India: A History. Revised and Updated (15 page)

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’.

Nowhere was this need for legitimacy more acutely felt than amongst the thrusting new states and cities far away to the east in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. By way of the
uttarapatha
, the ‘Northern Route’ along the base of the Himalayas, they maintained close contacts with Taxila and, judging by the punch-marked coins found in the Bhir Mound, were soon financing much of its trade. To them the city owed its prominence quite as much as to Achaemenid enterprise. For while Gandhara and ‘India’ remained under Achaemenid suzerainty well into the fourth century
BC
, another would-be imperium, India’s first and much its proudest, had begun flexing its muscles in the distant plains of southern Bihar.

Here, in the kingdom of Magadha, between the south bank of the sprawling Ganga and the rolling forests of Chota Nagpur, in a region today of the bleakest rural poverty with cities of almost unendurable squalor, the historian’s patience is finally rewarded. From a pre-historic dawn as shrouded in myth as any, the smoke of burnt offerings and ancient obscurities begins at last to lift. A sparsely featured but genuinely historical landscape is briefly revealed.

At the easternmost extremity of the
uttarapatha
, the kingdom of Magadha, with its capital at Rajagriha (Rajgir), occupied the region between today’s unlovely cities of Patna and Gaya. Its location coincided with that of the sacred trails trodden by the Buddha and Mahavira; and its rise coincided with their followers’ concern for an accurate record of the masters’ lives and teachings. In consequence, a succession of authentic historical figures, together with a chain of related events, at last looms dimly from the myth-smoke.

THE MARCH OF MAGADHA

Only the dates remain problematic. Buddhist sources show a healthy respect for chronology, and usually disdain the mathematical symmetries and astronomical exaggerations found in Vedic and Jain texts. Like Christians, they count the years to, and then from, a major event in the life of their founder. Thus, just as Christians measure time from the birth of Christ, so do Buddhists from the death, or
parinirvana
(achievement of
nirvana
), of the Buddha. Neither of these benchmarks can be determined with absolute precision. But because the Christian
BC
/ad system has become something of an international convention, it matters little that Christ may in fact have been born, not in zero
AD
, but several years later. On the other hand, it matters much that, depending on the tradition endorsed, the Buddha may have died either 350 to 400, 483 to 486, or even 544 years ‘Before Christ’.

Obviously, if the Buddhist chronology had commanded international regard, an agreed date for the
parinirvana
would long since have emerged, and it would then be the uncertainties about when Christ was born in terms of the Buddhist reckoning which would be considered unsettling. Euro-centric, or Christo-centric, assumptions about the measurement of time should be viewed with caution. Like those map projections which give mid-sheet prominence to Europe or the Americas, they carry an inherent distortion.

Nevertheless, the widely divergent dates adduced for the Buddha’s
parinirvana
do pose serious problems. That of 544
BC
derives from a much later Sri Lankan tradition and is usually discarded. As between the 486
BC
of Indian tradition and the 483
BC
of a Chinese record, the difference is slight and not too important. Indeed, it was the near congruence of these two dates which led the majority of scholars to accept their validity; one or other was used to deduce a date for the Buddha’s birth of c566–3
BC
, which thus became ‘the earliest certain date in Indian history’. Recently,
however, opinion has swung towards a much later dating for the
parinirvana
, in fact ‘about eighty to 130 years before Ashoka’s coronation [in 268
BC
],
i.e.
not a very long time before Alexander’s Indian campaign [327–5
BC
],
i.e.
between c400
BC
and c350
BC
’.
⁵
This reappraisal of the evidence, mainly by German scholars, shunts the Buddha forward by around a century. Besides promoting the Achaemenid conquest of
Hindu
in c520
BC
to the status of India’s first (more or less) certain date, it carries potentially devastating consequences for the chronology of just about every development in India of the first millennium
BC
. The Vedic period may have to be extended into the sixth century, state-formation and urbanisation brought forward to the fifth century, and the chronology of Magadha before the appearance of Ashoka condensed into a hundred years.

