The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  European missionaries and visitors to India in preceding centuries had noticed the similarities between Sanskrit and some European languages. William Jones now set the connections in a more systematic framework. He also suggested the monogenesis of these languages, tracing them back to a common ancestor. Grammars and analyses of Sanskrit confirmed connections between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and led eventually to the discipline of comparative philology. Some attempts were also made to relate the chronology of the ancient texts, the Puranas, with Biblical chronology, but this was not successful. A son of Noah was said to have migrated to India to establish the Indian population but the evidence for this was found wanting! Comparisons between Greco-Roman and Indian deities were among the early attempts at comparative religion, and Indian mythology fired the romantic imagination of Europe.

  Interpretations of the Indian past, growing out of these studies, were inevitably influenced by colonial concerns and interests, and also by prevalent European ideas about history, civilization and the Orient. Orientalist scholars studied the languages and the texts with selected Indian scholars, but made little attempt to understand the world-view of those who were teaching them. The readings therefore are something of a disjunctive from the traditional ways of looking at the Indian past. European preconceptions imprinted on the readings gradually came to influence the way in which Indians themselves viewed their own culture. This reordering of Indian culture facilitated the direction given even to the self-perceptions of Indians.

  Orientalism fuelled the fantasy and the freedom sought by European Romanticism, particularly in its opposition to the more disciplined Neo-Classicism. The cultures of Asia were seen as bringing a new Romantic paradigm. Another Renaissance was anticipated through an acquaintance with the Orient, and this, it was thought, would be different from the earlier Greek Renaissance. It was believed that this Oriental Renaissance would liberate European thought and literature from the increasing focus on discipline and rationality that had followed from the earlier Enlightenment. This in part accounts for the enthusiasm for India in the writings of German authors, such as Herder, or the brothers Wilhelm and Auguste Schlegel, or Novalis. Others, such as the English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, were apprehensive of the changes introduced by industrialization and turned to nature and to fantasies of the Orient.

  However, this enthusiasm gradually changed, to conform with the emphasis later in the nineteenth century on the innate superiority of European civilization. Oriental civilizations were now seen as having once been great but currently in decline. The various phases of Orientalism tended to mould European understanding of the Indian past into a particular pattern. In the late nineteenth century it also influenced the emerging Indian middle class in its understanding of its own past. There was an attempt to formulate Indian culture as uniform, such formulations being derived from texts that were given priority. The so-called ‘discovery’ of India was largely through selected literature in Sanskrit. This interpretation tended to emphasize non-historical aspects of Indian culture, for example the idea of an unchanging continuity of society and religion over 3,000 years; and it was believed that the Indian pattern of life was so concerned with metaphysics and the subtleties of religious belief that little attention was given to the more tangible aspects.

  German Romanticism endorsed this image of India, and it became the mystic land for many Europeans, where even the most ordinary actions were imbued with a complex symbolism. This was the genesis of the idea of the spiritual east, and also, incidentally, the refuge of European intellectuals seeking to distance themselves from the changing patterns of their own societies. A dichotomy in values was maintained, Indian values being described as ‘spiritual’ and European values as ‘materialistic’, with little attempt to juxtapose these values with the reality of Indian society. This theme has been even more firmly endorsed by a section of Indian opinion during the last hundred years. It was a consolation to the Indian intelligentsia for its perceived inability to counter the technical superiority of the west, a superiority viewed as having enabled Europe to colonize Asia and other parts of the world. At the height of anti-colonial nationalism it acted as a salve for having been made a colony of Britain.

  Colonial Constructions: A Utilitarian Critique

  The other strand in the European interpretation of the Indian past was a critique of Indian culture. It drew from the Utilitarian, legalistic philosophy current in Britain, and was largely the contribution of those writing on India but based in Britain. This interpretation is best represented in the views of James Mill and Thomas Macaulay and was partially endorsed, but for quite other reasons, by the Evangelicals among the Christian missionaries. Mill, writing his History of British India in the early nineteenth century, was the first to periodize Indian history. His division of the Indian past into the Hindu civilization, Muslim civilization and the British period has been so deeply embedded in the consciousness of those studying India that it prevails to this day. It is at the root of the ideologies of current religious nationalisms and therefore still plays a role in the politics of south Asia. It has resulted in a distorting of Indian history and has frequently thwarted the search for causes of historical change other than those linked to a superficial assessment of religion.

  Indian civilization was said to lack the qualities that Europe admired. For instance, the perceived emphasis on the values of rational thought and individualism was said to be absent, and India’s culture was seen as stagnant.This attitude was perhaps best typified in Macaulay’s contempt for things Indian, especially traditional Indian education and learning. The political institutions of India, visualized largely as the rule of Maharajas and Sultans, were dismissed as despotic and totally unrepresentative of public opinion. And this, in an age of democratic revolutions, was about the worst sin. Mill’s History of British India, in which he argued these propositions, became a hegemonic text in the nineteenth century which influenced many commentators and administrators associated with India. Mill’s views were echoed in aspects of colonial policy, increasingly concerned with the conquest of the subcontinent and the restructuring of its economy to suit colonial requirements.

