The Penguin History of Early India

by Romila Thapar

  Brahmanas Vedic exegetical texts for rituals

  brahmi the earliest deciphered script of India and dating to historical times

  chaitya a sacred enclosure – later took the form of a hall and became an essential focus of Buddhist worship together with the stupa

  chakravartin/chakravartigal/chakkavatti universal monarch

  chandala a group from among the outcast section of society, gradually regarded as untouchable

  Chandravamsha the lunar lineage, indicative of royal status

  chetti/chettiyar merchants

  daivaputra literally, the son of a deity; a royal title

  dakshina sacrificial fee; the southern direction

  dana donation/votive offering

  danda force/coercion/punishment

  dasa initially ‘the Other’ of the arya – later a slave or servant

  desha territory or an administrative unit; a region

  devadana usually land or revenue donated to a temple

  devadasi female slave of the gods, used with reference to women dedicated to the temple

  devanagari the later, evolved form of the brahmi script, also used for some modern Indian languages

  Dhamma/dharma piety, morality, ethics, virtue/the social and religious order

  Dharmashastra texts attempting to codify the social and ritual duties, and obligations of the members of the four varnas and the relationship between them

  Digambara literally, ‘sky-clad’, one of the two main Jaina schools

  digvijayin the conqueror of the four quarters

  dinara a coin based on the Roman denarius

  doab the land between two rivers

  dronavapa a measure of grain

  dvija literally, the twice-born, refers to either the highest varna or the three upper varnas of Hindu caste society, where the first birth is the physical birth and the second is the initiation into varna status

  eripatti land from which the revenue was used to maintain irrigation tanks

  gahapati a landowner

  gana-rajya oligarchy/chiefdom

  garbha-griha literally, the womb-house, the sanctum sanctorum of the Hindu temple

  gavunda categories of landowners; could be a member of a local administrative committee

  ghatika an educational centre often attached to a temple

  ghi clarified butter

  grama village

  guru teacher or guide

  heggade a term used in the peninsula for a landowner

  Hinayana The Lesser Vehicle, a major school of Buddhism

  itihasa-purana sections of texts claiming to refer to events of the past

  jana people, subjects, tribe, clan

  janapada literally, where the clan or tribe places its foot; the territory initially occupied by a clan and which could evolve into a state

  jati caste; a social segment identified by membership through birth, marriage circles, occupation, custom and location

  jyestha elder, as in the guild-like organization of the shreni

  kahapana/karshapana/pana widely used coin series, often silver

  kakini copper coins

  Kalamukha a Shaiva sect

  kaliyuga the fourth and final age of the great cycle of time, the mahayuga

  kalpa a frame of time-reckoning

  kama desire

  Kapalika a Shaiva sect

  karma action or deed, and also used in the theory of future births being conditioned by the deeds of the present life

  kassaka a cultivator, not as well-off as the gahapati

  kayastha a caste, chiefly of scribes

  kharoshthi a script used in north-west India and derived from the Aramaic script

  kshatrapa associated with the administrative title of satrap, and used specifically for some rulers of western India

  kshatriya the second in rank among the four varnas; included a warrior aristocracy, landowners and royalty

  kshetra field

  kula family

  kuladevi clan goddess

  kulyavapa a winnowing basket

  kumaramatya a title of honour, often used for a prince

  kutumbi householder

  lingam the phallic symbol, associated with the worship of Shiva

  mahadanas great gifts/donations

  maharajadhiraja great king of kings

  mahasamanta ruler or governor but subordinate to an overlord

  mahasammata ‘the great elect’, the person elected to rule and signifying the origin of government in Buddhist theory

  mahasenapati commander-in-chief of the army

  mahattara head of the village

  Mahayana the Great Vehicle, a major school of Buddhism

  mana a large unit of weight

  mandala a cosmogram, projecting the universe in a geometric pattern, often concentric with indications of cardinal points and sometimes square; also refers to a theory of interstate relations where the king desirous of victory is at the centre and the pattern lays out potential allies and enemies.

