The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  The finds include not only horses and wheeled vehicles, but curved mud-brick fire altars – like elongated horseshoes – of the same shape and design as those still used in Vedic rites in India. Sunken bowls have also been found, containing traces of ingredients used for a sacred drink based on ephedra, a twiggy mountain plant believed to be the base ingredient of the Rig-Vedic soma. When infused in boiling water, ephedra produces quite a powerful sensation of euphoria (as I can testify). But here it may have been mixed with other ingredients – poppy seeds and cannabis – a fitting tipple for Indra!

  The wind blows up in the late afternoon, lifting great swirling clouds of dust from the tractor blades that Sarianidi is using to shift accumulated tons of sand off the upper layers of the site. This is archaeology on a heroic scale: the main enclosure is a quarter of a mile across, while the temenos, with round corner bastions, is over 350 feet in diameter.

  Sarianidi takes me over to a square pit containing a horse burial; the foal’s skeleton is still perfect. ‘They practised horse sacrifice as a special ritual – like the Aryans in India and other Indo-European peoples, even as far as the ancient Irish.’

  There is no evidence of which people lived on this site: they did not use writing, but the material culture has too many affinities with the texts of the ancient Indo-Iranians and Indo-Aryans not to draw parallels. It is hard to look at the finds – horse burials, spoked chariot wheels, the ephedra-based sacred drink, the fire altars – and not think of the Vedic culture. Sarianidi thinks he may have found the ancestor of the early Iranian branch of the Indo-European migration into Iran and the subcontinent. But he has also found material links with northern Mesopotamia: he believes that the people who settled Gonur Tepe had previously had contact with the culture zone of Mesopotamia, and were part of the movement that left the Indo-European-speaking dynasty of the Mitanni in northern Syria around the fifteenth century BC.

  The big picture, then, is that the ancestors of Aryans were part of a huge language group who spread out from the area between the Caspian and the Aral seas 4000 years ago, and whose language lies at the root of modern European languages, including English, Welsh, Gaelic, Latin and Greek, but also Persian and the main modern north Indian languages. They were people with new technology (horse-drawn chariots) and a religion that was, in a broad sense, ‘Vedic’. Then, in the second millennium BC, the ‘Aryans’ were driven by climate change and population pressure to move south in several waves into Iran and India – a momentous event for India and the world.

  The wind is up again, catching our tent flaps as the earth-movers rumble back to camp for the night. Beyond the food tent wolves howl in the distance as I write up these notes. So this was one point on the migration of one large and organized group who had come from the west or northwest. Sarianidi sums it up like this: ‘They came into the oasis towards 2000 BC and left in 1800 BC or a little later when the Murghab delta dried up.’

  So they were caught up in the same big climate change that affected the Indus civilization. From here they followed the water, moving south towards Herat and east towards the Oxus, from where the Hindu Kush rises across the plain of northern Afghanistan on the southern horizon. From the Oxus it is only 200 miles to the Khyber, and the first sight of the plains of India. These migrations will have involved many such groups, and they may have taken place over centuries, a slow leakage across the hills of Afghanistan, fighting along the way to carve kingdoms for themselves in the rich plains of northern India.

  ‘THE GREAT EPIC OF INDIA’

  So the Aryan tribes entered the subcontinent from Afghanistan, perhaps over some centuries in the Late Bronze Age. Despite the massive academic controversy over these matters in India, the evidence of the Rig-Veda shows that the newcomers saw themselves as conquerors, modelled on Indra himself. Entire tribes or groups of tribes entered the subcontinent, conquering whoever stood in their way. Later verses in the Rig-Veda tell something of the battles in northern India as the Aryans expanded their lands eastwards, sometimes fighting against natives with strange, non-Aryan names, sometimes allied to indigenous chiefs, sometimes fighting each other. In places they coexisted with the local powers: one verse says that the forts of one enemy of the Aryans, a king called Sambara, were stormed only ‘in the fortieth year’. These all sound like real historical events recorded in the bards’ verses. As they moved east, gaining more land, the mountains always ‘on the left’ (still the Sanskritic term for ‘north’), the conquest of the sub-Harappan peoples of the Punjab is a continuing theme in the Rig-Veda: ‘You put down 50,000 blacks. You beat thin their forts like a threadbare garment.’ Indra himself ‘destroyed the ninety-nine forts of Sambara … Indra destroyed a hundred stone forts … and put to sleep 30,000 Dasas’. These figures need not be taken any more seriously than those for the Greek and Trojan heroes in Homer, but the drift is clear. This was not a small-scale trickle; nor was it a more or less peaceful migration.

