the history of india - 2nd edition (2015).pdf

8/16/2019 The History of India - 2nd Edition (2015).pdf

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THE HISTORY OF INDIA


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ADVISORY BOARD

John T. AlexanderProfessor of History and Russian and European Studies,University of Kansas

Robert A. DivineGeorge W. Littleeld Professor in American History Emeritus,University of Texas at Austin

John V. LombardiProfessor of History,University of Florida


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THE HISTORY OF INDIA

Second Edition

John McLeod

The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations

Frank W. Thackeray and John E. Findling, Series Editors


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Copyright © 2015 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in areview, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McLeod, John, 1963–The history of India / John McLeod. — 2nd edition.

pages cm. — (The Greenwood histories of the modern nations)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978–1–61069–765–1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–1–61069–766–8 (ebook)

1. India—History. 2. India—History—1947– I. Title.

DS463.M224 2015954—dc23 2014032374

ISBN: 978–1–61069–765–1EISBN: 978–1–61069–766–8

19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.

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Contents

Series Foreword vii

Preface xi

Timeline of Historical Events xv

1 The Settings 1

2 The Birth of India 133 Religion, Trade, and Conquest 35

4 The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Dynasty 55

5 A Century of Realignment 73

6 Indians and British Rule 91

7 The Struggle for Independence 111

8 Building the New India 139

9 Toward a New Dynasty 157


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10 India Transformed 179

11 Into the Twenty-First Century 199

Notable People in the History of India 213

Appendix: Mughal Emperors, British Governors Generaland Viceroys, Prime Ministers of India 225

Glossary 229

Bibliographic Essay 241

Index 245

vi Contents


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Series Foreword

The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations series is intended to pro-vide students and interested laypeople with up-to-date, concise, andanalytical histories of many of the nations of the contemporary world.Not since the 1960s has there been a systematic attempt to publish aseries of national histories, and as series editors, we believe that thisseries will prove to be a valuable contribution to our understandingof other countries in our increasingly interdependent world.

Some 40 years ago, at the end of the 1960s, the Cold War was anaccepted reality of global politics. The process of decolonization wasstill in progress, the idea of a unied Europe with a single currencywas unheard of, the United States was mired in a war in Vietnam,and the economic boom in Asia was still years in the future. RichardNixon was president of the United States, Mao Tse-tung (not yet MaoZedong) ruled China, Leonid Brezhnev guided the Soviet Union, andHarold Wilson was prime minister of the United Kingdom. Authori-tarian dictators still controlled most of Latin America, the Middle Eastwas reeling in the wake of the Six-Day War, and Shah MohammadReza Pahlavi was at the height of his power in Iran.

Since then, the Cold War has ended, the Soviet Union has vanished,leaving 15 independent republics in its wake, the advent of the


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computer age has radically transformed global communications, therising demand for oil makes the Middle East still a dangerous ash-point, and the rise of new economic powers like the People’s Republicof China and India threatens to bring about a new world order. All of these developments have had a dramatic impact on the recent historyof every nation of the world.

For this series, which was launched in 1998, we rst selected nationswhose political, economic, and socio-cultural affairs marked them asamong the most important of our time. For each nation, we found anauthor who was recognized as a specialist in the history of that nation.These authors worked cooperatively with us and with GreenwoodPress to produce volumes that reected current research on theirnations and that are interesting and informative to their readers. Inthe rst decade of the series, more than 40 volumes were published,and as of 2008, some are moving into second editions.

The success of the series has encouraged us to broaden our scope toinclude additional nations, whose histories have had signicanteffects on their regions, if not on the entire world. In addition, geopo-litical changes have elevated other nations into positions of greaterimportance in world affairs and, so, we have chosen to include themin this series as well. The importance of a series such as this cannot be underestimated. As a superpower whose inuence is felt all overthe world, the United States can claim a “special” relationship withalmost every other nation. Yet many Americans know very little aboutthe histories of nations with which the United States relates. How didthey get to be the way they are? What kind of political systems haveevolved there? What kind of inuence do they have on their ownregions? What are the dominant political, religious, and cultural forcesthat move their leaders? These and many other questions areanswered in the volumes of this series.

The authors who contribute to this series write comprehensive his-tories of their nations, dating back, in some instances, to prehistorictimes. Each of them, however, has devoted a signicant portion of their book to events of the past 40 years because the modern era hascontributed the most to contemporary issues that have an impact onU.S. policy. Authors make every effort to be as up-to-date as possibleso that readers can benet from discussion and analysis of recent

events.In addition to the historical narrative, each volume contains an

introductory chapter giving an overview of that country’s geography,political institutions, economic structure, and cultural attributes. Thisis meant to give readers a snapshot of the nation as it exists in the

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contemporary world. Each history also includes supplementary infor-mation following the narrative, which may include a timeline that rep-resents a succinct chronology of the nation’s historical evolution, biographical sketches of the nation’s most important historical gures,and a glossary of important terms or concepts that are usuallyexpressed in a foreign language. Finally, each author prepares a com-prehensive bibliography for readers who wish to pursue the subjectfurther.

Readers of these volumes will nd them fascinating and well writ-ten. More importantly, they will come away with a better understand-ing of the contemporary world and the nations that comprise it. Asseries editors, we hope that this series will contribute to a heightenedsense of global understanding as we move through the early years of the twenty-rst century.

Frank W. Thackeray and John E. FindlingIndiana University Southeast

Series Foreword ix


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Preface

In 2002, I opened the rst edition of this book by observing thatmore than many other countries, India is often described in cliche ´s.This remains true to this day. Foreigners may preserve old ideas of the exotic East and regard India as a land of spirituality or of poverty;or they may reect the preoccupations of the Western media and see init a place of violence and disasters, both natural and man-made. Indi-ans may think of their homeland as a modern industrial and military

power, as the world’s largest democracy, or as a country where anancient civilization thrives alongside the latest computer technology.Like most cliché s, all these images contain some truth and much

exaggeration, but none represents more than a small part of reality.Cliché s and reality alike are rooted in India’s long history, and this book is intended to introduce that history. I hope it will tell generalreaders and students something about India and its people, aboutwhat the country has been in the past, and what it is today. If it helpsthem understand where conventional representations of India comefrom, and then move beyond them, it will have attained its goal. Givenits length, the book can offer no more than a taste of the history of India, but I hope that this taste inspires readers to learn more aboutthe subject. The book begins with an introduction to the settings on


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which the history of India has been played out—geographical, politi-cal, human, and cultural. This is followed by 10 chapters recountingthat history, from the earliest permanent village settlements to thetwenty-rst century. The title of each chapter suggests its theme. Mostof the time, political history is used as a framework for presentingeconomic, social, cultural, and religious developments.

The book includes several features that are intended to help thereader make sense of what can be a complicated story. The timelinelists some of the principal events in the history of India, and the mapshows the states and major cities of modern India. In addition, thereare short biographical notes on 70 leading people who appear in the book, and an appendix that lists the Mughal emperors, British gover-nors general and viceroys, and prime ministers of India. The glossaryexplains Indian terms, and the bibliographic essay points interestedreaders toward other works on the history of India.

Historians do not simply collect facts; they also organize and ana-lyze them. As they grasp for convincing interpretations, they inevi-tably argue with one another. In such controversies, I have adoptedthe position that seems to me to accord best with the evidence. I knowthat one day some of my interpretations will be proved wrong, andnew debates will arise over issues that now seem settled.

Indians write in the nine related Indic scripts and in the Perso-Arabicand Roman alphabets. Each of these operates on different principles,which makes transliteration complicated. Moreover, all Indian lan-guages use sounds that are absent in English. For example, most havetwo forms of each of a, i, u, t, and d, which are quite different to an Indi-an’s ear but can seem almost identical to foreigners. Scholarly transliter-ations use diacritical marks to keep them all straight—for example,Mahā tmā Gāndhı̄ . Because this book is aimed at nonspecialists, I havedispensed with diacritics, while writing words and names in such away that they are recognizable to readers who know Indian languages.

To add to the confusion, the pronunciation of the same letter may varyin different parts of India, and the Indian forms of Arabic words andnames often diverge from the original. I have normally written Perso-Arabic words in accordance with Indian pronunciation, but have givenArabic words directly connected with the Muslim religion in their Arabicforms. An example is dhimmi: Arabs pronounce dh as the English th in

“this,” whereas Indians make it z or j. As this word is used in connectionwith Islam, I have written it as dhimmi rather than zimmi or jimmi.