  mandalam an administrative unit

  manigramam a formal association or guild of merchants

  mantra sounds, words, verses associated with magical and religious connotations

  marga the path/mainstream

  matha a hospice or a monastery attached to a temple and often a centre of education

  matsyanyaya a political theory where a parallel is drawn between a condition of drought when tanks dry up with the big fish eating the small fish, and a condition of political anarchy when the strong devour the weak

  maya illusion

  mlechchha outside the pale of caste society/impure

  moksha liberation from rebirth

  nadu a territorial unit in south India

  nagarashresthin the chief merchant of the city

  nataka dance, mime, drama

  Nayanars Shaiva poets of Tamil devotionalism

  nigama a market or a ward of a city

  nirvana release from the cycle of rebirth

  nishka a unit of value, later used for a coin

  paan betel-leaf

  Pali an Indo-Aryan language in which the Buddhist Canon of the Theravada sect was recorded

  palli a hamlet, sometimes also a small market centre

  panchakula administrative body

  panchayat an administrative body, said to be a council of five

  Pashupata a Shaiva sect

  pipal ficus religiosa tree

  pradesha an administrative unit

  pratiloma literally, against the direction of the body hair, therefore against the hierarchy of castes in relation to marriage

  purohita priest and mentor, especially in families of status

  rajadhiraja royal title

  rajasuya sacrifice performed to enhance royal or chiefly status

  rajuka official designation

  ranaka rank or status given to a landed intermediary

  rasa a mood or an emotion evoked in creative literature, music and dance rashtracountry/administrative unit

  sabha an assembly, usually small and of special persons

  samanta initially a term used for a neighbour; later it referred to a landed intermediary subordinate to the king

  samiti an assembly

  samnyasi ascetic

  samsara used most commonly to refer to the cycle of transmigration

  sangha frequently used to indicate the organizational Order in the Shramanic religions and more commonly in Buddhism

  sankirna jati mixed caste

  sarthavaha caravaneer

  sati a virtuous woman; one who has immolated herself on the funeral pyre of her husband

  setthi merchant

  shakti power

  Shangam assembly; more specifically the earliest literary corpus of Tamil poems

  shastra texts on various subjects viewed as authoritative

  shatamana coin

  shikhara tower surmounting the sanctum of the temple

  shraddha worship of the ancestors
at a particular time of the year

  shreni formal association of members of a profession; a guild

  shudra the fourth and lowest varna

  shunya the zero

  Shvetambara literally, clad in white, one of the major Jaina schools

  soma the plant from which the juice was prepared and drunk in a ritual context during some Vedic sacrifices, and thought to be a hallucinogen

  stridhana the wealth of a woman given specifically to her for her own use

  stupa tumulus-like structure containing relics of the Buddha or others and worshipped by Buddhists

  Suryavamsha solar lineage

  suvarna literally, of good colour and another name for gold

  svyamavara the ceremony at which a princess chose her husband from among an assembly of suitors

  thakkura the rank or status of a landed intermediary

  Theravada an early Buddhist sect

  tirtha literally a ford, more frequently a place of pilgrimage

  tirthankara literally, a ford-maker; the teachers of Jainism

  ur village assembly in south India

  vaishya the third status in the varna hierarchy concerned theoretically with raising livestock, cultivation and trade

  valanadu administrative unit in south India

  vana forest

  varna literally, colour; used for the four castes often as ritual statuses; the reference was not to skin pigmentation since in one text the four colours listed are white, yellow, red and black

  varna-ashrama-dharma upholding a society organized on the basis of varna and the social and sacred duties that this entailed

  velala peasants or landowners of various categories

  vihara Buddhist monastery

  vina lyre

  vishaya an administrative unit

  vishti forced labour or labour in lieu of a tax, often compared to the corvée

  vratya initially referring to those who were thought not to conform to orthodoxy, it came to mean degenerate forms in various categories

  yaksha a demi-god

  yoni female organs of generation

  yuga a period of time

  ziarat a place of pilgrimage

  Select Bibliographies

  1 Perceptions of the Past

  COLONIAL CONSTRUCTIONS: ORIENTALIST READINGS

  Jones, W., Discourses Delivered before the Asiatic Society, 2nd edn (London, 1814)

