The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  This encourages a more incisive questioning of the sources. Archaeology is often a useful counterbalance as it provides evidence of material culture, on the basis of which one can observe some of the changes towards new social forms. The time-dimension of this change is often overlooked by modern commentators. It was a slow mutation over almost a thousand years. Initial attempts at maintaining a distance between societies were gradually eroded and, although cultures remained distinct, they also registered change from early to late periods. One of the more obvious but complex examples of this is illustrated in language changes.

  In the course of its evolution Vedic Sanskrit incorporated elements of Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic. This borrowing, it has been argued, was based on bilingualism or on the interrelations between the diverse groups that constituted the many societies of this time, even those who referred to themselves as aryas – those who used Indo-Aryan and were regarded as respected members of society. The historically relevant question is: how did Indo-Aryan become the dominant language of northern India, given the currency of other distinctly different languages? Dominance tends to be associated with power, effective technologies and claims to ritual superiority. These were claims made by the aryas, but why and how they were so widely accepted needs investigation.

  The grammar of Panini, the Ashtadhyayi, written in the fifth century BC, was an attempt to regulate the more familiar form of Sanskrit and structure its grammar. The upper castes were familiar with Sanskrit, although it is likely that Prakrit was preferred for routine usage and for general speech by that time. If there is evidence of borrowing from other local languages in the language used for ritual, then the borrowing must have been greater in everyday speech. Mixed languages would have partially blurred the linguistic demarcation between Aryan and non-Aryan speakers. At one level Sanskrit was to become a unifying factor in the subcontinent, but it also tended to isolate its speakers from those who used other languages. That some aspects of Vedic Sanskrit had already become obscure to its speakers is indicated by the need for etymological explanations, such as are contained in the Nirukta of Yaska. The codifying of the language in a grammar could also have been a way of preventing further linguistic change, or else of enabling those unfamiliar with the language to learn it more easily.

  Stratification through caste led increasingly to the upper castes having access to resources and subordinating the lower castes. It gave a ritual sanction to a variety of inequalities. The permanency or otherwise of this inequality varied according to group and occasion. Interrelationships between castes were influential in public life, which sometimes tended to divert attention away from distant political concerns and towards local loyalties. Where central political authority became remote, the nature of local functioning had clearer contours.

  The centrality of the yajna became a characteristic of Vedic Brahmanism. The contesting of this centrality released a range of new philosophical concepts and religious articulations. This is evident from the Upanishads, and from the ideologies that drew on these in the subsequent period, as well as from a range of other teachers who introduced new forms of belief and worship. The brahmanical contribution to the discussion in the Upanishads – what became the interconnected notions of karma and samsara – also became pivotal to the confrontation of the Shramanic sects such as the Buddhist and the Jaina, with Vedic Brahmanism, albeit in a differently defined form; and it was foundational to many sects of an even later period, giving rise to what has come to be called Puranic Hinduism, which was in many ways a departure from Vedic Brahmanism.

  It was also a time when various social groups left their imprint on the physical landscape. Small patches of forests and wasteland were cleared for cultivation to feed not only the growing population, but also to provide for the incipient centres of exchange. Some of these grew into towns by the mid-first millennium and were the base for urbanization in the Ganges Plain. The people who saw themselves as aryas were essentially unconcerned with whether they were indigenous or alien, since arya comes to be used as signifying status and culture. The difference is apparent from the Rig-Veda and the later Vedas. In the former, the divide between the arya and the dasa relates to language, ritual and custom. In the latter, there appears to have been a reshuffling of these and the divide changes to the arya being the respected one and dasa being a member of the subordinated group, but irrespective of origins. The words are taken from the earlier Veda but have by now acquired another meaning.

