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IN 1856, A CONTRACTOR NAMED WILLIAM BRUNTON, working on the Multan to Lahore railway, found the perfect source for track ballast to construct embankments. At the small village of Harappā he discovered thousands of uniformly shaped kiln-fired bricks buried in a series of mounds that locals had been excavating to obtain building material for their houses. The news eventually reached Alexander Cunningham (1814–1893), the founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, who, in 1873, surveyed an extensive series of ruins almost a kilometre long running along the banks of the Ravi River. He assumed they were the remains of a Greek settlement left behind by Alexander the Great’s army in the fourth century BCE. So much of the rubble had been cleared away he decided that there was little worth preserving, leaving the most significant discoveries for future archaeologists.
Among the artefacts Cunningham did collect was a small seal, not much bigger than a postage stamp, made of smooth black soapstone and bearing the image of a bull with six characters above it. Because the bull had no hump and the characters did not resemble the letters of any known Indian language, he believed the seal came from elsewhere. Other seals were gradually uncovered featuring animals such as elephants, oxen and rhinoceroses – and mysterious characters.
Some of the seals made their way to the British Museum, where one, depicting a cow with a unicorn-like horn, features in Neil MacGregor’s 2010 book, A History of the World in 100 Objects. As the museum’s former director notes, the tiny seal would lead to the rewriting of world history and take Indian civilisation thousands of years further back than anyone had previously thought.
Originally thought to be a unicorn, the animal on this seal is now believed to be a bull. The seals of the Harappān civilisation contain the oldest writing in South Asia. It has yet to be deciphered.
It was Cunningham’s successor, Sir John Marshall (1876–1958), who recognised the significance of the seals. In the 1920s, he ordered further excavations at Harappā and a site that came to be known as Mohenjo-daro, or ‘Mound of the Dead Men’, several hundred kilometres to the south in what was then British India and is now the province of Sindh, in Pakistan. Marshall realised immediately there was a link between the two sites. At both places there were numerous artificial mounds covering the remains of once-flourishing cities. As dozens of similar sites came to light over an area stretching from the Yamuna River in the east to present-day Afghanistan in the west, it became clear that between roughly 3300 BCE and 1300 BCE, it had been home to the world’s largest civilisation (by area).
Until Marshall’s discoveries, there was no material evidence of any Indian civilisation that predated Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), whose conquering armies reached the shores of the Indus River in 326 BCE. Almost all of the archaeological remains from around this date were Buddhist, with much of the statutory bearing Grecian influences.
Map showing Mature Phase of the Harappān civilisation, also known as the Indus Valley civilisation. The former, named after the first discovered site, is now preferred because the civilisation extended beyond the Indus River.
As Marshall continued his excavations, he was stunned by the uniqueness of the finds. To begin with, those prized bricks turned out to be remarkably uniform across all the excavated sites. The settlements were built on similar grid layouts, with street widths conforming to set ratios depending on their importance. There were imposing communal buildings, what appeared to be public baths and a sophisticated sanitation system – triumphs of town planning, far in advance of anything known in the ancient world and not to be repeated in India until Maharaja Jai Singh I laid out plans for Jaipur in the early eighteenth century. Even the weights and measures used in trade were remarkably uniform.
Toys and figurines made of clay and bronze, jewellery and cooking aids, rudimentary agricultural tools, fragments of painted pottery, whistles made in the form of hollow birds, and even terracotta mousetraps were found at dozens of sites. Then there were those seals – almost 5000 have been discovered so far – some with anthropomorphic figures, others with animals including that mysterious unicorn-like bovine in the British Museum. ‘Not often has it been to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus,’ Marshall announced triumphantly in September 1924.
We now know that at its peak in 2500 BCE, around the time the Great Pyramid of Giza was completed and a century or so before Stonehenge rose from the fields of Wiltphire, the Harappān civilisation covered an area of more than a million square kilometres, making it bigger than the civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. But unlike our knowledge of its better-known contemporaries, what we know of this momentous civilisation is scanty. No Rosetta Stone has been discovered to crack the code of those ubiquitous markings on the seals.