  Inden, R., Imagining India (Oxford, 1990)

  Drew, H., India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi, 1987)

  Leslie Willson, A., A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism (Durham, 1964)

  Leask, N., British Romantic Writers and the East (Cambridge, 1992.)

  Marshall, P. J., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1970)

  Mukherjee, S. N., Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth Century British Attitudes to India (Delhi, 1983)

  Said, E., Orientalism (New York, 1978)

  Schwab, R., The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East 1680-1880 (New York, 1984)

  Staal, F., A Reader on the Sanskrit Grammarians (Cambridge, Mass., 1972)

  Teltscher, K., India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 (Delhi, 1995)

  Thapar, R., The Past and Prejudice (Delhi, 1975)

  Thapar, R., Time as a Metaphor of History (Delhi, 1996)

  Thapar, R., Interpreting Early India (Delhi, 1992)

  COLONIAL CONSTRUCTIONS: A UTILITARIAN CRITIQUE

  Mill, J., The History of British India, 5th edn (New York, 1968)

  Metcalfe, T. R., Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1995)

  Majeed, J., Ungoverned Imaginings. James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford, 1992)

  Philips, C. H. (ed.), Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (London, 1962)

  Smith, V., Early History of India from 600 BC to the Muhammadan Conquest, 4th edn (Oxford, 1957)

  INDIA AS ‘THE OTHER’

  Weber, M., The Religion of India, repr. (Glencoe, 1967)

  Kantowskcy, D., Recent Research on Max Weber’s Studies of Hinduism (London, 1986)

  Durkheim, E., The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology (London, 1915)

  Hubert, H. and Mauss, M. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (tr.) (London, 1964)

  Mauss, M., The Gift, repr. (New York, 1967)

  Bougle, C., Essays on the Caste System, repr. (Cambridge, 1971)

  ‘DISCOVERING’ THE INDIAN PAST

  Cumming, J. (ed.), Revealing India’s Past (London, 1939)

  Tod, J., Annals and Antiquities of Rajastan (Oxford, 1821)

  Kejriwal, O. P., The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past, 1784-1838 (Delhi, 1988)

  NOTIONS OF RACE AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON INDOLOGY

  Poliakov, L., The Aryan Myth (London, 1974)

  Max Müller, F., Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas (London, 1888)

  Max Müller, F., India What Can it Teach Us? (London, 1883)

  Trautmann, T. R., Aryans and British India (Delhi, 1997)

  Robb, P. (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (New Delhi, 1995)

  HISTORY AND NATIONALISM

  Jayaswal, K. P., Hindu Polity, 2nd edn (Bangalore, 1943)

  Altekar, A. S., State and Government in Ancient India (Banaras, 1949)

  Majumdar, R. C., Raychaudhuri, H. C. and Datta, K. K., An Advanced History of India (London, 1961; 3rd edn, Delhi, 1973)

  THE SEEDING OF COMMUNAL HISTORY

  Thapar, R., Mukhia H., and Bipan, Chandra, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History, repr. (Delhi, 2000)

  Panikkar, K. N., The Concerned Indian’s Guide to Communalism (Delhi, 1999)

  Pandey, G., The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi, 1990)

  MARXIST HISTORIES AND THE DEBATES THEY GENERATED

  O’Leary, B., The Asiatic Mode of Production: Oriental Despotism, Historical Materialism and Indian History (Oxford, 1989)

  Bailey, A. M. and Llobera, J. R. (eds), The Asiatic Mode of Production. Science and Politics (London, 1981)

