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CONTENTS
Introduction
G. N. Devy

PART I: THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANS AND THEIR LIFE

CONDITIONS
1. The Early Indian Population and Population Admixture
Partha Pratim Majumder
2. The Oxygen Isotope Stages: Human Adaptations during the Last 200,000
Years
Ravi Korisettar
3. The Migrations that Shaped Indian Demography
Tony Joseph
4. Rock Shelters and Caves: Prehistoric Settlements
Ravi Korisettar
5. Microliths before the Holocene
Bishnupriya Basak
6. Post-glacial Climate Change and its Impact on Life: 18000 YBP to
Present
Gwen Robbins Schug
7. Weather Patterns
Sridhar Vajapey
8. Holocene Climate from the Perspective of South Asia
Dorian Q. Fuller
9. Anthropological Man
Subhash Walimbe

PART II: FOUNDATIONS, EMERGENCE, AND THE DECLINE OF

CIVILIZATION
10. Primeval Hunter–Gatherer Societies of India
K. Paddayya
11. Domestication of Animals in India
 Arati Deshpande-Mukherjee
12. The Nomadic Pastoralists in Prehistory and Protohistory
Ajay Dandekar
13. Domestication of Plants: Origins and Development of Agriculture
Satish Naik
14. Prehistoric Agriculture
Ravi Korisettar
15. The Ideology of the Indus Civilization
Akinori Uesugi
16. Rise of Urban Habitats
Jennifer Bates
17. Decline and Transformation of Urban Habitats
Jennifer Bates
18. Social Formation: Archaeological Scholarship of the Indus Civilization
Sudeshna Guha
19. The Pre-Vedic and the Vedic Sarasvati
Rajesh Kochhar
20. Varna and Jati: Consolidation of Social Hierarchy
G. N. Devy

PART III: THE LANGUAGE MIX AND PHILOSOPHIES IN ANCIENT

INDIA
21. Sanskrit, its History, and its Indo-European Background
Hans Henrich Hock
22. Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Ancient Dialects
Madhav Deshpande
23. Contact with Indo-European/Indo-Iranian Languages
Meera Visvanathan
24. Vedic Tradition
Shrikant Bahulkar
25. Vedic Divinities
Mugdha Gadgil
26. Scientific Achievements of Traditional India
 Hans Henrich Hock
27. Buddhism
Pradip Gokhale
28. Buddhism in Early India
Naina Dayal
29. Non-Pali Buddhist Literature
Lata Deokar
30. The Emergence and Spread of Jainism
Paul Dundas
31. Philosophy through Controversies and Commentaries
Pradip Gokhale
32. Early Inscriptions
Andrew Ollett
33. Pali Language and Literature
Mahesh A. Deokar
34. Prakrit Literature
Andrew Ollett
35. The Brahmi Script and Indian Languages
Thomas Trautmann
36. Ideas and Metaphysical Foundations of ‘Dravidian’
Stalin Rajangam
37. Dravidian Language Family
K. Rangan
38. Language Families of India Other than Indo-Aryan
Anvita Abbi

PART IV: CULTURES, SUB-NATIONALITIES, AND REGION

39. Medieval Tamil India: Pre-Vijayanagara Phase
T. K. Venkatasubramanian
40. Early Kannada Literature
Andrew Ollett and Sarah Pierce Taylor
41. Medieval Karnataka
Manu V. Devadevan
42. Lingayatism
Shivanand Kanavi
43. Early History of Kerala in Social Perspective
Rajan Gurukkal
44. Early and Medieval Kerala
Kesavan Veluthat
45. Early Telugu Literature
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
46. Telangana: An Overview of the Medieval Period
Salma Ahmed Farooqui
47. Cultural Heterogeneity Telangana
Bhukhya Bhangya
48. The Modern South
Rajmohan Gandhi
49. The Kerala of Narayana Guru: A Historical Perspective of Ideas and
Society
George Thadathil
50. Christianity in India before the Protestant Evangelicals
Ines G. Županov
51. Goa
Rochelle Pinto
52. Cultural Confluence in Pre-modern Deccan
Shraddha Kumbhojkar
53. Maharashtra before Shivaji
Rahul Magar
54. Tribal History of Middle India
Shyamrao Koreti
55. Progressive Thought in Maharashtra
Devkumar Ahire
56. Ancient and Medieval Gujarat
Aparna Kapadia
57. Nomadic Communities in Western India
Tanuja Kothial
58. Rajasthan
Rima Hooja
59. Sindh
Manan Ahmed
60. The Northeast: Prehistoric and Ancient Past
Manjil Hazarika
61. Assam: The Long View
Arupjyoti Saikia
62. Sikkim
Anira Phipon Lepcha
63. Multilingual Pre-modern Bengal
Thibaut d’Hubert
64. Late Medieval and Early Modern Bengal
Ujjayan Bhattacharya
65. Odisha in Pre-modern Times
Pritish Acharya
66. The Bhakti Movement: Pre-colonial Social Transition
G. N. Devy
67. The Emergence and Spread of Sufi Thought in Medieval India
Richard M. Eaton
68. India’s Ties with the Arab World and Iran
Abhay Kumar
69. Islam in South Asia
Reyaz Ahmad
70. Punjab
Rajkumar Hans
71. The Western Himalayan Region
Chetan Singh
72. Northern India: Medieval and Colonial
Hitendra K. Patel
73. Medieval Uttar Pradesh
Mayank Kumar
74. Delhi: The Last Millennium
 Sunny Kumar
75. The Idea of Delhi
Narayani Gupta

PART V: COLONIALISM
76. The Impact of Colonial Rule on the Indian Economy
Sunny Kumar
77. The Asiatic Society and its Impact on Indian History
Thomas Trautmann
78. Interaction with Colonial Ideas
Pradip Datta
79. Print Technology and Modernity
Urvashi Butalia
80. Perceptions of Colonialism (1800–1950)
Mohinder Singh
81. Colonial Forest Laws and the Forest-dwellers
Dhirendra Datt Dangwal

PART VI: TOWARDS FEDERALISM—SOCIAL AND POLITICAL

MOVEMENTS
82. Adivasi Movements in Santal and Munda Regions
Vasundhara Jairath
83. Caste and Reforms: Modern Period
Rinku Lamba
84. B. R. Ambedkar and the Making of Modern India
Rahul Kosambi
85. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Tridip Suhrud
86. Ambedkar and Gandhi: Visions for Modern India
Nishikant Kolge
87. Emergence of the Idea of Freedom (1900–1947)
Mohinder Singh
88. The Freedom Struggle: The Early Phase
Vinay Lal
89. The Freedom Struggle: The Final Phase
Vinay Lal
90. India’s Struggle for Independence: The Last Phase
Sucheta Mahajan

PART VII: INDIA SINCE INDEPENDENCE

91. The Rise of Identity Politics
Amir Ali
92. The 1947 Partition of India
Rajmohan Gandhi
93. The Partition of India
Sugata Bose
94. Linguistic State Formation (1900–2000)
Asha Sarangi
95. The Working of the Constitution
Nivedita Menon
96. Nehruvian India
Vinay Lal
97. India and the Making of Bangladesh
Srinath Raghavan
98. Urbanism in India
Narayani Gupta
99. Identity Politics since Independence
Aditya Nigam
100. People’s Movements since Independence
Krishna Menon
101. India since Liberalization
Kumar Ketkar

Afterword
Vinay Lal
Contributors
Notes and References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
 LIST OF MAPS

Purana Basins
Ancient India
Mughal Empire
British India
Rivers of Afghanistan
Present-day Ghaggar River System
South Asian Language Families
Purana Basins: The seven Purana and interconnecting Gondwana basins, which provided perennial
resources both for hunter-gatherers and early agricultural societies, were natural habitats across the
Indian subcontinent during the Pleistocene and Early Holocene times. The vast majority of natural
rock shelters and caves are found across these basins. Contemporary tribal habitats are coterminous
with these basins. Some of the well investigated prehistoric sites include: Attirampakkam in the
Upper Gondwana region on the southeast coast, Isampur in Bhima Purana Basin, Bhimbetka and
Dhaba in the Vindhya Basin, Billa Surgam, Jwalapuram, and Hanumathunipadu in the Cuddappah
Basin. These basins represent the core areas of Pleistocene human occupation of the Indian
subcontinent. The sites outside these basins fall under the range expansion of populations from these
basins.

Not to scale: This map has been prepared in adherence to the ‘Guidelines for acquiring and producing
Geospatial Data and Geospatial Data Services including Maps’ published vide DST
F.No.SM/25/02/2020 (Part-I) dated 15th February, 2021
Ancient India

Not to scale: This map has been prepared in adherence to the ‘Guidelines for acquiring and producing
Geospatial Data and Geospatial Data Services including Maps’ published vide DST
F.No.SM/25/02/2020 (Part-I) dated 15th February, 2021
The Mughal Empire

Not to scale: This map has been prepared in adherence to the ‘Guidelines for acquiring and producing
Geospatial Data and Geospatial Data Services including Maps’ published vide DST
F.No.SM/25/02/2020 (Part-I) dated 15th February, 2021
British India

Not to scale: This map has been prepared in adherence to the ‘Guidelines for acquiring and producing
Geospatial Data and Geospatial Data Services including Maps’ published vide DST
F.No.SM/25/02/2020 (Part-I) dated 15th February, 2021
INTRODUCTION
G. N. Devy

It is difficult to decide if Time at all exists and it is not but an imagined

absolute. Leaving aside the metaphysical uncertainty, it is necessary to
accept that human affairs carry upon them a deep imprint of the unceasing
interplay between the past and the present of individuals as well as all forms
of their collectives, whether families, societies, or nations. Depending on
the material, cultural, and ideological expediencies of a given present,
societies and nations conceptualize, constitute, inhabit, and represent their
past, rather their several and ceaselessly shifting pasts. Being forever in the
process of getting restructured, no single version of the past can admit the
test of absolute authenticity. Notwithstanding these known uncertainties, the
established conventions of scientific discourse of history expects the
conversations about a society’s past to keep a safe distance from fantasy,
hallucination, and wishful nostalgia.
The many-ended openness of history as a field of enquiry allows
majoritarian politics and autocratic regimes to replace the narrative of
history by irrational and untenable claims. They tend to raise the pitch of
hatred for perceived injustice at the hands of ancestors of the people against
whom the sentiment of revenge is sought to be invoked. In order to bolster
up the self-esteem of the dominant sections of society, such regimes
concoct illusions of a glorious past era as ‘the essential’ of the people they
intend to control and lead, no matter how farther from truth such claims
drive narratives of the past cautiously constructed by professional scientists,
archaeologists, and historians, and no matter how they marginalize real
achievements of the past. Present-day India is a living example of this
pattern of re-imagining history, wilfully brought to depart from its
established and academically rigorous narratives.
The genesis of this book lies in the contestation unfolding before us in
recent years between the scientific view of history and the ideologically
charged attempts to distort the history of South Asia. A press release from
the Press Information Bureau (PIB) on 14 September 2020 stated that an
expert committee had been constituted by the Government of India for
conducting a holistic study of the origin and evolution of Indian culture by
the culture minister. It had been set up for ‘conducting holistic study of
origin and evolution of Indian culture to since 12,000 years before present
and its interface with other cultures of the world.’* This committee was not
the first one. A similar committee was constituted in 2017, comprising
almost the same members. Neither of the committees had any women in it,
experts from the Northeast, or representatives from the Scheduled Castes or
Scheduled Tribes. There were no representatives, none at all, from any
religion other than Hinduism. The composition clearly indicates that the
history proposed to be constructed is likely to display a male-dominated,
North Indian, upper caste Hindutva ideological bias. To that extent, it can
fall short of reflecting the past of India in its fullness.
A Reuters report on 6 March 2018 attempted to lay bare the intentions
of the 2017 committee. Parts of the report are reproduced here:
During the first week of January last year, a group of Indian scholars gathered in a white
bungalow on a leafy boulevard in central New Delhi. The focus of their discussion: how to
rewrite the history of the nation.
The government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi had quietly
appointed the committee of scholars about six months earlier. Details of its existence are
reported here for the first time.
Minutes of the meeting, reviewed by Reuters, and interviews with committee members
set out its aims: to use evidence such as archaeological finds and DNA to prove that
today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants many thousands of
years ago, and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth.
Interviews with members of the 14-person committee and ministers in Modi’s
government suggest the ambitions of Hindu nationalists extend beyond holding political
power in this nation of 1.3 billion people—a kaleidoscope of religions. They want
ultimately to shape the national identity to match their religious views, that India is a
nation of and for Hindus.

The report further states:

Referring to the emblematic colour of the Hindu nationalist movement, RSS spokesman
Manmohan Vaidya told Reuters that ‘the true colour of Indian history is saffron and to
bring about cultural changes we have to rewrite history.’
Balmukund Pandey, the head of the historical research wing of the RSS, said he meets
regularly with Culture Minister Sharma. ‘The time is now,’ Pandey said, to restore India’s
past glory by establishing that ancient Hindu texts are fact not myth.
Sharma told Reuters he expects the conclusions of the committee to find their way into
school textbooks and academic research. The panel is referred to in government documents
 as the committee for ‘holistic study of origin and evolution of Indian culture since 12,000
years before present and its interface with other cultures of the world.’
Sharma said this ‘Hindu first’ version of Indian history will be added to a school
curriculum which has long taught that people from central Asia arrived in India much more
recently, some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, and transformed the population…
…. Nine of 12 history committee members interviewed by Reuters said they have been
tasked with matching archaeological and other evidence with ancient Indian scriptures, or
establishing that Indian civilization is much older than is widely known. The others
confirmed their membership but declined to discuss the group’s activities. The committee
includes a geologist, archaeologists, scholars of the ancient Sanskrit language and two
bureaucrats.*

The two branches of science on the basis of which the Rashtriya

Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the Bharatiya Janata
Party, is trying to recast the Indian past are Genetics—despite the fact that
population genetics papers have provided no support to its understanding of
Indian history in many years—and Archaeology. The RSS has made itself
an expert in circulating random selections of outdated, misinterpreted, and
adventurous findings drawn from these two disciplines as support for its
already made conclusions. Such materials are being circulated through
social media to the gullible social media users.
In September 2019, David Reich, an eminent geneticist and professor at
Harvard Medical School, and a collaborating group of scientists from some
of the most respected universities around the world came together to
produce a definitive report on prehistoric population of South Asia. Their
paper was published in Science and posted on the portals of various
participating universities. The joint work of all these experts goes to show
that the emergence of the Sanskrit language does not predate the Indus
Civilization. The RSS’s claim that the Harappan people and the Vedic
people have continuity is misplaced since the speakers of the Indo–Aryan
language are shown by the David Reich study as having arrived from the
Eurasian steppes centuries after the Indus Civilization declined. The RSS
view of prehistoric Indian people, in contrast, is that they have been a
continuous population with Sanskrit being the language used by them since
the pre-Indus Civilization era. During the eighteenth century, there was an
active debate about the ancient homeland of ‘Aryans’ in various remote
parts of Europe. That debate has by now been put to rest. However, in tune
with that debate, the RSS historiography likes to imagine that Aryans
originally belonged to the Sindhu–Saraswati region and spread out to
various parts of the world known to them, in turn, spreading their language
and culture, and became the vishwaguru. That position is as extremely
untenable as possibly a wild and wishful hypothesis can be. That hypothesis
has no support either in archaeology or in genetics.
The summary of Reich’s important paper clearly states the exact
contrary.
The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia

Introduction and Rationale: To elucidate the extent to which the major cultural
transformations of farming, pastoralism and shifts in the distribution of languages in
Eurasia were accompanied by movement of people, we report genome-wide ancient DNA
data from 523 individuals spanning the last 8000 years mostly from Central Asia and
northernmost South Asia.
Results: Movements of people following the advent of farming resulted in genetic
gradients across Eurasia that can be modelled as mixtures of seven deeply divergent
populations. A key gradient formed in south-western Asia beginning in the Neolithic and
continuing into the Bronze Age, with more Anatolian farmer-related ancestry in the west
and more Iranian farmer-related ancestry in the east. This cline extended to the desert oases
of Central Asia and was the primary source of ancestry in peoples of the Bronze Age
Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). This supports the idea that the
archaeologically documented dispersal of domesticates was accompanied by the spread of
people from multiple centres of domestication.
The main population of the BMAC carried no ancestry from Steppe pastoralists and did
not contribute substantially to later South Asians. However, Steppe pastoralist ancestry
appeared in outlier individuals at BMAC sites by the turn of the second millennium BCE
around the same time as it appeared on the southern Steppe. Using data from ancient
individuals from the Swat Valley of northernmost South Asia, we show that Steppe
ancestry then integrated further south in the first half of the second millennium BCE,
contributing up to 30% of the ancestry of modern groups in South Asia. The Steppe
ancestry in South Asia has the same profile as that in Bronze Age Eastern Europe, tracking
a movement of people that affected both regions and that likely spread the unique shared
features shared between Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages.
The primary ancestral population of modern South Asians is a mixture of people related
to early Holocene populations of Iran and South Asia that we detect in outlier individuals
from two sites in cultural contact with the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), making it
plausible that it was characteristic of the IVC. After the IVC’s decline, this population
mixed with north-western groups with Steppe ancestry to form the “Ancestral North
Indians” (ANI) and with south-eastern groups to form the “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI)
whose direct descendants live today in tribal groups in southern India. Mixtures of these
two post-IVC groups—the ANI and ASI—drive the main gradient of genetic variation in
South Asia today.
Conclusion: Earlier work recorded massive population movement from the Steppe into
Europe early in the third millennium BCE, likely spreading Indo-European languages. We
reveal a parallel series of events leading to the spread of Steppe ancestry to South Asia,
thereby documenting movements of people that were likely conduits for the spread of
Indo-European languages.
When Tony Joseph, Ravi Korisettar, and I had been working towards
compiling this book, a rather disturbing news about the use of genetics
appeared in an English language newspaper. In June 2022, a report in the
New Indian Express stated that the ministry of culture had funded the
Anthropological Survey of India to carry out genomic verification of ‘pure’
communities. The proposal, which brought back to memory the horrifying
Nazi obsession with eugenics and racial purity, was so shocking that the
community of scientists immediately reacted in anguish. Within days they
wrote an open letter to the ministry. There were more than a hundred
signatories to it. They included eminent professors from the country’s
leading scientific and technology institutes. Their letter to the secretary at
the culture ministry is self-explanatory:
(10 January 2022) Reports appeared recently in the media to the effect that the Ministry of
Culture, Government of India, is funding a project to study genetic similarities and
differences in the DNA (genetic) profiles of Indian population groups… The Ministry of
Culture has tweeted that the reports are “misleading, mischievous and contrary to facts”
and that the proposal is in no way related to establishing genetic history and trace the
purity of races in India…While welcoming these responses, we think that all concerned
should issue public disavowals of any present or future project related to race, especially
one for studying racial purity. We say so because the notion of tracing the “purity of races”,
whether in India or elsewhere, is extremely worrisome. A plan to do so would be both
absurd and dangerous.
It is absurd because the concept of biological races was discarded long ago. The term
“race” was invented as part of the effort to classify humans into distinct groups based on
physical features such as bone structure and skin colour, and social characteristics such as
faith and religion. It was assumed that the groups were somehow “natural”, or that they had
a meaningful biological basis. However, in terms of the genes that make up individual
biological inheritance, all human beings, irrespective of where they come from, share the
same “gene pool”. As an epochal paper of 50 years ago pointed out, most gene-based
distinctions occur within so-called races, not between races… Subsequent studies have
only reinforced the strength of that conclusion…It is dangerous because the notion of
“purity,” in addition to being meaningless, carries with it the sense of some groups being
less pure or more pure than others. Human history is replete with examples of horrible
injustice—denial of benefits or even persecution—meted out to “less pure” groups by
“more pure” groups… Racial stereotyping of humans has been discarded, and there should
be no attempt to revive the concept in India.

The ministry, on its part, maintained that it was fake news. But on further
investigation, it turned out that the Anthropological Survey of India was
indeed engaged in carrying out testing on some of the tribal communities,
particularly the ones that were earlier called the ‘Most Primitive’, indicating
their long ancestry in India.
 Given this context, I felt that it would be necessary to establish a
collective of scholars and present a comprehensive narrative of India’s past,
spanning the earliest prehistory, protohistory, and history of India. I had
written to Professor Rajmohan Gandhi and Professor Vinay Lal, both of
whom teach history in the United States, if it would be possible to bring
various scholars together on a non-institutional platform for a report on
India’s past. That was in October 2020. Based on their assessment, I started
contacting various institutions of Indology and archaeology as well as
eminent authors of various books on all aspects of India’s past. The field is
vast, to say the least, the challenges involved are many. I persisted,
however, in the hope that an appeal to restore reason may find adequate
response among the academic community. I am glad it did. Out of nearly
one hundred thirty scholars contacted for contributions to the present book,
ninety agreed to contribute. Most others expressed their wish to contribute
but could not have done so in view of the limited time available. In order to
seek expert advice on the topics to be included and the very best scholars
from all continents to be invited to contribute, we formed a small advisory
group comprising Professor Rajmohan Gandhi, Professor Vinay Lal, Dr
Rajesh Kochar, Professor Hans Henrich Hock, Professor Ravi Korisettar,
Mr Tony Joseph, Professor Sudeshna Guha, Professor Mahesh Deokar, and
Professor Andrew Ollett. All of them participated in the complicated task of
giving the present work a fullness which it would not have acquired had it
been the work of any single individual’s limited talent. Professor Rajesh
Kochar’s untimely death was sad loss for all of us involved in the work. His
pioneering research on the origin of the Vedic phase of Indian history,
particularly the geographical location and the dating of the Saraswati River
has been a landmark contribution to the scientific view on India’s past. I
deeply regret losing him when India most needed his continued
participation in building the narrative of India’s past. Two of the scholars in
the group of advisers, Tony Joseph and Ravi Korisettar, agreed to share
with me the responsibility of editing this work. Tony Joseph is known all
over the world for his celebrated work Early Indians: The Story of Our
Ancestors and Where We Come From (2018) and is also an acute analyst of
contemporary India. Ravi Korisettar, author of Beyond Stones and More
Stones: Defining Prehistoric Archaeology (2017) is known as one the finest
archaeologists of our time. Their participation as co-editors in this joint
mission has lent to this book the required breadth and perspicuity.
 2

The word ‘civilization’ is not used to refer to the people of our past, or
alternately, the present of a great people but, astonishingly, for the breath-
catching amazement experienced by a generation of relatively recent
observers when they suddenly come across not too different people in the
past—people who set up large cities, developed architecture, arts,
amenities, trade, economy, and beyond. A mood of amazement gripped the
European scholars of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century when they
chanced upon some long forgotten prehistoric sites, structures, scripts, and
texts. Many of the modern attitudes to the past remain dominated by the
colonial discoveries of ‘civilizations’. India’s distant past was no exception.
The Asiatic Society was founded on 15 January 1784 to study every
aspect of the history, religion, languages, culture, society, flora, and fauna
of what was known at that time as the Orient. Later similar institutions
inspired by it were founded in London, such as the Royal Asiatic Society,
and in India, the Asiatic Society of Bombay, and outside India in West Asia.
Scholars engaged in the work proposed by the Asiatic Society produced a
body of studies and translations that became the foundational texts for
nineteenth-century interpretations of Asiatic civilizations. Inspired by it,
several colonial scholars took interest in archaeology and history and
brought to light various archaeological and cultural deposits paving the way
for the modern world to explore the ancient civilizations of Asia. Though
immensely useful to us even today, the vast intellectual enterprise of those
scholars is now described pejoratively as ‘Orientalism’, an intellectual quest
that was guided by the colonial interests of European countries.
Scholars from Asian countries turned to these areas of inquiry during
the nineteenth century and advanced the work of the Orientalists by
bringing their knowledge of local languages to aid. From the second half of
the nineteenth century some illustrious institutions of Indology or Oriental
studies were set up in India and neighbouring countries. In India, the
Baroda Institute for Oriental Studies, Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, Deccan
College in Pune, and L. D. Institute of Indology in Ahmedabad contributed
to furthering knowledge about ancient texts.
Dharmanand Kosambi (1876–1947) revived the study of Pali and as a
result institutes for the study of Pali and Prakrit were set up in West Bengal,
Rajasthan, and Karnataka. Departments of Pali, Prakrit, and Ardhamagadhi
were considered essential parts of the university framework until the
Second National Science Policy which prioritized engineering as the main
focus of education.
Dravidian studies emerged with the Dravidian Language Family
hypothesis proposed in 1816 by F. W. Ellis (1777–1819). Other illustrious
European scholars who contributed to this branch of Asian Studies include
Robert Caldwell (1814–91), Ferdinand Kittel (1832–1903) during the
nineteenth century and Thomas Burrow (1909–1986), M. B. Emaneau
(1904–2005), and Kamil Zvelebil (1927–2009) during the twentieth
century. There is a long line of Indian scholars who stepped in and further
developed the field. Some of them are T. R. Sesha Iyengar (1887–1939), P.
T. Srinivas Iyengar (1863–1931) born in the nineteenth century. The
advances in print technology helped in dissemination of their work. Suniti
Kumar Chatterjee (1890–1977), Iravati Karve (1905–1970), H. D. Sankalia
(1908–1989), Harivallabh Bhayani (1917–2000), Bh. Krishnamoorthy
(1928–2012), and Iravatham Mahadevan (1930–2018) were the most
illustrious among those who did their work in the second half of the
twentieth century. The last mentioned, Mahadevan (d. 2018) established the
links between the Dravidian–Brahmi and Harappan scripts.
The situation of this vast field of study has changed since Independence.
Though the Archaeological Survey of India (established in 1861) initially
had a much larger geographical spread under its purview, it is now focused
more on conservation of sites. Even this has proven beyond its capacities
and resources. Throughout the twentieth century, national boundaries of
most of the Asian countries have changed, new nations that did not exist
previously have come into being, and the pan-Asian civilization narrative
has remained unattended, except by some universities in Europe and North
America. Because of the new national boundaries that emerged throughout
the twentieth century and also the linguistic boundaries that emerged within
India, the narrative of Indian past, its people and their culture has become
segmental and unmindful of the larger and complete narratives. The
narrative of the past and the present of none of the Asian countries can be
complete if constructed in isolation from the comprehensive picture. In the
case of India, a knowledge of India cannot be complete unless it is seen in
the context of India’s historical links with countries from Syria, Turkey,
Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan in the west, with China, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan, and Mongolia in the north and with Indonesia, Thailand, and
Japan to the east—in short with the entire stretch of Asia.
In the last few decades, genetics has contributed much to establishing
the routes of prehistoric humans from Africa to Asia and beyond.
Archaeology today has advanced to non-invasive methods to investigate
geological ocean-bed traces of human activities. Moreover, information
technology has made it possible to make all of the studies and reports
produced available to scholars anywhere in the world.
It has not been the aim of this book to establish the origins of things.
The somewhat simplistic and childish question ‘exactly when was the
first…?’ has long ceased to be at the heart of the enquiries related to the
past. The aim is to bring together as many accounts of numerous beginnings
as possible in a spread-out gestalt that the pasts of Indian regions, sub-
nationalities, and communities forms. One hopes that the collection of short
texts by so many eminent scholars presented here covers discontinuities as
well as continuities in India’s long past spread over 12,000 to 18,000 years.
The exchanges, encounters, and mutual influence between the prehistoric
civilizations in West Asia and India, the mutual transformative impact of
India and the world known to India during the historic years, and the
intimate give and take between modern world and India, form a vast range
of fascinating stories. Add to these, the population shifts within India,
cultural interactions among the countless communities, and the hundreds of
languages of India. Therefore, what is offered is an overview of some or
many of these. The texts are designed to provide, to the extent it is possible
at all, a lucidly presented picture of population movements, emergence of
social and political organizations, development of philosophies, diversity of
languages, major social movements, impact of colonialism on ideas and
culture, the freedom struggle, and the independent India till 2000 CE.
Yet, this is not a book of ‘history made easy’ written by ironing over all
complexities. The temporal span these texts cover is very large, beginning
with the arrival of the Homo sapiens and ending with the onset of the third
millennium in the year 2000 CE. The number of books, unpublished
manuscripts, dissertations, and well-research articles in these areas of study
is so large that even compiling an annotated bibliography of all those works
can take a lifetime’s work by a scholar or even more. The editors of this
volume, therefore, do not wish to make any claim even remotely towards
the book being all-inclusive. That is neither possible for any small team of
scholars nor is that the objective of the present work. The aim is to highlight
that the space for several alternate narratives is not entirely erased and
cannot be erased if the scholars dealing with the past continue to follow the
ground rules of their disciplines, the rules guided by logic, causality, and
veracity.
This comprehensive volume on India’s vast past is conceptualized to
provide adequate space for histories of various regions, faiths, and
languages that constitute the ‘idea of India’ founded in immense diversity.
An often overlooked phenomenon in Indian historiography is that the
timelines of change and transformation vary from region to region. None of
the so-called ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, or ‘modern’ periods begins
simultaneously in all parts of India. If one state/area/eco-cultural zone is
seen moving towards values and ideas that can be called ‘modern’, one
notices many other areas in the subcontinent trailing far behind and
continuing their existence in ‘another time’. Besides, the amazing
coexistence of several epochs in many of the cultural practices or social
systems makes setting them within the straitjackets of ‘periods’ a futile
task. The report presented here focuses on the people of India rather than on
dynasties, without overlooking, however, that many parts of history just
cannot be discussed without bringing the rulers at the centre.
As a methodological principle, the contributors to this volume were
given the flexibility to conceptualize their text in terms of their discipline
and theme. In that sense it is a work of a ‘collective’ and not an
encyclopaedic monolith about the subcontinent. Consistent with the
method, the team of contributors has an ideal diversity profile, given their
differences in gender, ethnic, religious, and regional identities. It is assumed
that the different perspectives with which they approach their respective
sub-section and theme make this report sufficiently versatile, though that
may leave an over-disciplined reader somewhat distraught. I am beholden
to all of the scholars who agreed to participate in the collective and non-
institutional intellectual experiment and produced this unique, and perhaps
unprecedented, work. The fields of history and historiography in India have
continued to be rewardingly productive over the last 150 years. The
profusion of books on practically every aspect of social, political,
economic, and cultural history should easily make any new work look quite
redundant. Yet, the current worrisome context of an agenda-bound and
aggressive rewriting of prehistory makes it necessary to reassert that the
interpretation of the past cannot be made fodder for any vindictive political
ideology. During the twentieth century, the world has faced a holocaust
because pseudo-history was used to sway emotions of the masses to
generate scorn and hatred. A repeat of that experience is unaffordable for
humanity at a time when the technologies of destruction have moved many
grades higher. To that end, this fairly comprehensive and yet short report on
the past of South Asia has been produced. We do not wish to make the
entirely untenable claim that the themes covered in this volume exhaust the
narration of India’s past. We look at it as a work in progress, to be refined,
revised, and reformulated after short intervals so as to bring it closer to the
Idea of India as a union of states, traditions, their continuous
transformations, and the people who propel the dynamics.
I worked on the entire report in extreme financial difficulties. Mr Sisir
Chalasani of Hyderabad, whom I did not know previously, read in
newspapers about my meeting with M. K. Stalin, the current chief minister
of Tamil Nadu, and made a visit to me in Dharwad. He offered to take care
of the initial funding requirements for the study, and fulfilled his promise
expeditiously. The value of his timely support cannot be weighed in words.
Shri Ashok Vajpeyi of the Raza Foundation offered to give a grant for
taking the work to its final form as a book published in English and
translated into several Indian languages. Mr David Davidar of Aleph Book
Company accepted to publish it in a short time and ensure its wide
distribution. I thank all of these extraordinary individuals for what they did
in order to safeguard the researched understanding of India’s past and the
inheritance that India needs to carry forward to future generations.

G. N. Devy

Dharwad, January 2023

 
*PIB, ‘An expert committee has been set up for conducting holistic study of origin and evolution of
Indian culture-Culture Minister’, 14 September 2020.
*Rupam Jain and Tom Lasseter, ‘By rewriting history, Hindu nationalists aim to assert their
dominance over India’, Reuters, 06 March 2018.
 PART I

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANS AND THEIR

LIFE CONDITIONS
1
THE EARLY INDIAN POPULATION AND POPULATION
ADMIXTURE

Partha Pratim Majumder

Charles Darwin propounded the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Humans and apes are the living representatives of a superfamily called
Hominoidea. A single hominid lineage separated, about 10 million years
before present from a common ancestor, into the extant human,
chimpanzee, and gorilla branches (Scally et al., 2012). The human–
chimpanzee lineage separated from the gorilla lineage about 6 million YBP
(years before present) and then the human and chimpanzee lineages
separated about 3.7 million YBP. Therefore, after chimpanzees, gorillas are
the closest living relatives of humans.
Anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa about 200,000 years
ago. The region in Africa where we evolved remains uncertain (Chan et al.,
2019). Demographic expansions and other causes encouraged humans to
move and explore other regions. Human evolution can be reconstructed
using evidence and tools of various domains; palaeontology, archaeology,
genetics, history, etc. Of these, genetic evidence may be the most foolproof,
especially with the recent technological ability to analyse ancient DNA. In
this note, we shall primarily rely on genetic evidence.
Our genes are a palimpsest of our history. As humans move, they carry
genetic variations present among the residents of the region. During their
dispersal, they admix with pre-existing individuals of the new region. With
admixture, the frequency of a variant carried by the migrant group reduces.
With increasing geographical distance, the frequency of a genetic variant
present in the source region forms a declining gradient. This allows us to
identify the source region/population of a variant. Population genetic
models allow estimation of the time of separation between a migrant
population from its ancestral source population.
 Humans came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago. They followed a
‘southern exit route’ from the Horn of Africa across the mouth of the Red
Sea along the coastline of India to southeastern Asia and Australia
(Oppenheimer, 2012). A second and more recent human migration from out
of Africa followed a ‘northern exit route’ through the Nile Valley into
Central Asia and then beyond, including into India.
When humans reached southwest Asia and Europe, they met the
human-like Neanderthals. That was about 40,000 YBP. Neanderthals are
our closest relatives. Neanderthals mixed with modern human ancestors;
contemporary humans contain traces (1–9 per cent depending on the
geographical region) of Neanderthal DNA. Neanderthals became extinct
approximately 30,000 YBP (Green et al., 2010). Another distinct human-
like species, Denisovan, was also present and admixed with the human, but
overall much less than the Neanderthal. They also became extinct.
India has served as an ancient and a major corridor of human dispersal.
After humans settled down and with the development of language, culture,
and technologies, they aggregated into mating groups at various time
periods and remained genetically isolated from other groups. This resulted
in genetic diversity among them and many groups formed cognizable
genetic profiles. Contemporary India is a rich tapestry of genetically,
linguistically, and culturally diverse populations. Languages belonging to
four linguistic families are spoken in India; Indo-European in North India,
Dravidian in the South, Tibeto-Burman in the Northeast, and Austro-Asiatic
in East and Central India. Indo-European and Dravidian speakers are
numerically larger. Indo-European and Dravidian speaking groups evolved
from two distinct ancestral populations, but all the contemporary groups
that speak these languages are admixed and have differing proportions of
genes that were characteristic of their ancestral groups (Green et al., 2010).
The early ancestral groups were likely formed by admixture of early
Holocene (~12,000 YBP) populations of Iran and South Asia with
populations of (a) Steppe ancestry of northwestern Eurasia, and (b) other
southeastern populations (Narasimhan et al., 2019). In addition, the Tibeto-
Burman and the Austro-Asiatic speakers can be traced to two separate
ancestors; the tribals of Andaman and Nicobar Islands also have a separate
ancestry (Basu et al., 2016).
Based on the locations of origin and subsequent dispersal of male-
restricted Y-chromosomal markers, most notably R1a, it has been inferred
that there was a significant migration of Indo-European speaking males
from Central Asia (Pontic-Caspian Steppe) during the Bronze Age (~5000-
3000 YBP; and until about ~2000 YBP) (Silva et al., 2017; Moorjani et al.,
2013) and earlier (~9000–7000 YBP) from southwest Asia (Fertile Crescent
region; Syria, Lebanon, Turkey) (Sengupta et al., 2006). These immigrants
brought with them the technology of organized agriculture, in addition to
the Indo-European language. In other words, genetic evidence supports
migration to India, but not of large-scale ‘invasion’ of India by Indo-
European speakers (Aryans). The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) that
lasted from about 5,300 to 4,000 YBP was not impacted upon significantly,
if at all, by the early Steppe-derived ancestors but more by later migrants
from the Iranian region, as evidenced by genetic analysis of samples from
the IVC and adjacent contact regions (Shinde et al., 2019). The genetic
input of people who may have brought agricultural technology into India
from west and central Asia has been limited, since the majority of the
genetic signatures found among the males in India are older than 10,000–
15,000 years (Sengupta et al., 2006).
The Austro-Asiatic speakers, who are exclusively tribal, are possibly
the earliest inhabitants of India. Caste origins, however, appear to be
complex. Origins of many caste groups of the same rank in different
geographical regions have been different (Basu et al., 2003; Majumder,
2010). With the imposition of social strictures by some dominant social
groups that formed in India, the extent of admixture reduced but the pattern
of admixture between groups became asymmetric consistent with
dominance and patriarchy (Basu et al., 2016).
2
THE OXYGEN ISOTOPE STAGES HUMAN ADAPTATIONS
DURING THE LAST 200,000 YEARS

Ravi Korisettar

This chapter focuses on terrestrial archaeological records and continental

and oceanic climatological records, made available by multidisciplinary
investigations during the last two decades, to provide a background to the
last 12,000 years of India’s history and prehistory. While Tony Joseph in his
essay traces the appearance of human settlements through an analysis of
genetic data, this chapter relies on archaeological residues and multi-proxy
climate records to trace the colonization of the Indian subcontinent through
a series of dispersal events out of Africa, since Oxygen Isotopic Stage 5
(130 kilo years ago onwards). High resolution climate change
reconstructions and application of improved and secure dating methods
have facilitated delineation of culture processes in a scientific framework
covering the last 200,000 years.

HUMANS AND CLIMATE DURING THE LAST 200,000

YEARS
During the last 200,000 years, the anatomically modern humans (humans
hereafter), Homo sapiens—with their origins placed in Africa—have
successfully colonized major parts of the globe. Developments in the
cultural, social, and technological spheres of human endeavour enabled
them to colonize diverse geographical and environmental regions across the
world, during the last 100,000 years in particular. This global dispersal is
likely to have been possible because of the human ability to successfully
adapt to changing Quaternary—the last 2.6 million years of earth’s history,
including the present—climatic conditions, which have been identified as
Oxygen or Marine Isotopic Stages (OIS/MIS). Humans have reigned
supreme over their early contemporaries such as Neanderthals, Denisovans,
and other archaic hominins, through interbreeding and replacement
whenever and wherever they encountered each of them.
The aDNA preserved in the hominin fossils from different parts of
Eurasia and the genomic data from living populations in both the Old and
New Worlds have facilitated the reconstruction of human population
histories of diverse geographical environments in the lower and middle
latitudes, the last 100,000 years in particular. In the absence of aDNA data
from fossil hominins’ archaeological material cultural data have been
considered as reliable evidence for tracing human colonization patterns,
adaptations to regional environments, and reconstruction of culture history
and culture change.
As there are debates regarding the timeline of the emergence of modern
humans and behavioural modernity in Africa, so there are also debates
about the timing of the colonization of different geographical regions
following their emigration out of Africa (Korisettar, 2017). The lack of
human fossil remains and the complexity of archaeological records in the
Indian subcontinent have constrained conclusive reconstruction of
population histories. Questions regarding how human populations spread to
the subcontinent, when they reached, by what paths they entered, and what
adaptive strategies were employed during the course of their colonization of
a network of physiographic and ecological zones across the subcontinent
have been debated (Haslam et al., 2017).
Only material residues and symbolic artefacts preserved in
archaeological deposits are found well preserved in central and southern
Indian refugia—an area in which organisms can survive in unfavourable
conditions, especially glaciation (Map 1) (Korisettar, 2007). However,
archaeologists have continued their search for well-preserved fossil
hominins and associated material residues reflecting on anatomical,
symbolic, and behavioural modernity. The gamut of evidence includes
presence of artefacts made from bone, ivory, and shell; appearance of art
and symbolic expressions on materials; spatial organization of camp sites;
presence of materials brought from a long distance source, referred to as
manuports, transported from long distances; initiation of mortuary
ceremonies and rituals; adaptability to mid-latitude environments (reflected
in increasing number of cave and rock shelter sites); invention of
Microlithic tools as a means for exploitation of a broad spectrum of plant
and animal food resources; significant increase in tool diversity; increase in
the rate of tool variation through time; colonization of hitherto unoccupied
rainforest ecosystems, etc. The archaeological record of modern humans is
characterized by the presence of all of these or some of these in varying
quantities at different sites and at different times in different geographical
regions of the Old and New Worlds.
While such a complete package of evidence for the period between 50
and 100 ka from the Indian sites is conspicuously absent, the Sri Lankan
sites are known for relatively well-preserved human fossils, Microlithic
assemblages, and symbolic repertoire. Revised and firm dates for this
Microlithic expansion is provided by the recent reinvestigations at Fa Hien
Lena, Batadomba Lena, and Beli Lena Kitulgala cave sites in Sri Lanka.
Recent reinvestigations at these sites and chronometric dating have
extended the time–depth of human occupation by tens of thousands of years
and place the human occupation of Sri Lanka around 50 ka (kilo years ago)
(Wedage et al., 2019; Langley et al., 2020; Picin et al., 2022). It is presumed
that humans first migrated to the Indian Peninsula and moved further into
tropical forest ecosystems of Sri Lanka by crossing a land bridge during the
low seal levels of OIS 4 (a cold and dry climatic period). In the last two
decades, several Microlithic sites in India have also produced comparable
dates (Korisettar 2017; Haslam et al. 2017; Mishra et al. 2013). Quite likely
the Indian Microlithic sites predate the Sri Lankan. Indications for the
presence of Late Pleistocene (50–10 ka period) sites were first provided by
findings from Patne excavations in western Maharashtra (Sali, 1989).
However, new Microlithic sites with deeper time depth and revised
chronology for Patne ostrich eggshells going back to the early part of the
Late Pleistocene have been investigated since the turn of the century (see
Basak in this volume, Basak et al., 2015)).
There are a series of models discussing the possible scenarios of human
expansion to the subcontinent (Haslam et al., 2017) whether the
colonization occurred during Pre-Toba (OIS 5) or Post-Toba (OIS 4)
supervolcanic eruption. Nevertheless, the presence of humans endowed
with a Microlithic technology during the intervening OIS 5 (130–75 ka) and
OIS 4 (74–60 ka) period is suggested by the new radiometric dates for the
Microlithic expansion from across the Indian Peninsula.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND OXYGEN ISOTOPIC STAGES
DURING THE LAST 200,000 YEARS
Periodic fluctuations in palaeomonsoon precipitation, which refers to cyclic
changes in the monsoon precipitation in accordance with glacial and
interglacial episodes, over the Indian subcontinent spanning the last
200,000 years has been reconstructed from a diverse variety of proxy
records. They include tree-ring width, oxygen, and hydrogen isotopic
composition of tree cellulose, stable carbon isotopes of peat cellulose,
stable oxygen isotopes of corals, marine microfossils (benthic and
planktonic foraminifera), drip stones (speleothems), and fluvial and
aeaolian terrestrial sediments. The planktonic foraminifera preserved in the
Indian Ocean’s bottom sediments have facilitated the reconstruction of
palaeoclimate changes during the last 200,000 years. Marine sediments are
continuous and uninterrupted and unlike other proxy records they have
potential for covering the entire Quaternary Period (the last 2.6 million
years). The isotopic stages are alternate arid-humid events reconstructed
from ocean sediments and represent a standard reference for global climate
change reconstruction from other proxy records.
During this period, earth’s climate fluctuated over a broad range on
millennial time scale. Odd numbered isotopic stages were warm and humid
and the even-numbered ones were cold and dry. These stages witnessed
expansion of ice volumes and low sea levels followed by contraction or
melting of ice volumes and high sea levels. These events drastically
affected the productivity of habitable environments and altered the
geographical range of hominin habitats. Although the subcontinent did not
experience the direct influence of glaciations, the peninsular coast has
preserved the evidence for sea level changes during the Late Quaternary
(Deo and Rajaguru, 2017).

THE SIX OXYGEN ISOTOPIC STAGES AND THE INDIAN

RECORDS
Six Isotopic Stages (OIS 6–1) comprising two glacial cycles (190-80 ka and
80 ka to the present) represent cyclic changes between warm-humid and
cold-dry climatic phases. The Late Quaternary begins with the onset of the
last interglacial stage—OIS 5. Stage 6, though a cold and dry phase, was
relatively warm and humid compared to Stage 4, 3, and 2. Stage 5 is
subdivided into five sub-stages: 5a, c, and e are interstadials and 5e and d
are stadials, or cooler periods during an interglacial warmer episode. During
5e sea levels were higher than the present. Stage 4 (74–60 ka) was a brief
cold period, during which period the well-known Toba super-eruption
occurred in Sumatra, Indonesia. Stage 3 lasted from 60 to 25 ka, Stage 2
from 25 ka to 12 ka, and Stage 1 from 12 ka to the present (generally
referred to as Holocene). Although the climatic fluctuations during the
200,000-year period were less significant, they were large enough to impact
the rise and fall of civilizations. For example, the fall of Indus Civilization
is attributed to prolonged drought (nearly 300 years) due to the onset of the
Meghalayan Phase around 4,200 years ago.
The Indian subcontinent is a sub-tropical monsoon region and its
habitability is governed by the monsoon circulation and its intensity and
geographical variation in the precipitation regimes across the vast
continental area. As a result, a network of ecosystems and habitats have
come into existence during the Quaternary. The subsistence economic
resources: their nature and diversity was governed by the prevalence of
monsoon circulation and its response to alternating oxygen isotopic stages
of the larger glacial cycles during the Quaternary. Monsoon fluctuation
during the last 200,000 years over the Indian subcontinent and its impact on
the biota has been reconstructed from Indian Ocean sites as well as other
proxy records, reflecting on the stability of the environment and continuity
of human populations on the Peninsula (Band et al., 2017; Roberts et al.,
2014).
Band et al. provide a summary of monsoon fluctuations over the
subcontinent during the last 200,000 years based on variation in the relative
abundance of certain planktonic foraminifera in the Arabian Sea sediment
cores covering the last six Isotopic Stages. Higher abundance of
foraminifera (e.g. Globigerina bulloides), a marine calcareous micro fossil,
in sediment cores represent higher monsoon precipitation regimes and
lower abundance a weaker monsoon wind regimes. Accordingly during
colder phases of OIS 6, 4, and 2, abundance of G. bulloides was less, and in
contrast, monsoon winds were stronger during OIS 5, 3, and 1.
Transition to cold OIS 4 is considered a critical period in human
evolution and expansion beyond Africa, as it has been thought to have
coincided with the Toba super-eruption around 74–75 ka. This eruption
injected massive quantities of volcanic ash into the atmosphere and its
subsequent deposition on land caused pollution of terrestrial environments
and consequent biological bottleneck leading to extinction of life in most
parts of Eurasia. On the contrary the Arabian Sea sediment core (referred to
as S090–93KL) has shown that the transition occurred prior to this super-
eruption and decrease in the abundance of foraminifera had occurred
around 73 ka.
It is of interest to note that many quaternarists have focused their
attention on the 74 ka Toba super-eruption: its impact on terrestrial
environments and its adverse effect on human evolution. Although there are
a multitude of theories concerning Toba’s impact on terrestrial biomes and
human population, the empirical data from archaeological sites from across
the world do not support this conclusion. This is well attested by findings
from Toba related Middle Palaeolithic sites in the Jurreru Valley of Andhra
Pradesh and Middle Son Valley in the Vindhya basin, Madhya Pradesh
(Map 1). Multidisciplinary investigations in both these areas have attested
the continuity of human populations with a Middle Palaeolithic
technological tradition (Clakson et al., 2017).
While the analysis of relative abundance of foraminifera from oceanic
sediment cores provided a measure of wind strength during oxygen isotopic
stages, terrestrial proxies such as lake, fluvial, lacustrine, and peat deposits
revealed changes in the monsoon precipitation regimes in response to past
climate changes. Fine floodplain deposits along rivers banks (rivers
Sabarmati and Mahi, for instance) were deposited during OIS 5 (sub-stages
e, c, and a), and during cooler phases of 5d (120–100 ka) and OIS 4 (74–60
ka) the rivers tended to braid under lower monsoon precipitation and during
the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) of OIS 2 (26–25 ka) fluvial
sedimentation was replaced by deposition of wind-blown deposits (fine
silts). The sand dunes of the Thar Desert have also preserved records of
humid-arid phases covering the last 200 ka. Higher monsoon spell is
recorded around 200 ka followed by an arid phase represented by calcretes,
sand dune accumulation, and playa formation. Cold and arid conditions are
recorded for OIS 5, OIS 4 and between 30–25 ka suggesting aridity and
intensification of monsoon is seen post LGM, represented by the
stabilization of dune and formation of soil (7–6 ka).
TERRESTRIAL RECORDS AND HUMAN OCCUPATION
Whether these fluctuations affected the stability of terrestrial habitats is
presented, based on findings from multidisciplinary investigations at Billa
Surgam cave in southern India, in the following (Map 1) (Korisettar, 2022).
The Billa Surgam is a complex of caves: Cathedral, Charnel House,
Purgatory, Chapter House North, etc. Of these the Charnel House Cave and
Cathedral Cave floors were excavated to greater depths in order to reach the
bedrock (Smith et al., 2017). The composite stratigraphy of the two caves—
Cathedral and Charnel House caves—has revealed an 11-metre succession
of deposits characterized by silt dominated cave earths. OSL dating of the
strata and the identification of YYT cryptotephra (74–75 ka) at a depth of
3.5 metre from the top in the Charnel House floor deposits has enabled the
chronometry of the sedimentary strata, ranging in time from >200 ka to the
present, from the base to the top. The limestone rubble deposit which
yielded cryptotephra of YTT also yielded an OSL age of 74 ka, confirming
the dating of the cryptotephra to the YTT source. The composite
stratigraphy and OSL chronology were correlated with the oxygen isotopic
stages (OIS 7 to OIS 1). Sedimentological changes observed in the
sequence are attributed to corresponding global cooling and warming
climatic events.
The absence of lithic artefacts in the cave excavations was compensated
by abundant micro and macro palaeontological remains. Taphonomical
considerations suggest that these faunal remains are preserved in a
secondary context, and that only about 181 out of 5,281 faunal remains
were identifiable to species or genera level (Roberts et al., 2014). The upper
levels of the Charnel House are dated back to the Holocene by the presence
of Neolithic pottery. The Neolithic occupation of these caves is also
supported by the presence of ceramic sherds and a dated nested diamond
shaped petroglyph (5000 YBP) on the wall of Cathedral cave. In addition
the succession of strata have preserved a continuous record of mammalian
fossils, covering the last more than 200 ka, which have implications for
landscape changes. Patrick Roberts et al. also note the presence of
Rhinoceros and Equus species of mammals (during OIS 5) and
Semnopithecus entellus (during OIS 2 and 1). It is inferred that during the
last 125,000 years, landscapes around Billasurgam supported a variety of
grazing animals and their predators and that there was a mix of grassland
and forest vegetation, with sufficient wetlands in the area.
Although evidence for Palaeolithic hunter–gatherer human occupation
of the immediate cave area is not evident in the neighbouring Jurreru
Valley, it has produced a continuous record of hominin occupation ranging
from Acheulian to Historic period through the Middle and Microlithic
periods. While the Middle Palaeolithic spans both OIS 5 and 4 indicating
little or no impact of presumed volcanic winter, the Microlithic period
appears to have emerged during OIS 4, prior to the onset of OIS 3’s warm
and humid climate phase.
In the Jurreru Valley a major technological transition from Middle
Palaeolithic to Microlithic occurs around 38–34 ka, during the middle of
OIS 3, suggesting climate change and behaviour change do not coincide
with each other. This evidence from a rock shelter excavation at
Jwalapuram ( JWP 9) is associated with sediments spanning the last 38 ka.
The depositional strata contain molluscs and fauna and evidence of spring
related deposits (tufas) between 35–30 ka and 20–11 ka, indicating more
humid conditions and freshwater resources.
This suite of archaeological and faunal evidence clearly attest to the
stability of inland habitats during the last 200,000 years and the Indian
Peninsula provided a stable environmental base for human colonization of
the region.
Fluctuation in monsoon precipitation over the subcontinent during the
12,000 years has been reconstructed from multi-proxy records, both from
land and sea. At the end of the Pleistocene or the Last Glacial Maximum,
the summer monsoon continued to be weak (between 11.7 and 10.2 ka) and
picked up intensity between 10.2 and 9.8 ka. The strength of the monsoon is
recorded for the period from 10 to 9 ka, designated Younger Dryas, and
again after 4.2 ka, designated as Meghalayan Stage. These critical changes
have been reflected in the archaeological records, which demonstrate
dramatic changes in the lifeways of the Holocene human societies.

BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF HOMININ SETTLEMENTS IN

INDIA
Different geographical regions of the world present different trajectories of
population prehistories, reflected in both genetic data and well dated
archaeological records. The Indian subcontinent has preserved
archaeological records of hominin settlements dating from 1.5 million—
(Lower Pleistocene (between 2.5 Ma to 0.7 Ma) onwards (Pappu et al.,
2011; Paddayya et al., 2002). In the absence of Pleistocene hominin fossils
in India lithic assemblages (Attirampakkam, Map 1) are the main source of
prehistoric human colonization. The period between 1.5 Ma to 140,000
years ago is represented by Early Palaeolithic Acheulian technological
tradtion. The period between 385,000 and 35,000 years ago is represented
by Middle Palaeolithic technological tradition. Both these traditions
represent cultures produced by archaic hominins, during the Lower and
Middle Pleistocene sub-periods of the Quaternary. The current evidence
suggests the emergence of Late Palaeolithic Microlithic tradition beginning
around 60,000 years ago, that transgresses into the Holocene Mesolithic
Microlithic tradition. There are three broad groups of Microlithic
assemblages: (a) those of the Late Pleistocene, (b) terminal Pleistocene
Epipalaeolithic, and (c) the Early to Mid-Holocene Mesolithic. All these
groups, however, are attributed to modern humans.
The early emergence of Middle Palaeolithic tradition was ascribed to an
early expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa, suggesting replacement of
archaic hominins by advancing Homo sapiens with a Middle Palaeolithic
technology (Petraglia et al., 2007, 2009, 2013). However, recent findings
suggest that behaviour change in archaic hominins likely gave rise to the
Middle Palaeolithic in India (Kumar Akhilesh et al., 2017; Anil Devara et
al., 2022; Korisettar, 2017) and that the end of the Middle Palaeolithic
period was marked by the efflorescence of Microlithic technology
(originating in Africa around 100,000 years ago or earlier) ushering in the
emergence of the Microlithic Period around 60,000 years ago as a
consequence of human expansion out of Africa into the Indian
subcontinent. Based on available archaeological evidence, it can be asserted
that Middle Palaeolithic Technology in India persisted from 400 ka to 38 ka
and can be interpreted as a long survival of archaic hominins successfully
adapting to changing climatic and environmental conditions as well as
surviving the presumed deleterious effects of Toba super-eruption 74,000
years ago. The Middle Palaeolithic populations were largely confined to the
refugia of Purana and Gondwana basins on the India Peninsula.
Undisputedly there is evidence of the presence of direct ancestors of
modern Indian populations dating back to at least about 60 ka (Map 1). The
archaeological record of the subcontinent post 60 ka is represented by
Upper Palaeolithic or Late Palaeolithic Microlithic tradition comparable to
the African Late Stone Age on the one hand and to Classical Upper
Palaeolithic of Europe on the other. With the increased application of high
resolution geochronologic methods, it has become possible to reconstruct
the environmental background of modern human populations across the
Indian subcontinent and also trace the evolution of behavioural modernity
among them (Korisettar, 2015; Clarkson et al., 2009). The new
chronological methods have also contributed to a secure reconstruction of
Late Quaternary palaeoclimate and environmental changes. Excavations of
rock shelters and open air Microlithic sites have contributed significantly to
our understanding of hominin adaptations to changing conditions. The
archaeological and environmental record for the last 200,000 years show
how this period witnessed the ‘laying foundation’ for the later prehistoric
and early historic populations of the Indian subcontinent. The
archaeological record clearly reveals the continuity of human populations
during the last 60 ka.
It has been found that the period between 30 and 16 ka was a period of
maximum global glaciations commonly called Last Glacial Maximum. The
sea levels were low, of the order of 200 metres, causing increased
continentality, low productivity for human habitation, and decreased
monsoon precipitation, which led to restricting hominin populations to
refugia. Post 16 and 12 ka the sea levels began to rise slowly but steadily.
At the start of the Holocene, the sea levels rose at the rate of 15 millimetre a
year and again between 11,500 and 9,500 years ago. The intervening period
witnessed a dry phase called Younger Dryas. Stage 3 also witnessed similar
fluctuations. It is also suggested that during Stage 3, the Indian subcontinent
harboured highest density of human populations around 35 ka. By this time
the descendants of L3 lineage (M and N haplogroups) from Africa were
well settled in the subcontinent.
3
THE MIGRATIONS THAT SHAPED INDIAN DEMOGRAPHY

Tony Joseph

In the last one decade, our understanding of how the world got peopled and
how different population groups formed has changed significantly. To a
great extent, this has been due to advances made by a relatively new
discipline called population genetics, which gained the ability to access and
analyse DNA collected from skeletons of people who lived thousands or
tens of thousands of years ago. Over the last few years, thousands of ancient
human DNA samples have been recovered from all over the world (up from
just 10 in 2014), giving us a far clearer picture of which population groups
moved when and where, to create the world as it is today (Montgomery
Slatkin, 2016; Reich, 2018).
Population genetics has been around for decades, but until recently, it
used to look only at the genomes of currently living population groups.
These studies could tell us which population groups were closely or weakly
related to which other population groups, but they could not say how these
relationships came about. And this is what changed when population
geneticists acquired the ability to extract and analyse ancient DNA. For
example, let us say we have collected ancient DNA from an archaeological
site in X region. And let us say, hypothetically, that from an archaeological
level 4,000 years ago, we find no evidence of, say, Central Asian ancestry,
but that from a level that is 3,000 years ago, we do find such ancestry. It
would then be a reasonable conclusion that Central Asian ancestry moved
into region X between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago. In other words, we can
now figure out which population groups moved into which parts of the
world and when. Since large population movements in prehistory happened
across vast swathes of territory, the new picture that we get of human
movements looks like a jigsaw puzzle that is coming together, with each
new ancient DNA discovery filling in a part of the puzzle and thus helping
us to complete the picture.
 As a result, we now know that Europe went through two major periods
of churn in just the last 10,000 years. First, a population of farmers from
West Asia or, to be specific, from Anatolia, which is today’s Turkey, moved
into Europe around 9,000 years ago (Iosif Lazaridis, 2016). These newly-
arrived farmers from Anatolia then replaced or, to a lesser extent, mixed,
with the hunter–gatherers who were already living there. Then, around
5,000 years ago, yet another group—of pastoralists from Central Asia, with
mastery over horse and metallurgy—moved into Europe, replacing or
mixing with the then-existing dominant population of farmers and the still
remaining, smaller population of hunter–gatherers (Wolfgang Haak, 2015;
Allentoft, 2015; Inigo Onalde, 2018).
We also know now that the Americas saw at least three migrations from
Asia, through Siberia and the Bering Strait, long before the Europeans ever
set foot there (Reich, 2012) and that Southeast Asia saw at least two major
migrations that reshaped its population, the first one spreading Austroasiatic
languages across the region, and the second one, Austronesian languages
across the Pacific islands and Madagascar (McColl, 2018; Lipson, 2018).
Putting the new genetic evidence together with earlier evidence from
other disciplines such as archaeology, we can identify four classes of
migrations, in particular, that played a big role in shaping world
demography, each of which lasted hundreds or sometimes, thousands of
years. The first class of migrations began around 70,000 years ago, when a
group of modern humans left the African continent and moved into the
Arabian Peninsula, and then went on to people the rest of the world
(Oppenheimer, 2004). The last continent they reached was the Americas,
and it is likely that they got there more than 16,000 years ago. So, between
70,000 years ago and over 16,000 years ago is when the most of the world
got populated by modern humans, and the first people who moved into all
of these regions can be called ‘Out of Africa’ or OoA migrants.
The second class of major prehistoric migrations happened much later,
after the last glacial period ended around 12,000 years ago, when some
modern human populations took to agriculture in different parts of the
world (Bellwood, 2013). Not every group took to agriculture at the same
time, and not all agriculture was equally productive or beneficial. Those
who were in situations that enabled them to take up cereal cultivation, for
example in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China, were in a more
advantageous position than, say, those who took to cultivating tubers, yams,
and bananas, as in the Pacific islands or Southeast Asia. And wherever
modern humans took to cereal cultivation, what followed was a population
explosion. After people settled down to farm and found ways to increase
productivity, human fertility, and numbers increased dramatically, leading
to migrations. This set of farming-related migrations, or Neolithic
migrations as they are called, left behind strong marks on human
demography everywhere. The migrations from West Asia, which took
farming to Europe, is one example. Migrations originating from China that
spread Austronesian languages through maritime Southeast Asia,
Madagascar, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean beginning around 5,000
years ago are another.
The third major class of prehistoric migrations happened after some
modern humans in Central Asia mastered the art of metallurgy and
weaponry and wheels and wagons and later also managed to domesticate
horses well enough to use them for the kind of mobility modern humans
never had before. This set of migrations affected a large part of Eurasia,
from the farthest reaches of Europe to West Asia, South Asia, and China.
We could perhaps call them the Bronze Age migrations (Wolfgang Haak,
2015).
These three classes of migrations happened, by and large, in the
prehistoric period, or before writing had become a common practice in most
parts of the world.
But the fourth major class of migrations driven by historic forces took
place in the last few centuries, when some modern humans figured out how
to cross the vast oceans and invented steamships that helped them sail
around the world quickly and create colonies. This was also global in its
impact and changed the demography in major and minor ways in different
parts of the world. Australia and the Americas, for example, saw their
demography being fundamentally altered, while the Indian demography felt
no significant impact from this particular migration because the number of
colonialists who arrived here were too small relative to the population of
the region. (This is also true of other migrations or invasions that happened
in the historical period, including that of the Greeks, the Sakas, the
Parthians, the Huns, and the Arabs.)
To understand how India got peopled, therefore, we need to understand
how the three earlier classes of migrations impacted the subcontinent: the
OoA migration that still contributes the largest part to the DNA of the
average Indian; two Neolithic migrations—one that features a population
related to early farmers of Iran that was part of the agricultural
transformation in northwestern India and the other from East Asia that
brought Austroasiatic languages to India; and, of course, the last major
migration which came from Central Asia and brought Indo-European
language speakers, who called themselves ‘Arya’, into India.
Population genetics can today tell us the basic story of how populations
formed over what period of time, but the resolution of these findings and
their explanatory power increases manifold when they match well with
findings from other disciplines that have looked at the same issues.
For example, we know from genetics that all modern humans outside of
Africa are descendants of a small group of Africans who moved into Asia
around 70,000 years ago and then spread across the world. How do
geneticists know this? Because looking into the genomes of all living
populations outside of Africa today, they are able to trace their ancestry
back to a small subsection of the African population that existed around
70,000 years ago.
So, whether we are talking about the First Indians, First Europeans,
First Chinese, First Australians, First Japanese, or First Americans, we were
all descendants of the small group of Out of Africa migrants.
But as yet, genetics is not able to tell us about when the OoA migrants
reached India, or about their process of settlement in the subcontinent. For
that we need to turn to archaeology, which shows that the earliest modern
humans were in India by at least 65,000 years ago. This is because we can
see, from fossils and tools that the earliest migrating modern humans left
behind at various places, that they were in Australia by at least 59,300 years
ago and southeast Asia by at least 63,000 years ago (Clarkson, 2017);
Westaway, 2017). If this is so, it should be reasonable to assume that they
were in India by at least 65,000 years ago, since their most likely route to
southeast Asia and beyond, to East Asia and Australia, would have taken
them through India.
However, it is not just the question of when they reached India, but also
how they settled in the subcontinent that is being answered by archaeology.
For instance, archaeology informs us that when the First Indians arrived in
the subcontinent, it was already well populated by archaic humans or
members of other Homo species that are our evolutionary cousins. This we
know from the abundant stone tools that the latter left behind, especially in
central and southern India (Akhilesh Kumar et al., 2018).
Archaeologists believe that the new migrants from Africa would have
preferred to stay out of the way of the well-established population of
archaic humans, especially in peninsular India. We often believe that when
modern humans arrived on the scene, they were much superior to the other
Homo species. This belief is incorrect. Modern humans were not distinctly
superior to archaic humans and, in fact, some archaic humans had larger
brains than us. For most of the time that they shared the earth, the tools
made by modern humans were indistinguishable from those made by
archaic humans.
So, it is likely that when they arrived in the Indian subcontinent, modern
humans chose not to tangle with the archaic humans and instead, moved
across the sub-Himalayan region, with their descendants, over time, going
on to East Asia, Australia, etc. It is also possible that another branch of the
same population of modern humans took the coastal route to avoid the
archaic human populations in the heart of the Peninsula, travelling down the
western coast all the way south to Sri Lanka and then up the eastern coast
and on to southeast Asia, etc. The earliest modern human fossils discovered
in the Indian subcontinent have been from Sri Lanka, dated to around
50,000 years ago. In other words, modern humans reached different parts of
the Indian subcontinent at different periods of time, and archaeologists give
this settlement pattern the name ‘Indian Staged Dispersal’ (Korisettar,
2017).
That takes us to the next question: What was the second major
migration into India which, as we saw, was most likely related to the spread
of agriculture? When did it happen and what chain of events did it give rise
to?
Evidence for the first agricultural settlement in the subcontinent comes
from a village called Mehrgarh in the Balochistan province of today’s
Pakistan, dating back to around 7000 BCE, and at its earliest levels we see a
population that was beginning cultivation of wheat and barley and was
domesticating animals ( Jarrige, 2006). In the archaeological record, we can
see the agricultural revolution spreading from Balochistan to Sindh to
Punjab to Haryana and across an entire region of northwestern India, with
villages slowly becoming fortified and developing into towns and, finally,
the emergence of the Harappan cities and civilization.
 So, who were these people that were starting up agriculture in the
subcontinent who then went on to create the Harappan Civilization?
Genetic studies based on ancient DNA recovered from the Mature
Harappan period—that is, between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE—answered this
question in 2019. The Harappans, it is now clear, were an admixed
population of First Indians and a population related to early agriculturists
from the Zagros mountain region of Iran, who may have been in India from
sometime before 8000 BCE, before there is evidence for agriculture
anywhere in the world (Narasimhan, 2019; Shinde, 2019).
But the full story begins emerging when you bring in archaeological
evidence. The thing to keep in mind is that the genetic research that
confirmed the link between Iranian populations and the Harappans was
based on ancient DNA recovered from an archaeological site called Ganj
Dareh in the central Zagros mountains. This is the earliest site (as yet) with
evidence of sheep and goat domestication in the world from around 7000
BCE. More importantly, this is the site that has been compared with the
above-mentioned Mehrgarh by the French archaeologist Jean-François
Jarrige, who excavated Mehrgarh in the 1980s. In an article written in 2006
—a dozen years before genetic evidence linked Ganj Dareh to northwestern
India, this is what he had to say: ‘…the full setting of the farming economy
at Mehrgarh displays evident similarities with what had been noticed in the
case of the early Neolithic settlements in the hilly regions forming the
eastern border of Mesopotamia.’ Here, Jarrige is specifically talking about
sites such as Ganj Dareh. What exactly are the ‘evident similarities’? The
same kind of quadrangular houses built with narrow bricks about 60
centimetres long with finger marks for keying the mortar; circular fire pits
filled with burnt pebbles, suggesting the use of heated stones for cooking
bread, a technique used in Balochistan even today; traces of red paint on the
walls of the structures; skeletons in burials placed in similar positions;
baskets coated with bitumen; oblong cakes of red ochre; similar styles of
making early ceramics…the list is so long that it can leave no doubt about
the links between these early farming regions. It is no surprise then that
Jarrige uses the phrase ‘cultural continuum’ to describe the relationship
between the two regions.
The archaeological evidence thus adds flesh and blood to the story that
DNA tells. It tells us of a group of modern humans related to the pioneering
animal herders in the Zagros region of Iran mixing with the First Indians
who were perhaps already domesticating humped cattle and buffalo. We
know from genetic research that both these animals—the zebu and the
water buffalo—were domesticated in India. This mixed population then
went on to spark an agricultural revolution in northwestern India and later,
on that foundation, to create the Harappan Civilization. When the Harappan
Civilization declined around 1900 BCE due to a long drought that brought
down other civilizations of the time in other parts of the world as well, the
Harappans moved east towards north India and south towards south India,
mixing with other populations and becoming the ancestors of all Indians.
The next large migration was of farmers from East Asia who brought
Austroasiatic languages and some new farming practices to India around
4,000 years ago. This was revealed because of recent genetic studies based
on extensive use of ancient DNA from all across Southeast Asia.
Austroasiatic languages such as Mundari and Khasi are spoken by tribals in
central and eastern India, and these languages are related to the Mon-Khmer
family of languages spoken today in Thailand, Vietnam, etc. This brings us
to the last of the four major migrations that shaped Indian demography, that
of the Indo-European language speakers who called themselves ‘Arya’
(Mark Lipson, 2018; Gyaneshwar, 2011).
In 2019, the journal Science published a paper titled ‘The Formation of
Human Populations in South and Central Asia’. It was co-authored by 117
leading scientists from across disciplines and geographies including India,
and it presented the most exhaustive genetic evidence for prehistoric
migrations from the Central Asian Steppe into India between 2000 BCE and
1500 BCE. It said that until around 2100 BCE, there was no evidence of a
Central Asian Steppe ancestry in the regions on the periphery of the
Harappan Civilization. But after this period, we begin to see evidence of
such ancestry in these regions. The study said that there was a southward
migration of pastoralists from the Kazakh steppe—first towards southern
Central Asian regions such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan
after 2100 BCE, and then towards South Asia between 2000 and 1500 BCE.
But how do we know that this migration brought Indo-European
languages, including a precursor of Sanskrit, to India? There are two kinds
of evidence that genetics itself provides. One is the discovery that steppe
pastoralists from Central Asia moved into Europe about a thousand years
before they moved into India. This gels with the observed geographic
spread of Indo-European languages from western Europe to the Indian
subcontinent (Wolfgang Haak, 2015). In addition, as pointed out in the 2019
study authored by Narasimhan, ‘…the fact that traditional custodians of
liturgy in Sanskrit’ tend to have more Steppe ancestry than is predicted by
the model ‘provides an independent line of evidence…for a Bronze Age
Steppe origin for South Asia’s Indo-European languages.’
In a nutshell, by around 1500 BCE, all the four major components of the
Indian population were in: the First Indians, the West Asians, the East
Asians, and the Central Asians. And what we see during the next 1,500
years is genetic mixing between these populations in such a way that no
Indian population group is left untouched. Today, if you analyse the DNA
of any population group in India, no matter in how remote a region, you
will find that it carries mixed ancestry in varying proportions. The only
population group that escaped this mixing in this period probably was the
Andaman islanders and that is only because they were cut off from the
mainland.
But what is remarkable is that this mixing came to an end, sometime
around 100 CE, when endogamy took hold (Moorjani, 2013). Since
endogamy is a distinguishing mark of the caste system, we can surmise that
it was around this time that the caste system fell into place. In other words,
a full-fledged caste system may not have begun with the arrival of the Arya,
as is commonly believed, but over 1,500 years later.
Summing up, this is one way to look at and understand the Indian
population structure: four prehistoric migrations that provided the basic
components; a 1,500–2,000-year period of mixing, which ensured that
almost all population groups in the country are a combination of these
components in different proportions; and then a 2,000-year period of
genetic segregation or endogamy that has created a large number of small
populations.
There is also another figurative method that could help us understand
the Indian population structure: the metaphor of the Indian demographic
pizza, where the base is the ancestry of the First Indians, the descendants of
the original OoA migrants. This is so because we know from genetic studies
that the ancestry of the First Indians accounts for 50 to 65 per cent of the
ancestry of most Indian population groups today. Without this base, there is
no Indian demographic pizza (Silva, 2017).
On top of this base comes the sauce, which is Harappan ancestry. Why
is this so? Because when their civilization declined due to a long drought
around 1900 BCE, the Harappans moved from northwest India to north India
as well as to south India, thus becoming the ancestors of today’s north
Indians as well as south Indians. In the north, they mixed with the new
arrivals from Central Asia and in the south, they mixed with the First
Indians. Thus, in many ways, the Harappans can be seen as the cultural glue
that holds Indians together, because when they moved all over India, they
took with them many of the cultural practices and belief systems that they
had perfected in the crucible of the Harappan Civilization, and these have
now become integrated into the lives and belief systems of Indians
everywhere. The later migrations can then be seen as the cheese and the
toppings on this demographic pizza.
This roughly sums up the way in which current findings explain the
structure and distribution of the Indian population. Very broadly, therefore,
one can expect the eastern parts of India to carry relatively more East Asian
ancestry, the northern and western parts to carry more west Eurasian
ancestry, and the southern parts of India to carry comparatively more First
Indian ancestry.
4
ROCK SHELTERS AND CAVES PREHISTORIC
SETTLEMENTS

Ravi Korisettar

GEOGRAPHICAL FACTORS OF THE SUBCONTINENT

General Geography

The mainland Indian subcontinent represents a large continental landmass

lying between the Himalayan mountain range to the north and the Indian
Ocean to the south. It has 15,200 kilometres of land frontier and 7,500
kilometres of sea frontier. It covers an area of 3,267,500 square kilometres.
India extends 3,200 kilometres in the north-south direction and 2,960
kilometres in east-west direction. The subcontinent is broadly divisible into
three physiographic zones, viz., the Peninsula, the Indo-Ganga Plain, and
the Himalayas. The Burma mountains (Arakan Yoma), Balochistan, and
Hindu Kush mountains separate the subcontinent from East Asia and
western Asia. The Himalayas occupy a 2,400 kilometres long and 250–300
kilometres wide area along the northern frontier of the subcontinent and
constitute a formidable mountain barrier. The northwestern part of the
subcontinent is an extension of the Indo-Ganga Plain bounded to its west by
the Balochistan mountain range. The major part of Pakistan is the vast
Indus River plain flanked by the interconnected Punjab (including the
eastern and western sectors), Gomal, and Kachi plains. In terms of a macro-
topography, the entire Indus River basin is a bowl shaped depression
measuring approximately 1,200 kilometres long and 600 kilometres wide at
its greatest extents. The Indus Basin is bounded to the west by the Kirthar
and Sulaiman mountain ranges and by the Pir Panjal range to the north. The
Aravalli mountain range and the Indo-Ganga divide are to the east and
northeast of the Thar Desert.
 The Indo-Ganga Plain occupies an area of 700,000 square kilometres. It
is drained by the many rivers rising in the Himalayas and the northern
slopes of the peninsular bulge (northern Vindhya slopes). The older
mountain ranges are known by names such as Aravallis, Sahyadri, Eastern
Ghats Mobile Belt, Satpuras, etc. Vast plateau areas have formed in the
central and western parts of the subcontinent such as the Deccan Plateau,
stretching between the Vindhya hills to the north and the Nilgiri mountains
to the south. This plateau is surrounded by the coastal lowlands. The
Western Ghats (Sahyadri) is a major continental divide that has given rise to
east- and west-flowing rivers, including the Godavari, Krishna. and Kaveri,
which have given rise to major drainage basins and deltas on the coastal
lowlands. The rivers Narmada and Tapi flow in the westerly direction
within the Vindhya and Satpura ranges. The entire Peninsula is bounded by
the Indian Ocean on the south.

INTERNAL PHYSIOGRAPHY AND ECOSYSTEMS

Physiographic zones of the subcontinent include montane, inter, and
intramontane and submontane terrains, large alluvial plains, hill ranges (the
Ghats), rocky plateaus with braided stream networks, coastal plains, and a
vast expanse of hot desert (the Thar). These zones represent regional
ecosystems that have formed under the monsoon circulation, and the
formation of a network of vegetation zones governed by the latitudinal and
longitudinal variation in the distribution of rainfall between the proximal
southwestern Peninsula and the distal Himalayan range in the north. These
vegetation zones are broadly categorized as mangrove, evergreen,
deciduous, dry evergreen scrubland, high altitude grasslands (margs), and
alpine zones. The climatic zones include arid, semi-arid, humid, sub-humid,
biodiversity hotspots, climax forests, hot and cold deserts, swamps,
marshes, etc. Long and short-term fluctuations in the monsoon climate over
the subcontinent have governed the habitability of the internal network of
ecosystems since the Palaeolithic times.
The mountains, oceanic barriers, and monsoon circulation over this
region have played a major role in the formation of monsoon habitats across
the region since the Quaternary and earlier. Based on the documented
evidence of prehistoric settlements and geographic variation in the density
and continuity of settlements, core areas (areas of attraction), peripheral
areas (relative isolation), and isolation have been identified. The observed
spatial variation in the patterns of Palaeolithic settlement across the
subcontinent is likely to be a product of hominin presence in particular
zones as favorable habitats are critical to an understanding of dispersal
processes and hominin adaptations as they provided critical resources,
including a reliable water supply, a high animal and plant biomass, and raw
materials for stone toolmaking.
The Purana-Gondwana basins constitute core areas (see Map 1). The
geomorphic environment and the lithological unconformities facilitated
high permeability of ground water in the rocks, including ground water
discharge through springs. Perennial water resources were present and such
environments would have maintained a high biomass index of plants and
animals, likely adapted to a deciduous woodland-savanna ecosystem. The
stone outcrops yield hard rocks as well as cryptocrystalline varieties that
were used for stone tool manufacture (Korisettar, 2007). The geology and
topography of these basins have also given rise to the formation of caves
and rock shelters. These areas contain evidence for long-term human
occupation, since the Lower Palaeolithic times. Hominin occupations are
evident in caves, rock shelters, and along perennial springs and low order
streams. Significant Investigations carried out at representative rock shelter
and cave sites on the Indian Peninsula is given below.

ROCK SHELTERS HUMAN OCCUPATION IN THE

VINDHYAS, MADHYA PRADESH: THE BHIMBETKA
COMPLEX
Bhimbekta is situated about 45 kilometres south of Bhopal, the state capital
of Madhya Pradesh (Map 1). Since 1957, several hundred painted rock
shelters were documented by the Indian archaeologist V. S. Wakankar and
his successors in the Bhimbetka region of Madhya Pradesh. This region
comprises a large of body of evidence relating to prehistoric human
occupation of rock shelters ranging in time from the Lower Palaeolithic to
historic times. However, archaeological research has laid greater emphasis
on documenting rock art and excavation of prehistoric occupation.
Organized study and documentation of the entire gamut of rock art
imageries and excavations of a series of rock shelters produced primary
context multidisciplinary datasets. Rock shelters IIIF-28, 29, 30, and IIIF-
24 were excavated by V. S. Wakankar. Rock shelter IIIF-23 was excavated
by V. N. Misra and IIIF-21 and IIIC-13 by S. Haas. Group III rock shelters
at Bhimbetka were most productive inasmuch as one could trace, for the
first time, an uninterrupted occupation history from the suspected Lower
Palaeolithic pebble tool culture (maybe even pre-Acheulian) to historic
times. A brief account of excavations at two rock shelters is given below.

Bhimbetka IIIF-23

Rock shelter IIIF-23 is the largest of the rock shelters at Bhimbetka with a
3.80 metres thick depositional sequence of Palaeolithic cultures. The
deposit was divided into eight levels with the following succession of lithic
industries: the Lower Palaeolithic occurs over an area of 26 square metres
and through 2.4 metre deposit from the bottom, towards the inner part of the
shelter. This deposit has yielded 4,705 artefacts made from the locally
occurring ortho-quartzites and some introduced varieties of sandstones.
That the toolmaking took place in the shelter is indicated by the presence of
debitage well up to two-thirds of the collection. Over 60 per cent of the
collection is represented by the Acheulian bifaces and cleavers, and in
addition flake tools such as notches, denticulate scrapers, and knives have
been identified (Misra, 1976, 1978a and b, Misra et al., 1978).

Excavations at IIIA-28

At IIIA-28, five contiguous trenches were dug into the floor of the rock
shelter to a depth of 2 metres. Six cultural layers, from top to bottom, were
demarcated on the basis of cultural remains. The first two layers comprised
historical period remains. Layer 3 (20 centimetres thick) was represented by
a dense occurrence of microliths made from cryptocrystalline silica such as
chalcedony and agate and ceramics of Malwa ware, steatite beads, pigment
pieces, small number of copper artefacts, and faunal remains of deer, boar,
antelope, peacock, etc. Layer 4 (15 centimetres thick) dominantly
comprised a variety of geometric microliths assigned to conventional Late
Mesolithic period, because of the presence of geometric microliths. Further
below, at Layer 5, typical dense occurrence of microlithic assemblages was
documented along with a human burial. Layer 6 was identified as typical
Upper Palaeolithic of microlithic tradition. Layer 7 at the base of the trench
comprised of a Middle Palaeolithic assemblage made from quartzite
(Wakankar 1973, 1975a and b, Wakankar and Brooks 1965).

THE ROCK SHELTER HUMAN OCCUPATION IN THE

CUDDAPAH BASIN, ANDHRA PRADESH
Errajari Painted Rock Shelters

A couple of hundred painted rock shelters occur along the Errajari hill
range between Bethamcherla and Banaganapalli in the Kurnool basin of
Andhra Pradesh. Five rock shelters along the northern bank of the Jurreru
River near Jwalapuram were subject to detailed mapping and excavation
(Map 1).
On the walls of rock shelter 9 at Jwalapuram ( JWP9), for example,
paintings include a red outline elephant, red outline animal (probably a
humpback cow), two red outline and line infill unidentified quadrupeds,
two solid red human-like figures, a partial solid red human figure and a
solid red back-to-back human figure motif. Similar imageries are common
at many rock shelters in the region. These discoveries have added to the
earlier sporadic research on painted rock shelters in the region and
demonstrate that the Cuddapah basin painted rock shelter are no less
important than the Vindhyan and that South India also possesses a wide
range of rock art dating from the Pleistocene. These rock art sites are
located in an archaeologically rich area, as attested by the series of
Palaeolithic occurrence described above. Tacon et al. (2010) who made a
comprehensive study of the rock art of the area are of the opinion that
though the early rock art of the region under study is dissimilar to most of
the known rock art of India. It is however, comparable to Magdalenian rock
art of western Europe.

38–12 ka Microlithic Sequence at Rock Shelter Jwalapuram 9 ( JWP9)

At rock shelter JWP9, the front of the rock shelter is strewn with dense
scatter of microliths made from a variety of high quality cryptocrystalline
silica such as chalcedony, jasper, chert, etc. Excavation of the rock shelter
JWP9 at Jwalapuram in Kurnool basin of Andhra Pradesh has revealed a
microlithic industry that dates back to 35 ka (Map 1). The artefacts from the
excavation include proliferation of the microlithic industry, beads of stone
and shell, worked bone (harpoon and awl), and fragments of human
cranium; the first example of well-dated Pleistocene human fossils
(Clarkson et al. 2009).
A 4 x 4 metres trench to a depth of 3.3 metres was excavated at the base
of the rock shelter. The section was divisible into five layers (A–E) on the
basis of associated cultural material, and stratum F at the base was
identified as sterile calcretized bedrock. Neolithic to Iron Age cultural
materials were documented from the upper two Layers A and B, belonging
to the Late Holocene period (post 4200 YBP).
Layer C comprised calcium carbonate encrusted sediment, with a stone
feature indicating structural activity. There is an abundance of microlithic
artefacts and mussel shells. Bone artefacts include pieces of worked and cut
bone and antler. Lower layers (D–E) show decrease in the number of lithics,
bone, and shell. AMS radiocarbon dating of land snail and bivalve shelves
(Unio sp.) has provided ages of 20–12 ka to Layer C and around 34 ka to
Layer D. Significant finds are listed below:
Human Remains: Jwalapuram 9 has preserved first well-dated remains
of human cranial fragments of Homo sapiens in India. Four cranial vault
fragments and a tooth come from the Layer C, bracketed by ages of 20 and
12 ka cal. YBP. These fragments show calcined marks, indicating cremation
practices.
Faunal Remains: A total of 2,732 vertebrate animal remains and 1,644
mollusc shells have been recovered from excavations. Wild animals are
represented by Gazella gazelle, Antilope cervicapra, Boselaphus
tragocamelus, Sus sp., Tetracerus quadricornis and Muntiacus muntjak.
Small and medium sized ungulates dominate the assemblage. Only a few
bones derive from carnivore and non-human primates. Change in the
macrovertebrate assemblage through time reveal shift in habitat preference
from Layers D to C, suggesting broad environmental changes in the region
during the later Pleistocene shift from OIS 3 to 2.
A solitary example of uniserial harpoon was found around the same
depth as the initial proliferation of backed artefacts. The mollusc
assemblage record from the site reveals the intensity of site use, with
emphasis on freshwater bivalves collection through the period of
occupation at the rock shelter. Large land snails constituted an important
component of diet during much of the periods covered by Layers D and C.
 Symbolic Artefacts: The oldest known stone beads are documented
from Layer C-25 limestone and bone beads, along with stone drills and a
suspected bone awl. A large number of bead blanks are also recovered. A
striated red ochre crayon has also been at the interface between Layers C
and D.

NEOLITHIC CAVE HABITAION: SANYASULA GAVI AND

BILLA SURGAM CAVE COMPLEX, KURNOOL BASIN,
ANDHRA PRADESH
The Sanyasula Caves occur as a cluster of caves in the interior region of the
Kurnool basin. There are five caves, among them three are large caves
(Sanyasula Caves 1–3). Currently they are used by ascetics. Ethnographic
and ethnoarchaeological accounts indicate that foragers visited the caves in
order to trap animals such as porcupines and collect honey from beehives.

Cave 1

A 1x1 metre trench was dug to a depth of 1.5 metres. The upper layers
contained potsherds and a sandstone quern. The lower levels yielded as
many as 116 microlithic blades and bladelets. The sandstone quern found in
the upper levels indicates the possibility for plant processing activities.

Cave 2

In Cave 2, a 1x2 metres unit was dug to a depth of 1.6 metres depth. The
most conspicuous stratigraphic feature in the unit was a bone bed,
consisting of large quantities of micromammal fauna and an ash layer.
Potsherds were recovered in the upper most levels as 45 lithic artefacts
including blades and bladelets. Radiocarbon samples obtained from Cave 2
provided estimates of 1159 ±30 YBP for Layer A and 3515 ± 35 YBP for
Layer B (ca. 1900–1800 cal. BCE).
Ceramics from the upper units of both caves were similar in having a
mixture of Neolithic and later types, although Neolithic types dominated.
Nearly 300 potsherds were collected from both the caves, a significant
number were of the distinctive Neolithic Patpad painted ware. A few
unburnished black-slipped, red-polished, and coarse red ware sherds
indicated continuity into the Iron Age or historic times. Forms include
typical Neolithic open bowls and a necked jar of later Neolithic type.
Of the many vertebrate remains (n = 3836) from the Sanyasula Caves,
about 97 per cent are from small-sized rodents (pre dominant at Sanyasula
Gavi 2), bats (predominant at Sanyasula Gavi 1), birds, amphibians, and
reptiles. Interestingly, only wild taxa have been positively identified in the
small macrovertebrate assemblage—nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus),
sambar (Cervus unicolor), four-horned antelope (Tetracerus quadricornis),
a small bovid, a small fox (Vulpus sp.), black-naped hare (Lepus
nigricollis), mongoose (Herpestes edwardsi), bandicoot rat (Nesokia sp.),
and porcupine (Hystrix indica). These sites produced a small land snail
assemblage (n = 303) that includes a mix of the genera Cryptozona,
Cyclotopois, and Pterocyclus. Flotation of soil samples yielded evidence of
at least local crops, including brown top millet (Brachiaria ramosa) and
mungbean (Vigna radiata), two of the predominant staples of the South
Indian Neolithic. A possible barley fragment was also present, as was the
Indian jujube fruit. A direct AMS date on the mungbean (R 28680/33;
3515±35 YBP) and another on jujube. (BA-04397; 3505±40 YBP)
confirmed the Neolithic association of these crops and put back the
Neolithic occupation in these caves to ca. 1900 BCE.

ROCK SHELTER JWP9 NEOLITHIC OCCUPATION

Ceramics came only from the upper feature B1, which appears to have been
a burial pit. A total of 983 sherds were recovered and examined. Most
sherds are thin walled, and might have been made by paddle-and-anvil
technique rather than the coil methods considered more typical of Neolithic
ceramics. Interestingly there is complete absence of the typical Patpad
ware, suggesting a post-Neolithic occupation but predating the classic
Megalithic period. A small number of red-slipped polished sherds are
indicative of a Megalithic time horizon. A few recognizable forms are also
of Iron Age types, including an open bowl form with inturn rim, and a
narrow-neck evert rim jar. Both of these forms can be regarded as evolving
from Neolithic antecedents and to occur rather earlier than more elaborately
rimmed jars and carinated bowls which are more typical of the Classic
Megalithic period.
Billa Surgam Cave: Evidence for Neolithic Occupation

The Billa Surgam is a complex of caves: Cathedral, Charnel House,

Purgatory, Chapter House North, etc. The cave complex is situated along
the foot of the southern escarpment, locally called Yerrakonda. The
lithological succession includes sandstone, shale, and quartzite. Of these the
Charnel House Cave and Cathedral Cave floors were excavated to greater
depths in order to reach the bedrock. Excavations and analyses of cave floor
deposits did not, however, yield diagnostic and definite lithic artefacts of
the Palaeolithic period. However identification of the presence of YTT
glass shards enhanced the scope of dating the cave floor deposits. The
composite stratigraphy of the two caves—Cathedral and Charnel House
caves—has revealed an 11-metres sequence of deposits characterized by silt
dominated cave earths (silt grade siliciclastic deposits), with intercalations
of angular blocky limestone breccias and lenses of well-rounded waterworn
pebble conglomerate. Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating of
the strata and the identification of YYT at a depth of 3.5 metres from the
top in the Charnel House floor deposits has enabled the chronometry of the
sedimentary strata, ranging in time from more than 200 ka to the present,
from the base to the top (Roberts et al., 2014).
The upper levels of the Charnel House are dated to the Holocene by the
presence of Neolithic pottery. The Neolithic occupation of these caves is
also supported by the presence of ceramic sherds and a dated nested
diamond shaped petroglyph (5000 YBP) on the wall of Cathedral cave
(Tacon et al., 2013). The absence of lithic artefacts in the excavations was
compensated by abundant micro and macro palaeontological remains.
5
MICROLITHS BEFORE THE HOLOCENE

Bishnupriya Basak

Microliths form part of Stone Age industries, which imply a particular

technological skill for making systematically knapped microblades and
backed artefacts. Microblades are defined as blades (a blade is a flake with
more or less parallel sides and length equal to twice its breadth) with a
maximum dimension of 4 centimetres. Backed artefacts made on
microblades are composite tools that were hafted on arrows or spears to
hunt small animals. Associated with both archaic and modern humans, they
are found in different parts of the world at different time scales. Microliths
in the subcontinent have a chronological continuity till 3,000 YBP.
However, for the present concern we shall dwell on the microlithic
technologies of the Late Pleistocene (1,30,000–10,000 YBP) which have
been invariably linked with modern human origins, dispersals, and the
emergence of more complex human behaviour. As the Indian subcontinent
lies on a crucial west-east corridor of hominin expansion across Asia, it has
emerged as a prominent site for debates centring the human dispersal and
colonization. The common African ancestry is not doubted; the debate is on
how and when modern humans left Africa. Over the last decade or so our
understanding of the problem has been substantiated by results generated
from major interdisciplinary projects and enhanced control over
chronometric dating in South Asia. There have been two contrasting models
put forth by archaeologists. Paul Mellars (2006) has argued that modern
humans left Africa sometime after 60,000 YBP with a distinctive
microlithic technology, entering the Indian subcontinent around 50,000
YBP. Other cultural components like ostrich egg shells, seashell beads and
bone tools occasionally formed part of the microlithic assemblage. This
view has been supported by Mishra et al. with results derived from
excavations at the site of Metakheri, in the Narmada valley, in the Vindhya
basin, Madhya Pradesh. The microlithic industry of the site was constituted
of microblade cores and microblades, and dated to 45,000 YBP. Sheila
Mishra argued that the assemblage showed clear affinities with the South
African Howiesons Poort industry, indicative of a sharp break with the
earlier Middle Palaeolithic industry (Mishra et al., 2013). Thus modern
humans, she stated, could have only entered the subcontinent with the
microlithic industries, which are likely to have had a deeper chronology.
Clarkson and Petraglia with their colleagues on the other hand have argued
that the microlithic technology was a device to adapt to deteriorating
climatic conditions at the end of a warm wet phase when populations were
very large (Clarkson et al., 2009). The microliths were standardized tools
made on cryptocrystalline raw material forming part of a reliable toolkit
which were maintainable once they were made. They proposed that the
transition to these industries from the earlier Middle Palaeolithic/Middle
Stone Age prepared core or Levallois technology was gradual and the
microliths evolved from the latter, thus it was a local development. They
proposed that modern humans were already in the subcontinent by at least
65,000 YBP, during the time of the Middle Palaeolithic. Of late, with recent
discoveries, the impact of the Toba volcanic ash eruption approximately
74,000 YBP (the Youngest Toba Tuff or YTT) on hominin populations has
become the chronometer in the debate (Clarkson et al., 2020). Thus the
debate now centres on whether Homo sapiens entered the subcontinent
prior to the YTT event with a non-microlithic African Middle Stone Age
technology or they arrived with microlithic technologies resembling the
Howiesons Poort technologies of South Africa around 50,000– 60,000 YBP.
As hominin fossil remains are rare in the subcontinent, the lithic industries
become significant indicators of modern human dispersal and presence. The
database and chronology to understand the problem is still inadequate and
restricted to a few sites in the subcontinent. The Dhaba locality, located on
the banks of the Middle Son River in the Vindhya basin, Madhya Pradesh
has yielded evidence of human habitation, the earliest dates going back to
80,000 YBP covering the period just prior to the YTT and continuing
beyond. The lithic technology resembling African Middle Stone Age
industries continues with a break at 48,000 YBP with the introduction of
microlithic technologies. As of now this represents the earliest chronology
of microliths in the subcontinent, the assemblage constituting of
microblades, backed artefacts, and microblade cores. Quartz and agate are
the dominant stone types used in their making. It has been claimed that the
transition to microlithic industries is a stepwise development that spans the
YTT event. A similar stepwise development from the Middle
Palaeolithic/MSA industries has been also argued for the site of Jwalapuram
in the Jurreru Valley, Andhra Pradesh. Predominantly Middle Palaeolihic
assemblages underlying the YTT event (Map 1) abound in the open air
sites. At Jwalapuram rock shelter, a continuity of microlithic technology
from 35,000 YBP is documented till well into the Holocene. The lithic
sequence with changes in core and flake technology is suggestive of a
gradual development of microlithic technology.
Thus, it has been argued that the transition to microlithic technology
was gradual from an earlier existing Middle Palaeolithic prepared core
technology. There was no abrupt break as has been claimed by Mishra. The
modern humans did not make a drastic entry, but could be rather associated
with the Middle Palaeolithic, gradually adapting to the deteriorating
climatic conditions with an effective technology.
The early chronology of microliths is now well-established. Recent
researches on microlithic industries of two sites, Mahadebbera and Kana,
on the colluvium-covered pediment surface of the Ayodhya hills, Purulia,
West Bengal have yielded a chronology of 42,000–25,000 YBP (Basak et
al., 2014). The industries may be seen in relation to the other sites as well as
those in Sri Lanka. These microlithic industries, incorporating both
microblade and geometric and non-geometric microliths, made mostly on
felsic tuff are not found in association with other cultural components,
which is suggestive of a regional heterogeneity. Overall, the microlithic
assemblages also speak of a technological specialization best suited to deal
with environmental deterioration. However, in the absence of
environmental data nothing more conclusive can be said. Although a few
Middle Palaeolithic prepared cores have been found from a third site in the
region any association between the two is conjectural.
The outcome from the Ayodhya hills points us to the complexity of the
problem. It may be challenging to accommodate all datasets into either of
the models given the varied patterns of developments across the
subcontinent, besides inadequate evidence. The dispersal of Homo sapiens
in South Asia can neither be explained by a single dispersal route. The
importance of these researches lie in the crucial role they have played in
successfully challenging the previously existing notion of microliths as
products of only the Holocene. This has forced one to rethink the Stone Age
cultures of South Asia.
6
POST-GLACIAL CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS IMPACT ON
LIFE: 18000 YBP TO PRESENT

Gwen Robbins Schug

Research on palaeoclimate is a critical source of evidence for understanding

the archaeological record and for making predictions about future trends in
the context of global warming. There are some climate-related trends that
occur on a global scale, while others are much more localized. This short
report summarizes current knowledge about broad trends in climate and
environmental change for the past 18,000 years, covering the tail end of the
Pleistocene (2.6 my to 12 ka YBP) and the entirety of the Holocene (12 ka
YBP to present) epoch.

MONSOON
The most important climatic variable for India is the strength and
predictability of the monsoon system. The southwest monsoon brings most
of India’s annual precipitation; it hits the southern tip at the end of summer
(typically in the month of June) and slowly moves over the subcontinent
through September, with rainfall decreasing as it travels north. The
northeast (winter) monsoon from December to February brings cyclones
(Western Disturbances) that are responsible for approximately one-third of
India’s annual precipitation in the north. Variability of the southwest
(summer) monsoon has been tracked historically since 1870 as this system
is primarily responsible for economic and agricultural production; the
winter monsoon has been less studied and is less well understood (Dimri et
al., 2016).
Proxy palaeoclimate records go back millions of years in deep sea cores
from the Northern Indian Ocean and from records of wind-blown silt (loess)
from China. The latter demonstrate the establishment of the Indian
monsoon system at the end of the Late Miocene, when the uplift of the
Tibetan Plateau reached a height that created a low-pressure zone over the
Indian subcontinent strong enough to pull moisture from South and East
Africa on a cyclical basis. From the Late Pleistocene, climate, seasonality,
and monsoon strength were determined by coinciding natural forces
involving predictable cycles of insolation, eccentricity of the earth’s orbit,
precession, and obliquity (Clemens et al., 2021).
These natural Milankovitch cycles coincided to create periods of
warmer, wetter climate alternating with periods of colder, drier climate. The
Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was associated with relatively arid
conditions. As the ice sheets melted, and sea levels rose with the onset of
the Holocene, warmer and more stable climatic conditions prevailed. In
general, the Early to mid-Holocene (9,000–6,000 YBP) in India was
characterized by a warm, moist period when the summer monsoon
intensified. The modern, semi-arid climatic regime of central and northwest
India was established approximately 5,000 years ago. A substantial
anthropogenic warming trend associated with the Anthropocene became
noticeable in the twentieth century and is expected to increase mean annual
surface temperatures and annual precipitation across the subcontinent.

BROAD CLIMATE TRENDS IN INDIA

The earliest work on palaeoclimatic reconstruction was based on
palynology from lake core data in northwest India (G. Singh, 1974; G.
Singh, Joshi, and Singh 1972; S. Singh, 1977; G. Singh, 1971). Those early
reconstructions suggested a warmer, wetter phase from 9–6 ka YBP,
followed by a more arid phase lasting until 4,700 YBP, and the
establishment of contemporary climatic conditions around 1,000 YBP. This
work was followed up by the same author in 1990 with improved methods
and chronology (G. Singh, 1990). The more recent reconstruction described
the climatic sequence in northwest India as arid until 13 ka YBP, relatively
more humid until 4,200 YBP, when contemporary conditions were
established, punctuated by an extremely arid phase at 4,200 YBP, when
both summer and winter monsoon appear to have failed.
Dune formation in the northwest deserts is associated with arid phases
and changes in vegetation cover. An analysis of aeolian sediments indicated
large deposits of windblown sand led to the formation of sand dunes dated
via thermoluminescence to 13–11ka YBP, 5,200 YBP, and 3,500 YBP,
suggesting an arid climate predominated at that time (Wasson et al., 1983).
Data from Arabian Sea cores has been interpreted as supporting this
reconstruction, demonstrating a strengthening of the summer monsoon from
11 ka YBP to the Mid-Holocene (Staubwasser et al., 2003; Gupta et al.,
2004; Caratini, 1994; von Rad, 1999). Broadly, it appears that Early
Holocene was characterized by a humid phase and fluctuating lake levels;
the semi-arid climate of northwest India was broadly established by 5,000
YBP (Prasad and Enzel, 2006).
Landscape changes resulting from human activity have been significant
throughout the latter half of the Holocene (Stephens et al., 2019),
culminating in the designation of a new geological epoch named the
Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin, 2015). In South Asia, increasing
dependence on agriculture and domesticated animals began at Mehrgarh at
the beginning of the Indus Age (9,000–3,300 YBP) and has substantially
altered the ecosystem and the biosphere since 5,000 YBP. While human
activities have changed the climate and environment on a global scale, the
climate has also shaped biocultural adaptations in India, creating a multi-
cropping system that is responsive to monsoonal variation, for example
(Petrie and Bates, 2017).
The broad climate trends described here are important but so are data
that describe Rapid Climate Change (RCC) events that we know occurred
on a large scale throughout the Holocene. Most of these events are periods
of several centuries when there is evidence of severe and prolonged global
drought. These events occurred at 8.2 ka YBP, 4.2 ka YBP, and 3.1 ka YBP.
Global mega-droughts are associated with substantial sociocultural and
historical impacts across Eurasia, Africa, and in the Americas. This is
particularly true for the latter two RCC events, which occurred during a
period of increasing social complexity, urbanism, and widespread reliance
on agricultural production. In India, these mega-droughts caused failure of
the monsoon rains for centuries and were associated with the disintegration
of the Indus Valley Civilization and large-scale population movements in
central India, respectively.
7
WEATHER PATTERNS

Sridhar Vajapey

Anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago.

Due to various reasons, these early humans then started to migrate out of
Africa into other parts of the world already populated by other human
species such as Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and many other
hominins. India had been populated by Homo erectus and other early
hominins.
We must first ask the question of why there has been migration out of
Africa. Early humans being hunter–gatherers depended upon animals which
in turn had to migrate chasing food. Local population growth and the
sustainability reasons were perhaps among the reasons inducing early
humans to migrate. Sustainability itself is driven in a large part by local and
global weather pattern changes and hence one of the drivers of migration.
Aside from the normal seasonal weather fluctuations, there are other
causes for systemic weather pattern variations that occur over hundreds and
thousands of years which completely reshape the global landscape such as
changing grasslands into deserts affecting the food supply for animals and
hence humans. For this we must step back and look at the world weather
pattern timetable on a much larger time scale. Much work has been done,
by analysing the ice-cores from Antarctica, and world climatic conditions
have been looked at for the last 450,000 years.
Global weather pattern changes are caused primarily by three
parametres related to the major movements of the earth, viz., earth’s
eccentricity, obliquity, and precession, which have approximate durations of
1,00,000, 41,000, and 23,000 years respectively. Driven by these three, one
finds that the changes are cyclic, with the earth going through long cold
glacial periods and then comparatively shorter warm inter-glacial periods.
Weather fluctuations have been observed to be between 85,000 years to
110,000 years approximately (Buis, 2020).
 The past 450,000 years can be seen to have five warm phases including
the one we are in, with long cold phases interspersed between them. With
anatomically modern humans having evolved 2,00,000–2,50,000 years
before present, they have gone through two glacial periods, one at the dawn
of evolution of anatomically modern humans, and one warm phase. We are
currently experiencing the second warm phase. During the last glacial
period, about 1,00,000 years before present, the changing climatic
conditions and inadequate food supply were the most likely causes
encouraging the first migrations out of Africa between 90,000 and 70,000
YBP with many of these early migrants entering India. The lower sea levels
would have enabled easy crossings of the Red Sea and other water bodies.
Coming out of the last glacial period (Carlson, 2013), about 12,000 years
ago, during the Younger Dryas Stadial period which lasted about 1,300
years, there was an abrupt and severe cooling starting in the northern
hemisphere and propagating to the southern hemisphere. This cooling in the
northern hemisphere led to aridity.
Back in time, during the glacial periods, a large part of the land mass,
especially in the northern latitudes, was quite uninhabitable reducing the net
effective regions available to be populated by early humans. During the
warm periods, as we are observing now, the weather patterns fluctuate to
more extremes between excessive rainfall and flooding in many areas and
droughts in many other areas forcing the resident populations to move.
Early humans being hunter–gatherers, effectively followed the animals,
their major source of food. We see this nomadic relationship between
reindeer and the Chukchi people in parts of Siberia in the Chukotka region
even today.
For the early Homo sapiens, its likely that the changes in the Sahara
region, its gradual reduction of pastoral lands forced the migration of the
early peoples down south in Africa and for some small bands of people,
migration out of Africa. With much of Europe under large ice sheets, the
genetic breadcrumbs give us visibility of the migration paths taken out of
Africa, viz., a southerly route through the Horn of Africa into Arabian
Peninsula into India and the other a northerly route through Egypt and then
a subsequent dispersal both eastwards and westwards. For India the
eastward migration both from the southern and the northern migration
routes are of interest.
 Early migration through the southerly paths were made easier by the
fact that the ice sheets all over Europe and Americas caused the seas to be
lower by over 300 feet allowing land bridges across some of today’s seas.
The Red Sea was in fact much reduced as were the Bering Straits as
examples making migration of early humans possible more easily than
today.
8
HOLOCENE CLIMATE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SOUTH
ASIA

Dorian Q. Fuller

The Holocene is the most recent geological period in earth history, although
currently the utility of separating a more recent Anthropocene is debated
(Lewis and Maslin, 2015). Proponents of recognizing an Anthropocene era
contend that human activities have become a force in the earth’s system,
affecting climate and sedimentological processes in fundamental and
perhaps irreversible ways in recent times. Throughout the Pleistocene
(starting c. 2 million years ago) Earth’s climate has vacillated between cold
glacial periods and generally shorter interglacials. These are recognized
globally in ocean sediment record with fluctuating isotopes (marine isotope
stages, numbered from the most recent, therefore, MIS 1= the Holocene),
and in ice core records from Greenland and Antarctica. From the
perspective of glacial stages, the Holocene is the most recent interglacial,
starting 11,700 years ago (9750 BCE). Compared to glacial periods, the
climate of the Holocene inter-glacial has been relatively stable with only
modest fluctuations, but that is not to say that significant climatic changes
did not occur. Indeed significant changes have taken place globally and are
evident in the records of palaeovegetation and past monsoons in India
(Dimri et al., 2022).
In cultural terms, the Holocene is the only period in earth history in
which human societies included farming economies or permanent
settlements, but these cultural innovations did not take place uniformly in
time or in character across the globe. A major focus of archaeological and
palaeoenvironemtnal research is to identify the origins and spread of
agriculture and to characterize its impacts on regional environments. Recent
global synthesis suggests as many as twenty-four plausibly independent
centres of plant domestication or agricultural origins. Among those
documented archaeologically, only five date from the Early Holocene,
taking place before 8,000 years ago, while the majority—at least nine—
occurred in the Mid-Holocene, between 8,200 and 4,200 years ago (Larson
et al., 2014). Among the Mid-Holocene centres of domestication are three
in India, including western India (around Saurashtra), the northern valleys
(middle Ganga basin), and the southern Deccan. The northwestern regions
of Balochistan and the Indus valley derive their earliest crops and livestock
from western Asia probably around the transition to the Mid-Holocene
around 8,000 years ago, although additional local domestication events
included zebu cattle, tree cotton, and riverine water buffalo (Fuller, 2006;
Fuller and Murphy, 2018).
Climatic changes through the Holocene can be characterized in terms of
overall temperature, especially important in northern latitudes, and in terms
of rainfall and length of dry season, which were effective in semiarid and
tropical regions such as the Indian subcontinent. The coldest conditions of
glacial periods in northern regions like Europe or the high Himalayas
correlate with drier periods in regions such as India, which means an
expanded Thar Desert, a Ballari region desert in the south, and much
expanded savannah grasslands and reduced forests. In the Early Holocene,
by contrast the world was warmer, which meant stronger and longer
monsoons, greening of most of the Thar, and much expanded tropical
forests through most of the Deccan. Glacial melt meant that ocean levels
were rising and coastlines retreating; Sri Lanka would have separated from
the Indian mainland in this era. Species that had been restricted to tropical
forest refugia would have expanded; this offered new diversity to many
hunter–gatherer societies of the Mesolithic. A global dry/cold event took
place around 8,200–7,900 YBP, meaning expanded deserts and grasslands
took place in the transition to the Middle Holocene. Some scholars attribute
to this period the expansion of farming or pastoralism out of southwest
Asia, or the beginnings of agriculture in other regions such as parts of
China.
The Middle Holocene (8,200–4,200 YBP) as a whole saw the return of
warmer and wetter conditions, often termed a climatic optimum. In river
basins where farming was already established such as Mesopotamia, the
Indus valley, or the Chinese Yangtze and Yellow rivers, sedentary
settlements expanded with the first urban centres towards the end of this
era, e.g. 5,600 YBP Mesopotamia, 5,200 YBP in the Lower Yangtze, 4,600
YBP in the Indus Valley. In most of India this period was characterized by
expanded areas of tropical forest (Ponton et al., 2012). Over the course of
time, however, there was a gradual weakening of the monsoon and drying,
which led to the expansion of grassland and dry scrub forests in place of
dense forests. Evidence from the Deccan indicates a substantial expansion
of savannah from 5,500–4,500 years ago. This formed a corridor of open
environments that linked the semi-arid grasslands of the Thar Desert
margins through the middle of the Deccan Plateau (Reidel et al, 2021). The
weakening of the monsoons, however also coincided with an anomalous
period of increased winter rains in the northwestern/Indus region from
4,500–3,000 YBP (Goisan et al., 2018).
This period was crucial for the emergence and spread of crop cultivation
and pastoralism in tropical savannahs, including domestication of millets in
Africa and South Asia. After 5,500 YBP, archaeology reveals the first
evidence in Gujarat for domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and cereal of local
origin (Brachiaria ramosa, Panicum sumatrense) (Garcia-Granero et al.,
2016). In south Indian livestock, pastoralism had spread to Karnataka by
5,000–4,500 YBP, and local domestication of millets (Brachiaria ramosa)
and pulses (Vigna radiata, Macrotyloma uniflorum, Cajanus cajan) took
place by 4,000 YBP.
Subsequent climatic shifts to wetter and drier conditions took place but
were generally more modest, with somewhat wetter conditions taking place
during the height of Early Historic Urbanism (2,300–1,700 YBP) and again
during the high medieval period (1,300–700 YBP). What is known as the
Little Ice Age in Europe began around 1360 CE and continued to around
1800; this correlates with increased drought frequency, and fewer river
floods in India (Kale and Baker, 2006). A reversal and trend towards
warming took place as fossil fuel use rose over the past few centuries.
9
ANTHROPOLOGICAL MAN

Subhash Walimbe

Great African apes (gorillas and chimpanzees) are humans’ closest relatives
in the primate family. It is believed that sometime around 4 million years
ago, human ancestors left the trees (A. afarensis stage), started walking, and
began to live in larger groups. Though they were spending more time on
ground they still retained the bodily capability to brachiate. Their behaviour
was still more ape-like. The perfect bipedal striding gait was achieved
around 2 million years ago at the Homo erectus stage. Eventually their
brains also got bigger. The more evolved and bigger brain enabled us to
behave differently and go far complex reasoning abilities. Yet these
biological changes are not the only factors which make us the modern man,
different from the pre-hominids.
One of the most significant traits that make humans unique is the ability
to stand and walk on two legs (biped striding gait). This enabled humans to
hold, carry, pick up, throw, touch, and see from a higher visual plane, with
stereoscopic vision as the dominant sense. With such upright posture,
humans were able to travel great distances as well, using relatively little
energy in the process. When the upper limbs (hands) were freed from
locomotor duties they could be used to manipulate objects of nature. This
was possible because of the efficient opposable thumbs (meaning the ability
to touch the other fingers with thumb). Humans have a relatively longer and
more distally placed thumb and larger thumb muscles. This gives fine motor
skills to perform precision grip (when force is applied between the
fingertips of isolated digits to a small target, like writing with a pencil) and
power grip (which demands using the whole hand for higher stability and
power around the target object, like holding a stone or stick). Human
shoulders evolved in such a way that the whole shoulder joint angles out
horizontally from the neck. This is in contrast to the ape shoulder, which is
pointed more vertically. The ape shoulder is better suited for hanging from
trees, whereas the human shoulder is better for throwing and hunting,
giving humans invaluable survival skills.
Humans have naked, hairless skin with sweat glands. This change is
attributed to the dramatic climate changes around 2,00,000 years ago,
compelling human groups to travel long distances for food and water.
Abundance of sweat glands and hairless, naked skin enabled them to
maintain their body at the right temperature while travelling in unfriendly
climatic settings.
The other outstanding human feature is the large and complex human
brain. The relative size, scale, and capacity of the human brain is greater
than that of any other species. Interestingly the human brain grows more
during the lifespan. The childhood of a human being is of the longest
duration, requiring the offspring to be with elder members of the group for a
longer period of time, providing enough time to learn and get trained—
consequently maturity and independence occurs much later.
It is not clear exactly when speech evolved, or how. Homo erectus
probably started with language-like symbols as a way to express
themselves, followed by the ability to speak after the modifications in the
oral apparatus. In humans the tongue became more flexible and independent
and came to be controlled more precisely. The tongue is attached to the
hyoid bone, which is not attached to any other bones in the body. The
human neck is longer so that it can accommodate the tongue and larynx.
This increased flexibility of the mouth, tongue, and lips enables humans to
speak as well as to change pitch. The ability to speak and develop language
was an enormous advantage for humans.
Larger, more complex brains made the modern man very special in
many behavioural and emotional ways, though no ‘science’ can prove or
quantify this enormous contribution in the evolutionary model.
The human mind is different from the brain. The brain is the visible part
of the physical body whereas the mind reflects thoughts, feelings, beliefs,
and consciousness. Humans have the unique ability to imagine the possible
future and to prepare accordingly, increasing their chances of survival. The
reasoning and the structures of thought are more refined and developed in
the human being than in most living organisms.
The perception of forethought also gives humans the awareness of
mortality. The knowledge of mortality probably prompted humans onto
great achievements. It is believed that without the knowledge of death, the
birth of civilization, and the accomplishments it has spawned might never
have occurred.
Memories and knowledge are passed on through human communication
from generation to generation, allowing human culture to evolve.
There is little evidence that any other hominins made any kind of art.
Although some animals are able to draw plans and assimilate or learn
certain things, they always act by instinct and not as a result of a logical
reasoning of the causes, consequences, advantages, and disadvantages of
the scenarios. The symbols made by modern humans are clearly more
advanced. The ability to read and perceive others made humans develop
intimate bonds. They not only became increasingly reliant on each other,
but also developed a great sense of responsibility.
At this juncture, our brains needed fuel to get bigger and so
collaborative hunting may have played a key role in that. The acquisition of
food among from the Homo erectus era is a corporate and well-organized
responsibility, an activity involving exchange and sharing among adults and
young. On the contrary food acquisition among apes or lower hominids is a
solitary affair. Not only the acquisition but typical postponement of the
consumption of at least some food among Homo erectus, until they return to
a home base, was very unique act exhibiting family ties. Large game
hunting requires accurate planning and coordination of activities among
group members, including decisions such as where and what to hunt, the
distance to be covered, the kind of tool kit required, and other items
(including food items, containers to bring food back to base camp, etc.)—
these required a high-skilled brain and requisite thinking abilities, which the
Homo erectus possessed.
In brief, the traits which makes us ‘different’ from our close biological
associates are physical, biological, social, and emotional.
 PART II