Since the nineteenth century, many Indians have adopted Englishspellings for their names. I have followed their lead, even though theydo not always follow the system of transliteration used in this book:

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thus, Rammohun Roy, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, and Atal BihariVajpayee, the forms preferred by the bearers of those names, ratherthan the “scientic” Rammohan Ray, Sayyid Ahmad, and Vajpeyi.Along the same lines, I have kept the traditional nonscholarly Englishspellings of some place-names—Bengal, Deccan, and Punjab, which (if I were being consistent) would appear as Bangal, Dakhan, and Panjab.I have written the highest-ranking caste in Hinduism as “Brahmin,” aswithout diacritics the more correct “Brahman” would be indistin-guishable from the name of the substance from which (according toHindu philosophy) all things in the universe emerged.

Unfortunately, all this makes it impossible for the layperson toknow how to pronounce Indian words correctly. It is probably safest(though wrong as often as not) to treat all vowels as long, whichmeans pronouncing them as if they were Italian or Spanish. Most con-sonants may be pronounced as in English, with th and ph having theirsounds in “pothole” and “uphill”; in gh, dh, and bh, the g, d, or b is fol-lowed so closely by an h that the two consonants almost become onesound. (This points to yet another complication: scholars use dh to re-present completely different sounds in Arabic and in Indian lan-guages. The same is true of gh, which in Perso-Arabic words ispronounced rather like a French r.)

Without diacritics, it is also impossible to know where the stress liesin Indian words, why in “Upanishads” it is on the rst syllable,whereas in “Debendranath” it is on the last. The reader is thereforeadvised to give a more or less equal stress to each syllable.

In place of the more familiar Before Christ (BC) and Anno Domini(AD), I have employed Before the Common Era (BCE) and CommonEra (CE). This is only right in a book about a country where the greatmajority of the people do not regard Jesus of Nazareth as either theirMessiah (Christ) or their Lord (Dominus).

I have accumulated many debts in writing this book, although anyerrors of fact or interpretation are entirely my own. The bibliographicessay names some of the authors whose work has been particularlyinuential in molding my thought. Over the years, my teachers, col-leagues, and students have stimulated my studies of India. In the rstedition of this book, I acknowledged my profound debt to two of my teachers, Professor N. K. Wagle and “Shastriji” J. C. Sharda. Now,

I shall also express my gratitude to His late Highness Maharana SrirajMeghrajji III, Maharaja Sriraj of Dhrangadhra, who for more than aquarter of a century was a valued mentor, a cherished friend, and agenerous host. He has a walk-on role in this history. When I presentedhim with a copy of the rst edition, he read it in a single sitting.

Preface xiii


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As I have worked on this revised edition, it has been a pleasure forme to work with the editors of this series, Professors Frank W. Thackerayand John E. Findling, and the editorial and production specialists whohave provided invaluable assistance, particularly Bridget Austiguy-Preschel, Cathleen Casey, Anthony Chiffolo, Kaitlin Ciarmiello, and ErinRyan of ABC-CLIO, and Magendra Varman of Lumina Datamatics.Finally, Dr. Mary Hora remains (in the words of the author of the rst book that she gave me) “the most severe of critics, but—a perfect Wife !”

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Timeline of Historical Events

BCE

c. 7000 First permanent village settlements in Balochistan

c. 4300 First use of copper

c. 3200 First village settlements in Indus and Sarasvativalleys

c. 2600–2500 First use of bronze

c. 2500–2000 Harappan urban civilization

c. 2000–1600 Collapse of Harappan urban civilization

c. 2000–1000 Spread of Aryan ways eastward to the Ganges(including Brahminical religion, Vedic language);

composition of Rig Vedac. 1300 Disappearance of the Sarasvati

c. 1000 First use of iron


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c. 1000–550 Spread of Aryan world across North India; for-mation of oligarchies and kingdoms; compositionof Brahmanas

c. 700–500 First wave of religious speculation; compositionof Aranyakas and Upanishads

c. 550 Emergence of Gangetic urban civilization

c. 550–350 Second wave of religious speculation; emergenceof Buddhism and Jainism; rise of Magadha

c. 325–185 Mauryan dynasty (Magadha)

c. 272–235 Reign of Ashoka Maurya3rd centuryBCE–3rd

century CE Foreign kings in Northwest (includ-ing Kanishka)

1st centuryBCE–3rd

century CE Satavahana or Andhra dynasty(Deccan)

CE

1st–3rd centuries Probable composition of Shangam literature

1st millennium Completion of Mahabharata and Ramayana; con-solidation of Hinduism

c. 320–550 Gupta dynasty (North India)

c. 375–415 Reign of Chandra Gupta II

6th–11th centuries Pallava dynasty (Tamil country)6th century–1310 Pandya dynasty (Tamil country)

606–647 Reign of Harshavardhana (North India)

636 or 644 Muslim Arab attack on pirates near Mumbai

644 Arab conquest of Balochistan

711–713 Arab conquest of Sindh

743–974 Rashtrakuta dynasty (Deccan)

c. 750–1161 Pala dynasty (Bengal)

9th century–1019 Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty (North India)

xvi Timeline of Historical Events


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9th century–1310 Chola dynasty (Tamil country)

962–1186 Ghaznawid dynasty (Afghanistan)

997–1030 Reign of Mahmud the Ghaznawid; raids into India11th century–1194 Gaharwar dynasty (North India)

c. 1097–1223 Sena dynasty (Bengal)

12th century–1215/16

Ghauri dynasty (Afghanistan)

1192–1206 Ghauri conquest of North India

1210–1526 Sultanate of Delhi

1223–1224 First Mongol invasion of South Asia

1296–1324 Ala ud-Din Khalji and Ghiyas ud-Din Tughluq of Delhi subjugate most of India

1330s–1340s Sultanate of Delhi loses Bengal and south India(Vijayanagara, Bahmani sultanate)

1398 Sack of Delhi by Temü r; collapse of sultanate of

Delhi1451–1526 Reunication of North India by Lodi sultans of

Delhi

1469–1539 Lifetime of Nanak

1526–1857 Mughal dynasty

1556–1605 Reign of Akbar

1565 Defeat and collapse of Vijayanagara1600 Foundation of English East India Company

1628–1658 Reign of Shah Jahan; conquest of Ahmadnagar;construction of Taj Mahal and Shahjahanabad(Old Delhi)

1658–1707 Reign of Aurangzeb; war with Marathas; con-quest of South India

1699 Foundation of Khalsa1719–1748 Reign of Muhammad Shah; disintegration of

Mughal empire; Marathas become dominantpower in South Asia

Timeline of Historical Events xvii


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1739 Sack of Delhi by Nadir Shah

1750s Rise of Mysore

1757 Siraj ud-Daula of Bengal defeated by British EastIndia Company at Battle of Plassey

1761 Marathas defeated by Afghans at Battle of Panipat

1765 British East India Company appointed diwan of Bengal and Bihar

1798–1846 British East India Company establishes

supremacy over almost all of India1799–1839 Ranjit Singh ruler of Sikh empire

1856 First steam-powered cotton mill in India

1857 Great revolt against British rule

1858 Transfer of control from East India Company toBritish Crown

1885 Foundation of Indian National Congress1905 Partition of Bengal

1906 Foundation of All-India Muslim League

1909–1910 Morley-Minto Reforms

1912 Capital moved from Kolkata to New Delhi

1914–1918 World War I

1916 Lucknow Pact

1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms; Rowlatt Acts;Amritsar Massacre; beginning of Khilafat move-ment

1920 Mahatma Gandhi enters politics; starts nonco-operation satyagraha; becomes leader of IndianNational Congress

1922 End of noncooperation satyagraha

1927–1928 Simon Commission

1929–1931 Collapse of Indian agricultural prices

xviii Timeline of Historical Events


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1930–1932 Round Table Conferences

1930–1933 Salt Tax satyagraha

1935 Government of India Act passed1937 First elections under the 1935 Act

1939–1945 World War II

1940 Muslim League endorses creation of Muslimstates (“Pakistan”)

1942–1943 Quit India rebellion

1947 Partition and independence; Jawaharlal Nehruprime minister

1947–1948 First Indo-Pakistani war

1948–1949 Merger of kingdoms of “Indian India”

1948 Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi

1950 Constitution in effect; beginning of creation of Nehruvian economy

1952 First Lok Sabha election; Congress wins majority

1957 Second Lok Sabha election; Congress wins majority

1962 Third Lok Sabha election; Congress wins major-ity; war with China

1964 Death of Jawaharlal Nehru; Lal Bahadur Shastri becomes prime minister

1965 Second Indo-Pakistani war; beginning of GreenRevolution

1966 Death of Lal Bahadur Shastri; Indira Gandhi becomes prime minister

1967 Fourth Lok Sabha election; Congress wins majority

1969 Split of Indian National Congress

1971 Fifth Lok Sabha election; Congress (R) winsmajority; third Indo-Pakistani war

1974 Successful tests of nuclear explosives

1975–1977 The Emergency

Timeline of Historical Events xix


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1977 Sixth Lok Sabha election; Janata Party winsmajority

