The New Penguin History of the World (25 page)

Strictly speaking, ‘Aryan’ is a linguistic term, like ‘Indo-European’. None the less, it has customarily and conveniently been used to identify one group of those peoples whose movements make up so much of the dynamic of ancient history in other parts of the Old World after 2000
BC
. At about
the time when other Indo-Europeans were flowing into Iran, somewhere about 1750
BC
, a great influx began to enter India from the Hindu Kush. This was the beginning of centuries during which waves of these migrants washed deeper and deeper into the Indus valley and the Punjab and eventually reached the upper Ganges. They did not obliterate the native peoples, though the Indus valley civilization crumbled. No doubt much violence marked their coming, for the Aryans were warriors and nomads, armed with bronze weapons, bringing horses and chariots, but they settled and there are plenty of signs that the native populations lived on with them, keeping their own beliefs and practices alive. There is much archaeological evidence of the fusion of Harappan with later ways. However qualified, this was an early example of the assimilation of cultures which was always to characterize Indian society and was eventually to underlie classical Hinduism’s remarkable digestive power.

It seems clear that the Aryans brought to India no culture so advanced as that of the Harappans. It is a little like the story of the coming of Indo-Europeans in the Aegean. Writing, for example, disappears and does not emerge again until the middle of the first millennium
BC
; cities, too, have to be reinvented and when they are again to be found they lack the elaboration and order of their Indus valley predecessors. Instead, the Aryans appear slowly to have given up their pastoral habits and settled into agricultural life, spreading east and south from their original settlement areas in a sprawl of villages. This took centuries. Not until the coming of iron was it complete and the Ganges valley colonized; iron implements made cultivation easier. Meanwhile, together with this physical opening up of the northern plains, the invaders had made two decisive contributions to Indian history, in its religious and in its social institutions.

The Aryans laid the foundations of the religion which has been the heart of Indian civilization. This centred on sacrificial concepts; through sacrifice the process of creation which the gods achieved at the beginning of time was to be endlessly repeated. Agni, the god of fire, was very important, because it was through his sacrificial flames that men could reach the gods. Great importance and standing was given to the Brahmans, the priests who presided over these ceremonies. There was a pantheon of gods of whom two of the most important were Varuna, god of the heavens, controller of natural order and the embodiment of justice, and Indra, the warrior god who, year after year, slew a dragon and thus released again the heavenly waters which came with the breaking of the monsoon. We learn about them from the
Rig-Veda
, a collection of more than a thousand hymns performed during sacrifice, collected for the first time in about 1000
BC
but certainly accumulated over centuries. It is one of our most important
sources for the history not only of Indian religion but also of Aryan society.

The
Rig-Veda
seems to reflect an Aryan culture as it has been shaped by settlement in India and not as it had existed at earlier times or in its original form. It is, like Homer, the eventual written form of a body of oral tradition, but quite different in being much less difficult to use as a historical source, since its status is much more certain. Its sanctity made its memorization in exact form essential, and though the
Rig-Veda
was not to be written down until after
AD
1300, it was then almost certainly largely uncorrupted from its original form. Together with later Vedic hymns and prose works, it is our best source for Aryan India, whose archaeology is cramped for a long time because building materials less durable than the brick of the Indus valley cities were used in its towns and temples.

There is a suggestion again of the world of Homer in the world revealed by the
Rig-Veda
, which is one of Bronze Age barbarians. Some archaeologists now believe they can identify in the hymns references to the destruction of the Harappan cities. Iron is not mentioned and appears only to have come to India after 1000
BC
(there is argument about how late and from what source). The setting of the hymns is a land which stretches from the western banks of the Indus to the Ganges, inhabited by Aryan peoples and dark-skinned native inhabitants. These formed societies whose fundamental units were families and tribes. What these left behind, though, was less enduring than the pattern of Aryan social organization which gradually emerged, to which the Portuguese later gave the name we use, ‘caste’.