FOUNDATIONS, EMERGENCE, AND THE

DECLINE OF CIVILIZATION
10
PRIMEVAL HUNTER–GATHERER SOCIETIES OF INDIA

K. Paddayya

‘That speechless past…lost is lost…gone is gone’ was the uncomplimentary

remark that was freely made in medieval Europe about what we now call
prehistoric or preliterate past. The world had to wait for validation of the
prehistoric past until the Royal Society’s ratification in 1859 of the
authenticity and Ice Age (Pleistocene) antiquity of stone tools found earlier
together with fossilized bones of extinct species of wild cattle and other
mammals in the old river gravels of France and England. Fortified further
by the revolutionary developments in earth and biological sciences,
prehistory emerged as a distinct branch of archaeology by the end of the
century and was soon introduced into the university curriculum. The East
African discoveries of fossil human skeletal material and stone tools
initiated in the 1950s by the Kenyan British archaeologists and
palaeontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, and continued by later workers,
have stretched back our hominin ancestry to 3 million years.
We now also know that this long prehistoric prelude—Nehru admiringly
called it ‘that astonishing adventure of man’ in The Discovery of India
(1960)—consists of several developmental stages of the mobile hunting–
gathering way of life, which began to transform into a settled agropastoral
way of life towards the beginning of Holocene (12,000 years ago). In due
course, this led to the rise of civilization in certain parts of the Old World.
Interestingly, these broad cultural phases in human history (hunting,
pastoralism, agriculture, and civilization) were already envisaged in the
writings of Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century. Gordon
Childe’s books, Man Makes Himself (1956) and What Happened in History
(1950), and Robert Redfield’s work, The Primitive World and Its
Transformations (1968), brought this whole message to the doorsteps of
educated laymen across the world. More recently, as if giving a fresh rebuff
to the dismissive comment of the medieval age, in their edited book, Deep
History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011), the American
historians Andrew Shryock and Daniel Smail make a forceful statement that
many of the human attributes had their genesis in the prehistoric prelude
itself. So they advocate that we do away with the phrase ‘prehistory’ and
instead call it ‘deep history’. In the Indian context we may call it the ‘deep
past’.
Turning now to the Indian evidence for prehistoric hunter‒gatherer
communities, three things immediately strike us. First, quite unlike the
Judeo‒Christian conception of a 4,000-year-long antiquity of the world and
man, ancient Indian cosmogony treats both time and space as ananta
(limitless). The cyclic conception of time in Hindu cosmology, as enshrined
in the yugas and mahayugas (ages), is at variance with the linear notion of
Western thought. Secondly, some of the ancient Indian writings such as the
Jain text Kalpasutra and King Bhoja’s work Samaranganasutradhara
contain references which state that in the distant past people were living in
hills and forests and on plant foods (kalpavrikshas or wish-fulfilling trees)
catered for all their needs. Later on they learnt how to cut down trees, sow
seeds, crush grains, make pots, etc. The important thing to note is that, like
the famous Latin poetic work De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, these ancient
Indian textual references envisage that the infancy of human story was long
and was characterized by the foraging and farming stages.
In India, the scientific proof of these literary references to a primeval
hunting‒gathering way of life came in 1863–64 with the colonial geologist
Robert Bruce Foote’s discovery of stone implements at Pallavaram and
several other sites in the area around Chennai. Thus prehistory was born in
India on the heels of its recognition in northern Europe. Foote pursued his
prehistoric findings assiduously in southern India and Gujarat for the next
thirty-five years and brought to light over 450 sites. While he used his
geological background to make accurate recording of landscape and
sedimentary contexts of sites, Foote adopted an anthropological approach
for reading their cultural meanings. He assigned these sites to four
successive periods, viz. Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Early Iron Age, and Later
Iron Age, which mark what he called ‘stages in the progress of civilization’.
Stone technology and foraging were the hallmarks of the Palaeolithic
period, while the Neolithic period already witnessed agropastoral activity
and the knowledge of pottery, basketry, and other crafts. Metals like gold
and bronze appeared in the later Iron Age, so Foote called it protohistoric,
meaning a transitional stage between prehistory devoid of writing and
history. In his seminal work, The Foote Collection of Indian Prehistoric and
Protohistoric Antiquities: Notes on Their Ages and Distribution (1916), he
puts together his various research papers that won a secure place for India
in world prehistory well before World War II. Foote is therefore rightly and
fondly remembered as the father of Indian prehistory (Paddayya, 2018).
Surely, Indian prehistory made remarkable progress during the next one
hundred years, thanks to the detailed field investigations undertaken in
different parts of India by workers from the Archaeological Survey of India
and universities. These advances involved a series of theoretical and
methodological innovations which include: a) the selection of areas away
from major rivers, followed by intensive foot surveys for the discovery of
primary or in situ sites where life activities actually took place in lieu of
earlier findings of stone tools from secondary deposits like river gravel; b)
redefinition of culture not merely as a list of similar-looking objects but
comprising a series of interacting components; c) and culture as an adaptive
mechanism for dealing with surrounding environment in life maintenance
or resource-use activities. Earth and biological sciences have been tapped
for palaeoenviormental reconstructions. We now know that during the
Pleistocene, climate changed from wet to semi-arid and arid conditions.
Prehistoric research also benefited from analogies drawn from experimental
studies as well as ethnographic research pertaining to living hunter‒gatherer
and other simple societies. Another major development relates to
chronology. In the place of earlier relative dating of cultures with the help
of site or regional stratigraphy of alluvial and other sediments, several
methods developed by physical sciences have been used for dating sites in
absolute terms stretching back to more than a million years.
Information about the developmental stages within the Stone Age and
their general chronological ranges can be summarized in a tabular form as
follows (Sankalia, 1977; Dhavalikar, 2014; Paddayya and Deo, 2017):

Culture Age in Years (Before Present)

Lower Palaeolithic/Acheulian 15,00,000–1,50,000
culture (with three phases)
Middle Palaeolithic 1,50,000–45,000
Upper Palaeolithic 45,000–10,000
Mesolithic (terminal phase) 10,000–6,000
(followed by
Agropastoral/Neolithic–
Chalcolithic period)

The above table is admittedly a gross one and needs some clarifications.
First, besides the Acheulian culture, the Lower Palaeolithic has a second
tradition called the Soan confined to the Siwalik zone of Punjab but many
doubts surround its identity and age. Secondly, the lower limit of the
Acheulian is based on the dates of 1.2 and 1.5 million years calibrated for
Isampur in Karnataka and Attirampakkam in Tamil Nadu, respectively
(Map 1). These dates are only suggestive and we need many more such
early dates as conclusive proof of the Early Pleistocene age of the Lower
Palaeolithic. But hominin occupation definitely commenced in Middle
Pleistocene (4 to 5 lakh years ago). Thirdly, the various developmental
phases noted above in the hunter‒gatherer past were not a matter of cake-
layers or switch-off and switch-on situations. Rather, in most cases, there
was a continuity of some of the traits of earlier cultures into newer cultural
phases or tradition. Fourthly, in terms of chronological range, the regional
culture‒sequences are only homotaxial but not synchronous. In other words,
within any cultural phase there could wide region-wise chronological
disparity.
Moving on to the cultural aspects of this ‘deep past’, Mortimer Wheeler,
in 1959, dubbed the Indian Stone Age as a matter of ‘Stones’ and ‘More
Stones’. D. D. Kosambi was less rash and more thoughtful when he treated,
in 1965, prehistory’s task as one of reconstructing ‘the essential ways of life
of people’. The early foragers were intelligent beings who, through creative
efforts, deviated from the evolutionary line of their higher primate cousins
and evolved into modern human species through the processes of
encephalization (brain size enlargement) and culturalification (making tools
out of stone, wood, or bone as extensions to their bodily limbs). The
evidence of human skeletal remains is small and limited to an incomplete
skull (archaic Homo sapiens) from Hathnora from the Narmada and skulls
and other bones from the Mesolithic sites of Langhnaj, Bagor, Bhimbetka
rock shelters, and from sites in the Mirzapur hills and middle Ganga valley.
The long chain of field investigations undertaken in different parts of the
country commencing with Bruce Foote’s pioneering work permit us to
make some general observations.
As implied by the phrase Stone Age itself, stone was the principal raw
material employed for making tools and weapons. The hominin groups
made intelligent use of a series of locally available rocks and siliceous
materials such as quartzite, sandstone, schist, dolerite, fossil wood, chert,
chalcedony, etc. Surely wood and animal bones and antlers too would have
been used for this purpose but these have rarely survived ravages of time.
Far from being a matter of stasis, stone technology showed improvements
or progressive changes in both methods of manufacture and shapes and
sizes of implements themselves. It is these changes which have served as
the criteria for recognizing the Lower, Middle, Upper Palaeolithic, and
Mesolithic as distinct cultural phases. Within the Lower Palaeolithic
(Acheulian culture), three phases of bifacial tools (axes and cleavers made
on large flakes) have been identified. Flake and long blade tools are the
hallmarks of Middle and Upper Palaeolithic phases, respectively. Short
blades and miniature tools (a centimetre or two in size) used for preparing
composite tools like arrowheads, harpoons, etc., mark the Mesolithic phase.
These technological improvements facilitated the occupation of newer
areas and hilly tracts hitherto considered to be inhospitable. The Acheulian
sites occur as clusters in the plateau tracts of southern, central, and western
India and hominin occupation took place along banks of major rivers, in
interior erosional hollows or valleys, hill slopes and foothills. In the later
Acheulian stage, occupation expanded to desert lands and forest and hill
tracts with high rainfall. This settlement expansion continues further into
the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic cultures. In the Mesolithic period, all
nooks and corners of different environmental zones were brought under
human occupation.
What was the subsistence system of these primeval simple societies?
The occurrence of large quantities of mammalian bones at the East African
Stone Age sites led to the ‘Man the Mighty Hunter’ hypothesis. But
taphonomical studies of these bones have now shown that they were mostly
scavenged from kill-sites of carnivorous animals. So it is being recognized
that plant foods of various kinds formed the dominant component of food
economy. Independently, in the Indian case D. D. Kosambi arrived at a
similar inference more than half a century ago. In his book The Culture and
Civilization of India in Historical Outline (1965), he stated that Stone Age
subsistence rested essentially on the exploitation of vegetal products which
‘may be gathered without cultivation: fruits, nuts, tubers, honey,
mushrooms, leafy vegetables, etc.’ Ethnobotanical surveys done in some
parts of the Deccan and central India have indeed brought to light that a
wide variety of forest plant foods are still being used by the local tribal
groups such as the Yanadis, Yerukalas, Chenchus, Gonds, etc. The
Mesolithic sites of middle Ganga Valley such as Damdama and Sarai Nahar
Rai have produced rich evidence of exploitation of various of plant and
animal foods. The finding of fossilized bones of wild cattle, deer, etc., at
Isampur, Chirki, Samnapur, and other sites show that meat-eating was not
altogether absent but mostly obtained by scavenging.
The Hobbesian description of the condition of man in the state of nature
as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ is at best a half-truth. The Stone
Age groups were not ‘brain-dead’ but adapted themselves to their
respective environmental settings and made intelligent use of the locally
available rocks for toolmaking, surface water sources, and wild plant and
animal foods. They were aware, too, of the importance of erosional valley
settings enclosed by hills as ideal habitats for occupation. And aware of
rhythmic nature of monsoonal climate and the division of a year into a
broad wet or rainy season lasting from July to December and the remaining
months constituting the dry season.
My own prolonged study of the Acheulian culture of the Hunsgi‒
Baichbal erosional basin (measuring about 500 square kilometres in extent),
located in north Karnataka and 30 kilometres away from the left bank of the
Krishna River, affords a fairly representative example of seasonality-based
hunter‒gatherer adaptations. A unique aspect of this culture concerns the
use of a hard variety of limestone for making tools. Data pertaining to the
distribution of sites numbering about 200 and ethnoarchaeological evidence
about inland surface water sources fed by springs and wild plant and animal
foods facilitated the inference that the annual adaptation process of these
early hunter‒gatherers consisted of two principal seasonal resource
management strategies: a) dry season aggregation of the groups near
perennial water flows in stream beds fed by springs and reliance on large
game hunting and b) wet season dispersal of groups all over the valley floor
and exploitation of inland water pools, small mammals, insects, and a
variety of plant foods. The Acheulian population probably comprised eight
or nine bands, each consisting of ten to fifteen individuals. With some
regional variations, this mechanism of seasonal aggregation and dispersal
within respective regional habitats and exploitation of wild plant and animal
foods was common throughout the hunting‒gathering era right up to the end
of Mesolithic culture.
It is important to note that we also have a limited body of evidence
which suggests that non-utilitarian or mind-expressive activities already
began to appear in the Late Pleistocene. Bhimbetka and many other rock
shelters in central India have preserved evidence of rock art depicting
paintings of group hunting and fishing scenes of the Late Palaeolithic
period. The site of Baghor II on the Son River has preserved evidence of a
rubble shrine where a triangular-shaped stone block with natural bright-
coloured laminations was picked up from surrounding area and worshipped,
as in the case of Kols and Baigas of the region, as a manifestation of the
mother goddess. Incised ostrich eggshells, perforated ostrich eggshells, rock
crystals, and ochre pieces found at some of the sites are other
manifestations of mind-expressive soft behaviour.
This is the nature of the country’s Stone Age past. Contrary to the
widely prevalent impression, far from having faded into aeons of time as a
faceless entity, it represents our ‘deep past’ and forms an inalienable part of
the present society in terms of both its blood and cultural streams. We have
to ask ourselves the question: what happened to the Mesolithic hunter‒
gatherers after the beginning of settled village farming? Some of the groups
voluntarily ‘missed the bus’ and chose to continue with their old life by
retreating into forests and hills. They more or less maintained their identity
through historical periods and are now represented by various tribal groups
occupying the forested hill tracts of central India and other regions. They
survived in another way too. As pointed out by V. N. Misra, in the northern
tracts of Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, and Uttar Pradesh lacking hill tracts, some
of the hunter‒gatherer groups became adjuncts to village life and
specialized in various crafts and other complementary jobs. They are now
called the Scheduled Castes which are numerous and account for 20 to 30
per cent of the population. Their numerical strength is relatively less in
other parts of the country. The hunter‒gatherer contribution to the
composition of present society is in fact much more than this. It was
actually some of the enterprising hunter‒gatherer groups themselves who
took to and developed the village farming way of life; they are now
represented by various dominant agricultural castes of the country.
Therefore, the American anthropologist Robert Redfield (1956) rightly
stated that, ‘Rural India is a primitive or tribal society rearranged to fit a
civilization.’
Coming to the cultural stream, Surajit Sinha, Nirmal Kumar Bose, and
other anthropologists have drawn attention to the processes involved in the
absorption of tribal groups into Hindu society. Bose has referred to the
process of some of the tribal groups (Juangs, Mundas, and Oraons)
becoming a part of the mainstream by participating in Hindu festivals and
fairs, adopting Hindu personal names, worshipping Hindu gods and
goddesses, and imbibing the sacred thread. With special reference to the
Deccan, D. D. Kosambi drew attention to the contribution of tribal religious
and cultural forms to the enrichment of Hindu society.
I find no better way of conveying the immanence of our ‘deep past’ in
present Indian society than repeating the words of Jitan Ram Manjhi (from
the Musahar community), a former chief minister of Bihar and now
president of the Hindustan Awam Morcha. After taking oath as the chief
minister, he visited a Hindu temple in Patna to seek blessings. After he left
the temple premises, the Brahmin priests ‘purified’ the temple by washing it
with water. Expressing his anguish over this, he noted that the ancestors of
lower castes and tribal groups were the original inhabitants of India.
Draupadi Murmu’s election as the president of India is not merely a matter
of giving representation to the ten-crore-strong tribal segment of the society.
She is in fact the rightful representative of our ancient past.
Hunter‒gatherer societies are usually content with what nature offers as
part of its functioning or dynamics and rarely, if ever, squeeze extra benefits
from it. This is another message coming from our deep past to the modern
world, which is driven by the rampant exploitation of nature,
overconsumption of resources, and contagious materialism. By revealing
the common roots, the study of the prehistoric past emphasizes the unity of
mankind (Clark, 1965).
11
DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS IN INDIA

Arati Deshpande-Mukherjee

Since prehistoric times, animals have shared varied kinds of relationships

with humans—serving as a food resource; for obtaining secondary products
such as raw material; predators, parasites, and companions; and as
transport. Through time human association with animals has changed in
different ways. The transition from hunting animals and to domesticating
some of them reveals the complex relationship shared by humans and
animals. In the Indian subcontinent, a wide range of fields such as
palaeontology, literary studies, inscriptions, numismatics, and
archaeozoology provide significant insights into the past human–animal
interactions going as far back as 100,000 years ago. Among the sources
used, the unearthing of skeletal parts of different animals from
archaeological sites and their study, referred to as archaeozoology, is the
closest one could get to inferring these relationships in the past. One of the
earliest encounters with animals is evident from the recovery of animal
fossils from the Pleistocene period. This is the geological epoch that lasted
from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the earth’s most recent
period of repeated glaciations and when humans first appeared. It is from
this period that animal fossils have been discovered at Palaeolithic sites in
Hunsgi and Baichbal valleys, Attirampakkam in Tamil Nadu, Chirki on
river Pravara, Morgaon, and Bori in Maharashtra, Kalpi in Uttar Pradesh,
etc. A wide range of animal fossils such as Bos namadicus, Equus
namadicus, Elephas hysudricus, Hexaprotodon sp. are reported from
Peninsular India along the banks of the rivers Narmada, Godavari, Ghod,
Krishna, and Manjra. Fossil occurrence has also been reported from the
Siwalik hills in the Subhimalayas and from parts of eastern India. Towards
the end of the Pleistocene, however, some animals like Hexaprotodon sp.
(hippopotamus), Equid sp. (horse), and Bos namadicus (wild cattle)
disappeared from the faunal record and have no extant species surviving
them today in India. So far there is no convincing evidence to show that
these now-extinct animals had been exploited by humans, but their
existence has helped in palaeo–environmental reconstruction, suggesting
the existence of a wet humid landscape with grass cover wherein animals
like the hippo, elephant, rhino, buffalo, could thrive.
Some evidence for early human animal interactions is available from
the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic cultures at Jwalapuram and Billa Surgam
caves in Andhra Pradesh, Katoati in Rajasthan, Patne in Maharashtra (Map
1). Here, among other terrestrial mammals that were hunted such as the
black buck, gazelle, and wild boar, a common use of ostrich is strongly
evident in the form of egg shell beads. This particular bird was found to be
used during the Early Holocene period but following that it became extinct
in the subcontinent, one probable factor being over exploitation. That
smaller animal resources were also used as food is seen from the shells of
freshwater and terrestrial molluscs at some of the Kurnool Cave sites.
Depiction of animals in the rock shelters at Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh
has revealed the faunal diversity and aspects of hunting in the Late
Quaternary period from central India. In general, aspects of animal-based
subsistence during Palaeolithic times is difficult to reconstruct due to the
limited nature of the archaeozoological remains from the Pleistocene
period.
Following the end of the Pleistocene period, a more substantial amount
of evidence for the transition from hunting or gathering or trapping of
animals to herding and stock rearing of domestic animals is documented in
the last 10,000 years during the Holocene. During early Holocene, South
Asia was inhabited by the Mesolithic cultures characterized by microlithic
tool assemblages, human burials, and rock art. The Mesolithic stone
industries were an adaptation to the Early Holocene environment between
the Upper Palaeolithic and the introduction of agriculture. In India many
Mesolithic sites are reported from Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh,
Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and the Indo-plains. The Mesolithic culture
spanned over a long period with its beginnings in the early part of the
Holocene and then continuing as late as the Indus Valley Civilization.
Faunal data recovered largely shows a subsistence economy based on
hunting and fishing. At sites such as Neemkhedi, Bagor, Tilwara, Langhnaj,
Mahadaha, Damdama, Loteshwar, Datrana, Santhali, etc. wild cattle, wild
caprines, antelopes, and rhinoceros are reported. At some later period sites
like Langhnaj, the presence of domestic cattle and goats along with the
rhino is also recorded. In the Ganga plains from the Mesolithic period
onwards, animal bones post meat extraction were commonly used to make
tools like bone points, awls—a tradition which continued into the later
periods such as the Neolithic/Chalcolithic, Painted Grey Ware, and Historic.
Due to the surface nature of many Mesolithic remains, limited
radiocarbon dates and highly fragmented animal bones, it has been difficult
to learn about the transition from hunting gathering to early domestication
of animals like sheep, goat, and cattle.
The advent of the Neolithic cultures around 8000–7000 BCE saw the
introduction of pottery, beginnings of agriculture, and animal domestication
in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and China. In South Asia, Neolithic culture is
identified as early as the seventh millennium BCE at Mehrgarh in Pakistan.
Here the beginnings of settled life—agriculture, use of ceramics, and
domesticated animals—has been documented. In its early levels, during the
aceramic phase, exploitation of wild animals is recorded but in the
succeeding phase ceramics and presence of domestic cattle, sheep, and
goats is seen. From the presence of domestic cattle, such as the humped
variety referred to as Zebu (Bos indicus) at Mehrgarh, and its more recent
identification in the Hakra Ware period at the Harappan settlement of
Bhirrana in Haryana, it is established that domestic cattle were used in
northwest South Asia by the seventh millennium BCE. Following which, by
the third millennium BCE, cattle pastoralism was quite common in the Indus
valley and adjoining areas.
Other Neolithic settlements have been found in the northwest
(Kashmir), south (Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh), northeast (Meghalaya),
and eastern parts (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha) of India, datable
between 3000 BCE to 1000 BCE. Some important Neolithic sites are
Burzahom (Kashmir), Gufkral (Kashmir), Chirand (Bihar), Lahuradewa
(Uttar Pradesh), and Utnur (Andhra Pradesh). In Period II at Burzahom in
Kashmir, a significant discovery is of humans buried along with wild
animals like deer, ibex, wolf, and domesticated animals like cattle, buffalo,
dog, sheep, and goat. Discovery of dog skeletons along with human burial
indicates the relationship of dogs with humans as pets, companions, etc.
Another important Neolithic site is Lahuradewa, in Sant Kabir Nagar
district of Uttar Pradesh, which has provided the earliest evidence for rice
domestication in India. In its early period 1A, no domestic animals like
cattle or goats were identified. However these were introduced during the
period IB early farming phase. At this site cattle were killed at a younger
age, Shorthorn variety of cattle having a height of 120–25 centimetres at
withers were used. Since the Ganga Valley sites were in the vicinity of
rivers and oxbow lakes, the Neolithic people were able to exploit a variety
of aquatic resources such as fish and turtles.
At southern Neolithic sites in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, like
Budhihal, Kodekal, Utnur, Piklihal, Hallur, Sanganakallu, it is observed that
both cattle and sheep goat pastoralism was commonly practised. At Hallur,
the ankylosis of cattle bones probably indicated that it was a result of
carrying heavy loads. A characteristic feature of these Neolithic sites is the
large-scale accumulation of burnt cattle dung, hence referred to as
ashmounds. While factors responsible for their formation remain unclear,
the large number of animal bones, the painting of cattle on rocks at
Sanganakallu-Hiregudda, and terracotta cattle figurines—all indicate the
important role of cattle in the economy of the southern Neolithic people.
More complex human–animal interactions become evident during the
Indus Valley Civilization, which flourished between 2600 BCE and 1900
BCE, in northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent. The development of
this civilization witnessed expansion of settlements, systematic town
planning, social organization, craft specialization, writing, etc. That animals
had contributed in various ways is strongly attested from the depiction of
animals on seals, pottery, as figurines, and the large quantities of excavated
animal remains from many Harappan sites across the IVC. Due to the
numerous faunal studies carried out, a rich archaeozoological record has
been retrieved for this civilization as compared to other cultural periods. In
the early twentieth century, publication of reports on excavated animal
remains from Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, for the first time, helped initiate
archaeozoological studies in India. Following which many more came to be
carried out for sites such as Rangpur, Surkotada, Lothal, Nageshwar,
Kuntasi, Dholavira, Shikarpur, Kalibangan, Bagasra, Farmana, Kanmer,
Bhirrana, Kotada Bhadli, etc. These studies have revealed the exploitation
of domestic animals such as cattle, buffalo, sheep, goat, pigs, dogs, and
chicken. Hunting was also practised wherein large bovids such as the gaur,
wild buffalo, and rhino were hunted along with deer, nilgai, antelopes, wild
pigs, etc. At almost all of the sites, the humped cattle (Bos indicus) is the
most predominant. Its frequent depiction on seals, figurines, and pottery
attests to its economic importance. Cattle had been used as food and for
obtaining secondary products such as milk and dung. The common
depiction of bull signified power and strength. Since the presence of the
horse remains debatable, the bulls were the most commonly used draught
animals for ploughing and traction. Recovery of toy bullock cart frames and
wheels from Bhirrana and Banawali provides insights into the type of carts
used by the Harappans. Insights into the palaeoclimatic conditions during
the IVC have been obtained from recent studies at Bhirrana, integrating
faunal, radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates, and
stable isotope studies on cattle teeth. They have shown that Bhirrana had
flourished from the 9 to the 7 ka along the banks of the river Ghaggar from
the Hakra or Pre-Harappan phase during intensified monsoon conditions
which declined after 7 ka. Yet Bhirrana continued to survive from the early
to mature Harappan period. The exploitation of domestic animals like
cattle, sheep, and goat is evident from its earliest cultural periods, that is,
the Hakra or Pre-Harappan phase. Besides cattle, buffaloes were also
utilized but whether the latter was also domesticated in the Indus valley
remains to be established. Till date the overall faunal evidence shows that
the Harappans had exploited a wide range of animals which they used as
food, for their secondary products like milk, hide, dung, bone, ivory, and
shell, and for their labour as draught animals. A mixed subsistence
economy of cattle breeding, sheep and goat herding, hunting and fishing
was practised. The latter is evident from the depiction of fish on pottery and
skeletal elements of both riverine and marine fish. These have been
recorded at coastal sites like Kuntasi, Shikarpur, and inland sites of
Bhirrana, Dholavira, Lothal, etc. Among the many animals reported, the
presence or absence of the domestic horse during the Indus Valley
Civilization continues to be debated upon. While it shows negligible
representation in figurines or on seals and pottery, a few isolated bones are
reported from Surkotada, which were identified as those of the domestic
horse by the archaeozoologist Sandor Bokony. However this identification
has been challenged and it is postulated that these instead belong to the wild
ass (Equus haemionus). Osteologically, both the domestic horse and wild
ass share similarities hence it is difficult to identify if the skeletal markers
are lacking. Till further in-depth investigation of the horse remains is done
using both genetics and archaeozoology, this problem will remain
unresolved. Another animal of which little is known is the camel due to the
poor recovery of its skeletal remains, which have been recovered mostly
from the late levels at Mohenjo Daro, Kalibangan, and Harappa. These are
identified as the remains of the single-humped Arabian camel (dromedary).
The presence of elephants is attested from their depiction on seals but the
limited bones recovered has made it difficult to learn about their role, which
might have been for obtaining ivory and as draught animals. All these three
large animals gain considerable economic importance in the historic and
medieval periods. In the IVC, certain animals such as cattle, buffalo, rhino
were economically important, but in addition to this they also had some
socio-religious significance attached to them as well as observed from their
depiction on seals and as figurines. Significant development during the
Indus Valley and contemporary Chalcolithic cultures was the manufacture
of objects made using shell, bone, and ivory. Of significance is the use of
marine shells particularly of the large gastropod, Turbinella pyrum, for
making objects like bangles and beads. The development of shell working
activities during the IVC are found to continue into the later cultural periods
as well when particularity during the historic period became important craft
industries exhibiting high craftsmanship as is noted at the site of Vadnagar
in Gujarat. The Indus Valley Civilization, due to its vast geographical
spread and exploitation of wide-ranging animal resources, can be credited
for laying the foundation for the development of animal husbandry and a
strong animal-based subsistence economy in the Indian subcontinent.
Similar modes of animal exploitation are visible in the contemporary
Chalcolithic cultures in western and central India. Its continuity is also
observed in later cultural periods such as the Iron Age, Early Historic, and
Historic periods.
Following the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization between 1900
and 1300 BCE and with the introduction of iron during the Iron
Age/Megalithic period around 1000 BCE, appreciable evidence for animal
exploitation is available from sites associated with Painted Grey Ware
culture in northern India and at Iron Age sites in Vidarbha and a few sites in
Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. It is in this period that horse
remains have been reported from sites such as Bhagwanpura, Mahurjhari,
Raipur, and Pochampad. In Vidarbha region of eastern Maharashtra, faunal
evidence from both Megalithic burials and habitation sites like Mahurjhari,
Raipur, Naikund, and Malli has revealed that the Iron Age faunal economy
was also based largely on the use of cattle, bufalo, sheep, goats, and pigs. A
significant finding is the skeletal parts of a horse with some ornaments in
the burials at Mahurjhari and Raipur, suggesting a special status given to
the animal after its death.
With the onset of the Vedic Age and the culmination of the Iron
Age/Megalithic period, followed by Early Historic and Historic cultures,
large-scale dependency on domestic animals is observed. Cattle, in
particular, were important because their secondary products such as milk
and ghee were required in many of the Vedic rituals. They also came to be
worshiped and were considered sacred. Animals like the horse, who were
required during the Vedic sacrifices and for transportation, became common
trade commodity by the medieval times in trade. Activities involving
animals are highlighted in some of the Buddhist and Jaina texts, ancient
literary texts such as the Rig Veda, Kautilya’s Arthasashatre, Sangam
literature, and travel accounts from foreigners. These have provided
interesting details on animal husbandry practices, their management,
economic importance, etc., during the last 2,000 years.
To conclude, in India, archaeozoological evidence from the last 10,000
years and more has revealed the diverse ways in which animals had been
utilized during different cultural periods. This has eventually led to the
continued dependency on domestic animals even in modern times despite
technological advancement and also in the near extinction of some wild
fauna.
12
THE NOMADIC PASTORALISTS IN PREHISTORY AND
PROTOHISTORY

Ajay Dandekar

Pastoralism is defined as such when communities are completely dependent

on their herds for their livelihoods. The element of nomadism comes in
when the requirement of pasturage and water compels a movement between
pasture and water locations. There could be a number of combinations
between the two, the herds and pastures and each of the combination should
entail a movement that is determined by the above. The movement is also
regulated by the community customary practices as well as agreed notions
of sharing common resources. The size of the herd is determined by the
ability of the community, clan, and family to be able to have access to good
pastures and secure watering points. Usually as these are common
resources, the share given in both often determines the size of the herd for
that particular family or clan or even an entire village.
What was the form of nomadic pastoralism in India’s prehistory and
protohistory? The earliest evidence from the subcontinent about the
domestication of plants and animals comes from Mehrgarh, a site located to
the west of Indus River and on the Bolan River which is a tributary of the
Indus. At Mehrgarh, we get the first evidence of cultivation of barley and
wheat as well as the domestication of sheep and goats in the Indian
subcontinent. The site is dated beyond 7000 BCE. The later evidence from
other regions, such as the Chirand in Bihar, in southern Deccan and in
South India at places such as Maski and other areas, suggests that by 3000–
2000 BCE that Neolithic had spread to the rest of subcontinent. The
protohistoric phase of the subcontinent would include the Bronze Age and
Chalcolithic cultures starting with the Indus Valley Civilization from about
3000 BCE to about 600 BCE. This period saw the rise of the Indus Valley
Civilization and its transition from the early to mature phase and subsequent
decline with the coming in of people who spoke the Indo-European group
of languages. We can locate the mature phase of the Indus Valley
Civilization perhaps up to 2000 BCE and the coming in of the people who
spoke the Indo-European group of languages thereafter with the
composition of Rig Veda being dated roughly to about 1600–1500 BCE. As
the transition occurred in the protohistoric times up to the beginning of the
mature phase of the Indus Valley culture, the question then is about the
evidence regarding the pastoralists and nomadic people. How do we
interpret the material culture evidence obtained from excavations and ‘read’
pastoralism into it? On this aspect, extremely interesting work has been
done by Shereen Ratnagar who suggests that the hinterlands of the Indus
Valley Civilization were to some extent inhabited by the pastoralists as
well. We do, of course, come across evidences of faunal remains on the
sites and their sheer numbers do suggest that there is certainly a possibility
of a flourishing pastoral and perhaps nomadic subsistence pattern in
prominence in the region.
With the coming in of the people who spoke the Indo-European group
of languages, the context at least in this respect is clearer. The Indo-
European language speaking people certainly practised cattle pastoralism
and we can certainly suggest that cattle pastoralism was the dominant form
of subsistence even as early state formation took place in the Ganga valley.
This second early state formation (the first one being the Harrapan state) in
the Ganga Valley was premised on agrarian settlements and use of iron as
well as on pastoralism. The Mahabharata has references to the major cattle
raids carried out by the Kurus against the kingdom of Virat, which then led
to a war. Cattle raids, given the importance of cattle in the general economic
context of the age, were an established practise to increase the size of the
herd as wealth was usually measured in cattle heads and their ownership by
the clans.
There is yet a great deal of work to be undertaken on the issue of
pastoral nomadism for the period mentioned above. We need to analyse the
archaeological evidence from the perspective of pastoralists to understand
the nature of pastoralism and its influence on the social and political
processes for the protohistoric times for the subcontinent. This venture is
difficult as material culture evidence can be ‘read’ in so many different
ways that much of the reading would be purely inferential. The future
generations of archaeologists and historians should take cues from ground
breaking research and build on the foundations laid by them.
 13

DOMESTICATION OF PLANTS ORIGINS AND

DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURE

Satish Naik
INTRODUCTION
Plant domestication is the genetic modification of a wild species to create a
new form of a plant altered to meet human needs. Hence, domestication is
the transition from the use of wild plants to the cultivation of actual
domesticated species. This leads to the origin of agriculture, which is the
result of the transition from hunting and gathering to a settled way of life
which Gordon Childe called the Neolithic revolution. It started in the
Mediterranean or tropical dry savannah and forest biomes, as well as in
highland environments, coastal areas, and temperate and tropical rain
forests of the world around 12,000 to 10,000 years ago. Archaeological
research in these natural agricultural landscapes played a significant role in
generating factual evidence of domesticated plants along with their wild
progenitors. These regions are accepted as centres of origin. However,
recent research has been adding additional archaeobotanical data which
helps to assess sub-centres or local origins of agriculture (Fuller et al.,
2012). This attests to the continuity in plant domestication, which is an
evolutionary process driven by the relationship between man–plant, leading
to selection, adaptation, cultivation, and utilization (Gepts, 2014).
Prehistorians, archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, ecologists,
linguists, historians, and many scholars from other disciplines supplied
valuable research data.
Different approaches help to uncover the antiquity of the domestication
of plants. Different analyses of plant remains such as plant taxonomy, use of
14C radiocarbon dating, molecular markers, gene flow between wild and
domesticated types, akin to paternity, tests of putative region of
domestication, and overall distribution area of the wild ancestors are helpful
in understanding the process of domestication. Archaeobotanical seed
characteristic features and their direct dating through the Accelerator Mass
Spectrometry (AMS) method helps generate data on the actual
domestication. The genetic constitution of each domesticated crop plant
species is an important element in determining its identity and changes in
domesticated crops from their wild and genetically closest original
progenitor types provide ancestral linkage. Genetic analysis of
archaeobotanical remains has limited scope; hence there are limitations to
the inferences about the wild progenitors. The current existing
environmental set up with species distribution may be used to estimate the
original distribution of the putative ancestral progenitor types. Recent
archaeobotanical and genetic data suggest domesticated individual crop
plants in different parts of the world.
Linguistic analysis also contributes a lot of information in finding out
the area of plant domestication based on lexical similarities, and
palaeolinguistics reconstructs words in precursors of modern languages.

DOMESTICATION OF PLANTS IN THE WORLD

The domestication of crops has taken place in multiple regions on Earth.
Different crop plants have been domesticated in different parts of the world.
Barley, different species of wheats, pea, lentil, chickpea, onion, date palm,
and grape were domesticated in Fertile Crescent or adjacent areas. Apples,
pomegranates, horseradish, and walnuts were domesticated in Central Asia.
Millets such as broomcorn millet and foxtail millet were domesticated in
the Yellow River basin while rice was domesticated in the Yangtze river
basin with other plants such as tea, peach, litchi, mulberry, soybean, and
citrus in China. Banana, sugarcane, durian, sagopalm, clove, and breadfruit
were domesticated in Southeast Asia. Sorghum, pearl (bulrush) millet,
cowpea, bambara groundnut, oil palm, enset (wild banana), rice (African),
black-eyed pea, okra, coffee, watermelon, hyacinth bean, shea, teff, kola
nut, hibiscus was domesticated in Africa.
Cassava on the southern border of Amazonia; peanut or groundnut east
of the Andes; yam bean in western Amazonia; pineapple and pejibaye or
peach palm, cocona, cupuacu, and pepper in the lowlands east of the Andes
were domesticated in the region of tropical lowland of South America.
Simultaneously, squash, maize, bromus mango (a minor cereal), canihua,
quinoa, potato, sweet potatoes, oca, achira, ullucu, and anu were
domesticated in South America.
The Andean region is also a centre of origin for common bean, lima
bean, Andean jack beans (Sauer 1964), Andean yam beans in Peru and
Bolivia, chilli peppers in the valleys of Bolivia, and two well-known
stimulants such as cocoa and tobacco. Stephens and Westengen have argued
that cotton was domesticated in coastal Peru, South America, and
Mesoamerica. Further research throws light on domestication of crops such
as maize and amaranth in Mesoamerica; squash in southern Mexico,
common beans in central Mexico; tepary bean in central or northern
Mexico; runner bean in the cool, humid highlands, sieva bean in the humid
lowlands of either Mexico or the eastern Andes, yam bean in Mexico, chilli
pepper and tomato in Mesoamerica, cacao in Mexico, and cotton in the
Yucatan Peninsula. Eastern North America provides evidence of
domestication of sunflower and squash.

PLANT DOMESTICATION IN SOUTH ASIA

Recent research on identifying wild progenitors for many crops has proved
that independent domestication of plants has taken place in five regions in
South Asia (Kajale, 1991; Fuller, 2011). This is possible because of the
increase in archaeological evidence generated by employing systematic
flotation techniques at archaeological excavation sites, especially those
belonging to the Neolithic period. These sites belong to the stage of early
village farming communities dependent on the cultivation of local wild
progenitors. Hence, several parts of South Asia can be pointed out as
centres of early crop origins due to high agrobiodiversity in terms of native
cereals, millets and pulses domesticated in different geographical and
ecological contexts (Fuller, 2002, 2006; Fuller and Harvey, 2006; Asouti
and Fuller, 2008)..
In the Ganga plain, indica rice is reported from Mesolithic, Neolithic,
and Chalcolithic sites, suggesting its early domestication and cultivation.
This view is well supported by palynological studies at Sannai Tal which
have significant microcharcoal remains from the terminal Pleistocene warm
period dating back to c. 14,500–13,000 YBP through the Early and Mid-
Holocene period and similar evidence is reported from the end of the
Pleistocene at Lahuradewa. The charcoal levels at Lahuradewa are
accompanied by the presence of bulliform phytoliths of rice (Oryza sp.)
from c. 8000 BCE, indicating morphological diversity in wild rice species
such as Oryza nivara, O. rufipogon, and O. cultivated indica rice (oryza
sativa) from c. 7000 BCE. It shows that some of the rice grains from
Lahuradewa resemble domesticated types while others are of wild and
weedy types with wild immature harvested rice spikelet bases. Charred
grains dated by AMS dating shed light on rice and pottery use dating back
to around 6400 BCE. The evidence of rice from Lahuradewa period 1B and
Senuwar period II points out that rice was a major food resource and as a
domesticated crop co-occurred with indigenous millets in the Ganga Valley.
Further, new AMS dates suggest that the use of pottery and rice
consumption may have started earlier than ca. 9000–8000 YBP. On the
basis of studies on anthropogenic-influenced diatoms which flourished and
increased during 8300–7000 cal YBP, Thakur et al. have argued that the
Neolithic settlers used the lake margin as a paddy field since about 9000
YBP at Lahuradewa.
In the Ganga–Yamuna region, Neolithic evidence is lacking, but Early
Harappan sites such as Harappa, Ludawala, Siswal, and Kunal 1A/1B
dating back to c. 3200 to 2400 BCE show dominance of barley and wheat
with winter pulses. The native Indian crops such as rice from Kunal, Vigna
sp. from Balu, little millet (Panicum sumatrense), foxtail millet (Setaria
sp.), green gram from Harappa, and horse gram (Macrotyloma uniflorum)
from Ludawala give important clues to their early domestication on the
Indian subcontinent. These crops also attract attention towards their
independent cultivation from wild progenitors in the northwestern part of
the subcontinent. The Neolithic site of Mehrgarh and its successor sites in
the Indus Valley show clear evidence of early village farming communities,
cultivating non-indigenous crops such as barley, wheat, and cotton
(Costantini, 2008), which is quite different from the early cultivation of
indigenous crops.
In Odisha, the Mahanadi river basin and the surrounding hills played a
significant role in rice domestication with their diverse wild progenitor
populations. Sites like Gopalpur, Golbai Sasan, and Suabarei provide
evidence of early village farming communities of the Late
Neolithic/Chalcolithic period in the coastal plain around Chilika Lake
dating back to 1500–1000 BCE (Harvey et al., 2006). Besides rice, Indian
pulses such as black gram (Vigna mungo), green gram (Vigna radiata),
horse gram, and pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan) showed their occurrence in
anthropogenic deposits of the Neolithic period. The grains of little millet
have been documented from Gopalpur dating back to 1400–1000 BCE and
its wild progenitors are still present in the region. Sawa millet (Echinochloa
sp.), kodo millet (Paspalum scrobiculatum), and foxtail millet are plausible
weeds of rice in the region. Historical linguistics suggests that the
Dravidian speaking tribes in western Odisha show some early migration
processes supported by the common words used in Munda and Dravidian
languages.
 Archaeobotanical findings from Late/post-Harappan sites dating back to
2500 to 2000 BCE in Saurashtra provided evidence of cultivation of small
millets such as browntop millet (Brachiaria ramosa), little millet, and
foxtail millet of Indian origin and finger millet (Eleusine coracana) of
African origin from the sites such as Bagasra, Ghalo-daro, Kanmer,
Kuntasi, Padri, Rojdi, Vejalka, etc. These findings attest that the Saurashtra
region shows potential as a plant domestication centre for small Indian
millets due to its biogeographic evidence of potential wild progenitors. The
fragmentary evidence of barley and wheat from Bagasra, wheat from
Kuntasi, and barley from Rojdi showed that these crops were introduced in
Saurashtra during the mature Harappan phase (2600–1900 BCE). The
African crops such as sorghum millet, pearl millet, finger millet, and
hyacinth bean were probably introduced at the beginning of the second
millennium BCE. Simultaneously, Indian pulses such as black gram and
green gram may have been introduced in the third millennium BCE, while
horse gram in the second millennium BCE. These crops also pointed out that
the native monsoon adopted crops such as browntop millet, little millet,
foxtail millet, black gram, and green gram were part of the primary Pre-
Harappan agricultural tradition in Saurashtra. This is well supported by the
faunal remains reported from the early ceramics site of Loteshwar, located
in northern Gujarat, dating back to 3500 to 3000 BCE. Hence, it can be
concluded that the primary local plant domestication in Saurashtra was
inspired by the advent of intrusive pastoralism.
In peninsular India, Neolithic sites such as Budihal, Hallur,
Sanganakallu, Nagarajupalle, Utnur, and Watgal unearthed evidence of
millet cultivation, which comprised browntop millet and bristly foxtail
millet (Setaria verticillata) with pulses such as horse gram and green gram.
Both browntop millet and bristly foxtail millet could have been available in
wild state in local dense patches in favourable environments and horse gram
in less disturbed scrub patches in wild form. Browntop millet is currently
grown in the Eastern Ghats, while bristly foxtail millet is grown in Tamil
Nadu (Maheshwary and Singh, 1965). These have also been found in wild
habitat in Maharashtra, and their close relative (yellow foxtail grass) Setaria
pumula syn S. glauca is still grown in Peninsular India. The domestication
of green gram must have taken place in dry deciduous forests and slightly
wetter Mid-Holocene conditions in the north of the Krishna River as it
shows evidence in the Neolithic sites dating back to 1700 BCE in the
Kurnool district (Fuller et al., 2007; Bovin et al., 2008). The exotic crops,
which include barley and wheat, were introduced in South India through
cultural diffusion as reported from the site of Sanganakallu. The occurrence
of Harappan pulse crops such as common pea, chickpea, and lentil at
Chalcolithic sites in Maharashtra, namely Inamgaon and Tuljapur Garhi,
occurred because of cultural diffusion and these may have been adopted as
valued food stuffs (Fuller, 2005). Recent archaeological research suggests
that the early settlements in the South Deccan predate 2500 BCE, while those
in the North Deccan predate 2500 to 2300 BCE (Naik, 2022; Naik and
Sontakke, 2022; Naik et al., 2014). Historical linguistics data helps to
understand that the Proto-Dravidian speakers knew livestock, flora, and
their adjacent woodlands and techniques of seed gathering and processing
in peninsular India.

SUMMARY
The biogeography of wild progenitors and archaeobotanical research data
show that a number of tropical crops were independently domesticated in
South Asia, as reflected in their occurrence in Neolithic trajectories of
different geographical zones in the Indian subcontinent. Cultivation may
have begun in five regions, namely the Ganga basin, Ganga–Yamuna
region, Odisha, Saurashtra, and peninsular India of the Indian subcontinent
before the introduction of exogenous crops. Archaeobotanical evidence
from hunter–gatherer sites or evidence of the transition to initial cultivation
is lacking. But it appears that food production began among more mobile
and sparser groups which, led by demographic pressure as a prime mover,
experimented the beginning of agriculture. This review paper argues that
local independent domestication took place in the above-mentioned five
regions, paying particular attention to archaeobotanical data. A clear
understanding of domestication of plants and origin of agriculture needs
further research work in South Asia. Such studies will permit more critical
analysis of possible examples of multiple domestications and the spread of
distinctive variants within crops. They also offer the possibility of
improving major food staples and also minor crops for developing
alternative crops for marginal areas.
 14

PREHISTORIC AGRICULTURE

Ravi Korisettar

Reconstruction of ancient agriculture is based on a combined study of plant

and animal remains preserved in the archaeological contexts.
Archaeobotany and archaeozoology are fundamental sub-disciplines
contributing to a systematic reconstruction of agri-history. It is gratifying to
note that, during the last five decades, a series of archaeobotanical and
archaeozoological studies in India have contributed to presenting a
synthesis of spatio-temporal development of early agricultural societies.
Findings of such investigations have also focused on the broader issues of
transition from hunting–gathering to agriculture, climate–agriculture
change, domestication morphology of cultivated crops and animals, plant
and animal genetics, and identification of independent centres of
agricultural transitions in the diverse ecosystems across the vast
subcontinent.
Relevant information on the reconstruction of Holocene (OIS 1)
monsoon, climate change, consequent vegetation changes, and the
vegetation context of early agriculture is now available to contextualize
ancient agriculture in its natural setting across the subcontinent. The
beginning of OIS 1 is placed at 12,000 years ago, coinciding with the end of
an arid phase gradually leading to climatic amelioration. Six major rapid
climatic change events have been recorded globally since the dawn of OIS
1, 9000–8000, 6000–5000, 4200–3800, 3500–2500, 1200–1000, and 600–
150 years before the present. These events are characterized by ‘polar
cooling, tropical aridity, and major atmospheric circulation changes.’ These
intervals are found to coincide with major disruptions of civilizations,
illustrating human significance of Holocene climate variability (Mayeswick
et al., 2004; Band et al., 2017).
It is now well established that Southwest Asian Neolithic archaeology is
key to understanding the Neolithic developments in the Indian subcontinent
into which several cereal food crops and animal domesticates were
introduced early in the Holocene. The period between 12,000 and 4,000
YBP witnessed the transition of prehistoric hunter–gatherers to village-
based first farmers and herders in different geographical regions of the Old
World. This time bracket covers a series of events leading to the formation
of the complete package of food crops that characterizes the food habits of
the inhabitants of the subcontinent and elsewhere in the Old World.
Regional dietary habits that once formed the distinctiveness of various
culture–historic divisions disappeared during the last five thousand years
with the rise of intensive agriculture, the early phase of cultural unity, yet
with diversity.
Increasing intensity of archaeobotanical and archaeozoological research
over the last three to four decades, however, has revealed the existence of
independent centres of early agriculture, based on cultivation and
domestication of native crops and animals, including millets, pulses, and
cereals, and domestication of cattle, sheep, and goats. Archaeobotanical
research at a number of agropastoral settlements of the third to second
millennia BCE has revealed the importance of native small millets and pulses
in the early agricultural societies of these regions. Crops and livestock
involved in the development of early agriculture in the subcontinent during
the Neolithic/Chalcolithic phases and the Indus Civilization (also Indus-
Sarasvati Civilization) included cereals, millets, and pulses of multiple
origins, including Southwest Asia, northern Africa, East Asia, and the
Indian subcontinent.
However, owing to a lack of research emphasis on Neolithic
archaeobotany in some regions of the subcontinent, our knowledge of early
agriculture reveals geographical gaps. The humid coastal lowlands, the
Lesser Himalayan and sub-Himalayan plateaus, the Ganga–Brahmaputra
Delta (including Bangladesh), and the northeastern humid uplands have yet
to be subjected to systematic survey and bioarchaeological investigations.
However, Neolithic sites in the northeast humid uplands and coastal
lowland of Odisha have shown potential to support the reconstruction of
early agricultural economies. Nevertheless, archaeobotanical research
during the last two decades has led to (a) recognizing independent centres
of agricultural origins in different parts of the Ganga Plain, the Northern
Maidan of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and Gujarat, (b) proof
that an agricultural way of life developed at different times in different
geographic–culture provinces across the subcontinent, characterized by
native millets and cereals and (c) that by 2500 BCE, a major part of the
subcontinent witnessed a transformation from a hunting–gathering to an
agricultural way of life. A significant body of evidence on the regional
distribution of native small millets across the Indian Peninsula and further
north has enabled recognition of independent centres of agricultural origins
predating the introduction of southwest Asian and east Asian domesticates.
Of particular interest to archaeologists is the origin of indica rice that
has witnessed considerable debate on the antiquity of its cultivation and
domestication. The available research informs us on the cultivation and
domestication of rice in the Ganga Valley as evidenced by the Neolithic
sites in the Ganga Valley.
Rice husk impressions on pottery and rice microbotanical remains from
Lahuradewa, Koldihwa, Senuwar, and Chirand show that after 2000 BCE,
rice assumed a certain importance when hybrid-indica replaced the
indigenous and morphologically wild proto-indica. Evidence of rice
remains from Mahagara, Koldihwa, Senuwar, and Lahuradewa and their
radiocarbon dating has ushered in an ongoing debate on the antiquity of rice
cultivation in India, and the dated evidence from Lahuradewa has
intensified this debate. However, archaeobotanical analysis suggests that the
direct date of 6400 cal BCE on rice indicates the plausibility of recognizing
the Ganga Plain as an independent centre of rice cultivation of the sub-
species indica through a protracted and complex process (Fuller and
Murphy, 2018). The scientific scrutiny of the dataset on rice from the
Neolithic contexts of the Middle Ganga Valley in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar
has led the authors to assert that full-fledged rice cultivation occurred
during the middle of the third millennium BCE. However, Tewari et al.
conclude that, ‘keeping in view the nature of deposits in Lahuradeva Period
IA…and also the occurrence of phytoliths of cultivated rice in the lakebed
sediments datable 8,300 YBP as well as AMS date of rice husk-clot, we
place confidence to regard the rice cultivation at Lahuradeva during 9th
millennium YBP. (Tewari et al., 2008)’
The sequence of socio-economic changes in the well-investigated
regions, the transition to sedentary settlements, and a food-producing way
of life is securely dated by the AMS radiocarbon method. This data has
enabled the reconstruction of the spread of cultivation as well as diffusion
of crops and movement of populations and language families. As a result,
the dated archaeobotanical record reveals a slow pace of expansion into the
contiguous provinces within the subcontinent, indicating uneven events of
population movements affecting different culture–historic divisions at
different times.
It has been documented that in the culture–historic divisions of the
subcontinent, the early agricultural communities were equipped with
diverse varieties of crops, including drought-resistant barley and millets,
and may have had incipient irrigation facilities providing a means for them
to cultivate pulses and vegetable crops. The mixed economy also meant that
agricultural activities were supplemented by animal husbandry (cattle,
buffalo, sheep, and goats), hunting, fishing, and harvesting wild resources
as well. Such adaptive diversity must have provided them with stability and
security.

INDIGENOUS AND INTRODUCED FOOD CROPS

Southwest Asian cereals and legumes were introduced to the subcontinent
in domesticated form with the possible exception of barley, which could
have been domesticated locally in Balochistan. The African millets and
legumes were first introduced to the Indus Civilization through maritime
contact between Mesopotamia and the Greater Indus Valley. The two main
millets from Africa, sorghum and pearl millet, were introduced around 2000
BCE. The African legumes, cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), and hyacinth bean
(Lalab purpureus), were introduced during the Late Harappan times (1900–
1300 BCE). Finger millet is another African crop (Ethiopian origin), known
from the South Indian Neolithic after 1000 BCE.
Among the East Asian crops the most important is Asian rice (Oryza
sativa), a domesticate from the Yangtze basin of China. There is no clear
evidence of early domestication from local wild rice, the long grained
(indica) variety that came to be incorporated into domesticated crop
package in the rice economy of the Ganga Valley. Two other millets of
external origin found in protohistoric and later prehistoric contexts include
foxtail millet (Setaria italica) from the Yellow River Valley of China and
broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), a Central Asia domesticate.
Domesticated crops native to the subcontinent were the rain-fed small
millets, pulses, and legumes. Black gram, green gram (Vigna sp.) and
horsegram are known from the Ghats region and the Deccan Plateau. Minor
millets belonging to Paspalum and Chenopodium genera and Brachiaria
ramosa and Setaria verticillata are known to have been locally developed
in southern India during the time period from 3000 to 1000 BCE. Towards
the end of this period the crop package, including the native and exotic food
plants, came to support both rain-fed and irrigation agriculture, paving the
way for intensive agriculture during the Iron Age.
Thus, there are nearly a dozen varieties of small millet species
cultivated in India and they have different geographical origins. In the
context of identifying independent centres of agricultural origins within the
Indian subcontinent, our knowledge of their provenance is critical to
elucidating the process of domestication in the archaeological context. The
authors postulate the Upper Punjab region as the possible epicentre of millet
cultivation prior to the introduction of southwest Asian crops into the Indus
Valley.
The southwest Asian crops cultivated in India include: wheat (Triticum
spp.), barley (Hordeum vulgare L. sensu lato), lentils (Lens culinaries
Med.), chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), peas (Pisum satium L.), grass pea
(Lathyrus sativus L.), and linseed/flax (Linum usitatissimum L.). Beginning
with the Mehrgarh Neolithic, these crops were well established by the time
of Mid-Holocene Indus Civilization. Goats in domesticated form were
introduced into the subcontinent, whereas sheep are a local domesticate.
Zebu cattle are native to Balochistan and inner India.
Africa provided a variety of millets and legumes with their origin in the
different geographical regions of northern, central, and Saharan Africa.
They include: sorghum or great millet (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench); Ragi
or finger millet (Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaetner); Bajra/ pearl millet
(Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br. syn. P. americanum (L.) Leeke, syn. P.
typhoides Rich.); Cow pea (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp.); and hyacinth
bean (Lablab purpureus (L.) Sweet). Among the several varieties of
sorghum of African origin the bicolour race is reported from
Neolithc/Chalcolithic and Harappan contexts. This race is best suited for
high rainfall areas, it is found to be grown in the high rainfall zones of the
Eastern and Western Ghats.
The Durra rice is also widely cultivated in India and Pakistan. Though it
is of African origin, its cultivation began much later over there. It is
speculated that the domestic sorghum may have evolved in India from the
early introduction of a bicolour and that it was reintroduced during the Arab
conquests in Africa.
Crops introduced from Central Asia/China include: foxtail millet
(Setaria italic L.) Beau); proso millet (Panicum miliacum L.); hemp
(Cannasis sativus L.); and rice (Oryza sativa L.). Some tree crops were
introduced through overland trade in fruits and nuts from 2000 BCE
onwards. Also, the Bactrian camel was introduced into the subcontinent.
Horses also came, but the antiquity of domestication has become an issue of
controversy. Some of the tree crops of the Late Harappan (1,800–1,300 BCE)
period found in Kashmir are: peaches (Pranus persisa (L.) Batsch.),
apricots (Pranus armeniaca L.), and walnuts (Juglans regia L.) from
Central Asia and west China. Almonds (Amygdalus communis L.) came
from Southwest Asia.
Food crops native to North India include rice (Oryza sativa L.), moth
bean (Vigna acontifolia ( Jacq.) Marchal), black gram (Vigna mungo (L.)
Hepper), cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.), ivy gourd (Coccinia grandis (L.)
Voigt), and citrus fruits. Rice appears to have been a domesticate in China
and North India on two different occasions. Similarly, chicken and water
buffalo were domesticated in China and India, independently at different
points of time.

EARLY DOMESTICATED ANIMALS: CATTLE, SHEEP, AND

GOATS
As regards domestication of cattle, the subcontinent has been long
recognized for the presence of wild cattle, zebu, in the subcontinent. Goats
were introduced from West Asia into Balochistan and further east. The
possibility of sheep being a local domesticate in the northwest of the
subcontinent is not ruled out. Crops and livestock from the Greater Indus
Valley dispersed eastwards, though timing of their dispersal into different
early agricultural provinces was not simultaneous.
As early as the fourth millennium BCE sheep-goat pastoralism and the
cultivation of winter crops has been documented in the Ahar–Banas
tradition of northwest India and by the third millennium BCE in Saurashtra.
In the Ganga valley there is no evidence of domestic fauna in the Mesolithic
context, but research indicates the cattle not sheep or goat in the Neolithic
Mahagara and Koldihwa. Further east in Bihar, domestic sheep, goat, and
cattle have been recorded in a Neolithic context of the early second
millennium BCE. The available radiocarbon chronology reveals that by mid-
third millennium BCE, both domestic crops and livestock were fully
established throughout the subcontinent.