1980 Seventh Lok Sabha election; Congress (I) winsmajority; Indira Gandhi returns as prime minister

1983–1993 Militants’ campaign in Punjab

1984 Army attacks Golden Temple complex; assassina-tion of Indira Gandhi; Rajiv Gandhi becomesprime minister; eighth Lok Sabha election;Congress (I) wins majority

1987–1991 Indian intervention in Sri Lanka

1988-2003 Militants’ campaign in Bodoland

1989 Ninth Lok Sabha election; Congress (I) wins plu-rality, but National Front forms government; beginning of militants’ campaign in Kashmir

1990–1992 Militants’ campaign in Assam

1991 Economic crisis; assassination of Rajiv Gandhi;

tenth Lok Sabha election; Congress (I) wins plu-rality; P. V. Narasimha Rao becomes prime minis-ter; beginning of economic liberalization

1992 Destruction of Babri Masjid, followed by bloodycommunal rioting

1996 Widespread complaints of corruption in Nara-simha Rao’s government; eleventh Lok Sabhaelection; BJP wins plurality, but United Frontforms government with support from Congress(I) (with H. D. Deve Gowda and then I. K. Gujralas prime ministers)

1998 Twelfth Lok Sabha election; BJP wins pluralityand forms a government with other parties of the National Democratic Alliance; Atal BihariVajpayee becomes prime minister; Sonia Gandhi becomes president of Congress (I); successfultests of nuclear weapons

1999 Expulsion of inltrators in Kargil district of Kash-mir; thirteenth Lok Sabha election; BJP wins plu-rality and Vajpayee remains as prime minister

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2001 India pledges support to the “War on Terror”; Nar-endra Modi becomes chief minister of Gujarat

2001–2006 Terrorist attacks in New Delhi, Gandhinagar, andMumbai

2002 Bloody communal riots in Gujarat

2004 Fourteenth Lok Sabha election; Congress (I) winsplurality and forms a government with other par-ties of the United Progressive Alliance; whenSonia Gandhi proves to be unacceptable to manyIndians (on account of her foreign birth), Man-

mohan Singh becomes prime minister2005 In response to activist campaigns against “bride

burning,” Parliament passes legislation to protectwomen from domestic violence

2006 India and the United States sign an agreement onnuclear energy

2007 Rahul Gandhi becomes general secretary of

Congress (I) (his title was changed to vice-president 2013)

2008 Terrorist attacks in Mumbai; Indian economy begins to feel effects of worldwide downturn

2009 Fifteenth Lok Sabha election; Congress (I) winsplurality and Manmohan Singh remains as primeminister

2011 Public anger over corruption leads to AnnaHazare’s satyagraha in support of the creation of an effective Lokpal (anticorruption ombudsman)

2012 The rape and murder of a young woman in Delhileads to widespread demonstrations in supportof stronger laws to prevent crimes againstwomen; BJP selects Narendra Modi as its candi-date for prime minister

2014 Sixteenth Lok Sabha election; BJP wins majority;Narendra Modi becomes prime minister

Timeline of Historical Events xxi


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In 2007, Uttaranchal was renamed “Uttarakhand.” In 2011, the ofcial Englishspelling of the name of the state of Orissa was changed to “Odisha.” In 2014, thenorthwestern part of Andhra Pradesh became a separate new state under thename of “Telangana.”


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1The Settings

THE GEOGRAPHICAL SETTING

South Asia. The Indian subcontinent. India. Like many geographicalterms, these are imprecise. “South Asia” logically refers to Malaysia,the southernmost country of mainland Asia. By convention, however,Malaysia is placed in Southeast Asia, and “South Asia” is applied toan area that lies considerably to the west. In its widest sense, “SouthAsia” embraces India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka,Maldives, and Afghanistan, which form the South Asian Associationfor Regional Co-operation, or SAARC.

The term “Indian subcontinent” is sometimes used to suggest thatalthough the region is a part of the Asian continent, it is in many waysself-contained. This designation may cover the SAARC countriesother than Afghanistan, or it may exclude the two island states, SriLanka and Maldives. India is the name of the Republic of India, the

subcontinent’s largest country; historically, it also covers Pakistanand Bangladesh, which before 1947 were parts of India.This book is a history of the Republic of India, including Pakistan

and Bangladesh until they became separate states. When referring toevents that occurred before the middle of the twentieth century, the


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book applies the designations “South Asia,” “Indian subcontinent,”and “India” interchangeably to the area now occupied by all threecountries.

Geologists say that the subcontinent was once an island, and that ithas been driven into the rest of Asia by plate tectonics. As a result, it isshaped rather like a diamond, bounded on two sides by arms of theIndian Ocean (the Arabian Sea on the west and the Bay of Bengal onthe east), and on the other two by mountain ranges that were thrownup by the collision with Asia. The diamond measures roughly2,000 miles from both north to south and east to west. The Republicof India has an area of 1,222,243 square miles, which makes it theseventh largest country in world. It is in the same league as Argentinaor Kazakhstan, and considerably under half the size of Brazil orAustralia. Pakistan and Bangladesh add another 364,351 square miles.Even then, however, the subcontinent would easily t twice over intothe United States.

Nevertheless, this area is large enough to allow for great diversity interrain. South Asia is separated from its neighbors to the north by theHimalayas and their offshoots the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush,which include some of the highest mountains in the world. Lower but still impressive ranges of mountains mark much of the boundarywith Afghanistan and Iran in the west; in the east, India extendstoward the hills of Burma. Inside of these highlands come the basinsof two great rivers, the Indus and the Ganges, huge at expanses of land separated from each other by the Thar or Great Indian Desertand a range of low hills. This crescent-shaped region is often calledthe Indo-Gangetic plain. Many of the great rivers of North Indiadeposit silt in mountain valleys, on the plains, and at their mouths.As a result, much of the Indo-Gangetic plain is quite fertile. The Indusrises in Tibet. It ows through India and Pakistan, where it is joined bymany tributaries that give Punjab (“ve waters”) its name, and emp-ties into the Arabian Sea. (Since 1947, Punjab has been divided between India and Pakistan.) The Ganges and its tr ibutary theYamuna originate in Himalayan glaciers and, after running throughNorth India, ow into the Bay of Bengal through a huge delta, twothirds of which now lies in Bangladesh.

South of the Gangetic plain the land rises slowly into the Vindhya

mountains, the traditional boundary between northern and southernIndia. Then comes peninsular India or the Deccan, most of which is adry, hilly plateau. To the west, the plateau ends in a range of moun-tains called the Western Ghats, below which a narrow strip of landruns along the Arabian Sea. The rather lower Eastern Ghats separate

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the plateau from the coastal plain on the Bay of Bengal. The Narmada,immediately south of the Vindhyas, is the main west-owing river of the Deccan. Most of the peninsula’s other rivers (which include theGodavari and the Krishna) begin in the Western Ghats and run east-ward into the Bay of Bengal. The Deccan rivers are fed by rain. Thismeans that they become torrents if the rains are heavy and virtuallydry up if the rains fail. They leave little silt in inland valleys, althoughseveral of them break into large fertile deltas in the coastal plains.Finally, most of the Tamil country, the southern tip of India, is a dryplain.

India includes tropical rain forests and deserts, rocky hills and sav-annas, dry forests and farmland; in 2005, 19 percent of its land areawas forested, and 52 percent was used for agriculture. There is greatregional variation in climate. The Tamil country of the deep south ishot for 12 months of the year, the Deccan plateau similar but withsomewhat lower temperatures. The Indo-Gangetic plain has the hot-test weather in all India in June, and warm days with cool nights in January. The mountainous areas of the north see harsh, snowy win-ters, and pleasant summers.

Despite this diversity, most of the subcontinent shares a climate of three seasons. During the hot season, which typically runs from Marchto June, the temperature rises steadily, exceeding 110 ° F in the northernplains. This makes it difcult to work during the day, and people try toconne their activities to night and early morning. Then comes thesouthwest monsoon, moisture-bearing winds that blow off the IndianOcean in two branches: one heads eastward from the Arabian Sea, theother northward from the Bay of Bengal, until they merge over theGangetic plain. The monsoon reaches South India in June, Gujarat onthe west coast in early or mid-July, and Punjab in the north a week ortwo later. Its winds bring rainstorms that may last a few minutes orseveral hours each day. The rain reduces temperatures and watersthe elds. It also ruins roads and may cause ooding, though if it fails,India faces disaster. The nal season of the year is the cold weather,from November to March, when cool dry air from central Asia blowsacross the subcontinent.

