and frozen system than it was previously thought to be, but at the same time this raises a new set of interesting questions for social historians.

  The manifold expressions of structured knowledge are generally seen as tied to philosophical notions, as indeed they were. But not all categories of knowledge were invariably divorced from technological practices and texts. The techniques of preserving knowledge or the methods of advancing knowledge are diverse, ranging from the oral to the literate, and incorporate, at various levels, the technological as well as the theoretical. Equally important are the intellectual contestations between the heterodoxy and the orthodoxy, between the nature of belief and the nature of doubt.

  Creative literature is characteristic of every period, but the predominant forms that it takes would appear to vary. The great oral compositions, such as the epics, date to earlier times, while the more courtly literature of the educated elite became more frequent from the early centuries of the Christian era. Nevertheless, even if courts fostered poetry and drama of a sophisticated kind, the popularity of the epics continued. This popularity is demonstrated from time to time in the choice of themes for courtly literature, selected from the popular literature, but of course treated in a different manner.

  Similarly, religious literature ranges from ritual texts to the compositions of religious poets and teachers intended for a popular audience, and the intricacies of the philosophical discourse intended for other audiences. Since the sources are largely those of the elite, we have less information on the religions of ordinary people, and what we do know comes indirectly from the sources. Possibly the excavation of settlements in the future will provide more data on popular religion. But from what can be gathered there appears to have been a considerable continuity at the popular level, for example in the worship of local goddesses – as would be expected.

  Apart from the study of texts, on which the initial understanding of Indian religions was based, the history of religions in India has been studied by investigating cults with information on ritual and belief, and working on the history of sects that extends to the social groups supporting particular beliefs and forms of worship. Arguing that Vedic Brahmanism – drawing its identity from the Vedic corpus – was a religious form associated with socially dominant groups, supporting practices and beliefs that could be seen as an orthodoxy, there have been studies of movements that have distanced themselves in various ways from Vedic Brahmanism. The Shramana group – Buddhism, Jainism and various ‘heterodox’ sects – is one such well-established group. More recently, sects within the Hindu tradition deriving their identity from the texts known as the Agamas and the Puranas, variously linked with or distanced from the orthodoxy, are being seen as constituting what some historians of religion prefer to call Puranic Hinduism or the Puranic religions. The distinguishing features relate to differences in belief and ritual from Vedic Brahmanism. The history of these sects points to processes that either retain their distinctiveness or else encourage an accommodation with Vedic Brahmanism, although the two are not equated.

  Close identities between religious sects and castes are frequent in Indian religion and the multiplicity of reasonably independe
nt sects has led some scholars to speak of the Hindu religions (in the plural). The term ‘Hindu’ to describe a religious identity came into currency as late as the second millennium AD. Prior to that, sectarian identities were more frequently referred to, since the overarching term Dharma included not only sacred duties but also a range of social obligations. Sects are not invariably formed by breaking away from a historical religious mainstream, but are at times born from a mosaic of belief, worship and mythology coming together. Relating religious sects to castes as segments of society provides pointers to where religious and social concerns overlap. What is of greater interest is the manner in which some of these popular manifestations of religion find their way into the religious activity of the elite.

  This last aspect also introduces a dimension relating to the history of art that perhaps requires a fuller integration into history. The history of art is no longer confined to discussing an image isolated in a museum or a structure seen as an entity by itself. Each is part of a larger history. Architecture, for instance, has also to be viewed as representing an institution, and both institutional and aesthetic needs would determine form. In many ways narrative art provides a bridge, whether it be stories relating to the life of the Buddha or the mythology surrounding deities. At one level these are representations of reality, but are not merely that, and their other meanings also have to be read. Similarly, there remains the perennial question of whether the icon of a deity is to be viewed primarily as an aesthetic object or a religious representation, or both, or much more. There is also the question raised by art historians as to when an image becomes a stereotype. This is related to the question of the identities of artists or architects. These remain largely anonymous in the earlier periods, barring an occasional name, and it is only in the later period that names are mentioned more frequently so that we learn something about them. But even this information is limited, although we know relatively more about their patrons. Our contemporary aesthetic concerns become primary, although these are different from the aesthetics of earlier times. As has been rightly said, we have to assess how much was routine and how much was inspired by the ideals of their time, which means that historians have to recover ‘the period eye’.

  Implicit in these lists of items, and in their narration and discussion as aspects of the past, are theories of explanation. My attempt to address these aspects leads to a presentation of how history moved and societies changed in the Indian subcontinent. There is now far greater sensitivity among historians of early India about the way in which early history is written and the intellectual dimensions of this historiography. Four decades ago, this was a preliminary inquiry but it has since become a theme of considerable historical interest. This has also made historians more aware of their own location on the historiographical map. To that extent, historical argument has become more demanding and more taut. Given the centrality of theories of explanation in the historical research that has followed, the narrative of history has been encouraged to present connections between the personalities of the past, their activities and the degree to which they made or were made by their historical context where information is available. However, barring a few exceptions, it is the historical context that has primacy, which is evident also in the shift of focus to the group. Inevitably, the range of players has increased with some attention to groups earlier thought to be insignificant and to activities earlier thought to be marginal. The change aims at a more integrated understanding of a complex society, its various mutations, its creativity and its efforts at enhancing its contributions to civilization.