NEOLITHIC AND CHALCOLITHIC CULTURE HISTORIC

SUBDIVISIONS
Based on the above account, eleven major Neolithic/Chalcolithic culture–
historic divisions are identified—some of independent agricultural origins
and others originating from diffusion (Bellwood, 2004; Fuller, 2006, 2011;
Korisettar, 2018, 2021). These represent stages in the spatio-temporal
development of early subsistence economies during the Holocene. In these
provinces the Neolithic/Chalcolithic archaeobotanical record reveals spatial
and temporal variation in the rise of agricultural economies. These divisions
also reveal distinctiveness in terms of staple crops: wheat and barley in the
Indus–Saraswati Basin; rice in the northeast and Middle Ganga Valley; and
millets in western and southern India. Some of these zones have been
identified as independent centres of agricultural origin. While the northwest
of the subcontinent witnessed Early Holocene (7000 BCE) transition to
subsistence production and its gradual expansion covering the whole of the
Indus–Sarasvati Basin leading to the emergence of the first urbanization,
the rest of the subcontinent continued with hunting and gathering until Mid-
to Late Holocene times. During the third and second millennia BCE, a series
of regional Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures, with clear evidence of a
mixed subsistence economy emerged across the rest of the subcontinent,
outside the Indus–Sarasvati Basin. While some of these regional cultures
have been named after a type site or local river, others have been designated
either Neolithic or Chalcolithic (e.g. Ahar–Banas culture in Mewar;
Kayatha-Malwa in Malwa; Anarta in Gujarat; Savalda, Malwa-Jorwe in
west Deccan; Ashmound and Non-ashmound Tradition Neolithic in mid-
Deccan; and Vindhyan Neolithic). Salient aspects of these provinces given
below:

1. Balochistan and the Indus–Saraswati Basin: Mehrgarh Tradition

Mehrgarh is a key site located on the Bolan River in the Kachi Plain. The
archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence from Mehrgarh suggests that
the first farmers arrived east of the Indo-Iranian borderlands around 9,000
years ago, equipped with goats, and a cool-season complex of crops (e.g.
barley, emmer, flax, lentil, and chickpea). Three varieties of wheat, two
forms of barley, and local zebu are the early domesticates, and later
introductions include sheep, goat, and cattle varieties. Flax, safflower, and
southwest Asian pulses were later introduced in waves from the late fifth
millennium BCE, whereas cotton appears to have been cultivated prior to the
fifth millennium BCE.

2. The Himalayan Region: The Kashmir and Swat Valleys and the
Burzahom Tradition

Burzahom is a key site located about 16 kilometres northeast of Srinagar.

Other key sites include Kanispur, Gufkral, Qasim Bagh, Yunteng, and
Pethpuran Teng. The Neolithic in the region was dispersed widely across
the Kashmir Valley, with time ranging from fourth millennium BCE to the
end of the second millennium BCE. The first settlers subsisted to some extent
on cereal farming and stock raising supplemented by hunting. Grains of
domesticated wheat, barley, lentils, broomcorn millet (of Chinese origin),
and pea have been identified, and bones of domesticated sheep and goat,
Among the hunted animals, bones of ibex, bear, wild sheep/goats, wild
cattle, wolf, and Kashmir stag have been identified.

3. The Vindhya Region: The Son and Belan Valleys and the Kaimur
Tradition

Koldihwa, Mahagara, and Chopani-Mando on Belan River show the

transition from intensified food gathering and selective hunting through
incipient food producing to settled village farming. The animal remains
comprise cattle, sheep, goat, horse, deer, and wild boar. The wild rice
(Oryza nivara) is known from Koldihwa, Mahagara, and Indari. Bone
fragments of deer, antelope, bear, and bird suggest that hunting and
collecting of wild plant food was as important as domestication and
cultivation. The Neolithic site of Senuwar further east in the Kaimur hills
has also yielded carbonized grains of cultivated crops that include rice,
barley, field pea, and lentils dated between 1770 and 1400 BCE.
4. The Middle Ganga Basin: The Ganga Tradition as an Independent Centre
of Rice Cultivation

Archaeobotanical research in the Middle Ganga basin has produced a good

data set of crops, with clear evidence for cultivated rice in the beginning of
2000 BCE. Lahuradewa, Jhusi, Hetapatti, Bhunadih, Waina, Sohgaura,
Imlidih Khurd, Lahuradewa, Senuwar, and Chirand in Uttar Pradesh and
Bihar have yielded material culture as well as organic remains helping in
the characterization of the Ganga Valley Neolithic culture. At Chirand the
beginning of the Neolithic is placed at 2200 BCE. The period (2000–1800
BCE) witnessed the introduction of winter crops and livestock from the Indus
Valley and south Indian pulses such as mung bean and horse gram. A
variety of cereals and pulses including rice, barley, wheat, field pea, lentil,
green gram, etc., have been documented from the Neolithic levels.
Domesticated animals included cattle, buffalo, sheep, goat, and pigs. At
Lahuradewa, there is evidence for sedentary settlement and ceramics dating
to c. 7000 BCE. This early date is suggestive of the early use of rice or
systematic management or non-domestication cultivation.

5. Eastern India: The Utkal Tradition as an Independent Centre of Rice

Cultivation

The excavations at Golbai Sassan, Gopalpur, Harirajpura, Talapada, and

Khameshwaripali have revealed cultural layers ranging from the early third
millennium to the early first millennium BCE, from the Neolithic to early
Iron Age, with the main phase of occupation beginning in the middle of the
third millennium BCE. The archaeobotanical assemblage comprises rice,
peninsular pulses, and local pulse red gram. The ceramic types and bone
tools reveal an affinity with the Ganga Valley sites of Chirand, but wheat
and barley are distinctly absent.

6. North Gujarat: The Anarta Tradition as an Independent Centre of Millet

Agriculture

Holocene archaeological research in this region has identified a distinctive

sequence of cultures showing the existence of hunter–gatherer (microlith-
using Mesolithic communities), semi-nomadic agropastoral, and urban
Harappan settlements well adapted to arid and hyper-arid environments.
Recent integrated multi-proxy study of two sites, Loteshwar and Varahvo
Timbo, revealed that at both the sites, the earliest levels are represented by
hunter–gatherer activity indicated by the microlithic assemblages. Varahvo
Timbo has hunter–gatherer occupation (5600 to 5000 BCE), and Loteshwar
has both hunter–gatherer (5168–4708 BCE) and Anarta sedentary culture
(3681–2243 BCE). The Anarta levels from Loteshwar were dominated by an
assemblage of bristly foxtail (Setaria verticillata), including the hulled
grain of yellow foxtail (Setaria pumila). Other taxa include little millet (cf.
Panicum), browntop millter (Brachiaria ramosa), Digitaria sp., and jungle
rice (Echinochloa cf. colona). These findings have pushed back the
antiquity of agricultural origins to the fourth millennium BCE.

7. The Banas Valley (Eastern Rajasthan): The Mewar Tradition

The Ahar-Banas culture sites are located in the Mewar region of Rajasthan
contiguous to the Aravallis, the source of a variety of rocks, minerals, and
metals. The Ahar–Banas culture falls in the radiocarbon time bracket of
3700–1830 BCE. Excavated sites include the type site at Ahar and the nearby
sites of Balathal, Gilund, and Ojiyana. The subsistence economy was a
mixed one—cultivation, animal husbandry, and hunting. Wheat (Triticum
sp.), barley (Hordeum vulgare), lentil (Lens esculenta Moench), the
common pea (Pisum arvense L.), finger millet (Eleusine coracana L.),
Italian millet (Setaria italica (L.) Beauv.), and panicum millet (Panicum sp.)
were cultivated. Domesticated animals included cattle, buffalo, sheep, goat,
and pig and they also hunted wild animals such as gaur (Bos gaurus), nilgai
(Boselaphus tragocamelus), chausingha (Tetracerus quadricornis), and
blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra). Remains of turtles, mollusks, and fish
have also been recovered, reflecting a varied diet based on local available
resources.

8. Malwa (the Chambal, Betwa, and Narmada Valleys): The Kayatha and
Malwa Traditions in Malwa

The Chalcolithic sites of Kayatha and Dangawada have been excavated.

Both these sites have yielded all three regional Chalcolithic cultures—
Kayatha, Ahar–Banas, and Malwa—and preliminary radiocarbon dates
suggest a chronological presence between 2000 and 1800 BCE. The Malwa
culture is more widespread than the Kayatha culture with more than one
hundred sites reported from various river valleys such as the Narmada,
Betwa, Chambal, and their tributaries. The people of the Malwa region
cultivated cereals, legumes, oil seeds, and fruits. Cereals included bread
wheat (Triticum compactum) and rice (Oryza sativa L.). Among the pulses
and legumes were lentil (Lens esculenta), black gram (Vigna mungo), green
gram (Phaseolus mungo), and khesari (Lathyrus sativus). The presence of
linseed (Linum usitatissimum) has been documented as well as wild jujube
(Zizyphus jujube). Domesticated cattle, sheep, goat, and pig are present.

9. West Deccan: The Tapi, Godavari, Upper Krishna, and Bhima Valleys
and the The Deccan Chalcolithic Tradition (Malwa and Jorwe Cultures)

The Deccan Chalcolithic is characterized by the development of an

agropastoral economy identified by ceramic styles: (1) Savalda (c. 2200–
1800 BCE), Late Harappan (c. 1800–1300 BCE), Malwa (c. 1600–1400 BCE),
Early Jorwe (c. 1400–1000 BCE), and Late Jorwe (c. 1000–700 BCE). There is
evidence for the cultivation of barley (Hordeum vulgare), wheat (Triticum
spp.), and rice (Oryza sativa). Three additional species of African millets
were adopted in the Early Jorwe phase: finger millet (Eleusine coracana),
sorghum millet (Sorghum bicolor), and Kodo millet (Paspalum
scrobiculatum). Deccan Chalcolithic people also cultivated peas, beans, and
lentils, including some species imported from southern India. Pulses found
in the floral remains at Daimabad and Inamgaon included lentils (Lens
esculenta), common pea (Pisum arvense), horse gram (Macrotyloma
uniflorum), hyacinth bean (Dolichos lablab), black gram (Vigna mungo),
and mung bean (Vigna radiata). Oil seeds included linseed (Linum
usitatissimum) and safflower (Carthamus tinctorius). The domesticated
animals comprised Bos bubalus (buffalo), cattle (Bos indicus), sheep/goat
(Capra/Ovis), and dog (Canis familiaris). Hunted animals included
blackbuck (Antelope cervicapra), chital (Axis axis), sambar (Cervus
unicolor), and the four-horned antelope (Tetracerus quadricornis).

10. Mid-Deccan: The Ashmound Tradition and an Independent Centre of

Millet Agriculture

Several hundred Neolithic sites in the southern states of undivided Andhra

Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu have been documented, hence grouped
as Southern Neolithic sites. Recent archaeological research on the Southern
Neolithic has identified three distinctive traditions in the developmental
sequence of agropastoral economies between 3000 and 1200 BCE. They are
(1) the Ashmound tradition, the earliest among them, (2) the Kunderu
tradition, and (3) the Hallur tradition. Radiocarbon data from Watgal,
Sanganakallu, Tekkalakota, Budihal, and Kodekal have considerably helped
in extending the beginnings of the Southern Neolithic culture to the
beginning of the third millennium BCE. Two breeds of cattle have been
identified: (1) longhorned (acutifrons), slender-bodied, and humped (the
zebu) and, (2) massive and relatively short.
The staple crops of the Southern Neolithic were millets, dominated by a
foxtail millet (Setaria sp.), in some cases to be identified with the bristly
foxtail (S. verticillata), although the yellow foxtail may also have been
present. It is also possible that sawa millet (Echinochloa colona), horse
gram/kulthi (Macrotyloma uniflorum (Lam.) Verdc., synonym Dolichos
uniflorum Lam.) were followed by green gram (Vigna radiata (L.) Wilczek,
syn. Phaseolus radiatus L.). and pigeon pea/tuvar/arhar (Cajanus cajan (L.)
Mill sp.), introduced later from Bastar region. Another pulse widely
recovered from second millennium BCE sites on the Peninsula is hyacinth
bean/sem (Lablab purpureus (L.) sweet).
11. Northeastern Region: The Brahmaputra
Tradition
Northeastern India, comprising Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh,
Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram is a distinctive Neolithic culture zone.
The Northeastern Neolithic culture zone includes the Cachar, Garo, and
Naga Hills containing the excavated sites of Daojali Hading and Salbalgiri
(Garo Hills) and Sarutaru and Marakdola (Shillong plateau). It is postulated
that this region might hold the key to understanding an independent
development of rice cultivation or spread of rice from the east into the
subcontinent probably very early in the Mid-Holocene. The tool types
comprised harvesters, knives, axes, adzes, and single- and double-
perforated celts mostly made of schist shale and basalt. Some of these
types, like the double-perforated celts, are typical of this region and have
affinities with the Indian Neolithic assemblage. The adzes, Honan knife,
perforated celts, and harvesters are typical of the South Chinese Neolithic
assemblage. Cord impressed pottery, shouldered celts and rice cultivation
are the hallmark of the Neolithic of this region. They range in time from the
early second millennium BCE.
15
THE IDEOLOGY OF THE INDUS CIVILIZATION

Akinori Uesugi

In the absence of deciphered scripts, our understanding of the ideological

aspects in prehistoric India, especially the Indus Civilization in this context,
solely depends on archaeological evidence. Different aspects of ideology of
the Indus Civilization can be found, though not directly, in the material
culture of the civilization, that is, funerary practices and iconographic
representations in different media, such as stones, clay, and metals.
Evidence of the Neolithic period from Mehrgarh in central Balochistan
(present-day Pakistan) amply exhibits that Neolithic people started building
graves to bury the dead in and around their settlement. The dead was buried
along with different kinds of grave goods, such as lithics, ornaments,
baskets, sacrificed animals, etc., in the proximity of the living space.
Among ornaments, raw materials such as turquoise and marine shells,
which were brought from a distance, were used along with locally available
ones; they are likely to represent prestige items, though no discrete patterns
representing social hierarchy and specific ideology have been identified so
far.
In the Chalcolithic period at Mehrgarh, evidence of iconographic
representations became more prominent with painted pottery and terracotta
figurines. While it is difficult to identify the meaning of painted motifs, a
wide range of motifs including anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and
geometric ones provide us with some glimpse of the ideology of the
prehistoric people. It is clear that prehistoric people attempted to express
their ideology through painting. Terracotta figurines, including
anthropomorphic and zoomorphic, more concretely exhibit the prehistoric
ideology. Female figurines with numerous ornaments seem to represent
mother goddesses or the symbol of fertility. Figurines of domesticated
animals, including zebu and sheep, also likely depict the ideological
conception and worship of fertility. In the early part of the Bronze Age
period, generally called Pre-Harappan or Pre-urban Indus period dating to
the early third millennium BCE, the use of terracotta figurines became
widespread across the Indus Valley, suggesting that some ideological
concepts and the worship towards fertility were widely shared in the
formation process of urban society.
Another important phenomenon relating to the period just prior to the
birth of the urban society during the early third millennium is the separation
of cemetery between infants and adults. At the settlement of Mehrgarh
Period VII, only infant burials have been found in the middle of the
settlement, but very few adult graves have been attested in the settlement,
indicating that adult graves were built away from the habitation area. This
evidence may indicate the funerary ideology and practices were reorganized
and complexed in the formation process of the urban society.
For the Mature Harappan or Urban Indus period (2600–1900 BCE), the
evidence of iconographic representations became more diverse with seals,
painted pottery, and terracotta figurines. In contrast to the ones of the pre-
urban period, which depict geometric motifs, the seals of the urban period
have a wide variety of figurative motifs, including zoomorphic,
anthropomorphic, and composite. Most of the seals are depicted with an
animal in the side view; among the animals represented, the unicorn is
dominant, followed by the bison, zebu, elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo, tiger,
etc. While, the unicorn, an imaginary animal, may have been a symbol of
the urban Indus society, the presence of a wide variety of animals, in which
many animals with horns or tusks are included, is noteworthy. While we do
not know the meanings of these animals, or why they were selected as a
motif for seals, it is likely that the people of the urban Indus society found
auspicious power in these animals and that the ideology behind the animals
were widely shared in the urban society to maintain sociocultural
integration. It also seems that seals with a specific iconography were used
for demonstrating sociocultural identity.
A few seals depict an anthropomorph, which seems to represent some
deity. They are crowned with horns and plants, which may have symbolized
the auspicious power of the deity and is associated with animals. One seal
has a narrative scene of animal sacrifice to a god. While it is likely that
these anthropomorphs represent deities, the rarity of the seals with
anthropomorphs makes it difficult to understand their nature and
importance in the ideology of the Urban Indus society.
 It is interesting that the animals represented in seals are not depicted in
painted pottery, in which peacocks and peepal trees are dominating. It
appears that seals and painted pottery were different types of media, in
which different sets of iconography were represented.
Anthropomorphic terracotta figurines have been discovered from Sindh
and Punjab, but are conspicuously rare in other parts of the Indus region. In
addition, animal figurines from Sindh and Punjab include a diverse range of
animals, many of which are common to seals. It is likely to indicate that the
ideology behind terracotta figurines was more diverse than the case of seals.
Graves are another source of information for our understanding of the
Indus ideology. Cemeteries have been found at several sites in the different
parts of the Indus region. The graves in these cemeteries largely share the
same funerary practice, consisting of a rectangular burial pit with an
extended dead body and grave goods. Grave goods are dominated by
pottery including pots, jars, goblets, dish-on-stands, etc. They may have
been offered to the dead for their life after the death. Some examples of
graves showed dead bodies with ornaments, though limited in number.
While there is a variation in the number of grave goods among graves, no
outstanding difference can be found in the size and structure among them. It
means that no social stratification is visible in the graves. Although we
should be careful in interpreting this phenomenon, graves can be an
important key for our understanding of the society and ideology of the
Indus Valley Civilization.
Even after a hundred years of research on the Indus Valley Civilization,
we know little about the ideology of the urban Indus society based on hard
evidence. However, different types of approaches to the material culture,
such as stylistic, technological, scientific, multi-scale, qualitative,
quantitative, etc., can provide us with various clues to better understand the
ideology that sustained the urban society.
16
RISE OF URBAN HABITATS

Jennifer Bates

How we came to live in urban settlements, the move from small settlements
to dense crowded and large metropolises is a question that has occupied
much of archaeology across the globe. Within South Asian archaeology, the
multiple phases of urbanism and how these came to be are critical stories in
the pre/proto and historic periods. Discussions have focused around the why
as well as how of urban origins, and also comparing and contrasting
different urbanisms. The origins of the Early Historic cities, the
Mahajanapadas (great republics) of the Ganga Valley following the decline
of earlier Indus cities and the so-called ‘dark ages’ between these two eras,
is of particular interest to many archaeologists (Allchin, 1995; Coningham,
1995; Erdosy, 1995; Lahiri, 2000), and provides us with a case study to
think about some of the themes around the rise of urban habitats in South
Asia.
The rise of the Mahajanapadas is the second cycle of urban
development within South Asia. It is often described as the Early Historic
period as this is the first time we see indisputably textual (historical)
evidence. The focus of this urban development was in the Ganga Valley,
where we see several large settlements forming. These become the capitals
of the Mahajanapadas. Following the Indus decline (beginning 1900 BCE
and accelerating by 1500 BCE) we see a shift in lifeways, with Indus cities
abandoned or reduced in size, material goods changing from Indus-like to
new forms and styles, and a shift in populations eastwards (Coningham and
Young, 2015; Erdosy, 1995; Kenoyer, 1997; Sinopoli et al., 2010). Around
600 BCE a new ceramic form arrives, Northern Black Polished Ware
(NBPW) that by 300 BCE is the most common and widespread type across
the north of the subcontinent. NBPW is associated with increasing
settlement hierarchies that included small settlements (averaging 1-6ha),
mid-size sites (starting around 12ha), and eventually the rise of what we
might term urban sites (50ha initially, reaching around 250ha eventually),
including places like Hastinapura, Kausambi, and Ahich chatra. These
settlements were large and included features like ramparts, centralized
control of economics and politics, and social division seen in goods
(Erdosy, 1995). The patterns of social division increased over time, setting
up the historic systems of urban-rural lifeways and systems of centralized
control that accelerated in later periods. Other urban sites also developed in
other regions across the subcontinent during the post-Indus period, like
Takshashila, Ujjain, Paithan, and Anuradhapura, highlighting the point that
this second cycle of urbanism was more diverse than that seen before in the
preceding Indus era. (Map 2)
One aspect we might consider is what it means to ‘be urban’ in the
context of South Asia. There has been a tendency to assume that ‘city’,
‘town’, and ‘village’ are self-explanatory terms and related primarily to
settlement size and shared descriptive features. This links back to early
culture–history models, and some of this must be laid at the door of the
‘classic’ text by Childe (1950). A reliance on Childe’s trait list is commonly
seen in South Asian literature, and is shown in the hunt for elite residences,
road systems, fortification, platforms, drainage, and town planning seen
from Indus to historic periods (Eltsov, 2008; Mehta, 1993; Petrie, 2013a).
Settlement size has also often been key to identifying Indus urbanism.
However, this is deeply problematic, as cities are a more conceptual and
culturally situated construct. A Mesopotamian city is different from a South
Asian city; an Indus city is different from an Early Historic city; and we
might even argue that between Mahajanapadas the idea of what a city
should be may have been contextually situated. This is the basis from which
P. A. Eltsov began when reconsidering the idea of a ‘South Asian city’.
Eltsov argued that there cannot be a single and universally comprehensive
definition of the city in the South Asian context. Instead, the city should be
viewed as a historical phenomenon that was inseparable from the idea of
the city in the minds of the historical agents. He drew on information from
ancient Indian literature, has proposed that there are two critical factors for
defining Indus and Early Historic cities: evidence for fortifications and
authority. These should not be looked for as ‘traits’ but as concepts relating
to how power was materialized in cities and the way cities were used.
Petrie argues that this is an important step in the right direction, to move
away from the descriptive, prescriptive lists of Childe, towards a more
culturally situated and conceptual approach. However, he notes issues with
this, both theoretical and practical. From a theoretical side it is still
descriptive to a degree, just with less rigid categories (one can be flexible
with what ‘fortification’ and ‘authority’ are and how to look for them or
define them), and from a practical side, Petrie notes that very often we have
little data actually available archaeologically or from early urban periods.
Despite this he notes that we do indeed see evidence of fortification across
numerous settlements within the Mahajanapadas such as the walls of
Kausambi, and evidence of authority such as the placement of large sites
near resources and the control of luxury good movement. Building from
this he agrees with Eltsov that this shows cities were likely a materialization
of rivalries between kingdoms and reflections of the increasingly complex
socio-economic hierarchies. As such, cities might be thought of as a
physical manifestation of centralization of elite power in the landscape
during the initial urbanizing period (Petrie, 2013a; Erdosy, 1995: Eltsov,
2008).
That being said, the development of urban habitats across South Asia
was not homogenous or uniform, and they were not static spaces that once
formed stayed the same forever. While we see the development of 3(+)
settlement hierarchies in the Ganga Valley gradually developing out of
regional materials like NBPW and increasing economic and political
centralization, in the west of the subcontinent secondary urbanism was
likely earlier than that of the Ganga and part of an independent series of
processes in the fallout of the Indus decline. We see regional materials
developing as the Indus break down began and the development of larger
settlements taking advantage of changing social dynamics, such as
Charsadda, Akra, and the rise of Pirak as a regional centre. The shift in
power as the Indus urban centres reduced and were abandoned, and the
influx of increasing amounts of material from outside the Indus from the
BMAC region suggests perhaps the shifting influence of centralization and
control within the wider Indus region may have been influential in changing
urban patterns. We might contrast this with the developments in the South
and in Sri Lanka, where debates around urban origins are focused more
around theocratic power such as that at Anuradhapura (Coningham et al.,
2007; Goonatilake, 2011).
Urbanism and urban origins in historic South Asia were therefore
variable. There were likely many reasons why cities formed, and how they
were understood by the people living in them. We can contrast the picture
of Early Historic urbanism with Indus urbanism to illustrate this, and with
the continued diversification of urban trajectories throughout the historic
periods to show the impacts of this nuancing. We can see for example how
different imperial systems across time chose different cities for their
centres, and used their historic contexts and formation to guide power and
control. Mauryan choices of Rajgir and Pataliputra can be contrasted with
Sunga and Satavahana use of numerous regional centres, and the Indo-
Greek desire to found new non-South Asian style centres to reform the
materialization of power in their own vision (Shaikan Dheri for example).
Beyond this however it is important to remember that as Wright has stated
any view of urbanism that concentrates on cities alone is only half the story.
T. H. Charlton and D. L. Nichols have noted that ‘cities cannot be
understood apart from the larger societal structures in which they’re
embedded’. There has been a tendency within South Asian archaeology
regardless of period to focus on defining the city as a concept the minute
urbanism appears on the horizon, and this has had a knock-on effect in our
modelling, theory and practice. Critically, towns are often seen as smaller
versions of cities with slightly less of the features that ‘make’ cities ‘urban’
and villages are seen as small sites mostly without much of anything in
them (see Mehta, 1993; Eltsov, 2008; Petrie, 2013). This has led to a lack of
research into villages and towns, as they are seen as simply small versions
of cities with less ‘stuff’ and not of analytical value in themselves. Petrie
has noted that such a view is problematic, and more work needs to be done
to redress this balance. On this critical point, the section on the rise of
urbanism ends—with a call for exploring non-urban sites to help us
understand urban civilizations in a holistic way.
17
DECLINE AND TRANSFORMATION OF URBAN HABITATS

Jennifer Bates

As we attempt to parse out the processes and circumstances facing our own
societies, the situations facing past civilizations provide long-term
‘experiments’ to study. South Asian prehistory, protohistory, and history
have seen multiple periods of urbanism involving numerous cultures. The
start and especially the end of these has often been the focus of research, as
we try to understand how societies collapse, decline, or change and place
this in contrast with the trajectories of our own societies today (e.g.:
Chakrabarti, 1995; Coningham and Young, 2015; Erdosy 1995; Shaw and
Sutcliffe, 2003; Sinopoli et al., 2010). This is perhaps seen most acutely in
the Indus Civilization of northwest South Asia, where the debates
surrounding the Late Harappan ‘end’ of urbanism and indeed the entire
civilization has been placed under a microscope since it was first discussed
within the field of archaeology. It provides a case study to look at how
decline, collapse, and transformation in urban habitats and urban
civilizations have been conceived and debated within South Asian
archaeology, and how these are still being debated. (e.g.: Petrie, 2017;
Petrie et al., 2017; Pokharia et al., 2017; Robbins Schug et al., 2012)
The Indus Civilization (3200–1500 BCE) covered the region that is today
modern Pakistan, northwest India, and extended up to parts of Afghanistan,
an area possibly as large as 1 million square kilometres. At its zenith in the
urban Mature Harappan period, it consisted of five large sites, sometimes
called cities, a myriad of other large sites (towns) (Petrie, 2013), and
thousands of small settlements (villages). Trade networks extended across
the region, and linked the Indus into the subcontinent and across the sea to
Arabia and Mesopotamia. Complex crafting, urban planning, and
agricultural systems were also present ( Jansen, 1993; Petrie and Bates,
2017; Vidale and Miller, 2000). Around 2000–1900 BCE things begin to
change, and by 1500 BCE the Indus has changed so radically it might be
deemed as ‘over’.
How we define this end however is open to debate, and this ties into
bigger debates in archaeology (e.g. Allchin, 1995; Marshall, 1931; Petrie,
2017; Possehl, 1997; Singh, 1971; Wheeler, 1968; Wright, 2010). Terms
like ‘collapse’, ‘decline’, and ‘transformation’ have been variably used.
Underpinning these terms are different notions of the acuteness or
gradualness of the end, whether it was a crisis or something more
transformative. Citing Tainter, Petrie notes that simply using the term ‘end’
is difficult as it implies something rapid and simple, and instead notes that
what we see in the Indus is difficult to define because we have both a long
process (2000–1500 BCE) which is almost as long as the urban period itself
and varies from site to site, and there is no agreement about what caused it.
What we do see is a deurbanization and a series of variable social shifts,
and as Petrie notes, this suggests that there was a definite change in the way
populations in the Indus were living. Fundamentally this was both physical
(where they lived) but also psychological (what it meant to be Indus).
These changes happened at many scales of Indus life, but it is not a
simple, homogenous story. Initially there was an intensification in the
patterns of Indus life (such as in trade and the rebuilding of the Great Hall
at Harappa c. 2200–1900 BC) but we also see the beginnings of change. At
Mohenjo Daro, starting around 2200 BCE and increasing into the Late
Harappan period, structures like the Great Bath are not repaired and
eventually fall out of use, and over time, many of the large urban sites like
Mohenjo Daro are entirely abandoned. However this is not the entire story
—at Harappa the population did not entirely abandon the city, but it was no
longer the vast conurbation of the Mature period (Kenoyer, 2008).
Settlement patterns also seem to reorientate. We see a general shift
eastwards, with areas like Sindh and Cholistan depopulated. But again,
other areas are less affected or even increase in the number of small
settlements, regions like Gujarat, Haryana, and East Punjab. There was a
general loss of ‘technical virtuosity’ in fine crafts, standardization, and long
distance trade (Vidale and Miller, 2008; Wright, 2010; Cleuziou and Tosi,
2000), but products like ceramics continued to be made although forms and
designs changed gradually over time. And while it has been proposed that
there was a ‘Late Harappan revolution’ in agriculture, the ground reality is
much more complex and differs from site to site.
 What we see then is a complex picture where the end of Indus urbanism
was not fast nor homogenous nor total. And to explain this multiple causes
have been put forward. Both natural and human-induced causes have been
invoked. It is worth noting here again (as many others have) that invasion
theories have been disproved. Typical factors invoked today include
reorientation of long-range trade, resource exhaustion, social evolution,
population increases, declining rainfall, desiccation, and river shift. Climate
change, and the 4.2 kilo years ago change in the Indian Summer Monsoon,
have been particularly key in recent thinking, but as Petrie et al., Dixit et al.,
and Madella and Fuller, for example, have shown, the causation and
correlation is particularly difficult. This is an ongoing area of research to
look at how shifts in rainfall patterns link to changes in food supply and
then to the reactions of people.
After the urban Indus period we see multiple cultural groups in the
region, often defined not by their cultural or social structures, but by
ceramic types (BRW, OCP, PGW). This period is often called the ‘dark
age’, both because of a lack of urbanism for study but also a lack of
research generally. Overall though, the differences between this period and
the Indus, if we conceive of the ‘end’ of the Indus as a long drawn out
process and not a catastrophic sudden event, is that the changes happening
in the Late Harappan period were both crises and/or collapse, in the sense
that urban centres ended and peoples’ lives were disrupted, but also
transformative, with gradual changes that resulted in some elements of life
continuing in new forms into the next chronological era. Petrie has argued
that we can think of the end of the Indus as including decline, collapse,
transformation, and crisis as it happened at so many scales, and had
nuanced ramifications for both the Indus people and what happened after.
The end of the Indus demonstrates the complexity of studying the end of
urban habitats within South Asia, and archaeology more generally, and
there remain many questions left to address, from the causes of change to
the impacts of it and life in the period after the Indus.
18
SOCIAL FORMATION: ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCHOLARSHIP
OF THE INDUS CIVILIZATION

Sudeshna Guha

Histories of social formations constitute a key source for knowing the

world, past and present. Small shifts within patterns of social organization
often inform us of major shifts within political, economic, cultural,
subsistence, and religious pursuits, and it is perhaps possible to assert
authoritatively that the study of society is the best way to explore a specific
time period and place. Such studies allow us to see the reality of historical
change and remind us to reckon with issues of ethics because they
demonstrate the many ways in which notions of civilizational legacy are
established through the archaeological and historical scholarship into
material truths.
The archaeological scholarship of South Asia notes evidence of social
formations from the Upper Palaeolithic, 35000 YBP to c. 10000 BCE, and
maps developments towards social and political hierarchies within the life
histories of the Chalcolithic, or Bronze Age Indus Civilization (3200–1750
BCE). This civilization, as is well known, is an archaeological phenomenon
that spans over a very large area, over 680,000 square kilometres, including
parts of Balochistan, Sindh, southern Afghanistan, Rajasthan, Gujarat,
Punjab, western Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana, and it peaked during the mid-
third millennium BCE with the emergence of cities and towns (2600–1900
BCE). The antecedents of urbanization is historicized through an Early
Harappan phase (3200–2600 BCE) that comprises regional settlement
clusters, such as Amri–Nal, Sothi–Siswal, Kechi Beg, and Damb Sadaat—
some of which show traces of possible incipient political formations, craft
specialization, and public architecture. Scholars consider this phase to be
the ‘threshold to the Mature Harappan’ period and put forth various theories
to explain social developments, including due to political transformations
within the regional domains. Thus, we note the long debate regarding
whether the Mature Harappan period constitutes a state society—a state, an
agglomeration of states, or city states—or that of chiefdom (Kenoyer, 2015;
Possehl, 1998). However, all agree that the Indus cities were home to
diverse communities and ‘this had social, as well as economic and political,
dimensions’ (Wright, 2010: 19).
Insightful inferences regarding the social fabric of the cities have
largely emerged from the scholarship of the technologies. They document
the likelihood of kin-related forms of political economy in the organization
of craft production, trade, and patterns of subsistence which fashioned the
competition of the elites to control different aspects of the social and
economic lives in the cities (e.g. Kenoyer, 1998: 15-9). Notably, a recent
study of the faience seals reiterates the importance of investigating this
class of objects—from which evidence of bureaucracy, control of trade, and
a stratified society and polity has been historically sought—as the ‘“public
persona” of the official “users” rather than the personal identity of their
owners’ (Frenez, 2018: 187).
Possibly the biggest theoretical change in the century-long scholarship
of the Indus Civilization is the definitive understanding that it is home
grown, albeit within a vast and variegated landscape of northern South
Asia. The evidence of indigeneity represents evidence of the absence of
large-scale migrations in the archaeological record. However, it facilitates
renewed attempts to claim the Indus Civilization’s historic ownership for
questionable purposes. Thus, many Indian archaeologists draw into the
evidence to obfuscate the linguistic histories of the Indo-Aryan. They
display the ‘Vedic Aryan’ within the folds of the Indus Civilization, often
by recourse to genetic data of the ‘basic biological continuity within the
Indus Valley from ca. 4500 BCE to 800 CE’ (cf. Lal, 1997: 287). The
ostensible realities of the Indus Civilization’s primordial Hindu population
addresses the cultural anxieties of the acutely narrow Indian nationalism of
today.*
Significantly, the Hindu, and Vedic, histories of the Indus Civilization
draw upon the lore of continuity that has been fashioned through the non-
partisan archaeological scholarship of the phenomenon. To a large extent,
this lore constitutes the legacy of the analogical method which scholars use
for exploring the unknowns through that which appear to them similar,
which is well known, but of a different time. Of the early examples of this
method within Indus studies are the attempts towards configuring the
religion. Notably Sir John Marshall, possibly the most astute early scholar
of the Indus Civilization, who saw the merit of studying this phenomenon in
relation to the other Bronze Age civilizations, drew upon the religions that
developed within the Indian subcontinent at least a thousand years later for
deriving inferences. Marshall could therefore see the iconographic
representations of the trimurtis of Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu in the seal
with a ‘horned deity’, and not surprisingly his inferences of the ‘pashupati
seal’ adds to the fashioning of an incipient Hinduism through the minor
antiquities of the Indus Civilization.
The analogical method has prominently served the pioneering
scholarship of the Indus crafts which inform us of the strong ‘social and
ideological linkages’ between the Indus and Early Historic cities, and the
possibility that the settlement patterns of the kin-related Indus craftsmen
were akin to those of the segregated varna society of ancient India.
Analogies have also fashioned the likelihood of rituals of purity and
pollution in the Indus cities through the feature of water management, such
as the drains, wells, flood platforms, and undoubtedly Mohenjo-daro’s
Great Bath, which allows speculations of the presence of caste-based kin
societies in the South Asian Bronze Age.
To locate the material presence of varna, if we consider this to be the
earliest reference—as we know, in the Vedas—of an incipient caste based
society, would require gauging inferences of colour-based distinctions
within the archaeological assemblage, which is not a feasible undertaking.
Additionally, in postulating the possible presence of some sort of a caste
society in the Indus Civilization, we need to remember that the jati
affiliations that characterized the varna of the Brahmanical religion shifted
continuously. Hence, an archaeological search for evidence of caste entails
configuring methods to determine an inherently changing social affiliation
from the evidence of the Indus cities and their crafts. As the above brings us
to note, literary references of varna and jati elude attempts of fixing these as
material features. The inhabitants of the Indus cities were undoubtedly a
part of a class-based society. However, the exercise of invoking varna and
caste to speculate their social status displays the biases that creep into the
historical studies of South Asia due to expectations of its supposedly unique
and antique civilizational essence.
Nevertheless, finding elements of the Vedic and Brahmanical social
structures within the Indus assemblage now gear many enquiries into the
bio-ancestry of the Indus Civilization. The assumptions remind us to heed
the warning of intrepid social scientists about the racialization that has
always embedded the bio-statistical constructs. And they ought to provoke
us to note the astute scholarship of the sociology of scientific knowledge
which has repeatedly demonstrated that the ways in which we see the world
colour our undertakings of ‘objective measurements’ and ‘impartial
analyses’.
The attempt to fit the Indus Civilization into a historical narrative of a
continuous cultural tradition has often been undertaken in the mistaken
assumption that this would decolonize the South Asian civilizational history
from the colonialist, and Western, historiography of rupture. Such attempts
have entailed sourcing unrelated material, especially disparate Sanskrit and
Pali texts, such as the Vedas, the epics, Arthashastra, Ashtadhyayi,
Milindapanha, and Manusmriti for also seeking ‘holistic and conceptual
models of the nature and genesis of the ancient Indian civilization’ (Elstov,
2008: 1). The various legacies of a supposedly Indus Valley Cultural
Tradition show the skeweredness of the analogical method, which derives
inferences about aspects of the Indus Civilization through the phenomena of
later times and then draws into those inferences for explaining other aspects
of South Asia’s subsequent cultural histories. The social histories of the
Indus Civilization, therefore, provide a rich field of research for enquiring
into the ways in which the archaeological scholarship establishes the
ontology of absence.
A growing strand of the Indus scholarship today emphasizes the ‘lack of
unequivocal references to Indus cities in later historical, mythological, or
religious texts.’ Building upon the evidence of diversity, variability, and
fragility in the Indus Civilization it highlights the constant transformations
and adaptations we would expect within the ‘socio-political trajectories’ of
a phenomenon that was ‘marked by contrasting urban and rural dynamics’
due to changing conditions, especially the environmental (Petrie, 2017:
110). Such studies build upon the known; namely, that the Indus cities
declined but most aspects of rural lifeways continued. But they provoke
renewed considerations of the feasibility of prising social histories through
trait lists and key diagnostic features that has characterized the
archaeological scholarship of civilizations throughout the twentieth century.
Additionally, the new scholarship brings to fore the promise of the
strikingly beautiful but small objects of the Indus Civilization for exploring
the emphasis of transformation which the Indus craftsmen seem to have
documented by radically changing the chemical composition of the material
they worked with through their production techniques. In this respect the
studies demonstrate the heuristic value of experimentations for creations of
Bronze Age technologies. Additionally, some note the problems of
exploring social change without examining the change in kinship practice
(Chase 2018: 109), and suggest the possibilities of an egalitarian early
complex society that would defy presumptions about the covalence of
urbanization and inequality (Green, 2021).
One hopes that this academic scholarship would, with erudition, display
the vacuousness of the searches for origins and indigeneity of a civilization.
Because such searches bring us to see the problems of seeking selfhood and
identities of a past whose literature and language we do not know, and lead
us to ask: how did the various inhabitants of the cities and villages
distinguish their cultural territories? What notions of indigeneity did they
foster with respect to their own spatial affiliations? Such questions bring us
to the heart of the epistemic limitations of a traits-based construct of
archaeological culture. They also illuminate the logic of intellectually
disengaging with an expectantly extractable social history of the deep past.

 
*Hartosh Singh Bal, ‘The Desire to Mislead: What media reporting on ancient DNA results says
about our times’, The Caravan, 30 September 2019.
19
THE PRE-VEDIC AND THE VEDIC SARASVATI

Rajesh Kochhar

The main clue to the geography of the Rig Veda is provided by the river
Sarasvati on whose banks many hymns were composed and whose name was
given to the goddess of learning. We must, however, distinguish between the
celebrated Sarasvati of the old mandalas and the Sarasvati named in passing in
the Indus-centric nadistuti-hymn of the tenth mandala (RV 10.75).

NADITAMA VERSUS VINASHANA SARASVATI

Sarasvati has been described in detail in one exclusive hymn (RV 6.61) and in
various other passages. It is described in superlatives. It is called naditama,
‘the best of the rivers’ (RV 2.41016), which surpasses ‘in majesty and might
711 other rivers’ (RV 7.95.2). It is ‘fierce’ (RV 6.62.7) and ‘swifter than the
other rapid streams’ (RV 6.61.13). It ‘comes onward with tempestuous roar’
(RV 6.61.8), ‘bursting the ridges of the hills with its strong waves’ (RV
6061.2). Sarasvati springs from a ‘three-fold source’ (RV 6.61012) in the
mountains (RV 7.95.2), and finally ends in a samudra (literally ‘the gatherer of
the waters’ or sea) (RV 7.95.2).
Sarasvati must be a long river because many kings live on its banks (RV
8.21.18) and the five tribes (RV 6.61.12) derive their prosperity from it. It also
has a number of tributaries themselves ‘strongly flowing’, with Sarasvati as
the seventh; it is Sindhumata, the ‘mother of rivers’ (RV 7.36.6), It swells with
rivers (RV 6.52.6), said to be seven in number (RV 6.61.12). Two rivers,
Drishadvati and Apaya, are explicitly named in (3.23.4) in conjunction with
Sarasvati. In addition, it is Saptashvasa, ‘seven sistered’ (RV 6.61.10), Another
verse (RV 8.5404) speaks of Sarasvati and seven rivers (Sapta Sindhavah).
These must be the ‘seven mighty rivers’ that ‘seek the seas’ (Rv 1.7107).
The picture that emerges is as follows: The long and mighty, partly
mountainous river Sarasvati receives a number of tributaries. It is called their
mother. In addition, there are independent rivers in the region that go to the sea
on their own. Sarasvati is called their sister. (The number seven may have been
used in the sense of an auspicious number rather than in an exact sense.)
So far, we have depended only on the Rig Veda for information on
Sarasvati. We now turn to the secondary Vedic literature for additional details.
The Brahmana and sutra literature, though linguistically younger, seems to
contain material belonging to an earlier era. Panchavimsha Brahmana (25.10,
for example) introduces us to the region Kuruksetra in which Sarasvati,
Drishadvati and Apaya flowed. In it were located the lake and district of
Sharyanavant and the district of Arjika mentioned in RV (1.84.14). Another
lake, Anyatahplaksha, is also placed in Kurukstra (Satapatha Brahmana
11.5.1.4). The well-respected Baudhayana Srautasutra (18.45) says that in
Kurukshetra there are lotus lakes called Bisvatis and ‘hills’ named
Aushanasas. The Srautasutras of Ashvalayana (12.6.1) and Sankhayana
(13.29.24) tell us that the source of river Sarasvati is a place called
Plakshaprasravana.
RV (6.61.1) talks of a people Paravatas slain by Sarasvati. These Paravatas
are placed on river Yamuna by Panchavimsha Brahmana (9.4.11). Yamuna in
turn is associated with Drishadvati, as can be seen from Latyayana Srautasutra
(10.19.8–9): ‘He should proceed on the southern bank of Drishadvati. When
he has reached the armah (village) whencefrom she springs, he should offer
his offering and descend into Yamuna in the vicinity of the place [called]
Triplakshavaharana. ‘The above passages suggest that Yamuna is a tributary of
Sarasvati in the hilly areas where Drishadvati also originates. River Ganga
must also be a part of this network as can be seen from the exploits of the
celebrated King Bharata, son of Dushyanta. Bharata won his victories on
Sarasvati (Aitareya Brahmana 8.23) as well as on Ganga and Yamuna
(Satapatha Brahmana 13.5.4.11).
The only reference to Ganga in the old mandalas is RV (6.45.31) which
mentions the epithet Gangyah. It can be interpreted to mean the man Urukasha
who was son of a woman named Ganga, or who lived on a river named Ganga.
Alternatively, it could mean a broad thicket on the river called Ganga. If
Ganga in this family mandala refers to the river, it must be the Ganga
associated with the naditama Sarasvati. Ganga is not mentioned in any other
Veda.
The connection between Ganga and Sarasvati is more explicitly stated in
the tertiary literature, that is the Puranas and the epics. Ramayana
(Ayodhya.65.5) tells that while returning from Kekaya to Ayodhya, Bharata
crossed the confluence of Ganga and Sarasvati. Mahabharata Vanaparvan
(84.38; 88.176, 201) mentions this confluence and names a sacred place
Gangaharda, ‘the tank of Ganiga’, in Kurukshetra. In a similar manner,
Vamana Purana (13.6-7; 15.62) lists Ganga as one of the rivers of Kurukhetra
and mentions the sacred places Kritajapya and Kotitirtha on it.
Thus we have a persistent tradition right from the older mandalas of the
Rig Veda down to the epics which calls Sarasvati a mighty river and associates
it with Drishadvati, Ganga and Yamuna. Let us call it the naditama Sarasvati.
But on the other hand, the later Vedic texts contain descriptions that are
inconsistent with the above, Panchavimsha Brahmana (25.10.1), Jaiminiya
Upanishad Brahmana (4:26.12) and the associated Srautasutras say that
Sarasvati disappears in the desert sands at a place called Vinashana (literally
disappearance). Let us call this weakling river Vinashana Sarasvati.
Identification of naditama Sarasvati is made difficult by the known
fickleness of the Himalayan rivers and the vast artificial irrigation network in
the alluvial plain. There lies between the Satluj and Yamuna, the Ghaggar river
system consisting of, from west to east, the Wah, Ghaggag, Dangri, Markanda,
Sarsuti and Chautang, (For the Ghaggar tributary, we deliberately use the de-
Sanskritized name Sarsuti in place of Sarasvati to avoid confusion with the
textual river.) These rivers are formed by a junction of small rivulets in the
lowly hills of the Shivaliks. The Ghaggar system acts as a rainwater drainage
for the Shivaliks. The water collected is however not sufficient to flow down
to the sea, some 1,400 kilometres away. The Ghaggar loses its way in the Thar
Desert.
There are sufficient reasons to believe that the Ghaggar had a far more
dignified existence in the past than it has today. Actual fieldwork done more
than a hundred years ago showed the presence of a large number of dry beds in
the area. One could trace the dry bed of the Ghaggar down to the mouth of the
Rann of Kutch. Parts of the dry bed carry local names: Hakra, Sotra, Whind,
Nara, Dahan and Mihran (Wilhelmy, 1969). We may use the term Ghaggar-
Hakra channel or old Ghaggar to refer to the whole course of the river. The
name Ghaggar may be used to denote the upper course of the river, and Hakra
the lower.
Satellite imagery of the region has brought the Ghaggar into sharper focus.
A detailed visual examination of the Landsat imagery obtained during 1972–
79 has revealed the following features of the old Ghaggar river system. The
bed of the Ghaggar in its early course is rather narrow, as is expected from a
rainwater stream. At Shatrana, 60 kilometres south of Patiala, the Ghaggar
receives the palaeo-channel of the Satluj as well as of the Yamuna, resulting in
a sudden widening of the bed. From Shatrana downstream, the bed maintains a
constant width of 6 to 8 kilometres. Near Anupgarh, the bed bifurcates and
both the branches come to an abrupt end, the upper branch terminating near
Marot and the lower near Berewala. The final fate of the bed is not clear. The
old Ghaggar certainly could not have ended inland. It is likely that the river
flowed into Nara and further into the Rann of Kutch without joining the Indus.

Rivers of Afghanistan

Not to scale: This map has been prepared in adherence to the ‘Guidelines for acquiring and producing
Geospatial Data and Geospatial Data Services including Maps’ published vide DST F.No.SM/25/02/2020
(Part-I) dated 15th February, 2021

It is surmised that at some epoch in the past there were environmental and
geological changes (with or without tectonic movements) which diverted the
Satluj westwards into the Indus, and the Yamuna eastwards into the Ganga.
Between the Ghaggar and the present-day Satluj, there are a number of braids
which probably are a result of the upheaval. The Yamuna’s shifting seems to
have been in well-recognized stages. One can see in the satellite images a
palaeo-channel, named Y1, which joined the old Ghaggar bed near Shatrana.
There is another palaeo-channel, Y2, through which the Yamuna later flowed.
This joined the Ghaggar lower down near Suratgarh. The third paleo-channel,
Y3, deposited the Yamuna into the Chambal which in turn flowed into the
Ganga. Finally, there came the present stage when the Yamuna became a direct
tributary of the Ganga. The present-day Sarsuti flows through the old channel
Y1, while Y2 corresponds to the Chautang (Pal et al., 1980). It is important to
keep in mind that satellite imagery provides a wide-angle snapshot of the
region. It tells us about the old channels of rivers but cannot tell us when these
channels were abandoned.

The present-day Ghaggar River System. Rivers Sarsuti and Chautang as well as man-made canals use
channels vacated by the old Yamuna and the old Satluj during successive migrations.
Not to scale: This map has been prepared in adherence to the ‘Guidelines for acquiring and producing
Geospatial Data and Geospatial Data Services including Maps’ published vide DST F.No.SM/25/02/2020
(Part-I) dated 15th February, 2021

It has implicitly been assumed that changes in the fortunes of the Ghaggar
took place during the Vedic times. It has been part of received wisdom for
many generations that the Ghaggar is identical with the Sarasvati of the
literary texts: the old Ghaggar is equated with the mighty Rig Vedic Sarasvati,
and the present-day Ghaggar with the weaker Sarasvati of the later texts. Very
often, even scholarly publications use the literary terms Sarasvati and
Drishadvati as if they were present-day geographical names. This causes
confusion, the more so because Sarasvati (Sarsuti) is an existing river. More
importantly, this obliterates the vital distinction between hypothesis and fact.
On first appearance, the identification of the naditama Sarasvati with old
Ghaggar looks plausible. In fact, any long river which goes from the mountain
to the sea and receives tributaries on its way can fit the general description of
the Rig Vedic Sarsvati. It has indeed been suggested, with all seriousness, that
in some Rig Vedic passages, Sarasvati is another name for Indus (Macdonell
and Keith, 1912)! If an identification is to be acceptable, it should not be
superficial, but should conform to the recorded description down to the
minutest detail. We now present arguments to show that the old Ghaggar
cannot match the attributes of the Rig Vedic Sarasvati. The two major
arguments are as follows:

i. The assumption that confluence with thc Satluj and the Yamuna wou
have made the Ghaggar a mighty river cannot stand close scrutiny. T
confluence would affect the Hakra part of the Ghaggar-Hakra chann
not the Ghaggar part. The inflow of water from the two snow-fed riv
would make the Hakra part affluent. From its origin in the Shivaliks
to the confluence, however, the basic character of the Ghaggar would n
change. It would still be a rainwater stream in low hills, whose heig
seldom exceeds 1,300 m. The Rig Vedic description of Sarasvati as
mighty, swift river that cuts the ridges of the hills does not fit t
Ghaggar of today. It would have neither fitted the Ghaggar of the pa
According to the Rig Veda, even the tributaries of Sarasvati we
‘strongly flowing’ rivers. This cannot be said of the puny rivers that jo
the Ghaggar.
ii. The biggest argument against the old Ghaggar’s being the naditam
Sarasvati comes from the position of the Satluj. If the old Ghaggar is
 be a mighty river, it must receive the Satluj. In the Rig Veda, howev
there is no suggestion whatever that Sutudri (Satluj) was in any w
connected with Sarasvati. As a matter of fact, the Rig Veda explici
associates Sutudri with Vipash (Beas) and refers to their confluence. R
(3.33) describes a dialogue between Vishvamitra, on the one hand, a
the rivers Vipash and Sutudri, on the other. Vishvamitra accompanied
the Bharatas addresses the two rivers:’Forth from the bosom of t
mountains Vipash and Sutudri speed down their waters [and] impell
by Indra move as it were on chariots to the ocean’. He says abo
Vipash, ‘I have attained the most maternal river; we have approach
Vipash, the broad, the blessed.’ He requests the two rivers thus, ‘List
quickly, Sisters, to the bard who cometh to you from far away with c
and wagon. Bow lowly down; be easy to be traversed: stay, Rivers, w
your floods below our axles.’ The rivers acceded to Vishvamitr
request, because we are told, ‘The warrior hosts, the Bharatas, far
over: the singer won the favour of the Rivers.’
  We learn a number of things from this hymn. If Vishvamitra arriv
there with car and wagon, it must be the entourage’s first crossing of t
rivers. Significantly, Vishvamitra addresses Vipash first, implying that
was parked to its west. There is however a curious element.
Vishvamitra was crossing the rivers for the first time, how did he kno
that the two waters reach the ocean? The poem must therefore have be
composed in commemoration of the event. The most important point
our present purposes is undoubtedly the documentary evidence that
the Rig Vedic times, the Satluj joined the Beas and flowed into t
ocean.
  Interestingly, the Mahabharata (Adiparvan 167.8) narrates a lege
that when Vasishtha threw himself into Satluj with a view to committi
suicide, the river broke into a hundred channels. This cannot be treat
as a contemporaneous account of the Satluj’s shifting its course.
simple interpretation of the legend would be that dry channels east of t
Satluj were generally noticed and correctly associated with the riv
From this, a story was made to enhance the prestige of Vasishtha. Sin
in real life the Satluj is unlikely to have obliged the prior existence of t
dry channels was necessary for making up the legend (Roy, n.d.).
  There are other arguments as well:
iii. In the Shivaliks all rivers, whom we may call Ghaggarettes, are alik
There is no reason to single out any one of them as the foremost.
iv. It is strange that a river system containing such majestic rivers as t
Satluj and Yamuna should be known by the name of a puny rainwa
stream such as Ghaggar. In the Vedic literature, Yamuna is clea
subservient to Sarasvati. This is contrary to the arrangement in the o
Ghaggar system, where the Yamuna along with the Satluj would ha
been dominant.
v. The secondary Vedic tradition associates not only Yamuna but al
Ganga with Sarasvati. By no stretch of imagination can the present-d
Ganga be associated with the Ghaggar, leave aside in a subsidia
capacity.
vi. When Sarasvati is equated with the Ghaggar, the Chautang is designat
Drishadvati on plausibility arguments. As already noted, a rishi
Latyayana Srautasutra (10.19.8—9) can go to the source of Drishadva
and casually move over to Yamuna. This is not possible in the Ghagg
set-up, because the source of the Yamuna is not at walking distance fro
the Chautang. The Yamuna rises in the middle Himalayas, from t
Yamunotri glacier on the Bandar-punch (‘monkey’s tail’) peak
Garhwal, at a short distance from the birthplace of the Bhagirathi (whi
combines with the Alakananda to form the Ganga).
vii It is implicitly assumed that even when the Yamuna and Satluj flow
. into the Ghaggar, rivers like the Chautang would have been intact. Th
assumption does not seem to be valid. At present, the Sarsuti a
Chautang both flow in channels vacated by the old Yamuna. This mea
that when the Yamuna itself was flowing in these channels, these riv
probably did not exist.
vii In the region of the Rig Vedic Sarasvati, there are other sisterly rive
i. which independently go to the sea. This condition is not fulfilled by t
Ghaggar region. Rivers to its east join the Ganga, those to the west t
Indus.
ix. The ancient Kurukshetra appears to be a vast area. It contains not on
Sarasvati, Drishadvati and Apaya but many lakes and hills and probab
other rivers as well. The hilly extent of the Ghaggar system is very sm
and devoid of lakes.
x. Later texts say that Vinashana, where Sarasvati disappears in the san
was the western boundary of the Aryavarta. In contrast, the Rig Ve
says that Sarasvati reaches the sea. It would thus seem that while the R
Vedic people felt at home along the entire course of Sarasvati right up
the sea, their later-day successors confined themselves only up
 Vinashana. This is curious because one expects territory to expand w
time rather than shrink, unless there is a natural calamity or defeat at t
hands of an enemy.
xi. It is an accepted fact that the Sarasvati hymns in the Rig Veda are old
than or contemporaneous with the Indus hymns. If this Sarasvati we
identical with the Ghaggar, then the archaeological sites on the Ghagg
should have been at least as old as the Punjab-Sind sites. What
observed is otherwise. In the Indian subcontinent, western settlemen
are invariably earlier than the eastern ones.
xii A very important diagnostic seems to have gone unnoticed. Even wh
. the Rig Vedic locale moved from Sarasvati to Indus, the importance
Soma did not diminish. This means that Soma grew in both the local
This is certainly true of the upper Helmand and middle Indus, whi
share their natural environs. However, if Sarasvati were the Ghagg
then it is difficult to find a common plant growing in the hilly areas
the middle Indus, the Avestan lands and on the lower Shivaliks, th
would fit the Soma bill Also, if Soma grew on the Ghaggar, there wou
not have been any need to find substitutes for it in the Brahmana perio

IDENTIFYING THE NADITAMA SARASVATI

We have argued that the Ghaggar system was already defunct in the Rig Vedic
times and that otherwise also it does not fit the Rig Vedic description. We must
therefore look west of the Indus to locate the naditama Sarasvati. For a clue,
we once again turn to the Avesta. The Avestan Harahvaiti, phonetically the
same as Sarasvati, was known to the Greeks as Etymander and is now called
Arghandab (Hillebrandt, 1927; Kosambi, 1975). Vedic Sarasvati, however, is
to be equated not with the Arghandab but with the Helmand, of which the
Arghandab is the main tributary.
The Helmand, whose Avestan name is Haetumant (Setumant), is a 1,300-
kilometre long river in Afghanistan. It rises in the recesses of the Koh-e Baba
Range, about 80 kilometres west of Kabul city, and flows in a generally
southwesterly direction. (The three major rivers of Afghanistan—Helmand,
Kabul, and Harirud—all get their water supply from the same geographical
area, that is the central Hindu Kush Range. The Kabul and Helmand start
within 50 kilometres of each other. Anyone familiar with the Kabul can be
expected to have known the Helmand also.) In the mountain area, the Helmand
flows in narrow valleys with gorge-like cliffs. About 65 kilometres above
Girishk, the topography changes. The Helmand enters into a flat country and
flows over a gravelly bed. Near the Iranian border, it takes a sharp turn north
and empties into an inland lake in the Seistan called Hamun-e Sabari.
Several tributaries join the upper Helmand: Kaj-rud, Tirin, Rud-e Musa,
Gala, and others. The only other major river in the system is the 560
kilometres long Arghandab which also rises in the mountains. A low line of
hills separates the river from the city of Kandahar. The Arghandab joins the
Helmand at Qala Bist, 70 kilometres below Girishk. Two intermittent streams,
Kushk-e Nakhud and Garmab, join the Arghandab from the north. The 280
kilometres long Arghastan runs east of and parallel to the Arghandab. The
Arghastan receives Lora No. 1 and the Kushk-e Rud and itself falls into the
Dori which joins the Arghandab. The Tarnak, 320 kilometres in length, lies
between the Arghandab and Arghastan and finally joins the Dori. The
Helmand always has plenty of water. In ancient times when there were no
dams, it got flooded in spring when snow melted in the mountains.6
There is an uncanny similarity between the Rig Vedic description of
Sarasvati and the Avestan description of Helmand. RV (6.6148) talks of
Sarasvati ‘whose limitless unbroken flood, swift moving with a rapid rush,
comes onward with tempestuous roar’, while Yasht (10.67) refers to ‘the
bountiful, glorious Haetumant swelling its white waves rolling down its
copious floods’ (Hillebrandt, 1927; Kosambi, 1975). This suggests that the
same river is meant in both the cases.
Significantly, there are a couple of Puranic accounts that match the Seistan
locale. It is said that an early Ikshvaku king, Kuvalashva, killed a Rakshasa
named Dhundhu near a sand-filled sea called Ujjalaka. More specifically,
Vishvamitra is said to have attained brahmanhood at Rusharigu’s tirth that is
described as being on the bank of river Sarasvati and in the lowlands near the
sea (‘sagaranupe’) (Pargiter, 1922).
If we identify the naditama Sarasvati with the Helmand, we can
consistently account for all its attributes. Sarasvati, the mother of its
tributaries, would be the sister of other independent rivers in the region like the
Farah-rud and Fradath-rud. The Arghandab can be equated with Drishadvati
and, say, the Tarnak with Apaya. There have already been suggestions that
Arjikiya be identified with the Arghastan. Lakes like Sharyanavant and
Anyatahplaksha can easily be placed in the hilly areas of Koh-e Baba from
where the Helmand starts. The place name Girishk in the region is probably an
old name connected with Giri, the mountain. (The Rig Veda names a person
Girikshit.) In this picture, the original Ganga and Yamuna are the tributaries of
the Helmand lying between the Helmand and Arghandab. It is now easy to
understand the association of Paravatas, the mountain people, with Yamuna
and Sarasvati. These Paravatas are probably related to the people called
Paroyetai mentioned by Ptolemy and believed to be located near the southern
border of Paropamisadae (Kabul) (Hillebrandt, 1927).
A number of rivers figure in the exploits of King Sudas. RV (7.18)
mentions his victory first on Parushni (Ravi) and then on Yamuna. The hymn
closes with a reference to seven rivers. Since the closing part of the hymn is a
danastuti, it appears likely that the hymn is a summary of Sudas’s career, with
Ravi and Yamuna figuring in two different campaigns. From the text, it is not
clear which campaign is older, According to Pargiter, Sudas first defeated the
Puru king Samvarana on Yamuna, and then him and others in the so-called
battle of ten kings on Ravi (Pargiter, 1922).
There can thus be no doubt that Sudas was familiar with Punjab. The
Yamuna of his exploits is likely to be a tributary of the Helmand. In that case,
his area of operation remains compact and archaeologically plausible.
Furthermore, all the participants in the celebrated battle of ten kings would
have been located near the war theatre itself. Indeed, according to the Puranas,
Samvarana’s ally Druhyu is placed in Gandhara and Samvarana took shelter
near Indus for many years (Pargiter, 1922). The Puranas and the Mahabharata,
however, generally assign to the ten kings, territories their tribes came to
occupy all over India a thousand years later, thus transforming the historical
battle into an improbable event.

