India

Basically the Vedas and the epics portray the concerns, and celebrate the exploits, of a society consisting almost entirely of well-born clansmen. Known as ksatriya and rajanya, these warrior families acknowledged a chief with whom they shared a common ancestor. The chief was their raja, a term rich in potential for misunderstanding in that it later came to mean a king in the monarchical states and an elector, or a participant in government, in the republics. Thus Vaisali, the capital of the Licchavi gana-sangha in northern Bihar, is said to have housed 7707 rajas, or in another account ‘twice 84,000 rajas’. As well as the leadership of their rajas, the ksatriya also acknowledged the ritual insights and sacerdotal authority of a non-ksatriya priesthood, the brahmans. The latter, their profession becoming hereditary and exclusive through emphasis on their descent from certain ancient risis or seers, assumed the status of a parallel caste with well advertised rights and taboos derived from their monopoly of sacrificial lore, of religious orthodoxy and of academic jargon.

To these two castes was appended a third, possibly to differentiate clansmen of less distinguished descent who had forsaken their warrior past for agriculture and other wealth-generating pursuits. Vaisya, the term used to describe this caste, derives from vis, which originally meant the entire tribal community. They were thus considered to be of arya descent and, like the brahman and ksatriya, were dvija or ‘twice born’ (once physically, a second time through initiation rituals). As the ksatriya, literally ‘the empowered ones’, assumed military, political and administrative powers within the new state structures, the unempowered remainder of the erstwhile vis, that is the vaisya, continued as gramini and grhpati, villagers and household heads. Their role was that of creating the wealth on which the ksatriya and brahman depended or, as the texts have it, on which ksatriya and brahman might ‘graze’. In pursuit of this productive ideal many vaisya accumulated land holdings while others invested in trade and industry. Much later, just as the ksatriya in recognition of their martial status would be equated with ‘rajputs’, so the vaisya would be identified with the essentially mercantile ‘bania’.

Beyond the pale of the arya were a variety of indigenous peoples like the despised dasa of the Vedas. All were, nevertheless, subject to varying degrees of Aryanisation. Some, perhaps in recognition of their numerical superiority in regions newly penetrated by the clans, were actually co-opted into the three dvija castes while their cults and deities were accommodated in the growing pantheon of what we now call Hinduism. Others obstinately retained forms of speech and conduct which disqualified them from co-option and, perhaps as a result of conquest, they were relegated to functional roles considered menial and impure. Dasa came to denote a household slave or rural helot and dasi a female domestic or slave-concubine. Slavery was not, however, practised on a scale comparable to that in Greece or Rome, perhaps because most of these indigenous peoples were in fact assigned an intermediate status as sudra. The term is of uncertain origin and seems also to have embraced those born of mixed-caste parentage. Its functional connotation is clear enough, however. Just as the vaisya was expected to furnish wealth, the sudra was expected to furnish labour.

These then were the four earliest castes, and a much-quoted passage from the latest mandala (X) of the Rig Veda clearly shows their relative status. When, in the course of a gory creation myth, the gods were carving up the sacrificial figure who represented mankind, they chose to chop him into four bits, each of which prefigured a caste. ‘The brahman was his mouth, of both arms was the rajanya (ksatriya) made, his thighs became the vaisya, from his feet the sudra was produced.’13 Thus organised into a stratified hierarchy, each caste was theoretically immutable and exclusive; the purity taboos which derived from sacrificial ritual provided barriers to physical contact, while the lineage obsessions of clan society provided barriers to intermarriage.