Terrain and climate make India home to a great range of wildlife.The national bird is the peacock. Even in big cities, the visitor will

see monkeys and parrots, and the country is known around the worldfor elephants and snakes (including the king cobra, which can be up to12 feet long). Over half of the world’s 2,000 to 3,000 wild tigers live inIndia. Their number is steadily declining, however, thanks to poach-ing and the destruction of their habitat; and Project Tiger, a program

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established to rebuild India’s tiger population, has not met the highhopes that surrounded its creation in 1973. (This is only one symptomof the effects on wildlife of the spread of human settlement over thelast century, despite the efforts of a long-established conservationmovement.) Other fauna include cats and dogs, foxes and jackals,rhinoceroses, mongooses, deer, birds ranging from amingos topheasants, and freshwater and sea sh. Among domesticated animalsare humpbacked oxen, water buffaloes, horses, and camels, as well assheep, goats, and pigs.

THE POLITICAL SETTING

Indians pride themselves on the fact that their country is the world’slargest democracy. Almost alone in the developing world, Indiahas been a democracy since its independence from colonial rule. Theonly break occurred between 1975 and 1977, when Prime MinisterIndira Gandhi established a temporary dictatorship after declaring astate of emergency. It is unlikely that any future leader will repeatMrs. Gandhi’s experiment: over the last 40 years, democratic practiceshave become so rmly entrenched in India that no dictatorial regime

could nd the public support it would need to survive. A militarycoup is also highly unlikely, which sets India apart from most of itsneighbors. (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma have all been undermilitary rule.) Control over the Indian armed forces has alwaysremained in civilian hands. Despite the use of troops in politicalsituations—for example, against antigovernment demonstrations—the armed forces have not been politicized, in the sense that they donot take sides in politics.

Like the United States, India has a federal political system. The cen-tral government is led by the prime minister, whose equivalent in eachof the country’s 29 states is a chief minister. Elections to the lowerhouse of the federal parliament and the state legislatures are heldregularly. They are generally free and fair, although often accompa-nied by violence, and voter turnout in India is comparable to what itis in most developed countries. Parliament and state legislatures meetregularly, and use their power to decide who will or will not be primeminister or chief minister. Political leaders who lose elections or legis-

lative majorities peacefully hand over power to successors fromopposition parties. The judiciary is often called a pillar of democracy,and the Supreme Court of India has generally remained free of politi-cal interference (although in recent years it has faced some accusationsof corruption). The same is true of many of the state supreme courts,



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which are called high courts. Admittedly, the effectiveness of the judi-cial system is reduced by the fact that India has far too few judges.This has produced a backlog of 30 million cases, including over65,000 pending before the Supreme Court.

A further sign of Indian democracy is the existence of numerouspolitical parties to serve different ideological, social, or regional con-stituencies. Indians, unlike Americans, face no real difculties if theywant to start viable new parties. Nevertheless, it looks as if (for thetime being) federal politics in India have settled down to a two-partysystem, based on the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and the IndianNational Congress (Indira), or Congress (I). With smaller afliatedparties, the BJP and Congress (I) both have support across much of the country, and they may alternate in power for some time to come.The current leader of the BJP is the prime minister of India, NarendraModi; Congress (I) is headed by Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widowof the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

THE HUMAN SETTING

With 1.2 billion people, India is the second most populous countryon earth, and it is expected to supersede China in rst place by 2030.The population is young: in 2011, almost exactly half of all Indianswere under age 24. Another 25 million Indian expatriates and peopleof Indian ancestry live in other countries—businessmen and workersin the Arab states of the Middle East; the descendants of Indianplantation laborers in the former British colonies of Fiji, Mauritius,Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana; and emigrants who since the nine-teenth century have settled in the United Kingdom, the United States,Canada, and Australia. In recent years, Indians formed the fastestgrowing community in the United States. Their numbers have morethan tripled since 1990, and Americans of Indian origin now numberalmost 3 million. Today they are found in every line of work in theUnited States, from cooking fast foods to serving as the governors of Louisiana (Piyush “Bobby” Jindal) and South Carolina (Nimrata“Nikki” Randhawa Haley).

To many Westerners, India is rst and foremost a land of religion.Whether Indians really are more religious than other people isopen to debate, but their country is the home of several major faiths.Hinduism and Islam together account for 94 percent of the population,and India’s other religions include Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism,and Jainism. There are also small (and declining) numbers of Jews andZoroastrians.

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Over thousands of years, the mixture of different peoples, indige-nous and foreign, has created what can only be described as an Indianethnicity. But even though many Indians share such biological traits as blood group, they vary greatly in physical appearance. In the north-west, people are often relatively fair in color; northeasterners and theinhabitants of the Himalayan regions may resemble the Burmese andthe Tibetans; many South Indians are quite dark. Since the nineteenthcentury, this has led some Indians and foreigners to conclude thatNorth Indians have some European blood, whereas southerners areeither the aboriginal inhabitants of the country or immigrants fromAfrica. There is, however, no real evidence to support such views.

Most of the principal languages of India belong to two families,the Indo-European and the Dravidian, although three languagesof the Sino-Tibetan family have ofcial status in the northeasternpart of the country. English, Italian, Russian, and Persian are alsoIndo-European tongues, although there is not necessarily any bloodrelationship among their speakers. The Dravidian languages areunique to the Indian subcontinent. Most of them are found in thesouth, but the existence of scattered pockets in central India andwestern Pakistan suggests that they were once spoken over a muchlarger area than at present.

Hindi, an Indo-European tongue, is the most widely spokenlanguage in South Asia. It is the rst language of some 500 millionIndians, and is spoken by perhaps another 300 million alongside theirnative tongues. These gures are somewhat misleading, however, asthe name “Hindi” is used in two senses. On the one hand, it is appliedto many numerous dialects spoken across North India, some of themmutually unintelligible. On the other, it refers to a literary languagecreated in the nineteenth century from the Delhi dialect. The same dia-lect gave rise to Urdu, typically associated with Muslims, which is theofcial language of the Muslim country of Pakistan and is also spoken by 60 million Indians. Colloquial standard Hindi and Urdu are identi-cal, or nearly so. The forms of the two languages taught in schools andused in government are quite different, however, for Hindi draws newvocabulary from the ancient Sanskrit language, which also supplies itsscript, whereas Urdu uses Persian and Arabic for both new words andits alphabet.

Among the other major languages of India are Bengali (just under100 million speakers in India) and Marathi (84 million), both fromthe Indo-European family, and the Dravidian languages Telugu(86 million) and Tamil (71 million). Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam,Odia, Punjabi, and Assamese are each the mother tongue of millions



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of people. Furthermore, perhaps 350 million Indians speak English asa second language. For much of the upper middle class in large cities,English is the usual language of daily communication. RohintonMistry, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie, who were all born inIndia, rank among the most highly acclaimed novelists writing in En-glish at the beginning of the twenty-rst century. (The British authorSir V.S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in literature, is of Indian descent, but he was born in Trinidad.)

Farming is by far the largest single occupation in India, and in 2011,69 percent of the population was rural. India’s country people live invillages, which may have thousands of inhabitants and to a Westernerlook more like small towns; they are dened as villages because theirpeople—petty landowners or rich farmers, poorer peasants, laborers,craftsmen—are either agriculturalists or in some way connected withagriculture.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and gaining speed in the1950s, a large modern industrial sector has grown up in India. Thecountry now meets many of its own industrial needs, and exportssuch diverse products as fossil fuels, gemstones, trucks and cars, ironand steel, and clothes. Industrialization has contributed to urbaniza-tion, and almost a third of all Indians live in cities. These includeDelhi, of which the capital New Delhi is a part, with 11 million peoplein 2011; the ports of Greater Mumbai (12.5 million), Kolkata (4.5 million),and Chennai (8.4 million) (in English, these three cities were tradition-ally called Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras; in India and abroad, bothforms are in common use); the high technology centers of Bangalore(5.6 million) and Hyderabad (6.8 million); and the industrial city of Ahmedabad (4.7 million). The urban population includes many poorpeople from the countryside. They often live in the slums that containa fth of India’s city dwellers, and work as laborers or in services (it issaid that over 3 million people make biris, or cheap cigarettes). But Indiaalso has a huge urban middle class—businessmen, professionals, senior bureaucrats, and the like. Many of its members come from families thatformed the rural elite two or three generations ago.

When they travel long distances to see friends, go on vacation, orvisit ancestral villages, most Indians do so by train. India has40,000 miles of railroad, as well as almost 3 million miles of roads. Just

under half of this length is paved, and the roads are used heavily bytrucks, cars, motorcycles, and scooters, not to mention oxcarts andcamel carts.