Over the past century and a half, attempts to identify the characters by linking them to scripts or languages as diverse as Brāhmī (the ancestor to most modern South Asian scripts), Sumerian, Egyptian, Old Slavic and even Easter Island rongorongo have proven futile. Citing the brevity of most inscriptions (fewer than one in a hundred objects with ‘writing’ have more than ten characters), some historians and linguists have speculated that the seals do not contain script at all but are devices that denote ownership – a primitive form of a barcode.
If this was a form of writing, it would make the Harappān civilisation the largest literate society of the ancient world, and arguably its most advanced. It would not be until the reign of Emperor Aśoka in the third century BCE that evidence of writing emerged on the Indian subcontinent. Unless archaeologists stumble upon a buried library or archives, the mystery of the script, if indeed that is what it is, will remain just that.
In their attempt to establish a chronology of the Harappān civilisation, archaeologists have made little headway in determining how the society was governed and functioned. None of the structures appeared to be palaces or places of worship. Fortifications weren’t added until the later phase of the civilisation, and few weapons have been unearthed. The lack of elaborate burial places suggests a degree of social equality found nowhere else in the ancient world. Evidence of a ruling class with kings or queens has yet to established.
Based on the discovery of seals as far afield as Iraq, Oman and Central Asia, it is clear that this was also a significant trading empire. Copper, gold, tin, ivory and possibly cotton were traded with Mesopotamia, while bronze, silver and precious stones such as lapis lazuli were imported. Yet after a century of excavations, considerable uncertainty remains over how this prosperous and sophisticated civilisation was founded and what caused it to vanish.
In the absence of definitive evidence, numerous theories have filled the vacuum. The race to decipher the script has led to forgeries, including the doctoring of an image on a seal to make it look like a horse, an animal of considerable importance in Vedic ritual. Most of these forgeries have been constructed around the need to provide a continuous line to the foundation of the modern Indian state. In recent decades, Hindu nationalist historians have sought to incorporate the Harappān civilisation with the beginnings of Hinduism that they argue dates back to the third or fourth millennium BCE, thereby making it the oldest religion in South Asia.
THE EARLIEST INDIANS
If the archaeological discoveries of the early 1920s were a watershed in pushing back the beginnings of Indian civilisation by thousands of years, the 2010s will be remembered for the astonishing advances in our understanding of the ancestry of the earliest Indians. The ability to analyse the genetic DNA of skeletal remains has enabled scientists to map migration routes into India, identify the first agriculturalists and even date the beginnings of social stratification known as the caste system.
Based on archaeological finds, such as beach middens in Eritrea, we can confidently date the migration of modern humans, or homo sapiens, out of Africa to around 70,000 years ago. Their route took them through the Arabian Peninsula and across modern-day Iraq and Iran, until they reached the Indian subcontinent some 65,000 years ago. There, they encountered groups of what are termed ‘archaic humans’. In the absence of any fossil evidence other than a cranium discovered on the banks of the Narmada River and dated to approximately 250,000 years ago, we do not know who these people were. The discovery of Palaeolithic tools in South India pushes back the timeline for these archaic people to 1.5 million years ago, making them one of the earliest populations outside Africa. As modern humans settled in the more fecund areas of the subcontinent, their population increased rapidly until India became the epicentre of the world’s population during the period from approximately 45,000 to 20,000 years ago.
DNA dating points to a second wave of migrants who made their way eastwards from the southern or central Zagros region in modern-day Iran around 8000 BCE. The precursor to what became the Harappān civilisation can be found in a village so remote and obscure that even people living in the area don’t know of its existence. Mehrgarh is located in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, a lawless tribal area on the western edge of the Indian subcontinent. Archaeologists digging at the site in the late 1970s found the earliest evidence of agriculture outside the Fertile Crescent. Crops such as barley were cultivated, and animals including cattle, zebu and possibly goats were domesticated. Buildings ranged in size from four-to ten-roomed dwellings, with the larger ones probably used for grain storage. Buried alongside the dead were ornaments made from seashells, lapis lazuli and other semi-precious stones. Archaeologists discovered the world’s first examples of cotton being woven into fabric.
