The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  By the twelfth century the wealthier velalas were often the powerful functionaries of the temple. Caste consciousness was becoming a marked feature in social relationships, but the normative varna pattern does not seem to have been dominant in practice. The main distinction in the ordering of castes appears to have been the division of society into brahmans and nonbrahmans. Compared to other regions, among the nonbrahmans there was little mention of kshatriyas and vaishyas, but the shudras were prominent. The shudras were divided into the clean shudras – whose touch was not polluting – and the unclean shudras, who were debarred from entry into the temple, jatis are referred to in association with artisans and craftsmen. Slavery was an established category and although some slaves were used in agriculture and craft production, most were employed in domestic work. Many such persons were sold to the temple, particularly those impoverished or without an income during a famine.

  The temple could also act as a conduit of social mobility. In coastal Andhra, a large herd of cows was donated to the Draksharama temple. The herd was a considerable asset in terms of revenue from dairy produce, and was cared for by the local Boya tribal community. In the course of time, and because they were looking after temple property, these Boyas rose in status from outcastes to shudras. As shudras they entered the lower echelons of administration and gradually some attained high office.

  The new activities had generated a range of items required for exchange. Inevitably those in the business of procuring raw materials, producing finished goods and distributing these, now acquired social importance. This affected the potential for social mobility in caste society. It took the form of the emergence of two new groups referred to as the Right-and Left-Hand groups – the valangai and the idangai. This was a social division among the nonbrahman and the non-velala groups, which included those agricultural labourers who were performing services for the upper castes. The division began in the Chola period but became more evident from the thirteenth century onwards. Since the Right-Hand was considered superior to the Left, those anxious to attain a higher status made attempts to move from the Left-to the Right-Hand. It sometimes took the form of special organizations bestowing privileges on certain occupational groups, such as blacksmiths and carpenters. Some agricultural groups were also part of the scheme. Merchant associations were more concerned with the status of the artisans assisting in producing what was required for commerce. This was a new set of caste alignments arising out of a context in which the links between merchants and artisans were of mutual advantage. Inevitably the division into Left-Hand and Right-Hand, and the statuses associated with each, was to lead to caste rivalries.

  Economic interests could overlook the norms of varna. Brahmans who were merchants readily crossed the seas, while special privileges were occasionally granted to those who worked for the court, like the engravers of the copperplate charters of King Rajendra, or the weavers of Kanchipuram who wove the textiles for the royal family, or the stone masons working on the royal temple or palace. All these were exempt from paying certain dues, and although some of them, such as the weavers, were of low status, they were regarded with greater respect than other members of their castes. References are occasionally made to mixed castes, which would suggest that although the rigidity of caste rules was being emphasized, in practice lapses were common.

  Among the donations to the temples that were recorded, a fair number came from women devotees. These were larger in the ninth and tenth centuries, after which they declined and finally petered out after the thirteenth century. Presumably these were women who came from families that were financially comfortable, although donations from devadasis are also recorded.

  The institution of devadasis attached to the better-endowed temples came to be seen as an additional source of income for the temple. Some devadasis, where they were reduced to being merely temple attendants, came to be regarded as women of easy virtue. Others, however, who were highly accomplished women, were treated with deference. Because of their accomplishments, such women had a certain freedom of movement in that they could distance themselves from social conventions to a greater degree than most other urban women. Part of the reason for this was that they were educated and professionally trained in the arts, particularly music and dance. Women of royal families were also often educated, which encouraged self-confidence.

  One of the more notable features of royal patronage in the peninsula was the frequency with which queens were not only patrons but took an active interest in administration, for instance, among the Ikshvakus, Pallavas, Gangas, Cholas and Later Chalukyas. In the literature of the royal courts women are often projected as retiring, romantic and unconcerned with matters of state, as in the eleventh-century Vikramankadeva-charita written by Bilhana at the Chalukya court. But contemporary Chalukya inscriptions sometimes referred to queens not only as patrons but as administrators overseeing specific areas. Such women participated in the activities of the court that related to governance. Their decisions carried weight and their governance was firm.

  At the other end of the scale, peasant women had a limited access to movement being partners in the family occupation. The most liberated women were the poets and singers of hymns dedicated to the worship of Vishnu or Shiva, who rejected conventional restrictions. This rejection became part of their devotion, as in the poetry of Akkamahadevi writing in the twelfth century. But it is significant that this freedom was allowed them only because they were accepted as true worshippers who had taken on a degree of asceticism in their worship.