Many say that the persistence of poverty represents modern India’sgreatest failure: 22 percent of the country’s population falls below the

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Indian government’s poverty line, and half of its children are mal-nourished. In rural areas, the poor are typically landless laborers, orpeasants without enough land to support themselves. Many of theurban poor are unskilled or semiskilled workers, who in so populousa country may have little hope of receiving sufcient wages to live on.

Poverty is greater for some regions and people than for others. It isworst in the states of Odisha on the east coast and Bihar and UttarPradesh in north; all three have high populations that are growingfast, and inadequate resources for development and social welfare.From the 1950s until the 1990s, the governments sometimes helpedpoor states by building factories in places of high unemployment.Now India has adopted a free market economy, however, and indus-trialists look for access to markets, skilled and literate workforces,and good infrastructure. The poor states are weak in all these areas,and are therefore falling even further behind the richer ones.

Over half the population of India belongs to three disadvantagedgroups. There are 199 million members of Scheduled Castes, whooften refer to themselves as Dalits (“oppressed”) but are commonlycalled Untouchables in the West, and who historically formed the low-est division of Hindu society. Then come 103 million Indians belong-ing to Scheduled Tribes—until recently these people, known asTribals, lived in forests and remote areas, as hunters and gatherers orshifting cultivators. Finally, depending on how they are dened, any-where between 280 million and 620 million Hindus are included inthe Other Backward Classes, which traditionally ranked immediatelyabove Untouchables.

By and large, social and economic conditions for SCs, STs, and OBCs(as they are called) lag behind those of the communities that make upthe bulk of the rural elite and urban middle class. In villages, SCs oftenlive in a segregated neighborhood, with houses of poor quality.Although the law bans discrimination against them, their childrenmay be excluded from schools, or ignored by teachers. This leavesmost SCs without the skills required to take up the places that theIndian constitution reserves for them in legislatures, governmentemployment, and universities.

Although India has a vigorous women’s movement, and it is50 years since the country’s rst female prime minister took ofce,

women form another disadvantaged group. Many Indians—eveneducated women—prefer sons to daughters, as a son will carry onthe family and care for elderly parents (whereas on marriage, a daugh-ter becomes part of someone else’s family). Technology that deter-mines the sex of a fetus has led to increasing abortion of female



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fetuses by parents determined to have a son. The poor concentrate food,health care, and whatever other resources they have on sons. They mayalso be more reluctant to send their daughters to school than their sons.This is often because they do not want them to be taught by men, andwomen teachers are scarce. This in turn becomes self-perpetuating: because they lack education, few women can become teachers; poorgirls therefore continue to stay away from school and are unable toadvance when they reach adulthood.

Deadly adult diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis are rampantamong the poor. A strain of tuberculosis that is immune to all knowndrugs has developed in India, which also has the world’s third largestnumber of people with the human immunodeciency virus. Never-theless, rich or poor, Indians are living longer than they were 60 or70 years ago. A baby born in 1947 had a life expectancy of 32 years; a

boy born in 2013 could look forward to living 67 years, and a girl64 years. The main reason is a great reduction in death rates amonginfants and children, thanks to free immunization against major child-hood diseases, and government-funded health care centers acrossthe country. For example, India once had half of the world’s cases of

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Suva Lal repairs shoes at his makeshift stand in New Delhi on July 15, 1997. SuvaLal and the other members of his cobbler caste are Dalits, formerly known as

Untouchables, belonging to the lowest division of Hindu society. (AP Photo/JohnMoore)


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poliomyelitis. In 1995, however, the government launched a campaignto vaccinate all children against the disease. It was successful, and in2014 the World Health Organization declared that polio had beeneradicated from India.

THE CULTURAL SETTING

India spends less on education than many other countries in Asiaand Africa. One out of every 10 villages has no school, and India hasthe largest illiterate population in the world. Besides their worriesabout male teachers, many rural parents do not send their childrento school because they believe that education brings no nancialreturns. Low levels of education have certainly held back the country’seconomic growth.

In 2002, the Indian Parliament passed a constitutional amendmentdeclaring primary education to be a fundamental right. It remains to be seen whether measures will be implemented to ensure that all chil-dren can avail themselves of this right, and India’s overall literacy rateof 74 percent is below the global average of 84 percent. Nevertheless,the country has made enormous progress in the eld of education. In

1961, 34 percent of Indian males were literate, and 13 percent of females. Fifty years later, in 2011, the gures had reached 82 percentfor males and 66 percent for females.

Literate or not, for millennia Indians have enjoyed poetry, drama,architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and dance; and the develop-ment of Indian culture is one of the themes of this book. Today, the artsare diffused through many media. India is one of the world’s greatestcenters of book publishing. Its daily newspapers have a circulation of tens of millions of readers, and it has 57 million personal computers(up from under 10,000 in 1989).

Television broadcasting started in India in 1959, and from the begin-ning was a government monopoly. (Radio had been taken over by thegovernment in 1930, three years after the rst broadcasts.) In the1980s, more and more Indians began to buy television sets, rst inthe middle class and then across society. In the 1990s, private televi-sion was legalized. Satellite and cable channels proliferated, and in1997 the federal government transferred control of the state-owned

radio and television to an autonomous organization. All this greatlyincreased the quantity, and many said the quality, of the programmingavailable to Indians. At latest count there were 116 million televisionsin India (one for every other household), and TV had become ascentral to popular entertainment as lm.



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The history of Indian lm goes back to the beginning of the twenti-eth century. The country has produced several great lmmakers, of whom the director Satyajit Ray (winner of an Academy Award for life-time achievement in 1992) is the most celebrated. On a more popularlevel, there is the Mumbai-based “Bollywood” Hindi lm industry,which along with lms in other Indian languages makes India the larg-est producer of movies in the world. (Bollywood is an amalgam of thecity’s traditional English name, Bombay, with Hollywood.) The countryturns out 800 motion pictures every year. Besides watching televisionand lms, the people of India play many sports. Kabaddi, a sort of tag,is popular among children. Indians may be the world’s best eldhockey players, and their men’s eld hockey team has won eightgold medals at the Olympics. If India has a national sport, however, itis cricket. All Indians seem to follow international cricket matches,and emigrants play the game wherever they go.

The short period since the beginning of the twenty-rst century hasseen phenomenal changes in India: in its population, which has grownfrom just over 1 billion to 1.2 billion; in the physical appearance of major cities, with new buildings sprouting up everywhere, and farmore people and fewer animals in sight; in the number of touristswho visit, which has almost tripled to just under 7 million a year; inactivism, with popular movements emerging in opposition to corrup-tion and violence against women.

Yet, despite all the changes, modern India remains rmly rooted inits past. In 2012, the country’s longest six-lane express highway wasinaugurated. It links the cities of Delhi and Agra, which four centuriesago were capitals of the Mughal empire. In 2013, the Indian SpaceResearch Organization launched a spacecraft that will orbit the planetMars. It is known as Mangalayana , which means “Mars vehicle” in theancient Sanskrit language that was spoken in northern India3,000 years ago. In 2014, Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Partyto victory in India’s parliamentary elections. His party’s manifestoincluded a promise to “provide appropriate resources for the mainte-nance and restoration of all national heritage sites, and to prevent theirvandalisation in any form.” 1 All this suggests that understandingIndia today requires some knowledge of its history. That history goes back many millennia.

NOTE

1. Bharatiya Janata Party election manifesto 2014, p. 41, available at bjpelectionmanifesto.com/pdf/manifesto2014.pdf.

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2The Birth of India

THE HARAPPANS

For thousands of years, the only humans in India lived in small bandsthat wandered about in quest of food. Then, around 7000 BCE, some of these hunters and gatherers learned to domesticate animals and growcrops, and settled down in permanent villages in what is now theprovince of Balochistan in western Pakistan. The herdsmen and peas-ants were gradually joined by craftsmen, including potters, weavers,and jewelers. The most important craftsmen of all were toolmakers,who after 4300 BCE began to make tools out of copper, alongside thestone that had been used since the arrival of humans in the subconti-nent. As villagers exchanged their goods with one another and withthe people who lived around them, a barter economy developed.

The inhabitants of some remote tracts (called Tribals in modernIndia) continued to live as hunters and gatherers until the twentieth

century, supplementing their diet through shifting cultivation. Villagesettlements gradually spread across South Asia, however. Sometimes,hunters and gatherers adopted agriculture or herding. Other times,people from existing village communities colonized forested or unin-habited regions. About 3200 BCE, village settlements began to appear


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in the valleys of the Indus and of another river that, like the Indus,owed through western South Asia from the Himalayas to theArabian Sea. As will be seen, this second river later disappeared.Many scholars believe that it is the great river that is mentioned inthe Rig Veda, the earliest surviving Indian literary work, where it iscalled the Sarasvati. For that reason, it will be called the Sarasvati inthis book, although an equally strong case can be made for saying thatthe Rig Veda’s Sarasvati is actually the Afghan river that is nowknown as the Helmand.

