The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  Those interested in studying the Indian past and present through its languages and literatures, its ethnology and religion, gradually increased. The nineteenth century saw considerable advances in what came to be called Indology – the study of India by non-Indians, using methods of investigation developed by European scholars in the nineteenth century. In India the use of modern techniques to ‘rediscover’ the past came into practice. Among these was the decipherment of the brahmi script, largely by James Prinsep. Many inscriptions pertaining to the early past were written in brahmi, but knowledge of how to read the script had been lost. Since inscriptions form the annals of Indian history, this decipherment was a major advance that led to the gradual unfolding of the past from sources other than religious and literary texts. Epigraphic sources introduced many new perspectives that have as yet not been exhausted. They were used for firming up historical chronology but their substantial evidence on social and economic history, as also on the history of religious sects, was recognized only subsequently. Numismatics took off from reading bilingual coin-legends, some in Greek and brahmi on the Indo-Greek coins minted at the turn of the Christian era. The name of the king written in Greek had an equivalent written in brahmi, which provided some clues to the decipherment of brahmi. Alexander Cunningham explored the countryside searching for archaeological remains, using the seventh-century itinerary of the Chinese Buddhist monk, Hsüan Tsang, as a guide, and summarized his explorations in The Ancient Geography of India. Professionally, many of these scholars were surveyors and engineers, charting the colony in more senses than one. Textual analyses, which had begun with Sanskrit texts, were now slowly including Pali texts associated with Buddhism and, later, Prakrit texts of the Jaina tradition. This was careful, meticulous work and enlarged the data on the Indian past. The interpretation of what was found was of course most often within the framework of a colonial perspective on the Indian past.

  Many who had visited India from afar in the early past recorded their impressions for various purposes, and these are available as Greek, Latin, Chinese and Arabic writings, which provide different perspectives from the Indian. The descriptions of the visitors can sometimes be correlated with the more tangible remains of the past made possible through excavations. The corpus of evidence on Buddhism, for instance, was increased with the availability of the chronicles from Sri Lanka. Buddhist Canonical texts translated into Chinese and various central Asian languages filled in lacunae, in some cases providing significant variant readings. Similarly, texts in Arabic and Persian relating to the history of India began to be studied in their own right, and ceased being regarded only as supplements to Islamic culture in western Asia. Strangely, Indians travelling outside the subcontinent do not seem to have left itineraries of where they went or descriptions of what they saw. Distant places enter the narratives of storytelling only very occasionally.

  Notions of Race and their Influence on Indology

  Linguistic studies, especially those of Sanskrit grammarians, helped develop the discipline of comparative philology in Europe, which in turn led not only to encouraging the study of the early languages of Asia but also to re-reading the early history of Eurasia. The study of Sanskrit and the ethnography of India also fed into what was emerging as a new perspective on human society, the discipline of ‘race science’ as it came to be called. Race was a European invention that drew from a variety of contemporary studies and situations, such as the categorizing of plants by Linnaeus, Social Darwinism arguing for the survival of the fittest, and the triumph of imperialism that was used to claim superiority for the European.

  Social concerns, which later incorporated racial attitudes, governed the British approach towards their empire. Traditional aristocracies were regarded as racially superior and their status upheld prior to their being incorporated into the new colonial hierarchy. This also enhanced the status of the colonizer. Traditions could be invented, drawing on a supposed history and legitimizing authority. But theories of race were also applied to larger categories of people, believed to be the authors of civilizations.

  F. Max Müller is one example of a scholar who reflected on race while studying Sanskrit. His major contribution to the interpretation of Indian history was the reconstruction of a perceived Aryan presence, or even on occasion a race, from his study of the Vedas. Like Mill, Max Müller did not think it necessary to visit India, yet he projected Indian society as a reversal of the European, evidenced by his books India, What Can it Teach Us? and Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas. His fanciful descriptions of Indians made of them a gentle, passive people who spent their time meditating. His study of Vedic Sanskrit and philology brought him to his theories about the Aryans. In showing the similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, William Jones had argued for a monogenesis of language, suggesting that they had all descended from an ancestral language. Indo-European was now projected as such a language, a hypothetical language reconstructed from known languages that were related to each other within a structure of linguistic rules. This was often incorrectly extended to equating all those who spoke Indo-European languages with membership of an Aryan race. In the latter half of the nineteenth century discussions on social inequality were often projected in racial terms as in the writings of Gobineau.

  Max Müller maintained that the Aryans had originated in central Asia, one branch migrating to Europe and another settling in Iran, with a segment of the Iranian branch subsequently moving to India. He dated the earliest composition of the latter, the Rig-Veda, to about 1200 BC. The Aryans, he maintained, had invaded in large numbers and subordinated the indigenous population of northern India in the second millennium BC. They had introduced the Indo-Aryan language, the language of the conquerors who represented a superior civilization. The latter emerged as Vedic culture and became the foundation of Indian culture. Since a mechanism for maintaining racial segregation was required, this took the form of dividing society into socially self-contained and separate castes. The racial imprint may also have been due to the counterposing of arya with dasa, since it was argued that in the earliest section of the Vedic corpus, the Rig-Veda, the dasa is described as physically dissimilar to the arya, particularly with reference to skin colour. This was interpreted as the representation of two racial types. Race was seen as a scientific explanation for caste and the four main castes or varnas were said to represent the major racial groups. Their racial identity was preserved by the strict prevention of intermarriage between them.

