We have already commented on the elements of geographical diversity and homogeneity in India. It remains for us to do the same for her people and languages. The elements of diversity form a major theme in this context too, but one has first to understand the basic conceptual frameworks of these postulated diversities and the extent to which they can be said to provide clues to an understanding of Indian archaeology and history. The problem, in fact, lies in a wider area of correlation between the biological attributes of a human group, their language and their archaeological and historical past. This was a cardinal—almost an axiomatic—assumption of archaeological and historical studies for a long time and formed the basis of judging history in terms of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ ‘races’. There are many believers in this approach, even in the modern world. In the context of the subcontinent alone there is a voluminous literature on this topic, and no student of Indian archaeology or history can avoid running into the various classificatory schemes proposed for Indian people and languages.
Recent Approach of the Anthropological Survey of India
The People of India project undertaken by the Anthropological Survey of India between 1985 and 1992 has identified approximately 4635 communities, located and studied in all ‘states’ and ‘Union Territories’ of India. Obviously, this relates only to modern India. The other areas of the subcontinent, if surveyed from this point of view, may substantially increase this number. Several volumes of the Indian data have already been published, including the volume which discusses the methodology of the conceptual framework of this classificatory exercise.
At the centre of the whole exercise lies the concept of ‘community’. Having first defined community as being marked by territoriality, the ‘we’ feeling and a partial social system, the work sets its store on the ethnographic features of endogamy (i.e. marriage within the community), occupation and perception. Community has been considered a better term than caste, tribe and other non-caste categories because the original aspects of these latter categories have been breaking down in modern India. In view of the breakdown or weakening of their traditional features, community, or to use an Indian term, samudaya, seems to be a more appropriate concept for an all-India reference than caste with its various local names. The second major point to note in this context is that a community is a dynamic category, continually redefining itself, its relationship with other communities and with its social and physical environments. As K.S. Singh, the author of the first volume of this project, writes,
No definition can be too precise at any point of time. Definitions change. For instance, there was no single definition of a tribe and yet the tribe continued to be studied. Similarly, even if there was a difference about the notion of a community, it should be studied.12
The work has identified four types of communities. The first type comprises very large categories, including castes and minorities. The second type denotes mostly the major linguistic and cultural categories, such as the Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, etc. Even when they emigrate they are known by the state and the language area to which they belong. There is a third type of community—only about half a dozen of them—which does not conform to the three-fold criteria of endogamy, occupation and perception. The fourth type of community—Adi Dharma, Adi Karnataka, Adi Andhra, etc.—came up in the wake of the constitutional reforms of the 1920s and 1930s and continues to figure in the Government of India list of ‘scheduled castes’.
Of the 4635 identified communities, there are 2209 main communities with 586 segments (mostly major). But, when one considers the distribution of the communities and their segments over states and the Union Territories, their number goes up to 4635. Even a brief listing of these communities does not concern us here, but one can certainly point out the infinite background factors leading to their community perceptions and identifications. In many cases, it is the nature of occupation. Whether one catches snakes (Sapera) or makes bamboo baskets (Bansfors), it is reflected in his community name and perception. The places of origin can play a role too; for instance, there can be a community called Kanpuria, the group from Kanpur. Religious affiliation can also identify a community; for instance, the Kabirpanthis, the followers of Kabir, have formed a community. Even mendicants sometimes group themselves into communities, such as the Aghoris, Bairagis, and Fakirs. The narration is almost endless. Sometimes, there are markers of dress, ornaments, body-markings, etc. to denote particular communities. Members of the Lingayatcommunity of south India carry a small Linga or phallus, the emblem of Siva, around their neck. A study of Indian communities in relation to their food habits reveals that only about 20 per cent of them are vegetarians, with the males being mostly non-vegetarians. Alcoholic beverages are common too; alcohol is occasionally used in 2469 communities and regularly in 1106. Such grassroots realities contrast sharply with the traditional Indological image of India.