The term used for caste in the Vedas is varna, ‘colour’, which, in the context of the arya’s disparaging comments about the ‘black’ dasa, is often taken to mean that the higher castes also considered themselves the fairer-skinned. This is now disputed. According to the Mahabharata the ‘colours’ associated with the four castes were white, red, yellow and black; they sound more like symbolic shades meted out by those category-conscious brahmanical minds than skin pigments. Similarly the excessive rigidity of the caste system should not be taken for granted. Then as now, caste was not necessarily an indicator of economic worth; even the four-tier hierarchy was variable, with ksatriya more dominant than brahmans in the republics; and entry into the system – indeed progression within it – was never impossible. It may be precisely because alien cults, tribes and professions could in time, if willing to conform, be slotted into its open-ended shelving that the system proved so pervasive and durable: ‘Varna was a mechanism for assimilation.’14 Though undoubtedly a form of systematised oppression, it should also be seen as an ingenious schema for harnessing the loyalties of a more numerous and possibly more skilled indigenous population. Certainly, like the NBP ware, its acceptance from one end of northern India to the other hinted at a social, cultural and linguistic cohesion which belied the multiplicity of states and could – indeed imminently would – transcend them.

In Buddhist texts, and in common parlance even today, the more usual word for caste is not varna but jati. Jati derives from a verb meaning ‘to be born’, the emphasis being less on the degree of ritual purity, as in the four-tier varna, and more on caste determination as a result of being born into a particular kinship group. If varna provided the theoretical framework, jati came to represent the practical reality. With society assuming a complexity undreamed of in Vedic times, caste formation was veering away from ritual status to take greater account of the proliferation of localised and specialised activities. Geographical, tribal, sectarian and, above all, economic and professional specialisations determined a group’s jati.

Specialisation plumbed the depths of the social hierarchy, with tasks like disposing of the dead keeping the lowly candala as outcastes, irredeemably degraded by the nature of their work. It also cleft the pinnacles of the system, with some brahman groups artfully deploying their expertise as kingmakers and dynastic-legitimisers, while others had to rest content with handling ritual requirements at domestic and village level.

In the monarchical states leading associates of the ruling lineage assumed quasi-bureaucratic functions within the royal retinue. As the ratnins, or ‘treasures’, of ancient ritual, their designations date back to Vedic times and include such functionaries as the charioteer, the huntsman and the bard. Out of their ranks arose the senapati, or senani, who became commander of the army, and the purohita, or high priest. The charioteer seems to have become a treasurer, and the messenger ‘an official who looked after the state horses and was responsible for the maintenance of dynastic tradition’.15 A similar process whereby household officials became officers of state would apply in Europe: in the Norman kingdoms the master of the royal stables (comes stabuli) became the ‘constable’ of the realm, and the keeper of the royal mares (mareschal) the ‘marshal’ of the realm.

But it is in trade and manufacturing that specialisation is most apparent. The carpenter, once one of the royal retinue, or ratnins, by reason of his skill in building chariots, was now joined by a host of other craftsmen – ironsmiths and goldsmiths, potters, weavers, herbalists, ivory-carvers. Some were tied to a particular locality or village by their source of raw materials; others were encouraged to settle in designated areas of the new cities and towns by their predominantly royal patrons. Physically segregated and learning their skills by hereditary association, such groups were readily accorded jati status which, in the context of their specialisation, bore a close affinity to a professional fraternity or guild. Besides being more numerous and capable of endless proliferation, each jati was firmly based on an economic community. They contained an element of mutual support, and they may be seen as extending caste organisation deep into the burgeoning economies of the new states.

Similar changes may have been underway in peninsular India. Since neither Mahavira nor the Buddha ventured south, their followers had little to record of the area and there are no textual sources for it before the end of the first millennium BC. But it is clear that by then proto-states were well established in the extreme south and that they were already engaged in maritime trade. How much they owed to Aryanising influences is debatable. Although the epics were evidently known and brahmans respected, social stratification took a rather un-Aryan form, with different taboos and no place for two of the four varnas. In fact to this day indigenous vaisya and ksatriya castes are practically unknown in peninsular India.

4 Out of the Myth-Smoke C520–C320 BC

INDUS AND INDIA

MAPS PRINTED AFTER 1947 sometimes show the republic of India not as ‘India’ but as ‘Bharat’. The word derives from Bharata-varsha, ‘the land of the Bharatas’, these Bharatas being the most prominent and distinguished of the early Vedic clans. By adopting this term the new republic in Delhi could, it was argued, lay claim to a revered arya heritage which was geographically vague enough not to provoke regional jealousies, and doctrinally vague enough not to jeopardise the republic’s avowed secularism.