  Underlying these developments was the contestation between those who claimed the social status of arya and those who were excluded from this status, resulting in a continuous modification and transmutation of both. New people of diverse backgrounds were either recruited into the status or were excluded. The status was not biologically or racially determined but was recognized by other characteristics: by speech-forms deriving from the Indo-Aryan language; by belief systems and rituals as initially encoded in the Vedic corpus; and by the acceptance, at least in theory, of certain social codes eventually gathered together in the Dhartnasutras. The identification of the arya was therefore of a status that was modified from time to time by historical contingencies. It was neither a homogeneous nor a permanent ancestry. What was permanent to their self-perception was that they saw themselves as the dominant group, with the right to demand subservience or respect from others. By the mid-first millennium BC the societies of northern India had moved a long way from the agro-pastoral communities of the Rig-Veda and were now ensconced in the politically effective territories ruled by clan aristocracies or kings.

  5

  States and Cities of the Indo-Gangetic Plain

  C. 600-300 BC

  States and Cities

  The sixth century BC witnessed a transition to a new historical scene in north India with the establishment of kingdoms, oligarchies and chiefdoms, and the emergence of towns. Attention now shifted from the north-west and Punjab to the Ganges Plain, although the former area continued its activity. Changes in polity had begun somewhat earlier, but where they were accompanied by urbanization they were to become foundational to the flow of history in the Indian subcontinent. The preceding period had been one of accommodation or confrontation between polities based on clan organization and others experiencing the beginnings of kingship. Permanent settlement in a particular area gave a geographical identity to a clan, or a confederacy of clans, and subsequently this identity was given concrete shape by its claiming possession of the territory, then naming it after the ruling clan. Maintaining this possession required political organization, either as a gana-sangha, chiefdom, or as a kingdom. Polities of the earlier period, deriving their identity from the lineage of the ruling family, were gradually giving way to identification with territory and new forms of political authority, although traces of the continuity of descent from a particular ancestry can be found in the names given to the territories. The change to kingdoms was a more pronounced departure in the formation of states.

  The emergence of the gana-sangha might be better seen as a form of a proto-state. It was unlike a kingdom, since power was diffused, the stratification of its society was limited, and the ramifications of administration and coercive authority were not extensive. The persistence of the gana-sanghas in Indian history was quite remarkable, especially in the northern and western regions. Despite being conquered periodically, their resilience was demonstrated by their reappearance and continued presence until the mid-first millennium AD.

  A state has been described as a sovereign political entity and its rise assumes a complex network of conditions. These would include a density of population with a concentrated drawing on resources, agricultural or other; control over a defined, recognized territory; an urban centre as the location of authority, which could also be the location for craft activities that were produced for both local consumption and commercial exchange; diverse communities coming within a network of stratification and accepting unequal statuses; a political authority managing the incoming revenue
from taxes and their redistribution through at least a minimal administration; the assertion of authority through a monopoly of the agencies of coercion, both of armed force and the imposition of regulations and obligations; the awareness of diplomacy; and the sovereignty of the state being represented in the king as the focus of authority. The emergence of a state system frequently coincides with unequal power relations and access to resources and some social disparity. Such changes would also have sought support from various ideological justifications.

  Reference is made to the mahajanapadas, or the great janapadas, larger and more powerful than the earlier multiple janapadas, and some of these conformed to the definition of the state. Sixteen of them are listed in Buddhist texts as those of Anga, Magadha, the Vrijji confederacy and the Mallas in the middle Ganges Valley; Kashi, Kosala and Vatsa to its west; Kuril, Panchala, Matsya and Shurasena further west; Kamboja and Gandhara in the north-west; Avanti and Chedi in western and central India; and Assaka in the Deccan. This was the geography known to the early Buddhist Pali Canon. In Vedic sources Magadha and Anga are described as impure lands, but Magadha was to dominate the politics of the Ganges Plain. Assaka’s importance is related to the southern route to the peninsula, the dakshinapatha. The Vrijjis were a confederacy of eight clans, said to have 7,707 rajas; the Mallas were said to have 500 rajas; and the Chedis even more, these being gana-sanghas. The mahajanapadas listed in Jaina sources take in a wider geographical area, the list probably having been compiled later. This shift parallels the boundaries of the aryavarta – the land of the arya – which move eastwards in Jaina and Buddhist sources, since the epicentre of these religions was more easterly than the heartland of Vedic culture. Of the clans mentioned in the Mahabharata, many were closer to the gana-sangha system than to kingdoms, for instance Vrishnis, the clan to which Krishna Vasudeva belonged. The lynchpin of the janapada had been the ruling clan, after which it was named, and this in turn ensured some linguistic and cultural commonality. But the mahajanapada was also incorporating varied cultures.

