The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  The creation of Sanskritic cultures refers to more than just the extensive use of the language. It refers to the initial steps towards the legitimation of a new order – the culture and society of the landed intermediaries, of the new kshatriyas and the new religious sects. But beyond the horizon of these were the spectacular explorations of new systems of knowledge and creativity in literature. The former brought Indian learning into what was fast developing as the Asian interchange of knowledge, and the latter was marking a presence in many parts of Asia.

  This period is a threshold period. It carries some items from earlier times, but announces others which take on a more definitive shape in later times. Oral traditions were converted into texts and interpolations added to these. Implicit in these was an underlining of the upper-caste perspective, strengthening its effectiveness and power. The granting of land to brahmans, which increased in the post-Gupta period, emphasized the pre-eminence of the brahman in society. The brahmans strengthened this position by asserting an inheritance of Vedic Brahmanism. This tended to marginalize the heterodox and those who had opposed Vedic Brahmanism with its claim to a monopoly over knowledge, a claim that had become an additional source of power. However, with the establishing of the Puranic sects yet another dimension was introduced to social and religious life, different from either Vedic Brahmanism or Shramanism.

  Distinctions between courtly high culture and popular culture became more sharply defined. Such distinctions created separate areas of cultural engagement and the incorporation from one to the other required substantial social changes. Culture is therefore better understood not only by what became dominant, but also through what fell by the wayside. There are limitations to the historical sources for early Indian history which are mainly the writings of elite groups. For this reason, it is possible only to infer the process of negotiation between the courtly and the popular culture, which is essential to the creation of a dominant culture. Those identified by popular culture spoke other languages; their women were more liberated than those of the patriarchal elite; their rituals and customs were different. If the elite projected the varna stratification as frozen, one can only suspect that it was not so widely observed. For the majority, possibly, jati stratification was more real. If families of obscure social origin aspired to be kings then their genealogies had to be constructed. Brahmans, taking over the bardic data, could provide this legitimation. The spread of Sanskrit was legitimizing a new order.

  A significant medium in this process was the issuing of inscriptions as orders of the court, king and other functionaries, and their observance in distant areas. Inscriptions now emerge as a major historical source, encapsulating social and economic information relating to grants of land, commerce, administrative arrangements, religious endowments and suchlike. They tend to increasingly parallel the texts as sources.

  Politically, it was a period that registered the triumph of monarchy over the gana-sanghas and the forest-clans. Earlier, kings of non-kshatriya origin were not concerned with acquiring kshatriya status, but from the post-Gupta period this became common to monarchy. The newness of these kshatriyas was evident in more than one sense, since they set the style for the definition of the kshatriya. In seeking roots among the earlier kshatriyas, the assistance of the brahman was necessary and this assistance was not only recognized but rewarded.

  In the ideology of kingship current at the time there was a glorying in successful campaigns and suzerainty over many kings. Was this a revival of the Vedic concept of the king being a digvijayin, conqueror, of the four quarters, or a chakravartin, universal monarch, or was it echoing the pattern set by earlier rulers of the north-west? The identification of the king with a deity could again have come from both Vedic sources and Kushana ideas of kingship. The Vedic chakravartin had been set aside by the Buddhists, whose definition of the chakkavatti was the king who ruled not by conquest but by setting in motion the wheel of law. In the post-Mauryan period Ashoka was being referred to as a chakkavatti in Buddhist texts, and he was certainly not the role model for the Gupta kings. Those Gupta kings who took the title of paramabhattaraka were Vaishnavas, and claimed to be protectors of the dharma. This was the varnashrama-dharma – the defence of the normative – rather than the dharma of the Buddhists and the Jainas.

  The innovation of this period in the use of agencies to establish power lay in the notion of rewarding the legitimizes of kingship with grants of land. They were not the colonies of agriculturalists advocated by the Arthashastra. New settlements were to become the nuclei of support for the king. The extension of caste status implicit in these settlements was another agency of control, where the elite was given varna status and the rest constituted jatis.