In the first flush of independence ‘Bharat’ would seem preferable, because the word ‘India’ was too redolent of colonial disparagement. It also lacked a respectable indigenous pedigree. For although British claims to have incubated an ‘India consciousness’ were bitterly contested, there was no gainsaying the fact that in the whole colossal corpus of Sanskrit literature nowhere called ‘India’ is ever mentioned; nor does the term occur in Buddhist or Jain texts; nor was it current in any of South Asia’s numerous other languages. Worse still, if etymologically ‘India’ belonged anywhere, it was not to the republic proclaimed in Delhi by Jawaharlal Nehru but to its rival headed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Pakistan.

Partition would have a way of dividing the subcontinent’s spoils with scant reference to history. Pakistan inherited the majority of the main Harappan sites, so depriving India of the most tangible proof of its vaunted antiquity. Conversely, India inherited most of the subcontinent’s finest Islamic architecture, so depriving Muslim Pakistanis of what they regard as their own glorious heritage. No tussle over the word ‘India’ is reported because Jinnah preferred the newly coined and very Islamic-sounding acronym that is ‘Pakistan’ (see p. 496). Additionally, he was under the impression that neither state would want to adopt the British title of ‘India’. He only discovered his mistake after Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, had already acceded to Nehru’s demand that his state remain ‘India’. Jinnah, according to Mountbatten, ‘was absolutely furious when he found out that they [Nehru and the Congress Party] were going to call themselves India’.1 The use of the word implied a subcontinental primacy which Pakistan would never accept. It also flew in the face of history, since ‘India’ originally referred exclusively to territory in the vicinity of the Indus river (with which the word is cognate). Hence it was largely outside the republic of India but largely within Pakistan.

The reservations about the word ‘India’, which had convinced Jinnah that neither side would use it, stemmed from its historical currency amongst outsiders, especially outsiders who had designs on the place. Something similar could, of course, be said about terms like ‘Britain’, ‘Germany’ or ‘America’; when first these words were recorded, all were objects of conquest. But in the case of ‘India’ this demeaning connotation had lasted until modern times. ‘Hindustan’, ‘India’ or ‘the Indies’ (its more generalised derivative) had come, as if by definition, to denote an acquisition rather than a territory. Geographically imprecise, indeed moveable if one took account of all the ‘Indians’ in the Americas, ‘India’ was yet conceptually concrete: it was somewhere to be coveted – as an intellectual curiosity, a military pushover and an economic bonanza. To Alexander the Great as to Mahmud of Ghazni, to Timur the Lame as to his Mughal descendants, and to Nadir Shah of Persia as to Robert Clive of Plassey, ‘India’ was a place worth the taking.

The first occurrence of the word sets the trend. It makes its debut in an inscription found at Persepolis in Iran, which was the capital of the Persian or Achaemenid empire of Darius I, he whose far-flung battles included defeat at Marathon by the Athenians in 490 BC. Before this, Darius had evidently enjoyed greater success on his eastern frontier, for the Persepolis inscription, dated to C518 BC, lists amongst his numerous domains that of ‘Hi(n)du’.

The word for a ‘river’ in Sanskrit is sindhu. Hence sapta-sindhu meant ‘[the land of] the seven rivers’, which was what the Vedic arya called the Panjab. The Indus, to which most of these seven rivers were tributary, was the sindhu par excellence; and in the language of ancient Persian, a near relative of Sanskrit, the initial ‘s’ of a Sanskrit word was invariably rendered as an aspirate – ‘h’. Soma, the mysterious hallucinogen distilled, deified and drunk to excess by the Vedic arya, is thus homa or haoma in old Persian; and sindhu is thus Hind[h]u. When, from Persian, the word found its way into Greek, the initial aspirate was dropped, and it started to appear as the route ‘Ind’ (as in ‘India’, ‘Indus’, etc.). In this form it reached Latin and most other European languages. However, in Arabic and related languages it retained the initial ‘h’, giving ‘Hindustan’ as the name by which Turks and Mughals would know India. That word also passed on to Europe to give ‘Hindu’ as the name of the country’s indigenous people and of what, by Muslims and Christians alike, was regarded as their infidel religion.