An overwhelming number of communities are linguistically homogeneous, but the incidence of bilingualism is as high as 64.2 per cent in terms of the number of communities. Even the number of scripts is apparently in a state of flux; there are 11 scripts used by the scheduled languages, but many groups are re-inventing their ‘lost’ script in search of a distinct identity. The Santal script of Ol Chiki invented by a Santal savant, Raghunath Murmu, and officially recognized in the state of West Bengal, is one such example. The morphological and genetic traits are not, however, clustered around individual communities; data collected in this regard suggest that the variability of genetic and morphological traits is more within communities than between them. There are wide variations in the range of social organizations, beginning with clan organizations, marriage patterns, marriage symbols, and so on. Many of these variations are related to status, power and dominance of various community segments. The concept of purity and pollution is very important in allocating places in the basic social hierarchy which is by and large conditioned by the fourfold varna system, including the fifth category of untouchables. However, the varna system is not universal; only 68.5 per cent of the communities are reportedly aware of it, with the tribals or at least most of them standing outside this system. There are dual varna categories in 104 communities. To give an example, at least 54 communities recognize themselves as both Brahmins and Kshatriyas. More interestingly, among the 584 Muslim communities, 53 still recognize their place in the varna system, with 12 of them identifying themselves as Brahmins. The same is true of the 339 Christian communities which have been studied: 76 of them consider themselves to be part of the varna system. The hierarchical divisions within a community can be impressive; but what is interesting now is that many of these distinctions are gradually disappearing and there is more emphasis on the identity of the community as a whole with the formation of political associations. Religious affiliations also are not static; there are various levels and forms of Hinduism, from monism to plain shamanism. The survey identified 70 traditional rural occupations, with the artisan communities having a countrywide distribution. Some of the widely distributed occupational groups are leather-workers (Chamars), mendicants and beggars (Jogis), potters (Kumhars), oil-pressers (Kalu) and barbers (Nai). Again, none of these occupational groups has remained static.
The image of diversity notwithstanding, society is not perceived to be fragmented by Indians; to them it is a kind of ‘honeycomb in which communities are engaged in vibrant interaction, sharing space, ethos and cultural traits both at local and regional levels’.
On a theoretical level this sharing of space, ethos and cultural traits is better explained by the results of a much earlier Anthropological Survey of India study of the distribution of the material traits of life in the country. The relevant material traits were forms of villages, types of cottages, staple diet, oils and oil-presses, ploughs and husking implements, male and female dresses, footwear and bullock-carts. Some degree of regionalism is evident in the distribution of these traits, but, as N.K. Bose comments,
this regionalism seems to be on the whole independent of language as well of physical types. This means that the plough or the husking mortar and pestle, the unsewn cloth worn and regarded as ritually pure by women, the forms of villages, of oil-presses and methods of cooking food in oil, etc., show a kind of kinship between the peasant folk, the weaver, the potter, etc. of various parts of India which is quite likely to be overlooked.13
The degree of differentiation is said to be less in respect of the country’s social organization. Similarities are many between the various castes and the linked productive organizations in different parts of the country, the distinction being based on finer shades only. Besides,
as one considers other spheres of life, namely things like laws which guide inheritance or define the rights and duties of individuals in a kin group, or if one rises to higher reaches of life confined to ideals or faiths or art, the differences which one has noticed at the material level of life become feebler. They are eventually replaced by a unity of beliefs and aspirations which gives to Indian civilization a character of its own. The structure of Indian unity can therefore be compared to a pyramid. There is more differentiation at the material basis of life and progressively less as one mounts higher and higher.14
The Classificatory Systems Based on the Concept of Race
A well-known and certainly more deep-rooted approach to the study of Indian people is the system of racial classifications which crystallized at the turn of the twentieth century and is principally associated with H.H. Risley. He first published his all-India scheme of races in 1901 as a part of the report on the Indian census of that year.
Before we turn to Risley, it might be useful to take a historical look at the concept of race itself. In its essentials, this concept is based on a study of human physical characters, comprising skeletal and surface features. The shape and size of the skull vault, face, nose, jaws and teeth, development of brow-ridges, projection of the cheek-bones, projection of the jaws, stature, body-build and proportion of the limbs and their segments constitute the skeletal features. Among the surface features one may note skin colour, hair form and colour, eye colour and folds, the form of the lips and the extent to which they are everted, and some peculiarities like steatopygia (an unusual accumulation of fat on buttocks and thighs). The study of all these elements did not become significant at a single point of time. However, the study of the cephalic/cranial indices has long been a major part of the racial classificatory systems. Cephalic or the cranial index is the proportion of breadth to the length of the head or skull: brachy or broad-headed (80 per cent +), meso or medium-headed (75–80 per cent), and dolicho or long-headed (less than 75 per cent). Similarly the relation of the breadth of the nose to its height supposedly classifies people into platyrrhine (85 per cent and above: broad-nosed), mesorrhine (75–80 per cent: medium-nosed) and leptorrhine (less than 70 per cent of the height: narrow-nosed) groups.15
A number of features may be noted about the concept of race. First, various language elements have come to be mixed with this. Although many scholars theoretically disown such a linkage, in practice, when they write about race and racial classifications, the linguistic correlations generally creep in. Second, the racial classifications very often carry the tone of superior and inferior races. This element of racial hierarchy has been adduced virtually in every context since the second part of the eighteenth century when the idea of races was first systematically laid down. This has strong undertones in modern political and social situations. Its strongest manifestation took place in Nazi Germany. Third, the essential framework of grouping mankind into such categories as Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, etc. continued uninterrupted and unchallenged till recently. With its categorical hierarchy of superior/inferior races and their assumed roles in the march of civilization, such classifications offered an unmitigated racist approach to history. Fourth, although after the Holocaust of the Jews under the Nazi regime in Germany and the American Civil Rights movement, there is less preoccupation with race as a conceptual category of great historical significance among scholars, the idea has by no means lost its votaries in the academia.