By the time it was abandoned in favour of a larger town nearby sometime between 2600 and 2000 BCE, Mehrgarh had grown to become an important centre for innovation not only in agriculture but also in pottery, stone tools and the use of copper. The agricultural revolution it sparked would become the basis of the Harappān civilisation.
THE WORLD’S FIRST SECULAR STATE?
Historians divide the Harappān civilisation into three phases. The Early Harappān, dating from around 3300 to 2600 BCE, was proto-urban. Pottery was made on wheels, barley and legumes were cultivated, and cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo, deer and pigs were domesticated. The civilisation was extensive – remains from this period have been found as far west as the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and south to the Rann of Kutch, in modern Gujarat state. However, there is much about this phase that is unknown. At sites such as Mohenjo-daro, the ruins extend several metres below the current excavation depth, but with preservation taking precedence over excavation it may take many years before a more definitive picture of this period emerges.
The Mature Harappān phase, dating from 2600 to 1900 BCE, is considered the peak of urbanisation, though villages still outnumbered urban centres. The positioning of citadels, granaries, public and private buildings varied across the settlements, but all, from the biggest to the smallest, had some degree of planning. Irrigation works were sophisticated enough to allow a succession of crops to be grown; ploughs were used to cultivate the fields. Skeletal remains of dogs suggest their domestication. The population estimate for the Mature phase ranges from 400,000 to one million people.
While the absence of any evidence of large royal tombs, palaces or temples, standing armies or slaves, mitigates against the idea of a centralised empire, some form of state structure likely existed. The uniformity in crafts such as pottery and brickmaking down to the village level suggests specialised hereditary group or guilds, and a well-developed system of internal trade. By the Mature phase, the symbols that were found on seals became standardised. Gambling was widespread, as evidenced by dozens of cubical terracotta dice discovered at Mohenjo-daro and other sites. Cotton was cultivated for clothes and possibly traded with West Asia.
Although no structures that can be definitively classified as temples have been discovered, some kind of religious ideology almost certainly existed – the links between what is known of Harappān systems of belief and the development of Hinduism are too numerous to ignore. Images of what could be deities in peepal trees with worshippers kneeling in front of them were common (the tree is considered sacred in both Hinduism and Buddhism). Bathing, an important part of Harappān civilisation, is a centrepiece of Hindu ritual. The existence of what appear to be fire altars, evidence of animal sacrifices and the use of the swastika symbol recall Hindu ceremonies.
The most compelling evidence of a link is a seal depicting a figure seated in a yogic position wearing a horned headdress and surrounded by a tiger, elephant, buffalo and rhinoceros. The figure on the inch-high seal was named Pashupati or ‘Lord of the Beasts’, and was described by Marshall as a ‘proto-Śiva’, or early model of Śiva – a key deity in the Hindu pantheon, considered the god of creation and destruction.
But as the American Indologist Wendy Doniger points out, the Śiva connection is just one of more than a dozen explanations for the figure ‘inspired or constrained by the particular historical circumstances and agenda of the interpreter’. Similarly, small terracotta statuettes of buxom women could be prototypes of Hindu goddesses or mere expressions of admiration for the female form. What we do know is that the migrating tribes from Central Asia drew on existing deities and belief systems. If these alleged deity prototypes were not evidence of a coherent religious system, they open up the tantalising possibility that the Harappān civilisation may have been the world’s first secular state, predating the European Enlightenment by four millennia.
The description of the Lord of the Beasts seal as a proto-Śiva was eagerly embraced by Jawaharlal Nehru and subsequently by Hindu nationalist historians.
What caused the decline of the Harappān civilisation in the lead-up to its demise in 1300 BCE is still open to interpretation. Later religious texts suggest that invading war-like pastoralists who had mastered horse-drawn chariots laid waste to the civilisation’s cities. Sir Mortimer Wheeler, director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1944 to 1948, was a proponent of this theory, declaring famously: ‘On circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused!’ – a reference to the Āryan god of war.