GHAGGAR AS VINASHANA SARASVATI

Moving eastwards from the Helmand region, the Rig Vedic people would have
found the Indus mightier than any river they had seen before. So, they simply
named it Sindhu, the River. Further east, they would have found the Ghaggar
system in more or less the same state as it is today. On one of its rivers was
bestowed the name and the sanctity of the old Sarasvati, while names like
Drishadvati and Apaya were ignored. On reaching the Ganga, they would have
given it the name that hardly had any connotation in the old mandalas. Yamuna
(the twin) was then a natural name for its chief tributary. This implies naming
the Ganga first, even though the Yamuna was crossed first.
It is at this stage that the nadistuti hymn (RV 10.75) would have been
composed. In this hymn, the pride of place belongs to the river Indus to which
all the epithets of the naditama Sarasvati are transferred. The Sarasvati
mentioned in this hymn must then be the Vinashana Sarasvati, and Ganga and
Yamuna the present day rivers. It is significant that this hymn makes no
mention of Drishdvati and Apaya, implying their abandonment.
In its upper course, the Vinashana Sarasvati is more likely to be the
present-day Sarsuti rather than the Ghaggar. For one, the name is the same.
There are in fact four neighbouring Shivalik streams all carrying the name
Sarsuti. The local tradition holds the easternmost one, emerging from Adi
Badri, to be the most sacred. Secondly, more sites with ancient names are
associated with it than any of its neighbours. Examples are Kapaimochan,
Thanesar (Sthaneshvara), Kurukshetra, Pehoa (Prithudaka), and Bahar-Jakh
(named after Yaksa) (Bhargava, 1964). Interestingly, no other river of the
system carries a Rig Vedic name. There is a remarkable coincidence whose full
significance is not yet clear. Both the Sarsuti of Haryana and the Sarju of
eastern Uttar Pradesh are named after Rig Vedic rivers, and both fall into rivers
with similar names, Ghaggar/Ghoghra.
Vinashana marked the western boundary of the Aryavarta or
Madhyadesha. The tribes living beyond it were called Sudras, Abhiras and
Nishadas. (The very concept of a boundary in the middle of the country
suggests recent arrival.) Vinashana was considered a sacred place. Its
newfound sanctity coincided with the increasing mythification of the old
Sarasvati. Thus Panchavimsha Brahmana (25.10.1–23) places
Plakshaprasravana (Sarasvati’s source) at a distance of 40 ashvinas from
Vinashana.
An ashvina was the distance a horse could cover in a day and equalled five
yojanas according to Atharvaveda (6.131.3). A yojana in turn was made of
four kroshas and corresponded to about 14 kilometres. Plakprasravana was
thus located at a large distance of about 2,800 kilometres (Bharadwaj, 1986) .
The exact figure is probably not significant. What is significant is the fact that
the place was for all practical purposes inaccessible. No wonder then, many
legends and myths were built around it. Markandeya Purana (23.28) calls it
Plakshavatarana, a place of pilgrimage on Sarasvati in the Himavat mountain
where the Naga king Ashvatara repaired to propitiate goddess Sarasvati. In the
Mahabharata Adiparvan (169.20), Sarasvati is called Plakshajata (born in a fig
tree), while Vanaparvan (84.4–7) is more ingenuous; the water of Sarasvati is
described as coming out of an ant-hill (Bharadwaj, 1986).
Mahabharata Shalyaparvan (38) says that there are seven rivers in the
world known as Sarasvati: (i) Suprabha near Pushkar (ii) Kanchakshi in the
Naimisha forest, (iii) Vishala near Gaya, (iv) Manorama in north Kosala, (v)
Oghavati in Kurukshetra, (vi) Surenu near the source of Ganga, and (vii) the
Vimalodaka in the Himavat forest. These seven are said to unite at Sapta
Sarasvat (Bhargava, 1964). This geographical absurdity must be considered
significant because it points towards a realization that the location and
characteristics of Vinashana Sarasvati were not capable of satisfactorily
explaining the various references in the corpus of the sacred literature.
Bhagavata Purana (4.19.1) and Vamana Purana Saromahatmya (SM) (21.19)
explicitly call the Vinashana Sarasvati, Prachi (eastern) Sarasvati implying the
existence of one in the west. (The Pehoa inscription of King Bhoja-I of the
Pratihara dynasty [ninth century AD] makes a reference to Prachi Sarasvati.)
(Bharadwaj, 1986) Vamana SN (37.60–61) says that Gomati joins Sarasvati,
apparently not aware that in the Rig Veda, Gomati is associated with Indus
(Bharadwaj, 1986). It would thus appear that since the Vedic people had
moved away for good from the regions where these rivers flowed, their
geographical description became creative rather than factual.
As the centre of the Aryan activity moved east of the Yamuna, even the
Vinashana Sarasvati was forgotten. As a mark of respect to the old Sarasvati, it
was made into an invisible river that joined the Ganga and Yamuna. Thus, in
its transition from the naditama to the Vinashana to a mythical river, Sarasvati
like Soma traces the stepwise history of the Indo-Aryan migration from
Afghanistan to the Ganga Plain.

HARAPPANS ON THE GHAGGAR

The Ghaggar is important not only from the Vedic point of view but also from
the Harappan. The Ghaggar was the lifeline of the Harappans. Of a sample of
about 1,400 Harappan sites, more than 75 per cent are situated on the banks of
the Ghaggar-Hakra channel. The older sites corresponding to the Early
Harappan and Mature Harappan periods are located on the lower part of the
Ghaggar-Hakra, whereas the Late Harappan sites are mainly found on the
minor rivers in the Shivalik Hills. An in-depth study of the sites suggests that
this upstream migration took place in c. 1700 BCE (Misra, 1994).
It is certain that the settlements on the lower course of the Ghaggar-Hakra
River could not have been sustained at the present level of water supply. The
river, therefore, must have been more watery in the past. The question is: how
much more? The Harappan settlement pattern on the lower Ghaggar has been
cited as a proof that the Yamuna and Satluj flowed into the Ghaggar (Misra,
1994). Such a conclusion is unwarranted. What the Harappans required from
the Ghaggar was running water and not the combined might of two snow-fed
rivers. Abundant rainfall, and/or the overflow of the Satluj floodwaters into the
old channels, would have probably met the requirements of the various
Harappan-phase settlements on the Hakra. Alternatively, a small natural (or
man-made?) duct transferring some water from the Satluj into the Hakra would
have served the purpose. It is noteworthy that the Hakra settlements occupied
slightly different geographical areas at different times, implying an erratic
water supply (Mughal, 1992).
It is very likely that a mighty Ghaggar would have precluded the
appearance of Chalcolithic settlements on its banks. Suppose for a moment
that the Satluj and Yamuna were flowing into the Hakra in the Harappan times.
When the two rivers changed course, we would have expected the Harappans
to shift residence to the new banks of the two rivers. The Harappans did not do
this but moved northwards to settle on the rainwater streams of the Shivaliks.
It is noteworthy that the Harappans did not settle on the upper Indus and its
eastern tributaries whose character as snow-fed rivers is similar to that of the
Satluj or Yamuna (Misra, 1994). This suggests that the technologically-
restricted Harappans had consciously avoided the snow-fed rivers and that the
Hakra they knew was not a mighty river.
A study of the geological processes permits us to draw some conclusions
about the life history of major rivers. During a glacial period, a large mass of
water gets locked up in glaciers and ice caps, with the result that the sea level
falls. It has been estimated that about 20,000 years ago, the sea level was about
100 metres lower than it is now. As the climate got warmer the snow melted,
raising the sea level. About 6,000 years ago, the sea level stood 5–10 metres
above the present level.
Since water is transported from the mountain top to the sea by rivers,
climatic changes can be discerned in the rivers also. When the sea level is low,
rivers cut deep valleys. And since there is much water to be brought down,
rivers carry more water, making the deep valleys broad. Additionally, the river
channels meander and the sand deposits are finer. As the sea level rises in the
postglacial period, rivers have to learn to respond to the change. It follows
from the laws of physics that the river valleys cannot be deeper than the sea
level. Rivers, therefore, tend to fill their valleys with sediments; the process is
known as aggregation. With a decrease in water supply, river channels become
braided rather than meandering and sand deposits become coarser. Smaller
rivers on their part may even fail to cope with the combination of diminished
water supply and rising sea level, and simply dry up.
 Detailed studies carried out in the Yamuna-Ganga (YaGa) Plain show that
all the rivers are well entrenched in their valleys which they have been
continuously filling up. It has been guesstimated that for the last 20,000 years,
there has been no significant change in the course of the Ganga and by
implication the Yamuna. In other words, if the Yamuna flowed into the
Ghaggar, it must have been earlier than about 20,000 years ago (Singh et al.,
1990).
A preliminary study of the Ghaggar’s hydrology was carried out during
1983-87 by an Indo-French team. An intricate analysis of solid samples and
water-flow patterns suggested that the present water-deficient state of the
Ghaggar has been in existence for ‘some tens of thousands of years’ (Courty,
1986).. This conclusion has not found general acceptance, because it does not
seem to be consistent with the observed high incidence of Harappan sites on
the lower Ghaggar.

CLIMATIC CHANGES
Recent studies have shown that the world’s climate has not remained the same
but has undergone cyclic changes. The ancient climate of the Thar Desert has
been reconstructed by analysing pollen scooped from different layers of
sediment at the bottom of the saline lakes Sambhar, Lun-karan-sar and
Didwana. Studies show that the rainfall was particularly heavy in the period c.
4000—3000 BCE. In about 2000 BCE or slightly later, there began a long
drought lasting a few hundred years (Singhvi and Kar, 1992). There is similar
evidence from the Western Ghats and the Nilgiri Hills, indicating that the
aridity extended over the whole of India (Caratini et al., 1991). It has been
suggested that similar conditions prevailed in central Asia also (Sarianidi,
1987) (Sukumar et al., 1993).
It is surmised that during this dry phase, the Ghaggar ceased to be a
perennial river. Its bed was choked with sand, so that the lower part of the
channel became incapacitated forever. The drying up of the lower Ghaggar
would have compelled the settlers to move upstream. There are indications of
water-induced migrations in south Turkmenistan as well.
In passing we may note that the Rig Vedic eyewitness account (RV 3.33)
of Satluj’s being a part of the Indus system can be approximately dated with
the help of Puranic genealogies. According to Yaska, Vishvamitra’s patron in
this hymn was Sudas, who is placed three generations after Rama or at about
1400 BCE (Pargiter, 1913). At this time, the Satluj-less Ghaggar could not have
been a mighty river. This is consistent with the archaeological evidence that
the Hakra was waterless in ca. 1700 BCE. It is comforting to note that the
much-maligned Puranas provide a date which is consistent with the
archaeologically determined chronology.
The identification of the naditama Sarasvati with old Ghaggar was first
proposed at a time when the Harappan civilization had not yet been
discovered. However, if this identification is to be defended now, the
archaeological evidence must be taken into account. From the Late-Harappan
evidence it is clear that the Ghaggar could have been a mighty river only
before 1700 BCE. If it was then the naditama Sarasvati, then all the settlements
on its banks must have been Aryan settlements. In other words, if the Ghaggar
is equated with the Rig Vedic Sarasvati, then the Harappans must be equated
with the Rig Vedic people.
The corollary turns out to be more significant than the main theorem. If the
Harappans and the Rig Vedic people are to be identified as one, then we must
construct a cultural continuum that (i) extends from the Neolithic through the
Chalcolithic to the Iron Age, and which (ii) not only accounts for the various
phases of the Harappan tradition but also incorporates in it the Indo-European,
Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan linguistic and mythological traditions. On the
face of it, this does not seem to be a trivial task. Therefore, if the identification
of naditama Sarasvati with the old Ghaggar is to be considered a plausible
hypothesis, it must be presented not in isolation but in the context of the
Harappan and Indo-Iranian traditions.
To sum up, the available literary and scientific data suggest the following
hypotheses (Kochhar, 1999):

i. The stage when the Satluj and Yamuna flowed into the Ghaggar was lo
over before the Harappan times.
ii. During the early and mature Harappan periods, the Ghaggar-Hak
channel was perhaps perennial or nearly so, to be able to susta
population groups on its lower course.
iii In about 1700 BCE, the water supply diminished further, desiccating t
. lower part of the Ghaggar channel and forcing the later-period Harappa
to migrate upstream to the Shivalik region.
iv. In about 1400 BCE there arrived, from the northwest, the Rig Ved
people who gave to the upper course of the Ghaggar the nam
(Vinashana) Sarasvati after the naditama Sarasvati (Helmand) they h
left behind in Afghanistan.
The key to India’s prehistory lies in the hydrological history of the Ghaggar.
Suppose it turns out that the Ghaggar was a powerful river in 2000 BCE. By
itself this would not prove that the old Ghaggar was the Rig Vedic Sarasvati,
because every mighty river need not be Sarasvati. But if it turns out (as is
likely) that the Ghaggar has been more or less in its present state for say
10,000 years or more, then the Ghaggar would automatically be ruled out as a
candidate for identification with the Rig Vedic Sarasvati.
20
VARNA AND JATI CONSOLIDATION OF SOCIAL
FORMATION

G. N. Devy

The why, the wherefore, and the how of varna and jati in Indian civilization
need to be discussed, since they are like festering wounds for Indian
society. Scholarship on these social phenomena has not yet resolved the
emergence and spread of varna and jati as a social arrangement in ancient
India and its continuation through ages. While explaining the source, it is
customary to point one’s fingers at the Manusmriti or Manu Samhita. When
one peruses the 2,685 verses of the Manu Code, the single comprehensive
statement of the statutes for social regulation in ancient India, one likes to
think of the smriti as the fountainhead of varna/jati ideas in India. They also
read as a definitive statement of gender segregation. However, it is far from
clear whether the Samhita is a single text composed either by a group of
moral legislators—believed to be a tribe called the Manava in the
northeastern part of India, or by an author Manu believed to be the ancestral
patriarch of the Aryans belonging to a pre-Vedic era, or whether the one
who falls historically between Vedic times and the age of composition of
the statutes known as the Brahmanas. The age of Manu is conceptualized
differently, ranging from the most orthodox estimate of 1500 BCE to the
most modest date of 200 CE. Normally, the cross-references in other texts
following the rise of a given text, or the lack of such references in the texts
of any previous eras, should make the precise dating of a text possible.
Similarly, linguistic evidence based on the evolution of meanings and
etymological shifts should help one guess, with fair accuracy, the historical
period of a text. This method does not work in the case of the Manusmriti.
For one thing, the variety of Sanskrit in which it has come down to us
through centuries is sufficiently close to post-Vedic Sanskrit, that is, the
kind of language in which the Mahabharata has come down to us through
centuries. But, without any shade of doubt, the precepts of the Samhita find
unmistakable echoes in the main body of the Vedas. Thus, we have the
Purusha Sukta in the Tenth Mandala of the Rig Veda. On the other hand, the
ninety-seventh verse of the tenth section of the Manusmriti is found
reproduced, with very minor modification, in the third adhyaya of the
Bhagavad Gita, verse 35: ‘Shreyan svadharmo vigunah paradharmat
svanishtuthat; svadharme nidhanam shreyam paradharmo bhayavaha.’ The
meaning is: ‘One’s own duty, even when less attractive, is better than
another’s, even if it is more attractive. Death in one’s own duty is preferable
over finding sustenance in another’s duty, for the latter is horrible’ (my
translation). Therefore, it is quite difficult to settle the precise period for the
emergence of the Manu Samhita.
While a mythological Manu is believed to have preceded the Vedic
Aryans, and numerous Manus preceded him from the beginning of human
time, the version of genesis which the Manu Samhita presents, and on the
basis of which it builds its entire social cartography, is several times
contradicted by the literature of later Vedic times. In the Upanishads,
particularly the Taittiriya drawn from the Yajur Veda, contains several
versions of the genesis describing the process of evolutionary creation—a
radical variation on the divinely granted creation—and several aspects of
the creation dealing with the spirit, the mind, the consciousness, life, and
the human body. This Upanishad proceeds in its delineation of the process
of creation without any trace of influence of the Manu Samhita version of
the origin of life and society. The difficulties in deciding the precise period
of Manusmriti need not be taken as a plea for not holding it responsible for
what it says. Yet, the uncertainty in dating it raises the important question as
to whether the Manusmriti merely precipitated what existed as a social and
legal practice before it and in its own time, or whether it originally
proposed and propagated these practices.
As a text with a relatively more certain historical description, and
containing a clear statement of the basis on which ancient Indian social
cartography was attempted, the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda is the most
outstanding. It describes the Purusha, the universe (of whom are born the
rig and the saman—the Vedas), and later the horses, and other animals and
goats and sheep. Then, the gods divided Purusha. From the mouth of the
divided Purusha came the Brahmin; from the arms came the Rajanya; from
the thighs came the Vaishya; and from the feet came the Shudra. Such
genesis myths mark early literature, particularly the literature that comes to
be seen as scriptural, in every civilization. In the oral literature of tribal
communities in India, we come across a variety of such creation myths and
stories of the rise of the human species, with a certain moral responsibility
to keep the universe going. Every religion is based on its unique genesis
story, and every culture or nation finds it nourishing to have its own version
of how or where it began in some mythical time. Some claim to have
emerged from the Sun; others claim their origin in the Moon; yet others in
some distant ocean, or a mythical mountain or forest.
What is astounding is that, in ancient India, the story of genesis was
used as a basis for law governing inter-community relations. The hierarchy
of the vocationally high and the low implied in the Purusha Sukta of the Rig
Veda was taken to mean a prescription with legal sanction. Thus, any
attempt in thought, move, or gesture to change the hierarchy came to be
seen as a sin against Purusha. Later, at whatever date the Manusmriti came
into circulation, Purusha of the Rig Veda was replaced by Brahma, a deity
with whom Vedic lore would not have felt at ease.
The most critical account of the process through which the formulation
articulated in the Purusha Sukta came to acquire an irreversible legal
sanction is to be found in Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s scholarly enquiry Who Were
the Shudras? His thesis is that, initially, ancient India had only three varnas:
Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya.
The Shudras were not a varna but a community of the solar race. There
was a continuous feud between the Shudra kings and the Brahmins. As a
result of the enmity, the Brahmins refused to perform the upanayana
ceremony for the Shudras. Due to the denial of the upanayana, the Shudras,
who were equal to Kshatriyas, became socially degraded (Ambedkar 1970:
242).
This long historical process resulted in the creation of the Shudras as a
varna. Ambedkar’s book is devoted to establishing the veracity of this
historical process. In his view, upanayana was made a privileged
entitlement of the first three varnas, and denied to the fourth one. The
concept of upanayana rests on the idea of the possibility of a second birth,
though a metaphoric one. In the initial form of the upanayana, the ritual did
not involve the wearing of a yajnopavita, or the sacred thread, around one’s
chest. This practice crept in later times when post-Vedic society started
reading the metaphoric as being literal. Upanayana was, in its initial days, a
symbolic birth, that is, the second birth of a person to the life of both the
mind and the body. It was, in its original form, a rite of initiation. Such rites
exist in various civilizations in a variety of forms. The Brahminic denial of
ordaining a young person with the yajnopavatia or the denial to perform the
ritual of upanayana came to mean that the possibility of a second birth was
foreclosed in the case of the Shudras. One of the abiding concerns of the
Manu Samhita was how to avoid getting into impious deeds by following
the do’s and dont’s in relation to the inter-varna relations. All these
prescriptions were heavily biased in favour of those who could perform the
upanayana ritual, and against those who could not, and starkly severe to
those who were denied the possibility of upanayana altogether. If the
Shudras were denied the entitlement to the upanayana ritual, by a slight
extension of the same logic, it meant that they were denied the entitlement
to all other rituals. They were, thus, ritually exiled. If they had been denied
the entitlement to rituals because they were supposed to have committed
some ‘lowly acts’ in a previous life, then by a more aggressive extension of
that logic, they were also destined to engage in all manner of ‘impure’ work
in their present life—work such as scavenging, cleaning, skinning, tanning,
etc. Since warped logic denied the possibility of their rebirth, they came to
be despised as being less than human and at par with other animals.
Therefore, they could be treated as such, without any fear of the
perpetrators gaining any spiritual demerits. Given that this kind of
metaphysics got translated into social and legal practices, there was no
possibility of creating a humane society. The argument for this was closed
in India forever.
As the higher varnas found the given social arrangement to their
advantage, they kept resisting every reformist movement. After the eighth
century, India witnessed the rise of many sects. The early sects arose round
the figures of Shiva and Shakti. They originated in the southern regions
first. By the eleventh century, the rise of sects had become a widespread
phenomenon in the subcontinent. By the end of the fifteenth century, many
founders of such sects had already been accepted in public memory as
divine figures. Since the idea of the avatar came to occupy centre stage in
the dynamics of sect emergence, Krishna and Rama—the two heroes of the
two pan-Indian epics—became the cult figures for many of the sects. This
entire movement highlighted the possibility of ‘release’ for any individual,
born high or low, negating the logic on which the varna system was based.
The eighth to the eighteenth century is the period when jati became the
main principle for social segregation in India. The jatis had no clear
metaphysical basis. They were more an expression of difference in terms of
language, region, occupation, cultivation practices, food habits, and skills.
But these differences, once accepted, lead to a particular jati formation, with
its identity being invariably expressed in terms of the specific practice of
worship. If the metaphysics based on the story of genesis was the basis for
varna consolidation, the perception of ‘difference’ leading to a metaphysical
view was at the heart of the jati-formation process. In one, metaphysics was
the cause; in the other, it was the consequence, expressive of the desire of
the non-Brahminical classes to be counted at par.
It is not surprising that when the colonial Europeans arrived in India,
they found the social segmentation utterly confusing. During the
seventeenth century, the Portuguese in India followed the practice of
describing every community as a ‘tribe’. This term became somewhat less
favoured when the British, French, and Portuguese started noticing the
sharp distinctions between the dominating communities and the dominated
communities in India. It was at this time that they began using the term
‘caste’ for the higher classes. The difficulty of the Europeans continued
throughout their colonial rule in India, for while they could more easily
understand the linguistic, racial, and organized theological distribution of
Indian society and the economic segregation of the different classes, the
vast diversity of jatis, informal and non-institutional, eluded their
anthropological grasp. They could not fathom how jati consolidation works;
how within the overall framework of varnas, the jatis place themselves in a
defined social hierarchy; how endogamy and exogamy work in these jatis;
and what makes a perfectly normal looking human act appear criminal in
the eyes of another given community. Besides, colonial scholars had no
means of grasping the structural principles of sects which permitted
multiple belief affiliations. British colonial officers, well-meaning or
otherwise, made repeated attempts at understanding the social and linguistic
cartography of India. Most of these attempts were initiated in order to meet
the demands of consolidating the government’s authority, though that was
not invariably the case. However, the inadequate understanding of the
dialectic between religion and sect, varna and jati, language and script,
often resulted in these attempts deepen the differences.
 PART III

THE LANGUAGE MIX AND PHILOSOPHIES IN

ANCIENT INDIA
 21

SANSKRIT, ITS HISTORY, AND ITS INDO-EUROPEAN

BACKGROUND

Hans Henrich Hock

INTRODUCTION
Sanskrit, first documented in the Vedic Samhitas, is the earliest attested
form of the Indo-Aryan language family, modern representatives of which
include Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Marathi, Punjabi, and Sindhi, as
well as the language of the Roma, who migrated out of South Asia. Indo-
Aryan, in turn, is part of a larger language family, called Indo-Iranian,
which has one or two additional branches—Iranian and Nuristani; however,
the exact affiliation of Nuristani is a matter of dispute.
The Indo-Iranian language family, in its turn, belongs to the large family
of the Indo-European languages, whose members are attested as far east as
present-day Xinjiang (Tocharian), as far south as present-day Turkey
(Anatolian, whose best-known member is Hittite), and through most of
western Eurasia, including Albanian, Armenian, Baltic (Lithuanian,
Latvian, and Old Prussian), Celtic (including Old Irish and Middle Welsh),
Germanic (including English and German), Greek, Latin (and other Italic)
languages, and Slavic (Russian, Polish, and many other related languages).
The ancestor of the Indo-European languages, generally called the Proto-
Indo-European, is not directly attested, but aspects of its structure, lexicon,
and culture can be inferred by means of the method of comparative
reconstruction. The following presents a brief overview of the history of
Sanskrit and of its historical relationship to the other Indo-European
languages.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SANSKRIT

While Greek and Hittite, the other two earliest attested members of Indo-
European, are attested in written documents starting from about the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries BCE, the earliest Sanskrit texts were
composed, edited, and transmitted orally; their dates, therefore, must be
inferred. Modern scholarship generally agrees on a time around the middle
of the second millennium BCE. This time frame has become controversial
among many Indian nationalists, who argue for a date in the early third
millennium BCE, or even earlier, and an identification of Vedic Culture with
the Indus Civilization.*
 The oldest Vedic texts are the Samhitas. Among these, the Rig Veda is
generally considered the oldest, and the Samhitas of the other Vedic
branches (Sama Veda, Yajur Veda, Atharva Veda) to be later. Since the
mantras of the Sama Veda are largely identical with Rig Vedic mantras, this
chronological ranking is probably accurate for these two branches. For the
other branches, things are more complex. Yajur Vedic and Atharva Vedic
Samhitas contain some mantras of equal (or nearly equal) age as those of
the Rig Veda, in some cases the linguistic form of a given Yajur Vedic
mantra may be older that its Rig Vedic counterpart, and conversely, some of
the Rig Vedic hymns are quite late. These chronological complications are
best explained by the notion that the text collections were composed over
extended periods of time, and that during that time they were able to
interact with and mutually influence each other.
Each of the Vedic branches has sub-branches. For instance, the Yajur
Veda has a major division between the ‘Black’ and ‘White’ Yajur Veda
traditions. The Black Yajur Veda has several further sub-branches, including
the Maitrayani and Taittiriya branches. The texts of the White or Vajasaneyi
tradition come in two recensions, the Madhyandina and Kanva ones. The
Sama Vedic tradition has two major sub-branches, the Jaiminiya and the
Kauthuma-Ranayaniya ones. And so on.
In principle, each branch has a Samhita and a Brahmana (the latter
explaining the meaning or function of mantras and other sacred texts in the
Vedic ritual), plus an Aranyaka and/or Upanishad (which deals with more
esoteric issues). In addition, each branch has in principle further, ancillary
texts, such as the Srauta Sutra and Grhya Sutra, which present summaries
of the grand and domestic rituals respectively.
There is an implicit chronological order to these texts: Brahmanas
follow the Samhitas (as their commentaries); Aranyakas and Upanishads
grow out of the Brahmanas (in fact, in some cases they have been
transmitted both as final parts of particular Brahmanas and as independent
texts); and the Sutras summarize aspects of the ritual that the Brahmanas
have discussed at greater length. In actual fact, however, this chronology
suffers from similar problems as the chronology of the Samhitas, and for
similar reasons.
Consider for instance the arrangement of mantra and prose texts. The
Samhitas of the Rig Veda and Sama Veda consist entirely of mantras. The
Atharva Veda mainly contains mantras; but there are some prose passages.
The Samhitas of the Black Yajur Veda consist both of mantras, yajuses, and
other ritual formulas, but also contain prose texts commenting on the
performance and significance of the sacrifice, and their Brahmanas continue
the commentatorial tradition. In the White Yajur Veda, the two different
types of text have been taken apart, so that the Samhita contains only
mantras, yajuses, and other formulas, while the explanatory prose texts are
relegated to the Satapatha Brahmana. In this respect, the White Yajur Veda
follows the example of the Rig Veda, Sama Veda, and Atharva Veda which
likewise relegate the explanation of the ritual to their Brahmanas. With
these caveats, the relative chronology of the Vedic texts can be summarized
as in chart 1:

Chart 1: Approximate chronology of Vedic Sanskrit texts

Abbreviations
While some of the early Upanishads (including the Brhadaranyaka,
Chandogya, and Taittiriya Upanishads) are stylistically and linguistically
Vedic, the tradition of composing Upanishads continued into the post-Vedic,
Classical period, including even an Alla(h) Upanishad of the sixteenth and
seventeenth century.
In the post-Vedic period, Sanskrit is attested in two major ‘streams’—
the Epic and the Classical traditions. The Epic tradition of the Mahabharata
and Ramayana developed out of the Late Vedic tradition and, similar to
Vedic, differs in grammar from the Classical tradition, in addition to
showing different degrees of influence from Middle Indo-Aryan (Prakrit).
The Classical tradition of kavyas and (the Sanskrit parts of) dramas by
authors such as Kalidasa attempts to adhere to the grammatical rules
established by Pāṇini (ancient India’s greatest grammarian and one of the
most accomplished linguistic scholars of all times) and the later
Mahabhasya (with varttikas by Katyayani and commentary by Patanjali).
During the early common era period, Classical Sanskrit became the
language of literature, government, medical texts (Ayurveda),
astronomy/astrology and mathematics, philosophy, and religion (not only
Hinduism, but also Buddhism, and to a lesser extent, Jainism). Moreover,
Sanskrit spread throughout South Asia, into Southeast Asia, and through
Central Asia into East Asia. The reasons for this spread are a matter of
controversy.
 Vedic and Post-Vedic Sanskrit differ considerably, both in phonology
and in grammatical structure. In phonology, for instance, Vedic is
characterized by a pitch-accent system that can distinguish different words
or grammatical forms. Thus, the Vedic texts as well as the Mahabhasya
refer to a mythological event when failing to make the distinction between
indraśátru ‘(victorious) enemy of Indra’ vs. índraśatru ‘having Indra as
(victorious) enemy’ led to the downfall of Tvashtr’s son, Vrtra. This accent
system is lost in Post-Vedic. In grammatical structure, Vedic distinguished
between three past-tense formations, among which the so-called aorist was
used to indicate a past action with continuing effect in the present. In Post-
Vedic, the aorist survived only marginally and with the same (general past)
function as the other two past-tense formations.
Sanskrit continues as a scholarly written language into the present
period. As a spoken language it has been subject to attrition, but there are
various attempts to maintain or revive it.

SANSKRIT, ANCIENT IRANIAN, AND INDO-IRANIAN

The closest Iranian relative of Sanskrit is Avestan, the sacred language of
Zoroastrianism. Avestan is roughly contemporary with the Vedic tradition
and scholars have demonstrated that, with proper phonological adjustment,
early Avestan verses can be transformed into Vedic mantras. Old Persian,
the language of the Sasanian empire, is attested later and comes from an
area farther to the west. The examples in the following figure illustrates
some of the similarities as well as differences between (Vedic) Sanskrit and
the Old Iranian languages.

Figure 1: Select data illustrating similarities and differences in

early Indo-Iranian
The Indo-Iranian languages are more closely related to each other than to
any other branch of Indo-European, and they differ markedly from the other
Indo-European languages and from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) by having
undergone a large number of exclusively shared changes or ‘innovations’.
They thus form an independent branch of the Indo-European language
family.
The shared innovations include the loss of distinction between PIE e-,
a-, and o-vowels, which change into a-vowels (vowel merger), the merger
of velars (k, g(h)) and labiovelars (kw, gw(h), into velars (a velar merger),
and the shift of velars to palatals (c, j(h)) before original e-and i-vowels and
before y (palatalization). As a consequence, palatal consonants come to
contrast with velar consonants before a-vowels. See Illustration 2.

Illustration 2: Changes from Proto-Indo-European to Indo-

Iranian
In addition to the testimony of the (Vedic) Sanskrit, Avestan, and Old
Persian textual traditions, Indo-Iranian words are also attested in the names
of Mitanni royalty in Mesopotamia and of a horse-training treatise in
Hittite. Most scholars claim that these words are specifically of Indo-Aryan
origin. Examples include panzawartana ‘five turns (around the training
course)’, which can be equated with a Sanskrit form pañcavartana (or Indo-
Iranian pancawartana) with the same meaning. (The component parts of this
compound word can be derived from PIE penkwe ‘five’ and the root
wert-‘turn’ by the same changes that can be seen in the above examples.)
There is no clear evidence as to how and when these words, and the
speakers who originally used them, came to Anatolia.

SANSKRIT, IRANIAN, PROTO-INDO-IRANIAN, AND

PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN
While the Sanskrit and Iranian languages are documentarily attested, their
immediate ancestor Proto-Indo-Iranian, from which they developed through
divergent changes, is not and neither is Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor
of Proto-Indo-Iranian, Greek, Latin, and the other members of the Indo-
European language family. However, the method of comparative
reconstruction makes it possible to develop a good picture of what these
ancestral languages must have looked like.
Comparative reconstruction is a method of developing hypotheses on
the nature of ancestor languages that will explain both the similarities and
the differences between the related languages, defending these hypotheses
against alternative proposals, and choosing an account that best accounts for
the facts, without unnecessary complications (Occam’s Law). The
reconstruction must be in conformity with what we have learned about the
nature of linguistic change over some two hundred years of historical
linguistic research. One of the most important insights is the ‘Regularity
Principle’—sound change, properly defined, is overwhelmingly regular and
apparent instances of irregular sound change require reexamination of both
data and hypotheses.
For a very brief illustration of the comparative method, focusing on the
vowels, consider the data in Figure 2, which are representative of much
larger data sets. (Not all items are attested in all languages, which accounts
for occasional gaps. The broader evidence shows that the data sets cannot
be ‘collapsed’ by invoking conditioned changes that would differentiate one
subset from another. That is, each set must be reconstructed separately.)

Figure 2: Data for the reconstruction of PIE short vowels

Where all the languages agree on the vocalism of the first syllable, i.e. sets
(a) and (e), reconstructing that vocalism for the ancestral language is the
most reasonable procedure; anything else would violate the principle of
Occam’s Law. As a consequence we reconstruct i for set (a), and for set (e).
For similar reasons we reconstruct the vowel of the majority of the
languages when only one branch shows deviations; hence we reconstruct u
for set (b).
Set (c) is a bit more complex, since one language (Sanskrit) has a
completely different vowel from the e of Greek and Latin, and Germanic
shows variation between between e and i. Still, the preponderance of the
evidence is in favour of e (and the Germanic variation between e and i,
similar to that between u and o in set (b) can be considered to result from
special developments). Hence we reconstruct e.
By contrast, no appeal to ‘majority rule’ is applicable for set (d): two
languages have a (Sanskrit and Germanic), and two languages have o
(Greek and Latin). However, a has already been reconstructed for set (e)
and there is no evidence in terms of phonetic environment that would make
it possible to account for the o of Greek and Latin by regular sound change
from *a. Moreover, vowel systems like the following are widespread in the
world’s languages; and our reconstruction so far has posited i, u, e, and a.
Under the circumstances, a reconstruction o would not only best account for
the facts but it also would be natural.

The greatest difficulty is presented by set (f). True, ‘majority rule’ might
favour reconstructing a, but that vowel is already taken for set (e).
Moreover, the reconstruction a is reflected as a in Sanskrit, and there is no
evidence in terms of phonetic environment that would make it possible to
account for the Sanskrit i of set (f) through regular sound change from an
earlier *a. In this case, then, we have a compelling reason for violating
Occam’s Law by reconstructing a sixth vowel for Proto-Indo-European; and
so as not to further complicate the reconstruction and the changes needed to
account for the attested facts, scholars have postulated a vowel ә, which as
shown below can change to the Sanskrit i and the a of the other languages
without merging with another vowel along the way.
The assumption that sound change, properly defined, is overwhelmingly
regular has met with occasional opposition, even among historical–
comparative linguists. But a simple experiment shows that it is only
because of the overwhelming regularity of sound change that we can even
establish a relationship between languages, as in the systematic and regular
correspondences between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Old English in Figure
3.

Figure 3: Regular sound correspondences in early Indo-

European languages

If sound change did indeed apply randomly, with different results in

different words, we would expect there to be correspondences like the ones
in Figure 4. Concluding that a linguistic relationship can be established on
the basis of these data would be preposterous. (The data were created by
taking the PIE reconstructions in Figure 3 as input and applying up to six
different outcomes for each speech sound, in each word, in each language,
with the choice determined by casting a die.)

Figure 4: Expected sound correspondences if sound change

were random

THE DATE AND HOMELAND OF PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN

In the early days of Indo-European linguistics, it was commonly assumed
that Sanskrit was identical or at least the closest language to Proto-Indo-
European, and consequently the homeland of Proto-Indo-European was
considered to have been in or close to India.
As time progressed, it became clear that Sanskrit (and Indo-Iranian) had
just as much diverged from the linguistic ancestor as languages like Greek
and Latin. (Consider for example, the changes outlined in §3 above.)
Western linguists began to argue for a homeland closer to Europe. In many
cases the motivation for doing so was ethnocentrism and racism, leading to
the Nazi ideology of Nordic superiority.
More recently a hypothesis was developed that places Proto-Indo-
European in the Eurasian Steppes. The hypothesis is based on the fact that
all branches of Indo-European have inherited words for ‘domesticated
horse’ such as Sanskrit aśva- (from PIE *h1(e)Ќwo-), that most of the
languages have inherited words for ‘wheel’ such as Sanskrit cakra and
ratha (*kwekwlo or *rotHo), and that two-wheeled horse-drawn battle
chariots play a significant role in their earliest texts.
These linguistic facts mesh with the archaeological evidence for horse
domestication in the Eurasian Steppes during the early fourth millennium
BCE, the development of horse-drawn battle chariots in the same general
area by the early third millennium BCE, and the spread of domesticated
battle chariots in Eurasia along with the first appearance of Indo-European
speakers. (Hittite may have left for Anatolia earlier, before the development
of the wheel and the two-wheeled battle chariot.)
Recent research, based on the investigation of ‘Ancient DNA’, shows
that there were a series of migrations from the Eurasian Steppes to Europe,
the Xinjiang area (where Tocharian languages are attested), and to South
Asia, at roughly the same time. Moreover, this time roughly corresponds to
the times that earlier research postulated for the spread of Indo-European
languages into the various areas in which they are first attested.
There is, thus, strong cumulative evidence for the hypothesis that the
speakers of Proto-Indo-European originally lived in or near the Eurasian
steppes in the fourth millennium BCE and centrifugally spread from there to
the locations where their languages are first attested, and that this spread
included the speakers of Indo-Aryan/Sanskrit into South Asia.
This hypothesis has been questioned from two sides. One presents a
scholarly, but highly controversial argument for a homeland in Anatolia and
a time frame of about 6500 BCE. In addition to numerous other problems,
this argument fails to provide a principled account for the existence of Indo-
European words for ‘horse’ and ‘wheel’—there were no domesticated
horses or wheels at the time–depth of 6500 BCE anywhere.
The other argument comes from various Hindu/Indian nationalists who
want to see the original home of Sanskrit in India and as contemporary or
identical to the Indus Civilization. Adherents of this view reject what they
call the ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ (AIT) as a hoax perpetrated by
colonialists, racists, and missionaries.
Here again the evidence for domesticated horses causes difficulties.
There is no evidence for horses in the rich iconography of the Indus
Civilization until the mid-second millenium, the time when the Indus
Civilization was coming to an end. Only at this point do we find horse
imagery and horse burials, and only at the outer periphery of the Indus
Civilization, close to the passes to Afghanistan and Central Asia—areas
where later newcomers typically first set foot in South Asia. Moreover,
while the Indus Civilization had extensive imagery, the early Vedic
Civilization was aniconic, and while the Indus Civilization was largely
peaceful, warfare was a common characteristic of the Vedic Civilization.
 Opponents of the AIT argue that Sanskrit was always spoken in India
and generally assume that it was the ancestor of the other Indo-European
languages. The other Indo-European languages, thus, are assumed to have
migrated out of India—the ‘Out of India Theory’.
Examination of the data in Figure 5 shows that this view cannot be
sustained without violating the Regularity Principle (for which see §4
above).

Figure 5: Some correspondences between Sanskrit, Greek, and

Latin and their PIE sources
(The Latin forms are cited in phonetic transcription.)

Given Sanskrit k, it is not possible to derive the k or p of the corresponding

Greek words or the kw of the Latin words without violating the Regularity
Principle. In each case Sanskrit k is followed by the same vowel quality or
consonant; there is thus no phonetic condition under which k would change
to k rather than p or kw. To get the desired results would require the
assumption of random sound change; but as seen in figure 4, random
change would not produce the kind of regular phonetic correspondences
that are exhibited in Figure 5. For similar reasons it is not possible to derive
the Greek and Latin a-, e-, or o-vowels from the corresponding Sanskrit a-
vowels through regular sound changes. Only by reconstructing Proto-Indo-
European forms with *k vs. *kw and *e vs. *o vs. *a can all the forms,
including those of Sanskrit, be accounted for by regular sound changes. In
Sanskrit, the velar merger and vowel merger discussed in §3 above account
for the consonant k and for the a-vowels; in Greek PIE *kw changes to p
before consonant and before o- and a-vowels; in Latin *kw changes to a
sequence of k and w.
The situation is essentially the same as the one holding for Sanskrit and
Pali. As the data in Figure 6 shows, we can derive the Pali forms from
Sanskrit by postulating a merger of ś, ṣ, and s to s. (This change applies
regularly in the development from Sanskrit to Middle Indo-Aryan.) A
derivation of the Sanskrit forms from Pali, however, would not be able to
tell under what phonetic conditions Pali s would change to ś, to ṣ, or remain
s, since the contexts in which s occurs are phonetically identical. Deriving
Sanskrit from Pali, therefore, would require violating the Regularity
Principle.

Figure 6: Sibilant correspondences between Sanskrit and Pali

Under the cirumstances, the ‘Out of India Theory’ cannot be sustained.

Only the hypothesis of an original home in or near the Eurasian Steppes and
of a movement from there into South Asia around the middle of the second
millennium BCE conforms with the linguistic, archaeological, and genomic
facts.

 
*Michael Meier-Brügger, Indo-European Linguistics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003, p. 20.
22
SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND ANCIENT DIALECTS

Madhav Deshpande

Vedic texts present us a high ritual, liturgical, and especially in the Rig Veda
a poetic register. Can such a high elite register exist in the absence of other
registers of usage? One of the verses of the Rig Veda describes the process
of the poetic/liturgical selection of language: Rig Veda 10.71.2 ab: ‘When
the Wise created language with the mind, as if winnowing barley with a
sieve….’ If we look at this description, it tells us that the linguistic usage
found in the Vedic texts is this special subset, and not the totality of the
linguistic usage which may have been in use in the day-to-day life of the
Vedic people. For example, consider the verb pard ‘to fart’. Whitney says:
‘Not quotable either in verb-forms or derivatives.’ Given its meaning, it is
clear why the verb pardate would not be found in the select vocabulary of
the liturgical texts, and yet it is not only listed in Pāṇini’s Dhatupatha as
parda kutsite sabde, it has cognates in many modern Indo-Aryan and
Dravidian languages (Bohtlingk, 1887. This example indicates that there
must have been historical continuity of this expression from its Indo-
European prehistory to post-Vedic Sanskrit and Indo-Aryan vernaculars
(Turner, 1966). The fact that pard is not attested in the available Vedic texts
simply means that this expression was not appropriate for the liturgical
context. One cannot imagine that an Indo-European expression somehow
was discontinued during the Vedic period and was reintroduced into the
post-Vedic usage. This indicates the existence of layers of linguistic usage
during the Vedic period that are not part of the Vedic liturgical subset, and
yet must have existed contemporaneously in the popular linguistic domain.
The existence of the so-called Prakritisms in the language of the Vedic texts
is another indicator of the existence of more popular Indo-Aryan Sanskrit
and related dialects contemporary with Vedic Sanskrit. The very fact of the
existence of Prakritisms in the Vedic texts seems to suggest that there was
rather a close relationship between the language of the Veda and the popular
dialects, so that words could easily pass from one to the other. This implies
diglossia going back all the way to the Vedic period.
Mehendale suggests that the Upanishadic etymology of puruṣa as puri
śete is most likely based on the fact that the Prakrit cognates for Sanskrit
puruṣa are mostly like purisa, puliśa (Mehendale, 1963). This suggests that
the home dialects of the authors of some of the Upanishads were closely
related to what we know as Middle Indic or Prakrits. The same conclusion
can be reached with other pieces of evidence.
There is another source of information regarding some different
registers of Vedic Sanskrit coexisting with the main liturgical register. To
take just one example, the Indo-Iranian affix ‘ka’ has been studied by
Stephanie Jamison with reference to its occurrences in Iranian, Vedic,
Sanskrit, and Prakrit texts. Jamison points out:
Other kinds of evidence can be adduced to support the view that Indo-Iranian -ka- was far
more common in speech than its relatively restrained representation in the texts of the
oldest stages of Indo-Aryan and Iranian might suggest. One most important piece of such
evidence is the unbelievably prolific growth the suffix shows in the ‘middle’ periods of
both branches, Middle Indic and Middle Iranian. Since speakers of, say, Pāli and Middle
Persian were not in linguistic contact, it is hard to explain why the middle-period languages
on both sides simply explode with -ka forms—unless the suffix had already been regularly
on the lips and tongues of Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers when they were not aiming at the
high and dignified style of praise hymns or royal pronouncements.

Thomas Burrow pointed out that:

There are dialectal differences between the Vedic language of the North West and the later
classical language of Madhyadeśa. The most striking of these is that the Vedic language
turns l into r whereas the classical language, to a large extent, preserves the distinction
between r and l.

Are there different linguistic layers within a single Vedic text like the Rig
Veda? Scharfe shows how the different family books of the Rig Veda come
from somewhat different geographical zones ranging from the river Kubha
in the northwest to Ganga and Yamuna in the east. With an insightful
analysis of the names of rivers, animals, mountains, etc., besides
peculiarities of grammatical and phonetic variation, Scharfe shows how
these different Maṇḍalas of the Rig Veda belong to different micro-
geographies within the region from Afghanistan to Haryana. His
demonstration suggests that originally there must have been significant
dialectal differences between different Vedic communities, and many of
these dialectal differences were perhaps levelled when the hymns composed
by different families from different regions came to be collected into a
single Samhita.
Within the liturgical register of the Veda, there are indeed significantly
different sub-registers. Among them must be recognized the medical sub-
register. Certainly, in terms of its specialized vocabulary, this register as
seen primarily in the hymns of the Atharva Veda is a distinct linguistic
domain, requiring specialized expertise not available to other Vedic priests.
In all likelihood, there was a continuity of the medical/magical register
from the hymns of the Atharva Veda to the more systematic works of
Ayurveda (Bahulkar, 1994).
In the fifteenth Kanda of the Śaunakīya Atharva Veda, the so called
Vrātyakāṇḍa, we have clear evidence of communities of Vrātyas. The hymn
15.2, for instance, refers to the Vratya moving to the eastern direction and
several subsequent verses refer to the eastern region of Magadha and the
local culture of Puṃscalī and Māgadha as part of the culture associated with
the Vratyas. This already takes us to the eastern margins of the Vedic area,
as compared to the northwestern regions reflected in the Rig Veda, and into
dialects of the east. Instead of using the retroflexed form pariṣkanda,
Śaunakīya Atharva Veda 15.3.10 uses the eastern form pariskanda.
Pāṇini 8.4.48 (nādinyākrośe putrasya) says: ‘Gemination does not
replace t of putra in composition with adini when indicating insult or
censure.’ This rule refers to a feature of colloquial Sanskrit used as a home
language. While cursing a woman, the expression putradini or ‘Eater of
Son’ does not have doubling of t, while describing something like a mother
cat eating her cub the same expression could have the doubling. Again, we
are given a glimpse of a realm of Sanskrit usage that is part of the home
language and not related to any liturgy.
Pāṇini 8.2.83 (pratyabhivāde ‘śūdre) says: ‘A prolated vowel which is
high-pitched replaces the syllable beginning with the last vowel of an
utterance when responding to a respectful greeting, except in the case of a
Shudra.’ The modes of responding to greetings from various social layers,
Shudras and non-Shudras, take us into a domain of widespread popular
usage, rather than anything restricted to liturgy.
There is evidence of regional variation of Sanskrit usage in Pāṇini’s
Ashtadhyayi. P.4.2.109 (udīcyagrāmāc ca bahvaco’ntodāttāt) tells us that the
Taddhita affix aÑ is introduced after a polysyllabic nominal stem
designating a village name in the north ending in a high-pitched vowel to
denote previously unspecified meanings. There are references to eastern
and northern usages in many other rules of Pāṇini. Pāṇini also refers to nine
previous grammarians who record specific usages known to them, possibly
referring to local dialectal variation.
Pāṇini’s dialect of Sanskrit is in some sense a dialect from the frontier
of subcontinental India (Deshpande, 1983). Pāṇini’s rule for the use of
gerunds (samānakartṛkayoḥ pūrvakāle ktvā, P. 3.4.21) requires that the
gerund clause and the main clause must have the same agent. However, no
such condition is laid down in his rule that prescribes the use of the
infinitive ‘tum’ in the sense of one action being the purpose of another
action (tumunṇvulau kriyāyaṃ kriyārthāyam, P. 3.3.10). In most of the
Sanskrit literature known to us, the infinitive construction seems to follow
the same condition as that of the gerund. Then why did Pāṇini not include it
in his rule for the infinitives? I have shown that examples like vaidyaḥ
rogiṇe auṣadham pātuṃ dadyāt—‘The doctor should give the medicine to
the patient to drink’—with different agents for the main clause and the
infinitive clause are found in the older chapters of the Carakasamhita, but
not in the chapters added later by Drdhabala, and rare in other Ayurvedic
works. Older chapters of the Carakasamhita are believed to originate in the
region of Gandhara, a region close to Pāṇini’s town of Salatura in the Swat
valley.
Yaska, the author of Nirukta, also describes regional variation in the
usage of Sanskrit. For instance, Nirukta (2.1.2) says, ‘Further, primary
forms alone are employed (in speech) among some people, secondary forms
among others. The verb śavati, meaning to go, is used by the Kambojas
only. …Its modified form śava is used by the Aryans. The verb dāti, in the
sense to cut, is employed by the people of the east, while the people of the
north use the noun dātra (sickle).’
A more expanded version of this passage is found in Patanjali’s
Mahabhasya. Thieme’s articles draw our attention to the connection of
Sanskrit usage to the usage in the Iranian borderland. I have pointed to
some aspects of Pāṇini’s grammar as being due to Pāṇini being a resident of
this border region, and more recently Hock has again drawn our attention to
the difference of usage between the frontier region of Pāṇini and the
Madhyadesa or Aryavarta of Patanjali (Deshpande, 1983).
 Such regional variation in the usage suggests existence of regional
dialects of Sanskrit such that the differences were clearly noticeable to the
grammarians. I have pointed out the existence of dialects even as regards
the syntax of ditransitive verbs in Sanskrit as seen from the usage in
Patanjali’s Mahabhasya (Deshpande, 1992).
Patanjali reports that if we do not explicitly study grammar, we will
speak incorrectly like girls or women. The Mahabhasya tells us (1.4.21):
drśyate khalv api viprayogaḥ / tad yathā / akṣīṇi me darśanīyāni / pādā me
sukumārā iti /, Some contrary usage is indeed seen. For example: [A girl
says] ‘My eyes are beautiful, and my feet are delicate.’ Here, the girl who
has not learned the proper Sanskrit usage uses Sanskrit plural forms to refer
to her eyes and feet, where she should have used dual forms. However, this
Prakritized usage of Sanskrit was possible because the category of dual had
disappeared in Prakrits. So, a sort of Sanskritized Prakrit or a Prakritized
Sanskrit usage had emerged at the popular level.
The Mahabhasya on Sivasutra 2, remarks: ‘aśaktyā kayā cit brāhmaṇyā
ṛtakaḥ iti prayoktavye Ịtakaḥ iti prayuktam/ tasya anukaraṇam : brāhmaṇī
ṛtakaḥ iti āha/ kumārī Ịtakaḥ iti āha iti’—Due to lack of capacity, some
Brahmin woman said Ḷtaka instead of Ṛtaka. Its imitation: The Brahmin
woman said, ‘Ḷtaka.’ The girl said, ‘Ḷtaka.’ This simply suggests that even
Brahmin women and girls in a region like Magadha replaced ‘r’ in Sanskrit
with ‘l’, a feature commonly seen in the Prakrit in this easterly region, for
example, rājā appearing as lājā in the Magadhan inscriptions of Ashoka.
The story of the sages named Yarvanastarvanah in Patanjali’s
Mahabhasya is very instructive regarding the interaction between Sanskrit
and Prakrit. These sages are so called because in their non-ritual use of
language they used the Prakrit expressions yarvāṇa and tarvāna for the
proper Sanskrit expressions yad vā naḥ and tad vā naḥ. However, Patanjali
says that they used the proper Sanskrit expressions during the sacrificial
ritual (yājñe karmaṇi punar nāpabhāṣante). Patanjali does not fault them and
explains that the restriction on using proper Sanskrit applies only to the
domain of ritual, and there is no such requirement outside of ritual (yājñe
karmaṇi sa niyamaḥ). This hints at bilingualism among users/speakers of
Sanskrit, who are living in a Prakrit speaking world. While they are
assiduously trying to maintain grammatical Sanskrit in the domain of ritual,
the use of Prakrit elsewhere cannot but affect their use and perception of
Sanskrit. This also suggests the possibility that Sanskrit, beyond the realm
of conservative ritual use, was probably even more affected by the Prakrits.
This says something about the non-liturgical domains of Sanskrit being
potentially more affected by the use of local Prakrits by the users of
Sanskrit.
23
CONTACT WITH INDO-EUROPEAN/ INDO-IRANIAN
LANGUAGES

Meera Visvanathan

‘The Aryan Debate’ remains one of the most contentious issues in the study
of early Indian history (Thapar, 1996; Trautmann, 2005; Bryant and Patton,
2005). In its broadest outlines, it is a question of origins, of how we
understand the peopling of South Asia. But it is also fundamentally a debate
about evidence, as four kinds of evidence—linguistic, textual,
archaeological, and genetic—are brought together to make sense of the
past.
The challenge for historians is to understand the specificities of each
kind of evidence, how they fit together, as well as the instances in which
they diverge. Where it is possible to correlate these different sources, we
also need to ask, what conclusions can be drawn from them? In this essay, I
will spell out the broad contours of this debate as it has evolved over more
than a century, focusing in turn on the different kinds of sources.

PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN AND THE INDO-ARYAN

LANGUAGE FAMILY
The origins of the debate can be traced back to 1786 when William Jones,
the British judge and scholar, in his ‘Third anniversary discourse’ to the
Asiatic Society, postulated the existence of an Indo-European language
family. Jones showed that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin shared a deep
structural connection that went beyond borrowings of words. Instead, it was
rooted in the deep past of these languages, in the ‘roots of verbs’ and ‘forms
of grammar’. As he pointed out, what this indicated was that these three
languages sprang ‘from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer
exists.’
 This common ancestor is identified today as Proto-Indo-European. The
existence of Proto-Indo-European is postulated on the basis of linguistic
connections since there are no texts or materials available in this language.
It follows that a language family can be understood as a group of related
languages that develops from a common ancestor, which is referred to a
proto-language. This ancestor language is not known directly, but we can
discover many of its features by applying a comparative method.
Where the languages of the Indo-European family are concerned,
linguistic study over more than two centuries has shown that there exist a
number of languages in Europe, West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia,
which share a familial and historical relationship with each other. These
include not only languages being used today, but also languages known in
the past which are no longer being spoken today (e.g., Tocharian). In the
South Asian context, a branch of the Indo-European language family known
as Indo-Aryan provides the familial grouping within which many modern
Indo-Aryan languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Odia,
Sindhi, etc., can be classified.
While much scholarly ink has been spilt on the question of the Indo-
European homeland, the archaeological and linguistic evidence taken
together points to the origin of Proto-Indo-European on the Pontic Caspian
Steppes around 4000 BCE (Anthony and Ringe, 2015). The reconstructed
vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European show a culture of pastoralists, where
horses and wheeled vehicles played an important role. The spread of the
Indo-European languages can thus be linked to the emergence of a highly
mobile pastoralist culture in the Steppe region, even as points of divergence
between the different branches of Indo-European are still improperly
understood. Consequently, while claims still abound of Sanskrit being the
ancestor of all Indo-European languages or of the Indo-Aryans being
indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, these cannot be accepted as they
contravene the evidence.

DATING THE RIG VEDA

In the case of South Asia, the earliest language belonging to the Indo-Aryan
family is Rig Vedic Sanskrit (also referred to as Old Indo-Aryan). Rig Vedic
Sanskrit is the ancestor of the languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan
language family that are spoken in South Asia today. Here, it is worth
qualifying that Rig Vedic Sanskrit differs from Classical Sanskrit, which
was created later. Classical Sanskrit is a post-Vedic form of Old Indo-Aryan
which follows the grammatical rules laid down in Pāṇini’s grammar, the
Ashtadhyayi¸ dated to c. 500 BCE. It is also worth emphasizing that Old
Indo-Aryan is the ancestor only of the Indo-Aryan languages and not of any
of the languages belonging to the other language families of the
subcontinent.
The presence of Old Indo-Aryan is attested by the text of the Rig Veda.
While the transmission of the Rig Veda is marked by a long tradition of oral
memorization and study, its analysis as a historical rather than sacred text
began only in the colonial period. Scholars such as Max Müller (who
published the first printed edition of the Rig Veda, based on various
manuscripts) tried to make sense of the historical traces contained in these
texts. The hymns of the text refer to the people who composed them as
‘arya’, but Müller understood these references through the lens of the racial
science of his time, thereby making ‘Aryan’ a racial category that, as we
know, led to terrible, genocidal consequences in the twentieth century.
Today, however, we understand the text in very different terms.
Dating the Rig Veda remains an issue, given that the hymns of the text
were oral compositions that were also transmitted orally for generations.
This makes it difficult to date them precisely. Müller dated the Rig Veda to
1200 BCE and this is a dating that we continue to accept because it fits in
with the other pieces of evidence. Especially important in this regard are the
links between Old Indo-Aryan and Old Iranian which show that they
constituted a singular branch of the Indo-European language family, known
as Indo-Iranian. Old Iranian is the source language of Avestan which is
found in the inscriptions of the Achaemenid rulers. The Avestan is dated
later than the Rig Veda, but its contents have been used to show that the
Indo-Aryans and Indo-Iranians originally shared common deities and a
common mythology, before Zarathustra’s reforms (Skjærvø, 1995).
Another piece of evidence cited by scholars for the movement of
speakers of old Indo-Aryan is a cuneiform tablet from the region of modern
Turkey, dated to c. 1380 BCE, recording a treaty between the Hittites and
Mittani which refers to Vedic deities such as Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and
Nasatya. Similarly, a Hittite manual on horse-racing, known as Kikkuli’s
text, contains several Indo-Aryan terms for horse rearing and horse racing.
These indicate that the linguistic and cultural complex of the Indo-Aryans
was part of the cultures of West Asia, even though it did not subsequently
endure in these regions.
Rather than one singular immigration, it has been suggested that the
Indo-Aryans could have entered the subcontinent in small groups at
different times. Based on references to rivers in the hymns, the geographical
locus of the composition of the Rig Veda is held to be the Sapta-sindhu or
the area covered by the tributaries of the Indus in northwestern South Asia.

EVIDENCE OF INTERACTION
As the earliest textual evidence in Old Indo-Aryan, the Rig Veda is of
importance not only from a linguistic vantage point, but also from the
perspective of religious and social history. Discarding the term ‘Aryan’
because of its racial connotations, scholars today use the term ‘Indo-Aryan’
to refer to the composers of the Rig Veda. The hymns of the Rig Veda show
that the use of Sanskrit was an important cultural marker, so that those who
spoke this language and followed the ritual practices outlined in the texts
were referred to as ‘Aryas’. It follows that the term ‘Arya’ is used in the
text as an ethnic and linguistic label, and not as a racial one.
Scattered through the text, however, are references to the opponents of
the Aryas who are called the ‘Dasas’ and ‘Dasyus’. A whole range of
derogatory terms are used for them—they are called akratu (non-
sacrificers), adevayu (godless), anyavrata (lawless, with different rights) or
asiva (inauspicious). Who were these opponents? From the information
contained in the text, we can say that they were speakers of a different
language and followers of a different religion and culture from the Indo-
Aryans. The likelihood is that the language(s) they spoke belong to the
Dravidian or Austroasiatic language families (the Sino–Tibetan frontier
being farther east that the location of these interactions). However, our
analysis is limited by the fact that we have no texts or inscriptions in these
languages dating to a period contemporary to the composition of the Rig
Veda. How then can we argue that these language families existed in the
past? The answer to this lies in the loanwords that have been noticed by
scholars as existing in the Rig Veda and later Indo-Aryan texts.
Using an interdisciplinary method known as ‘linguistic archaeology’,
scholars such as Franklin Southworth have compared and tested the
evidence of linguistics with the findings of other fields such as archaeology
and palaeobotany. Such an approach works particularly well in showing that
the Sanskrit names for plants and animals native to India do not share
cognates with other Indo-European languages. Instead, they show likely
origins from proto-Dravidian and proto-Austro–Asiatic languages, as well
as from languages that have not survived (what the linguist Colin Masica
referred to a ‘Language X’).
Three kinds of linguistic patterns can be seen as resulting from these
ecological and cultural encounters. The first is that of borrowing words
from other languages. Thus, a number of Dravidian and Austro–Asiatic
etymologies have been proposed for words for plants and animals that are
found in the Vedic texts. Secondly, there was a process of inventing words.
The word for the elephant (mṛga hastin—‘the animals with the hand’) is
one such neologism, suggesting a sense of wonder and amazement at the
encounter with this animal. Finally, it is argued that Old Indo-Aryan gained
retroflexion (exemplified by the sounds ṭa, ṭha, ḍa, ḍha, ṇa, and ṣa) as a
result of interactions with speakers of other languages on the subcontinent.
Retroflexion is a pattern that characterizes most languages in South Asia
and is correspondingly absent in other Indo-European languages.
Such interactions tell us of a process of cultural assimilation and
convergence that continued over the centuries. It was not always a seamless
process, being also marked by contestation and conflict. But such
borrowings could not have taken place without a situation of extensive
bilingualism or multilingualism.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL CORRELATIONS: LIMITS AND

POSSIBILITIES
The Indo-Aryan question is primarily a linguistic issue, which is why, in
attempts to address the issue, the archaeological materials have to be read in
relation to the linguistic data. At the same time, we must remember that the
concerns of archaeologists relate to many aspects of the mosaic of
archaeological cultures in this period, far exceeding whether or when the
Indo-Aryans came to South Asia (Menon, 2019).
In the 1920s, when the Harappan civilization was discovered, scholars
and the public alike wanted to understand how the evidence of this
civilization fit into the narrative of origins that had been so far been
reconstructed from the Rig Veda. One such attempt postulated that an
‘Aryan invasion’ destroyed the Harappan civilization, but this theory has
since been discarded as there is no archaeological evidence for the
destruction of the Harappan cities on account of warfare.
That being said, it is also clear that the evidence of the Harappan
civilization and the Indo-Aryan culture do not match. Thus, the hymns of
the Rig Veda show a non-urban pastoral society with cattle-keeping as its
main concern, whereas the Harappan civilization was marked by
widespread urbanism, writing, and external trade. Further, the Vedic texts
make no reference to areas that were part of this trading network such as
Sindh, Gujarat, Oman, the Persian Gulf, or Mesopotamia. In the Rig Veda,
the rhinoceros and the elephant are unfamiliar animals, whereas the Indus
seals show us that they were well known to the people of the Indus
Civilization. Similarly, while the horse was well known to the Indo-Aryans,
its presence in the Harappan materials, is at best, contested.
Added to this is the fact that the Indus script remains undeciphered.
While many ‘decipherments’ have been proposed, these have not been
accepted by the scholarly community. Where the language of the script is
concerned, it could be a language belonging to the Dravidian or Austro–
Asiatic language families, but also a language without any modern
descendants. Rig Vedic Sanskrit is not one of the possibilities given the time
gap between the decline of the Mature Harappan civilization (c. 1500 BCE)
and the advent of the Indo-Aryans in South Asia.
Scholars continue to debate which archaeological cultures, if any, can
be associated with the Indo-Aryans in South Asia. In this regard, interesting
possibilities have been raised with regard to excavations at the site of
Sanauli in Uttar Pradesh in 2018 which yielded a burial with an associated
chariot with wooden wheels covered with copper, and anthropomorphic
copper figures (Parpola, 2020). While it is clear that the excavations have
revealed the presence of a warrior grouping and a necropolis of elite burials,
the evidence still needs further contextualization and substantiation. This is
particularly so given that the copper hoards and their association with the
Ochre Coloured Pottery (OCP) culture have been inadequately understood
so far.
Meanwhile, attempts to correlate the evidence of archaeology with
linguistic prehistory appear to be more successful in the case of linking
Proto-Munda with the Neolithic cultures of eastern India, and Proto-
Dravidian with the Neolithic and Megalithic cultures of the Deccan and
South India (Fuller, 2007).

THE GENETIC EVIDENCE

In recent decades, the sequencing of the human genome has made it
possible to reconstruct movements and interactions of people in the deep
past. The nature of the Y-chromosome and mtDNA—that they are inherited
without recombination and trace the exclusively paternal and maternal lines
of a person respectively—together with the mutations that accumulate in
them, are the basis on which population geneticists are able to reconstruct
the history of individuals and populations.
In the South Asian context, extensive sampling and systematic analysis
of genome-wide data shows that the populations of mainland India are
marked by four ancestral components, namely: Ancestral North Indian
(ANI), Ancestral South Indian (ASI), Ancestral Austro–Asiatic (AAA) and
Ancestral Tibeto–Burman (ATB) (Basu, et al., 2016). These four
components can be understood as ethnic and cultural groupings, and
correlate well with the patterns of linguistics and kinship in South Asia. At
the same time, the data also show considerable admixture between these
populations, even if these admixtures are not always symmetric. In many
ways, this allows for a more fine-grained reconstruction of India’s
population history than was earlier possible purely on the basis of the
linguistic, archaeological, or textual material.
Advances in the extraction of DNA from ancient skeletons allow us to
more closely nuance and historicize the genetic formation of populations. In
this regard, a recent study co-analysed ancient DNA and genomic data from
diverse present-day South Asian populations to show, among other things,
that there was a migration of communities from the Eurasian Steppes into
South Asia in the period between 1700 BCE and 1000 BCE (Narasimhan et.
al., 2019). This correlates well with what the linguistic evidence tells us
about the Proto Indo-European homeland as well as the migration of the
Indo-Aryans into South Asia. While ancient DNA from South Asia has
been scarce so far, in the Indian context, the successful extraction of ancient
DNA was recently undertaken from a skeleton found at the Harappan site of
Rakhigarhi in Haryana. Analyses of this DNA suggested a genetic profile
related to groups from the regions of Iran and Turkmenistan that were in
contact with the Harappans (Shinde et. al., 2019). In time, further study of
ancient DNA will undoubtedly provide more information on ancient
populations.
While the genetic evidence is often presented as being more ‘scientific’,
we need to remember that it provides us one more body of data that has to
be read in relation to other kinds of evidence. As we can see, it does not
invalidate the picture provided by the linguistic, textual, and archaeological
evidence gathered so far; rather, it nuances it in several ways.
Although the Indo-Aryan debate has a long history, it is worth
reiterating that the ways in which linguists, archaeologists, and historians
now understand the evidence differs quite a bit from articulations in the
popular domain.
The evidence of linguistics and genetics allows us to reach out to
movements of crops, languages, and peoples that are often not traceable
through written records. At the same time, answers to many questions
concerning prehistoric movements and developments can only be answered
through an interdisciplinary approach which ties together the insights of
historical and archaeological studies. Given that each of these fields of
research continues to evolve, the evidence that we have at hand will also
continue to accrue and evolve.
Finally, while we often respond to this debate in terms of the story of
our ancestors, this is a story with many other implications ( Joseph, 2018).
Taken together, the sources help us reach out to a deep history of
agriculture, language families, kinship systems and cultural
interconnections, all stemming from the movement of people into the South
Asian region.
24
VEDIC TRADITION

Shrikant Bahulkar

A study of the Vedic tradition is based mainly on the evidence furnished by

the Vedic literature that comprises the four Vedas. These Vedas are further
divided into four major texts. The Samhita is a compilation of mantras—
metrical and prose. The Brahmana explains the mantras in their ritual
settings, The Aranyaka is a collection of philosophical speculations made
by the forest-dwellers and the Upanishad devotes a major part to
philosophical dialogues seeking the ultimate truth called ‘brahman’. Each
Veda may not necessarily have all these four types of texts. There are also
six later texts called Vedangas, or the ‘limbs of Veda’, that deal with some
ancient sciences connected with the Vedic ritual: Siksa which pertains to
‘phonetics, explaining the correct pronunciation of letters’; Kalpa that are
‘manuals describing minute details of sacrificial performances’; Nirukta or
the ‘science of etymology of Vedic words and interpretation of mantras’;
Vyakarana or ‘grammar’; Chandas or ‘prosody or metres’; and Jyotisa or
‘astronomy’. The Vedic texts except Vedangas are believed to be ‘the
revelation’ in the sense that they were not composed by any human agency
but were seen by the sages, the rishis or the ‘seers.’ They are therefore
called Sruti, literally meaning, ‘what is heard’, because they have come
down to us through ‘the listening’ or through the oral tradition. On the
contrary the Vedangas are believed to have been composed by
knowledgeable sages. Most of the modern scholars are of the opinion that
Vedic literature was composed between 1500 to 600 BCE. This chronology
of Vedic literature has a background of a linguistic approach according to
which, the Vedic language, a prototype of the Sanskrit language, is derived
from a hypothetical language called the Indo-European language. The
speakers of the Vedic language were the composers of Vedas, the Vedic
Aryans, who came from a region outside India. This theory was called the
Aryan invasion or migration theory which has so far been accepted by most
of the modern scholars. In recent years, some scholars have challenged this
theory. They argue that the Vedic Aryans lived in areas around and to the
east of the Sarasvati River in at least the third millennium BCE, and that they
started migrating or expanding westwards around that time (Talageri, 2008).
These scholars attempt to substitute the Aryan invasion or migration theory
with a theory called ‘Out-of-India theory’. This theory has been examined
on the basis of linguistic evidence (Hock, 1999).
The Vedic texts exhibit different stages of the language: 1. Rig Vedic
language, 2. Mantra language, 3. Samhita prose, 4. Brahmana prose, and 5.
Sutra language (Witzel, 1989).
The Vedic Aryans had some connection with the Mittani people from
the region of Northern Syria and Iraq. This can be inferred on the basis of
cuneiform documents in Akkadian from the second half of the second
millennium BCE, found in Boghazkeui and El-Amarna where they found
‘Aryan’ looking names of [Mittani] princes. There are certain words that
evidently look similar to the Vedic ones: aika- (eka) ‘one’, tera- (tri)
‘three’, panza- (pancan) ‘five’, asua- (asva-) ‘horse’, and so on. There is
also a series of names of Aryan deities on a treaty between the Mittanis and
the Hittites (fourteenth century BCE). These similarities have been discussed
quite often since the beginning of the twentieth century (Thieme, 1960).
There are grammatical and phonetic similarities in the vocabulary of the
Vedic Sanskrit and the Avestan language and similarities between the
deities and the rituals in the Vedic religion and the religion of the early
Iranians. These similarities point to a common home of the Indo-Iranian
people.
The four Vedas have a number of Sakhas or ‘recensions’, established by
the masters who taught the Samhitas and other texts to their students. These
schools differ from each other mainly in the way the texts were recited and
the rituals performed.
Besides the attempts to recite the Vedas correctly, the traditional
scholars invented a unique way of recitation in order to preserve not only
the letters, but even the accents of each of the Vedas, through a device of
modifications of the mantras (vikrti). The reciters of the Veda, called
Vedamurtis or the ‘embodiments of Veda’, begin with the original mantra in
the Samhita, then go to the recitation of the words (pada) in the mantras
separating them from their euphonic combinations as found in the Samhita.
This recitation is called Padapatha. Then they go to various modifications.
There are eight modifications; however, it is customary to recite only the
three, namely, Krama, Jata, and Ghana. This device pertains to the Rig
Veda, the Yajur Veda, and the Atharva Veda. In the case of the Sama Veda,
the way of recitation is different; recitation of the verses (arcika), the
former chanting (purvagana) and the latter chanting (uttaragana).
All these texts have come down to us mainly through the oral tradition.
It is not known when Indians committed to writing down the Vedas. The
mastery over the recitation would be judged only by the ability of
memorizing the Vedic text and reproducing it correctly, without any mistake
even of an accent. One who recited the Veda with the help of a written text
was considered to be one of the wretched reciters (pathakadhama,
Yājñavalkya-śikṣā, verse 86).
It has been observed that in ancient times, it was forbidden to write
down the Vedas. The first, unsuccessful attempt towards writing down the
Vedas goes back to 50 BCE (Witzel, 1989). There exists some evidence of a
Veda manuscript as old as the eleventh century ce. In his travelogue, Al-
Biruni, a Khwarazmian–Iranian scholar mentions that Vasukra, a native of
Kashmir, had undertaken the task of explaining the Veda and committing it
to writing, because he was afraid that the Veda might be forgotten and
entirely vanish out of the memories of men. There are at least two oldest
survived manuscripts of Vedic texts, namely, the Vājasaneyi-Saṃhitā and
Vājasaneyi-Padapāṭha from Nepal and Western Tibet, written around 1150
CE (Witzel and Wu, 2019).
This tradition has a close relation with the application of the mantras in
the performance of Vedic sacrifices. Due to various restrictions, the actual
performance of Vedic sacrifice has become a rare phenomenon. Attempts
have been made to survey the tradition of Veda recitation and, at times,
recording the recitation of Vedic Sakhas (Staal, 1961, Howard, 1986,
Witzel, 2011). In 1975, J. F. Staal and other scholars arranged a
performance of a Soma sacrifice in the village Panjal (Pāññāl) in Kerala.
The entire performance was recorded with audiovisual aids (Staal, 1983).
During the past several centuries, some of the Vedic Sakhas have become
almost extinct. However, the tradition of some Sakhas continues despite the
changing political and social scenario.
25
VEDIC DIVINITIES

Mugdha Gadgil

Vedic texts praise an array of divinities. The Rig Veda describes many such
deities through the most ancient mantras. The Yajur Veda refers to the
deities in sacrificial context. The Nirukta by Yaska (c. sixth century BCE) is
the first available text discussing about the names and categories of Vedic
deities. The Vedic deities are classified on the basis of their location,
namely terrestrial, mid-regional and celestial (7.4–5). This method is later
used partially by modern Indologists. These deities can be also categorized
as individual, dual and group deities.

INDIVIDUAL DEITIES
Among the solo deities, Agni or the sacred fire is a natural power, one of
the most revered, as burnt sacrifices were the backbone of Vedic religion. In
the arrangements of the hymns, the hymns to Agni are the first, followed by
the hymns to other deities. Agni has two aspects: 1) A sacred fire kindled in
the fireplace in which offerings are made; 2) and as deity Agni who carries
the oblations to the deities and accompanies them to the sacrificial place
(havyada). He is also known for burning the dead bodies (kravyada). The
most vividly described deity is Indra who is the king of the gods (rāṭ). He is
celebrated for slaying many opponents, especially Vrtra. He is depicted to
be as a war hero and is instrumental in the emergence of the world. He is
fond of drinking the soma-juice (somapā). Varuna is the controller of
physical and moral conduct. He is thus a strict administrator of cosmic law
(rtapa) and hailed as an emperor (samrat). He is supposed to belong to the
religion of the Indo-Iranian predecessors of Vedic Indians. Soma is a plant,
identified as Ephedra Vulgaris, the juice of which is considered divine and
thus it is a natural phenomenon deified. Curiously, soma is a deity as well
as an offering material for the other deities. This divine drink is known for
bestowing immortality. It is also the master of all plants and forest
(Vanaspati). Gradually, in the later layers of Vedic texts, soma is identified
with the moon. There is Savitr who is famous as the ‘impeller’ and his
invocation from the third mandala of the Rig Veda is still chanted on
various occasions. Pusan is the protector deity of animals and people
travelling on paths. Asvinau has its own special characteristics in the Vedic
pantheon. They are twins and are applauded for helping needy people by
applying miraculous methods and being known as divine physicians. They
are also depicted travelling in chariots drawn by birds or asses or
crocodiles. Tvastr is famous for his skills in the creation of wonderful
equipment for other deities. However, sometimes he is also credited for
creating the world.
Rudra and Vishnu are those solo Vedic deities who have emerged as the
most significant gods in later Hinduism. So historically they have the most
important status. However, in the Rig Veda, they occupy subordinate
positions. Rudra, the predecessor of Siva, possesses contradictory qualities.
He causes an epidemic among cattle and at the same time, he owns soothing
remedies. Further in the Yajur Veda, he possesses a neck with a bluish hue.
Vishnu in the Rig Veda is praised by many and is known for his wide strides
(urugaya) but has some association with the phallic worship as he is called
sipivista. This might suggest his non-Aryan origin. The same deity is later
honoured highly with the advancement of the sacrificial system. Yama is
described as the first mortal and ruler of the world of the manes. Prajapati
stands exalted amongst the Vedic divinities. He has hardly any place in the
Rig Vedic mantra collection. However, he has become the pillar of ways of
worship in the Yajur Veda tradition.
There are a few female deities in the Vedic tradition. Usas is the
deification of the dawn. She is said to be the daughter of heaven (divo
duhita). She is famous for inspiring the living beings to become active.
Aditi symbolizes infinity and is the mother of the Adityas. Prthivi or the
mother Earth is too praised in the Vedas. Atharva Veda has a long hymn
praising Prthivi for supporting humans in all walks of life. Aditi and Prthivi
are merged together in later stages of Vedic literature. River Sarasvati,
another life-supporting source for Vedic Indians, and Vak or speech through
which the strong oral Vedic tradition survived exists independently in the
Rig Vedic period. However, in the late Vedic period these two terms have
become synonymous. Apah means the waters prominently celestial but
sometimes terrestrial too. These female deities possess qualities such as
cleansing sins and bestowing remedies and healing.

DUAL DEITIES
Praying to the deities in a paired form is a speciality of the Vedic pantheon.
Dyava-Prthivi (Heaven and Earth) is a prominent pair praised as the parents
of the world. Mitra-Varuna are another celebrated dual deity known as
emperors and disciplinarians. Usasa-Nakta is a pair symbolizing dawn and
night. However, the night is praised not as dark but as a star-studded one.
Indra-Agni, Indra-Brhaspati, and Agni-Soma are some more from this
category.
In case of these pairs, characteristics of the superior one are imposed on
the other.

GROUP DEITIES
Adityas is a group which includes prominent deities such as Varuna and
some lesser known ones such as Bhaga and Amsa. Total number of the
Adityas varies from seven to twelve in the later layers of Vedic literature.
Maruts are the deified stormy winds. They are the sons of Rudra. They
assist Indra in his valourous ventures. Rbhus is a trio of brothers. Their
description suggests that they exemplify humans who can obtain divine
status due to hard work.

Miscellaneous:

One observes that the Vedic pantheon comprises some other minor deities
such as gandharvas and apsaras. These two groups are sometimes depicted
to be malevolent. Nirrti is another malevolent divinity considered the
goddess of calamity. She is also equated with the death. Manyu (anger),
Sraddha (faith), and Kama (desire) are examples of human emotions
converted into abstract deities. One observes that the physical attributes of
the Vedic divinities are more or less figurative. For example, the flames of
Agni are described as his hair or tongues. There is no reference to the idols
or idol worship till the last phase of the Vedic texts. Vedic gods are true and
moral. They favour honest and righteous people and punish the dishonest
and deceitful ones. Luminosity, vigour, and benevolence are common to
most of them.
It is apparent that in later periods, most of the Vedic divinities have
almost disappeared or no longer enjoy similar status except the striking
examples of Rudra and Vishnu.
Vedic deities were considered to be deified forms of natural powers by
the initial generation of modern Indologists (Hillebrandt, 1927-29; Max
Mueller, 1910). In case of certain deities like Indra, one finds the traits of a
rain-god and of a mortal hero too. There is no unanimous decision about
Varuna being the god of the sky or that of the ocean. However, later the
Indologists realized that all Vedic deities cannot be associated with nature
forces and the concept of Euhemerism was accepted (Chakravarty, 1997).
Nonetheless it is difficult to claim that modern Indology scholars have
fathomed the complete depth of the intriguing Vedic divinities.
 26

SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF TRADITIONAL INDIA

Hans Henrich Hock

INTRODUCTION
India can lay claim to several great scientific accomplishments and
traditions—in medicine (Ayurveda), astronomy, mathematics, and phonetics
and grammar. There must have been other traditions of a more technical
sort (such as tanning and metal work), but their accomplishments have not
be recorded in the Brahmin-dominated, largely Sanskrit-language textual
transmission. Present-day popular and ideologically motivated perspectives
argue for many other scientific accomplishments, but these claims rest on
slender or even dubious evidence; see, for example, the critical review in
Kumar 2019. Further, ideologically motivated quasi-scholarly publications
tend to exaggerate (to different degrees) the accomplishments of Indian
scientific traditions.
This essay attempts to provide a brief overview of the well-documented
scientific traditions. Section 1 addresses medicine (Ayurveda); astronomy is
covered in section 2; mathematics, to a large extent closely affiliated with
astronomy, forms the topic of section 3; finally, section 4 discusses
phonetics and grammar.

MEDICINE (AYURVEDA)
While there is evidence for the practice of some kind of dentistry ca. 7000
to 5500 BCE, there are no written (or deciphered) documents from the pre-
Vedic phase, including the great Harappan Civilization. The early Vedic
texts offer glimpses of medical practices, such as a Rig Vedic reference to a
bhiṣaj ‘physician’ who desires a fracture (presumably to set it). However,
the term bhiṣaj is widely used to refer to the Aśvins and other deities who
provide magical support, including the restoration of eyesight, rescue from
the sea, or even providing a horse for a seer. More specifically focused on
medicine are many of the hymns of the Atharva Veda (and some of the Rig
Veda), which sing the praise of medicinal amulets and plants such as the
herb called arundhati. One hymn of the Atharva Veda (10.2) also gives an
exhaustive list of body parts. True, this is in the context of the sacrifice of
the primordial Purusa, but the list suggests a fairly thorough knowledge of
human anatomy.
 First systematic treatises on medicine or Ayurveda ‘life-science’ come
from the post-Vedic period. Important documents are the Sushruta Samhita
(2nd c. BCE–3rd c. CE?), the Caraka Samhita (1st c. BCE–3rd c. CE?), and
Vagbhata’s compendium and systematization of earlier Ayurvedic works,
the Ashtangahrdaya Samhita (seventh millennium ce). The exact dating of
many texts is still not resolved. Moreover, texts are preserved in many
different manuscript variants, and a systematic collection and comparison of
them with the aim of establishing critical editions has begun only recently
(at the Wellcome Institute in London).
While the textual Ayurveda tradition itself claims continuity with the
Vedas, Western accounts tend to accept arguments by scholars like Zysk
that the tradition emanated from the ascetic/mendicant non-Vedic
sramanical (or caraka) tradition, including Buddhism, and was adopted by
the Brahmanical tradition secondarily. In this context it may be significant
that with the exception of the early Sushruta Samhita, the extant texts do
not deal with surgery: it has been surmised that this reflects the fact that
Ayurveda became the province of Brahmins who disdained or prohibited
procedures that involve blood or cutting into bodies; surgery therefore was
left to the practitioners of the barber profession. The latter argument,
however, is weakened by the fact that the procedure of blood-letting is
recognized in the Ayurveda tradition.
Ayurveda medicine is said to be based on observations and committed
to rationality, focusing on direct observation (pariksaa), reasoning (yukti),
and inference (anumaana). An important concept is the tridosa-vidya or
thea ‘science of the three dosas’, with the three constituents elements or
‘dosas’ of vaata ‘wind’, pitta ‘choler’, and kapha or slesman ‘phlegm’.
(This system is similar to the Greek tradition, but the latter has four
humours and also differs in other respects.) Although external causes of
illness (such as arrow wounds) are considered, a strong emphasis lies on
maintaining a balance between these three ‘dosas’ or preventing a particular
dosa from being excessively present in a particular part of the body. Lack of
balance or excessive presence is considered a major basis for illness. (The
term dosa usually means ‘fault’, but the term became attached to the three
constituent elements, presumably via the notion that predominance of one
or the other is a ‘fault’.)
Topics covered in the Ayurveda tradition include various aspects of
internal medicine; treatment of wounds and extraction of foreign bodies;
embryonic growth, childbirth, and treatment of women during pregnancy;
pediatrics; general well-being; and even such topics as treatment of
intoxication, demonic possession, and aphrodisiacs. Medical procedures
include diet, enemas, bloodletting, and ointments.
Medicines are largely based on plant or animal substances, but
inorganic substances such as metals are also employed. Metallic
compounds, including mercury, become more prominent in the second
millennium CE.
With (regional) modifications, partly driven by the commentatorial
literature on the foundational texts, Ayurveda has continued into the present
period. However, its medical practices, especially the use of heavy metals in
its pharmacopeia, have been subject to sometimes very critical examination.
In response there have been efforts to subject Ayurveda medicine to the
same kind of clinical trials and testing as in mainstream western medical
science.

ASTRONOMY (JYOTISA) AND RELATED ISSUES

While the grid-like organization of Harappan cities in terms of north-south
and east-west streets suggests familiarity with a system of cardinal
directions, the lack of (deciphered) written texts makes it impossible to
assess the extent to which of astronomy and related issues were subjected to
scientific study.

The Vedic Tradition

The rich textual tradition of the Vedic period makes it possible to gain some
insights into the extent to which astronomy and related, especially
calendrical issues were understood.
Naturally, there are references to the sun, the moon, and the stars, as
well as to some constellations, such as the Seven rishis or rikshas ‘seven
seers or bears’, i.e. Ursa Maior. Most important was the development of the
notion of nakshatras or ‘lunar stations’ and the interaction of this notion
with the calendrical system; see below. There are also references to
eclipses, but there are no indications of attempts to predict eclipses and
other celestial phenomena.
 What may be called an ideology of light vs. dark underlies a set of
distinctions between day and night; the light and dark parts of the month
(starting with the full moon and new moon respectively); and the northern
course and the southern course of the sun (a period during which the sun
rises farther north each day and the days get longer and a period when it
rises farther south each day and the days get shorter). The starting point for
the northern course naturally was the winter solstice, for the southern
course, the summer solstice. In addition, there was a division of the year
into six seasons—vasanta ‘spring’, grishma ‘hot season’, varshaa
‘monsoon’, sharad ‘autumn’, hemanta ‘cool season’, sisira ‘cold season’.
The Aitareya Brahmana and Taittiriya Samhita group hemanta and sisira
together and thereby postulate a five-season year; the Satapatha Brahmana
instead groups varsha and sharad together to arrive at five seasons. (Some
further variations are also found. Only three seasons are mentioned in the
Rig Veda, but it is not clear whether the absence of the other seasons should
be taken to be significant.)
The calendrical system was lunar-solar, with both a (simplified) solar
year of 360 days and twelve thirty-day months, plus intercalation, and a
synodic or sidereal lunar year of twelve months adding up to 324 or 354
days. Because of the discrepancy between the lunar year(s) and the
(simplified) solar year, further intercalation was necessary. The lunar
calendar operates with the notion of nakshatras, constellations along the
apparent motion of the moon over the horizon, and lunar months are
identified in terms of the nakshatra under which the full moon rises. Over
time, however, the tendency was to identify the twelve lunar months with
the twelve solar months. The earliest texts (Atharva Veda and Maitrayani
Samhita) postulate twenty-eight nakshatras; the later tradition generally
operates with twenty-seven. Late Vedic texts add a division of the day into
thirty muhurtas of forty-eight minutes each.
There have been proposals to attribute the 360-day, twelve-month solar
year to the ancient Mesopotamian tradition, and a similar account has been
considered for the naksatra system. Now, the older system of twenty-eight
nakshatras bears close similarities to the ‘lunar mansions’ of the Chinese
and Arabic traditions, a fact that may suggest some kind of diffusion; and
the 360-day, twelve-month solar system may be considered reminiscent of
the sexagesimal numeral system of Mesopotamia. However, some scholars
have pointed out that the lunar mansions of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt
differ in number (twelve or thirty-six) from the Vedic system (twenty-eight
or twenty-seven). Most important, there are good arithmetic reasons to opt
for a 360-day year: A 365-day year would be divisible only into 5 and 83
(both prime numbers). A 354-day sidereal lunar year offers a larger number
of options, but 12 (the number of months) is not among them. By contrast,
an (idealized) 360-day year makes it possible to accommodate twelve
months, thirty days per month, and six seasons as simple fractions.
Moreover, the 360-day year occupies a middle ground between the solar
365-day year and sidereal lunar year of 354 days. Different societies,
therefore, may have arrived at a 360-day year independently.
Except for some late texts, the cosmology of the Vedic tradition is
threefold: This world (prithivi), yonder world (dyauh), and antariksam in
between.

The Puranas and the Jyotisa Vedanga

The cosmology of the Puranas is more complex than that of the earlier
Vedic period. The earth, whose centre is Mount Meru, is a circular disk
surrounded by other continents which are each separated from each other by
oceans. The sun, moon, and the nakshatras circle the earth, attached to an
axis connected to Mount Meru. Divinities dwell above the earth and
demons below.
Towards the end of the Vedic tradition, astronomical texts arise, called
Vedangas (auxiliary members of the Veda); these culminate in the Jyotisha
Vedanga. Innovations include the notion tithi ‘lunar day’ defined as 1/30 of
a lunar month; the use of nakshatras as units of equal length, defined as
1/27 of arc; attempts to establish clear rules for intercalation; the use of a
vertical gnomon for time keeping; and accounts of the motions of (some of)
the planets.

Greek influence and Classical Astronomy

The early centuries CE see some major changes which have been plausibly
attributed to Greek influence. In fact, there is robust linguistic evidence for
Greek influence in terms of borrowings made into Sanskrit, such as kendra
‘centre’ (Greek kentron), kona ‘angle’ (Greek-gonos ‘angle’), trikona
‘triangle’ (Greek trigonon), hora ‘hour, half of a zodiac sign’ (Greek hōra),
lipta ‘minute, 60th part of a degree’ (Greek lepte). Moreover the name of
one of the most important texts of this era is Yavanajataka, where Yavana
refers to Greeks (and other Western foreigners).
Astronomy now aims at a more detailed and accurate account of
celestial phenomena, including local latitude and longitude, position of the
sun or moon on a specific date, the exact time of lunar first visibility, and
the times, locations, the specific nature of solar and lunar eclipses and
planetary conjunctions. There are also attempts to determine the duration of
the true solar year; durations vary from 365; 15, 30, 22, 30 days to 365; 15,
31, 15 and 365; 15, 31, 31, 24 days. Nakshatras are defined in terms of both
the ecliptic and Greek-origin zodiac signs. In addition, there is a
considerable degree of ‘mathematicization’, including the use of sines; see
§4 below. Mathematicization is carried even further in the so-called Kerala
school of medieval times.
The universe as well as the earth are now conceived of as spherical;
Mount Meru is the North Pole; and the sun, moon, nakshatras, and other
constellations turn around the earth. An alternative view attributed to the
fifth-century astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata held instead that the
earth rotates, but this view was generally ignored. Some scholars have
interpreted Aryabhata’s hypothesis as heliocentric. However, this
interpretation goes beyond the evidence of Aryabhata’s work. The Kerala
school, however, did propose heliocentric orbits for the planets Venus and
Mercury.
As time progresses, pre-calculated kosthakas ‘tables’ are produced
which record planetary (and other) motions for given locations. More
practically oriented variants of these are the pancangas, which list the day,
tithi, nakshatra, and other astronomical features for each day. Variants of
these texts are still in use for predicting auspicious and inauspicious times
for festivals, marriages, and the like. It is commonly assumed that these
tables may have been influenced by similar Islamic lists.
Islamic influence also manifests in the use of the planisphere astrolabe
and certain innovations in astrology that are referred to as tajika ‘Persian’.
The effect of these contributions, however, remained limited in mainstream
Indian astronomy.

MATHEMATICS
It is in the area of mathematics that India/South Asia has made most
significant scientific contributions. Some of these spread west and became
foundational parts of Islamic/Arabic and European numerical notation and
mathematics; others did not and were rediscovered much later in Western
mathematics. After a brief historical survey, this section focuses on some of
the major developments and achievements.

Brief history of Indian Mathematics and the Format of Mathematical Texts

The mathematics of the Late Vedic Sulba Sutras (ca. 800–300 BCE) arose in
the context of the construction and scaling of different altars used in the
Vedic ritual. In this context, mathematical procedures like determining
square roots were developed, as well as approximations of π (generally
defined as √10), and discovering the so-called Pythagorean Theorem
(several centuries before Pythagoras). The Late Vedic period also saw the
composition of Pingala’s Chandah Sastra (third to second century BCE),
which used something like a binary code system for making generalizations
about different possible patterns of metrical poetry. In describing the 0-
element of the code, Pingala at one point uses the term sunya ‘empty’,
which in later mathematics is used as one of the terms for the numeral and
number 0. It is not clear whether Late Vedic mathematical practices carried
over into the post-Vedic period.
Post-Vedic or Classical mathematics is largely associated with
astronomy, but topics such as interest calculation, accounting, and prosody
also played a role. This period, lasting from about the mid-1st millennium
to the mid-second millennium saw an ever-increasing sophistication of
mathematics, ending among other things in work on infinite series. The
names of important mathematicians and their approximate dates are as
follows. Aryabhata I (476–550), Aryabhata II (920–1000), Bhaskara I
(600–680), Bhaskara II (1114–1185), Brahmagupta (598–668), and towards
the end of the period, Madhava (1350–1425) and Nilakantha Somayajin
(1444–1544) of the so-called Kerala School. Note also the existence of the
so-called Bakhshali Manuscript, which may have been originally composed
around the middle of the first millennium; however, the extant manuscripts
are later.
As can be seen, the period of Classical mathematics extended well into
the period of Islamic presence; however, there does not seem to be any
evidence for Islamic influence on Indian mathematics. On the contrary,
elements of Indian mathematics were taken over by Islamic/Arabic
mathematics.
With few exceptions (such as the Bakhshali Manuscript), mathematical
texts are designed for memorization and oral transmission. Texts typically
are in ‘sutra’ format, i.e., in highly condensed aphorisms which require
commentaries for fuller explanation. Further, most Classical treatises are in
verse, which imposes metrical restrictions on the occurrence of
mathematical terms. One solution consists in the use of conventionalized
‘synonyms’ for numerals, such as agni ‘fire’ = 3, in order to accommodate
specific poetic-metrical exigencies (for instance, agni has the metrical
structure heavy-light). Note also the katapayadi system and Aryabhata I’s
idiosyncratic system of abbreviations; see §4.2. Given the primarily oral
nature of transmission, the use of graphical representations in manuscripts
is rare; they are most common for fractions written in the format below
inserted as blocks into the text.
12345
67890

Numerals and numbers

As early as the Vedic period (and inherited from Proto-Indo-European), the

basic system is decimal. However, during Vedic times there is no numeral 0
and there is no place notation. Moreover, complex numerals are formed in a
variety of patterns, suggesting that at least some of them are an overlay of
an originally simpler system. To the extent that numerals are compounded,
the lower numeral precedes the higher one, not only in the teens but also
beyond (e.g. trayas-trim. śat ‘33’, catuḥ-śatam ‘104’, trimsac-chatam
‘130’). The highest numeral in the inherited system is sahasram ‘1000’. For
the ‘nines’ in each series, the pattern ekān na vim. śati ‘19’ (lit. ‘by one not
twenty’), ekān na śatam ‘99’ begins to appear. Multiple hundreds are
formed syntactically as in trīṇi śatāni ‘300’ (lit. ‘three hundreds’), and
similarly for thousands. Higher complex numerals tend to be syntactically
conjoined as in sapta śatāni ca vim. śatiś ca ‘720’ (lit. ‘seven hundreds and
twenty’). Over time, larger powers of ten than sahasram begin to appear,
going up to parardha ‘1,000,000,000,000’ or 1012. (Similar numerals for
large powers of 10 are also found in Buddhist and Jaina texts, and according
to one text, the Buddha could recite such numerals beyond the power of
50.)
By the time of Aryabhata-I we find reference to negative numerals or
numbers. The technical terms used to refer to these are ṛna lit. ‘debt’ and
kṣaya lit. ‘decrease, loss’, a fact that might suggest that the terms originated
in the mathematics of accounting.
Important breakthroughs of the post-Vedic period are the development
of place notation, the use of 0 as a numeral in that notation, and finally the
recognition of 0 as a number. The usual terms for 0 are śūnya lit. ‘empty’
and kha lit. ‘gap, hole’. Extant texts do not make it possible to clearly
discern the origins of these developments. Speculations, therefore, abound.
Some would consider the Buddhist notion sunyata to have been the
inspiration; others have considered Chinese influence through Southeast
Asia; and yet others have suggested inspiration from Pāṇini’s Sanskrit
grammar. For a survey see Staal. Other possibilities are mooted below.
The earliest direct attestations are no earlier than the mid-first
millennium CE. Plofker notes references in a commentary on Patanjali’s
Yoga Sutra to lines of hundreds, lines of tens, and lines of ones, and
references in the work of the first-century Buddhist philosopher Vasumitra
to a ‘similar analogy involving merchants’ counting pits’; but these
passages may simply be reference to abacus-like arithmetic methods. At the
same time, if a line or counting pit in, say, the ones was empty, this may
have been characterized as sunya ‘empty’; and by further semantic (and
mathematical) extension, the term could have secondarily been employed to
the ‘empty’ position in a decimal count. (In addition, the possibility has
been considered that the 0 of Pingala’s quasi-binary code may have played
a role.)
The development of 0 as number, comparable to the other numbers, is
an even farther-reaching event. Perhaps the recognition of negative numbers
may have played a role here: If 2 minus 1 yields the number 1, 2 minus 3
yields the number -1, then the logical conclusion might be that 2 minus 2
yields not just absence, but also a number, namely 0.
Finally, it is possible that the Pāṇinian use of 0-elements in the
framework of his grammar may have been an inspiration, because (some of)
these 0-elements function like full grammatical elements; see §5.2.
Moreover, as commonly acknowledged, Pāṇini’s grammar or later recasts
were fundamental to education and literacy in Sanskrit, and his rules could
be cited in mathematical treatises. (This is the position of Staal. Bronkhorst,
by contrast considers the influence of grammar on mathematics to be
relatively small, and he rejects the idea that mathematical 0 was influenced
by grammar.)
Influence of Sanskrit phonetics and grammar may in fact also be found
in the system of katapayadi numeral notation and in Aryabhata-I’s more
idiosyncratic system of notation. Both of these operate on the varnamala of
Sanskrit speech sounds developed in the Vedic pratisakyas, and although
details differ, Aryabhata-I’s system is reminiscent of Pāṇini’s use of
pratyaharas (roughly, drawing elements together) to make grammatical
generalizations; see §5 for further discussion of Sanskrit phonetics and
grammar.
Aryabhata’s system assigns square values to the stop consonants of
Sanskrit, non-square values to the remaining consonants, and increasingly
higher powers of ten to the vowel series. Consonants and vowels are then
drawn together into syllables. By this procedure it is possible to designate
300 as gi, where g stands for 3 and i designates 102, and the juxtaposition
of g and i stands for multiplication.
While Aryabhatas system apparently was too complex for other
mathematicians to employ, the simpler katapayadi system was more widely
employed. In this system, numerical values were assigned to the different
consonants and combined with an arbitrary vowel to spell out words that
designate numerical values. For instance, bhavati (which also is an ordinary
Sanskrit word meaning ‘is, becomes’) spells 4-4-6, which following the
general procedure of starting with the lowest decimal place, designates 644.
The katapayadi system was especially employed in the Kerala School.

Major Mathematical Insights

Like its Late Vedic predecessors, Classical mathematics discovered the so-
called Pythagorean Theorem (e.g. Bhaskara I and Brahmagupta) and
attempted to define and refine π. In the Kerala School, toward the end of the
Classical era, Madhava approximated π as 2,827,433,388,233/900,0
00,000,000, which translates to a decimal notation of 3.1415926535922…
accurate to the 11th place.
Some other, general developments include the following. Brahmagupta
for the first time makes a distinction between arithmetic and algebraic
procedures. Aryabhata I introduces the kuttaka ‘pulverizer’ in dealing with
linear indeterminate equations, a procedure similar to Euclid’s algorithm for
finding the greatest common divisor. Equations with multiple unknowns
come to be dealt with. Where Greek astronomers and mathematicians had
operated with chords, Classical Indian mathematics introduced the notion of
sines.
Finally, there are two remarkable developments, both involving the
notion of infinity. One is in effect a consequence of recognizing 0 as a
number, not just as a numeral or notational device. In this context the issue
of division by 0 arises. While other mathematicans such as Brahmagupta
generally left an expression of the type 1/0 unsolved, Bhaskara II calls the
product khahara, defined as follows: ‘In this khahara there is no change by
adding or subtracting, just as in the unending, imperishable brahman …’ –
i.e. in effect as infinity. (The issue of division by 0, of course, remains a
contested issue till the present day. What is remarkable is that Bhaskara
tried to tackle it.)
The other development involving the notion infinity is Madhava’s work
with infinite series, partly in connection with determining the value of π,
but also for expansions of sine, cosine, and arctangent functions. These
series were rediscovered in the West by scholars like Newton and Leibniz
and originally named after them. After the rediscovery of Madhava’s work
they now tend to be given hyphenated names, such as Madhava-Leipniz
Series.

Issue of Proof

Unlike its Greek counterpart, the Indian mathematical tradition generally

does not provide explicit proofs of particular theorems, and it lacks a
formalized system of proofs. The only exceptions are found in the latest
phase, the Kerala school, where interestingly some of the proofs are
produced in documents written in Malayalam, rather than Sanskrit. It is an
unsolved question whether the earlier tradition may have provided some
kind of proofs in the oral commentaries that would be associated with the
extant treatises.

India’s Contributions to Islamic/Arabic and Western Mathematics

While some of the Indian mathematical accomplishments remained
unknown to the Islamic/Arabic and Western traditions until after their
rediscovery by Western mathematicians, other accomplishments were
transmitted to the outside, first to the Islamic/Arabic area and then to the
West. These are the decimal numeral notation including 0, important
elements of algebra, and to a more limited degree, some aspects of
trigonometry. While the numeral system has been traditionally referred to as
‘Arabic’ in the West, the Islamic/Arabic mathematicians frankly
acknowledged their Indian origin; and similarly they acknowledged their
debt in the area of algebra.

PHONETICS AND GRAMMAR

As in the area of mathematics, India made major contributions in phonetics
and grammar. Unfortunately, these achievements are generally left out of
consideration in publications on the scientific traditions of ancient India,
and they are almost entirely ignored by the general public (except for an
Indian postage stamp honouring Pāṇini). The following presents a brief
overview of these achievements, focusing on works dealing with the
Sanskrit language.

Phonetics

Although the Vedic texts contain occasional references to phonetic matters,

systematic accounts of Vedic phonetics first appear in the late Vedic
Prātiśākhyas (c. fifth to second century BCE), treatises that also deal with the
relationship between the samhita or ‘continuous recitation’ version of the
Vedic texts and a word-by-word analysis called padapatha.
One of the major accomplishments of these texts is a classification of
the speech sounds of Sanskrit based on a sophisticated understanding of the
manner in which these sounds are produced. Nothing of a similar degree of
sophistication or accuracy is found in Greek and Roman phonetic accounts,
or with a few exceptions in later Western studies, until the nineteenth
century when Sanskrit phonetic knowledge came to be known. In fact,
much of modern Western phonetic terminology is of Sanskrit origin.
Consider e.g. English voiceless vs. voiced, German stimmlos vs. stimmhaft,
marking the difference between, say, t and d. Both the English and German
sets of terms are simply translations of Sanskrit a-ghoṣa ‘not having
voicing’ and ghoṣa-vat ‘having voicing’. Especially noteworthy is the
characterization of ‘voiced aspirates’ such as dh as involving an articulatory
setting of the glottis that is in between that for voicelessness and voicing.
Nineteenth-century Western linguists had a difficult time coming to grips
with this characterization; it was only in the twentieth century that the
articulatory setting involved (called breathy voice) was found to be close to
the description of the Pratisakhyas.
An overt manifestation of the solid articulatory basis of Vedic phonetics
is the varṇamālā or varṇasamānaya, the arrangement of speech sounds.
Vowels are followed by consonants and the consonants are classified as
stops, ‘semi-vowels’, and sibilants/fricatives. Interestingly, nasal sounds
such as n are classified as stops, reflecting the fact that their primary, oral
articulation is the same as for, say, d, with nasal resonance reflecting a
secondary articulatory feature.
Underlying all of this is a classification in terms of place of (primary)
articulation, which is most obvious in the stops, but also informs the
arrangement of semivowels and sibilants, as well as, with some
complications, that of the vowels. Unlike in modern Western arrangements,
the system is organized from the velar (or glottal) position at the back of the
oral area toward the labial position at the front, following the direction of
the air stream. See Table 1. (When writing was introduced in peninsular
South Asia in the form of Brahmi, the Vedic varnamala was employed to
organize the written symbols. As a consequence, India’s Brahmi-derived
writing systems stand out among the systems of the world in terms of its
phonetically-based arrangement. Only the Korean writing system exhibits
comparable phonetic sophistication, possibly influenced by Indian phonetic
knowledge; and the arrangement of the Japanese kana-system may also
show (indirect) influence from Indian phonetics.)

Table 1: The varṇasamāmnaya

A later development, reflected in some of the Prātiśākhyas, is a
classification in terms of resonance, one of whose effects was the
classification of velars and glottals under the heading ‘glottal’. While
interesting in its own right, the development led to some changes in
terminology that obscured the original articulatory system. Some of these
effects also influenced varieties of Western phonetics.
The later phonetic treatises, called śikṣas, betray influence from the
grammatical tradition. Because grammar focused on the common feature of
aspiration shared by voiceless and voiced aspirates, the śikṣas neglected the
‘breathy voice’ feature that distinguish the voiced aspirates; and when
Indian phonetic knowledge was first transmitted through the śikṣas, that
distinction was lost in European grammatical publications on Sanskrit.

Pāṇini’s Grammar

Pāṇini’s grammar of the late Vedic Sanskrit language (c. fourth century BCE)
has been called one of the most monumental achievements in linguistics.
Focused on the contemporary spoken language of his time and area, but
with ample references to Vedic usage, it provides perhaps the most
complete description of any language, in a highly condensed format.
Although Pāṇini acknowledges a number of predecessors, their work
apparently was lost, overshadowed by his accomplishment.
 Being composed in the aphoristic sutra style it probably was originally
accompanied by an auto-commentary; however that commentary has been
lost. The interpretation of Pāṇini’s grammar therefore to a large extent
depends on later commentaries, the most famous of which is the
Mahābhāṣya, the ‘great commentary’. The latter text contains vārttikas or
critical comments on Pāṇini’s grammar by the grammarian Kātyāyana and a
more general commentary by Patañjali who frequently defends Pāṇini
against Kātyāyana. The commentatorial tradition continues to the present.
Pāṇini’s work gave rise to various later recasts that simplify aspects of
the grammatical presentation. Perhaps the best known among these is the
Siddhāntakaumudī ‘elucidation of what is established’. The grammatical
tradition also comes to be applied, with various changes, to the description
of Middle Indo-Aryan/Prakrit languages, including Pali and Ardha
Magadhi, sacred languages of the Buddhists and Jains. Most of these
grammars are composed in Sanskrit, but the Theravada Buddhist tradition
comes to develop Pali grammars composed in Pali.
Pāṇini’s work is recognized as a śabdānuśāsana, i.e., a grammar
accounting for the correct formation of words. Its major focus is phonology
and morphology; but some issues of syntax are also covered, especially the
marking of major constituents and the relation between active and passive
structures. Unlike Western approaches, Pāṇini’s grammar does not use the
concepts Subject and Object, but instead operates with notions such as
Agent (defined as acting on one’s own) and Patient. Further,
‘grammaticality’ is defined in term of formal correctness; the grammar does
not rule out semantically anomalous structures.
Pāṇini’s grammar is generative in the technical sense of formally
accounting for all grammatical forms of the language in terms of general
rules as well as specific restrictions or exceptions to these rules. The need
for a generative account is explicitly discussed, and justified, in the
introductory part of the Mahābhāṣya.
The grammar was most likely composed and transmitted orally.
Replacement rules such as ‘a is replaced by b after c and before d’ (a → b /
c _ d in modern notation) therefore are stated in an oral metalanguage, as a-
genitive b-nominative c-ablative d-locative. (For an example see further
below.)
One metalanguage method, employed in making phonological
generalizations, is the use of ‘prātyahāra’ expressions such as iK to
designate the vowels i, u, ṛ, and ḷ and aC to designate all vowels including
the so-called diphthongs (e, ai, o, au). These pratyāhāras draw on the
rearrangement of the Sanskrit sound system presented in Table 2 and
operate as follows: take the initial sound of a particular series and add the
grammatical marker, here indicated by small caps, at the end of the series.
(The use of small caps, of course, is merely an aid for easier comprehension
of the written representation. Pāṇini’s grammar operates on an oral basis,
where there are no such things as small caps.) So based on the pratyahara
sutras, iK can be read as the vowels starting with i and ending with ḷ, and
aC can be read as starting with a and ending with au; see the first two lines
in Table 2. There are specific sutras in the grammar which specify that the
short vowels in pratyāhāras stand also stand for their long counterparts, as
well as overlong and nasalized vowels. Further sūtras specify that in
replacement rules, the substitutes of sounds must be phonologically related.

Table 2: The Śiva or pratyāhāra sūtras

aiuṆ
ṛḷK
eoṄ
ai au C
hyvrṬ
lN
ñmnnnM
jh bh Ñ
gh ḍh dh Ṣ
jbgḍdŚ
kh ph ch ṭh th c ṭ t V
kpY
śssR
hL

To see how this ‘machinery’ works, let us take a look at one of Pāṇini’s
phonological rules iKo [genitive] yaṆ [nominative] aCi [locative]
Given Pāṇini’s conventions of rule formulation this can be read as ‘iK is
replaced by yaṆ before aC’. Further, as we have seen, iK designates the
vowels i, u, ṛ, ḷ and their long, etc., counterparts, and aC all vowels (and
their long etc. counterparts). As for yaṆ, Table 2 shows that this stands for
the series y, v, r, l in the fourth and fifth rows. Moreover, Pāṇini’s provision
that substitutes must be phonologically related to what they replace assures
that i gets replaced by y, u by v, and so on.
The expression iKo yaN aCi thus states that i, u, ṛ, and ḷ (whether long
or short) are replaced by y, v, r, and l respectively before any following
vowel. An example would be prati-āhāra → pratyāhāra.
For other aspects of grammatical derivation, other grammatical markers
are used, including abstract markers which are rewritten as actual
grammatical elements under appropriate grammatical conditions.
According to one rule, grammatical markers (such as the K of iK) are
‘lost’ after all processes triggered by them have applied.
Now, while the term lopa used in this rule literally means ‘destruction,
disappearance’, it is defined elsewhere in the grammar as a replacement;
that is, it functions as a grammatical zero element. Moreover, this
replacement retains the grammatical features or properties of the element
that it replaces; that is, it is not inert, but an ‘active’ grammatical element.
In these respects, lopa contrasts with another set of null-replacements, luk,
lup, ślu which do not retain the grammatical features or properties of the
elements that they replace. These replacements, thus, are grammatically
inert. Pāṇini, thus, operated with grammatical zero (0) elements long before
their ‘rediscovery’ in Western linguistics, and also long before the
emergence of 0 as a number element in Indian mathematics. (See §4.2 on
this matter.)