Between 2600 and 2500 BCE, craftsmen in the Indus and Sarasvativalleys began to work bronze, which is a harder metal than copper.People learned how to write, although it is unknown whether theyinvented writing on their own or acquired it from elsewhere. Andcities—large settlements where most people were neither peasantsnor herdsmen—came into being. It is not clear whether these develop-ments were connected, or why they happened. However, they markthe birth of the rst urban civilization of South Asia. We do not knowwhat the people of this civilization called themselves. Today, they areoften called the Harappans, from Harappa, the modern name of oneof their principal cities.

The Harappan urban civilization lasted from about 2500 to2000 BCE. It centered on the Indus and the Sarasvati, in the modernPakistani provinces of Sindh and Punjab, but it covered most of whatis now Pakistan and much of northwestern India. We know less aboutit than about any other great civilization of the ancient world. This ismainly because no one has been able to decipher the Harappan writ-ing. Our knowledge of the Harappans therefore depends almostentirely on archeological nds. Unfortunately, many of the theoriesthat have been based on these nds are mere guesses, and they some-times contradict each other. For example, some scholars say that theHarappans lived under a centralized government of priests who livedat the cities of Harappa in the north and Mohenjo Daro in the south;others believe that each of the half dozen major Harappan cities wasindependent and run by merchants.

However, archeology does tell us that the Harappans’ houses were built of bricks (in standard sizes) and connected to underground sew-ers that carried away waste. Though they varied in size, the houses

followed an identical oor plan. Unlike other ancient peoples, theHarappans did not construct ornate palaces or temples, although large buildings that were presumably used for governmental or religiouspurposes stood on a walled earthen mound beside each city. Nor dothey seem to have had large statues, though they did make small



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human and animal gurines and models of objects such as wagons.The gurines may provide a clue about Harappan religion, as the dis-covery of numerous female gures and phallic symbols could meanthat the Harappans worshipped fertility deities.

We also know that trade and manufacturing were central to the livesof the Harappans. They mass-produced tools and jewelry at factorytowns, each specializing in a particular line of goods. In fact, it has been suggested that the Harappan economy was based on the distri- bution of these tools and jewelry. This theory may explain how threeof the features that mark the beginnings of Harappan urbanizationare connected: the introduction of bronze made it possible to manufac-ture better tools than before; by letting them send orders and invoices,writing allowed merchants to ship goods over a wide area; and per-haps the cities were built in locations that gave access to raw materials,

because all of them were either near mines or at the end of traderoutes.

The best known Harappan relics are small square seals made of astone called steatite, which depict animals, religious scenes, andinscriptions. The seals were apparently used by merchants to identify

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A brick-lined drainage system constructed by the people of the Harappan civiliza-tion (also known as the Indus Valley civilization). The Harappan civilization aroseabout 2500 BCE in what is today northwest India and Pakistan. (Stock.xchng)


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their goods. Harappan objects, including seals, have been found in thecountries of the Persian Gulf. This shows that the Harappans tradedwith the Near East, although it is unknown how signicant thiscommerce was to their economy. Of course, not all Harappans weremerchants or craftsmen. Outside of the cities, peasants and herdsmencontinued to live much as they always had, except that they couldnow acquire the new manufactured goods.

Then, about 2000 BCE, the urban features of the Harappan civiliza-tion began to disappear. Within four centuries they were gone. Build-ings and sewers fell into disrepair; cities were abandoned; tradecollapsed; the mass production of metal tools and jewelry ended;and people apparently stopped using inscribed seals and writing.The Harappans thereafter lived in small farming communities. Therewas little contact among these settlements, and cultural practicesincreasingly diverged within what had been a unied civilization.

The Harappans must have been hit by a disaster, but scholars can-not agree on what happened. Proposed explanations include a buildup of salt in the soil, foreign invasion, and epidemics. Whateverthe nature of the crisis, it was apparently compounded by environ-mental changes in the Harappan heartland. It has been suggested thatthe land along the lower Indus became waterlogged; and something—perhaps shifts in the earth’s crust, sedimentation, or a change in thepattern of monsoon winds—diverted the headwaters of the Sarasvatito other rivers between 2500 and 1700 BCE. The once-mighty Sarasvatishrank, shifted its course, and dried up about 1300 BCE. All of thismeant that the Indus and Sarasvati regions could no longer supportlarge populations. As a result, after abandoning their cities, theHarappans also more or less deserted their heartland. Between about1700 and 1600 BCE they resettled in the east, in the modern Indianstates of Punjab and Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh.

THE ARYANS

In the wake of the collapse of urban civilization, a new culture became dominant in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent.The economic, social, and religious practices associated with this cul-ture seem to have been quite different from those of the Harappans.

Indians who followed these practices referred to themselves asAryans, or “ones to be respected.”

For a century and a half, scholars have debated the question of justwho the Aryans were. Their language, which is sometimes called Vedic(from their word for “knowledge,” which appears in the titles of the



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earliest Aryan works of literature), belongs to the Indo-European familyof languages. Unless the painstaking work of generations of historicallinguists is completely wrong, there is no room to doubt that theIndo-European languages originated on the steppes of modern Ukraine,Russia, and Kazakhstan.

On the basis of these facts, earlier historians built a theory that acohesive group of people, speaking what became the Vedic language,gradually made their way across central Asia and then, perhaps inthe second millennium BCE, invaded the Indian subcontinent. Fromthe 1920s, when archeologists excavated the sites of Harappa andMohenjo Daro, many have assumed that the Harappan urban civiliza-tion was destroyed by this Aryan invasion. Probably reecting thepreoccupations of some Europeans and Americans in the twentiethcentury, it was further postulated that the Aryans were fair skinned,and that the Harappans, whom they supposedly conquered, weredark-skinned.

In fact, there is no evidence that the Aryans and the Harappans haddifferent skin colors or that the Aryans conquered the Harappans.There is also no conclusive evidence that the people who called them-selves Aryans (as opposed to speakers of earlier forms of the Vediclanguage) ever lived anywhere except the Indian subcontinent orneighboring areas of Afghanistan, and archeology provides no indica-tion that a foreign population appeared in South Asia in the secondmillennium BCE.

There have been many attempts to explain all of these seeminglycontradictory pieces of evidence. Perhaps the most straightforwardtheory holds that the term “Aryan” referred to culture, rather than toethnicity or race: an Aryan was any Indian who, in the wake of the col-lapse of the Harappan urban civilization, adopted the Vedic languageand certain religious and social practices. One explanation of theway this came about is that, during (or even before) the days of theHarappan urban civilization, speakers of an early form of the Vediclanguage made their way to South Asia. These people may themselveshave emigrated from the steppe regions where the ancestor of theIndo-European languages was rst spoken, or they may have origi-nated elsewhere and learned their language from another groupwhich had come from the steppes.

Because we do not know what the language of the Harappans was,it is possible that some or all of them spoke Vedic during the urbanphase of their civilization. However, it is more likely that theseVedic-speakers remained on the fringes of the Harappan world untilurban civilization broke down. Then, they either settled in Harappan



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territory or made themselves rulers of some Harappan villages. Overthe next few centuries, more and more other Harappans apparentlyadopted Aryan practices and, if they did not already speak it, they alsolearned the Vedic language. This is suggested by the presence of words of non-Indo-European origin in the earliest recorded form of Vedic.

This raises another question: assuming the theory is correct, whydid Harappans refashion themselves as Aryans by adopting newpractices and (apparently) a new language? One answer is that theend of urban civilization must have been traumatic for the Harappans,whose way of doing things no longer worked, and it has been sug-gested that this explains why they seem to have taken to the cultureof the Aryans.

At any rate, whoever they may have been or where they came from,the Aryans dominated northwestern India after the end of the Harap-pan urban civilizations. Our knowledge of both the Vedic languageand Aryan culture comes from the Rig Veda, a collection of 1,028hymns, ballads, and songs that were apparently composed over manycenturies between 2000 and 1000 BCE. Three other works are groupedwith the Rig Veda to form the Samhitas, or collections: the Sama Veda,poems from the Rig Veda in a different order; the Yajur Veda, instruc-tions for priests; and the Atharva Veda, magic spells. The Samhitaswere very holy to the Aryans. Priests had to memorize them perfectly,and passed them on by word of mouth (writing apparently vanishedfrom South Asia with the end of the Harappan urban civilization).