  The Utilitarian critique of India argued that backwardness can be remedied through appropriate legislation, which could be used by the British to change the stagnant nature of Indian society that had prevented its progress. Mill’s insistence on these negative features reflected his use of this description as part of his campaign to legislate change in Britain. Many of the debates assessing the condition of India can be better explained through a familiarity with the current debates on political economy in Britain at that time.

  A theory often associated with the Utilitarian view of Asian civilizations was that of Oriental Despotism. This visualized a system of government consisting of a despotic ruler with absolute power, said to be characteristic of Asian societies. Such societies featured the existence of isolated, self-sufficient village communities whose surplus produce was creamed off by the despotic ruler and his court, governing through an autocratic bureaucracy. The latter controlled irrigation, which was a prerequisite for agriculture dependent on water management, and also organized the collection of surplus produce. Much of Asia was thought to be arid and dry, irrigation being provided by the state and controlled by the bureaucracy to ensure a surplus agricultural income providing revenue for the despot. The peasant was kept subjugated and had little freedom; cities were largely administrative centres and there was hardly any commercial exchange; the association of divinity with kingship strengthened the status of the king. According to this theory, Oriental Despotism encapsulated the political economy of Asian empires.

  This view can be traced to early Greek sources perceiving the Persian Achaemenid Empire of the mid-first millennium BC as despotic. The Greeks themselves were not averse on occasion to despotic behaviour, but their view of Asian societies as culturally alien led to exaggerated accounts. To this was added the vision of luxurious Oriental court
s, a vision deriving in part from the luxury trade with the east since early times, and partly on the fantasy world of the east as described by Greek visitors. The Greek physician Ktesias at the Persian court, for instance, let his imagination run riot in describing the marvels, mysteries and wealth of the eastern lands. The Crusades and the ensuing literature on the Turks would have strengthened these notions, many of which were exaggerated to impress European audiences.

  Given the concerns of eighteenth-century France and England, the central question was seen as private ownership of land. The theory of Oriental Despotism assumed there was no private ownership of land in Asia and that the king owned all the land. There had been a controversy between Voltaire, supported by the Physiocrats, arguing against the state ownership of land in Asia and Montesquieu, who held the contrary opinion. The standard text on the traditional economy of India used in Haileybury College, where administrators were trained before going to India, was that of Richard Jones who endorsed the theory. The standard history was that of James Mill who also did not question this idea. Those who came to administer India assumed the essential viability of the theory, and some among them were also the pre-eminent historians of the period writing on India.

  The theory became axiomatic to the interpretation of the Indian past in the nineteenth century, particularly that aspect which concerned land relations and the rights of the state over the cultivator. The nature of ownership of land was debated, as was the question of who was the owner – the king/state, the individual cultivator or the village community. The village community was sometimes projected as an autonomous republic or as a collective for gathering and paying taxes. These debates were reflected in the writings of administrators and historians, such as Henry Maine, Baden-Powell, Munroe and Montstuart Elphinstone. In the process of answering these questions, conditions in pre-colonial India began to assume importance. Land ownership and revenue collection by the state became themes of historical study, but the exploration of these questions was influenced by the prevailing preconceptions about the Indian past.

  India as ‘The Other’

  Trends such as these, deriving from Orientalist and Utilitarian notions about Asia, led, in the latter part of the nineteenth century to treating Asia as significantly different – ‘the Other’ of Europe. The central question related to the lack of a capitalist system in Asia, and the answers were thought to lie in the pre-modern history of Indian society and religion. The analyses of Karl Marx, in what he called the Asiatic Mode of Production, envisaged despotism and stagnancy as key characteristics which nullified movements towards change parallel to that of Europe. In the absence of private property there were no intermediary groups between king and peasant, nor classes or class conflict of a kind that would lead to dialectical change. This was further nullified by the absence of commercial centres and cities specializing in production for a market which, if they had existed, might have encouraged economic change. The theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production has been resorted to from time to time in the last century for reasons of current politics to explain the inability of Asian societies to develop capitalist systems. Accepting the idea of Oriental Despotism, Karl Wittfogel argued that the control of the irrigation system – the hydraulic machinery – lay in the hands of the bureaucracy in Asian states, and this allowed the ruler to be despotic. The theory was widely discussed by Asian Marxist historians, who pointed out that there was little historical evidence to support it. The question of technologies, such as irrigation and their impact on Indian history, is in any case far more complex than the simplistic notion of bureaucracies controlling water management and thereby the entire economy.

