The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  The flood supposedly occurred many thousands of years ago and is a time-marker in the narrative. The sequence of descent is in the form of genealogies that were obviously fictional since they cover almost a hundred generations. The descent is unbroken and the pattern suggests an attempt to present a continuous narrative of the past. A point of culmination is the war at Kurukshetra, described in the Mahabharata, which acts as another time-maker, after which the present cycle of time – the Kaliyuga – commences. The date for this is given in the form of a planetary configuration. It was calculated many centuries later for astronomical purposes, probably by Aryabhatta, and is equivalent to 3102 BC. There seems to have been a conflation of the date for the Kaliyuga with the date for the war, as 3102 BC would be far too early for such a war and would be in conflict with historical evidence suggesting a later date. After the account of the war, the narrative goes on to chronicle the dynasties of the historical period. The listing of the dynasties and their kings brings the account up to about the mid-first millennium AD. At this point the narrative in the Puranas comes to a close and this is thought to be the final date of the composition of the early Puranas.

  Such traditional accounts were collected and written many centuries after the events they claim to record. As long as the Puranic genealogical tradition was the monopoly of the sutas, bards, it was oral. When the tradition came to be used to legitimize kings of later times, it was shuffled, compiled, edited and given a written form for easy reference. It therefore encapsulates a late perspective on the past. As with all such traditions, it cannot be taken literally. These sections of the Puranas are not entirely mythical, since they contain some references to historical dynasties. But claims to factual history need to be used with circumspection, more so than with some other textual data. Such texts raise many historical problems about authorship, date, interpolations and veracity. It is difficult to ascertain the veracity of the genealogical sections, since only a few names find mention in other sources and there are substantial differences between the genealogies in various texts. Genealogies are known to be stretched and contracted as required, and to have legends woven in.

  The name Manu is linked to the generic base for manava, meaning ‘mankind’. The myth about the first ruler, Prithu, clearing the forests and introducing cultivation and cattle-herding has echoes of early settlements, familiar from archaeology. The story of the flood in all its details immediately brings to mind the earlier Mesopotamian legend, also borrowed by the Hebrews in the story of Noah’s Ark. In Indian sources it may have filtered down from Harappan traditions that in turn could have been derived from the Mesopotamians. At the time the Puranas were finally revised and edited royal families began tracing their origin to the Solar and Lunar lines, and there was naturally an attempt to connect these with what were believed to be the earliest rulers.

  The link between the Puranas and the epics is that the descent of Manu’s progeny comes down to the heroes and clans who are the actors in the epics. Inevitably, there are also parallel narratives which could have been borrowed or taken from a common source. Narrative literature, where it is initially preserved as an oral tradition, is frequently stitched together from bardic fragments. Hence the insistence on single authorship, even if the text is far too long to have been composed by a single author. This also permits constant interpolation, making it difficult to give a date to the composition. Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past. A later age looks back with nostalgia at an earlier one and depicts it in terms of ideals and activities now receding. The social assumptions implicit in the narratives are of value to the historian even if the events are fictional.

  The Mahabharata brought into the story the many segments of the Lunar line and its narratives were pre-eminently stories of societies adhering to clan and lineage organization. References to complexities of administering kingdoms would be later interpolations. The Ramayana is more clearly an endorsement of monarchy and the heroes are of the Solar line. Within each epic, societies that do not conform to monarchy are also visible. The epics therefore give us a glimpse of that which had receded or was different from conventional kingship. They are each concerned with events that are difficult to date since many passages were added at times later than the original composition. The versions we have today are generally placed in a chronological bracket between the mid-first millennium BC to the mid-first millennium AD. Therefore they can hardly be regarded as authentic sources for the study of a narrowly defined period. Hence historians have abandoned the concept of an ‘epic age’. Incidents from the epics, in the nature of bardic fragments, can have some historical authenticity provided supporting evidence can be found to bear them out. Attempts are therefore being made to correlate archaeological data with events described in the epics. An example of this is the flood at Hastinapur, evident from archaeology and mentioned in the epic, which has been used to date the war to c. 900 BC. But such correlations remain tenuous since chronologies and locations pose insurmountable problems. Poetic fantasy in epic poetry, undoubtedly attractive in itself, is not an ally of historical authenticity.

  The Mahabharata as it survives today is among the longest single poems. The main action revolves around what has become famous as the contest between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, and is set in the fertile and strategic region around Delhi. The Kauravas, with their capital at Hastinapura, were the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra, and the Pandavas – the five sons of Pandu – were their cousins. The Pandavas became heirs to the Kuru territories, since Dhritrashtra was blind and therefore not eligible to rule. But Pandu had a skin ailment that made the succession of the Pandavas uncertain. This was a culture in which he who ruled was required to be free of any physical blemish, at least in theory. Dhritrashtra, in the hope of avoiding a conflict between the cousins, divided the territory and gave half to the Pandavas, who ruled from Indraprastha (in the vicinity of Delhi). But this arrangement did not satisfy the Kauravas, who challenged the Pandavas to a gambling match. The latter staked all their wealth including their patrimony and their joint wife, and lost, but as a compromise were permitted to retain half of the patrimony and their wife, provided they first went into exile for thirteen years. At the end of this period the Kauravas were still unwilling to allow them to rule, so the matter had to be settled through a war. They battled for eighteen days on the plain at Kurukshetra, resulting in the annihilation of many clans, including most of the Kauravas. The Pandavas, after ruling long and peacefully, renounced rulership, installed a grandson and went to the City of the Gods in the Himalaya.