It must, however, be strongly emphasized that an increasing number of biological anthropologists no longer believe in this concept. In an edited volume called The Concept of Race and published as early as 1964, the anthropological concept of race has been described as an ‘omelette which corresponds to nothing in nature’ and does not have any existence ‘outside the statistical frying pan in which it has been reduced by the heat of the anthropological imagination.’16 On the basis of their statistical study of the Indian populace in 1990, P.P. Majumdar and his associates at the Indian Statistical Research Institute, Calcutta, unambiguously showed that ‘the people of India cannot be classified into a fixed set of ethnic categories based on anthropometric data.’17 According to them research should concentrate on the sources of anthropometric variation and attempts to arrive at typological/racial classifications should be abandoned. However, the literature on Indian archaeology is still replete with references to race in slightly disguised form of ethnicity.18
By the end of the nineteenth century the method of racial classification based on cephalic index was well accepted in Europe, and throughout the second half of that century there was also a growing concern with the need for a classification of Indian people. It was not primarily an academic concern. The main purpose was to serve the interest of the Empire by giving scientific sanctity to the common perception of multiple divisions of ‘caste, tribe and race’ among the Indian people. This would eminently serve the cause of ‘divide and rule’ on the one hand, and, on the other, it would lead to an aggravation of divisive feeling among people themselves, which in turn would lead to some political consequences as well.
All secret societies of a dangerous political character are impossible in a population, which is honeycombed with deep, though innocent fissures; the panchayat of the caste is a welcome and powerful ally to a Just Ruler; the old Roman proverb applies, Divide et Impera. … I am glad to hear that there is a prospect of an Ethnological Survey of British India.19
In 1886–88 Risley conducted a survey in Bengal, Bihar, UP and Punjab and published the resultant anthropometric data and ethnographic glossary in 1891. The tradition of classifying Indian people into ‘communities’ of various kinds, which we have observed in the Anthropological Survey of India ‘People of India’ project, goes back to this publication by Risley. For instance, under the entry Lalbegi, one gets their description as a class of Muslim sweepers from upper India who were generally employed as sweepers in the European households. However, Risley’s main classificatory system of Indian population was published in his chapter on ‘caste, tribe and race’ in a report related to the 1901 census.
According to Risley, there are basically seven racial categories of Indian people:
Risley’s classification was based as much on his perception of the Indian past and the history of Indian languages as on anthropometric data. Among his theoretical observations one may note the following two points. First, he asserts that the prevalence of the caste system in India with its emphasis on marriage within the caste was a major factor in the maintenance of racial purity. Second, he makes easy correlations not merely between race and language but also between race and occupation. The concept of racial superiority/inferiority is also very much there, the topmost position in the hierarchy being given to the Indo-Aryans. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept of the Aryans gained major ground on the basis of comparative philological studies. The Rigveda being the earliest ‘Aryan’ text, the upper castes of India had to fall into the Aryan (or, in this case, Indo-Aryan) fold, and through this affiliation they could also claim a cousinship with their ‘Aryan’ English rulers. Now, with the Indo-Aryans at the top of Risley’s racial hierarchy there was naturally a clamour among the Indian upper castes to lay claim to as much Aryanness as possible. An Indian scholar, R.P. Chanda, went to the extent of writing a book titled Indo-Aryan Races to argue that the Bengali upper castes did not derive their broadheadedness from the Mongoloids, as Risley argued, but from some good ‘Aryan’ skulls in the Taklamakan desert. The study of India’s ancient past had, in fact, become completely racist by this time.