  1

  Perceptions of the Past

  Colonial Constructions: Orientalist Readings

  The modern writing of Indian history began with colonial perceptions of the Indian past that were to be seminal to its subsequent interpretations. It took shape with the beginnings of colonial rule in various parts of the subcontinent from the eighteenth century onwards. European scholars searched for histories of India but could find none that conformed to the familiar European view of what a history should be, a view influenced in part by the thinking of the European Enlightenment. The only exception according to them was the twelfth-century history of Kashmir, the Rajatarangini, written by Kalhana. They saw India only as a Hindu and Sanskritic civilization, so they set aside the numerous chronicles written largely in Persian by court poets and chroniclers of the Turkish, Afghan and Mughal rulers. These were regarded as alien to Indian civilization, even though their contents concerned Indian society and politics and the people whom they wrote about had settled in India to become part of Indian society. There was as yet little familiarity with other sources in Sanskrit such as local chronicles or, for that matter, the lengthy inscriptions issued by various rulers that were in effect dynastic annals.

  Hindu and Sanskritic elements were highlighted as the contribution of India to world history and the presence of other religious and linguistic cultures, such as Buddhism, Jainism or even Islam as it evolved in India, were barely recognized in terms of constructing Indian civilization. Concession to the importance of Buddhism came later. The initial hostility to Islam was doubtless aggravated by European antagonism due to historical reasons, beginning with the Crusades. If the role of Islam was conceded at all, it was said to be negative, and such judgements were based on little or no evidence since the history of Islam in India had not been investigated at this point.

  That there could be other ways of perceiving the past or that Indians might have seen their history in a different manner was discounted. Societies were divided into those who have a sense of history and those who lack it. Indian civilization was described as a-historical. Not only were there no histories of India, but the absence of history was also explained by arguing that the concept of time in early India was cyclic. Therefore, all human activities were continually repeated in each cycle. This was inimical to a historical perspective that required each event to be seen as unique, a view endorsed by a linear concept where time moves not in a circle but in a straight line, from a given beginning to a stipulated end. Ways of looking at the Indian past in the form of genealogies, chronicles and annals, which conformed to linear time, were certainly studied for the reconstruction of the chronology of rulers, but their obviously linear dimension was ignored in discussions on the concept of time. That there is evidence of both linear and cyclic time in early India, and that the most insightful way of appreciating this would be to see the intersections of the two, was an idea alien to these scholars.

  Since there was no recognizably connected narrative of the happenings in the Indian subcontinent since earliest times, the modern writing of history began with narratives constructed from this early European inquiry: hence the references to the ‘discovery’ or the ‘rediscovery’ of the Indian past. History as a distinctive discipline was coming into its own in Europe and was being moulded by a variety of practitioners. The sense of the past that emerged from ideas fostered by the European Enlightenment gave shape to the writing of history, as did influential historical works such as the narrative of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Inevitably, the imprint of the European image of India drew on these earlier reconstructions, an imprint that has now faded with the questioning of these readings.

  Initially, there were two major strands in the European interpretation of Indian civilization, which came to be known as the Orientalist and the Utilitarian. These developed from the studies made by British officials working for the British East India Company, trading with India, some of whom held office in India and some in England. The administrative functions of the East India Company required that its officers be knowledgeable about Indian practices and norms, particularly when parts of India came under the administration of the Company and eventually became colonies. This led to the officers studying Sanskrit, Persian, Bengali, Tamil and various other Indian languages, as well as writing grammars in English that became essential tools for this study. Administrative requirements also encouraged the t
ranslation of what were believed to be legal codes, such as the Dharmashastras, which were actually not codes of law but norms relating to social obligations and ritual requirements.

  Much of this activity was fostered by the belief that knowledge about the colony would enable a greater control over it and would provide a firm foundation to the power that the colonial authorities exercised. This was thought to be ‘the necessary furniture of empire’ and the recasting of this knowledge became as important as its acquisition. In the course of investigating what came to be called Hinduism, together with various aspects of its belief, ritual and custom, many were baffled by a religion that was altogether different from their own. It was not monotheistic, there was no historical founder, or single sacred text, or dogma or ecclesiastical organization – and it was closely tied to caste. There was therefore an overriding need to fit it into the known moulds of familiar religions, so as to make it more accessible. Some scholars have suggested that Hinduism as it is formulated and perceived today, very differently from earlier times, was largely born out of this reformulation. In India, diverse and multiple religions were practised, with royal patronage extending to more than one. This was a contrast to the European experience where a single religion – Christianity – and sometimes only a single division within this religion, either Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, received royal patronage.

  Such activities encouraged what have come to be called Orientalist studies, and the major British scholars initially associated with them were William Jones, Henry Colebrooke, Nathaniel Halhead, Charles Wilkins and Horace Hyman Wilson. Some of their initial research and seminal papers were published as monographs, with many more in Asiatic Researches, a periodical of the Asiatic Society of Bengal established in 1784. There was much discussion at the meetings of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, focusing largely on the origins and reconstruction of language and on religion and custom. But, curiously, membership of the Society was not open to Indians for many years, even though those presenting their findings were being trained by Indian scholars.