In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  This has tremendous implications for the whole history of early India. For it suggests that Dravidian languages are not native to the south, but moved from Baluchistan through Gujerat and into Southern India only after about 5000 BC. There the early Dravidians found ancient tribes who still live in the forests stretching down into Andra and across into Orissa, and who still preserve older forms of religion and social organization. Once rooted in the south, the Dravidians developed towns and rediscovered writing only in the late first millennium BC.

  The proving of these linguistic links transforms our understanding of the Indus civilization, for it makes it virtually certain that an early form of Dravidian, related to modern Tamil, was spoken in the Indus valley at the time of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Hence, most probably, the undeciphered inscriptions on the seals are Dravidian, as scholars have long suspected. Other fascinating pieces of evidence back this up, from the survival of Dravidian kinship terminology in today’s Gujerat to the continued presence of Dravidian-derived custom in the Indus region. One tiny detail will serve as an example: on Hindu pilgrim stalls in Madurai, South India, the symbol of the town’s goddess Minakshi is a fish with stars. Her name comes from the most ancient stratum of Tamil: ‘min’ means both ‘fish’ and ‘star’, ancient symbols of divinity. This combination is depicted on Harappan pottery and seals; but it is also still found on Muslim pilgrim stalls in Sind where the fish is carved with the Muslim creed – an amazing testimony to the tenacity of religious symbols over time!

  Eighty years after the discovery of Harappa, the strands are beginning to come together. The Indus civilization was almost certainly Dravidian, its culture closely related to the Elamite world of Iran, and distantly related to today’s culture in South India. It declined around 1700 BC, through a combination of factors which may have included a marked decrease in rainfall and the collapse of long-distance trade. The big cities were abandoned, though smaller settlements continued later. At the same time the Indo-European Aryans who had conquered Iran were expanding into the mountainous zone between the Oxus and the Indus, and over a long period of time they became the dominant culture and speech in the Sind and Punjab, completely assimilating the native Dravidian speakers (though loan-words in the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda testify to their presence). Between 1500 and 1000 BC the Aryans spread into the Ganges and Jumna valleys, burning the forests, building settlements and cultivating the land. In the meantime Dravidian language and culture had spread into South India where we can trace continuity back to 3000 BC. It was out of the interaction of these two cultures that the civilizations of classical India would emerge. This is a tentative reconstruction as yet, but its basic outline is surely right.

  THE HEROIC AGE

  For a long period after the decline of the Indus civilization, perhaps for as much as a thousand years, there was no true urban life in India. North Indian society was rural, ruled by various Aryan chieftains who settled along the river valleys surrounded by vast tracts of forest inhabited by the aboriginal population, the Adivasis, whose tribal descendants still live there today. It may have been during this period that the caste system began to take shape, a form of social segregation based on an elaborately graded hierarchy – from Brahmins (priests) at the top, to the ‘untouchables’ at the bottom, who for example dispose of the dead. The original meaning of caste (varna) is colour, and perhaps the system began as a way of keeping the light-skinned Aryans apart from the darker-skinned native population. The epic poem Mahabharata, though written down much later, preserves genuine traditions of this time. It tells of warring Aryan clans in the Ganges valley, sacking each other’s citadels and seizing women, cattle and treasure, much like the heroic age portrayed by Homer’s Iliad. In some cases modern archaeology has confirmed the basic tale. The Kaurava capital in the Mahabharata, for example, was Hastinapur on the Ganges, which excavation in the 1950s showed to have been destroyed by flooding in about 800 BC. This event is actually described in one of the Sanskrit religious texts as taking place in the time of the seventh king to rule there since the great war of the Mahabharata, which dates that war quite plausibly to about 900 BC. Some of the traditions of that time have been very long-lasting: the scene of the Mahabharata’s climactic battle, Kurukshetra, is still an important pilgrimage place today.

  The Mahabharata also suggests that the sacred geography of India was well established during the first millennium BC, in a pattern which has remained ever since; indeed the concept of India as one motherland united by pilgrimage may come from this time. The poem contains a list of 270 holy places which form a circuit of the entire country. The last, and most famous, was Prayag, now Allahabad at the junction of the Ganges and Jumna.

