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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
'A masterpiece of compression... conveys 5,000 years of history with flair and authority' JOHN KEAYFrom the tantalising traces of ancient Harappan civilisation to the emerging superpower of today, here is India's story in all its contradictions, drama and splendour.InThe Shortest History of India, John Zubrzycki distils five millennia of gods and kings, conquerors and colonisers into an epic tale teeming with personalities both legendary and largely unknown outside India. Gautama Buddha, Alexander the Great and Mahatma Gandhi share the stage with Candragupta ('India's Julius Caesar'), Nizam Saqqa, the water-carrier who became king for a day, and Raziyya, the first Muslim woman to rule in the subcontinent.The later chapters reveal a modern India riven by contrasts: the brutal reality of partition and the fantasies of Bollywood, booming IT businesses and expanding slums. In conclusion, Zubrzycki asks whether internal challenges - from religious tensions to an increasingly undemocratic regime - might still thwart India's rise to wealth and power.
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THE SHORTEST HISTORYofINDIA
John Zubrzycki
Contents
iii
ANCIENT INDIA
c. 1.5 million BCEEarliest humans in Indiac. 65,000 BCEOut-of-Africa migration reaches Indiac. 7000 BCEEarliest evidence of agriculturec. 3300–2600 BCEEarly Harappān civilisationc. 2600–1900 BCEMature Harappānc. 2000–1500 BCEĀryan migration from Central Asiac. 1900–1300 BCELate Harappānc. 1200–1100 BCEṚg Veda compiledc. 800–300 BCEUpaniṣhads composedc. 599–527 BCEMahāvīra, founder of Jainismc. 563–483 BCESiddhārtha Gautama, founder of Buddhismc. 400 BCE–300 CEMahābhārata and Ramayana composed326 BCEAlexander the Great invades northern IndiaAGE OF EMPIRES
c. 322–185 BCEMauryan Empirec. 100–240 BCEFirst Indian Buddhist missions to China135 BCE–150 CEKuśāṇa Empirec. 100–500Gandharan art flourishes in North India and Afghanistanc. 320–550Gupta Empirec. 200–400Kāmasūtra composedAGE OF INVASIONS c. 455First Hūṇa invasionc. 606–47Reign of Harṣac. 712Arabs occupy Sindhc. 300–888Pallavas of Kāñcīc. 871–907Rise of the Cholan Empire1004–30Mahmud of Ghazni raids India1192Prithviraj Chauhan defeated at battle of Tarain1206–1526Delhi Sultanate1336–1565Vijayanagara EmpireGREAT MUGHALS
1526–1530Reign of Babur1530–40, 1555–56Reign of Humayun1556–1605Reign of Akbar1605–27Reign of Jahangir1627–58Reign of Shah Jahan1632–54Taj Mahal constructed1658–1707Reign of AurangzebCOLONIALISM 1600 BritishEast India Company (EIC) founded1739Delhi sacked by Persian Nadir Shah1756Black Hole of Calcutta1757Battle of Plassey1765 EICgains rights to revenue collection in Bengal1773Regulating Act establishes a governor general and supervising counciliv1799Tipu Sultan defeated at Srirangapatnam1813Charter Act allows Christian missionaries into India1817–18Third Anglo–Maratha War and British conquest of India1856Lord Dalhousie orders annexation of Awadh1857Indian Uprising or Mutiny1858India comes under the CrownBRITISH RAJ
1876Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India1885Indian National Congress founded1905Partition of Bengal1906Muslim League founded1918Mahatma Gandhi holds first satyagraha in Bihar1919Amritsar Massacre1930Indian National Congress calls for self-rule1931Gandhi attends Round Table Conference in London1942‘Quit India’ resolution, Congress leadership jailed16 August 1946Jinnah proclaims Direct Action Day14–15 August 1947Pakistan and India gain independence from BritainINDEPENDENT INDIA
October 1947India and Pakistan war in Kashmir30 January 1948Gandhi assassinated26 January 1950India officially becomes a republic1952First general election1962India–China border war27 May 1964Jawaharlal Nehru diesSeptember 1965India and Pakistan war over KashmirJanuary 1966Indira Gandhi becomes prime ministerDecember 1971India and Pakistan war over East PakistanJune 1984Indian troops storm the Sikh Golden Temple31 October 1984Indira Gandhi assassinated; Rajiv Gandhi becomes prime minister21 May 1991Rajiv Gandhi assassinated1991Congress launches sweeping economic reforms6 December 1992Hindu zealots tear down the Babri mosque, Ayodhya1998Bharatiya Janata Party forms a coalition governmentMay 1998India and Pakistan conduct nuclear testsMay 1999Kargil conflictMay 2004Manmohan Singh becomes prime ministerNovember 2008Mumbai terror attackMay 2014Narendra Modi becomes prime ministerNovember 2016DemonetisationMay 2019BJP wins second termMarch–June 2021Devastating second COVID-19 wave kills thousands
A Note on Pronunciation, Place Names and Dates
viA Note on Pronunciation, Place Names and Dates
To aid pronunciation, diacritic marks have been used for Sanskrit words, names and places up until the Mughal period.