  Language and Literature

  The temple continued to function as a place for formal education in Sanskrit. Pupils were either taught by the temple priests, as in the smaller village temples, or else trained at a more advanced level in the ghatikas or colleges attached to the larger temples. Brahmans who were thus educated were absorbed either into the temples as priests or, being literate, into the administration of the region. Jaina and Buddhist monasteries also educated novice monks or even some lay persons, but as the number of monasteries decreased their impact lessened. Because the medium of instruction was Sanskrit, formal education became distanced from everyday life. Professional education was still maintained through the training given to apprentices in guilds and among groups of artisans. Where this was combined with a greater demand for technical expertise, with some training in Sanskrit, the status of professionalism rose. Oral instruction in the poetry of devotion serves as a reminder that audiences were not necessarily literate.

  This period witnesses the more extensive use of regional languages and their consequent development for multiple purposes. The impetus towards this change came from the devotional movement that used these languages to express the ecstatic experience of closeness to the deity. At another level, the official archive used the regional language for recording locations and rights relating to grants of land. Books were written on palm leaves that were then tied together. Interpolations therefore required the untying of the book and the insertion of what was new. Books were stored in the libraries of the Jaina monasteries and the mathas.

  Literary works in Sanskrit were largely grammars, lexicons, manuals, works on rhetoric, commentaries on the older texts, prose fiction, drama and poetry. These adhered to the classical conventions of composition, and experimenting with new forms was limited. This tended to place a premium on linguistic proficiency and a somewhat laboured description of mood. Kings continued to be described as authors of literary works and some may actually have been so. But the concept of learning had moved beyond creative literature. The Manasollasa of the Chalukya King Someshvara, for instance, takes on the character of an encyclopaedia.

  A few works had their counterparts in Tamil, where the models of literary composition were sometimes taken from Sanskrit literature. Tamil literature of this period showed great liveliness and vigour, as in Kamban’s version of the Ramayana. It was earlier thought that all the many Ramayanas, composed as part of the oral or literary tradition in various part
s of India, by and large followed the Valmiki version. Further studies of these versions now reveal that the location and language of composition, the intended audience and the treatment of gender all point to noticeable variations. The narratives diverge according to the symbolic meaning intended by diverse authors for various audiences, which imbue the narratives with new events and sensitivities. For instance, the treatment of the personality of Ravana in the Kamban version is far more sympathetic to his predicament than in the Valmiki Ramayana.

  The language of the inscriptions provides a perspective on wider historical change. Bilingual inscriptions increasingly became the norm in recording grants. The exclusive use of Prakrit for inscriptions had given way to Sanskrit by the fourth century. But the change to bilingual records dates to a few centuries later. The introduction of Sanskrit into a Tamil-speaking area is illustrated in the bilingual Sanskrit-Tamil inscriptions. The formulaic passages in these, stating the origin myths, genealogies, titles of the king and benedictions, tend to be in Sanskrit. The royal genealogies were sometimes fabricated, as they were in many kingdoms, in order to give legitimacy to the makers of the grant. But the actual terms of the grant were in Tamil, so that they were well understood in the locality. This covered information on the land or village granted, its boundaries, the participation of local authorities, the rights and obligations of the grantee, his taxes and dues, the witnesses to the grant and any other matter of local concern. The two languages had a purpose, the content of each being significantly different. Both sections were important to the legality of the document, but the description of the land in Tamil ensured that there was no ambiguity about the location of the land and the rights of the grantee.

  The more extensive use of Sanskrit coincided with educated brahmans seeking employment and migrating to various parts of the subcontinent. Where they were successful they were given employment and a grant of land. This may on occasion have taken them into interior areas where Sanskrit would be a new language, requiring the grantee to become bilingual. The two languages of many inscriptions were Sanskrit and the regional language, such as Tamil or Kannada.

  The Sanskrit section of the grant therefore had a political agenda, publicizing royal authority and legitimizing the titles and status of the king, along with his connections to ancient heroes and earlier rulers. The capturing of history became significant. By appropriating the compositions of the suta or bard – the traditional keepers of history – and editing these in a new format, the authors of the texts could control the use of the past and thereby the status of the rulers. The Puranas, claiming to record the past, were now authored by brahmans and written in Sanskrit, although there was often a pretence that they were still being recited by the bard who was placed formally in the role of the original composer.

  The audience for this political agenda was the world of kings and courts. The forms in which the past was represented and their links with the present were not confined to a particular language or region. The genre of charita literature or historical biographies, inaugurated by Banabhatta’s Harshacharita, became fashionable in various courts. Bilhana travelled from Kashmir to various places seeking fortune and employment until he was given a position at the court of the Later Chalukyas, where he wrote the Vikramankadeva-charita, the biography of Vikramaditya VI. This was again a defence of a king who had usurped the throne of his elder brother.