About the early history of this vast and complicated subject and its implications it is impossible to speak with assurance. Once the rules of caste were written down, they appeared as a hard and solid structure, incapable of variation. Yet this did not happen until caste had been in existence for hundreds of years, during which it was still flexible and evolving. Its root appears to be a recognition of the fundamental class divisions of a settled agricultural society, a warrior-aristocracy (
Kshatriyas
), priestly
brahmans
and the ordinary peasant-farmers (
vaishyas
). These are the earliest divisions of Aryan society which can be observed and seem not to have been exclusive; movement between them was possible. The only unleapable barrier in early times seems to have been that between non-Aryans and Aryans; one of the words used to denote the aboriginal inhabitants of India by Aryans was
dasa
, which came eventually to denote ‘slave’. To the occupational categories was soon added a fourth category for non-Aryans. Clearly it rested on a wish to preserve racial integrity. These were the
shudras
, or ‘unclean’, who might not study or hear the Vedic hymns.

This structure has been elaborated almost ever since. Further divisions and sub-divisions appeared as society became more complex and movements within the original threefold structure took place. In this the Brahmans, the highest class, played a crucial role. Landowners and merchants came to be distinguished from farmers; the first were called
vaishyas
, and
shudras
became cultivators. Marriage and eating taboos were codified. This process gradually led to the appearance of the caste system as we know it. A vast number of castes and sub-castes slowly inserted themselves into the system. Their obligations and demands eventually became a primary regulator of Indian society, perhaps the only significant one in many Indians’ lives. By modern times there were thousands of
jatis
– local castes with members restricted to marrying within them, eating only food cooked by fellow members, and obeying their regulations. Usually, too, a caste limited those who belonged to it to the practice of one craft or profession. For this reason (as well as because of the traditional ties of tribe, family and locality and the distribution of wealth) the structure of power in Indian society right down to the present day has had much more to it than formal political institutions and central authority.

In early times Aryan tribal society threw up kings, who emerged, no doubt, because of military skill. Gradually, some of them acquired something like divine sanction, though this must always have depended on a nice balance of relations with the Brahman caste. But this was not the only political pattern. Not all Aryans accepted this evolution. By about 600
BC
, when some of the detail of early Indian political history at last begins to be dimly discernible through a mass of legend and myth, two sorts of political communities can be discerned, one non-monarchical, tending to survive in the hilly north, and one monarchical, established in the Ganges valley. This reflected centuries of steady pressure by the Aryans towards the east and south, during which peaceful settlement and intermarriage seem to have played as big a part as conquest. Gradually, during this era, the centre of gravity of Aryan India had shifted from the Punjab to the Ganges valley as Aryan culture was adopted by the peoples already there.

As we emerge from the twilight zone of the Vedic kingdoms, it is clear that they established something like a cultural unity in northern India. The Ganges valley was by the seventh century
BC
the great centre of Indian population. It may be that the cultivation of rice made this possible. A second age of Indian cities began there, the first of them market-places and centres of manufacture, to judge by the way they brought together specialized craftsmen. The great plains, together with the development of armies on a larger and better-equipped scale (we hear of the use of elephants), favoured the consolidation of larger political units. At the end of
the seventh century
BC
, northern India was organized in sixteen kingdoms, though how this happened and how they were related to one another is still hard to disentangle from their mythology. None the less, the existence of coinage and the beginnings of writing make it likely that they had governments of growing solidity and regularity.

The processes in which they emerged are touched on in some of the earliest literary sources for Indian history, the
Brahmanas
texts composed during the period when Aryan culture came to dominate the Ganges valley (
c.
800–600
BC
). But more about them and the great names involved can be found in later documents, above all in two great Indian epics, the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata
. The present texts are the result of constant revision from about 400
BC
to
AD
400, when they were written down as we know them for the first time, so their interpretation is not easy. In consequence, it remains hard to get at the political and administrative reality behind, say, the kingdom of Magadha, based on southern Bihar, which emerged eventually as the preponderant power and was to be the core of the first historical empires of India. On the other hand (and possibly more importantly), the evidence is clear that the Ganges valley was already what it was to remain, the seat of empire, its cultural domination assured as the centre of Indian civilization, the future Hindustan.