  Allahabad is still the site of a great religious festival each year, and every twelfth year, at the Kumbh Mela, it sees the largest gathering of humanity anywhere on earth. In February 1989, fifteen million were present on the most auspicious night, many more over the whole month of the festival. Just such a gathering with half a million pilgrims was witnessed here in 644 AD by the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsuan Tsang, who was told it had gone on since ancient times. Fascinating new research has shown why Prayag had pre-eminent sanctity as the ‘king of holy places’. Prayag was viewed as the navel of the earth, the mythical creation point of the universe, just like Eridu, Delphi, or Cuzco: the site of the primordial mound which rose out of the waters (a phenomenon still to be seen at Allahabad at Mela time as the flood water of the Ganges subsides). Here was an archaic pillar cult at the point where heaven and earth were first separated, and a sacred ‘undying’ tree like that at Eridu (or the Biblical Garden of Eden) which was seen by Hsuan Tsang in 644; still alive in the seventeenth century, it is now a stump only. In the period of the epics, the first millennium BC, the chief cult shrines at Prayag stood on an island whose outline can still be seen although the Ganges has changed its course over the centuries. On the north end of the island was a shrine to the primordial serpent who protected the eternal tree. It is still there today, the only one of its kind in India.

  THE GANGES CIVILIZATION

  Towards 600 BC a number of settled kingdoms had come into existence in the Ganges valley, and large cities began once more to be built in India. Some of them had great ditch and rampart systems. Kausambi, for example, near Allahabad, had a five-mile circuit with eleven gates and large public buildings. Its walls were constructed in burned bricks of standard size, and their huge sloping revetments strikingly recall those at Harappa, though it is hard to see how such a tradition could have been passed down directly. These cities became important centres of long-distance trade, and in them in the sixth century BC a great ferment of spiritual and intellectual ideas took place. The chief focus of this brilliant and exciting time was a city which has remained India’s greatest centre of learning and culture to this day: Benares or Kashi, ‘City of Light’.

  The Axis Age, c.500 BC. In a few decades on either side of 500 BC the Buddha and Mahavira were alive in India, Confucius (and Lao Tzu?) in China, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets in Palestine and Babylonia, along with early Greek scientists and philosophers and the founders of Athenian democracy: the spiritual legacy of the Bronze Age was being revalued.

  Medieval India, showing the Moghul Empire under Akbar. The South continued to go its own way, as it had under the Cholas (c.900–1300) and before: the most ancient cultural and linguistic divide in Indian history.

  The early history of Benares is very sketchily known. In the archaeological record it begins with the remains of a burned brick wall and ditch from the eighth century BC on the high plateau where the British built their railway bridge in 1887. Only in the Middle Ages did it spread south to today’s magnificent three-mile frontage along the Ganges. By the third century BC, it was said to be ‘the chief city in all India’ and by then had gained its reputation as the city of Shiva. How this happened is not certain: despite the evidence from the Indus valley, the origin of Shiva is still a mystery and should probably be sought
in the indigenous prehistoric cultures of North India. The recent find of a goddess shrine south of Allahabad, dated to 11000 BC and constructed exactly as is still done in tribal culture, is a hint at the immense antiquity of traditional Indian religion: Mesolithic cave paintings of a dancing shaman with horned head-dress, bangles and trident, closely resembling Shiva, suggest that god’s long prehistory.

  In the sixth century BC, the Ganges cities produced an astonishing intellectual and religious flowering. Writing was reintroduced, having vanished with the Indus cities; the new script, Brahmi, was adapted from that of the Persian empire and is the ancestor of all subsequent Indian scripts. A prodigious amount of material comes from this time: astronomy, geometry, grammar, phonetics, etymology, but especially religion and philosophy. This was a time of great speculation about the creation of the world, culminating in the Upanishads, one of India’s great legacies to the world. Out of the ancient pre-Aryan animism and Aryan sacrificial religion, Indian civilization had moved to the subtlest reaches of thought, and from that time till today there is an unbroken continuity of that kind of spiritual exploration which is so characteristic of Indian civilization.