But the archaeological record no longer supports this theory. Skeletal remains give no evidence of an assault on any of the major cities. Excavations at several sites point to a series of floods, possibly exacerbated by tectonic movements that raised the ground level. Other possible causes for the demise of the Harappān civilisation include changing river courses; deforestation; rising salinity; and diseases carried by waves of new migrants. A large-scale study by a team of scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution published in 2012 suggests a prolonged drought that caused rivers to dry up or become seasonal as the most probable culprit. There is currency to this theory: in 2018, scientists classified a new age in geological time, the Meghalayan, which began around 2200 BCE with a prolonged drought that triggered the end of civilisations not only in India, but also in Egypt, Mesopotamia and China.
THE VEDAS
If our inability to decipher those Harappān characters leaves us bereft of stories, historical figures and a reliable chronology of events for the period up to 1300 BCE, our knowledge of the following millennium and a half remains obscure for different reasons. The next chapter in the story of Indian civilisation would be shaped by multiple waves of migration by nomadic pastoralists who left behind few clues aside from tools, weapons and fragments of pottery. The paucity of archaeological remains, however, is more than made up for by a vast corpus of elaborate, sacred poetry known as the Vedas.
Composed in Sanskrit and initially transmitted orally through priests known as Brahmins, the Vedas form the basis of Hinduism. The mantras recited to waken the gods every morning and the prayers offered when a dead person’s body is placed on a funeral pyre have been passed down verbatim through the centuries. So precise was the transmission that when the Vedas began to be recorded in text form, versions from Kashmir, in the north, were found to be virtually identical to ones from Tamil Nadu, at the southernmost tip of the subcontinent. They have been studied by Europeans since the sixteenth century, but it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that the mystery of the authorship of these hymns would be solved. It was linguistics, rather than archaeology, that filled in the missing pieces of what we now know about India’s early history.
William Jones was a polymath who published his first book in 1770 at the age of twenty-four, a translation from Persian into French of the history of Persian king Nader Shah. It was followed a year later by A Grammar of the Persian Language, which remained a standard work for decades. Even before landing at Chandpal Ghat, on the banks of the Hooghly River in Calcutta, in September 1783, Jones had made it his ambition ‘to know India better than any other European ever knew it’. A year after his arrival he founded the Asiatic Society.
Jones’s passage to India was to take up an appointment as a judge on the Bengal Supreme Court. He believed that to dispense justice fairly, judges needed access to the sources of Hindu law and that required the understanding of Sanskrit texts. His first hurdle was to find a teacher. The high-caste Brahmins he approached refused to teach the sacred language to a foreigner but, fortunately for us, he found a medical doctor well-versed in Sanskrit who agreed to make him his pupil. While studying the grammar, Jones noticed a remarkable similarity between it and certain European languages. He compiled his findings in a paper, ‘On the orthography of Asiatik words’, which was published in the first volume of Asiatik Researches. In it he identified the Indo-European family of languages. Sanskrit scholar Thomas Trautmann has dubbed the article a major contribution to ‘the project of finding India’s place’.
William Jones: ‘The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.’
Jones went on to study the similarities between Hindu and European gods, leading him to conclude that there was not only a family of languages, but also a family of religions. The Roman god Janus becomes the elephant-headed Ganeśa; Jupiter corresponds to Indra. The Dionysian Kṛṣṇa is equated with Apollo. Saturn, Noah and Manu are all players in the same creation myth. For Jones, Hinduism was a living representation of the ancient paganism of Greece and Rome.
The only explanation for this remarkable linguistic and religious confluence, he surmised, was migration: those who spoke Indo-European languages had once shared a common homeland in the vast steppe that stretched from Poland to the trans-Ural. Historians have traced some of the earliest usages of this Indo-European language to northern Syria. A peace treaty signed between a Mitanni and Hittite king in c. 1380 BCE calls upon certain gods as witnesses. At least four of them – Uruvanass, Mitras, Indara and Nasatia – correspond to the Hindu gods Varuṇa, Mitra, Indra and Nasatya. The treaty suggests that although the Mitanni people spoke the local Hurrian language, their rulers had Indo-Āryan–sounding names and invoked Indo-Āryan gods.