  The poems of the Rig-Veda mention thirty Aryan clans and tribes, but the key books are about the history of two lineages – the Purus and the Bharatas – how they rose to power, fought with each other, and eventually intermarried and joined together. The Rig-Veda implies that the climactic victory of the Purus was the ‘Battle of Ten Kings’ near the Ravi river. With that, they established a kingdom in the Punjab, which they expanded into the Ganges-Jumna doab. Thus they came to control access to the richest lands in India, using horses, chariots and their superior weaponry (made of iron) to spread their power over the indigenous peoples, the post-Harappan population and the older stratum, many of whom had lived in the adjacent forests since the Stone Age. The Rig-Veda shows that the Aryans burnt and cleared the forests for agricultural land, building forts with earth and timber ramparts. They used their surplus to enrich the warrior class and to uphold a basic three-tier division of society – priests, warriors and farmers. Below them the workers, servants and slaves came from the majority indigenous population. Here, perhaps, lies the root of the caste system. The divisions were apparently based on varna (colour) and jati (literally ‘births’, meaning the level of society or job you are born into). Very likely the colour of skin was used by the paler-skinned immigrants as a means of separation. Later, language and religious rites would become key definers. An inheritance from the Bronze Age, the caste system persists to this day; and even now, the majority of the underclass is descended from the aboriginal peoples.

  This time of warfare may be distantly reflected in the most famous work of Indian literature, the Mahabharata – ‘The Great Epic of India’. Just as Homer’s Iliad, the tale of Troy, became a defining text of Greek culture, so the Mahabharata became the national epic of India, retold countless times and in many forms for over two millennia. For the orthodox Hindu, the war it describes is the dividing line between myth and reality: the beginning of ‘political’ history.

  The Mahabharata tells the tale of two clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, descended from the same grandfather, Kuru, head of a real clan that took his name and also appears in the Rig-Veda. It is a tale of war. Just as the Iliad begins with the wrath of Achilles ‘that brought untold sufferings on the Greeks’, so the Mahabharata starts with a fateful dissension, between the ‘wrathful sons of Drita-rashtra, born of Kuru’s royal kin … god-born men of god-like race’. The tale tells of a disputed succession of a kind that runs right through Indian history. In the end there is a terrible war and the final victory of the good, but, as at Troy, almost all the heroes on both sides die.

  The location of the tale is the same as in the later historical poems of the Rig-Veda – on the river Jumna, centring on the region of Kurukshetra, the ‘homestead of the Kurus’. Out of this comes the first defining myth of India, a great sprawling compendium of myths and morals. As a later commentator put it,’ what is here is nowhere else; what is not here is nowhere’. Indian audiences have loved it, admired its characters and referred to its dilemmas and moral judgements as exemplars for action for over two millenni
a, especially the key idea of dharma – the necessity of doing your duty.

  The text as it stands amounts to roughly 100,000 verses – the longest poem in the world – and it probably reached its present shape between the last century BC and the first century AD. But its roots lie in bardic poetry of a much earlier epoch: the Sanskrit of the poem still carries traces of formulas of earlier Indo-European poetry. If we could see the version known to the grammarian Panini in the fifth century BC (only a fifth of its present length), we would no doubt be struck by the similarities to Homer’s poems and other Iron Age heroic poetry. A Greek writer in the early second century AD refers to the Indians having ‘an Iliad of 100,000 verses’, which strongly suggests the text we have today. But the story was still expanding as late as the Gupta period (c. AD 320–600) because it mentions the Romans, the Hellenistic city of Antioch, and even the Huns’ invasion of India in the fifth century AD.