The Rig Veda tells us that the Aryans were grouped into indepen-dent tribes. Some tribes were ruled by councils, which may have con-sisted of elders. Others were headed by a chief, who was chosen by thetribe or its elders for his prowess in war and his generosity in distrib-uting plunder. Owning cattle was the most prestigious occupationamong the Aryans, and cows formed the basis of their wealth. Withineach tribe, the Rajanyas (later called Kshatriyas), or warriors andcattle-owners, dominated the more numerous Vaishyas (peasants)and craftsmen; the latter included bronzesmiths, who made toolsand weapons, and the makers of the warriors’ chariots.

The Aryan tribes lived in villages, but frequently abandoned themto nd new pastures. They often battled with each other, mainly to

acquire cattle. They also fought people who did not follow their socialand religious practices, whom they called Dasas, Dasyus, and Panis.The Rig Veda describes the Dasas as black, which some scholars believe means they were darker in complexion than the Aryans.A few have gone further and connected this with the notion



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(mentioned above) that the Harappans were dark skinned. On this basisthey have posited that the Dasas were identical to the Harappans.Others point out that the difference between the Dasas and Aryansseems to have been cultural rather than racial, and that the Vedic wordfor “black” often merely suggests that something is bad. Captured Dasaswere incorporated into Aryan tribes under the name of Shudras andwere compelled to do menial work.

The main gods of the Aryans were male. They included Indra, godof war and weather, who led the Aryans in battle. Like an ideal Aryanchief, he was brave and fun loving. Agni was god of re, and Varunaan all-knowing father who oversaw Rita, the law that keeps order inthe universe. To ensure that the gods remained well disposed, theAryan tribes held sacrices. As tribesmen watched and prayed, theirBrahmins or priests made elaborate preparations and then slaugh-tered animals. The priests were so central to the ritual life of the tribesthat we often use the word “Brahminical” to describe the Aryanreligion.

By 1000 BCE, the eastward migration of Aryan tribes, and the adop-tion of Aryan ways by the earlier inhabitants of North India, had brought the Aryan world to the Ganges river. It then spread eastward,across the Gangetic plain; southward into Madhya Pradesh; and prob-ably northward into the upper Indus Valley and Nepal. Nevertheless,not everyone in North India became an Aryan. Especially in hills andforests, many people continued to live as hunters and gatherers or asnomads.

By about 550 BCE, the central Gangetic plain had become the centerof the Aryan world. The plain could not sustain large cattle herds, butit was agriculturally productive. Land therefore replaced cattle as the basis of wealth among the Aryans. Already, about 1000 BCE, Indiansmiths had learned to work iron. Some scholars believe that iron toolswere crucial to the Aryan movement across the Gangetic plain, argu-ing that such tools made it possible to clear the plain’s forests and tocultivate its heavy black soil.

Meanwhile, for reasons that are unclear, the Aryan tribes gaveway to oligarchies and kingdoms, which were often associated witha particular territory rather than with a mobile group of people. Inoligarchies, the dominant men elected a ruler. In kingdoms, the chief

became a king; he inherited his position and was consecrated byBrahmins in a ritual that had not existed at the time of the Rig Veda.The consecration signied that the king had the approval of the gods,which made it hard to challenge his position. During this period,Brahmins developed many new sacrices, often to reinforce the king’s



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power. Some Brahmins specialized in particular sacrices. For exam-ple, the ancestors of a former prime minister of India, Atal BihariVajpayee, were Brahmins who performed the Vajapeya, a sacrice thatrejuvenated an old king. In the sixth century BCE, the Aryan worldwas divided into 16 states. The kings of Magadha, in what is now theIndian state of Bihar, were particularly powerful thanks to their con-trol of trade on the Ganges and of iron deposits. By the fourth centuryBCE, they had conquered most of the other Aryan oligarchies andkingdoms.

THE SECOND URBANIZATION

About 550 BCE, urban civilization returned to South Asia with thereemergence of cities and the revival of long-distance trade. The rea-sons for this second urbanization are just as disputed as those for thedisappearance of the Harappan urban civilization a thousand yearsearlier. The new cities were concentrated in the central Gangetic plain.

Trade was made easier when coins were introduced in South Asiaaround 400 BCE. By this time, merchants had acquired another usefultool with the revival of writing, which was well established by the

middle of the fth century BCE. The most widely used script, Brahmi,may have been borrowed from the Near East, or it may have devel-oped in India (there are doubtful suggestions that it is derived fromthe Harappan script). Over the previous millennium, the Vedic lan-guage had changed greatly, both with the passage of time and as itwas learned by people who originally spoke other tongues. The changestook different forms in different places and eventually produced severaldistinct new languages, called Prakrits (natural).

The Vedic language remained in use in the Brahminical religion,however, and was learned by Brahmins. It was now called Sanskrit(rened). Sanskrit was apparently never written at this stage of Indianhistory, and the new scripts were used exclusively to write Prakrits.However, the Brahmins continued to compose sacred literature inSanskrit, which they passed on orally. The principal Brahmin worksof this period are the Brahmanas, textbooks explaining sacrices.

But the Brahminical religion was not static. In the Rig Veda, souls of good people spend eternity in the World of the Fathers, and souls of

bad people in the House of Clay. After 1000 BCE, the belief spread thatsouls only stay temporarily in heaven before being reborn on earth.Our deeds ( karma) in life determine the nature of the rebirth. Thosewho were good may return as fortunate humans, whereas those whowere bad will become birds or insects. When these beings die, the



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whole process is repeated. The notions of karma and reincarnationhave been central to many Indian religions ever since.

However, many people found the prospect of endless rebirth to be boring. There was a consensus that with special understanding, onemight escape the cycle. This understanding is explained in two San-skrit works, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads, completed between700 and 500 BCE. The Upanishads say that everything—space, gods,living beings—emerged from a substance called Brahman (not to beconfused with the Brahmins), which continues to exist in all of them.He who wishes to escape rebirth must meditate on this concept untilhe understands that both the universe and his own soul are Brahmanand therefore identical. He will then lose consciousness of everythingexcept Brahman and reach a new level of existence where he is free.

Some scholars have suggested that these doctrines were popular because they relieved anxiety caused by the end of Aryan tribalsociety. Another theory connects the new teachings with economicchange: newly wealthy merchants resented the wastefulness of Brahminical sacrices and sought alternative means of salvation. Inany case, the belief in rebirth and escape became so widespread thatthe Brahmins accepted the Aranyakas and the Upanishads alongsidethe Samhitas and the Brahmanas as part of their scriptures, whichare collectively called the Vedas. (The term “Vedas” is sometimes morespecically applied to the Samhitas.)

The authors of the Aranyakas and Upanishads represent a rstwave of religious speculation in the Aryan world. They were followed by a second wave between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, withteachings so different from those of the Brahmins that they developedinto separate religions entirely. The best known teacher of this secondwave was Siddhartha Gautama, called the Buddha (the EnlightenedOne), who founded Buddhism. The Buddhist scriptures contain sto-ries about the life and teachings of the Buddha, but in most cases theirauthenticity is doubtful. It is not even certain when the Buddha lived;Buddhist sources place his death around 483 BCE, but many scholarsnow believe that a date between 378 and 358 BCE is nearer the truth.

Similarly, it is unclear what the Buddha actually taught. There aresuggestions that it was quite different from what appears in theBuddhist scriptures, but the latter provide the only surviving explana-

tions of early Buddhist doctrine. They assert that the heart of Buddhism is the teaching that there are four Noble Truths: life is fullof unpleasantnesses (sometimes translated as “suffering”); theunpleasantness is caused by our thirst (or “craving”) to satisfy our-selves; we can end the unpleasantness by stopping the thirst; and we



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can stop the thirst with the Noble Eightfold Path, or a life of modera-tion. This thirst arises because we think that we are individuals.Actually, according to Buddhism, the universe and everything in itare ever-changing compounds of elements. The only stable thingis Nirvana, which is similar to the state that followers of the Upani-shads reach when they realize that everything is Brahman. Nirvanais attained by ethical conduct, such as performing good works andabstaining from killing. The Buddha’s most dedicated followersformed an order of monks and nuns, who gave all or part of their livesto preaching and to monastic devotion. By the third century BCE,India was covered with Buddhist monasteries.

Another great religious teacher was Vardhamana, called Mahavira(Great Hero), the founder of the Jain religion. The life and teachingsof Mahavira are as uncertain as those of the Buddha. According tothe Jain scriptures, Mahavira was a contemporary of the Buddha. Heis said to have taught that the universe contains an innite numberof living entities or souls. These are found in everything, includingplants and stones. For this reason, nonviolence or ahimsa is central to Jain notions of righteousness, and Jain monks must refrain fromkilling even insects.