The nomadic pastoralists who set off from these steppes referred to themselves as the Ārya: the name used by ancient Persians and the origin of the word ‘Iran’. ‘Ārya’ also forms the root of ‘Eire’, the most westerly of the lands colonised in this great migration. The Āryans who settled in India tamed the horse and used light chariots capable of carrying three men. They bred cattle, melted bronze to make tools and weapons and, like their Harappān counterparts, gambled.
Vedic texts tell of a sudden invasion that decimated the Harappān civilisation. With their fleets of horse-drawn chariots and egged on by their warrior gods such as Indra – variously described as the Mars, Zeus or Thor of the Āryan pantheon – the Āryans destroyed the remnants of the Harappān civilisation and subdued the Dāsa, the descendants of the first wave of migration to India sixty millennia earlier.
The invasion theory took root during the British period, when scholars were looking for convenient ways to justify their military conquest of India. The problem with the theory is two-fold: there is no archaeological evidence to support the invasion hypothesis, and it does not account for the two-century-long gap in the archaeological record between the demise of Harappā and the arrival of the Āryans.
DNA testing of ancient burial sites now confirms what archaeologists had long surmised: rather than a single Āryan invasion, there were waves of migrations, which interacted with a variety of cultures coexisting in India, steadily bringing various diverse indigenous cultures into the Āryan fold.
Perhaps the most important book to tackle this question is Tony Joseph’s Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From (2018). His sweeping appraisal of recent genetic DNA testing and studies leads him to conclude that today’s Indians ‘draw their genes from several migrations to India; there is no such thing as a pure group, race or caste that has existed since “time immemorial”’. Hindu nationalist historians see this as heretical. As Joseph explains:
For many in the right wing the idea that they came to India from elsewhere is unacceptable because it would dethrone Sanskrit and the Vedas as the singular and fundamental source of Indian culture, as it would mean that the mighty Harappān civilisation that has left an indelible impression on Indian history and culture would have preceded their arrival.
Because of the gaps in the historical record, even DNA evidence has been unable to satisfy those who cling to the belief that Vedic civilisation preceded the Harappān. It is hard to see how this debate will ever be settled conclusively. The corpus of literature composed between 1100 and 600 BCE is vast, but open to interpretation. Like so much in India’s early history, little is definitive.
VEDIC INDIA AND THE RISE OF THE RAJA
Of the four Vedas, the Ṛg Veda is the oldest and most important. The emerging consensus among historians is that it was first compiled in around 1100 BCE, or possibly a century earlier. It comprises 1028 hymns to the gods, arranged in ten books, or mandalas, of varying lengths and composed over several hundred years. There is no evidence that the Āryans made effigies of their gods. Mantras not statues were the means of communicating with the sacred. They were meant to be chanted at sacrifices accompanied by the consumption of soma, a hallucinogenic drink. The Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) described them as ‘a poetic testament of a people’s collective reaction to the wonder and awe of existence’.
The Sama Veda (Knowledge of Songs) consists of stanzas mostly taken from the Ṛg Veda arranged for chanting, while the Yajur Veda is a series of prose poems or mantras for conducting rituals. The fourth Veda, the Atharva Veda, was associated with the rites, superstitions and spells of the inhabitants of pre-Āryan India. Some may have been the ancestors of the Stone Age inhabitants of India; others were the Dāsa or tribal communities that had arrived with the Out of Africa migration. Common to them was the practice of sorcery and witchcraft and the belief in the efficacy of charms and incantations through which men could achieve powers greater than the gods. Rather than trying to suppress these beliefs, the Āryans absorbed them.
The Brahmins, who transmitted the Vedas, used their knowledge to monopolise the performance of important rituals. Indra, the god of war and rain, is mentioned in almost a quarter of the hymns in the Ṛg Veda, followed by Agni, the god of fire, and Surya, the sun god.
Place names mentioned in the Vedic texts reveal that the first Āryan migrants settled in an area known as the Sapta Sindhu, or Seven Rivers. The name ‘Sindhu’ refers to the Indus River; the five others were its tributaries, and the seventh was the Saraswatī, which has since dried up. Vedic society was based around tribes and clans – around thirty are mentioned in the texts. Numerous battles are described, and it is almost impossible to distinguish between real and mythical foes. Nowhere is this expressed more clearly than in the Battle of the Ten Kings, which is akin to an ancient Indian version of Game of Thrones. The battle was fought on the banks of the Ravi River between the Āryan king Sudās and a vaguely defined alliance of ten chiefs, who may have been ‘fallen Āryans’ or Dāsas. It was won not by superior weaponry or tactics, but through the recitation of prayer.