  Another area that brought forth debates among those involved with Indian administration in the nineteenth century concerned the origins of caste. The possible genesis was said to be from regulations of kinship and marriage or occupation, religious functions or political hierarchies. Caste was linked to religion and the close connection between the two was seen as a barrier to economic change. This was discussed in Max Weber’s study of the religion of India, focusing on Hinduism. Castes were projected as distinct and separate, with no social action across castes being possible. Max Weber was also concerned with the non-emergence of capitalism in India, but his perspective was different from that of Karl Marx. He surveyed a variety of religious sects, and the underlining feature that he emphasized was the absence of a Puritan ethic in their belief and function. This for him was a crucial factor in the emergence of capitalism in Europe. The Puritan ethic favoured frugality, saving and investment of wealth, a commitment to a vocation and a concern with the salvation of the soul. Economic rationality had to be present in the religious teaching of the ethic. The economic rationality of a number of Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina sects was thought to have played a marginal role. Even those Islamic sects in India that were significant to its commerce, and whose religious perceptions were heavily infused with the local religious interests of commercial castes, were excluded, since India was seen as a Hindu civilization. Curiously, the contribution of colonialism to the emergence of capitalism in Europe was given no attention in this analysis. The intention was to depict a situation in contrast to the European, even if the depiction had to be exaggerated.

  Weber’s study of Indian society in terms of its caste components and its interface with religious activity was not an isolated interest. This was an area in which a number of philologists, sociologists and specialists of religious studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had developed an interest, often seeing the Indian evidence as indicative of a different system from those now familiar to European scholars. Emile Durkheim’s studies helped to recognize survivals from earlier societies in the rituals of later historical periods. His demarcation between beliefs and rituals was significant to later studies of Vedic sacrifice, and the centrality of deity to religion and its absence in Buddhism was also a matter of considerable debate in defining religion. Marcel Mauss and H. Hubert analysed the ritual of sacrifice in some detail, particularly in attempts to separate the sacred from the profane. Mauss’s work on gift-giving was pathbreaking in examining the links between social and religious relationships, and early Indian texts were central to these studies. Celestin Bougie raised the question of whether caste was characteristic of Hindu society alone, or whether it could be found in other societies. This led him to define caste as more pertinent to jatis – hereditary groups arranged hierarchically, with unequal rights, a separation based on taboos of marriage rules, food and custom, and a resistance to unification with others. This was a different analysis from that of many Indologists, for whom the definition of caste was restricted to varna or ritual status and viewed in terms of brahmanical culture. Jati and varna did not annul each other, but had different origins and functions.

  ‘Discovering’ the Indian Past

  When European scholars in the late eighteenth century first became curious about the past of India their sources of information were largely brahmans, who maintained that the ancient tradition was preserved in Sanskrit works about which they alone were knowledgeable. Thus, much of the early history of India was reconstructed almost entirely from Sanskrit texts, and reflected views associated with their authors. Many of these works were texts on religion or manuals of ritual, which coloured the interpretation of early Indian culture. Even texts with other concerns often had brahman authors and commentators, and were therefore biased in favour of those in authority, generally adhering to brahmanical theories of society irrespective of whether or not they had widespread historical applicability. For example, caste as described in texts such as the Dharmashastras referred to varna distinctions, a hierarchy of ritual status creating a closed stratification of society, apparently imposed from an early period and thereafter preserved almost intact for many centuries. The lower castes were seen from the perspective of the upper-caste brahman authors of the texts. Yet the actual working of caste in Indian society permitted of variation, in accordance with
local conditions, which the authors of the Dharmashastras were reluctant to admit.

  It is curious that there were only a few attempts to integrate the texts studied by Indologists with the data collected by ethnographers. Both constituted substantial but diverse information on Indian society. Presumably the bifurcation was influenced by the distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ peoples, the latter being said to have no literature. Those who studied oral traditions were regarded as scholars but of another category. Such traditions were seen as limited to bards, to lower castes and the tribal and forest peoples, and as such not reliable when compared to the texts of the higher castes and the elite. Had the two been seen as aspects of the same society, the functioning of caste would have been viewed as rather different from the theories of the Dharmashastras.

  The use of evidence from a variety of different sources that were later to become dominant was a challenge to certain aspects of textual evidence, but a corroboration of others, thus providing a more accurate and less one-sided picture of the past. Evidence from contemporary inscriptions, for example, became increasingly important. A small interest developed in genealogies and local chronicles. James Tod gathered information from bards and local chronicles for a history of various Rajput clans, but this did not lead to greater interest in collecting bardic evidence or assessing the role of bards as authors of local history. Tod tended to filter the data through his own preconceptions of medieval European society, and was among those who drew parallels with European feudalism, albeit of a superficial kind. He popularized the notion that the Rajputs were the traditional aristocracy and resisted Muslim rule, disregarding their political alliances and marriage relations with Muslim rulers. L. P. Tessitori made collections of genealogies and attempted to analyse them, but these never found their way into conventional histories. He too consulted local bards in Rajasthan and collected their records.