A major modification of Risley was attempted only in the 1931 census operations conducted by J.H. Hutton. A section was written on the racial affinities of India by B.S. Guha of the Anthropological Survey of India and Hutton himself contributed a section on India’s racial history. The details of the Guha classification are not our concern here; the ways in which the racial basis of the Indian population have been determined should be clear from Risley’s pioneering scheme mentioned earlier. However, Guha’s racial types were briefly the following: dolichocephalic short-slatured, dolichocephalic tall-statured, brachycephalic medium-statured, short-statured with strongly marked brow-ridges (a group of ‘aboriginal’ population), pigmy strain with spirally curved hair (another ‘aboriginal’ group), brachycephalic Mongoloid in the Himalayan arc, and finally, a second Mongoloid strain on the eastern borders. On the basis of the available skeletal evidence Guha also offered a racial history of India: three racial types around the time of the Indus civilization—long-headed with high cranial vault, long-headed with lower cranial vault, and a broad-headed Armenoid type. The Iron Age South India was marked by another phase: long and high-skulled ‘megalithic people’ responsible for introducing agriculture in India and subsequently pushed to the south. Guha’s third phase was marked by the imposition of a race with Armenoid affinities on the Iron Age race at a later date.
Hutton’s racial history was more culturally oriented and laid the foundations of the kind of correlations that one can find among the writings of many subsequent scholars. The earliest race was Negrito, about which nothing is said except that it came from outside. The second group which came from Palestine is the Proto-Australoids, associated with an agglutinative tongue from which the Austro-Asiatic language was derived. They were followed by an early branch of the Mediterranean which introduced a rudimentary form of agriculture and navigation. A later branch of the civilized Mediterranean followed, to be followed in their turn by the Armenoid branch of the Alpine race which developed the Indus civilization and spoke Dravidian. In the third millennium BC there was an Indo-European-speaking brachycephalic race, whose main course went along the west coast and a lesser course to the Ganga valley. In the extreme south other (undefined) movements went on, including those of southern Mongoloids. Finally, around 1500 BC the Indo-European migration took place to Punjab and led on to produce ‘the philosophy, religion, art and letters that were the glory of ancient India’.21
The exposition of ancient Indian racial and cultural history that one finds in modern books on ancient India generally follows the Guha-Hutton line of argument. As late as 1994, the editors of the Anthropological Survey of India monograph, The Biological Variations in Indian Population, discuss ethnic classifications, especially B.S. Guha’s scheme.
There is also an elaborate scheme of language migrations to India, generally coinciding with the postulated racial migrations. We have seen some indications of this in Hutton’s scheme of India’s racial history. The linguistic survey of India was carried out by G.A. Grierson between 1903 and 1927. Its published volumes constitute the basic reference point of the study of Indian languages.22 Their main families are four: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austric or Austro-Asiatic, and Tibeto-Burman. Occasionally the names differ but that is not important. All these languages have their subdivisions. The 1951 census gives a total number of 845 languages and dialects spoken in the modern state of India alone. The number will obviously increase if the other nation-states of the subcontinent are taken into consideration. The classification undertaken by Grierson, which also covered Myanmar because till 1937 it was a part of the British Indian territory, listed a total of 179 languages and 544 dialects. The majority of the people speak various languages of the Indo-Aryan family; about 20 per cent speak the Dravidian languages; and a much lesser proportion speak languages of the Tibeto-Burman and Austric groups. The number of scripts in use in India are many, with most of the regional languages having their own scripts. At their roots is the dominant ancient script of the land, Brahmi. The historical development of this script in different regions led to the various modern scripts. There are about 11 major scripts, numerically the dominant one being Devanagari which is used for Hindi.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The purpose of the present chapter was to focus on the academic and physical context of what will be discussed in the rest of the book. Because archaeology is concerned essentially with the story of human cultural growth in the physical context of land, the land cannot be put outside the general academic milieu of its study. This is why we have put these two contexts together. Besides, throughout our subsequent discussion on the course of India’s evolution from the palaeolithic stage to the early historic foundations, geography, i.e., the context of land, will form a major backdrop of our analysis. In fact, if any particular perspective may be said to dominate the academic logic of our study, that is an unqualified concern with the geographically multilinear character of the subcontinent’s archaeological development.
Finally, we may here draw attention to another theoretical point. Because of the intrinsic character of its data and of the time-span over which these data are spread, archaeologists are forced to take an essentially long-term view of history at the grassroots level. To use the evocative words of a French historian (Braudel 1980: 12), this kind of history is the history of man ‘in his intimate relationship to the earth which bears and feeds him; it is a dialogue which never stops repeating itself, which repeats itself in order to persist, which may and does change superficially, but which goes on, tenaciously, as though it were somehow beyond time’s reach and ravages.’ Although Braudel did not write this specifically in the context of archaeological past, we feel that this vividly echoes a very important part of archaeological reality, and we have tried to remain aware of it throughout the course of this volume.