As an agricultural society, the early Āryans were dependent on horses and cows. Grazing lands were prized. They were notorious as cattle rustlers – historian of comparative religion Karen Armstrong even likens them to cowboys from the American Wild West. The sacred status of cows – almost a cliché in today’s India, where the consumption of beef is banned in most states – did not hold as strongly in Vedic India. Although one verse of the Ṛg Veda forbids the consumption of cow meat, another permits it at weddings as long as it had been ritually and humanely slaughtered.
In the early phase of Vedic civilisation, societies were based on tribes. At the apex of the social structure were warrior chieftains, who are referred to in the Ṛg Veda as rajas, a word that is related to the Latin rex. The raja was not an absolute monarch; various tribes were governed by councils known as sabhās and samitis. The former were committees of elders that presided over courts and councils and were arranged in a type of confederacy or republic, while the latter comprised all free tribesmen. Although the post was hereditary, a raja generally needed the approval of both to accede to the throne. When riding into battle, the raja would be accompanied by the royal priest, who chanted prayers and performed the rituals necessary for victory.
Despite their focus on religion, the Vedas and later texts such as the Mahābhārata do enable us to piece together a picture of this ancient society, though scholars such as the historian A.L. Basham caution that: ‘It is as futile to try to reconstruct the political and social history of India in the tenth century BC from the Mahābhārata as it would be to write the history of Britain immediately after the evacuation of the Romans from Malroy’s Morte d’Arthur.’ Basham allows one significant exception – the Mahābhārata’s references to the Battle of Kurukshetra. In this battle, the Pāṇḍavas, led by five brothers and aided by their cousin and charioteer the god Kṛṣṇa, defeat their cousins, the Kauravas, at a site near today’s New Delhi. Archaeological remains confirm that a battle did take place, but date it to the beginning of the ninth century BCE, rather than in 3102 BCE, as the Mahābhārata suggests. Whether it was the great war described in the text or a small-scale skirmish that was transformed on the page into an epic battle is unlikely to ever be resolved, particularly in the politically charged atmosphere that prevails in India.
Composed between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE, the Mahābhārata is the most renowned of the Hindu epics, and the longest – roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. Scenes from the Mahābhārata describing the battle between the rival clans of the Kuru tribe can be found wherever Hinduism spread, the sculptural reliefs of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the wayang puppet theatre of Java being just two examples. In the late 1990s, the epic was serialised as ninety-four weekly episodes on the state-run Indian television network Doordarshan, bringing the country to a virtual standstill every time it was broadcast.
The most famous section of the Mahābhārata is the Bhagavad Gitā, or Song of the Lord – a discourse between the god Kṛṣṇa and the Pāṇḍava prince Arjuna, who is questioning why he should fight his cousins. Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna that killing his cousins is his duty: ‘To die in one’s duty is life: to live in another’s is death.’ Circumstances, rather than personal interests or sentiments, must guide one’s actions, whatever the cost. Today the text is as well known among Hindus as the New Testament is among Christians. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, would reach for a verse from the Gitā to describe his feelings after watching the first testing of the weapon in New Mexico in 1945: ‘Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’
The Bhagavad Gitā is a dialogue between Kṛṣṇa (standing) and Arjuna (kneeling) before the start of the climactic Kurukshetra War in the Mahābhārata.
From the reading of texts such as the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, which details Vedic rituals, we know that the heartland of Āryan culture and society began shifting eastwards to the Doab, the land between the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers, from around the tenth century BCE. What is now a patchwork of cultivated fields being encroached upon by some of India’s fastest growing urban conflagrations was once, as the English historian John Keay describes it, a ‘moist green wilderness of forest and swamp, a tropical taiga of near-Siberian extent’.