  The ‘original’ Mahabharata, then, was not unlike the Iliad, an Iron Age poem with fossilized verse forms from an even earlier time. But in the twentieth century the tale was put on a different footing by archaeological discoveries in the Ganges plain. After the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and his successors at Troy, Mycenae and Knossos brought the Greek heroic age to life, Indian archaeologists attempted to uncover a real Indian heroic age, and they began at the place in the story where the Kuru brothers ruled by the Ganges, ‘in the royal hall of Hastinapur’.

  SEPARATING FACT FROM FICTION

  We are driving across the cow belt, the Ganges plain, the heartland of Indian civilization, heading from Meerut 50 miles northeast of Delhi towards what is now the village of Hastinapur, the focus of the Mahabharata. All around us are green fields as far as the eye can see. The Ganges plain is one of the most fertile places on Earth, and has consequently attracted many people: the population of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar-Jharkand alone is more than that of the USA. Great tracts of this land were cleared for cultivation in the first millennium BC by ‘Aryan’ settlers from the northwest, led (so the Rig-Veda says) by Agni, the god of fire.

  It is ‘cow dust hour’, the time before sunset when the bullock carts are heading back to the village, and dust churned up by their wheels rises into the warm air and golden light. Soon we enter the village, passing huge hostels for pilgrims, mainly of the Jain religion, who claim the site as the birthplace of two of their prehistoric founders. Presently a hill comes into view behind modern temples: this is the mound of the royal citadel, which in legend was the Troy of India, the residence of the Kauravas, and the place that sparked the fateful war that sealed the end of the heroic age when gods and heroes walked the Earth. But is there historical basis to the story? In India the Mahabharata has always been believed to be ‘what happened’, but colonial-period scholarship was both dismissive of the epic’s literary merits and sceptical of any historical basis. Soon after Independence a young Indian archaeologist, B.B. Lal, set out to see if there was more to it. Before leaving for Hastinapur, I visited Lal in Delhi. Although now in his eighties, he is still hale and hearty, with a winning sense of humour and a still formidable command of detail. Over the years he has been involved in many controversies surrounding early Indian history and archaeology. In his house he showed me blackand-whites slides he had taken in rural India a year or two after Independence – images that now seem almost like ancient history, nearer to the world of the epic than the neon-lit streets of modern Meerut. ‘Well, you see the question that was worrying me most of the time was the historicity of the Mahabharata because there are two divergent views. According to one, everything in the text is true. According to the other, everything is imaginary. My approach was simply as an archaeologist.’

  Fittingly, his was the first great dig by Indian archaeologists in newly independent India. In any state, even a modern democracy, it is crucial to establish a shared past, and the Mahabharata had been a central part of the Indian peoples’ idea of a shared past over many centuries. Historiography, in a modern sense, had been established by the colonial power, the British. But epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana harked back to an older tradition, what one might call the dominant national culture in northern India, through folk plays, poems, songs and stories. To test the historicity of the national epic, Lal set out to examine sites mentioned in the Mahabharata on the same principle as Schliemann, Wilhelm Dorpfeld and Arthur Evans had uncovered the Greek Bronze Age. However exaggerated later by the bards, did the epic recall real places and even real events?

  Lal went to Hastinapur in the autumn of 1949. The ancient city, named in Jain and Buddhist texts as the capital of the Kurus, had lain on the Ganges, which is now 3 miles away. The northern face of the mound still falls steeply 60 feet into the green farm fields, where a sluggish perennial stream is still known to local farmers as ‘the old Ganges’. On the edge of the mound was a shrine to Shiva, ‘Lord of the Pandavas’, by the look of it not old, but a pointer to the tale that still haunted the local folk memory. Although the river was long gone, one of the old ghats (landing places) that once lay on it was still called after the epic’s heroine Draupadi. Taking all this in, Lal scouted around for pottery finds in rain-eroded gulleys at the foot of the mound and soon turned up some distinctive thin, grey ware, often patterned with geometric designs filled with dots. ‘It was thali plates and bowls, ordinary tableware, just as we use today,’ Lal told me, ‘and we immediately began to suspect it was prehistoric, a marker of north Indian Iron Age culture. So we came back in 1950 for three seasons. We stayed in tents, though the local Jain community let us use their kitchens. We used bullock carts to move the tools and lifting gear. We decided to put a great trench through the mound where we had found all the grey pottery in rain gulleys.’

