The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  For convenience, the categories of societies may be listed as hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, peasants and townsmen. In setting out these categories the intention is not to suggest that they were demarcated and separate throughout history. These were predominant categories in different ecological regions, but there were overlaps and changes alongside the historical change that the region underwent. Nor is it intended to set these out in a strictly evolutionary order, each experiencing the previous stage and evolving into the next. Nevertheless, hunter-gatherers had a minimal organization, whereas urban societies were far more complex. Their activities and their relationships with each other need explanation when they surface both in the historical sources and as part of historical events. It was not characteristic of these societies to be invariably self-contained and isolated, for there were overlaps as, for example, in systems of kinship or in the interdependence of some. Even the normative texts that present a homogeneous society have to concede variations in occupation, patriarchy, matriliny, marriage forms and inheritance rules. The importance of these categories is underlined by the fact that until recent centuries such communities could be found juxtaposed in many parts of the subcontinent, although particular categories were predominant in each area. Now that they have been recognized, their contribution to the making of Indian culture is also beginning to receive attention.

  Hunter-gatherers

  As the term implies, hunter-gatherers lived by hunting animals for food and other requirements, and by foraging for edible plants. Breeding animals or growing crops were not part of their activity, so they were distinct from pastoralists and peasants. They were organized in small bands, sometimes constituted of a few families, and were unfamiliar with maners of status distinction or social organization beyond the family or a larger group linked through kinship. They used the forest and the scrublands as their resource. Hunting grounds may have been nominally demarcated, but such territories were large enough to accommodate more than one group. Such groups could therefore have lived in isolation, provided there were no demands on the territory within which they hunted. When such demands occurred, as when the cultivators from nearby villages or the neighbouring state began to clear forests and start cultivating the cleared land, the existing hunter-gatherers understandably resorted to a ferocious defence of their territory. It is possible that descriptions of those outside the pale of caste society – such as the Shabaras or even the demonic figures said to inhabit the forest, against whom the heroes of the epics had to fight – could be exaggerated accounts of such forest-dwellers resisting intruders. The rakshasas of the texts were projected as supernatural beings, and, as part of the unknown wilderness, some were also demonized forest-dwellers.

  One of the most graphic descriptions of clearing a forest to establish a settlement occurs in the Mahabharata, where the burning of the Khandava Forest to clear land for the settlement of Indraprastha led to large numbers of animals, as well as human and demonic inhabitants, being burnt to death. The presentation of forest-dwellers as demonic would have emphasized their being alien to caste society. The Shabaras, Pulindas, Nishadas and so on, frequently mentioned in early texts, would have been the prototype. The conventional description is that they were stocky in build, dark in complexion, with bloodshot eyes and speaking a strange language. Banabhatta, writing in the seventh century AD, described such groups in his Harshacharita, but some among them had been acculturated and their activities were similar to those of neighbouring peasant societies.

  As this description indicates, forest-dwellers were not confined to being hunter-gatherers. Some were shifting cultivators, or were horticulturalists, and some practised sedentary cultivation. Their societies were organized in clans and the larger unit was the tribe; this organization distinguished them from peasant cultivators and caste society. Social hierarchy received little attention and generally the differentiation was only between the chief, who had the highest status, and the other clansmen. Status and bonding based on kinship relations were more common. They had a preference for living in forests and used a limited technology, their religion was largely animistic, their rituals and beliefs created by shamans, and their isolation permitted them to use their own language.

  Awareness of such groups is apparent from early sources, and they were not entirely excluded from the dichotomy underlying much of the thinking about the environment and human activity. The demarcation between what was called the grama, village, and the aranya, forest or wilderness, and later the kshetra, literally field, and the vana, forest, reflects a perceived opposition between the two systems. In actual practice the dichotomy was not so sharp and the one faded into the other, but the divide was maintained in theory. The forest was the unknown, the wild, the unpredictable, whereas the settlement was predictable and subject to known laws. Fantasies about the people of the forest, be they apsaras, celestial maidens, or rakshasas, demons, occur more frequently in the earlier literature.

  But there was a perceptible shift in attitudes towards forest-dwellers from earlier to later times. Initially, the forest was the habitat of those regarded as outside the social pale. Subsequently, the establishing of hermitages in the forests and the preference of ascetics for forest retreats led to some romanticizing of the forest. But, parallel to this, the state and the rulers treated forest-people with some suspicion. The Arthashastra of Kautilya advised the king not to trust forest-chiefs and verged on regarding them with hostility. From the mid-first millennium AD onwards there were references to the uprooting of forest-dwellers, or to their conquest or assimilation becoming necessary to the foundation of new kingdoms. Encroachments were doubtless intensified from this period, what with clearing forests for cultivation or cutting routes through them. The persistence of such societies to the present time, and in appreciable number, is an indication of their having been resilient as a population and distinctive in culture.