The jungles, though more productive than the drier lands of western India, were hard to clear. Ultimately, however, they would support far greater population densities, which in turn led to the establishment in around 800 BCE of the first cities, such as Kashi (today’s Varanasi) and Hastināpura. What can be loosely thought of as republics based on geographical entities began to appear, made possible through more advanced technology. The use of iron dates to around this period, but its quality was poor. It would not be until the middle of the millennium that more sophisticated furnaces enabled the use of iron-tipped ploughs, which in turn led to the widespread cultivation of crops and the creation of a labour force. Another feature of this eastward expansion was the appearance of more sophisticated pottery known as painted grey-ware. By studying the remains of this grey-ware, we can trace the gradual migration of the Āryans to the borders of present-day Bihar and south to the Narmada River.
While evidence of social stratification in the Indian subcontinent dates back to the Harappān civilisation, it took on a deeper meaning as the light-skinned, Sanskrit-speaking Āryans mixed increasingly with the darker Dāsas. Purity of blood became important. By the middle of the first millennium BCE, the social division between Āryans and Dāsas had widened into a system of classes, or varṇas – its basis codified like so many aspects of Hinduism today by a verse from the Ṛg Veda.
The ‘Poem of the Primeval Man’ postulates a social order created at the beginning of time, one that is meant to last forever. It describes how the Primeval Man’s body was dismembered into the four varṇas, or colours. From the man’s mouth came the Brahmins, whose power derived from their monopoly over rituals such as the fire sacrifice (yajna). Like an ancient algorithm, the sacred words of Vedic hymns needed to be intoned perfectly or else they would be rendered valueless. So powerful were these hymns they could sway the gods to do good or evil. Through their knowledge of these hymns and rituals, Brahmin priests, known as purohitas, led prayers to ensure an abundant harvest, the birth of a son or victory in war.
From the arms came the kṣatriya, comprising rulers and the warrior classes. The vaiśya, who loosely encompassed peasants, merchants, traders and farmers, comprised the trunk. The lowest of the varṇas, emanating from the feet, were the śūdras, the servants: non-Āryans and intermarried Dāsa Āryans. Below them were the Untouchables, or those without caste, who did the most menial and degrading work, such as sweeping streets and removing nightsoil.
The first three varṇas were designated as the dvija, or twice-born; the second birth was an initiation into ritual status. That left the śūdras outside the caste system, perpetually locked into their lower status without any means of entering the ranks of the twice-born. The varṇas were the precursor to the caste system that became enshrined from the first century CE. Despite discrimination on the basis of caste being illegal under the Constitution, it remains a defining feature of Indian society.
The basic contours of Āryan society during the Later Vedic period (1100–500 BCE) can thus be characterised as the use of Sanskrit, though still as an oral language; a system of social stratification that placed the priesthood above kings; an economy based mainly on cattle herding; a pantheon of gods, most of whom shared a similarity with Western deities; and the reliance on the Vedas for rituals governing every aspect of life, from gambling through to marriage and death.
The rise in urban populations led to an increase in trade, but the predominantly agrarian nature of society meant links were rudimentary. There is no evidence of money being used or of the existence of a merchant class until the sixth century BCE. Nor is there any mention in the Vedas of writing, though its omission may have been due to it being seen as an objectionable innovation by the priesthood. The practice of cremation took precedence over burial, probably because of the association between fire and ritual purity. The concept of reincarnation, in which souls would be born into happiness or sorrow depending on their actions in their previous lives, would not become entrenched until after the composition of the corpus of literature known as the Upaniṣhads.
For all that can be gleaned from thousands of stanzas in the Vedas and epic texts such as the Mahābhārata, the history of India up to the middle of the first millennium BCE remains, as Basham laments, ‘a jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces … lacking in the interesting anecdotes and interesting personalities which enliven the study of the past for professional and amateur historians alike’. The picture is further muddied by disagreements, some based on interpretations of historical evidence, others motivated by purely ideological aims.
But the late Vedic period was also the cusp of a new historical epoch. For the first time, the era of myth and legend was about to be transformed into an age of kingdoms and visionary leaders. Foremost among them was Gautama Buddha, who Tagore would later call ‘the greatest man ever born on earth’.