The later Vedic texts and the general richness of the Aryan literary record make it all too easy to forget the existence of half the sub-continent. Written evidence tends to confine Indian history down to this point (and even after) to the history of the north. The state of archaeological and historical scholarship also reflects and further explains the concentration of attention on northern India. There is just much more known about it in ancient times than about the south. But there are also better and less accidental justifications for such an emphasis. The archaeological evidence shows, for example, a clear and continuing cultural lag in this early period between the area of the Indus system and the rest of India (to which, it may be remarked, the river was to give its name). Enlightenment (if it may be so expressed) came from the north. In the south, near modern Mysore, settlements roughly contemporaneous with Harappa show no trace of metal, though there is evidence of domesticated cattle and goats. Bronze and copper only begin to appear at some time after the Aryan arrival in the north. Once outside the Indus system, too, there are no contemporary metal sculptures, no seals and fewer terracotta figures. In Kashmir and eastern Bengal there are strong evidences of Stone Age cultures with affinities with those of south China, but it is at least clear that, whatever the local characteristics of the Indian cultures with which they were in contact and within the limits imposed by geography, first Harappan and then
Aryan civilization were dominant. They gradually asserted themselves towards Bengal and the Ganges valley, down the west coast towards Gujarat, and in the central highlands of the sub-continent. This is the pattern of the Dark Age, and when we reach that of history, there is not much additional light. The survival of Dravidian languages in the south shows the region’s persistent isolation.

Topography explains much of it. The Deccan has always been cut off from the north by jungle-clad mountains, the Vindhya. Internally, too, the south is broken and hilly, and this did not favour the building of large states as did the open plains of the north. Instead, south India remained fragmented, some of its peoples persisting, thanks to their inaccessibility, in the hunting and gathering cultures of a tribal age. Others, by a different accident of geography, turned to the seas – another contrast with the predominantly agrarian empires of the north.

Millions of people must have been affected by the changes so far described. Estimates of ancient populations are notoriously unreliable. India’s has been put at about 25 million in 400
BC
, which would be roughly a quarter of the whole population of the world at that time. The importance of India’s early history nevertheless lies in the way it laid down patterns still shaping the lives of even larger numbers today, rather than in its impact on big populations in antiquity. This is above all true of religion. Classical Hinduism crystallized in the first millennium
BC
. As it did, India also gave birth to the first world religion – Buddhism; it was eventually to dominate wide areas of Asia. What men do is shaped by what they believe they can do; it is the making of a culture that is the pulse of Indian history, not the making of a nation or an economy, and to this culture religion was central.

The deepest roots of the Indian religious and philosophical synthesis go very deep indeed. One of the great popular cult figures of the Hindu pantheon today is Shiva, in whose worship many early fertility cults have been brought together. A seal from Mohenjo-Daro already shows a figure who looks like an early Shiva, and stones like the lingam found in modern temples, the phallic cult-object which is his emblem, have been found in the Harappan cities. There is some presumptive evidence therefore for speculating that the worship of Shiva may be the oldest surviving religious cult in the world. Though he has assimilated many important Aryan characteristics, he is pre-Aryan and survives in all his multifaceted power, still an object of veneration in the twentieth century. Nor is Shiva the only possible survival from the remote past of Indus civilization. Other Harappan seals seem to suggest a religious world centred about a mother-goddess and a bull. The bull survives to this day, the Nandi of countless village
shrines all over Hindu India (and newly vigorous in his twentieth-century incarnation, as the electoral symbol of the Congress Party).