  The grey pottery proved crucial in dating the site. The citadel had lasted, Lal thought, till about 800 BC, when it was abandoned. Later genealogies, preserved in texts known as Puranas, described the abandonment of Hastinapur and the movement of the rulers to Kausambi, lower down the Jumna, after a great flood. Remembering this story, Lal had an incredibly satisfying ‘eureka’ moment in the middle of the night, when he went down with an oil lamp to inspect the exposed site and saw that the Iron Age occupation had indeed been ended by a flood. ‘There’s nothing like that for an archaeologist,’ Lal beamed. ‘You feel very excited and you think, “Yes, I’ve got it”!’

  None of this, of course, proved that the events of the Mahabharata war actually happened, or that its characters were real, but it proved that the bards who composed the earlier layers of the story in the Iron Age were writing about royal centres and clans that were important in the early part of that period: the setting of the story was back at the beginning of the first millennium BC.

  Emboldened, Lal searched on. He and his colleagues took a look at over thirty other sites mentioned in the Mahabharata, all of which produced the same grey pottery. They also looked at the traditional site of the climactic battle at Kurukshetra in a tract of land north of Delhi, which has been the scene of several great battles in Indian history. This is the dharmaksetra (holy field), the centre of the land where the battle is believed to have taken place, and where the god Krishna, disguised as a charioteer, revealed himself to the hero Arjuna before battle commenced, and spoke the famous words of wisdom, the Bhagavadgita, a text beloved of all Indians. Again from the pottery, Lal and his team identified an early Iron Age settlement out in the farmland half a mile beyond the medieval city, on a mound occupied by a village and topped with an old and revered Shiva temple.

  Tonight is Sivaratri, the ‘great night of Shiva’, when visiting Kurukshetra is deemed especially auspicious. It’s the February full moon, and all day crowds have been streaming from the city down the little country lanes lined with stalls selling pilgrim trinkets and souvenirs, food, and glasses of thick green bhang (cannabis), which adds an anarchic edge to the night of the great anarchist god himself. I walk past hostels for sadhus (holy men) and retirement homes for old or invalid cows, to th
e Shiva temple and its bathing tank, festooned with strings of fairy lights. Unlike Hastinapur, this is only a small place, but perhaps realistically sized for a fortified farmstead of an Iron Age royal clan. Maybe this was the site of the real kshetra of the Kurus: a royal hall on a royal estate with earthen defences in waving wheatfields by the Jumna.

  Lal had not proved that the story was true, but, like Schliemann at Troy and Mycenae, he had shown that the bardic tradition had handed down the names of real places that had existed at a particular time, and that later generations had preserved the names of those places. But what exactly had they remembered? An epic tale or a real event? Or an imaginative mixture of both? The Puranas suggested that a ninth-century date might be appropriate for the war, provided the genealogies had preserved the lineage of real people. Beyond the shadowy data of walls, pottery and ‘tradition’, Lal was prepared to discern the shadowy lineaments of ancient battles. On the basis of his painted grey ware, he suggested a date for the Mahbharata battle of around 860 BC. No more than with Troy, though, can we say that it really took place, but with India’s extraordinary tenacity of folk memory, it would be unwise perhaps to dismiss the possibility out of hand.

  IDENTITY: A DISTILLATION OF THE PAST

  The sun is setting as we head back to our hotel in Meerut (the town where the Great Indian Mutiny or, as Indians call it, the First War of Independence, began). We eat our meal looking over a packed bazaar, where crowds are out celebrating the festival. When he hears where we have been, our hotelier tells us a Meerut folk tale. Back in the fourteenth century, he says, Tamburlaine’s army had invaded India, and the Mongol cavalry swept across the Ganges-Jumna doab, looting, burning and killing, a seemingly unstoppable force. But here in Meerut a heroic resistance was organized by a local scholar and poet, who called on the people to ‘remember what Krishna said to Arjuna, and fight even though the odds against them seemed to be hopeless’. Organizing themselves into guerrilla forces that included women and children, they moved through the forests, braving the most brutal reprisals and harassing the invaders ‘to defend the people and land of Bharat’, until eventually the harried and baffled Mongols withdrew.