  Gough, K., Rural Society in Southeast India (Cambridge, 1981)

  Anderson, P., Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974)

  Hobsbawm, E. J. (ed.), Introduction to Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (London, 1984)

  Wittfogel, K., Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, 1975)

  Hobsbawm, E. J. (ed.), Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (London, 1964)

  Kosambi, D. D., Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay, 1957)

  Sharma, R. S., Indian Feudalism (Delhi, 1980)

  Jha, D. N. (ed.), Feudal Social Formation in Early India (Delhi, 1987)

  Byres, T. and H., Mukhia (eds), Feudalism and non-European Societies (London, 1985)

  Chattopadhyaya, B. D., The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi, 1994)

  Stein, B., Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi, 1980)

  Karashima, N., South Indian History and Society, Studies from Inscriptions AD 850-1800 (Delhi, 1984)

  HISTORY AS A SOCIAL AND HUMAN SCIENCE

  Burke, P. (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2001)

  Braudel, F., On History (Chicago, 1980)

  Chakrabarti, D. K., A History of Indian Archaeology from the Beginning to 1947 (Delhi, 1988)

  Chakrabarti, D. K., Theoretical Issues in Indian Archaeology (Delhi, 1988)

  Ucko, P. (ed.), Theory in Archaeology (London, 1995)

  Heninge, D., Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford, 1974)

  Vansina, J., Oral Tradition as History (Madison, 1985)

  Wachtel, N., The Vision of the Vanquished (Hassocks, 1977)

  Hivale, S., The Pradhans of the Upper Narmada Valley (Bombay, 1946)

  Deshpande, M. M., Sanskrit and Prakrit: Sociolinguistic Issues (Delhi, 1993)

  Chaudhuri, K. N., Asia Before Eu
rope. Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1990)

  Abu-Lughod, J., Before European Hegemony. The World System AD 1250-1350 (New York, 1989)

  Reynolds, S., Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994)

  Wickham, C., Land and Power (London, 1994)

  Klass, M., Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System (Philadelphia, 1980)

  Berreman, G., The Hindus of the Himalayas (Berkeley, 1963)

  Srinivas, M. N., Collected Essays (Delhi, 2002)

  Roy, K. (ed.), Women in Early Indian Societies (Delhi, 1999)

  Sharma, R. S. and Jha, D. N. (eds), Indian Society: Historical Probings. In Memory of D. D. Kosambi (New Delhi, 1974)

  Haskell, F., History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (London, 1993)

  Baxandall, M., Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford, 1973)

  Sebeok, T., Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 5: Linguistics in South Asia (The Hague, 1969)

  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF A DIFFERENT KIND

  Evans, R. J., In Defence of History (London, 1997)

  Skinner, Q., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, repr. (Cambridge, 2000)

  2 Landscapes and Peoples

  TIME AND SPACE

  Braudel, F., On History (Chicago, 1980)

  Braudel, F., The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London, 1973)

  Horden, P. and Purcell, N. The Corrupting Sea (Oxford, 2000)

  Thapar, R., Time as a Metaphor of History, repr. (Delhi, 1992)

  Law, B. C., Historical Geography of Ancient India (Paris, 1954)

  Chattopadhyaya, B. D., A Summary of Historical Geography of Ancient India (Calcutta, 1984)

  THE LANDSCAPE

  Subba Rao, S., The Personality of India (Baroda, 1958)

  Spate, O. H. K. and Learmonth, A. T. A., India and Pakistan, a General and Regional Geography, 4th edn (London, 1972)

  Singh, R. L. (ed.), India, a Regional Geography (Varanasi, 1971)

  Guha, R. (ed.), Social Ecology (Delhi, 1998)

  Gadgil, M. and Guha, R. The Fissured Land: an Ecological History of India (New Delhi, 1992)

  Reade, J. (ed.), The Indian Ocean in Antiquity (London, 1995)