  In recent times there has been a debate on whether or not they should be regarded as the adivasis, the earliest indigenous inhabitants of India. The game of ‘who was there first’ played by those claiming to speak on behalf of Aryans, or Dravidians or Austro-Asiatics, or whatever, is historically not viable. Not only are the claims to these identities as being historical and having an immense antiquity untenable, but the paucity of the required evidence to prove this makes it impossible to give answers with any certainty. Adivasi societies are not fossilized societies. The historical legitimacy of groups such as forest tribes lies in recognizing their way of life and in analysing the significance of their contribution to the creation of Indian culture since early times. Given that the precise meaning of the term ‘tribe’ remains controversial and is not uniformly defined, it becomes even more difficult to deduce an authentic history. Confrontations between forest-dwellers and migrating peasants, or with the armies of a kingdom, would result – if the former were overcome by the latter – in the conversion of the former to caste society.

  Pastoralists

  Another category, more frequently met with in Indian history than historians admit, is that of the pastoralists. Some pastoralists were nomadic, their circuits varying in distance, while others were semi-sedentary, occasionally practising a minimal agriculture as well. Most pastoralists were part of a system of exchange that brought them into contact with cultivators and others. Hence the preference for the term agro-pastoralism, which registers the presence of agriculture even in predominantly pastoral societies. Some acted as carriers of goods and this widened their range of contacts. Pastoral circuits encouraged possibilities of migration and the exploration of new grazing grounds, and therefore involved the history of the movements of peoples.

  Pastoral societies generally had a fairly conventional organization, with marginal variations. The family formed the core and patrilineal descent was often traced from a common ancestor. Kinship, whether actual or fictive, was essential to identity and to loyalty, with a premium on the latter. This ensured the coherence of the larger unit, the clan, which bec
ause of constant movement would otherwise tend to get dispersed. Charisma grew out of defending the clan when attacked. The clan was relatively egalitarian with a sharing of the produce, although a better and bigger share was collected by the chief. Where herds were acquired through raids, as described in the Rig-Veda, the clan chief had to be a successful raider to retain his status. A group of clans constituted what have been called tribes, although this word can cover diverse forms of social groups. Among pastoralists, membership of a tribe generally included those claiming common grazing grounds and descent from a common ancestor, with a common language and customs, as well as rituals. The creation of a tribe could be occasioned by political needs when searching for new pastures or attacking sedentary societies. The tribe can be viewed as segmentary, moving away from the family as the nucleus to larger entities such as lineages which were identified by a common, mythical ancestor. Where descent was unilineal the emphasis was on kinship, whether actual or fictive.

  Pastoralists from central Asia intervened from time to time in the history of India, often because of disturbances in central Asia that resulted in migrations and incursions or invasions further south. Such disturbances are thought to have led indirectly to the arrival of the Indo-Aryan speakers and to the Parthians, Shakas, Kushanas, Hunas and Turks. But other pastoral groups within the subcontinent were also important, such as the cattle-keepers in the peninsula. As a component of agriculture and exchange, these filled in the spaces between peasant societies. Cattle-keepers, apart from providing dairy produce, also acted as carriers of commodities for exchange. The banjaras continued to perform this role until quite recently. The frequency of memorials to local heroes defending cattle herds in western India and the peninsula is a pointer to the importance of pastoralism.

  In the upper reaches of the mountains where agriculture was scarce, transhumance became a practice regulated by the change of season, as it is in many parts of the world. The animals were taken up to pastures at higher elevations in the summer and then brought back in the autumn. This regular movement encouraged incipient trade, as, for example, in the exchange of rice from the Indian side in the Himalayan region for tea from Tibet, an exchange that has elsewhere been called ‘a vertical economy’.

  Transhumance provided the additional pasturage that at lower altitudes came from cultivating fodder crops or from an arrangement with farmers. There was considerable interaction between pastoralists and peasants, unlike the societies of hunter-gatherers and others, between whom such links were lacking. Pastoralists generally had (and continue to have) a symbiotic relationship with agriculturalists. When the crop was harvested a herd of sheep, goats or cattle was brought by herders to feed on the stubble. The animal droppings manured the land. As a by-product some exchange of essential items also took place. The effectiveness of this system required that the annual circuit of the pastoralists and its timing remained relatively unchanged, so that it was coordinated with harvesting activities. The relationship between the herder and the farmer was almost contractual. Such symbiotic relations of agro-pastoralism could have a considerable antiquity.