The core of Pāṇini’s grammar consists of eight books:

1. Technical terms, metarules, and kārakas (≈ abstract case categories)
2. Nominal composition, aspects of morphology (word structure)
3. Primary morphological derivation
4 and 5. Secondary morphological derivation
6 and 7. Accentuation and word-internal phonology
8. Phonological interactions across word boundaries

In addition there are the pratyāhāra sūtras of Table 2; a gaṇapāṭha (list of

nominal stems, grammatically organized); and a dhātupāṭha (list of verbal
roots, grammatically organized).
Significantly, the various components of the core grammar are
organized thematically, not in the order of application during a derivation.
In fact, derivations typically draw on rules distributed over various parts of
the grammar. For instance, the rule iKo yaṆ aCi occurs in Book 6, but rules
such as the use of case marking in phonological replacements and other
rules necessary to interpret iKo yaṆ aCi are found in Book 1; and the
pratyāhāra sūtras are appended to the beginning of the core grammar.
Traditionally, derivation is accomplished by accessing rules from the text as
stored in memory in a process similar to accessing data from computer
storage.
Although Pāṇini’s coverage of earlier Vedic grammar is at times
cursory, his account for the Late Vedic language of his time is generally
accurate. Exceptions seem to be limited to issues of syntax. In this regard an
important article by Deshpande is interesting. Pāṇini’s description of a
particular infinitive construction is not accepted in the mainstream,
‘Madhyadesa’ tradition of Sanskrit but is found in the Caraka Samhita, an
Ayurvedic text commonly assigned to the extreme northwest, around
Gandhara. Now, Pāṇini likewise comes from the extreme northwest, near
Gandhara. Deshpande concludes that the difference between Pāṇini’s
description and Madhyadesa usage does not constitute a mistake by Pāṇini
but reflects the fact that Pāṇini was a ‘frontier grammarian’ in whose
language the construction was grammatical. Since then, other differences
between Pāṇini’s grammar and Madhyadesa usage have been brought to
light, and it has been suggested that these, too, reflect Pāṇini’s being a
‘frontier grammarian’.
It should finally be noted that there have been claims that Pāṇini’s
grammar is the most outstanding model for computational work. Especially
important in this regard is an article by Briggs who claims that the
traditional Pāṇinian paraphrasing of the kārakas and the action underlying a
particular utterance constitutes an excellent basis for establish ‘knowledge
bases’ in artificial intelligence. The claim has been widely circulated in
India.
To illustrate the basis for Briggs’s claim consider the Sanskrit
expression

rāmo hastena brāhmaṇāya dhanam dadati

‘Rama gives money to a brahmin with his hand’

This expression can be paraphrased as follows
 rāma-niṣṭha-KARTṚtva-nirūpaka-hasta-niṣṭha-KARAṆAtva-nirūpaka-
brāhmaṇa-niṣṭha-SAMPRADAṆAtva-nirūpaka-dhana-niṣṭha-KARMAtva-
nirūpaka-dāna-KRIYĀ
Here the highlighted elements indicate that rama is classified as
KARTṚ ‘agent’, hasta ‘hand’ as KARAṆA ‘instrument’, the brahmin as
SAMPRADANA ‘recipient’, dhana ‘money’ as KARMAN ‘patient’, and
dāna ‘giving’ as KRIYĀ ‘action’.
While such paraphrases are indeed interesting, it should be noted that
they are not part of Pāṇini’s grammar; they seem to have been first
introduced in Navya-Nyāya logic around the twelfth century CE (in a
slightly different form); and they make their appearance in a grammatical
treatise of the seventeenth century CE.
27
BUDDHISM

Pradip Gokhale

Before the rise of the Buddha’s philosophy of life in the sixth century BCE,
three major streams of thought and practice were current in Indian society.
Vedic, Shramana, and Lokayata. The Vedic stream which might have its
origin in the remote past is said to have developed in the period between the
fifteenth and sixth century BCE. Within the Vedic stream there were two sub-
streams: activism and inactivism.
Activism divided the society and hierarchically arranged it into four
castes (varnas) based on birth. The Brahmana-varna was said to be superior
and it was assigned the task of preservation of Vedic scriptures through
recitation and performance of sacrifices and other ritualist acts. These
sacrifices often involved the killing of animals, exploitation of human
power, and destruction of plants. Among the four stages of life (often called
the four ashramas: a student’s stage, a householder’s stage, a forester’s
stage, and renunciation), it emphasized the householder’s stage as one in
which a person is supposed to continue the human race by getting married,
enjoying life, and accumulating wealth by following the social and moral
codes in society. The other sub-stream of the Vedic stream was inactivism
which emphasized liberation from the worldly life as the goal. The activism
of Vedic stream is reflected in Samhita and Brahmana part of the Vedas and
the inactivism is reflected in the Upanishads. Upanishadic philosophy of
inactivism or renunciation was not a natural development of Vedic culture,
but was a response to its conflict with Shramana culture.
Many scholars hold that the Shramana culture was not a reaction to the
Vedic culture, but was independently and simultaneously present. It
included many sects, such as the Jaina tradition of the Tirthankaras
(approximately tenth BCE onwards), and the Ajivika sect of Makkhali-
Gosala (sixth century BCE). The Shramana culture focused on liberation
from the cycle of births and deaths as the goal and developed different
forms of ascetic life as the means to it.
The third stream of thought and practice was the Lokayata materialism,
which denied the doctrines of rebirth, Karma, life after death, and other
worlds. The representative of this stream at the time of the Buddha was
Ajita-Kesakambali (sixth century BCE).
Buddha’s thought distinguished itself from all these streams in
significant ways. The Buddha was opposed to the hierarchical social
ordered based on birth in a higher or lower caste. According to him one
does not belong to a higher or lower rank of a society by birth, but he does
so by his moral qualities and actions. In his critique of sacrificial rituals
(yajna) (as reflected in Kutadanta Sutta) his approach was twofold. On the
one hand he is criticizing the traditional notion of yajna as sacred action and
suggesting a better moral alternative within the Brahminical framework. On
the other hand, he is transcending the ritualistic Brahminical framework and
presenting still better alternatives from a purely moral–spiritual point of
view. The Upanishadic texts accepted ‘atman–brahman’ as the eternal
reality and claimed the direct realization of it as the way to liberation. The
Buddha (as in Tevijja Sutta) questioned the possibility of such a direct
realization. He denied the existence of atman and anything as eternal. He
also argued that spiritual attainment is not possible without moral
perfection. In general, it can be said that the Buddha, while discussing the
concepts as understood and presented in Brahminical culture, was
developing two approaches side by side which can be said to be
representing two roles of the Buddha. One implies a moral critique of
Brahminical culture and the development of better alternatives before it.
The other implies creation of a moral–spiritual framework which represents
an alternative culture.
Just as the Buddha distinguished his thought from the Vedic culture, he
also distinguished it from the other sects in Shramana culture. For example,
as seen in the Samannaphala Sutta, the second discourse of the Buddhist
scripture Digha Nikaya, Makkhali-Gosala’s Ajivika cult advocated fatalism.
The Buddha was opposed to fatalism. He advocated activism in the field of
moral uplift and moral perfection. Another important sect included in
Shramana culture was the asceticism of Nigantha Nataputta (that is,
Bhagavan Mahavira) (seventh–sixth century BCE). The Buddha did not
accept his view partly because it supported ascetic practices which involved
self-mortification. The Buddha called his way the middle way, which
avoided both extremes: running after sensuous pleasures and self-
mortification. The Buddha’s way differed from that of the materialist
thinker Ajita Kesakambali, because the latter not only denied life after
death and other worlds, but also moral rules and regulations. Ajita also
promoted a sort of anarchy in moral realm.
The Buddha emphasized the spirit of empirical and rational enquiry in
his philosophy. He asked his followers not to accept anything based on
surface value, but to examine any given view in terms of experience and
reason. The Buddha based his own views on experience and reason. While
dealing with the problem of suffering and emancipation from suffering, he
used the fourfold scientific model provided by the medical science.
The way to the cessation of suffering, as advocated by the Buddha,
consisted of eight limbs: right view, right thinking, right speech, right
conduct, right livelihood, right efforts, right mindfulness, and right
concentration. Broadly it consists of three trainings: moral training of the
conduct, meditative training of mind, and training one’s understanding in
wisdom or insight. The Buddha had dialogues with people and gave his
teachings to the masses not in Sanskrit, which was the language of the
intellectuals, but in the language of the people, called Magadhi. The Pali
language, in which the Buddha’s dialogues and teachings exist, is a
modified form of Magadhi. The Buddha was concerned with questions
related to the problem of suffering. When unrelated questions were asked to
him, he preferred to observe silence. By this policy he saved his philosophy
from becoming speculative metaphysics. After the Buddha, his followers
interpreted his teachings in different ways, which resulted in the division of
Buddhism into many schools.
28
BUDDHISM IN EARLY INDIA

Naina Dayal

A story often told is that Siddhartha Gautama, born in Lumbini in a

Kshatriya family of the Shakya clan, led a pampered and protected life till
the age of twenty-nine, when he was unexpectedly exposed to an old man, a
sick man, a corpse, and a wandering mendicant. The first three indicated the
transience of worldly pleasures, the last the possibility of emancipation.
Like the renouncer he encountered, Siddhartha abandoned his earlier life.
He sought wise men who could instruct him about human suffering.
Siddhartha realized over time that no one seemed to have a formula for the
permanent eradication of misery. Eventually, through his own practice, he
gained enlightenment, a state that implied that he understood the cause,
conditions, and nature of suffering, thereby transcending it. Siddhartha
Gautama now came to be known as the Buddha (‘he who is awakened’),
and is regarded as the founder of Buddhism.
Traditional dates for the Buddha placed him circa sixth century BCE,
however, there has been a revision in favour of the fourth century BCE. The
debate over when the Buddha lived has implications for dating other
historical events and texts. The Pali canon (a major source for
reconstructing the period of early Buddhism, even if there is no consensus
on the chronology of its components) and archaeological evidence suggest
that the period of the Buddha was marked by the emergence of states and
urban centres, by an expanding agricultural frontier and material
abundance, as well as warfare and increasing socio-economic disparities. It
was also a time of great intellectual ferment, and the Pali canon clearly
indicates the existence of a range of competing belief systems during the
Buddha’s period. At least some of the Buddha’s teachings were formulated
in response to conditions around him—political, socio-economic, and
intellectual.
 After attaining enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, the Buddha proceeded to
Sarnath, where he delivered his first sermon, and ordained five disciples as
the first members of the sangha or monastic order. The Buddha was
persuaded by the Shakya matriarch Mahapajapati Gotami and his disciple
Ananda to establish a community of nuns. The Therigatha (Songs of the
Nuns) of the Pali canon contains poems by and about the earliest women to
join the sangha, which are arguably among the oldest examples of women’s
writing in the world. The Buddha also advocated a path of dhamma for lay
followers. He spent around forty-five years of his life preaching in present-
day Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. His supporters included Brahmins, rulers, and
members of royal households, wealthy landowners, merchants, influential
courtesans, and those regarded as ‘low’ in the socio-economic hierarchy,
even slave women.
The Buddha has often been portrayed as a revolutionary who advocated
social equality. In fact, the Pali canon suggests that the Buddha did not aim
to abolish social differences—its texts do not reject the divisions of high
and low, rich and poor, and some of the most prominent early monks
mentioned in the Pali canon are identified as Brahmins and Kshatriyas.
However, the Buddha tried to make unequal social relations more humane
—whether between kings and subjects, or masters and slaves. To enable
orderly functioning within the sangha, the rule of seniority, rather than a
birth-based hierarchy, prevailed (though nuns, however senior, were placed
under the authority of monks). Everyone, regardless of their social standing,
was entitled to follow the Buddha’s dhamma. In a society where sacred
knowledge continues to be inaccessible to many, the Buddha’s path opened
up the possibility of salvation to all. Not everyone was considered worthy
of attaining the ultimate goal of nirvana (the extinction of ignorance and
breaking free from the cycle of birth and rebirth), but even the lowest of the
low could aspire to improve their chances of being reborn into a better
existence by following the Buddha’s teachings.
What did being a follower of the Buddha’s path entail? The Vinaya
Pitaka of the Pali canon lays down disciplinary rules for members of the
sangha. However, Pali texts also tell us about people such as the Buddha’s
arch rival Devadatta who caused schisms in the sangha, and poached monks
from the Buddha’s order. It seems that even monks and nuns, let alone less
dedicated followers, did not necessarily remain committed to any one
doctrine for their whole life, but experimented with different ideas. And
what did it mean to be a lay Buddhist? The Buddha as well as other teachers
sought to attract adherents from communities who venerated divine and
semi-divine beings such as nagas (serpents) and yakshas (spirits associated
with trees, nature, fertility, and prosperity). Buddhism and other belief
systems acknowledged and tried to fit the plethora of deities and spirits
within their perspective of the world. Lay ‘converts’ were required to
proclaim that they had taken refuge in the three ‘jewels’ of Buddha,
dhamma, and sangha, and adhere to the panchashila (five moral precepts,
that is, not harming living beings, not taking of what is not given, avoiding
sexual misconduct, abandoning false speech and abstaining from substances
that cloud the mind), but seem to have adhered to their cults. Religious
boundaries were, thus, fairly fuzzy.
After the Buddha’s death, his ideas continued to be propagated by
members of the sangha. This, and the support of lay followers, including
kings, enabled Buddhism to spread beyond its original heartland, even
beyond India, through most of Asia. It is well known that the Maurya
emperor Ashoka was an ardent Buddhist, but it is important to remember
that he also extended his patronage to the Ajivikas, and his edicts record
that he honoured all religious communities (savapasamdani). Ashoka’s
policy emerged in the context of a vast and varied subcontinental empire
marked by cultural differences and religious tensions. Rulers in early India
adopted different approaches to religious diversity within their realm—there
are examples of hostility, but also instances of tolerance and patronage to a
range of religions. While Pushyamitra Shunga is said to have destroyed
84,000 stupas built by Ashoka and killed the monks of the Kukkutarama
monastery at Pataliputra, the imperial Guptas, who are often associated with
a ‘Hindu renaissance’, patronized religious traditions beyond their personal
beliefs, with Samudragupta allowing the Sri Lankan king Meghavarna to
construct a rest house for Buddhist pilgrims at Bodh Gaya.
Indeed, one of the most enduring indications of the spread of Buddhism
is provided by architectural remains such as stupas and monasteries, with
sculptural depictions and paintings of significant elements of the religion as
it changed over time. These have been found far from the original heartland
of Buddhism—in Nashik and Ajanta in Maharashtra, Amaravati and
Nagarjunakonda in Andhra Pradesh, and Kaveripattinam in Tamil Nadu, for
instance. As suggested above, some of the support for religious art and
architecture came from political elites. However, votive inscriptions at sites
such as Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh indicate that ordinary lay men and
women often contributed to the construction and maintenance of religious
complexes. While some inscriptions emphasize that donations were acts of
piety, the ability to offer gifts was also recognized as a marker of status.
Like all religious traditions, Buddhism changed over time. For instance,
in the earliest phase, no figures of the Buddha were crafted for fear that
such a gesture would develop into a cult of personality, or even a deification
of the Buddha. Such a position is consistent with the Buddha’s repeated
statements that he was just a man. However, in time, as with other religious
traditions in India, images of the Buddha came to be sculpted, painted, and
worshipped. While we may think of Buddhist monks and nuns as figures
who meditated in seclusion, in fact, they played an active role in promoting
image worship, which made their religion accessible, and attracted support.
Doctrinal differences within the fold also hardened over time, leading to the
emergence of distinctive schools of thought within Buddhism. So, for
instance, the Theravada (path of the elders) tradition attempted to retain
older values, emphasizing austerity and meditation, Mahayana (literally, the
great vehicle) Buddhism emphasized devotion and compassionate
Bodhisattvas, who postponed personal salvation in favour of an effort to
save all sentient beings. Interaction with Tantric beliefs and practices led to
the emergence of another form of Buddhism, often referred to as Vajrayana
(the way of the thunderbolt).
Buddhism has had a history spanning around two and a half millennia,
and a geographical scope that now encompasses large parts of the world.
While at least some of the Buddha’s teachings emerged from the context in
which he lived, he also asked and attempted to answer questions that
continue to be relevant today; his path continues to attract adherents and
new interpretations.
29
NON-PALI BUDDHIST LITERATURE

Lata Deokar

In stark contrast to the Vedic religion, which used only (Vedic) Sanskrit for
its scriptures, Gautama, the Buddha allowed his disciples to teach his
doctrine in the local languages/dialects. As a result of this liberal approach,
Buddha’s teachings were translated to a number of languages across a large
territory giving rise to a multilingual Buddhist literature. Out of these
languages, Buddhists selected and adopted certain individual languages as
one of the marks of their identity (Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism,
I.907). The Theravada school of Buddhism used Pali as the medium of its
scriptures whereas the other schools resorted to the use of various Prakrits
and different varieties of Sanskrit. Whereas Gandhari and Saindhavi appear
to be spoken idioms of a well-defined area (Gandhara and Sindh
respectively), Pali, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (= BHS), and Sanskrit do not
appear to be so. As pointed out by Oskar von Hinüber, names of Indian
languages generally refer to the area where they were/are spoken.
This non-Pali Buddhist literature spread across a vast territory of India,
present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, Central Asia, Nepal, and parts of
South and Southeast Asia. Its temporal span is equally wide. The oldest
documentary records from the greater Gandhara region date roughly from
the very late centuries BCE and the early centuries CE. Scholars from India
composed Buddhist texts presumably up to twelfth century CE and well
beyond this date in Nepal.
What follows now is a brief discussion about these languages and the
literature composed therein.

GANDHARI
Gandhari is an early Middle Indo-Aryan language. It has unique features
that distinguish it from all other known Prakrits. The name Gandhari was
coined by H. W. Bailey (1899–1996) for a Prakrit language found mainly in
texts dated between the third century BCE and the fourth century CE in the
north-western region of Gandhara since the language remained unknown to
the indigenous Sanskrit grammarians.
The language is attested in inscriptions, birch bark scrolls, palm-leaf
manuscripts, legends on coins, and legal and administrative documents. A
large number of manuscript fragments of around 200 Buddhist texts written
in this peculiar dialect are now known. These include parts of the
Sutrapitaka, two examples of the Vinaya texts, several specimens of the
Abhidharmapitaka, edifying narratives (purvayoga and avadana), Mahayana
texts and miscellenea. The Buddhist literature composed in the Gandhari
language consists a wide range of genres such as sutra, avadanas,
abhidharma, commentaries, and stotras. This literature is mostly from the
Dharmaguptaka school with at least Ashtasahasrikaprajnaparamita,
Bhadrakalpikasutra, Bodhisattvapitakasutra,
Sarvapunyasamuccayasamadhisutra of the Mahayana. These manuscripts
are the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in existence, and indeed by far the
oldest Indian manuscripts of any type. The database on the
www.gandhari.com, a website dedicated to Gandhari language and
literature, records 431 manuscripts/manuscript fragments as of 28
September 2022.

SAINDHAV
The Vatsiputriyas and the Sammitiya schools used another Buddhist
canonical Prakrit, namely Saindhavi. The texts available in this peculiar
language are rather few. They include the so-called Patna Dharmapada,
Sanghatrata’s Abhidharmasamuccayakarika, Manicudajataka, the
Kevattasutra and other manuscript fragments. Out of these, the first two
belong to the Sammitiya school of Buddhism, the third is a jataka as its
name suggests, composed by Sarvarakshita, a Sammitiya himself and others
seem to belong to the sutra genre. According to Dimitrov, these manuscripts
were most probably written in northeastern India sometime during the
twelfth century. These were written using the ‘arrow-headed’
Saindhavi/Bhaishuki script. A few inscriptions written in this script are
found in Bihar and Bengal. For epigraphic evidence of this script see
Dimitrov. One brief inscription each from Devnimori in Gujarat and
Ratnagiri in Orissa points to a variety of a language different from but near
to Saindhavi and Pali.

BUDDHIST HYBRID SANSKRIT

The term Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS) was coined by Franklin Edgerton
(1885–1963) to denote different varieties of Sanskrit used by northern
Buddhists chiefly belonging to the Mahasaṅghika-Lokottaravadin school of
Buddhism. The language of these texts is also named by scholars as the
Gatha dialect or mixed Sanskrit.
Edgerton tried to establish that the BHS originated from one single and
so far unknown Prakrit in northern India. According to him, the proto-
canonical Prakrit, on which BHS was based, was a dialect closely related to
both Ardhamagadhi and Apabhramsha, but not identical with either.
However, his view about the origin of BHS is not accepted by many
scholars. In fact, BHS is not one single language. It includes texts written in
various Middle Indic dialects mixed with Sanskrit to various degrees. It is
generally observed that the degree of Sanskritization varies temporally and
regionally. The older the text, the more Middle Indic features it preserves.
Similarly, one can observe more middle Indic forms in manuscripts of texts
belonging to Central Asia than those found in Nepal. For instance, the
original Saddharmapundarikasutra was ‘written in a language that had far
more Prakritisms than either of the two versions [Kashgar and Nepalese].’
When scholars, who were accustomed to the regularity of Sanskrit, first
encountered this variety of Sanskrit, they were baffled since it was
‘frequently ungrammatical and on occasion barbarously so’ as noted by
Brough. While editing these texts, they tried to remove as many
irregularities as possible by forcefully emending these texts. However, soon
they realized that many of the seeming anomalies have to be maintained as
genuine features of this language. In metrical passages, the legitimacy of
the non-Paninian forms is confirmed on the basis of the metrical structure
of that composition. The grammar and vocabulary of texts written in BHS is
strikingly different from those written in Classical Sanskrit, various
Prakrits, and Pali although it shares common features with each of them.
Brough remarked that BHS has to be judged according to its own standards
and not by the grammar of Classical Sanskrit.
 Edgerton has identified three stages of literature written in BHS.
Mahavastu of the Lokottaravadins of the Mahasanghikas is the only
representative of the first stage where the prose as well as metrical passages
are written in BHS. In the second stage, the prose part of texts is in classical
Sanskrit whereas the verses remain in the mixed/hybrid form. Examples of
this variety are: Lalitavistara, the entire Prajnaparamita literature,
Saddharmapundarikasutra, Lankavatarasutra, Suvarnaprabhasasutra,
Gandavyuhasutra, Tathagataguhyaka, Samadhirajasutra and the
Dashabhumikasutra. In the third stage, the prose and the metrical parts are
written in classical Sanskrit. However, their vocabulary is an indicator to
the fact that they belong to this variety of Sanskrit. Aryashura’s Jatakamala
is an example of this variety.
In the case of Buddhist Sanskrit texts of which no parallel Pali has
survived, it is practically impossible to determine whether such texts were
composed directly in BHS or were transposed from an original Prakrit.
BHS is thus derived from one or several Middle Indic dialects from the pre-
Christian era.

BUDDHIST SANSKRIT
According to von Hinüber, during the early centuries of the first
millennium, the growing influence of Hinduism and that of Sanskrit as the
chief literary language made it necessary for Buddhists to write in Sanskrit.
This, however, could be questioned since Buddhist literature is the oldest
classical Sanskrit available to us.
The Sarvastivada sect of the Sthaviravada tradition was important in
influential Buddhist regions such as Kashmir and Gandhara and also along
the Silk Road in some of the Tocharian kingdoms of the Tarim river basin,
such as Kucha. It had a Sanskrit canon of its own. Major parts of this canon
are preserved in their Chinese translations whereas some are available in
their original language, i.e., Sanskrit. Many manuscript fragments
belonging to this school were discovered from the eastern Turkestan. A few
traces of the original Middle Indic can be witnessed in the canonical
language of the Sarvastivada and Mulasarvastivada schools. The Sanskrit of
these and other texts written by successive generations of Buddhist writers
follows the Paninian norms. They differ from other non-Buddhist texts
chiefly on account of their vocabulary. For this reason, Brough makes a
distinction between BHS and ‘simply Buddhist Sanskrit.’
The Buddhist philosophical literature consists of texts written by such
eminent philosophers as Nagarjuna (second or third century CE), Aryadeva
(third century CE), Asanga (fourth or fifth century CE), Vasubandhu (middle
of the fourth century ce–early fifth century CE), Candrakirti (600–650 CE),
Shantideva (c. 690–750/685–743 CE), Shantarakshita (c. 725–788 CE),
Kamalashila (c. 740–795 CE), Ratnakarashanti (c. 970–1045 CE), and
Jnanashrimitra (c. 1025 CE) belonging to various schools of Buddhism such
as Madhyamaka and Yogacara. The birth stories of the Buddha’s previous
lives, known as Jatakas and the Avadanas (stories of good and bad deeds)
are also written in this variety of Sanskrit. Aryashura’s (beginning of fifth
century CE or earlier) Jatakamala and Avadanasataka are the oldest
examples of this genre.
Buddhist authors also composed texts belonging to various literary
genres in classical Sanskrit. These include: devotional literature (stotra),
anthology of good sayings (subhashita), didactics (niti), epistles (lekha),
parables (katha), plays (nataka), riddles (prahelika), long poems
(sargabandha); grammar (vyakarana), lexicography (kosha), metrics
(chandahshastra); erotics (kamashastra); logic (pramana) and epistemology.
It is evident from this discussion that Buddhists have made a significant
contribution to probably all the literary genres as far as Sanskrit is
concerned and have thereby enriched the Indian civilization. Apart from
contributing to various shastras by composing texts, Buddhists through their
constant debates with other schools were also responsible for the
development of Indian knowledge world in areas such as Indian language
theory, logic, epistemology, and philosophy.

THE SANSKRIT OF THE BUDDHIST TANTRAS

According to modern scholars, the Buddhist tantric tradition flourished in
India from the third or the seventh century up to the eleventh century ce.
The language of these tantras is more irregular than that of the Buddhist
sutras written in the BHS. About this language, Snellgrove remarks that
‘[t]he language need not be graced by the term Buddhist Sanskrit. It is just a
bad Sanskrit.’ According to Pundarika, the author of the Vimalaprabha
commentary on the Laghukalacakratantra, the author of the latter
deliberately used such a language to remove the obsession for correct
forms. Such a language, however, is not a feature of just the Buddhist
tantras, but it is also found in the Shaiva tantric treatises.

APABHRAMSHA
There are other Buddhist texts which were written in Apabhramsha, for
instance, the Dohakosha of Sarahapada (circa eighth century CE). Some of
the tantras such as the Sarvabuddhasamayogadakinijalasamvara ra, the
Vajramrtatantra, and the Hevajratantra contain verses written in
Apabhramsha.
Pundarika’s Vimalaprabha commentary (I.41) on the
Laghukalacakratantra provides a list of languages used for different types of
Buddhist scriptures and then remarks that ninety-six languages were used in
Buddhist texts. From this the multilingual culture of Buddhism and its
pluralist ideology come to the forefront which is an essential aspect of
Indian civilisation.

TRANSLATIONS OF BUDDHIST TEXTS INTO NON-INDIAN

LANGUAGES
Just like Buddhist scriptures were translated into different ancient Indian
languages, they were also translated into several non-Indian languages. As
is well-known the history of Buddhism is a history of translations. From the
first century ce many Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese. Similarly,
numerous Buddhist texts were translated into Tibetan from the seventh
century ce onwards. In due course, these translations were revised several
times. Khotanese, another Eastern Middle Iranian language, preserves
original treatises written in Khotanese as well as Khotanese translations
from original Sanskrit texts related to Buddhism belonging to a span of five
centuries from the fifth to the tenth centuries CE. The Chinese translations
later became a basis for faithful Sogdian—an East Middle Iranian language
—translations of Buddhist scriptures ‘not earlier than the seventh–eighth
centuries. In addition to these Buddhist texts are also found in Bactrian, two
varieties of Saka, Tocharian Old Turkic, and Tumshuqese. These are
important tools to understand the basic tenets and spread of Buddhism as in
case of many texts their originals are lost to us.
Due to these centuries-long widespread translation activities, mostly
supported by royal dynasties, translation tools and methodology were
developed in the Buddhist world at an early date. Through these large-scale
translation activities and languages beyond the Indian subcontinent, Indian
culture could spread to almost all parts of Asia.
30
THE EMERGENCE AND SPREAD OF JAINISM

Paul Dundas

Religions are as much social institutions which take shape over long periods
of time as they are soteriological paths to deliverance formulated at a
particular historical moment. However, since Jainism’s formative roots as
doctrine and community can be located to around the fifth century BCE, it is
justifiable to characterize this tradition as one of the world’s oldest
religions. The Sanskrit term ‘Jaina’, from which Jainism takes its English
name, signifies the followers of the omniscient teachers who are given the
epithet Jina, ‘conqueror’. The victory achieved by these conquerors, all of
whom are mortals, is over the passions and the senses and has enabled them
to gain enlightenment, envisaged in Jainism as omniscience, and subsequent
deliverance, envisaged as freedom from rebirth. During his lifetime each of
these teachers founds a fourfold community of males and female
renunciants and laymen and laywomen. This community is often
figuratively called the ‘ford’ across the river of rebirth, so that the Jinas are
also called ‘builder of the ford’ (Sanskrit tīrthaṅkara).
Jain tradition structures the appearance of these Jinas over vast temporal
periods. Time is envisaged as a wheel eternally moving in an upward and
downward direction and in the course of each one of these motions twenty-
four Jinas appear in succession to teach the eternal doctrine. This is a
powerful vision of a cosmos in which gods do exist but play no decisive
role and human beings are responsible for working out their destiny by their
own actions. Such an imaginative envisioning of the past, in effect a type of
mythohistory, provides a compelling explanatory narrative which enables
Jains to locate themselves within the universe as participants in an eternal
tradition and as such must be treated with respect. Many Jains today claim
that nothing militates against the chain of twenty-four Jinas of the current
temporal motion being regarded as historical figures and they point to the
fact that the word rishabha, ‘bull’, which is also the name of the first Jina
(the originator of human culture), occurs in the Rig Veda, the oldest
Sanskrit textual collection. However, the word is used in that source as an
epithet of the god Indra and there is no warrant for assuming the historicity
of rishabha.
If we move away from Jain legend in search of more historically
grounded evidence as understood from the perspective of scholarly analysis
of sources, Jainism can be regarded as originating as one of the
renunciatory movements of sramanas, approximately ‘striving ascetics’,
which appeared around the fifth century BCE in the eastern area of the
Ganga Basin, an geographical and cultural region called by Johannes
Bronkhorst ‘Greater Magadha’. Bronkhorst adjudges the early renunciant
traditions such as Jainism and Buddhism to have taken shape as socio-
religious entities in a distinct and urbanized Magadhan socio-religious
matrix, where ideas relating to subjects such as karmic retribution and
cyclical time were developed with the aid of analytical techniques
characteristic of a new type of medical science.
It is against this background that we may view the teachings of
Mahāvīra who is often said to be the historical ‘founder’ of Jainism. Jain
tradition refers to a teacher called Pāsa (who is more commonly known by
the Sanskrit name Pārśva) who was born in this Magadhan region and by
the early common era had become understood to be the twenty-third Jina of
this time cycle. It has long been standard in scholarly accounts of Jainism to
accept Pasa as a historical figure whose teachings were adapted or reformed
by the twenty-fourth Jina, Mahāvīra. However Indian scholars have recently
expressed justifiable scepticism about some unlikely aspects of the
traditional biography of Pāsa, in particular his birth as early as the eighth
century in the city of Varanasi. It may be excessive to deny the actual
existence of this teacher, but the most plausible characterization of his role
is that he was a śramaṇa teacher in the Greater Magadha region whose
views may have been reconfigured by Mahāvīra, leading to his
incorporation by the early Common Era into the chain of twenty-four Jinas.
There can be no dispute about the historicity of Mahāvīra, since he
seems to be identifiable in early Buddhist sources under the name Nigaṇṭha
Nātaputta as a contemporary of the Buddha, thus placing his lifespan
approximately between 480 and 410 BCE. However, the biography of this
teacher evolved over several centuries and did not take a fully rounded form
involving accounts of his birth, life, and death until about the fifth century
ce in the scriptural text, the Kalpa Sūtra. The earliest description we have,
in possibly the most ancient Jain scriptural text, the Ācārāṅga Sūtra,
perhaps dating from the fourth or third centuries BCE, portrays his
renunciation and subsequent long and harsh career as a solitary wandering
ascetic from which he received the epithet ‘Great Hero’ (Mahāvīra). The
fourth-century text Kalpa Sūtra, containing the biographies of Pārśvanātha
and Mahāvīra, describes how he was born into a royal family in the
Magadha region and given the name Vardhamāna, ‘Increasing’. The
description of his upbringing in regal luxury and subsequent abandonment
of this life in pursuit of enlightenment and deliverance from rebirth is a
narrative trope also found in the biography of the Buddha. The culmination
of Mahāvīra’s ascetic life was his attainment of omniscience that is full and
immediate knowledge of all entities in every temporal and spatial modality,
a unique claim for a teacher at this point of early Indian religious history.
Mahāvīra authority as a teacher derives from this and underpins the
substance of his teaching.
What distinguished Mahāvīra’s worldview from that of other renunciant
teachers was his integration of a thoroughgoing analysis of a minutely
observed multiplicity of life monads (jiva), which are all, wherever they are
situated in the spectrum of possible embodiment, equal in status in their
pristine form. Conjoined with this was an advocacy of a radically reoriented
and committed mode of life involving a particularly uncompromising
withdrawal from physical and mental engagement with the external world
in order to minimize violence, whether intended or not, to any living
creature. Freeing the non-material self from the physical entrammelments
of rebirth through the continual practice of ahim.sā, non-violence, is the
ultimate aim of life. In Mahāvīra’s renunciant path (formalized under the
rubric of five mahavratas, ‘great vows’ of abstention from violence,
possessions, lying, taking what has not been given, and sexual activity)
ethical vision and ascetic praxis mutually define each other.
Jain tradition holds that Mahāvīra had eleven close disciples, formerly
Brahmins, who were to be heads of the Jain renunciant order and
transmitters of the eternal āgama, a term corresponding to ‘scriptures’,
which has been mediated to them by the Jina. These scriptures are
composed in the Ardhamagadhi language, a type of vernacular-based
Prakrit which is peculiar to the Jains. The āgama comprises an extensive
number of texts, some of great length, which encompass many themes such
as ontology, cosmology, narrative relating to both renunciants and laity, the
requirements of ascetic practice, etc. Viewed from a critical historical
perspective, this body of material evolved over several centuries and seems
to have taken near conclusive form by the fifth century CE. The main
components of Jain doctrine were encapsulated by the teacher Umāsvāti
sometime around the fourth or fifth centuries ce in the Tattvārtha Sūtra
which remains authoritative to this day.
The most important development in Jainism in its early phase was its
transformation from a purely renunciant-oriented path to one in which a lay
community assumed increasing importance. The laity’s concerns and
practices were textually framed at an ideal level as a kind of diminished
simulacrum of the renunciant regime. However, while the laity made no
intellectual contribution to Jainism, its role was vital in forming a
sociocultural base for renunciants through the practice of religious giving.
Jainism seems to have spread throughout the subcontinent along trade
routes and was present in the Tamil country by the second century BCE, long
before Buddhism appeared there. The northwestern city of Mathura and its
environs provides the most extensive archaeological and architectural
evidence for the presence of Jainism during the early centuries of the first
millennium CE. During this period the community had begun to bifurcate
into what eventually became two separate groups based on renunciant
practice, the Shvetambaras whose monks and nuns wore white robes and
the Digambaras whose monks went naked. The former spread into Gujarat
and Rajasthan in particular, whereas the latter have always been most
visible in Karnataka, Maharashtra, and parts of Madhya Pradesh.
31
PHILOSOPHY THROUGH CONTROVERSIES AND
COMMENTARIES

Pradip Gokhale

Indian philosophy has developed through the thought–conflict or debate

among darsanas, the six traditional schools of Hindu philosophy and their
literature spirituality and soteriology. Three major dimensions of this debate
can be mentioned in this context—Brahminism versus non-Brahminism;
idealism versus materialism; and the dialectical development of darsanas
through commentaries.

ORTHODOX VERSUS HETERODOX SYSTEMS:

PARTICULARLY, BRAHMINISM VERSUS BUDDHISM
One of the well-known dimensions is astika versus nastika, that is, orthodox
versus heterodox schools. The same is sometimes expressed as Vedic versus
non-Vedic schools or Brahminical versus non-Brahminical schools. The
orthodox schools differed among each other on philosophical issues such as
oneness or many-ness of reality, acceptance or non-acceptance of God as
the cause, or atoms as the cause, and so on. But they were united on the
social viewpoint, namely the acceptance of Brahmana-dominated varna–jati
system, acceptance of Vedic ritualism, and acceptance of Vedas and
Upanishads as an authority on philosophical matters. The heterodox schools
were opposed to the orthodox schools on all these matters. Among the three
heterodox schools, namely Jainism, Buddhism, and Lokayata, Buddhism
has played the most dominant role in opposing the Brahminical standpoint.
Hence the philosophical-cum-social conflict in India sometimes assumes
the form of the conflict between Brahmanism and Buddhism. Hence B. R.
Ambedkar, in his incomplete work Revolution and Couter-Revolution, says,
‘…everyone who was able to understand the history of India must know
that it is nothing but the history of the struggle for supremacy between
Brahmanism and Buddhism’ (Ambedkar, 2014). The non-Brahminical
thinker and historian Sharad Patil argues that the uniqueness of this struggle
in Indian philosophy lies in the fact that it was fought on the issue of the
caste system. (In his words, the feudal jati system). Hence, whereas the
surface issue in a philosophical debate between a Brahminical system and
Buddhism was concerned with academic philosophy, the background issue
was concerned with the acceptance or rejection of the hierarchical social
structure of varna and caste.
The academic controversy between Brahminism and Buddhism was
also significant in many ways. All Brahminical systems are eternalistic and
soul-affirming. Buddhism denies soul and eternality in general. Upholders
of the Brahminical tradition hold that Buddhism has been refuted. For
example, it is claimed that Shankaracharya has refuted Buddhism and the
decline of Buddhism is due to that. Similarly, it is claimed that after
Udayana’s refutation of Buddhism in Atmatattvaviveka, a classical treatise
on the concept of self, there was no answer from the side of Buddhism. It is
also claimed that Buddha’s teachings are not original, but ultimately based
on the Upanishads. These claims need to be examined. The decline of
Buddhism in India was not due to the weakness of Buddhism as a
philosophy but other reasons which are yet to be discovered fully. In fact,
Buddhism has played an important role in the history of Indian philosophy.
Many doctrines of Buddhism were adopted by orthodox philosophers by
denying the legacy of Buddhism. Three such phenomena are worth
mentioning here:

1. The doctrine of Maya (illusory magical creation) developed by

Madhyamika and Yogachara Buddhists influenced the Vedantin
Gaudapada which was indirectly influential in shaping Shankara’s
Mayavada form of Advaita.
2. Dinnaga’s doctrine of perception as ‘nirvikalpaka’ cognition
and Dharmakirti’s theory of universal concomitance had a long-
lasting influence on other epistemologies.
3. The influence of Buddhist theory of suffering and emancipation
and its theory of meditation as formulated by Asanga and
Vasubandhu is visible in the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali.
Hence the placement and historical role of Buddhism in India has to be
studied anew and the dialectics between Buddhist and Vedic tradition has to
be reopened and carried forward in new light.

IDEALISM VERSUS MATERIALISM

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya in his works like What is Living and What is
Dead in Indian Philosophy (1976) has argued that the major philosophical
conflict in India was between Idealism and its antithesis, the most radical
form of the latter being Lokayata materialism. This philosophical conflict
also has social significance. It is a conflict between a world-denying and
world-affirming approach to life or between religion and science. In wider
senses of the terms, the idealist system is one which regards consciousness
as primary and matter as secondary. Contrariwise, materialist system is the
one which regards matter as primary and consciousness as secondary.
Under ‘Idealism’, Chattopadhyay includes three systems of Indian
philosophy. Madhyamika Buddhism which regards everything as empty,
Yogachara Buddhism, which regards external world unreal mental
construction caused by ignorance, and the Advaita-Vedanta of Shankara,
according to which atman, which is identical with the Brahmin, is alone real
and the empirical world is neither real nor unreal; it is undecidable, that is,
anirvacaniya. All these three philosophies are idealists in that they deny the
reality of the empirical world.
Chattopadhyaya’s conception of Indian materialism was not restricted to
the traditional Lokayata. In his wider conception of Lokayata, he includes
the early forms of Nyaya-Vaisesika as well as Sankhya systems of orthodox
or astika Indian philosophy. The original Sankhya, according to him, must
have been materialistic. According to Sankhya, the world originates from
prakriti, the insentient material cause of the world, and that is all insofar as
the early Sankhya is concerned. The category of purusha, which was
supposed to stand for pure consciousness that existed independently of
prakriti. This was a later interpolation influenced by Vedantic Idealism
according to Chattopadhyaya.
Similarly, Chattopadhyaya points out that Nyaya and Vaisesika systems
in their early forms were atheistic, though in the later development (or
degeneration) they accepted God as the efficient cause of the world. Though
early Nyaya-Vaisesika accepts atman as one of the substances,
Chattopadhyaya argues that consciousness is not supposed to be an
essential, but only an accidental characteristic of atman. Consciousness
arises due to the contact between object, sense-organ, manas, and atman.
And because consciousness is accidental, atman in liberated state according
to Nyaya-Vaisesika is devoid of pleasure, pain, desire, aversion, effort, and
even consciousness. These are some of the indications of the materialistic
character of the Nyaya-Vaisesika system according to him.
It can be argued here that Chattopadhyay’s arguments are not strong
enough to show that Nyaya-Vaisesika and the original Sankhya must have
been materialist. However, he succeeds in showing their close affinity to
materialism. What is important is that he rearranges the systems of
philosophy in a non-traditional way. Madhavacharya in his fourteenth-
century text Sarva-Darsana-Sangraha began with the Lokayata as the
lowest school and ended with the Advaita-Vedanta as the highest school of
Indian Philosophy. Chattopadhyay, in his popular introduction to Indian
Philosophy, turns this hierarchy upside down. He begins with Advaita-
Vedanta as the lowest system and ends with Lokayata as the highest system.
The point can be explained in terms of the distinction which is often made
in terms of common-sense truths (vyavaharika satya) and the ultimate truth
(aramartha). Common sense is inevitable for any ordinary way of life or
even for the higher philosophical activities. But idealist philosophy tends to
disregard the very common sense (vyavahara) on which it is based. This
leads to a pragmatic contradiction. Against this, Lokayata is firmly based on
common sense. Particularly, the sophisticated form of Lokayata which
accepts perception and this-worldly inference (lokaprasiddha anumana) as
the two pramanas, regards consistency with worldly practices the very
criterion of acceptability of any view. Reasoning which transcends the
worldly way (laukika marga) is not acceptable to them. Other systems
transcend the worldly way by developing transcendental metaphysics. They
either accept some entities beyond this world, such as God, transmigration,
and other worlds. Some systems such as idealist systems go to the extent of
denying the worldly way by regarding it as an illusion or a mere mental
construction and accept something non-worldly (alaukika) such as
emptiness, pure mind, or Brahman.
If adherence to common sense is regarded as a mark of a strong
philosophical position, then this leads to an alternative hierarchical order of
systems. It appeals to a secularist turn in Indian philosophy. We come
across a few indicators of such a turn actually taking place. Dr B. R.
Ambedkar has tried to secularize Buddhism through his interpretation in
The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957). Dr Bishwambhar Pahi has tried to
secularize the Vaisesika system. Professor S. S. Barlingay has tried to
reinterpret Advaita of Shankara as a form of materialism. The idea of
reconstruction poses some methodological issues which arise in the context
of the commentarial literature in Indian philosophy. Let us turn to them.

DIALECTICAL DEVELOPMENT OF DARŚANAS THROUGH

COMMENTARIES
It is well known that Indian philosophy has grown and developed through
darsanas (generally translated as schools or systems). Each school has its
source book. There are commentarial works on these source books and
again there are commentaries on the commentaries. Traditional students of
Indian philosophy generally depend upon commentaries for understanding
the source books. Generally, it is believed that a commentary just makes the
meaning manifest which is already there in the source text in non-manifest
form. It is many a time believed that a darsana is a continuous unity,
something unchanging, or sanatana. The changes that occur in a system are
like the blossoming of a flower, or the branching out of a tree, manifestation
of something which is already there in the root. Hence ‘continuity without
major changes’ can be regarded as a prevailing dogma regarding the
systems of Indian philosophy. Another related dogma is the dogma of
authenticity (pramanya) of the source text or the founder of the system. The
followers of any given darsana regard its source text as error-free, authentic,
or even author-less (apauruseya). These dogmas restrict radical
transformation in the system; they allow transformations only by way of
reinterpretations of the old stuff as new manifestations of the hidden
meanings of the text. These dogmas have affected the possibility of a proper
history of Indian philosophy as the real changes in the darsanic doctrines
are suppressed and presented in the form of interpretations of the old
doctrines. But in spite of these restrictions, important changes have taken
place in the systems of Indian philosophy. That is because the job of a
commentator is not only to interpret the source text, but also to defend the
system against the criticism levelled by the rival schools. We find in Indian
tradition that the commentators generally defended the text on which they
are commenting. When they found that the content of the source text is
insufficient or inadequate for defending the system against the rival
systems, they searched for new meanings and new contents in order to
protect the system against the opponents’ objections. Sometimes they
borrowed the new content from opponents and appropriated it for
strengthening their own system. Hence, we have a dialectical process by
which the systems were growing simultaneously by inventing new
conceptual tools or appropriating the conceptual tools of others for
defending themselves and criticizing others.
This dialectic operated also through suppression of the original meaning
and presentation of a new meaning as if it is the original one. This was
inevitable because even though the commentator deviated from the original
or established meaning of the source text, he could not do it officially or
openly, as it would amount to a betrayal. Hence although the original
system was changed, reformed, or reconstructed through commentaries, it
was always a disguised reconstruction, not an open reconstruction.
Naturally, though the commentators introduced many new ideas, they did
not claim their authorship. They gave the credit to the original author of the
source text. This is a peculiar situation which we find in the history of
Indian philosophy. Though such a practice of disowning one’s own
innovative contribution and attributing it to the author of the source text
expresses humility on part of the commentator, how far this practice can be
called just and healthy is a question. Though reconstruction can be an
important part of the development of a philosophical system, so far, we
mostly had disguised reconstructions. What is necessary for the healthy
development of Indian philosophy that there should be open reconstructions
rather than disguised ones.
32
EARLY INSCRIPTIONS

Andrew Ollett

For many scholars, the inscriptional record in South Asia begins with
Ashoka, the king of the Maurya dynasty who ruled around the middle of the
third century BCE. His date is secured by references to contemporary Greek
kings. His earliest inscriptions are in Greek and Aramaic, but soon
afterwards he issued inscriptions in Middle Indic languages. His earliest
inscriptions, called Minor Rock Edicts, are inscribed on boulders
throughout the subcontinent and discuss his becoming a Buddhist layperson
(upāsaka-) and his hopes for spiritual growth among the people. Soon
afterwards he issued the Minor Pillar Edicts on freestanding pillars, either
warning against schism within the Buddhist sangha or commemorating his
own pilgrimage to Buddhist sites. Around the same time as the Minor Pillar
Edicts, he began issuing his Major Rock Edicts to be inscribed on or
beyond the borders of his kingdom (Kandahar in present-day Afghanistan,
Girnar in Gujarat, Sopara in Maharashtra, Yerragudi and Kanaganahalli in
Karnataka, Dhauli and Jaugada in Odisha, Khalsi in Uttarakhand, and
Shabazgarhi and Mansehra in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan). These do
not mention Buddhism explicitly, but speak of Ashoka’s efforts to establish
and institutionalize dhamma, and the various programs and policies he
devised to that end, including the establishment of the Rock Edicts
themselves (MRE 14). The longest, MRE 13, speaks of his ‘conquest of
dharma’ (dhammavijayē) after his bloody conquest of the neighboring
territory of Kalinga:
aṭha[va]ṣābhiṣitaṣā [dē]vānaṁpiyaṣa piyadaṣinē lājinē kaligyā vijitā. diyaḍhamitē
pānaṣat[a]ṣaha[ś]e yē [ta]phā apavuḍhē śataṣahaṣamitē tata hatē bahutāvatakē vā maṭē.
tat[ō pa]cchā adhunā ladhēṣa kaligyēṣu tivē dhaṁma[vāy]ē dhaṁmak[ā]matā
dhaṁmānuṣaṭhi cā dēvānaṁpiyaṣa. ṣ[ē] athi anuṣayē dēvānaṁpiya[ṣ]ā vijin[i]tu kaligyāni.
(Hultzsch 1925 [1969]: 207)
When king Dēvānāṁpriya Priyadarśin had been anointed eight years, (the country of)
the Kaliṅyas was conquered by (him). One hundred and fifty thousand in number were the
 men who were deported thence, one hundred thousand in number were those who were
slain there, and many times as many those who died. After that, now that (the country of)
the Kaliṅgyas has been taken, Dēvānāṁpriya (is devoted) to a zealous study of morality
(dhamma), to the love of morality, and to the instruction (of people) in morality. This is the
repentance of Dēvānāṁpriya on account of his conquest of (the country of) the Kaliṅgyas.
(Hultzsch 1925 [1969]: 47)

Later, in the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh years of his reign, Ashoka

returned to putting inscriptions on pillars, which in contrast to the MREs
were discovered in the Ganga–Yamuna plains. The Major Pillar Edicts, like
the MREs, detail Ashoka’s policies on social welfare, religious toleration,
and the protection of animals. With the exception of several inscriptions in
Greek and Aramaic, all found in what is now Afghanistan, Ashoka’s
inscriptions are written in Middle Indic languages related to Sanskrit and
Prakrit. The language is not standardized, and it appears that the engravers
at local sites adapted the message from the king—which was presumably in
an eastern variety of Middle Indic—to the local language to a greater or
lesser degree (Norman, 1994, 2007). In what is now Pakistan, the
inscriptions were written in the Kharosthi script, which was based on the
Aramaic script that had been used in the region during the Achaemenid
empire. Elsewhere, the Middle Indic inscriptions were written in the
Brahmi script, a syllabic script ancestral to most of the scripts of South and
Southeast Asia.
Whether either Brahmi or Kharosthi were in use before Ashoka was
previously a topic of scholarly debate: some scholars drew attention to the
fact that there are no securely-datable inscriptions prior to Ashoka in these
scripts, and others entertained the possibility that the Brahmi script was
invented, or at least popularized, by Ashoka’s chancellery (von Hinüber,
1989; Falk, 1993; Salomon, 1998). The possibility that some Brahmi
inscriptions from Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka might be pre-Ashokan has
been raised, principally on the basis of inscribed pottery found in excavated
contexts (e.g., Rajan and Yatheeskumar, 2013), and often dismissed
(Mahadevan, 2003 and Falk, 2014). Further evidence will call for a
thorough reappraisal of the question of the early history of writing in the
subcontinent.
In Tamil Nadu, Brahmi was used to write the Tamil language (with
many names, however, exhibiting Middle Indic influence). Several
distinctive orthographic systems were in use, suggesting to Mahadevan
independent adaptations of Ashokan Brahmi for writing Tamil. Besides
inscribed pottery, which usually represents the name of the vessel’s owner,
there are dozens of stone inscriptions, mostly commemorating the donation
of shallow excavated beds for Jain monks; (Hanlon, 2018) some of these
mention the names of kings who are known to the Tamil literary tradition
(such as Perunkatunko at Pugalur and Atiyaman Netuman Anci at Jambai).
There are also a few inscribed hero-stones, although much different in
format than later hero-stones (Rajan and Yatheeskumar, 2013). The
situation is broadly similar in Sri Lanka, where however the language is
almost always Middle Indic (with specifically Sinhalese features) and the
lithic inscriptions are associated with caves (lēṇa-) for the use of Buddhist
monks and nuns. In both cases the inscriptions are generally dated between
the time of Ashoka and the early centuries CE.
Ashoka’s use of a Middle Indic language, written in the Brahmi script,
was extremely influential. Almost all inscriptions in the subcontinent
followed this model, apart from Tamil Nadu (which used Brahmi, and later
Vatteluttu, to write Tamil) and Gandhara (which used Kharosthi to write a
language, now called Gandhari, that began to rapidly diverge from other
forms of Middle Indic in the first and second century BCE). Ashoka’s
donation of an excavated cave for use by Ajivikas at Barabar was also
influential: from the time of Ashoka to about the fourth century ce, that is,
approximately six hundred years, the vast majority of Indian inscriptions
are found on monuments associated with Buddhists, Jains, or Ajivikas. The
richly inscribed structures at Bharhut, Sanchi, Amaravati, Kanaganahalli,
and Mathura contain include both labels and donative inscriptions. Some of
these donative inscriptions function as royal documents as well, for
example the year-by-year chronology of Kharavela’s rule (probably first
century BCE) in a Jain cave outside of Bhubaneswar (Barua 1929). Starting
around the first century BCE, caves began to be excavated in the western
Deccan in large numbers, mostly for Buddhists but occasionally also for
Jains. These caves contain hundreds of Brahmi inscriptions, many of which
are associated with the Satavahana dynasty that ruled over the Deccan at
this time, and their sometime rivals, the Ksatrapas (Dehejia, 1972).
Inscriptions associated with ‘Hindu’ communities are less common,
although evidence for the worship of Vishnu (in various forms) is provided
in this early period by the Besnagar Pillar (second century BCE), inscribed
by a Greek devotee of Vāsudēva named Heliodorus on a diplomatic mission
from Takshashila, as well as by the Hathibadi and Ghosundi inscriptions,
commemorating a place of worship for Saṅkarṣaṇa and Vāsudēva.
Sanskrit inscriptions are in fact extremely rare until the third and
especially fourth centuries BCE, despite the fact that Sanskrit is ‘older’ in
linguistic terms than the Middle Indic languages, and already had a long
history of cultivation as a learned language. Louis Renou called this ‘the
great linguistic paradox of India’: not just that Sanskrit was not commonly
used in inscriptions before the fourth century or so, but that there was a
pronounced shift from the Middle Indic languages towards Sanskrit. This
situation would be comparable to using Italian for inscriptions for six
centuries before shifting to Latin. The change is almost certainly traceable
to the aforementioned Kṣatrapas. These were rulers who referred to
themselves as Scythians (Saka)—an Iranian-speaking culture from Central
Asia—and set up various kingdoms throughout North India, starting more
or less in the first century BCE. In the northwest, inscriptions associated with
Kṣatrapa rulers tend to be in the Gandhari language and in the Kharosthi
script, including reliquary and copper-plate inscriptions. In Mathura,
however, they are usually in the Brahmi script, and use a Middle Indic
language that is strongly influenced by Sanskrit, conventionally called the
‘Epigraphic Hybrid Sanskrit’ (Damsteegt, 1978), although a few
inscriptions in verse are in Sanskrit strictly speaking. The earliest use of
‘Classical’ Sanskrit as a language of political expression is found in the
long Junagarh inscription of the Kṣatrapa king Rudradaman, dated to 150
BCE (Sircar, 1965). That inscription is significantly on the same rock that
Ashoka had engraved about four centuries previously, and mentions
Ashoka’s construction of conduits for the tank that Rudradaman rebuilt.
The Satavahanas continued to use Middle Indic, apart from very
occasional inscriptions in Sanskrit verse. But things changed very rapidly
after the dynasty collapsed in the third century ce. The Ikṣvākus, ruling in
the late third and early fourth century in Nagarjunakonda in Andhra
Pradesh, largely continued the epigraphic habits of their predecessors, with
hundreds of donative and memorial inscription, most of them in Middle
Indic, and most of them associated with Buddhist structures in and around
Nagarjunakonda. A few inscriptions, however, are in Sanskrit. And the
other successors of the Satavahanas in the Deccan (the Pallavas, Gaṅgas,
Viṣṇukuṇḍins, and Vākāṭakas, and so on) issued inscriptions for only a
generation or two before decisively switching over to Sanskrit. In North
India, meanwhile, the Guptas had already followed in the steps of
Rudradaman by documenting their rule in refined Sanskrit inscriptions,
often on pillars or other monuments. At Junagarh, this following was literal,
as Skandagupta (r. 455–67) left an inscription on the very same rock that
Ashoka and Rudradaman had previously inscribed.
33
PALI LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Mahesh A. Deokar

WHAT IS PALI?
Pali is an old Middle Indic language, which the Theravada school of
Buddhism used for its canon, its commentaries and other exegetical works,
chronicles as well as for other literary and scientific treatises. It has been
used as a means of communication among learned Buddhists (Norman,
1994). Dharmananda Kosambi considered even the language of Ashokan
inscriptions, which linguists generally prefer to call as Ashokan Prakrit, to
be a variety of Pali (Kosambi, 2010).
The word Pali originally meant the words of the Buddha (Buddha-
vacana) as against commentaries (atthakatha), which were composed to
explain the meaning of the Buddha-vacana. Later, around twelfth to
thirteenth centuries CE the expression Palibhasa (language of the canon) was
used in Sri Lanka to refer to the language. According to K. R. Norman, the
word Pali was established as the name of a language by abbreviating the
expression Palibhasa. A Frenchman Simon de La Loubère was the first
western scholar, who in his 1691 report on Siam and Siamese culture,
described the language of its sacred scriptures as Balie (Norman, 2006).
The Theravada tradition, however, primarily refers to the language as
Magadhi, the language of the Magadha region where the Buddha preached
his doctrine (dhamma).
Scholars have exerted themselves to locate the origin and homeland of
Pali (Winternitz, 1991; Upadhyaya, 1994; Norman, 1983, Gombrich, 2018).
Scholars consider Pali to be an artificial language, a lingua franca, created
for the purpose of preserving the Buddhist canon by homogenizing different
dialects bearing various features of eastern and western Prakrits (Norman,
1983). According to them, the Buddha originally must have given his
discourses in a regional language close to Pali, which were later compiled,
edited, and given a literary form.

BUDDHIST APPROACH TO LANGUAGE

Buddhist literature in both Pali as well as Sanskrit clearly spells out the
Buddhist approach to language. It challenges the hegemony of a single
language either by deconstructing extra-linguistic significance attached to
it, or by stating that languages other than Sanskrit are equally great
(Bahulkar and Deokar, 2012. In the Pali canonical texts, the Buddha is said
to have opposed the proposal to give his teachings a fixed form in the
manner of the Vedas. He advised his disciples to preach in regional
languages and not to disregard common parlance. He declared grace,
profitability, truthfulness, and righteousness as four inherent qualities of a
good speech rather than its correct pronunciation. He gave precedence to
meaning over expression. The Theravada tradition starting with a famous
Pali commentator, Buddhaghosa, of the fifth century CE, raised Pali to an
equally high status as Sanskrit. It declared Pali to be a root language from
which presumably all other languages derived. It also described Pali as a
natural language, which a child could speak spontaneously if it had not
heard any other language (Norman, 1983: 2; Bahulkar and Deokar, 2012).

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF PALI LITERATURE

Pali literature can be classified into three broad phases: early phase of
canonical literature (fifth century BCE to the third century BCE), middle
phase of commentarial literature (fourth century ce to the tenth century CE),
and the late phase of Shastric and allied literature (from the eleventh
century CE onwards).