  The Second Urbanization: the Ganges Plain

  The emergence of states and proto-states was a process frequently locked into urbanization. If various degrees of state formation are evident in the polities, degrees of urbanization are similarly reflected in different kinds of towns as they grew out of earlier settlements. The genesis of towns was not uniform and this gave them diverse features. Some grew out of political and administrative centres and were the hub of this power, such as Hastinapura. Somewhat later references mention the capitals of kingdoms, such as Rajagriha in Magadha, Shravasti in Kosala, Kaushambi in Vatsa, Champa in Anga and Ahicchatra in Panchala. Others grew out of markets, each catering to a variety of villages usually located where there was an agricultural surplus that could regularly enter an exchange nexus. Such exchanges were, to begin with, of mundane but essential items such as grain or salt. The exchange could be extended to goods from more distant places if the market was on a trade route, as at Ujjain. These were different from the rituals of exchange of expensive items or prestige goods conducted by elite groups on special occasions. Towns also grew from being sacred centres where people gathered, as is thought to have been the case with Vaishali. These various functions could also be combined in one place. Kaushambi became a town fairly early. The raja is said to have shifted the capital from Hastinapura to Kaushambi because of floods at the former location. The new location was more central to controlling river traffic on the Ganges. Later, it hosted one of the earliest Buddhist monasteries. A concentration of people and the scope for a range of occupations and products were obviously conducive to the growth of towns.

  Unfortunately, the details of these processes of change can become available only when horizontal excavations of urban sites of the Ganges Plain are carried out, exposing more extensive layers of occupation in an attempt to answer the more complex questions related to urbanism. Most excavations at such sites have so far been vertical sections that provide a chronology, but other information is limited. The contrast with the excavation of Harappan cities is only too apparent. Thus, although the earliest dated evidence comes from archaeology, it is difficult to discuss the genesis, growth and function of towns from the kind of data available. Bhir Mound, the section of the city of Taxila in the north-west that is dated to this period, has been excavated horizontally, but is a little too distant for use as evidence for the middle Ganges Plain.

  Inevitably, information is gleaned from texts, but these are not always contemporary and, in some cases, even though they reflect on the past, some of the data could be of the immediately subsequent period. Evidence of a more definitive kind about chiefdoms and towns comes from the grammar of Panini, generally dated to the fifth century BC and therefore contemporary with urban centres. The Buddhist Pali Canon, primarily the Tripitaka, narrates events relating to the Buddha and records his teaching, and these are often set in an urban context which encourages their use as data on urbanization. This Canon was initially an oral tradition, the writing of which began a couple of centuries after the death of the Buddha. It therefore does not coincide with the earliest phase of urbanization, but with the more mature period. Nevertheless, it can suggest the trends that led to the growth of cities.

  Two areas with a concentration of population in the Ganges Plain were the chalcolithic societies of the doab and of the middle Ganges Plain. States and urban centres emerged in both areas, but there was a difference. The doab and the western Ganges Plain was home to the cultures associated with the Painted Grey Ware/PGW (c. 1200-400 BC). Further east, the settlements associated with the Black-and-Red Ware/BRW cultures and the subsequent lustrous, luxury ware known as the Northern Black Polished Ware/NBP W (c. 700-200 BC), suggest what in comparison might be called a thicker urbanism, especially from the mid-millennium, although this impression could be due to the imprint of Buddhist texts as well.