  Many different sects arose in what was clearly an atmosphere of deep spiritual unrest, especially among the rising class of merchants in the cities who were least attracted by Aryan religion. All rejected the sacrificial polytheism of the Aryans; most opposed caste and ritual too. Such thinkers seem to represent a recognition of the rule of natural law in the universe, rather like their contemporaries, the natural philosophers of Ionian Greece. Among their gurus were atheists, rationalists, sceptics, and outright materialists like Ajita Kesakambalin who rejected any notion of the afterlife. Kassapa Kaccayana’s atomic theories, and his assertion that all change is illusory, remind us particularly strongly of the pre-Socratic Greeks like Heraclitus of Ephesus. All these strands can be found in medieval and modern Hinduism. But the two greatest religious movements of the Ganges civilization were the Jains and the Buddhists.

  BUDDHISM AND JAINISM

  Four miles away from the gaudy tumult of Benares, in about 500 BC, a young Indian prince preached a sermon which would change the world. His name was Gautama, but we know him as his followers did, as the Buddha, the ‘Enlightened One’. ‘I have reached the conviction,’ he said, ‘that human suffering must be comprehended.’ His answer to the perennial question of life was simple and typically Indian. ‘It is attachment to the senses and to material desires,’ he said, ‘which is the root of all human unhappiness. Get rid of those desires and you will find the path to salvation.’ This bleak, essentially atheistic message would spread across Asia to China, Korea and Japan, where it remains a fundamental force to this day.

  The Buddha (563–483 BC) was not the only reformer. Mahavira, the last guru of the Jains, who died around 477 BC, was his contemporary. Jainism, like Buddhism, is atheistic in nature, the existence of God being irrelevant to belief. For Jains, everything in the universe has a soul. Hence they practise an austere form of non-violence and vegetarianism. Unlike Buddhism, Jainism has an unbroken tradition in India especially among the merchant communities of Western India. Some have speculated, indeed, that it ultimately derives, however indirectly, from the mercantile communities of the Indus. It has continued with vitality until today: Mahavira’s teachings were recycled in the ethics of Gandhi, brought up in a Banias trader caste in the Jain culture of Gujerat.

  Both Buddhism and Jainism were characterized by a rejection of Brahmin civilization with its caste divisions and its sacrificial cult (and its Indo-European hierarchy of male gods). They represent a transition from the magical thought of the Vedas to a new kind of rationality, exemplified in the Buddha’s ‘four noble truths’ and his eightfold path to salvation which rested on individual morality and action. Both too were tinged with pessimism, notably in the Buddha’s view of life as an intolerable chain of suffering from which mankind can only break free by extinguishing earthly desire. It was a vision of the human condition as distinctive of India as tragedy and philosophy were of the Greeks; indeed when we consider the Buddha sitting lotus fashion in his deer park under the sacred pipal tree, ‘lord of the animals’, just like the enigmatic ‘proto-Shiva’ on the Indus seal, we may wonder how far such a figure, renouncing the material world, goes back into the Indian past.

  It may be no coincidence that the Buddha arose at this moment. The historian Karl Jaspers called the period of the Buddha’s lifetime, from the sixth to the fifth century BC, the Axis Age, because so many of the great thinkers in world history were alive at the same time: the Buddha and Mahavira in India; Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the early Greek philosophers; the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, in particular ‘Deutero-Isaiah’; Confucius, Lao Tzu and the Taoists in China. It is extraordinary to think that some of those people could actually have met each other! This coincidence of lives suggests that the ancient world which had emerged from the first civilizations of Iraq and Egypt, China and India, was undergoing a crisis of spirit. Fundamental questions were being asked about the nature of God, about the purpose of life on earth and about the basis of the authority of the kings and states. And at the heart of it all were the questions which still plague governments today, even in sophisticated, technocratic societies like the United States and Western Europe – all the more now perhaps, when the sanction of religion has lost its power to teach or frighten. How do you persuade your citizens to act as moral beings? How do you persuade them to be good? The different ways in which those early civilizations attempted to come to terms with these questions still shape their descendants, and us, today. The Near East took the path of monotheism which would become central to the ideology of the West, as well as of Islam. China held to the Confucian conception of the individual, the family and the state in a perfectable moral order on earth. In India the great tradition asserted that attachment to this earthly material life is illusion and that true enlightenment can only come by forsaking it: the very opposite of Western thinking. And so the social and economic character of these great cultures is still touched by that revolutionary epoch even today.