  The equation of language and race was seen to be a fallacy even by Max Müller, but there was a tendency to use it as a convenient distinction. In his later writings he clarified this fallacy, but by then it had become common currency. That Aryan should have been interpreted in racial terms is curious, since the texts use it to refer to persons of status who speak Sanskrit and observe caste regulations. The equation had still wider ramifications. It appealed to some of those working on Dravidian languages, who proposed that there was a Dravidian race speaking Dravidian, prior to, and distinct from, the Aryan. They quoted in support the fact that Indo-Aryan is an inflected language, and therefore quite distinct from the Dravidian languages which are agglutinative. Gradually, Proto-Dravidian was projected as the original language and came to be equated with Tamil, which is not a historically or linguistically valid equation. Proto-Dravidian, like Indo-European, is a hypothetical language reconstructed from known Dravidian languages of which Tamil was one, and therefore Tamil would have evolved later. The theory of a Dravidian civilization prior to the coming of the Aryans was to be reinforced in the 1920s by the discovery of the cities of the Indus civilization, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, dating to the third millennium BC.

  The reaction in India to the theory of Aryan race was wide-ranging, even among those who were not historians. It came to be used – and continues to be used – in the political confrontations of various groups. This is demonstrated by two examples at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Jyotiba Phule, an authority for t
he Dalits, argued in the late nineteenth century that the Sanskrit-speaking brahmans were descended from the Aryans who were alien to India, and that the indigenous peoples of the lower castes were therefore the rightful inheritors of the land. This argument assumes a conflict between the dominant upper caste and the conquered, oppressed lower castes. This was the foundation of caste confrontation and an explanation for caste hierarchy. It was later to be used extensively in those political movements that sought to justify their non-Brahmin and anti-Brahmin thrust, especially in south India.

  At the opposite end, some are now propagating an interpretation of Indian history based on Hindu nationalism and what has come to be called the Hindutva ideology. Since the early twentieth century, this view has gradually shifted from supporting the theory of an invasion to denying such an event, now arguing that the Aryans and their language, Sanskrit, were indigenous to India. The amended theory became axiomatic to their belief that those for whom the subcontinent was not the land of their ancestors and the land where their religion originated were aliens. This changed the focus in the definition of who were indigenous and who were alien. The focus moved from caste to religion: the aliens were not the upper castes, but Muslims and Christians whose religion had originated in west Asia. The Communists were also added to this group for good measure! According to this theory only the Hindus, as the lineal descendants of the Aryans, could be defined as indigenous and therefore the inheritors of the land, and not even those whose ancestry was of the subcontinent, but who had been converted to Islam and Christianity.

  Mainstream historians of an earlier period differed from both these interpretations, particularly the second. They accepted the theory of an invasion, with the introduction of Indo-Aryan and its speakers as the foundation of Indian history. This appealed to members of the upper castes who identified themselves as the descendants of a superior race – the Aryans – some insisting that membership of this race implied a kinship connection with the British! The theory provided what was thought to be an unbroken, linear history for caste Hindus. However, the discovery of the Indus civilization and its city culture in the 1920s contradicted this theory of linear descent. The cities of the Indus civilization are of an earlier date than the composition of the Vedic corpus – the literature of the Indo-Aryan speaking people – and do not reflect an identity with this later culture. The insistence on a linear history for the Hindus is now the reason for some attempts to take the Vedic culture back in time and identify it with the Indus civilization. Today mainstream historians argue that despite little archaeological evidence of a large-scale Aryan invasion with a displacement of the existing cultures, there is linguistic evidence of the Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-European family, having been brought to northern India from beyond the Indo-Iranian borderlands and evolving through a series of probably small-scale migrations and settlements.

  A close affinity can be observed between the present-day Hindutva view of ‘the Aryans’ and nineteenth-century colonial views, in particular the theories of some Theosophists. Colonel Olcott, for example, was among the early Theosophists who maintained that the Aryans were indigenous to India, as was the language Indo-Aryan; that Aryan culture as the cradle of civilization spread from India to Europe; and that the Aryan literature – the Vedic corpus – was the foundation of knowledge. Such Theosophical views attracted some of the nineteenth-century Indian socio-religious reform movements, such as the Arya Samaj. The Theosophical movement in India had a number of British and European members, some of whom may have endorsed these ideas as a form of sympathy for Indian nationalism. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were times when there were links between various wide ranging or alternatively narrowly focused assortments of ideas, some of which involved theories of race, of the Aryans, of Theosophy and of nationalisms.