  The ambience of the Mahabharata is that of clan-based societies, particularly in the case of the Yadavas. Intervening frequently in the narrative, as a close friend and adviser of the Pandavas, is a Yadava chief, Krishna. Where the Pandavas and Kauravas were descendants of Puru, the Yadavas were traced back to Puru’s elder brother, Yadu. There was therefore a distant kinship connection. The geography of the Mahabharata focused on the Ganges-Yamuna doab and adjoining areas, involving the Kauravas and Pandavas, and also Saurashtra in Gujarat, where the Yadavas were based. Incidentally, these were two of the more active areas after the decline of the Harappan cities.

  Originally the Mahabharata may have been the description of a more localized feud, but it caught the imagination of the bards and in its final form virtually all the clans and peoples known to the bards were said to have participated in the battle. One reading of the symbolism of the war could be that it marked the termination of clan-based societies, since subsequent societies tended to support kingdoms. But as in all epic poetry, it has layers of meaning enriched by frequent additions. Its composition is traditionally ascribed to Vyasa, who also plays various enigmatic roles in the story, but it is not the work of a single person. It is no longer only the story of the feud and the war, but has acquired a number of episodes (some of which are unrelated to the main story) and a variety of interpolations, many of which are familiar in themselves, such as the Bhagavadgit
a. A distinction has been made between what is called the epic and the pseudo-epic, or between what have also been called the narrative sections – believed to be older – and the didactic sections added later. But even this is not invariably a reliable chronological divide.

  The Ramayana is much shorter than the Mahabharata despite later additions. The scene is set further east into the middle Ganges Plain and the Vindhyan forests. The original version is attributed to the poet Valmiki, who probably brought together bardic fragments and crafted them into poetry that was to become a hallmark of early Sanskrit literature. The many parallels to segments of the story from other narrative literature, such as the Buddhist Jatakas, would tend to support this. The language of the Ramayana is more polished and its concepts more closely related to later societies, although it is traditionally believed to be the earlier of the two. It is frequently described as the first consciously literary composition, the adi-kavya, a description not used for the other epic.

  Rama, the heir of the King of Kosala, married Sita, the Princess of Videha. Rama’s stepmother wanted her son to succeed to the throne and successfully contrived to have Rama banished for fourteen years. Accompanied by his wife and his younger brother Lakshmana, the exile took them into the forests of the peninsula where they lived as forest-dwellers. But Ravana – the demon King of Lanka – kidnapped Sita. Rama organized an army, taking the assistance of Hanuman, the leader of the monkeys. A fierce battle was fought against Ravana, in which Ravana and his army were destroyed and Sita was rescued. Sita had to prove her innocence by undergoing a fire ordeal, and was eventually reunited with Rama. The fourteen years of exile having ended, Rama, Sita and Lakshmana returned to Kosala, where they were warmly welcomed. Rama was installed as king, his father having died during his exile, and his reign has been mythologized as associated with prosperity and justice. To this day the term ramarajya (the reign of Rama) is used to describe a Utopian state.

  The narrative follows the recognized forms of the morphology of a folk-tale, with contests, heroic deeds, obstacles and their resolution. There are many variants of the basic story, some with a different ethical message such as the Buddhist and the later Jaina versions, and some of a still later date with striking changes in the narrative relating to Sita. In one Buddhist version Rama and Sita are brother and sister who on their return from exile, ruled for many thousands of years. In the Buddhist tradition sibling origin symbolized the purest ancestry and therefore this assumes the highest status for Rama and Sita. An early Jaina version had a rational explanation for the unconventional descriptions of the Valmiki version and the major actors in the story were all Jainas.

  These variations and their treatment in the divergent narratives point to the story being used as a means of expressing diverse cultures rather than conforming to a single homogeneous cultural tradition. The story travelled widely all over India and Asia, wherever Indian culture reached, and these variations reflect the perceptions of the story by different societies who interpreted the idiom and the symbols in their own way. The widespread appropriation of both epics is reflected in the tendency to link local topography all over the Indian countryside with the characters and events from the stories.

  The original version of the Ramayana is generally dated to the mid-first millennium BC. The conflict between Rama and Ravana probably reflects an exaggerated version of local conflicts, occurring between expanding kingdoms of the Ganges Plain and the less sedentary societies of the Vindhyan region. The kingdom of Kosala represents the sophistication of the newly emerging monarchies and is a contrast to the society of the rakshasas, or demons, where the latter might be an exaggerated depiction of the forest tribes who were demonized because their pattern of life was so different from that of the monarchies. The dichotomy of kingdom and forest is an illustration of the vision of the world divided into grama and aranya – the settlement and the wilderness – which underlies much of the tension in Indian epic literature. The transference of events to a more southerly location may have been the work of editors of a later period, reflecting an expanded geography, as was possibly also the case in the depiction of Lanka itself as a city of immense wealth.