  The population of the doab, though small, slowly expanded. From staying close to the banks of rivers, some settlements moved into the interior where they cleared land for cultivation. This may have been an escape from floods or a more venturesome encroachment into forests. The small settlements linked to Ochre Colour Pottery were more frequent in the upper doab. The Painted Grey Ware settlements had a wider distribution in the doab and larger sites often occur on the edge of jheels, or lakes formed from natural depressions or as ox-bow lakes. Further east, wet-rice cultivation provided a high yield, even if it was more labour intensive. Although sedentary cultivation came to dominate the landscape, it did not eliminate hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and shifting cultivators. Closely placed, small settlements of the Painted Grey Ware gave way to appreciably larger settlements and, at longer distances these were associated with sites and levels of the Northern Black Polished Ware which herald incipient urbanism.

  Apart from pre-existing neolithic and chacolithic settlements in the Ganges Plain, the migration there of people from the watershed is suggested by the Black Slipped Ware associated with the Painted Grey Ware of the doab, being the same as that associated with potteries from the middle Ganges Plain although of a slightly late date. Imitation of some of the technologies of the watershed area may have resulted in the similarity of technique between the Painted Grey Ware and the Northern Black Polished Ware. This does not point to the imposition of a culture from the western plain, but merely to the presence of people and technologies from there mingling with the existing cultures. Hydraulic and climatic change, resulting in some desiccation in the north-west and Punjab, may have encouraged migrations to the doab, while further east the attraction would have been the potential of fertile lands. The archaeology of those settlements that developed into urban centres reflects differences when compared to earlier settlements, in addition to the occurrence of Northern Black Polished Ware which was an urban hallmark. Having travelled through trade to virtually every part of the subcontinent by the end of the first millennium BC, the Northern Black Polished Ware provides instant recognition. Referenc
es to towns of the doab, such as Hastinapura, gave way to Kaushambi and Bhita, carrying a hint of the metropolis. Excavation at sites such as Vaishali, Ujjain, Shravasti, Rajghat and Rajagriha date urban beginnings to the mid-first millennium BC. At Kaushambi, the start is somewhat earlier.

  Judging by excavated and textual data, there seems to have been a fairly consistent concept of the layout of urban centres, although the plan was not invariably adhered to. The town was enclosed by a moat or a rampart, and was sometimes fortified. Digging a moat probably threw up enough earth for the beginnings of a rampart. These sometimes began as mud-fillings, as at Rajghat, and graduated to include bricks, as at Kaushambi. Since many of the towns were located on river banks the rampart would have been a protection against flood, as well as providing a minimal defence against predators and raids. As it developed, the urban ambience was different from that of the village and this may also have encouraged a demarcation. Towns were the location of what was collected as revenue and placed in a treasury, which would also have made them vulnerable to attack and necessitated some form of fortification. The houses were better built than previously and, in the later stages, were of mud-brick with some limited use of fired brick. They were equipped with facilities that were new, such as drains, ring wells and soakage pits which were to become archaeological markers of the second urbanization and were different in form from those used in Harappan cities. Houses at Bhir Mound consisted of rooms built round a courtyard, and this was the prototype house-plan for many towns in India. Rooms opening directly on to streets may have been shops. Streets were levelled to allow wheeled traffic.

  A large range of items was involved in the early trade. Iron objects ranged from hoes, sickles and knives to hooks, nails, arrowheads, vessels and mirrors. Salt was mined in the Potwar Plateau in the north-west, and may have travelled the long distance to the Ganges Plain. Craftsmen and artisans in the towns produced textiles, beads, pottery, ivory objects, ceramics and glassware, and artefacts of other metals, all of which were items of trade. The occurrence of the occasional weight together with some of these items underlines exchange. The distribution through exchange was not limited to the Ganges Plain. Goods were also taken to the north-west, from where presumably horses were brought back, and texts refer to the production of blankets and woollen goods in this area, intended for trade. Human and animal forms in terracotta were in considerable demand, and terracotta moulds are commonly found. Figurines reappear, particularly those with extraordinarily elaborate coiffures. Terracotta was also used for making the impressively precise rings for the wells and for the large jars, fitted one above the other as soakage pits.