In recent decades, many cities in India have ditched their colonial names, thus Calcutta became Kolkata and Bombay is now officially Mumbai. The following text reverts to names in use during the periods that are being discussed. To aid the reader, the modern equivalents of ancient names are given, thus Kāñcī is now Kanchipuram and Kashi is today’s Varanasi. Dates for births, deaths and reigns of prominent historical figures up to the Mughal period are also given.
Introduction
‘Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.’
—British economist Joan Robinson
early on the morning of 9 august 1942, leader of the Indian National Congress Jawaharlal Nehru and nine of his colleagues were bundled into a train at Bombay’s Victoria Terminus. Their destination was Ahmadnagar Fort in the sweltering hills of modern-day Maharashtra. In 1707, the last of the Great Mughals, Aurangzeb, had died in the fort – the moment of his passing coinciding with a whirlwind ‘so fierce that it blew down all the tents standing in the encampment … villages were destroyed and trees overthrown’. Under the British, Ahmadnagar had been turned into a high-security jail. Nehru’s incarceration would last two years and nine months – the longest of his nine stints as a prisoner of the Raj. His crime was to launch the ‘Quit India’ movement, a desperate bid by Congress to pressure Britain into granting immediate independence if it were to count on India’s full support for the war effort. The war would be almost over by the time he was released.
India’s future prime minister described Ahmadnagar as a kind of ‘Plato’s cave’ – a prison whose inmates can only see shadows of what is going on around them. Yet he took solace in the sky over his prison yard with its ‘fleecy and colourful clouds 2in the daytime, and … brilliant star-lit nights’. Inside the fort’s walls was a firmament of a different kind – Nehru’s small cohort of fellow prisoners represented a cross-section of Indian politics, scholarship and society. Between them, they spoke four of India’s classical languages – Sanskrit, Pali, Arabic and Persian – as well as more than half a dozen of its modern ones, including Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and Telugu. ‘I had all this wealth to draw upon and the only limitation was my own capacity to profit by it,’ Nehru mused. There was plenty of time to cultivate a garden, hold impromptu seminars and speculate on what was going on in the rest of the country. As he had done during his earlier jail terms, Nehru took the opportunity to satisfy his voracious appetite for reading classic works on history and politics, and to translate those ideas into his own writings.
Compiled during many long, hot days, The Discovery of India (1946) would become his best-known work. Nehru dismissed it as a ‘jumble of ideas’– a journey through the past that also ‘peeped into the future’. Much of the work is just that – a skein of unconnected thoughts. But he begins the book with a fundamental question: ‘What is this India, apart from her physical and geographical aspects?’ In the last chapter, he feels confident enough to offer an answer, writing that India is ‘a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads … She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.’
Nehru’s conclusion might appear frustratingly vague and contradictory to aspiring students of India’s history. Yet India as both an idea and an entity has endured for thousands of years, accommodating a diversity of religions, cultures, languages, ethnicities and castes. ‘India has had that past tradition of synthesis,’ Nehru pointed out in a speech in 1953, adding: ‘Currents 3 came to it, rivers of humanity flowed into it, and got mixed up with the ocean of India, making changes there no doubt, and affecting it and being affected by it.’
Nehru took for granted the importance of ‘discovering India’. But for many outsiders, making the ‘passage to India’, to borrow the title from E.M. Forster’s book, is challenging. The country’s cultural and linguistic complexity, its extremes of wealth and poverty, its mosaic of religions and rituals, and its convoluted and increasingly contested history might deter all but the most committed. It may seem impossible to meld overlapping cultural, political and social currents into a coherent and comprehensive narrative. As the Bengali author and scholar Nirad Chaudhuri (1897–1999) wrote back in the 1950s, India is ‘so vast and so populous, the individuals who form the exceptions may well run into millions’.
Whatever the hurdles India’s complexity puts in the path of students and historians, it would be a folly to ignore the wider lessons of the country’s past and present. India is the world’s oldest civilisation and its largest democracy. It is the fulcrum between the eastern and western parts of Asia and an assertive Indian Ocean power. It is also changing rapidly, ditching the last remnants of the socialist experiment that guided its economy for decades and adapting to a new world order where its rhetoric of non-alignment – its refusal to side with one superpower or another – has less and less relevance.