Alternatively, it may be taken to suggest a much longer time-lapse between the India of later Vedic texts, like the
Upanisads
, and that of the earliest Buddhist and Jain texts. Even a cursory acquaintance with these sources leaves the reader wondering whether they can possibly refer to the same society. The Sanskrit texts evoke a mostly agrarian way of life in which states play a minor part and status is governed by lineage and ritual observance. Buddhist and Jain texts, on the other hand, portray a network of functioning states, each with an urban nucleus heavily engaged in trade and production. Here wealth as much as lineage confers status. Indeed, the Buddhist concept of ‘merit’ as something to be earned, accumulated, occasionally transferred and eventually realised seems inconceivable without a close acquaintance with the moneyed economy. By interleaving between these two societies a further century, Buddhism’s newly revised or ‘short chronology’ allows for a more gradual and credible evolution of state and city without unduly taxing the archaeological record.

Similarly, it allows room for the evolution of a tradition of heterodoxy and dissent. Buddhist texts in particular portray a society that was already in religious ferment when the Buddha was born. Rival holy-men swarm across the countryside performing feats of endurance, disputing one another’s spiritual credentials and vying with one another for followers and patronage. That this was not simply the impression of partisan hotheads is shown by the dispassionate Kautilya whose compendium on statecraft, the
Arthasastra
, recognises such renunciates as an important constituent of any state; they are to be given legal protection and free passage; special forest areas are to be allotted to them for meditation, and special lodging-houses in the city. Saints or charlatans, they evidently mirrored a society to which the paranormal, the supernatural and the metaphysical had a strong appeal. Many of them went naked or unwashed and they cheerfully
flouted the taboos of caste status. Defying social convention, they yet enjoyed society’s indulgence. Renunciation had become an accepted way of life in which asceticism was seen as a prerequisite to spiritual enlightenment.

The philosophies on offer from this rag-tag army of reformers ranged from mind-boggling mysticism to defiant nihilism and blank agnosticism, from the outright materialism of the Lokayats to the heavy determinism of the Ajivikas, and from the rationalism of the Buddha to the esotericism of Mahavira. Most, however, agreed in condemning the extravagance of Vedic sacrifice, in sidelining the Vedic pantheon, and in ignoring brahmanical authority. Moreover many, including the Jains, Buddhists and Ajivikas, recognised an assortment of antecedents whose teachings or experiences had in some sense anticipated their own. In other words, Mahavira, the Buddha, and Gosala of the Ajivikas acknowledged well established traditions of heterodoxy; and as one might infer from their own reception, they were able to capitalise on an already existing thirst for spiritual and moral guidance, as well as on an abiding credulity. Clearly the new sources of wealth and authority associated with state-formation and urbanisation had plunged society into a crisis which the rigidities of the
varnasramadharma
(the organisation of society into caste
varnas
and into social vocations based on age) could scarcely accommodate, and to which the ritual oblations of the Vedas seemed irrelevant as well as wildly extravagant.

Adopting, then, not the conventional 486–3bc for the
parinirvana
but some date between 400 and 350
BC
, one may place the birth of Siddhartha Gautama, the ‘Buddha’, some time in the mid-fifth century. Like his contemporary, Mahavira Nataputta of the Jains, he was a
ksatriya
, the son of Suddhodana,
raja
of the Sakyas. The Sakya state being one of those republican
ganasanghas
, it had many
rajas.
And since their chief was elected, the ‘Prince’ Siddhartha of later legend must be considered a fabrication. Moreover, Kapilavastu, the Sakya capital, was not a major political centre. Just within the southern border of present-day Nepal, it may have served as a staging post on the
uttarapatha.
Trade and craftsmanship were more the Buddha’s milieu than royal ceremonial. The affluence against which he eventually reacted by renouncing his wife and family to begin an enquiry into the human condition may have been real; equally it may have been the perceived luxury of more celebrated urban centres like Vaisali, capital of the Licchavis, or the Koshalan metropolis of Sravasti, or Rajagriha in Magadha.

In the course of his quest, Siddhartha visited all of these places and studied under a variety of distinguished but ultimately unconvincing teachers. On one occasion, while traversing Magadha, he met its king. His
name was Bimbisara and the date (given the Buddhist ‘short chronology’) must have been around 400
BC
. Bimbisara’s origins are uncertain, but he is said to have lived for over fifty years. He was now in the middle of his reign, and had already added to his domain the important kingdom of Anga.