  Does this amount to a revival or renaissance of Vedic Brahmanism or does it point towards concessions that Vedic Brahmanism made to what has been called Puranic Hinduism? In the ideology of kingship the rituals of Vedic Brahmanism were encouraged and grants of land enabled its survival, although it eventually made way for Puranic Hinduism. But, as priests in Vaishnava and Shaiva worship, the brahmans had to make many concessions, for instance that brahmans could be temple priests although these were given a lower status than specialists in Vedic ritual. There was a certain attraction to the performance of rituals of sacrifice, which may no longer have been regarded as wholly efficacious but which evoked the power of the initial formulation of kingship emerging out of a system of chiefships. More evidently, kings now drew on the imagery of the epic and heroic tradition where the eulogies on them echoed the earlier eulogies of the heroes of the Mahabharata. Were the Guptas, as patrons of the Puranic religion, inducting some rituals of Vedic Brahmanism into Puranic Hinduism in order to employ more than a single source of legitimacy?

  But there would have been other reasons. Dynasties whose origins are obscure often seek legitimacy by becoming the patrons of sects that may not be dominant but have potential. In choosing to be patrons of Puranic Hinduism and Vedic Brahmanism, these kings were seeking a different legitimacy from those who patronized Buddhism. If Ashoka can be viewed as a prototype Buddhist chakkavatti, then Samudra Gupta can be said to have approximated the brahtnanical version of the chakravartin. It is from this point on that the grants of land became the outliers of the Puranic religions, forming networks of support for many new and obscure dynasties claiming kshatriya status.

  10

  The Peninsula: Emerging Regional Kingdoms

  C. AD 500-900

  Pallavas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas

  With the passing of the Guptas and their immediate successors in northern India, historical interest shirts southwards to the Deccan and to the area referred to as Tamilaham. The more significant events of the period took place south of the Vindhyas in spheres other than the purely political. The institutions of south India were being established at this time and were to maintain a striking continuity. The polity of chiefships and small kingdoms from earlier times gave way to large kingdoms. There were some parallels with changes in northern India, but there were also significant differences. The courts of the peninsula reflected an interface between the assertion of local cultures and that of the expanding Sanskritic culture. The process can be seen in various spheres, but perhaps most clearly in the language of the inscriptions. The early inscriptions had been in Tamil. Later, Prakrit and Sanskrit were also used, but in the south Tamil soon predominated, until finally the main corpus was in Tamil and the more formulaic sections in Sanskrit. Similarly, inscriptions in other parts of the peninsula used Sanskrit and Kannada. Parallel to this in some ways was the juxtaposition of Vedic Brahmanism with what has come to be called the Tamil devotional movement. The kingdoms of the western Deccan maintained their historical role of bridging the north and the south, facilitating the transmission of ideas between the two. But it is clear from architectural history that this was not a passive role, as the Deccan style, or Vesara, provided forms and variants among what have come to be called the Nagara, or northern style, and the Dra
vida, or southern style.

  The political history of the Deccan and further south focused on the long years of conflict between two geographical regions, the western Deccan and Tamilaham – the vast plateau areas enclosed by mountains along the coasts on the one hand, and the fertile plain south of Chennai on the other. Most of the rivers in the region rise in the west and flow into the Bay of Bengal. The division of the peninsula into the plateau kingdoms on the west and the coastal kingdoms on the east increased the desire of each to control the entire waterway, particularly the Godavari and Krishna Rivers. Vengi, lying between the Godavari and Krishna Deltas, was frequently a bone of contention, together with the fertile Raichur doab further inland. The conflict was as much political as economic, and consequently it continued through the centuries despite the fortunes of particular dynasties. What appears to be a complex interplay of the rise and fall of kingdoms is not so complex when viewed from a geopolitical perspective. The deltas were prime agricultural lands and the eastern coast, dotted with Buddhist centres by now, was active in trade networks. In the absence of vast areas of fertile plains, large agrarian-based kingdoms were less effective as polities, and the formation of smaller, regional kingdoms was an early and consistent feature. Thus, the kingdoms of the peninsula were probably oriented to regional loyalties earlier than in the north.