  Epic literature has an imagined space, central to its imagery, which is inhabited by people whose culture could be either alien or worth imitating. Such imagined space had a vague geographical location because it was used as a way of incorporating new peoples into the ambit of the culture of the epic. If the sea was the space of exile in the Odyssey, the forest plays the same role in the Indian epics. The theme of exile is virtually predictable as it represents the migration and settling of communities in forested areas, which could bring them into conflict with existing communities. Exile also provides scope for the poet to prolong the story in a variety of ways.

  The Vedic Corpus

  Had these been the only sources available, the reconstruction of the beginnings of Indian history would have been relatively simple. But two other kinds of evidence have contributed to our understanding of historical beginnings, both predating the sources discussed above. In the nineteenth century the reading of the Vedic corpus and subsequent philological studies led to a different reconstruction of the past, at variance with the traditional story. European scholars of Sanskrit had recognized that it was related in structure and sound to Greek and Latin. This led to the theory of a common ancestral language, Indo-European, used by the ancestors of people speaking these languages.

  The focus of this research was on the Vedic corpus, the composition of which was earlier than that of the epics and Puranas, and the language was a more archaic form of Sanskrit that is now called Old Indo-Aryan. This differentiated it from the later form of Sanskrit referred to as Classical Sanskrit. The Vedas were primarily manuals of rituals and commentaries on these, the narrative being incidental. Epic literature was the narrative of the society of heroes and the Puranas were sectarian literature of later times. Therefore the purpose of the epics, the Puranas and the Vedas, was different. Since the last were the earliest in time, Indian history was said to begin with the information that they contained. Unlike the Puranas and the epics, which have some explanation of the past, the Vedic corpus has little of this, but is a collection of compositions contemporary with the period from the mid-second millennium to the mid-first millennium BC. The reconstruction was therefore based on the readings made by modern scholars of the evidence in the corpus.

  Indo-European and Indo-Aryan are language labels, but in the nineteenth century these were also incorrectly used as racial labels and this confusion persists. The correct usage should be ‘Indo-European-speaking people’ and ‘Indo-Aryan-speaking people’, but the shortened labels, Indo-European and Indo-Aryan or Aryan, are commonly used. Language is a cultural label and should not be confused with race, which, although also a social construct, claims that it has to do with biological descent. Indo-European is a reconstructed language, working back from cognate languages, and its speakers had central Asia as their original habitat. Gradually, over many centuries, they branched out and as pastoralists spread far a field in search of fresh pastures. They also worked as carriers of goods intended for exchange. Some migrated to Anatolia, others to Iran, and some among the latter, it is thought, migrated to India. In the texts composed by them, such as the Avesta in Iran and the Rig-Veda in India, they refer to themselves as airiia and arya, hence the European term, Aryan. Vedic literature in the Indo-Aryan language has been studied intensively, as an early textual source of an Indo-European language which was concerned with rituals and their explanation, and was regarded as the most sacred. The beginnings of Indian history were associated with the coming of the ‘Aryans’, some time in the second millennium BC.

  But this picture of the past was again to be disturbed in the twentieth century. In the 1920s archaeology revealed the existence of an urban civilization, dating to a period prior to the Rig-Veda, in the north-west of India: the Indus civilization or the Harappa culture. This discovery took the formative period of
civilization back to the third millennium BC. Archaeology has provided evidence on the evolution of cultures from pre-Harappan societies, and this goes back still further in time. The Harappa culture provides no clues to the rule of Manus, nor does the Vedic corpus.

  There are clearly many sources of information on the beginnings of Indian history. Archaeological evidence is chronologically more precise, but cannot be used to identify any culture as ‘Aryan’ since archaeology, in the absence of a script, cannot supply information on a language. Unfortunately, the Harappan script remains undeciphered. The theory of an Aryan invasion no longer has credence. The Rig-Veda refers to skirmishes between groups, some among those who identify themselves as aryas and some between the aryas and dasas. The more acceptable theory is that groups of Indo-Aryan speakers gradually migrated from the Indo-Iranian borderlands and Afghanistan to northern India, where they introduced the language. The impetus to migrate was a search for better pastures, for arable land and some advantage from an exchange of goods. The migrations were generally not disruptive of settlements and cultures. There is also the argument that these were dissident groups that had broken away from the speakers of Old Iranian, whose language and ideas came to be encapsulated in the Avesta. There is a significant reversal of meaning in concepts common to both the Avesta and the Rig-Veda.

  There is a tendency among those who oppose the idea of Aryan speakers coming from outside India to equate invasion with migration. Historically the two are distinctly different processes in terms of what would have been the preconditions of either, such as the activities and organization involved, or the pattern of social and historical change that ensued. The migrant groups would have remained small as there is little evidence of the substantial cultural replacements associated with massive migrations. Migration raises different questions from those of invasion, relating to cultural interactions, linguistic changes and the defining of social status among both the host groups and those arriving.