  THE MAURYAN EMPIRE

  In the fourth century BC came the first attempt to impose a political unity on India: the Mauryan Empire. And from this time comes the first Western account of India, written by a Greek ambassador, Megasthenes. Arriving at the Mauryan capital at Patna on the Ganges, the Greeks were stunned to find the largest city of the ancient world. A 22-mile rectangle with 570 towers, 64 gates and a population of 400,000: bigger than Rome at its height. They were surprised too, to find that – unlike Greece – India was not a slave-based society, though the regimented government was a far cry from the genial anarchy of today’s Patna. Chandragupta Maurya, whose court Megasthenes visited, is said to have been a Jain, and to have ended his life by resigning and fasting to death, as great holy men did in the Jain tradition. His grandson Ashoka expanded the empire further to include much of India. But it is not for conquests that Ashoka’s thirty-five-year reign is remembered as one of the most extraordinary in world history. Ashoka’s story can be pieced together in his own words from inscriptions on stone columns like that at Kausambi which is still today an object of veneration for Buddhist pilgrims from Korea, Japan and Tibet. It was after a victorious war in Orissa, he says, in which he killed a hundred thousand people, that Ashoka became convinced that war was wrong. Then he turned to the idea which would echo across the ages right down to Mahatma Gandhi: ahimsa, non-violence. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘I will try to conquer by right conduct alone.’

  All across India, from the Khyber to the southern Deccan, Ashoka had his edicts inscribed, often using the ancient Hindu cosmic pillars which already existed at sites of immemorial sanctity, such as Prayag and Sarnath, where the Buddha had preached his first sermon. These archaic symbols were transformed, literally, into pillars of morality, explaining what the doctrine of dharma, ‘right conduct’, actually meant. Remarkably, it was not based on the sanction o
f religious authority. It was a secular ideal of the dignity of human beings, and of the humanistic possibilities of civic morality, based on the Buddhist eightfold path of ‘right thinking’ and the Jain belief in non-violence. ‘I have honoured men of all creeds,’ said Ashoka. ‘But I consider this to be the essential thing, what I call “the approach through one’s own free will.”’ On the pillar edicts appear all those words which modern politicians find so difficult to pronounce today: compassion, tolerance, gentleness, truthfulness. The clauses on non-violence abjure meat-eating and preserve a whole range of species from the parrot to the white ant, from the Ganges porpoise to the rhinoceros. ‘Forests,’ Ashoka said with prophetic force, ‘must not be burned uselessly.’ In his ecological and conservation measures, Ashoka sounds astonishingly modern to us today, no doubt misleadingly so. We are impressed, too, by his wide-ranging social and welfare legislation. But there is also an ominously contemporary ring, in that bane of our own time, massive state intervention, with an army of spies and thought police to check up on what people were doing. It sounds intolerable to us today – and no doubt it was to some people of the time too! But Ashoka is an extraordinary product of that extraordinary age, the Axis Age, in his turning away from the authority of religion and magic to that of reason and morality as a basis for politics. And however imperfectly he tried to execute it, his idea of dharma, right conduct, was one of the great ideas of human history to set beside Greek democracy, the American Bill of Rights, the Communist Manifesto. Indeed, as the troubled twentieth century draws to its close, one might be forgiven for thinking that this was an idea whose time is almost come! After Indian Independence in 1948, Ashoka’s lion from his pillar at Sarnath was taken as the emblem of India. Nothing could be more appropriate.