  The Vakatakas in the western Deccan gave way to Chalukya power with a base in Vatapi/Badami. A series of kingdoms, south from the eastern Deccan, included those ruled by the Shalankayanas and later the eastern Chalukyas; the Ikshvakus in the Krishna-Gunrur region, with Nagarjunakonda and Dharanikota as important centres, and with the Vishnukundins ruling close by. Control over Karnataka was divided between the Kadambas, Nolambas and Gangas. This was again an interplay between people of the hills and the forests with those settled in the plains. Granite hillocks were useful bases for fortresses. Kadamba control extended to the Konkan, and the Eastcn Gangas ruled in Orissa. Other dynasties bordering on the eastern Deccan were the Sharabapuriyas and the Panduvamshis. Some dynasties had been founded by brahmans who had received grants of land and used these as nuclei which became small kingdoms. Hence the claim that some were of the brahma-kshatra caste – brahmans performing kshatriya functions or who could claim mixed brahman and kshatriya ancestry.

  Further south in the Tamilaham area, the control of the Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas over their respective states was rocked by the rise of the Kalabhras. The origins of the latter are unknown and this is another example of a dynasty rising from obscurity, which became a trend in the subcontinent. The Kalabhras are said to have been hill tribes, but soon became sufficiently settled to extend patronage to Buddhists and Jainas. Possibly this is why they were reviled in later texts, some of which were of brahman authorship. The change encouraged the breaking down of the system of clan-based societies. This introduced a more impersonal rule through kingship, with the major dynasties of the Pallavas and the Pandyas in the east and the Cheras/Perumal in Kerala.

  For 300 years after the mid-sixth century three major kingdoms were in conflict. These were the Chalukyas of Badami, the Pallavas of Kanchipuram and the Pandyas of Madurai, all seeking to control the fertile tracts. The Chalukyas first came into prominence as subordinate rulers of the Kadambas, from whom they broke away. The Chalukya base was in northern Karnataka at Vatapi/Badami and the adjacent Aihole, from where they moved northwards to annex the former kingdom of the Vakatakas, centred in the Upper Godavari. They also annexed some western coastal areas, presumably because these now hosted the traders from across the Arabian Sea. The power from the north was contained through the defeat of Harsha at the Narmada, by the Chalukya King Pulakeshin II, an event repeatedly referred to with pride in later Chalukya inscriptions. The eastern part of the Satavahana kingdom, the deltas of the Krishna and the Godavari, had been conquered by the Ikshvaku dynasty in the third century AD. Ikshvaku rule ended with the conquest of this region by the Pallavas. The latter were also responsible for the overthrow of the Kadamba rulers and the annexation of their kingdom, which lay to the south of the Chalukya kingdom.

  The origin of the Pallavas remains a matter of debate. Some time ago it was suggested that Pallava is a variant of Pahlava (Parthian), and that the Pallavas were originally Patthians who moved from western India to the eastern coast of the peninsula during the wars between the Shakas and the Satavahanas in the second century AD. This seems unlikely, since there was no reference to Pallavas/Pahlavas travelling to the south. Another tradition weaves a romantic story round the name. A prince fell in love with a Naga princess of the netherworld. When he finally had to leave her, he told her that if she set their child adrift with a young creeper or twig tied to its body he would recognize the child on finding it and would bestow part of the kingdom on the child. The princess did so, and the child was duly recognized and installed as the founder of the Pallava – literally, a young twig -dynasty. The territory over which the Pallavas ruled was called Tondainadu and this name reiterates the association with a twig. Naga chiefs were symbols of local power, so the story may reflect the likelihood of initial Pallava rule involving ascendancy over many continuing chiefships. This legend is not unique to the Pallavas, for a similar story is told about the Khmer kings of Cambodia, though possibly it was borrowed from the Pallava legend. Ambiguity of status is met with fairly often in the origin myths of dynasties of the subcontinent. Rituals of a particular kind performed by ritual specialists were prescribed to clear the ambiguity, and genealogical connections were made in order to provide high status. The biography of a later king, encapsulated in an inscription, claimed a descent from the brahman Ashvatthama and a mother who was an apsara, a celestial woman.