  Societies with a strong clan organization or those determined by lineage identity were frequently chiefdoms; these could be small and simple or could be larger confederacies. The emphasis was on relationships based on kinship bonds. The determining of marriage circles, namely the regulations regarding the taking and giving of women in marriage, were worked out in terms of relationships between various clans. Rules of inheritance could also mark the status of the clan. More complex systems would exclude those who were not members of the clan, but who nonetheless had other connections with the clan. These could be religious functionaries, such as shamans and priests, or could be those who provided labour. The former defined the belief systems and rituals of the clan. The latter were sometimes enslaved persons who had been captured after a raid or those who were not members of the clan. The change from a chiefdom to a kingdom, or the emergence of a state, with its attendant characteristics of the concentration of political power, rudimentary administration, revenue and other such changes, was usually accompanied by a greater reliance on peasant agriculture.

  Peasants

  The predominant category was that of peasant society. Historians have underlined the role of peasants as producers of food and providers of revenue. The revenue was a stipulated amount of agricultural produce claimed by the ruling group. The change from the categories of hunter-gatherers to pastoralism to agriculture involved using a decreasing area of land, but an increasingly more intensive use of the land. Whereas in the earlier two categories the landscape remained substantially unchanged, agriculture required clearing and cultivation. If the clearing was on a part of the grazing grounds or forested areas there could be confrontations between the societies living in each. It is generally thought that agriculture resulted in an increase of the population, the relative predictability of agricultural produce supporting larger numbers. Surplus food feeds non-producers and therefore elites, priests, soldiers and traders become viable. Unlike pastoral produce that cannot be stored for too long, grain was more easily stored and could therefore be used over a longer period. It has also been argued that density of population and a constant proximity to animals can result in the more rapid spread of disease, so that the increase in population could be offset to some extent by vulnerability to disease.

  Peasants, unlike the earlier categories, were sedentary and permanent occupants of the land they cultivated, and the cultivation was not dispersed. This perhaps made them less autonomous than pastoralists. Up to a point this also assisted in holding them down and peasants have generally had a subordinate status in social hierarchies. Peasant discontent was expressed most commonly in India through migrating to new lands, and only in the early second millennium AD is there evidence for what some have interpreted as revolts. In this, the situation is different from that of the Chinese peasant, given the frequency of peasant revolts in early Chinese history. Peasants were much more dependent on the land, a dependence that was also expressed in the worship of deities, generally goddesses, symbolizing what mattered most to the peasant – the earth and fertility.

  Peasants were more frequently identified by castes, which were distinct from clans as they were generally not kin-related, nor did they necessarily own resources in common. Peasant society was of various kinds, with differentiation of status based on ownership or arrangements regarding tenure with either superior owners or the state. At the simplest level, those who cultivated their own land paid a tax to the state, and those who cultivated land owned by landowners paid them a rent. Historical analyses involve assessments of the extraction of revenue from their labour and the degrees of unfreedom to which they were subjected. Peasant agriculture was also a necessary precondition of the formation of states and the evolution of cities, since it could produce the agricultural surplus to maintain populations that were not tied to producing their food.

  Peasant societies were closely linked to the emergent state. This could have been a primary state, newly formed in an area, or else a secondary state where it had earlier been part of a larger state system and then become an independent state for the first time. Apart from claiming a demarcated territory, the state had legal authority over the population and over resources, was sovereign in governing and exercised power through a hierarchy of administration. The institutions of the state such as the treasury, the administrative structure, the focus of power encapsulated in the army or in systems of coercion, were concentrated in the capital which was generally the most important town.

  Townsmen

  The genesis of towns varied: some began as administrative centres, with a focus on the location of the treasury where the tribute was brought; some as centres of craft production more specialized than in villages; some as pilgrimage centres; and some as centres of exchange. An area could have a hierarchical network of villages and small towns culminating in a central city. The physical plan of a town focused on a defence
circuit and the central location of those in authority, and reflected economic linkages of production and exchange. The consumption of wealth was also thought of as characteristic of some cities. The concentrations of people were generally those involved in the production of specialized items and their exchange: they were artisans and merchants. But a number of them retained links with rural areas, and towns also housed groups that were transitional between village and city. Townspeople depended on the countryside for much of their food. This encouraged rural-urban relationships that varied and were not uniform.

  There was a more marked division in the specializations characteristic of towns as compared to villages. As the loci of craft production and of exchange there was a premium on quantity, since production catered to more than a single village; and, given the concentration of specialists and the more extensive distribution of products, there was also an emphasis on quality. Both these demands frequently led to some organization or association of craftsmen and artisans where occupational requirements had priority. This was extended to associations of merchants whose occupation was to transport and distribute the items produced for exchange. Such associations, similar to guilds, became central to urban life. The bond began as an occupational one, but came to include marriage circles if the association became sufficiently large. Its identity was further established when it began to receive investments and property. Such associations also became patrons of religious sects and, where there was wealth, donations from them were recorded at sacred centres.