India has yet to replicate China’s shiny bullet trains, its glittering megalopolises or its giant factories producing laptops and smartphones for tech-hungry consumers around the world. It has also been poorly served by its democratically elected leaders, who have consistently failed to harness the country’s full potential. Rich in natural resources and with an immense pool 4 of highly educated, globally literate workers, India holds huge promise. By 2025, one-fifth of the world’s working-age population will be Indian, and a billion Indians will be connected to one another and the world through smartphones. India’s population is expected to overtake China’s in 2027, as both countries nudge the 1.5 billion mark. By then, India’s five largest cities will have economies of comparable size to middle-income countries such as Serbia and Bulgaria today. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, India was on track to become the world’s third-largest economy as early as 2031, after China and the United States, measured by market exchange rates.
Unlike China’s history, which can be divided neatly into dynastic periods such as those of the Yuan, the Ming or the Qing, India’s past is untidy, with disparate and competing centres of power. Even at the height of its imperial expansion, India’s three great empires – Mauryan, Gupta and Mughal – did not control the entire subcontinent. It was not until the defeat of the Marathas in 1818 that Britain could make that claim. Even then, the princely states, which covered two-fifths of India’s landmass and were home to one-third of India’s population, retained some nominal independence.
To include here the reign of every ruler on the subcontinent, the fortunes of all its major and minor dynasties, and the outcome of every battle for territory and wealth – not to mention India’s contribution to the world in fields such as science, literature and art – would be self-defeating, a jumbled mass of names, dates and declarations devoid of texture and depth. It has been challenging to condense 5,000 years of Indian history into a couple of hundred pages while trying to convey these subtleties, but it is necessary. 5
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
For traders and invaders who made the long trek over the Hindu Kush and arrived on the plains of what is now Pakistan’s Punjab province, the first significant geographical barrier was the Sindhu River. Unable to pronounce the S, the Persians called the river the Hindu. When the Greeks arrived in the fourth century BCE, the H was dropped and it became the Indus, as it is known today, and the lands beyond it, Ἰνδία, the root of the word India. In the same way that America and Australia are inventions that bear no relation to how the pre-colonial inhabitants referred to their lands, the name India never really took hold until the European trader-encounter of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought to India’s shores Portugal’s Estado da Índia, the Dutch Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie, France’s Compagnie des Indes and, finally, Britain’s East India Company. A more common name was Hindustan, which referred to ‘land of the Indus’ rather than ‘land of the Hindus’. The generic term ‘Hindustanee’ was commonly used to refer to anyone who came from what was then British India until the early twentieth century.
The Sanskrit name for India is Bharata, which was defined in the third-century text the Viṣṇupurāṇa: ‘The country that lies north of the ocean, and south of the snowy mountains, is called Bhārata, for there dwelt the descendants of [King] Bhārata. It is nine thousand leagues in extent, and is the land of works, in consequence of which men go to heaven, or obtain emancipation.’ The opening article of the Indian Constitution states: ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.’
Geographically, it is relatively simple to define the parameters of India and Indian civilisation over the millennia. Approximately 180 million years ago, the supercontinent of Gondwana 6began to break up, with the Indian Plate drifting in a northeast direction at the rate of around 15 centimetres a year until it collided with the Eurasian Plate nearly 55 million years ago to create the world’s highest mountain range, the Himalayas. The 2,500-kilometre-long range marks the northern boundary of what is referred to today as the Indian subcontinent. Quadrilateral in shape, its eastern extremities are hemmed by the jungle-clad ranges that form the Indo–Myanmar border. In the west lies the Hindu Kush, where the Bolan and Khyber passes became the pathways for waves of invading armies. The subcontinent’s southern boundary is a massive peninsula that protrudes like a spearhead into the Indian Ocean.
7Today, the subcontinent is divided into five nations. India is the largest of these, with an area of just under 3.3 million square kilometres, if all of contested Kashmir is included; it measures almost 3,200 kilometres from north to south and 2,900 kilometres from east to west. It is also the most populous, home to approximately 1.4 billion people. It shares land borders with the other four countries of the subcontinent – Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh – as well as with China and Myanmar. India is also one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with around 400 people per square kilometre – twice that of China.
As with Egypt and Mesopotamia, which flourished on the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates rivers, India’s earliest civilisations grew up around the fertile floodplains of the Ganges and Indus. From its source at Gangotri, in the northeast, the Ganges cuts through the Himalayas, before it flows eastwards and merges with the Brahmaputra River to form one of the agriculturally richest deltas in the world, encompassing the modern Indian state of West Bengal and the independent nation of Bangladesh. 8South of the Vindhya mountain range, which divides the subcontinent neatly in half, is the Deccan plateau, bounded on either side by the Eastern and Western Ghats. The major rivers of the Deccan and southern India include the Narmada, the Godavari, the Krishna and the Kaveri.