  Apart from inscriptions that were virtually the annals of history at this time, attempts were also made to provide historical details of some dynasties in the form of vamshavalis, chronicles. That the notion of seeking historical legitimacy had filtered down fairly extensively would seem evident from some of the shorter chronicles on lesser dynasties, for example, the Mushaka-vamsha-kavya, composed by Atula in the eleventh century on a little-known dynasty from Malabar. The structure of such chronicles remained similar irrespective of whether they were written in the state of Chamba in the Himalaya or in Malabar, and could take the form of a dynastic chronicle or the history of a region. Some of the myths were virtually identical. The chronicle moved from mythological beginnings to founding ancestors to more authentic genealogical history. A point of departure marked the establishing of a kingdom, which was accompanied by specific changes: more areas were opened to cultivation; a capital city was founded with a royal temple, and was connected to other places by a network of routes; the presence of an administrative hierarchy and an army were indicated; and inscriptions were issued to give the official version of royal activities. Subsequent to this, events of importance were recorded in the chronicle. Kalhana’s history of Kashmir, the Rajatarangini, frequently described as unique, is actually rooted in the vatnshavali form, although admittedly it is an extraordinarily fine example. The authors of these texts, allotting historical antecedents to dynasties, reiterated their hegemonic status in caste society. It underlined their role as the creators of a transregional Sanskritic network across the subcontinent, including even south-east Asia. Sanskrit inscriptions in south-east Asia date to approximately the same period. These gradually became bilingual, the second language being the local one.

  Bilingualism, however, became less frequent from about the fourteenth century when records were written more often in the regional language. Reiterating the difference between the language of the court and that of local administration may have led to this. Where local administrators became rulers, they probably carried their language with them. This would be parallel to installing the family deity as a cult deity by a new dynasty. Adventurers establishing kingdoms would also tend to use the regional language, and if this sufficed to explain their change of status then Sanskrit might not have been required. The large element of rhetoric in the Sanskrit section of inscriptions would, if expressed in the local language, carry the same message. There are eleventh-century records of endowments of land given to those who recited the hymns of the Alvars and Nayanars. This was extending patronage to Tamil.

  The performance of Vedic rituals was now mentioned less frequently. The growth of Vaishnavism and Shaivism required different rituals, as well as the use of the regional language, even if some of the literature of the religious sects was being written in Sanskrit. The latter bestowed prestige on the text and an elite readership. Brahmans who had taken to other professions, such as trade, would have been less proficient in the Sanskrit used in Vedic rituals. The change may also suggest that regional authority was asserted with more confidence. Paradoxically, the ensuing regional diversity of identity and language created a condition common to the subcontinent.

  Other regional languages such as Kannada and Telugu, also stemming from a Dravidian linguistic base, were widely used and bilingualism with Sanskrit led to some vocabulary being borrowed. But the memory of this derivation became distant as the languages came into current use. Telugu took shape and form in the Andhra region with texts from the eleventh century. The origins of Kannada in Karnataka go further back to the sixth century AD, with texts dating to the ninth century. Kannada had both royal patronage and support from the influential literate Jainas. It eventually became the language of the twelfth-century Virashaiva or Lingayat movement, which still had a significant religious and social identity. Many of the vachanas or verses composed in Kannada by the Lingayats had lower-caste authors, ensuring a popular appeal for both the language and the message. Matayalam as the language of Kerala evolved somewhat later, drawing on both Tamil and Sanskrit and with texts going back to the early second millennium AD.

  Marathi, the language current in the western Deccan, had evolved from local Prakrits and retained closer links with Sanskrit. It received encouragement from the Yadava rulers. But its wider development grew from its becoming the language of a popular devotional movement, in some ways parallel to the Alvars and Nayanars, which soon became established in the western Deccan. This involved not only the composition of poems in Marathi but also the exposition of older religious texts, such as the Gita, in a language understood by common people. Such expositions
naturally introduced innovations in interpreting these earlier texts and the religious concepts endorsed by them.

  The literary forms of these languages were initially translations and adaptations from works in Sanskrit that were thought to encapsulate high culture. But the translations were infused with local variations in narrative and action and were not identical with the original. Adaptations gave way to new texts and forms in the regional languages, which helped establish these languages as the media of intellectual discourse. Meanwhile, Sanskrit was essentially the language of brahmanical activity, although it became -more widely used by Buddhists and Jainas at this time. As a prestige language, Sanskrit also appealed to sectarian movements with social ambitions.