THE MAURYAS

In 330 BCE, Alexander the Great, king of Macedon, defeated andkilled Darius III of Iran. Alexander and his army then headed eastthrough Iran to northwestern India, which had been conquered bythe Iranians almost 200 years earlier. Alexander reached what is nowIndian Punjab, but when his army threatened mutiny, he withdrew.A man named Chandragupta Maurya, helped by his Brahmin adviserwho is variously called Kautilya, Chanakya, or Vishnugupta, appa-rently took advantage of the disorder that followed the Macedonianwithdrawal to seize territory in Punjab. From this base, Chandraguptaand Kautilya moved eastward, and, about 325 or 321 BCE, defeatedthe king of Magadha. Chandragupta ascended the throne of Magadhaand founded the Mauryan dynasty. He must have ruled all, or almostall, of the Aryan world. In 305 BCE, he seems to have defeatedSeleucus Nicator, a Greek general who had made himself king of Syria

and Iran after Alexander’s death, and added parts of Afghanistan tohis dominions.

Chandragupta ruled Magadha until about 297 BCE, when his sonBindusara became king. Bindusara probably conquered territory inthe vast Deccan plateau of peninsular India (the modern states of



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Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh). He diedabout 272 BCE. The next king was his son Ashoka, one of greatestmonarchs in the history of India. Thanks to the conquests of previouskings of Magadha, Ashoka ruled a huge empire, extending fromAfghanistan to Karnataka, and from Gujarat to Kalinga on the Bay of Bengal, even if he did not (as is sometimes said) rule the whole sub-continent. Kalinga played a pivotal role in Ashoka’s life, as, eightyears after he became king, he subjugated the region in a bloody war.Ashoka claimed to have been transformed by his remorse over the lossof life in Kalinga. Whether he really was or not, he apparently becamea Buddhist and adopted a new ethical system in his administration.

Ashoka was the rst ruler in South Asia known to have set upinscriptions, texts carved in stone and publicly displayed. His inscrip-tions, which are found all over India, include a pillar at Sarnath, wherethe Buddha is said to have preached his rst sermon. The pillar’scapital bears sculpted lions, which have been adopted as a symbol of modern India. Thanks to his inscriptions, we know more aboutAshoka than any previous Indian king. The inscriptions suggest thatAshoka was a devout Buddhist. But despite what has sometimes beensaid, Ashoka’s personal Buddhist beliefs seem to have been distinctfrom the ethical policy that he adopted after the Kalinga war. He usedthe Prakrit word dhamma for this policy, which called on his people tomake kindness to other living things the guiding principle of theirlives. He led the way by providing medical care for humans and ani-mals, planting fruit trees along the sides of roads to give shade andfood, and becoming a partial vegetarian. It is likely that the policy of dhamma agreed with Ashoka’s own beliefs, but it was also politicallyuseful: the king probably hoped it would bridge the many divisions(religious, linguistic, economic, cultural) among his subjects with anideology that almost everyone could accept, all under his leadership.

Besides Ashoka’s inscriptions, we have two major sources of information about Mauryan India. One is the fragments of a book byMegasthenes, a Greek ambassador to Chandragupta’s court. The othersource is a Sanskrit book called Arthashastra , which is said to have been writ ten by Chandragupta’s adviser Kautilya. The existingversion of Arthashastra was edited 500 years after Kautilya’s time, butmany scholars believe it includes passages that really were composed

by Kautilya, along with later additions. Kautilya supposedly wrote Arthashastra to show Chandragupta how to rule Magadha. The bookcontains information on Mauryan government, although it is unclearhow much of it is what Kautilya (or later authors) wanted and howfar it reects the way things actually were. In any case, Arthashastra



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describes a centralized administration, under the personal control of the king. It recommends that the king have secret agents all over thecountry, both to detect dissent and to keep in touch with the people.Whether this was actually done or not, we know that Ashoka ruledthrough a large body of paid bureaucrats.

The majority of the population of Mauryan India was rural. As theydo today, peasants lived in villages near their elds. Their main foodcrops were wheat and barley in the north, rice in the Gangetic plain,and millet in dryer areas (such as the Deccan). From before the timeof the Mauryas, the principal tax in India was the land revenue, whichwas collected at a rate of between one sixth and one third the value of the crop.

By the time of Chandragupta, cities denitely existed in theold Aryan world of North India, and probably also in the Deccan.Elsewhere, the Mauryas may have established new cities, for by theend of the dynasty, urban settlements existed in all parts of Indiaexcept the extreme south. Nevertheless, outside of the Gangetic plain,Mauryan cities fall into distinct clusters. These were apparently sepa-rated from one another by regions inhabited by Tribals, where theMauryas may have only controlled the roads linking the urbanizedareas.

Cities were centers for administration, manufacturing, and com-merce. Mauryan India had an extensive trade with the Mediterraneanworld. Its signicance is shown by the fact that Indians called all for-eign merchants Yavanas, meaning Greeks. Merchants had used writingfor several centuries before the accession of Ashoka, and it was nowemployed by the government as well. The language of administrationwas Magadhi, the Prakrit spoken in Magadha. There is little evidencethat Sanskrit was written before Mauryan times, but Arthashastra is inSanskrit, and it is difcult to believe that it was handed down orally.This suggests that Brahmins like Kautilya now wrote in Sanskrit, mostlikely in the Brahmi script that was already used for Prakrits.

The greatest Mauryan city was the capital, Pataliputra, in themodern state of Bihar. In Pataliputra, archeologists have found a pil-lared hall, apparently built by Chandragupta, which is the oldestknown stone building in India. In keeping with his Buddhist leanings,Ashoka built at Buddhist holy places. The Mauryan period seems to

mark the beginning of Buddhist construction in permanent materials.Ashoka died about 235 BCE. The Mauryan empire began to disinte-

grate almost immediately, showing that dhamma was insufcientto hold together so vast a territory. The decline has been attributed toeconomic decay, poor communications, problems in managing the



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bureaucracy, or war. About 185 BCE, the last Mauryan king of Magadha was overthrown, but the Mauryas had played a key role inthe development of South Asia. By bringing Gangetic civilization tomore of India than ever before, they created lasting cultural and eco-nomic ties over much of the country, particularly among the urbanareas. India was politically divided after the death of Ashoka, butcities and the Gangetic civilization (which from this point onwardcan be called Classical Indian civilization) continued to spread, andtrade grew steadily.

INDIA AFTER THE MAURYAS

After the Mauryas, the social and economic center of India shiftedfrom the Gangetic plain to the northwest and the south. The northwestwas repeatedly conquered by foreigners who adopted Indian cultureand religious beliefs—Greeks from Afghanistan, Parthians from Iran,and Shakas and Kushanas from Central Asia. The greatest Kushanaking, Kanishka, ruled much of Central Asia, and northern India atleast to the eastern frontiers of Uttar Pradesh, if not beyond. Thewealth of the Kushanas was based on trade. By this time, there was a

ourishing commerce between India and China, mainly in luxurygoods. Thanks to their control of Central Asia, the Kushanas were ableto tax traders on the Silk Road, the overland trade route from China tothe Roman Empire, which was then at the peak of its importance.Kanishka was a patron of Buddhism, which about this time spreadalong the trade routes from India into Central Asia.

North Indian sculptors and architects played a major part in thedevelopment of Indian artistic traditions. Their work was almostalways religious in nature—Buddhist, Jain, or Brahminical. The sculp-tures and buildings of the Gandhara school in the northwest showedthe inuence of the Greeks and the Romans and molded later Bud-dhist art. At the end of the rst century BCE, sculptors at Mathura inthe upper Gangetic plain borrowed Greco-Roman and other elementsfrom the northwest and apparently produced the rst statues of theBuddha (until then, depicting him had been regarded as sacrilege).The Mathura school developed into Classical North Indian sculptureand then into Hindu sculpture.

Gangetic civilization spread in the Deccan during and particularlyafter the Mauryan period. The process was encouraged by local kings,who sought power and legitimation by associating themselves withthe prestigious culture of the north. To this day, the Deccan marksthe southern limit of languages derived from Sanskrit: The inhabitants



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of Maharashtra adopted Prakrit languages (which became modernMarathi), whereas those of neighboring Andhra Pradesh, Telangana,and Karnataka did not. Although culturally part of the Gangetic world,they retained their own languages, which belong to the Dravidian family.

The greatest post-Mauryan dynasty of the Deccan was that of theSatavahanas or Andhras, from the rst century BCE to the mid-thirdcentury CE or later. The Satavahanas were apparently of Tribal origin, but they adopted Gangetic culture. They fostered the Brahminical reli-gion and the Prakrit and Sanskrit languages. After the Satavahanas,the Deccan was divided into smaller kingdoms. These were centersof rock-cut architecture, sacred buildings carved into the living rock.The best known of these creations are the Buddhist and Jain remainsat Ajanta and Ellora in

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