One of the most anticipated announcements in India is the annual monsoon forecast. The southwest monsoon, which begins in June and lasts until September, dumps approximately 80 per cent of the country’s annual rainfall. Parts of northeastern India receive up to 14,000 millimetres a year, while the western Thar Desert of Rajasthan can get as little as 100 millimetres. The monsoon is crucial to agricultural output in a country where only half of the farmland is irrigated. By raising food prices and cutting rural incomes, a poor monsoon can topple a government.
The subcontinent’s rivers, mountains and coastline define its sacred geography. Varanasi, also known as Kashi or the City of Light, is located on the Ganges. Sacred to the god Śiva, the city is as holy to Hindus as Mecca is to Muslims, the Vatican is to Roman Catholics and Jerusalem is to Jews. For Hindus it is a place of spiritual liberation. To die here is to achieve moksha, or freedom from the endless cycle of rebirth. Upstream at the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswatī rivers is Prayagraj, formerly known as Allahabad, the site of the greatest gathering of humanity anywhere in the world – the Kumbh Mela – which occurs every twelve years. Devout pilgrims carry jars of sacred Ganges water to the dozens of holy places scattered around mountain ranges, rivers and coastlines. When Sufi mystics, practising a more devotional form of Islam, began arriving in India early in the last millennium, they too established networks of dargahs or shrines, such as that of 9Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi and Mu’inuddin Chishti in Ajmer, one of the holiest places of Islam aside from Mecca and Medina. The web of pilgrimage routes crisscrossing India includes places sacred to Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and Christians.
Though formidable, the subcontinent’s geographical boundaries have always been porous, allowing new cultures, agricultural practices, languages, religions and even methods of warfare to take root. The nomadic Āryans, who spread into northern India from the steppes of Central Asia, were followed by the armies of Alexander the Great. From western China came the Kuśāṇas and from the Central Asian steppes the Hūṇas, a tribe related to the Huns. Chinese pilgrims seeking scholarship and enlightenment made their way to centres of learning such as Nalanda, considered the first university in the world, where the subjects taught ranged from Buddhist theology to alchemy and astronomy. The rise of Islam in the seventh century made its presence felt through trade and then conquest, culminating with the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. Even at the height of Mughal supremacy in the seventeenth century, European powers including the Portuguese, Dutch, French and British had footholds in India.
Over the millennia, the influence of Indian religion, thought and science would spread well beyond its borders, giving the world everything from the decimal system to yoga, from Bollywood movies to vegetarianism. The legacy of British colonial rule inculcated the English language with a masala of Indian words: bungalow, polo, gymkhana, loot, mogul, jungle and thug, to name just a few. Indian soft power predates the Raj by two millennia. In c. 240 BCE, the Third Buddhist Council – held in Pāṭaliputra, in the country’s north – was instructed by the Emperor Aśoka (r. c. 268–c. 232 BCE) to send emissaries to nine 10countries to spread Buddha’s teachings. As early as the first century CE, Hinduism was making its presence felt as far away as the islands of Java and Bali in the Indonesian archipelago. By the 1960s and 1970s, gurus such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had become household names in the West for preaching the benefits of transcendental meditation to The Beatles, and thousands of Westerners were making their way along the hippie trail.
India’s other outstanding gift to the world has been its diaspora. Numbering around 18 million, it is the largest in the world. Zubin Mehta has an almost unparalleled reputation as a conductor of Western classical music. M. Night Shyamalan’s films inducted the genre of ‘scary movies with a twist’. CEOs of Indian heritage head major companies including Google, Twitter and Microsoft. The diaspora’s reach was symbolised in January 2021 by the swearing in of Kamala Harris as the first American vice president of South Asian heritage. As the ceremony was beamed in live to their smartphones, residents of her ancestral village of Thulasendrapuram, about 350 kilometres from Chennai, lit firecrackers, distributed sweets and flowers as a religious offering and prayed at the local temple for her welfare.
Nehru once compared India’s ability to absorb and conserve ideas from abroad to a palimpsest: an ancient manuscript that is written over again and again without completely obliterating the layer before. The following pages of this short history aim to bring those layers to life.
1
Lost Civilisations
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 12believed 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 13remains 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 14sites. 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 5,000 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 Wiltshire, 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. 15
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 16prosperous 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 17the 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. 18
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, argues 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 groups 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 19by 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 centre piece 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, each of them ‘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 20tantalising possibility that the Harappān civilisation may have been the world’s first secular state, pre dating 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 21raised 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 22Tamil 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.