  It is also said that the original Pallava was the ancestor to the King, Ashoka-varman, presumably the Mauryan King, Ashoka. Buddhist tradition maintained that he built the stupa in the vicinity of Kanchipuram. He was also now being associated with the concept of the Buddhist chakravartin and was much revered. In making the connection with Pallava ancestry, it appears the intention was to draw on the Buddhist tradition that still had a presence in the area. The Buddha had been mentioned as an avatara of Vishnu in another inscription.

  The earliest surviving records of the Pallavas are inscriptions issued when the Pallavas were still a local dynasty ruling at Kanchipuram. The later inscriptions were issued when the dynasty controlled Tamil-nadu. At that time it became the first dynasty of real consequence in the region, which led to earlier historians calling it the ‘imperial Pallavas’. According to one of the early inscriptions the Pallava king performed various Vedic sacrifices, including the ashvamedha. These ceremonies, relatively new to the local population, were probably seen as largely symbolic, emphasizing the power associated with ritual in Sanskritic culture. The Ikshvaku kings are said to have distributed ox-ploughs in an effort to clear and settle wasteland. The early Pallavas may have encouraged a similar enterprise, the conversion to agriculture bringing in enhanced revenue. The Pallava kingdom was regarded as rich, and was therefore much targeted. Pallava sources refer to the subordinate rulers, Udayana and Prithvi-vyagraha, as chiefs of the Shabara and the Nishada. The latter were almost generic names for hunter-gatherers and shifting cultivators living in the forest, normally beyond the pale of caste society. This would again suggest that the Pallava state annexed forested areas and cleared them for cultivation, or as sources for forest produce such as timber, elephants and semi-precious stones. The adoption of Sanskritic names by these chiefs is a pointer to their acculturation.

  Among the later group of Pallava rulers, Mahendravarman I (600-630) was responsible for the growing political strength of the Pallavas. He also took on the role of arbiter and patron of early Tamil culture. He was a contemporary of the Chalukya ruler Pulakeshin II and of Harsha of Thanesar and, like the latter, was a dramatist and poet of some standing, being the author of a play, the comedy entitled Mattavilasa-prahasana (The Delight of the Drunkards). Associating kings with literary accomplishments b
ecame another gauge of Sanskritic learning, particularly when reflecting courtly culture. Some of the finest, even if small, rock-cut temples were hewn during his reign, including those at Mahabalipuram/Mamallapuram. Mahendravarman is said to have begun life as a Jaina, but was converted to Shaivism by Appar, and the claim was that the conversion eroded the patronage to Jainism in Tamil-nadu.

  But his accomplishments were not restricted to writing comedies and patronizing the building of temples, for wars had also to be fought. His northern contemporary Harsha was too far away for there to be conflict, but nearer home was the recently established Chalukya power, and Pulakeshin II was determined to confine the ambition of the Pallavas and prevent their control over Vengi. This was to start a long series of Chalukya-Pallava wars, which ceased for a while on the termination of the two dynasties but started again with the rise of their successors. Pulakeshin’s ambition did not rest with the control of the western Deccan. He tested the strength of his army by defeating the Kadambas and the Gangas to the south, and this led him to an equally successful attack on Andhra. He also faced and defeated the army of Harsha on the banks of the Narmada, pressing on to receive the submission of Lara, Malwa and Gujarat in western India. On returning to Badami he conducted another successful campaign, this time against Mahendravarman the Pallava, resulting in the Chalukya acquisition of some of the northern Pallava provinces. An inscription at Aihole recording the achievements of Pulakeshin II is among the finest literary documents in the category of archival texts.

  The defeat of the Pallava was not to remain unavenged. Mahendravarman had died, but his successor Narasimha-varman I was determined to reconquer lost territory, and this he succeeded in doing. Narasimha-varman swept into the Chalukya capital, and his occupation of the city justified his claim to the title of Vatapikonda, ‘the Conqueror of Vatapi’. Mahabalipuram was further embellished with elegant temples. The next move was to be made by the Chalukyas, but a twelve-year interregnum in the Chalukya dynasty led to a respite from war. Meanwhile, the Pallavas had been involved in naval warfare to support their ally, the King of Sri Lanka, who was trying to regain his recently lost throne and in which he was eventually successful. The interaction between Tamil-nadu and Sri Lanka that began earlier with similarities in megalithic settlements was to continue through history, as would be expected from close neighbours.