  By the mid-twentieth century, the notion that language and race can be equated was found to be invalid, and indeed the entire construction of unitary races was seriously doubted. The concept of an Aryan race fell apart. Race is essentially a social construct, although initially it was claimed to be based on biology. Recent genetic studies have further invalidated this claim. It is therefore more correct to refer to ‘the Indo-Aryan speaking peoples’ than to ‘the Aryans’, although the latter term can be used as a shorthand. It is important to emphasize that it refers to a language group and not to race, and language groups can incorporate a variety of people.

  History and Nationalism

  As we have seen, those who were most directly concerned with India in the nineteenth century were the British administrators, many of whom wrote on the history of India. Such histories tended to be ‘administrators’ histories’, recounting the rise and fall of dynasties and empires. This was also the predominant subject of historical study in Europe at that time. Admiration for the Roman Empire was imprinted both on those involved with the British Empire and on historians, such as Vincent Smith, writing on Indian history at the turn of the century; the first empire provided the model for the second. The protagonists of history were kings and the narration of events revolved around them. The autocratic king, oppressive and unconcerned with the welfare of his subjects, was the standard image of the Indian ruler, with a few exceptions such as Ashoka, Chandra Gupta II and Akbar. As for actual governing, the underlying assumption was that British administration was superior and a centralized bureaucracy was the best form of administration.

  In the late nineteenth century Indian historians followed the model of political and administrative history, producing dynastic histories highlighting the lives of rulers. But colonial explanations of the Indian past were not always acceptable to Indian historians. Historical theories were part of the growing political contestation, particularly now that the close relationship between power and knowledge was being tacitly recognized. The evolution of an Indian middle class familiar with the English language indicated more communication between the colonizer and the colonized.

  Most Indian historians of the early twentieth century were either participants in the national movement for independence or influenced by it. Prominent among them, and expressing varying degrees of nationalist sentiment, were R. Mitra, R. G. Bhandarkar, R. C. Dutt, A. S. Altekar, U. N. Ghoshal, K. P. Jayaswal, H. C. Raychaudhuri, R. K. Mookherjee, R. C. Majumdar, K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and H. C. Ojha. Historical interpretation often drew from existing views but could be changed to what was now regarded as a legitimate nationalist interpretation. Nationalist historians tended to endorse the more favourable views from colonial readings of the early past, but criticized the unfavourable. Thus, it was asserted that some institutions such as democracy and constitutional monarchy were familiar to the Indian past. References to the mantriparishad, the council of ministers, were compared to the working of the British Privy Council. Non-violence was praised as a special Indian contribution to civilization, yet at the same time the Gupta King, Samudragupta, was described as the Napoleon of India and his conquests much lauded. Nationalism was taken back to the fourth century BC with the opposition to Alexander’s campaign and the creation of the Mauryan Empire that extended over virtually the entire subcontinent. Aryan Vedic culture was viewed as the foundation of Indian civilization, its antiquity taken back to the second millennium BC. The emphases on indigenous origins of many past achievements were gradually becoming visible. There was an objection – not surprisingly – to the theory of Oriental Despotism, but an endorsement for the ancient past being a ‘Golden Age’; such an age being a prerequisite for claims to civilization. This view was an inevitable adjunct to nationalist aspirations in the early twentieth century. The Golden Age was either the entire Hindu period that was seen as unchanging and universally prosperous, or else the reign of the Gupta kings which historians, both Indian and British, had associated with positive characteristics and revival of the brahmanical religion and culture.

  Cultural achievement was measured in terms of the arts, literature and philosophy, with less attentio
n to descriptions of social realities. It also put a premium on Sanskrit sources compared to those in Pali, Prakrit or other languages. Sanskrit had been the language of the courts and of upper-caste Hinduism. What were regarded as lesser languages were assumed to have been used by people of lesser status. Sanskrit texts were given priority even where there were variants of the same narrative in other languages. Such variants, although known, were seldom analysed in a historically comparative way, a case in point being the different versions of the story of Rama. The Buddhist telling of the story in the Pali Jatakas, or the Prakrit versions of Jaina authors, were discussed in the context of the study of the Jatakas or of Jaina texts but seldom in a comparative way with similar works in Sanskrit, such as the Ramayana of Valmiki.

  Linked to this was a bête noire, casting its shadow on much of the early writing on ancient India. European historians working on this period had been brought up on the classical tradition of Europe, believing that the greatest human achievement was the civilization of the ancient Greeks – le miracle Grec. Consequently, every newly discovered culture was measured against the norms set by ancient Greece and invariably found to be lacking. Or, if there were individual features worth admiring, the instinct was to try and connect them with Greek culture. Vincent Smith, for some decades regarded as the pre-eminent historian of early India, was prone to this tendency. When writing of the murals at the famous Buddhist site at Ajanta and particularly of a painting supposedly depicting the arrival of an embassy from a Sassanian king of Persia, unconnected with Greece both artistically and historically, he states: