India

This story, though obviously of much later provenance (Shiva was not one of the Vedic gods), well illustrates the importance attached to ritual exactitude. In the Vedas this preoccupation with the precise performance of sacrificial rites extended to minutiae like the orientation of the sacrificial altar and the surgical dissection of the sacrificial victim. Both had scientific repercussions: the positioning of the altar stimulated the study of astronomy and geometry, while dissection encouraged familiarity with anatomy. Similarly that obsession with the ‘word perfect’ recitation of the liturgy would inspire the codification of language and the study of phonetics and versification for which ancient India is justly famed. To anxieties about the impeccable conduct and the sacred siting of such rituals may also be ascribed early notions about the purity, or polluting effect, of those present. Participants had first to undergo purificatory rites which were more rigorous for those who might, because of their dubious descent or profession, prejudice the occasion. A scheme of graded ritual status thereby arose which, as will be seen, contributed to that hierarchical stratification of society known as caste. Thus to the Vedic rituals may be traced the genesis of some of the most distinctive traits of ancient Indian society, culture and science.

PASTORAL PEOPLES

All this, however, scarcely adds up to a convincing picture of the Vedic world, let alone to any kind of understanding of the historical processes at work within it. Somehow this primitive, or pre-modern, society of tribal herdsmen gradually learned about arable farming, assimilated or repulsed neighbours, discovered new resources, developed better technologies, adopted a settled life, organised itself into functional groups, opened trade links, endorsed frontiers, built cities, and eventually subscribed to the organised structures of authority which we associate with statehood. It all took perhaps a thousand years (1500–500BC), but as to the processes involved and the determining factors, let alone the critical events, the sources are silent. They provide a few cryptic clues but no ready answers; and the historian has first to ask the right questions.

The better to identify these questions, scholars have turned to other disciplines, and particularly to comparative anthropology and the study of pre-modern societies that are less remote from our own experience. Thus tribal structures in Polynesia and South America have provided clues about how kin-based societies may become socially stratified and about how notions of land as property may emerge. From the customs of pastoralist peoples in Africa conclusions have been drawn about the importance of cattle-offerings and gifts as a prestige-generating activity. And from native American customs much has been learned about the economic role of sacrifice. Thus the great Vedic sacrifices have been likened to the potlatch, in which the indigenous inhabitants of north-west America indulged in an extravaganza of consumption designed to burn off any surplus and at the same time enhance the status of the leading kin groups. Indeed the central action of the Mahabharata has been likened to one massive potlatch.

All these examples draw on tribal, or lineage, societies united by a shared ethnicity. If the Vedic arya are to be regarded as united principally by language rather than ethnicity, a comparison might also be made with the pre-modern society of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. The Vedic jana is often translated as the Gaelic ‘clan’ since, like the Highland clan, each jana acknowledged descent from a single ancestor. Thus, just as all MacDonalds claim descent from a Donald of Isla who was a distant descendant of the Irish king ‘Conn of the Hundred Battles’, so the Bharatas, the most prominent of the Rig Vedic jana, claimed descent from Bharata, a distant descendant of Pururavas, grandson of Manu. The jana, like the clan, was further divided into smaller descent groups, or septs, which might break away from the parent clan and adopt the name of their own common ancestor as a patronymic. Real or mythical, these ancestral figures were not, however, necessarily of the same race. Some of the Highland clans were of Norse (Viking) origin and others of Pictish or Irish origin; similarly some of the Vedic jana, like the Yadavas, are thought to have been of dasa origin. Hence too the clearly -dasa names of Su-dasa, a Bharata chief who scored a notable victory over ten rival ‘kings’, and Divo-dasa of the ten horse-sacrifices at Varanasi. All, though, whatever their ethnic origin, and whether Indians or Scots, shared a language (Gaelic/Sanskrit), a social system in which precedence was dictated by birth, and a way of life in which both wealth and prestige were computed in cattle.

In Scotland as in India, the rustling of other clans’ herds constituted both pastime and ritual, with success being an indicator of leadership credentials as well as of divine favour. As with the Vedic rajanya, each Highland chief had his bard whose business it was, like Kakshivant, to extol the might and generosity of his chiefly patron and to harness the forces of magic. His, too, was the job of memorising the clan’s genealogy and recording its achievements in verses that might be easily handed down by word of mouth. In Vedic society the bard was originally the chief’s charioteer. His function was not necessarily hereditary nor exclusively reserved to a particular social group. The author of the Mandala IX of the Rig Veda frankly avows humble origins which would have been anathema in a later caste-ridden society.

A bard am I, my father a leech,

And my mother a grinder of corn,

Diverse in means, but all wishing wealth,

Alike for cattle we strive.

In north-west Scotland as in north-west India, cattle were currency; but land was a common resource, not subject to individual rights of ownership and enjoyed in common by the whole clan and its herds. In Scotland this situation changed only under the pressure of a growing population and after the discovery of the land’s greater potential under a different farming regime – namely wool production. Previously, annual migrations to traditional areas of seasonal pasturage had rendered notions of territory and of frontiers fluid and often meaningless. Allegiance focused not on a geographical region nor on a political institution but exclusively on the descent group of the clan chief. This too changed under the new regime, and the chiefs had to find a new role. Perhaps similar pressures confronted the Vedic jana, and similar adaptations to a new farming regime – namely crop-growing – demanded of the rajanya a more possessive attitude to territory and property.

Such comparisons can, of course, be misleading. Technologies and markets not available to the arya in the second millennium BC had ensured a ready demand for Highland beef in the second millennium AD. Hence burning off the year’s surplus in an orgy of sacrifice, gift-exchange and gargantuan consumption was not a Scottish tradition. Conversely, climatic and geographical factors which made livestock farming the only surplus-creating occupation available to upland agriculturalists in Scotland made it a less suitable occupation in the tropical flood-plains of northern India. Although pastoralism would continue in areas like the west bank of the Jamuna and along the skirts of the Himalayas, the environment of the Ganga plain invited more intensive farming and a more sedentary lifestyle. Reference to other pre-modern societies merely helps to clarify the norms which may have characterised Vedic society, and perhaps to render it more intelligible than does that ‘stupendous mass’ of Vedic hymns.

3 The Epic Age C900–520 BC

FROM WEST TO EAST

WHILE TOILING in the two-thousand-kilometre patchwork of fields which is the Gangetic plain today, farmers have occasionally unearthed substantial hoards of copper implements and even copper bars. Associated with them at some sites are poorly fired and ‘unspeakably crude’1 bits of ochre-coloured pottery (OCP) which tend to disintegrate at the touch. Unworthy of the Late Harappans and distributed too widely and too far east to be credited to the arya of the Vedas, these copper hoards remain a mystery. They are assumed to have been the property of itinerant smiths or traders who, for reasons unknown, stashed away their wares some time before 1000 BC. But the trouble with copper, or indeed iron, which first appears soon after this date, is that one can never be sure that the form in which it survives is that in which it was first cast. The harpoons and axes of this ‘copper hoard culture’ could have been made from the melted-down pins and arrowheads of an earlier people, while the presence of copper bars strongly suggests that the metal was already being widely traded.

Like metals, myths too get recycled. Reworked and so richly embellished as to be almost unrecognisable, stories which may once have reflected genuine historical events are liable to be re-used by later generations in a totally different context and for purposes quite other than that for which they were originally intended. This is not the case with the corpus of Vedic literature; the form and content of its sacrificial formulae were, as has been noted, too ritually crucial to be tampered with. Less sacred compositions, like the two great Sanskrit epics, were a different matter.

Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana survive in several versions, the earliest of which are at least five hundred years later than the Vedas. Yet their core narratives seem to relate to events from a period prior to all but the Rig Veda. As with the Greek epics attributed to Homer, this extraordinary antiquity justifies the attention accorded them in traditional histories. The wildly different dates adduced for the Mahabharata war – or for the Trojan war – scarcely matter if the events themselves can be verified. Sadly, though, in both cases so heavily have these tales been reworked for propaganda purposes, and so crammed and padded have they become with edifying sermons and other extraneous additions, that their original core stories are as hard to isolate as their dates.

Theoretically the Puranas, another group of Sanskrit texts, should be able to resolve this problem for the Indian historian. The most important collection of the Puranas, or ‘ancient legends’, is even later, dating only from C500 AD; yet it contains myths and genealogies which purport to go back to Manu (and beyond). Sure enough, here figure the names of protagonists from the epics as well as of Vedic chiefs and arya tribes. No doubt these lists were compiled from an ancient oral tradition which originated with the arya bards and would have been carefully memorised by their successors. But, like the epics, the Puranic compositions show signs of having been reworked. When finally they were written down, it was not in a spirit of disinterested scholarship but to elevate the pedigree of later dynasts and to enhance the repute of their brahmanical backers.

In their present form [the Puranas] are only religious fables and cant, with whatever historical content the works once possessed heavily encrusted by myth, diluted with semi-religious legends, and effaced during successive redactions copied by innumerable careless scribes; so that one finds great difficulty in restoring as much as the king-lists.2

This does not mean that they are worthless. Despite what D.D. Kosambi, himself a brahman, called ‘the deplorable brahman habit’3 of organising and categorising unrelated traditions into a convenient pattern, large chunks of the Puranic genealogies may be as authentic as the central characters and events in the epics. Moreover, just as the copper hoards, whatever their original provenance, reveal something about the uses, smelting techniques and distribution of copper, so these literary hoards can reveal something about the changes at work within north Indian society. The period between the events they describe and their being finally written down, roughly the first millennium BC, is of crucial importance. It is ‘the real formative period of Indian civilisation …: henceforth we can trace the continuity of civilisation through the succeeding ages.’4 Thus scholars like Kosambi and Romila Thapar, anxious to understand how, for instance, tribal structures crumbled and states emerged, focus less on the stirring events described in the epics and more on the contexts – geographical, social, environmental and economic – in which they occurred.

Like a self-denying ordinance, this stern approach deprives the historian of many a gallant hero plus whole chapters of rip-roaring narrative. More agreeably, it also diverts attention from that nagging problem of Indian history being so light on dates.

Because of the difficulty in assigning an exact chronology to the sources [i.e. the epics] it is impossible to be precise or dogmatic as to when particular changes took place … Consequently the major significance of these sources lies more in their indication of the nature of the trend of change which they delineate rather than in the precise dating of the change.5

The historicity of a hero demands that his place and dates be established; no such figure graces Indian history until the Buddha illumines the scene after 500 BC. But ‘the nature of a trend of change’ can reasonably be assigned to an entire river basin and a timespan of centuries.

The ‘trends’ which emerge from such studies are numerous and important though seldom explicit. For instance, central to both of the great epics is the question of succession. The Pandava heroes of the Mahabharata (Yudhisthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Draupadi, etc.), like their counterparts in the Ramayana (Rama, Sita and Lakshmana), are initially denied ‘kingdoms’ which would seem to be theirs by birthright and are forced into exile. Primogeniture evidently influenced succession and there are hints about the divine sanction of kingship; both of these ideas would become cardinal features of later monarchies. Yet Puranic references can be highly ambiguous about kingship as an institution, although one should not perhaps read too much in its oft-repeated adage: ‘As bad as ten slaughter houses is one oil-presser’s wheel, as bad as ten oil-pressers’ wheels is one inn sign, as bad as ten inn signs is a harlot, and as bad as ten harlots is a king.’6

But it is also clear that society at the time, though now settled and familiar with agriculture, was still clan-based. Kingship was subordinate to kinship and probably amounted to no more than chieftainship-among-equals. Succession by primogeniture was thus heavily qualified; much depended on the physical and moral perfection of the candidate, on the approval of his peers, and on his successful avoidance of fortuitous mishaps and curses. Ideas of a kingship which transcended clan affiliation and of automatic succession by right of birth, though obviously important to those who reworked the original stories, would only become the norm towards the middle of the millennium and then only among certain tribes.

As for the retreat into exile, the other central theme in both epics, this is taken to indicate the process by which clan society resolved its conflicts and at the same time encroached ever deeper into the subcontinent. Eventually population pressures on land and other resources would encourage greater social specialisation and the assertion of a central authority, two of the prerequisites of a state. But during the first centuries of the first millennium BC, these same pressures seem merely to have encouraged a traditional solution whereby clans segmented and split away to explore new territories.

Exile meant withdrawing from settled society not into the desert (which even renunciates seem to have shunned) but into the aranya, the forest. Here life was challenging though full of possibilities; numerous venerable sages and barely-clad nymphs could even make it idyllic. Something of the later antithesis between the safely settled, caste-based society of the village and the dangerously peripatetic and egalitarian society associated with the forest is already apparent. But for every agreeable sylvan experience there also lurked amongst the trees a monstrous demon or some other species of hostile primitive. These creatures, even if recognisably human, possessed no houses and subsisted as hunter-gatherers. To exiles who prided themselves on being settled agriculturalists, the nomadic ways and uncouth habits of the forest were anathema. The monsters had therefore to be exterminated, while harmless savages, like the snake-worshipping ‘Nagas’, could be enlisted as allies or tributaries, usually through marriage and through inventing acceptable pedigrees for them. In effect the relationship between the epic heroes and their forest foes mirrored the presumed pattern of Aryan ‘colonisation’ and settlement.

‘The people move from west to east and conquer land,’ says the Satapatha Brahmana. By the time of the Mahabharata they had evidently reached the upper Ganga, for there stood Hastinapura, the story’s disputed capital. Forest exile in this geographical context could only mean that, in their eastward spread, the pioneers of Aryanisation were entering the main Gangetic basin. Decidedly different from today’s dusty chequerboard where tufts of trees survive only as shade for huddled villages, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were then a moist green wilderness of forest and swamp, a tropical taiga of near-Siberian extent. Here, unlike in the drier Panjab, land clearance posed a formidable challenge. The soils were heavier and the jungle thicker; even fire-breathing Agni’s work must have been quickly undone as smoke-blackened stumps burst back into leaf. On the other hand the forest was rich in resources. The exiles invariably used their sojourn in the wilderness to re-arm with a formidable arsenal of new weapons. Though ascribed to divine provenance, these unbreakable swords, bows with unerring arrows, and devastating missiles may more plausibly have been fashioned from the exotic timbers and minerals only to be found in the terra incognita beyond the then confines of the western settlements.

Although copper from Rajasthan had been used by the Harappans, the best-quality deposits lie much further east in what is now southern Bihar. Thence too came iron. Whether its use was first learned from indigenous smiths in peninsular India or whether through trade contacts with west Asia is uncertain. Likewise the revolution it eventually effected. After 500 BC iron axes and probably ploughshares were indeed helping to solve the problem of clearing the land and working heavier soils; but until that time the ‘black metal’ seems to have been reserved almost exclusively for weapons and knives. Access to the new metallurgy may not, then, have eased the settler’s lot, but it could at least have given the exiled Pandavas a military edge – literally – over their enemies. Adopted by the other clans, iron represented a major technological advantage, comparable to the horse-drawn chariots of their arya ancestors and perhaps of more utility in the closer confines of the new environment.

Unfortunately, charting the eastward progress of Sanskritic but still tribal intruders was not germane to the purposes of those who retold the epics for the edification of later generations. Indeed surviving versions of the Mahabharata would have us believe that the Pandavas and their Kaurava rivals were not only far from primitive but that they already monopolised the resources of the subcontinent. When not in exile, they are described as living in pillared pavilions and marble halls, their interiors opulently furnished and their floors so highly polished that visitors hitched up their robes in the belief that across such glimmering expanses they must needs wade. The Kuru ‘kingdom’, centred on Hastinapura, is projected as being of vast extent and untold wealth, its armies feared throughout the subcontinent and its potential allies extending from coast to coast.

Such descriptions served solely to legitimise the grandiose ambitions of later empire-builders. (And if one may judge by the television serialisations of the 1980s, they still serve to underpin conceits about a pan-Indian prehistory of spectacular sophistication.) In reality, though, the core geography of the Mahabharata is limited to a small area of the Ganga-Jamuna Doab which was the maximum extent of Kuru territory. This is self-evident from an early episode in the story when, the territory having been divided, the Pandavas set out to the ends of the ‘kingdom’ to found a new capital. They choose Indraprastra, just sixty kilometres away and still so named – indeed still fortified; its crumbling walls, although not those of the Pandavas, served the British designers of New Delhi as a suitable feature with which to terminate the vista from their own marbled halls of Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhawan).

Further detail on the Indo-Aryan drang nach osten may be gleaned from the archaeological evidence for the first half of the first millennium BC. At Hastinapura and other sites that ‘unspeakably crude’ ochre-coloured pottery which is sometimes found with the copper hoards is succeeded by a very superior painted grey ware. ‘PGW’ was evidently produced on a wheel, and was confidently decorated with geometric and floral motifs. It is found principally throughout the Ganga-Jamuna Doab and in adjacent areas of the Panjab, Rajasthan and the western Gangetic valley, a distribution which tallies nicely with the geographical context of the Mahabharata. Often it occurs in quantities which imply a greater population density than previously, and thus ‘it marks an assertive society, richer than its immediate predecessors’.7 It was also a society which, judging by associated finds, worked the land as well as keeping both cattle and horses. Finally, the dating of this PGW also tallies well with that of the C950 BC date for the great war. If not the pottery from which Vedic chieftains once quaffed their psychedelic soma, it may well have been off PGW dishes that Bhima, trencherman par excellence amongst the Pandavas, prodigiously fed. In short, the PGW looks to have been the distinctive pottery style of the Kuru and associated clans on the north-west fringes of the Gangetic plain.

Another pottery style known as black and red ware (BRW) seems to have been contemporary with PGW but to have had a wider and patchier distribution which included much of western and central India. This has suggested an association with the Yadava clan, a sept or segment of which is said to have migrated south from its base at Mathura (between Delhi and Agra). In the process it seems to have established an important corridor of Aryanisation to Avanti (later called Malwa), where the city of Ujjain would soon arise, and further still into Gujarat and possibly down the west coast. The Yadava dimension has to be pieced together from scattered references in the Puranas, since it lacks the detailed documentation provided for the Kuru by the Mahabharata. Nevertheless into the latter epic as the Pandavas’ mentor and guardian is worked the legend of Lord Krishna, the scion and hero of the Yadava lineage. Krishna, although used as a mouthpiece for the revered but later Bhagavad Gita (and although later still to become the frolicsome toddler and pastoral heart-throb so dear to Indian sentiment), is here an aloof and awesome figure whose no-nonsense approach is partly an indictment of human frailty but also stems from an insistence on the centrality of clan loyalty and arya tradition. The Yadavas were evidently a conservative lot. In Gujarat as in Mathura pastoralism and dairy farming would retain their economic importance long after arable farming had become the mainstay of life and the source of surplus in the Gangetic basin. Likewise the western clans would cling to their traditional hierarchies long after their eastern cousins had adopted state formations.