On the strength of a slightly earlier Iranian inscription which makes no mention of Hindu, it is assumed that the region was added to Darius’ Achaemenid empire in or soon after 520 BC. This earlier inscription does, however, refer to ‘Gadara’, which looks like Gandhara, a maha-janapada or ‘state’ mentioned in both Sanskrit and Buddhist sources and located in an arc reaching from the western Panjab through the north-west frontier to Kabul and perhaps into southern Afghanistan (where ‘Kandahar’ is the same word). According to Xenophon and Herodotus, Gandhara had been conquered by Cyrus, one of Darius’ predecessors. The first Achaemenid or Persian invasion may therefore have taken place as early as the mid-sixth century BC. That it was an invasion, rather than a migration or even perhaps a last belated influx of charioteering arya, seems likely from a reference to Cyrus dying of a wound inflicted by the enemy. The enemy were the ‘Derbikes’; they enjoyed the support of the Hindu people and were supplied by them with war-elephants. In Persian and Greek minds alike, the association of Hindu with elephants was thereafter almost as significant as its connection with the mighty Indus. To Alexander of Macedon, following in the Achaemenids’ footsteps two centuries later, the river would be a geographical curiosity, but the elephants were a military obsession.

If Gandhara was already under Achaemenid rule, Darius’ Hindu must have lain beyond it, and so to the south or the east. Later Iranian records refer to Sindhu, presumably an adoption of the Sanskrit spelling, whence derives the word ‘Sind’, now Pakistan’s southernmost province. It seems unlikely, though, that Sindhu was Sind in the late sixth century BC, since Darius subsequently found it necessary to send a naval expedition to explore the Indus. Flowing through the middle of Sind, the river would surely have been familiar to any suzerain of the region. More probably, then, Hindu lay east of Gandhara, perhaps as a wedge of territory between it, the janapadas of eastern Panjab, and the deserts of Rajasthan. It thus occupied much of what is now the Panjab province of Pakistan.

Under Xerxes, Darius’ successor, troops from what had become the Achaemenids’ combined ‘satrapy’ of Gandhara and Hindu reportedly served in the Achaemenid forces. These Indians were mostly archers, although cavalry and chariots are also mentioned; they fought as far afield as eastern Europe; and some were present at the Persians’ bloody victory over Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae, and then at the decisive defeat by the Greeks at Plataea. Through these and other less fraught contacts between Greeks and Persians, Greek writers like Herodotus gleaned some idea of ‘India’. Compared to the intervening lands of Anatolia and Iran, it appeared a veritable paradise of exotic plenty. Herodotus told of an immense population and of the richest soil imaginable from which kindly ants, smaller than dogs but bigger than foxes, threw up hillocks of pure gold-dust. The ants may have intrigued entomologists, but the gold was what registered in political circles. With rivers to rival the Nile and behemoths from which to give battle, it was clearly a land of fantasy as well as wealth.

Herodotus, of course, knew only of the Indus region, and that by hearsay. Hence he did not report that the land of Hindu was of sensational extent, nor did he deny the popular belief that beyond its furthest desert, where in reality the Gangetic plain interminably spreads, lay the great ocean which supposedly encircled the world; Hindu or ‘India’ (but in fact Pakistan) was therefore believed to be the end of terra firma, a worthy culmination to any emperor’s ambitions as well as a fabulous addition to his portfolio of conquests. In abbreviated form, Herodotus’ History circulated widely. A hundred years after his death it was still avidly read by northern Greeks in Macedonia, where a teenage Alexander ‘knew it well enough to quote and follow its stories’.2

The traffic that resulted from the Achaemenid incursion into India was not all one-way. It may well have been from contacts between Indian troops and the enemies of the Achaemenid empire that Sanskrit acquired a name for the Greeks. Long before Alexander’s arrival on the scene, they became known in India as Yona or Yavana, words derived from a Persian spelling of ‘Ionian’ but which would thereafter serve to designate almost any people belonging to the lands west of the Indus who were alien to India’s traditions. Such peoples were also by definition mleccha (foreign and unable to speak properly), and hence despicably casteless. But caste being assimilative as well as exclusive, they might, as overlords, aspire to the status of vratya ksatriya, or ‘degenerate’ ksatriya. Macedonians, Bactrians, Kushans, Scythians and Arabs would all at some time be called Yavanas, and many would eventually be awarded vratya caste status.

WHERE WEST MEETS EAST

On the frontier of the Achaemenids’ Indian satrapy lay the city of Taxila (Takashila). Some thirty kilometres from what is now Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, it was not agriculturally disadvantaged, although in the absence of major irrigation schemes the Panjab was scarcely the land of wheat, sugarcane and canals which it is today. Indeed, Taxila seems to have owed its early urbanisation more to its economically strategic location. Here, by way of rugged trails like that of the Khyber from Afghanistan, passed all trade – horses, gold, precious stones and luxury textiles – between the Achaemenid world and the emerging Gangetic states. The city prospered as did the satrapy. According to Herodotus, the latter yielded to the Achaemenids a tribute of ‘ant-gold’ which was nearly five times more than the tribute extracted from Babylon and seven times that from Egypt.

Such wealth attracted to Taxila artisans and scholars as well as merchants. Sir John Marshall, who excavated the site in the 1940s, found three cities, the oldest of which lay beneath the Bhir Mound. There rubble walls indicated several levels of occupation, beginning with one which certainly belonged to the Iron Age and probably to ‘the close of the sixth century BC’.

… it would follow that this, the earliest settlement on the Bhir Mound, was little, if at all earlier than the invasion of Darius I; and it may even be plausibly conjectured, though there is no tangible evidence to support the conjecture, that Taxila owed its foundation to the Persian conqueror.3

Amongst Taxila’s imports from the west came the Aramaic script, which may have been the first script to be used in India since that of the Harappans. Whether or not the city was founded by the Achaemenids, it began heavily in debt to its western contacts, and would later become something of a showcase for imported western and even Mediterranean ideas and artefacts.

Yet it was also revered as a citadel of orthodoxy by the janapadas in the east. In the Ramayana it is claimed that Taxila was founded by one of Lord Rama’s nephews; in the Mahabharata it is said that it was actually at Taxila that the story of the great Bharata war was first told. Clearly the place was highly regarded throughout northern India. Students went there to learn the purest Sanskrit. Kautilya, whose Arthasastra is the classic Indian treatise on statecraft, is said to have been born there in the third century BC. It was also in Taxila that, in the previous century, Panini compiled a grammar more comprehensive and scientific than any dreamed of by Greek grammarians. ‘One of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilisation’,4 it so refined the literary usage of the day that the language became permanently ‘frozen’ and was ever after known as Samskrta (‘perfected’, hence ‘Sanskrit’). Given the defining role of language in arya identity, ritual observance and social differentiation, the importance of Panini’s work and of Taxila’s patronage can scarcely be exaggerated.

From Panini’s examples of different grammatical forms some historical information may also be garnered. ‘Eastern Bharatas’, for instance, is Panini’s example of tautology and verbosity; the ‘eastern’, he implies, is a superfluous qualification since everyone knows that Bharatas live in the east. It follows that by the fourth century BC all clans claiming Bharata descent must long have been located to the east of Taxila – like the Kuru in the Doab. Incidentally, by this chance example Panini also hinted at a definition of Bharata-varsha which, as ‘Bharat’, would nicely serve the purposes of twentieth-century nationalists in a Pakistan-less India.

Legitimacy as conferred by descent from the Bharatas, or one of the other arya clans, was yet more critical to emerging dynasties of dubious origin in the late first millennium BC. It accounts for the emphasis on genealogy in the much-revised epics and for the manipulation of descent lines in the Puranas; it may also account, along with trade, for the primacy accorded to Taxila located in the heartland of the arya’s original ‘land of the seven rivers’.