1. After the passing away of the Buddha, his disciples convened a council
to compile and systematically classify his teachings and those of his
prominent disciples for the benefit of future generations. This collection
is known by the name Tipitaka (three baskets/collections). According to
the Pali records, three such councils were held until the time of Emperor
Ashoka (circa third century BCE) after which the Tipitaka assumed more
or less its present form. Until the first century BCE, it was handed down
 orally from generation to generation through a well-organized system of
reciters (Bhanakas), who were responsible for the preservation and
transmission of particular portions of the Tipitaka (Norman 2006: 57
ff.). According to a Pali chronicle, the Tipitaka was committed to
writing in central Sri Lanka in the first century BCE in the reign of
Vattagamani Abhaya (Norman 1983: 10). One can get a rough idea
about the extent of the Pali canon from the fact that the Tipitaka covers
approximately 25,000 printed pages of its Nagari edition published by
the Vipassana Vishodhan Vinyas, Igatpuri. The Tipitaka comprises
Buddhist monastic rules and a code of conduct for its members called
Vinayapitaka, moral discourses of the Buddha and his disciples named
Suttapitaka, and psycho-ethical analysis of Buddha’s teaching entitled
Abhidhammapitaka. Although a major part of the Tipitaka was ready by
the time of Emperor Ashoka, certain texts were included in it as late as
the third century CE.
2. The commentarial literature includes exegesis of canonical texts based
on Sinhalese commentaries which are now lost. This phase marks the
revival of Pali after a gap of almost 600 years during which no Pali text
was composed with the sole exception of Questions of King Milinda
(Milindapanha). The orthodox Mahavihara monastic lineage in Sri
Lanka initiated this revival by undertaking a project of composing Pali
commentaries on the Tipitaka under the able leadership of a South
Indian monk-scholar named Buddhaghosa (370–450 CE) (von Hinüber,
1996). He was followed by other great commentators such as
Dhammapala (latter half of the fifth century CE?), Mahanama (sixth
century CE) and Upasena (middle of the sixth century CE), who
continued Buddhaghosa’s exegetical legacy (Norman, 1983). This
period also witnessed composition of historical chronicles such as the
Chronicle of the Island (Dipavamsa) and the Great Chronicle
(Mahavamsa), which provide chronological details of the history of
Theravada Buddhism as well as the political histories of India and Sri
Lanka. The first extant grammatical treatise Kaccayana’s Grammar
(Kaccayanavyakarana) was composed in the sixth/seventh century CE
(Pind, 1997). It is remarkable that unlike their Prakrit counterparts, who
wrote the grammars of Prakrits in the Sanskrit medium and described
the Prakrit languages as derived from Sanskrit, the Pali grammarians
wrote their grammars in Pali and presented it as an independent
 language claiming for it an exclusive status (Deokar, 2008). During this
phase, the literary activities in Pali were primarily located in southern
part of India, especially in the Kaveri delta region.
3. By the turn of the first millennium, an erudite Sri Lankan monk
Ratnamati alias Ratnashrijnana (c. 900–980 CE), who was well-versed in
Sanskrit grammar, poetics, and poetic composition, brought a fresh air
of new ideas and ideals in Sri Lanka. He emphasized the importance of
the study of sciences (shastra) and poetry (kavya) besides virtuosity and
practice of meditation as qualities of an ideal monk. After
Parakramabahu, the first (r. 1153–1186 CE) established his sovereign
rule in Sri Lanka and brought about monastic reforms, the centre of Pali
literature (Gornall, 2013) shifted from South India to this island country.
Since then Ratnamati’s ideals became a guiding force for the Sinhala
monastic order in the creation of new Pali literature. The literature of
this phase took a new turn when Pali authors began to venture into new
areas of scientific literature and poetry besides their usual religio-
philosophical themes. The literature of this era contains works on
grammar, poetics, didactics, law, medicine and astrology, as well as
lexicons. A whole new string of sub-commentaries and a number of
handbooks of the Abhidhamma and the Vinaya were also written in this
period. Shataka (a collection of 100 stanzas) and Khandakavya (minor
poem) devoted to Buddhist themes, as well as Sandesakavya
(messenger poem) and eulogies, were also composed. Although this
new wave of Pali literature started in Sri Lanka, it soon spread to the
neighbouring countries of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos, giving rise to
a large corpus of Pali literature in Southeast Asia. It followed the model
of Sanskrit shastras and kavyas composed in India and exhibited greater
Sanskritic influence in terms of topics, style, and vocabulary. Authors of
this phase very often adopted, modified, and presented the Sanskrit
material in a form suitable to their Buddhist readers. The Pali of this
phase is also influenced to a great extent by regional languages.

Despite stemming from a primarily religio-philosophical corpus, the Pali

literature exhibits remarkable diversity, and has contributed several distinct
forms to world literature. In the Tipitaka, we find autobiographical
compositions relating to the Buddha and his male and female disciples,
above all Theragatha (Songs of Monks) and Therigatha (Songs of Nuns).
Texts such as Vimanavatthu (Stories of Divine Abodes), Petavatthu (Stories
of Hungry Ghosts), and the famous Jataka tales of Buddha’s former births
are representatives of the narrative genre. One such text, the
Mahaummaggajataka, is claimed to be the first novel in the world literature.
Pali also has world’s first collection of dedicated women’s literature in the
form of Therigatha, Theri-Apadana, and sections of Samyuttanikaya and
Anguttaranikaya. Kathavatthu is a unique compendium of philosophical
debates, whereas Milindapanha is a masterly piece of philosophical prose
written in a question and answer style.
Pali literature is an important source of historical information about the
Indian civilization and its spread in the South and Southeast Asia,
containing data about ancient Indian religious beliefs and practices, cultural
life, social structure, political institutions, and economic activities. It also
presents diverse viewpoints on these topics prevalent during that period.
This includes on one hand an ideological contestation between Brahmanism
and Buddhism on issues such as goal of life, metaphysical ideas, role of the
creator, efficacy of rituals, and ideal social order, and on the other a contest
between Buddhism and the other ascetic schools over philosophical
speculations and the adherence to extreme asceticism. In this literature, we
can hear voices of people from diverse strata of the society. There are kings,
queens, and ministers as well as manual labourers and artisans. There are
learned Brahmins, merchants, farmers as well as courtesans and criminals.
Thus, Pali has a rich literary heritage covering a span of almost 2,600
years. Like Sanskrit, Pali crossed the territorial boundaries of India and
became an indelible part of the culture of South and Southeast Asia.
Although for a larger part of the history it served as a literary language of
the Theravada Buddhism, it was also used as a medium of epigraphs found
in western and central Southeast Asia (Skilling, 2021). For the elite
monastic community it became a language of communication connecting
Sinhalese, Burmese, and Thai Buddhist orders. Despite its growth outside
India after the twelfth century CE until this date, the Pali literature remained
firmly rooted in the Indian literary milieu, drawing inspiration and values
from it.

CURRENT STATE OF SCHOLARSHIP AND FURTHER

EXPECTATIONS
Scholarly works on the history of Pali literature present up-to-date
information about the entire literature. However, further research is needed
to satisfactorily answer questions such as:
What was the process of canonization and what were the criteria of
qualification for canonical texts?
Why does there seem to have been no production of Pali texts between
the third century BCE to the third century CE?
What was the state of Pali during this period?
How if at all did the Pali tradition interact with other Buddhist textual
traditions, such as the Sanskrit and the Gandhari, in this period? What can
we learn about the Pali canon by comparing it to related texts in Sanskrit,
Gandhari, and Chinese?
What were the processes by which the Pali tradition was committed to
writing and transmitted in manuscript form?
Why was Pali revived systematically in Sri Lanka in the fifth century
and how?
What was the state of Pali in India?
Why did the Pali literature take a new turn after the tenth century and
what were the forces, which produced and shaped this new literature?
The issue of language politics assumes greater significance in the
multilingual society like India. Buddhism and Jainism have much to offer in
this regard. However, the current state of research in this area is far from
satisfactory, since it does not deal with the issue thoroughly and
systematically. Besides these questions, it is also important to properly
assess the worth of Pali literature and to give it its deserved position in the
Indian literary and cultural history.
34
PRAKRIT LITERATURE

Andrew Ollett

‘Prakrit’ (prākṛta) is the name of a literary language that was used from
roughly the beginning of the common era. The word means ‘common’
(literally, ‘of or relating to the basic character,’ from prakṛti) and contrasts
with ‘Sanskrit’ (saṁskṛta), meaning ‘refined’. It thus designates a language
that, according to the Natyasastram (Treatise on Theatre), is ‘exactly the
same as Sanskrit, but reversed, insofar as it lacks the quality of saṁskṛta
(17.2). Sanskrit and Prakrit are often mentioned together as a contrasting
pair, and the two of them would be recognized as India’s preeminent literary
languages up until the emergence of vernacular literatures.
‘Prakrit’ has come to refer, in modern scholarship, to a wide range of
languages, including especially those languages that linguists call ‘Middle
Indic’ or ‘Middle Indo-Aryan’: these include Pali, Ardhamagadhi,
Gandhari, Apabhramsa, and the Middle Indic of inscriptions from the third
century BCE to the fourth century CE. This is partly based on the usage of
pre-modern grammarians, some of whom included under the general
category of ‘Prakrit’ varieties of Middle Indic used in stage plays and
named for regions of India, e.g., Sauraseni and Magadhi. These languages
were never used outside of the stage play. Hence people sometimes speak of
‘the Prakrits’, and use ‘Maharastri Prakrit’ to refer to Prakrit properly
speaking, which originated in the Western Deccan. It must also be borne in
mind that, despite being figured as the language of common people, Prakrit
and its varieties were always a literary language. It has no direct link to any
of the vernacular languages of India except for Marathi, of which it can be
thought of as an older cousin.
Linguistically, Prakrit is distinguished from Sanskrit primarily by
phonological changes: it has no clusters of heterorganic consonants, so the
only permitted clusters involve either nasal consonants or geminate
consonants; single intervocalic consonants are weakened or lost;
distinctions between sibilants and between nasals are lost; long vowels are
generally shortened before consonant clusters, in accordance with a
constraint on superheavy syllables, hence pāuakavvaṁ (prākṛtakāvyam)
and saddasatthaṁ (śabdaśāstram). The language is described in a number
of pre-modern grammars, the earliest of which to survive is probably the
Light on Prakrit Prākṛtaprakāśaḥ ascribed to Vararuci (see Nitti-Dolci,
1972).
The earliest works of Prakrit literature belong to two main categories.
One is Jain commentarial literature, represented by versified commentaries
on earlier Jain texts in Ardhamagadhi. The earliest layer of commentaries is
generally attributed to a monk named Bhadrabāhu (early centuries CE) and
called niryukti- (nijjutti-). These niryuktis were often followed by
explanations called bhāṣya (bhāsa). Probably around the same time as the
niryuktis, another group of Jain monks composed technical works in a
somewhat different variety of Prakrit, including the Ṣaṭkhaṇḍāgamaḥ and
Kaṣāyaprābhṛtam.
The other major category, linked to the niryuktis by language and the
extensive use of the gatha (gaha) verse form, is lyric and narrative poetry.
This includes what is arguably the most popular Prakrit work, the Seven
Centuries (Sattasaī), an anthology of seven hundred single-verse poems
compiled by Hala. Hala has traditionally been identified with a king of the
Satavahana dynasty, which ruled over the Deccan from the early first
century BCE to the later third century CE. The verses usually depict an
exchange between characters in a village setting, and almost always involve
an erotic theme or subtext. They have been highly prized for their
cleverness and suggestion, and are frequently cited in Sanskrit works of
poetics. At least a dozen Sanskrit commentaries on the Sattasaī have been
composed. Here is one well-known verse from that collection:

Shame on those who cannot appreciate

This ambrosial Prakrit poetry
But pore instead
Over treatises on love. (2)

(translation Khoroche and Tieken)

amiaṁ pāuakavvaṁ paḍhiuṁ sōuṁ ca jē ṇa āṇanti
kāmassa tattatattiṁ kuṇanti tē kaha ṇa lajjanti)
Another very early Prakrit work is Taraṅgavaī by the Jain monk Palitta,
which tells the story of a young couple who elope after realizing they were
a pair of cakravāka birds in a previous life. Palitta, too, has traditionally
been associated with the Satavahana court, and also composed a work of
astrology in Prakrit called Jyōtiṣkaraṇḍakaṁ. (Ollett, 2018).
The ‘second phase’ of Prakrit literature, as Dundas (2002) calls it,
extends over the fourth and fifth centuries CE. This includes mythological
poems in the skandhaka (khandhaa) meter composed by kings of the
Vakataka dynasty, such as ‘Hari’s Victory’ (Harivijayaḥ) by Sarvasena and
‘The Slaying of Rāvaṇa’ (Rāvaṇavadhaḥ) by Pravarasena. Vimala’s Jain
version of the Ramayana, ‘The Story of Padma’ (Paümacariyaṁ) probably
dates to this period as well (Chandra, 1970).
Prakrit was cultivated by a wide range of authors, including Buddhists
(Vairocana, author of the ‘Brilliance of the Connoisseurs’
[Rasikaprakāśanam]) and Brahmins (Vākpatirāja, author of the Slaying of
the Gauḍa King [Gauḍavahō], and Kautūhala, author of the Līlāvaī). But it
was cultivated most intensively by Jain poets, who produced an enormous
amount of narrative literature in Prakrit ( Jain, 1981), certainly because
Prakrit had been used for scriptural commentary in that community for
many centuries. Among the most well-known examples are the Story of
Samarāditya (Samarāiccakahā) of Haribhadra and the Kuvalayamālā of
Uddyōtana, both from the eighth century CE. These works tell the story of
characters who are linked by karmic bonds over multiple lifetimes
(Chojnacki 2016). Another genre that remained very popular since the time
of the Sattasaī was the anthology of single-verse Prakrit poems. Some of
these were produced by a single author (the aforementioned ‘Brilliance of
the Connoisseurs’ and Bappabhaṭṭi’s ‘Constellation’ [Tārāgaṇaḥ]), and
others were compiled from earlier works ( Jagadvallabha’s Vajjālaggaṁ and
Jinesvara’s Treasury of Gāthā Jewels [Gāhārayaṇakōsō]).
Prakrit was the language of a long and sophisticated literary tradition,
but it simultaneously functioned as a ‘notional vernacular’ (Ollett, 2017),
associated in the literary imagination with the speech of villagers, women,
and common people. The process of vernacularization in South Asia, while
typically seen as a shift from Sanskrit to the regional vernaculars, actually
had a more profound impact on Prakrit literary production. Interest in
Prakrit began to decline as interest in regional vernaculars grew, and already
from the later tenth century we see attempts to explain or convey in the
vernacular what had previously been expressed in Prakrit: this includes
translations of Prakrit texts into Kannada (e.g., Nēmicandra’s
Gōmmaṭasāraḥ) and adaptations of Prakrit texts into Sanskrit (e.g.,
Samarāiccakahā and Kuvalayamālā), as well as the practice of translating
quoted Prakrit verses into Sanskrit in commentaries and works of literary
theory. The production of new literature in Prakrit appears to have declined
after about the twelfth century, but because of its place alongside Sanskrit
as one of the primary languages of literature, learned poets continued to
cultivate it well into the second millennium. The sattaka, a stage play
composed entirely in Prakrit, was relatively popular in the early modern
period, and served as a test of a poet’s knowledge of Prakrit grammar.
35
THE BRAHMI SCRIPT AND INDIAN LANGUAGES

Thomas Trautmann

The Brahmin custodians of the Veda were intensely preoccupied with

controlling the language of the Veda so as to reproduce the text exactly,
trying to render it immune to change. For this reason, of the Vedic sciences
(using the term loosely to indicate subjects of formal teaching and
learning), several are concerned with aspects of language: phonology
(pratishakya), grammar (vyakarana), metrics (chandas), etymology
(nirukta). These, plus ritual (kalpa) and astronomy or calendrics (jyotisha)
comprise the Vedic sciences in the sense indicated, and all are motivated by
the imperatives of the religion of sacrifice. In the post-Vedic period these
sciences developed further. We may say that the special strengths of the
intellectual tradition coming out of the Veda lay in the three areas of
language analysis, the astronomy-astrology-mathematics cluster (from
jyotisha), and law (dharma, a branch of kalpa).
All these sciences got their start, there is good reason to believe, without
benefit of writing, for the Veda does not speak of the acts and implements
of writing, and relies on complex methods of memory-work, and prodigious
feats of memory, for its transmission. The writing system of the Indus
Civilization (2400–1900 BCE) had become extinct before the Aryans entered
India and composed the earliest of the Vedic texts, the Rig Veda (c. 1200
BCE). Writing was not reinvented in India until about the time of Ashoka (c.
268–231 BCE). When writing, in the form of the Brahmi script, reappeared
in India it was so perfectly suited to the languages it was employed to
represent (Sanslait, Pralait) that it has the look of having been a sudden
invention, not a long, slow evolution. S. R. Goyal may be right when he
argues that Ashoka himself commissioned the making of this script.
The perfection of Brahmi rested upon the prior perfection of Sanslait
phonology in the Vedic tradition, and the invention of a set of signs to give
one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and signs. The phonological
analysis that went into the making of the script is easy to see from the order
of signs in the chart of Brahmi (Figure 1). Right at the outset we see that all
the vowels come first, and then all the consonants. The set of vowels begins
with pairs of long and short vowels (a, a, i, T…) and ends with diphthongs
(e, ai, 0, au). Consonants begin with the ‘group of five’ (panchavarga)
plosives, consisting of a 5x5 grid. Reading across, we see an embedded
contrast of voiceless versus voiced (e.g. k, g) and unaspirated versus
aspirated (k, kh; g, gh), followed by the corresponding nasal, that is, the
nasal that goes with k and g (as in English kink and king). The five rows
follow the place of articulation in the mouth, from throat (k) to lips (p). The
remaining two rows give semi-vowels (y, r, 1, v) and sibilants (~, s, s, h).
Sanslait phonologists devised a technical vocabulary naming these qualities
abstracted from the grouped sounds, a metalanguage for the analysis of
language.
Brahmi appears to have been made out of the conjuncture of Vedic
phonology and the Semitic script. A version of the Semitic script was
available as an example and a source of signs, through the Aramaic-
speaking scribes of the Persian empire, and it is significant that Ashoka
used both Aramaic and Greek for his inscriptions on the western edge of his
empire. Due to the high state of their phonological analysis, Indians
transformed the Semitic script in significant ways to make it suitable for
Indian languages: (1) Signs for sounds similar to phonemes of Sanslait and
related languages were selected and other signs were passed over; (2) new
signs were created to represent phonemes not served by the Semitic script
and (3) the ABC alphabetical order of the Semitic script was replaced by
the alphabetical order devised for Sanskrit by the Indian phonologists. One
can readily see from the chart of the Brahmi characters how some of the
new signs were generated by modifying existing ones. Thus signs for long
vowels add modifications to the signs for short vowels, and the same goes
for the pairs of consonants c, ch; t, tha; p, ph; and others. Above all, we see
how the new alphabetical order concretizes and propagates the phonological
analysis of Sanskrit, such that learning the Brahmi alphabet, or one of its
descendents, is a first lesson in phonology much superior to learning the
ABC of Roman.
This matter of the concretization of phonological analysis in the
alphabetical order of Brahmi has profound implications for method and
conceptualization. Suppose we had no surviving texts of ancient Indian
language analysis and its metalanguage showing distinctions of vowels and
consonants, unvoiced and voiced, unaspirated and aspirated, and so on. We
would still be able to infer the existence of the analysis from the
alphabetical order. This hypothetical has a real-world example which we
learn in a classic article by Thorkild Jacobson on grammatical analysis in
Old Babylonian texts in cuneiform script. Series of a given word in
different inflections allow us to detect the presence of an ancient
grammatical analysis from the order, even in the absence of a metalanguage
identifying the inflections. Like an invisible planet detected by the
gravitational pull upon a visible star, we learn to read an embedded analysis
from the series. This leads us to reconceptualize the nature of what we think
of as simple objects of study such as the Sanskrit language or the Brahmi
script, but which we now see as complex objects, containing and
concretizing language analysis.

Figure 1
Before tracking the effects of this phonological analysis it must be added
that Indian language analysis attained this high level of achievement early,
and built upon it an even more imposing intellectual edifice in the form of
Pāṇini’s grammar of Sanskrit. Pāṇini created a set of rules, in the form of
extremely short aphoristic compositions called sutras only a few syllables
long, not unlike a computer program, which students would memorize.
Applied to the stock of verbal roots, the rules generate the entire universe of
Sanskrit words, using the human brain as a central processing unit, the
living hardware to Pāṇini’ s software. This grammar, and others of a
slightly less demanding and more student-friendly kind, became models for
the writing of grammars of other languages, in India and beyond. As a
result, Sanskrit grammars, including those in European languages, embody
aspects of the Indian tradition of language analysis, so that learning Sanskrit
is always also a matter of absorbing concretized embodiments of that
tradition.

INDIAN PHONOLOGY IN ASIA

Thus the grammatical tradition presupposed the phonological analysis
developed by the Vedic schools, and built upon it. Indian phonology,
through the Brahmi script, had an immense influence; and so did the
tradition of Sanksrit grammar. For present purposes we will confine
ourselves largely to examining the effects of the Brahmi script.
Most of the regional languages of India developed their own version of
Brahmi, with the full complement of Sanskrit phonemes, some of them with
additions, so that they were capable of expressing both Sanskrit and the
regional language. Tamil of South India, though a Dravidian language, not
descended from Sanskrit, followed a different path. Tamil acquired a
written grammar at an early stage, called the Tolkappiyam, inspired by the
grammars of Sanskrit in form (sutras) and analytic concepts, but very
different in substance. The acuity of Vedic phonological analysis when
applied to the problem of representing a Dravidian language with its very
different phonology caused several modifications to turn the Brahmi script
into the Tamil script: (1) Signs of Brahmi were dropped when Tamil
phonemes were lacking.
 Notably, voicing is not phonemic in Tamil, so that voiced consonants (g,
j, ~, d, b) were dropped, while signs for unvoiced consonants (k, c, t, t, p)
were retained as signs for allophones that varied by position. As aspiration
is not phonemic in Tamil, the aspirated consonants (kh, ch, th, th, ph, and
their voiced counterparts gh, jh, dh, dh, bh) were dropped. (2) Signs were
added for Tamil phonemes not provided for Brahmi (1, 1, r,~. (3) The
alphabetical order, however, remained substantially the same. The
imilli’gent modification of Brahmi, based on analysis of Tamil phonology,
resulted in a script with a similarly high degree of perfection. It was,
however, made perfectly suitable for Tamil at the cost of making it
unsuitable for Sanskrit. In the Tamil country, as a result, Sanskrit had to be
rendered in a different Brahmi-derived script, called Grantha.
Within India the Brahmi script was widely used and developed regional
versions connected with regional languages, both those Indo-Aryan
languages descended from Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages of South
India, such as Tamil, that constitute a separate language family. Most of the
scripts currently in use in India, including Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi,
Bengali, Oriya, and Sinhala for Indo-Aryan languages, and Kannada,
Telugu, Malayali, and Tamil for Dravidian ones, are descended from the
Brahmi script.
Brahmi script, and the phonological analysis that gave rise to it and that
is encoded in the alphabetical order, spread widely in Asia, but the way it
was received and put to use varied greatly according to the purposes of the
receiving societies. The script itself, or rather modified versions of it,
propagated widely. K. F. Holle in 1877 compiled charts of 198 different
scripts deriving from Brahmi, including those of India and continuing
through the Indo-China Peninsula (Burmese, Thai, Lao, Khmer) and the
islands of Indonesia (abundant different versions) as far as the Philippines
at the eastern limit. Central Asia has also adopted scripts based on Brahmi,
especially the Tibetan script, Khotanese, Mongolian, and others. In these
cases we may suppose Brahmi furnished the model for first writing systems
of these societies, spread by Indian missionaries, Buddhist and Brahmin.
In East Asia, however, the great antiquity and wide spread of the
Chinese writing system gave no occasion for the adoption of a Brahmi-
based script. The only exception to this generalization is the script devised
in 1269 by the Tibetan Buddhist monk Phags pa, the national preceptor to
the emperor Qubilai (Kublai Khan) who wanted a script in which all the
languages of the Chinese empire could be written, including Chinese, of
course, along with Tibetan, Uighur, and Mongolian. It was based on the
Tibetan script, which in turn was based on Brahmi (van der Kuijp, 1996).
Needless to say, it did not displace the Chinese script. But Sir William
Jones, in the late eighteenth century, had already noticed that the order of
sounds in Chinese grammars corresponded nearly with that of Tibet and
hardly differed from that of Sanskrit ( Jones, 1788).
In China, then, because of its highly developed script and the
advancement of its sciences, Indian phonological analysis was differently
consumed than in other parts of Asia. In effect, Indian phonology was
applied as a tool for the phonological analysis of the Chinese language,
making use of Indian techniques and Buddhist scholars for a purely Chinese
and non-Buddhist purpose.
The great purpose to which this phonological analysis was put in China
was to assist in the formation of a new philology for the study of literature
in Middle Chinese. The new philology was built upon a new way of
rendering in writing the sounds of written words, using logo graphic
characters as signs of sounds and ignoring their sense, in this context. The
sound of a word was broken down into two parts, the opening consonant
and the closing sound, and each was rendered by a sound-alike character.
This system of spelling called fanqie led to the grouping of words into
rhyming sets (that is, words having the same closing sound) in dictionaries,
called rhyming dictionaries or rhyme books. Rhyme books were known as
early as the Wei-Jin period (220–420 CE), but the early ones were eclipsed
by the Qieyun of Lu Fayan, written in 601 CE, which became the standard
work ever after. Because this is the period in which Indian, Central Asian,
and Chinese Buddhist monks were translating Buddhist scriptures from
Sanskrit into Chinese, with all the challenges that entailed of representing
foreign words in Chinese among other things that would stimulate the
application of Indian Sanskrit-based language analysis to Chinese, many
scholars think it likely that Indian philology was influential in the formation
of the fanqie spelling and the rhyme books. Thus Baxter says of this system
that it was ‘possibly influenced by knowledge of Indian phonology’, and
this seems to be the majority view. Pulleyblank is doubtful and thinks the
influence began later, for reasons that need not detain us. In any case it is a
matter of probabilities that vary between the possibly and the doubtful.
However that may be, there is general agreement that the next stage of the
development of this tradition was clearly influenced by Indian phonology.
This stage begins with the rhyme table of Yunjin, available to us in an
edition of the Song period (1161 is the earliest date we have) but written
before the Song. In the rhyme tables (not to be confused with the rhyme
books of the previous period) the order of columns replicates the order of
consonants in the Brahmi alphabetical order pretty closely, but in reverse: p,
ph, b, m, t, th, d, n, ts, tsh, dz, s, z, k, kh, g, ng, glottal stop, x, Y, ny, n
(Baxter, 1992; Pulleyblank, 1999). Thus in China, Brahmi and the
intellectual tradition which was its matrix was appropriated, not at the
ground level of script adoption but as a very high-order form of intellectual
analysis serving a specific cultural project that was itself external to the
phonological tradition in question-a completely unanticipated conjuncture
of different traditions of language analysis leading to a new form of Chinese
philology, via the fanqie spelling system, the rhyme books and the rhyme
tables. These tools continue to serve the phonological analysis of Chinese,
as the fundamental resources for modern linguistics, from Karlgren (1929,
1963) to Baxter (1992), that is, to the present day. As the Book of Odes
(Shijing) among the ancient classics makes use of rhyme, the methods of
historical linguistics built from this philological tradition are able, through
it, to extend their reach back to Old Chinese.
In Japan and Korea, where the Chinese writing system also prevailed
and served languages of different origins, Brahmi and Indian phonology
were consumed in yet different ways. The Japanese script is a composite of
the Chinese-derived logographic Kanji, plus the phonetic Kana, better
suited to the multisyllabic character of Japanese. Kana could not be called a
descendent of Brahmi, but like Brahmi it is a syllabary and the dictionary
order of signs follows the alphabetical order of Sanskrit and Brahmi. This
gives reason to suppose that Kana was formed under the influence of
Sanskrit and Indian scripts through Buddhism (Smith, 1999). In Korea,
King Seycong invented the Hankul script in 1444 CE. It shows an acute
analysis of the phonology of Korean, and the shapes of the signs are highly
original and rational, depicting the shapes of the mouth and places of
articulation for the sounds. It was an admirable invention in every way,
likely to have been inspired by knowledge of Indic scripts, again, through
Buddhism, possibly through the Phags pa script (King, 1999).

INDIAN PHONOLOGY IN EUROPE

Indian phonology and the influence of Indian grammars in promoting the
writing of grammars elsewhere is evident in Central Asia, East Asia, and
Southeast Asia, borne by the cultivation of Indian languages, especially
Sanskrit and Pali, propagated through Indian religions, especially Buddhism
and Hinduism. The special connection of Indian language analysis and
religion is evident when we look in the other direction from India, to
westward. Indian language analysis did not spread further westward than
Indian religions did, due to the spread of Christianity and Islam. By
contrast, for Indian sciences did spread to the West without the assist of
religion, in respect of the astronomy-astrology-mathematics cluster, or
rather, Indians participated with the cultures of the Middle East in a
vigorous interchange of ideas in which India was both a giver and a taker.
Elements of algebra and trigonometry from India went into the international
circulation of ideas; and of course there is the Indian number system with
place-notation and use of the zero, which ultimately spread to Europe and,
indeed, the world. So we must say that Indian science was differently
consumed to westward compared with the eastward spread of phonology.
Indian phonology, then, did not reach the Middle East and Europe in
antiquity, and European exposure came much later, through the mercantile
and imperial expansion of Europe to India, bypassing the Muslim countries
of the Middle East, and the formation of British India through the military
successes of the East India Company in the mid-eighteenth century. This
exposure was preceded by a series of encounters of European missionaries,
mostly Catholic, but the results were comparatively limited and tentative,
whereas the philological accomplishments of British-Indian orientalists
were substantial and enduring (Lorenzen, 2006; Truatmann, 2008). Through
the imperial relation Europe came into contact with Sanskrit and its
Brahmi-derived scripts, and Indian language analysis generally. It
consumed this tradition much as the Chinese had, as a resource for the
formation of a new philology, Comparative Philology as it was called, or
historical linguistics. Here again the Indian tradition was appropriated to
serve a cultural project that was external to it–another unanticipated
conjuncture by different traditions of language analysis leading to a new
form of philology. These two different outcomes come together in the
present, in the work of Baxter and others on Chinese historical phonology.
By the start of the eighteenth century, Europeans had a well-formed
collective intellectual project of mastering the languages of the world
through the collection of word lists and the construction of grammars and
dictionaries, with the object of constructing a family tree of languages that
would reveal the hidden history of the human kind. Leibniz was its most
articulate theorist and promoter, and it was taken up by his admirer,
Catherine of Russia, and also by Thomas Jefferson in America and Sir
William Jones in British India, more or less simultaneously. The result was
an utterly new deep history of the world, with unexpected groupings of
peoples that greatly changed previous beliefs, starting with the Indo-
European language family that linked the deep history of India and Persia
with Europe.
It is well to keep the worldwide, and imperial, character of this project
of language comparison in mind, as it helps us see the particular effects of
Indian phonology upon it. It is well to keep in mind also that this project,
since universalized and by no means limited to Europeans, is still underway
and has amassed a large literature—a veritable explosion in the grammar
factory—epitomized by the title of one of its famous products, Antoine
Meillet’s Les langues du monde (1952). Recent researches make it clear that
the branching, tree-like image of the historical relations among languages at
which this project aims is the application in the eighteenth century to
language–history of the Tree of Nations model that stems from the Bible
and that governed universal histories produced by Jews, Christians, and
Muslims for a thousand years and more (Trautmann, 1997). Thus the ways
of interpreting the historical relations among previously unknown
languages were preconditioned by the model of the family tree.
This is the context for the famous pronouncement of Sir William Jones,
brilliant linguist who had been sent to Calcutta as a judge of the supreme
court in the East India Company territories, and president-founder of the
Asiatic Society, about the Sanskrit language which he had recently begun to
learn:
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect
than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet
bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of
grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no
philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some
common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not
quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with
a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be
added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the
antiquities of Persia ( Jones, 1788b).
The passage sets out the conception of what came to be called the Indo-
European language family, and correctly names six of its ancient languages,
corresponding to branches of the family; and, again correctly,
conceptualizes their relation as co-descendents of an ancestral language,
‘which, perhaps, no longer exists’, that is, the hypothesized lost ancestor-
language, now called Proto-Indo-European.
On the way to learning Sanskrit and adumbrating the Indo-European
conception, however, Jones had first to encounter Indian phonology in the
form of the Brahmi-derived alphabet. In the Harry Ransome Library at the
University of Texas in Austin one can see a notebook of Jones at the
beginning of that process (jones, n.d.). In it we find renderings in Roman of
Sanskrit words, such as ‘tobo’ for tava, the second person singular genitive
pronoun, ‘of thee’, in a Bengali pronunciation that he must have heard from
his teacher. Jones soon learned the original values of the letters and used
them as the basis of a roman transliteration of Sanskrit. On the way to
mastering Sanskrit and, through it, coming to recognize the similarity with
Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Old Persian and to interpret the similarity
in terms of a branching family tree, he seized upon the Brahmi-derived
pattern of Indian scripts as a basis for a uniform system of roman
transliteration for Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, and published it as the very
first article of the Asiatic Society’s journal, Asiatic Researches, under the
title, ‘A dissertation on the orthography of Asiatick words in roman
characters’ (Jones, 1788a).
This transliteration scheme, which rendered Sanskrit available to
Europeans for comparisons with other languages, remains little changed in
the current romanization of Sanskrit, But the influence did not stop there.
The Jonesean scheme was much used by missionaries writing grammars of
languages having no scripts of their own; and by stages it evolved into the
International Phonetic Alphabet used today by linguists. Through this
means Indian phonology is embedded in the current practices of
cosmopolitan linguistics, kept living through countless iterations in daily
use.
While the role of Sanskrit language and grammar in the consolidation
and success of comparative philology or historical linguistics is well
known, the role of Indian phonology in relation to Sanskrit and other
languages is little known and appreciated. British India at the end of the
eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries was an extraordinarily
fruitful site for the production of new and unprecedented discoveries in
language history. The Jonesean enunciation of the Indo-European
conception is famous because Indo-European is the great success and model
for historical–linguistic comparison elsewhere in the world. But in addition
to that there were three other discoveries connected with British India and
employees of the East India Company learning languages from Indian
scholars: that of the Dravidian language family of South India, filled with
Sanskrit loan words but nevertheless constituting an unrelated language
family of its own; that of the Indo-Aryan derivation of the Roma or Gypsy
languages of Europe; and that of the Malayo–Polynesian language family
comprehending languages as distant from one another as Madagascar and
Hawaii (Trautmann, 2006).
This special fruitfulness of British India for the consolidation of
comparative philology and the execution of its languages and nations
project is due to the interactions of Indian and European scholars and their
language analysis traditions on Indian soil. The languages and nations
project of Europe needed a method of etymology for identifying cognate
words in related languages, and to discriminate them from accidental
similarities. Prior to the colonial connection there was a veritable chaos of
competing systems of etymology in Europe, each at war with the other;
because of the colonial connection, comparative philology quickly came to
a new etymology guided by exact phonological assessment, leading to the
formulation of ‘laws’ of sound-shifts. This new, scientific etymological
method put an end to the warfare among etymological systems of the
eighteenth century and formed a unitary scientific standard. The sudden
onset of a more exact phonological assessment coincided with European
access to the Sanskrit language and the Indian phonological analysis
concretized in the alphabetical order of Indian scripts descended from
Brahmi.

DISCUSSION
The hiddenness of the story is the result of a conjuncture, at this moment of
history, of quite different causes: the theory-deadness of antiquity under the
ideology of modernism; the theory-deadness of Asia under Eurocentrism;
and the theory-deadness of the pre-colonial under postcolonial theory.
 Let us begin by contrasting the obscurity of this story with the well
known, indeed iconic, story of how first European knowledge of Sanskrit
led to the discovery of its relation to the languages of Europe—the
discovery, that is, of the Indo-European language family. The similarity of
Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin is such that, as Sir William Jones put it, ‘no
philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have
sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.’ The
passage is famous for laying down the concept of what comes to be called
Proto-Indo-European, but it is also noteworthy for suggesting that this
concept follows from mere inspection of the three languages. Contrary to
this characterization, however, the emergence of the Indo-European was
pre-shaped by the tree-like conception of the historical relations among
languages, itself shaped by the prevailing Tree of Nations model of human
history deriving from the Book of Genesis; and the conception of an inner
core, native and ancient, of languages constituting the matter for the
construction of valid trees of language history through comparative study.
Internal to the frame supplied by the tree model, the comparative method in
linguistics in Bopp and his successors owes a great deal to the comparative
anatomy of Cuvier, as Baxter shows. What matters here, is that in the naive
empiricism of the Jonesean formulation, we have in effect a statement that
Sanskrit serves as mere content for the emerging idea of Indo-European, an
inert source among others, for the synthesizing inspection. This way of
putting things has been many times quoted as a kind of charter myth of the
emergence of scientific linguistics, especially important as the Indo-
European field becomes the model and standard for scientific study of
language history in other language families. India appears in this story as a
‘content provider’, not a provider of phonological theory. While the Jones
passage about Sanskrit is recited in virtually every history of historical
linguistics, the story of Indian phonology is obscure and received as a
detail, not a central part of the emergence of the science.
This is a telling difference, one that is doubly determined. The newness
of historical linguistics, expressed in the story of its miraculous emergence
from a non-science past, is only another instance of the over-valuation of
the new and the concomitant undervaluation of precedents in the ideology
of modernity, the idea, that is, of the modern appearing as a deep rupture in
history.
 Over-valuation of the new at the expense of precedent is connected with
the over- valuation of Europe at the expense of Asia. Hegel is an especially
useful resource in elucidating this effect, for his life project was concerned
both to express and theorize the vast expansion of European historical
consciousness in the age of the expansion of European imperial power, and
at the same time to contain and tame its decentering and destructive
tendencies. Hegel’s project was summed in the palindromic pair, history of
philosophy and philosophy of history. The history of philosophy side of the
project is especially germane here, as he insists that theory (or philosophy,
or science)—the very word ‘ theoria’ and therefore also the thing—is
originally and essentially Greek, and that there is no theory outside Greco-
Rome Europe (Hegel, 1876; 1882-96). Much of the cultural work Hegel’s
history of philosophy does, therefore, is to establish and fortify a boundary
between this deep Europe and the rest of the world. As Roger-Pol Droit
shows, Hegel ends the early nineteenth-century European enthusiasm for
Indian philosophy, causing it to be reclassified as religion and expelling it
from the philosophy syllabus in Europe. Hegel’s heirs, from the right to the
left of the political spectrum, accepted this result and elaborated upon it.
Finally, specific not to Asia as a whole but to the part of it subject to
European imperial rule (India in this instance) there is the effect of the
postcolonial theorists, especially the ‘Orientalism’ concept of Edward Said
(1978). This is a modification of Michel Foucault’s concept of power
knowledge, that is, the mutual entailment of power and knowledge, the
necessity of power to produce knowledge and the necessity of knowledge to
maintain power. Said’s modification was to make an analytic tool directed
at the study of Europe amenable to the study of European colonial rule and
knowledge-formation outside of Europe. Substituting terms, power became
colonial rule, and knowledge became colonial knowledge or Orientalism.
The concept, then, posits a close relation, a relation of mutual entailment,
between colonialism and Orientalist knowledge. Said’s book fomented a
huge revolution in the study of Orientalism, by insisting on this connection
between a form of rule and a form of knowledge. But its peculiar angle of
illumination threw other aspects of the colonial connection into the
shadows, and as we begin to reach the limits of what we may yet find that is
new and unexpected from this particular light source we increasingly feel
the presence of what is left obscure. Upon reflection, what the Saidian
reformulation of Foucault’s power/knowledge leaves out is India, Indians,
and Indian knowledge, and the processes by which Europeans acquired
knowledge of Indian languages. It is a ‘White men in the tropics’ kind of
story, and Indians figure in it largely as victims, not as agents. Moreover, its
constant tendency is to identify Europe with theory and India with content.
In doing so it reinscribes the way of looking that it condemns. At the last,
modernism, Eurocentrism, and colonial theory, acting in their different
ways, converge in the making of an interpretative machinery that turns non-
European theory into content, and produces the miraculous virgin birth of
European theory.
This machinery produces another effect, which is the hiddenness of the
history we have been examining. It is a question of a history that is hidden
in plain sight. Much of the continued life of Indian phonology in Europe
has been told in a splendid book by W. S. Allen in Phonetics in Ancient
India, written as long ago as 1953, and the influence of Indian phonology
on China is explicit in Baxter and Pulleyblank on the Chinese rhyming
dictionaries and rhyme tables. Pulleyblank rightly says, ‘The Paninean
system of Sanskrit grammar was much the most sophisticated analysis of
any language before modern times and associated with it was an analysis of
the production of the sounds of Sanskrit designed to ensure the preservation
of correct pronunciation of the Vedic hymns’ (Pulleyblank, 1999). But what
gets remembered is not the tradition of language analysis but the role of
Sanskrit language, conceived as a simple object, a content, in provoking the
apprehension of a historical relatedness among languages we call Indo-
European, and with it the (European) leap into scientific linguistics. The
hiddenness of Indian theory was actively made.
What is lost from this angle of illumination is, in the example in hand,
the way in which the colonial connection brought European and Indian
intellectual traditions together in India and directed them to Indian objects
of study. The interactions between European and Indian intellectuals, to be
sure, were colonial relations which put Europeans in directing roles and
Indians in assisting ones. But the colonial connection, for all that it was a
disaster for Indians, formed a zone of interaction between the two traditions
of language analysis that proved immensely fruitful. The durability of the
result is impressive. Two and a half centuries after Sir William Jones
adumbrated the Indo-European concept it continues to be used and
elaborated upon by historical linguistics and to be its model for the analysis
of other language families. The other three language families also continue
to be considered valid historical constructs among linguists today.
These results are effects of the Indian language analysis, of which the
Indian phonological analysis was the foundation and, concretized in the
alphabetical order of Brahmi script and its descendants, was in practice a
first lesson in the kind of exact phonological analysis that was needed to
carry out the European project of creating grammars and dictionaries and
discerning historical relations among the languages of the world.
If this argument is acceptable, it follows that a different paradigm is
needed to capture the processes of knowledge-formation that went on under
British rule of India, and by implication elsewhere as well. It is up to
historians of the ancient period to construct an alternative paradigm that
will illuminate this hitherto obscure terrain. Historians of the modern and of
European colonialism have evidently been unable to frame their study of
knowledge systems in ways that capture the phenomena of convergence this
case instantiates. Historians of the ancient period—the readers of
Fragments—will have to be critics of prevailing views and makers of
alternative approaches.
A new approach, to be valid, cannot be the mirror image of modernism,
Eurocentrism, and postcolonialism. An equal and opposite reaction will
result in a standstill, not a way forward. Overvaluing the past, the
indigenous, the traditional and the local are the pitfalls that it would be all
too easy to fall into. Indeed, if the history I have recited here tells us
anything it is that ideas propagate unevenly, at rates and with effects that
vary in relation to the perceived uses on the part of the receiving societies.
There are failures as well as successes to be accounted for, and some kinds
of knowledge remain stubbornly local, unable to grow, or even held secret
by their makers.
Any venture along these lines takes up the comparative method, and the
comparative method, as it rests on grouping phenomena on the basis of
similarity, confronts the problem of how so inexact a procedure can produce
certain knowledge. The question of method is always, how much similarity
is enough? Even historical linguistics, which operates by finding cognate
words and forms among languages as evidence of historical co-descent, and
which has achieved a great deal of exactness—thanks in part, we have seen,
to the timely appearance of Indian phonology on the European horizon and
its being folded into an emerging historical linguistics—has its internal
differences of detail over the question of how much similarity is enough to
settle a given issue of historical relatedness. How much greater will be the
problem of deciding the question of degree when there is no evident way of
calibrating them. This is a problem which dogs all comparison across
regions or across the longue durée.
One notable proposal for dealing with this problem has come, not from
historical linguistics, but from the comparative study of the exact sciences
in antiquity, to invoke the title of a splendid book on the subject by Otto
Neugebauer (1957). His argument is that when it comes to questions of
cultural contact among the civilizations, in the absence of direct evidence,
the best circumstantial evidence comes from the exact sciences, because
they contain parameters whose appearance in two different civilizations
cannot be attributed to chance because of their particularity and precision.
By exact sciences Neugebauer meant mainly mathematics and astronomy.
He should have included astrology as well, which was certainly an exact
science to the ancients if not to us, and was in a sense the glue holding
together the scientific triad of astronomy-astrology-mathematics which
developed together and travelled freely across political, regional, linguistic
and religious boundaries in ancient times.
David Pingree extended Neugebauer’s program from its Mesopotamia,
Egypt, and the Hellenistic sphere to India and beyond, through a lifetime of
brilliant contributions. In the course of his studies, we come to see an
increasing recognition that astrology and divination generally is a huge
preoccupation of ancient states and their peoples, from Europe to Southeast
Asia and beyond, which has left a massive archive for comparative study.
An example is the system of lunar asterisms (naksatras) in the Veda, that
preceded the adoption of the twelve signs of the zodiac. For a long time the
scheme of lunar asterisms was thought to be unique to India, but Pingree
has shown that the Mesopotamian omen texts contain a list of lunar
asterisms the same in number and largely in name as those of India, which
seems to have been the borrower (Pingree, 1963, 1978). The alphabetical
order of the Brahmi script acts in an analogous way as an index of
civilizational interactions. There are other spheres in which ideas and
precious objects readily spread across regions, languages, and religions,
notably ideals of kingship and forms of refinement, luxury, taste, and
comportment, though they are often attended by the problem of degree.
 The existence of an international sphere, including ideas of science,
kingship, and refinement, in the ancient world, all across Eurasia, helps to
undermine the deep boundary between the West and the Rest which was
Hegel’s project to produce and defend. It makes historians of the ancient
world better fitted for the kind of work that is needed to make sense of the
field of knowledge production beyond the obvious effects of power and
enable us to learn what we do not already know.
The spread of higher-order effects of the human mind across regions,
and of the perpetuation of the past in the present, is a phenomenon that is
systematically obscured by modernism, by Eurocentrism and by
postcolonial theory. They are not friends of ancient history, and act to
distance the past from the present, to minimize its significance for the
present and to throw doubt upon the very possibility of untainted
knowledge of the past. To reveal the true relation of the past to the present
falls to ancient historians, and to do so they must recognize the effects of
these wide-spread tendencies and work out alternatives. It will not suffice to
be experts of a limited slice of history that comes to an end at some date in
the past.
36
IDEAS AND METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF
‘DRAVIDIAN’

Stalin Rajangam

The concept of ‘Dravidian’ is often solely understood in political and

sociological terms and sometimes even reduced to a purely racial category.
Whilst Robert Caldwell discerned it philologically, the likes of Maraimalai
Adigal equated it to Tamil Saivam. Instead, this note shows its overlooked
cultural and philosophical uniqueness and delineates how its initial
conception was rooted in the realm of religion and philosophy.
During the nineteenth century, Tamil society underwent a sea change
where different communities reshaped their identities under British rule.
This period also witnessed the emergence of thinkers and movements across
India demanding social change and equality. There were also arguments on
how Buddhism has historically challenged Brahminical representations that
eventually led to the ‘renaissance’ of Buddhism in the social sphere.
In the Tamil context, Buddhism was conceived as the source of a
casteless society. The Buddhist society of the past was envisioned. For
instance, M. Masilamani Mudaliyar, a rationalist and intellectual, presented
Raavanan, Iraniyan, and Nandan as Buddhist kings in his significant work,
Varuna Pedha Surukkam (A Primer on Caste Differences, 1885). Pandit
Iyothee Thass (1845–1914), a Siddha doctor, polyglot, and man of immense
scholarship, argued that Buddhism was an antecedent to Brahminism. He
established the South Indian Buddhist Society (Sakya Boudha Sangam or
Dravida Boudha Sangam, 1898) and ran a weekly magazine, Tamilan, from
1907 to 1914, where his thoughts and reflections on Tamil culture appeared.
He based the idea of ‘Dravidian’ on philosophy and elaborated it as a
pivotal contrast between Buddhism and Brahminism. Thass articulated the
development and concretization of caste using metaphysics and Buddhist
epistemology. The current society is afflicted by caste. However, it does not
mean that it already always existed as the same. He disputed the idea that
caste was ancient and unchanging and contended that the origin of caste and
humans was not coetaneous. The caste order did not exist from the
beginning of time but developed only at some point in human history, and it
was only recent. Caste order was introduced into an earlier casteless society.
In other words, caste is the distortion or thiribu (thiribu signifies erasure,
distortion, and revision through retelling) from the order that existed before.
Here, he presented the binary of the ‘original’ and ‘present’ states. For
Thass, that earlier and original order was Buddhism which existed until the
arrival of the Aryans and the recent hegemonic rise of Brahminism or
Hinduism. Brahminism altered the societal order through several means
such as imitation, distortion/revision, re-narration, repetition, and
antiquation. The wily and imitative (vesha paarpanar) Brahmins adopted
Buddhism, distorted its principles, and repressed it. Caste was the offspring
of this process. Through the deceptive use of narratives, the altered form
was passed off as the original in order to hide it. Such distortions have been
multifarious.
Buddhist temples and religious centres were distorted into Saivite and
Vaishnavite temples. Buddha busts and statues have been damaged and
altered. Numerous broken, beheaded, and altered Buddhist figures are
found in various places (for example, Thalavetti Muneeswarar in Salem).
The Buddhist texts and philosophies were appropriated; meanings of
rituals/beliefs (tonsuring head, ear pinning) were misrepresented; names
were tweaked (Muni, Vinayagar). Since these changes occur in the cultural
milieu, they are not apparent. He construed the Tamil word ‘Unnmai’ as
having two lexical components, namely ‘ull’ (that is within) and ‘mei’ (that
is truth). What is visible to the eye is only an external truth/surface meaning
(puramei) and what is inside, that which is not distorted or revised is the
inner truth/deeper meaning (ulmei). Through ulmei, he sought to identify
such distortions in language, stories, rituals, practices, and festivals (The
first day of Pongal as Bodhi festival, the day of Buddha’s parinirvana in
contrast to the current Bhogi, a day of burning the old, Kaarthula Dheepam,
remembering the discovery of castor oil as against Karthigai Dheepam, a
festival of lamps in the Tamil month of kartigai, and Deepavali, finding the
value of sesame seeds rather than the killing of an Asura).
Iyothee Thass added a temporal component to this differentiation as
well. While ‘inner truth’ was ‘original,’ that which existed before, ‘external
truth’ was contemporaneous, was of the ‘now.’ Thus, the Hindu truths that
were current in the ‘now’ were fabrications; what was ‘original’ consisted
of Buddhist truths. For instance, he exemplified this distortion by
explaining the term ‘parayan’. According to popular belief, the pariahs got
their name because they play parai drums. It is also associated with them
playing parai in death rites, removing dead livestock, skinning, and
consuming carcasses. These are all intended to stigmatize and demean
them. Thass interprets it differently as he splits the word as para+ i + an.
The original Buddhists became aware that the ‘so-called’ Brahmins were
expropriating them. So, they cautioned people of the fraudulent ways of the
latter. Para in Tamil means ‘to speak or announce,’ and thus those who
spoke out were referred to as ‘parayargal’. The ‘self-claimed’ Brahmins, out
of the fear that the Buddhists will expose them, kept repeating that they
might announce ‘paraya pogirargal’ (they may propagate) which later
began to signify them as ‘paraiyargal pogiraargal’ (propagators are going).
Thus, the true meaning of parai is speaking rather than playing. Here, parai
is not thorparai (parai out of cattle skin) but of vaaiparai (parai out of
propagating). By deconstructing the word, he shows the distortion of
language used to stigmatize the so-called pariahs, the original Buddhists.
Contrary to the mainstream Tamil history that regards Buddhism as
foreign to the Tamil country, Iyothee Thass highlighted the presence of
Buddhist philosophy in Tamil literature and identified remnants of the
religion in distinctive Tamil cultural practices. Since he understood the
strength and significance of narratives, he contested the meanings ascribed
to people’s rituals and tales assigned to festivals. He sought after their
previous original reasonings and their subsequent distortions. Moreover, the
practices of his society were based neither on Buddhist practices that
existed in Maha Bodhi society, Sri Lanka, nor their modern forms. The
conception of religion as an institution and the absence of ‘external truths’
such as concrete structures (temples and icons) has led modern
historiography to conclude Buddhism has disappeared in the Tamil country.
However, Iyothee Thass’s understanding of caste and residual remains of
Buddhism construes it as ‘living.’
Pandit Thass conceptualizes freedom from caste-based oppression
based on a philosophical position. Hence, the anti-caste project cannot be a
political task but a cultural one. By demonstrating the imposition of caste
on original Buddhists who were ethical ‘Dravidian’ people, he provides the
cultural foundations for later political movements. After the first quarter of
the twentieth century, however, the ‘Dravidian’ evolved as a political
ideology that denoted a conflict between Tamil-speaking Dravidian ethnic
group and Sanskrit-speaking Aryans (here, the race was understood as
caste). This shift was propelled by the development of modern philology,
and emergent modernity emphasized secularism. With religion rejected, the
binary centred on philosophy also disappeared. The historical and
philosophical differences were perceived only as the ‘war of languages,’
and accordingly, myths were reimagined. Raavanan was seen as a Dravidian
hero, and Rama, an Aryan traitor (Pulavar Kuzhandhai’s Raavana
Kaaviyam, 1946). Iranian, a Tamil, and Narasimmar, an Aryan
(Bharathidasan’s Iranian Allathu Inayatra Veeran, 1943). The Aryans
engaged in wars and deceit to defeat the Dravidians. The Dravidian
movement, under the able leadership of Periyar E. V. Ramasamy, elaborated
its scope further. The idea of Dravidian then brilliantly used literature,
drama, cinema, and media rhetoric and has now maintained its hold over
the state for nearly a century. The recent archaeological, epigraphical, and
Tamil studies have helped recover the classical status of Tamil and
strengthened this difference.
Iyothee Thass too considered the term ‘Dravidian’ synonymous with
Tamil, however, he employed it with a wider implication. He was of the
view that the structure of the Tamil language was strongly impacted by
Buddhist philosophy. Thus, the metaphysics of Buddhism, not linguistics,
serves as the foundation for the ‘Dravidian’. Thass did not attribute the fall
of Buddhism to invasion or deception by the Aryans. More than the
historical veracity of such events, instilling belief in the people’s psyche
through the propagation of such stories achieved the success of
Brahminism. A culture cannot be destroyed or created instantaneously. Its
traits circulate among people covertly. To appropriate a culture, one must
distort or alter rather than exterminate it. Another component of distortion
is the insertion of new ones. Such distortions are not meant to trigger
ruptures because some of the original would still be present. Thus, Iyothee
Thass defined distortion in three stages—distorting: the image of divine
figures (inserting a different head in a statue), the philosophy (Vaishnavism
distorting Buddhism), and beliefs (altering the stories and rituals to conceal
their original meaning, e.g., Deepavali). This idea of distortion, informed by
metaphysics and Buddhist epistemology, was central to the conception of
Dravidian ideology.
37
DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGE FAMILY

K. Rangan

THE FAMILY OF DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES–EMBRYO

STAGE
The discovery of William Jones in 1784 that Sanskrit is related to Greek,
Latin, and other European languages turned the history of the Indo-
European comparative study. Both Indian and some of the Western scholars
were of the opinion that Sanskrit was the mother of all the Indian
languages. With the exception of Tamil, literary Dravidian languages like
Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam have borrowed heavily words from
Sanskrit. Our grammatical tradition lacks the historical and comparative
study of Indian languages.
The British researchers of South India were of the opinion that the
scholars working in Calcutta had no adequate knowledge of South Indian
languages and therefore they insisted on establishing a centre for the study
of languages in the southern part of India. The dream of these scholars was
realized when the College of Fort St George was established at Chennai in
1812 with the effort of Francis Whyte Ellis. It was intended to train East
India Company officials in Indian vernaculars. The scholars of this
institution prepared grammar books, dictionaries, and teaching materials.
Since the fields of historical and comparative linguistics dominated
linguistic research, they tried to compare the languages of South India. In
1916, Ellis pointed out, in his preface to the Telugu grammar written by
Campbell, that the South Indian languages formed a separate family of
languages distinct from Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan languages. This
event can be conceived as the embryo stage for the concept of South Indian
languages as a separate family. After this, the scholars attempted to
concentrate on the unique features of south Indian languages. The embryo
was firmly established as a fledgling child with the publication of Robert
Caldwell’s monumental work A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or
South-Indian Family of Languages in 1856. It was Caldwell who followed
the established methodology of comparative linguistics with sufficient
evidences and arguments. He proved that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada,
Malayalam, and other languages tribal languages such as Toda, Gondi, etc.,
belong to a separate family of languages distinct from Sanskrit and other
Indo-Aryan languages.

DISTINCT FEATURES OF DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES

The pronouns, numerals, the conjugation of verbs with tense and person,
number and gender agreement suffixes, the conjugation of nouns with case
suffixes, the arrangement of words in sentences are basic and they differ
from the structure of Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan languages.
Among the Dravidian languages, Tamil, a highly cultivated language,
could dispense with Sanskrit words altogether from its lexicon and, if need
be, it could not only stand alone but flourish without its aid.
In the third person singular, there is three-way distinction, i.e., male,
female, and non-human and in plural, a two-way distinction of human and
non-human. The verbs show the person, number, and gender distinction in
the third person and in the first and second persons the number singular and
plural alone. No gender distinction is expressed in the first and second
persons.
The neuter nouns are rarely pluralized; neuter plurals are still rare in the
inflexion of the verb.
The Indo-European languages use the prepositions and the Dravidian
languages the postpositions.
In Indo-Aryan languages, the adjectives agree with the head nouns of a
phrase in case, number, and gender. But the adjectives in Dravidian
languages do not agree with the head noun in case, number, and gender and
they are incapable of declension.
The distinction of inclusive and exclusive pronouns in the first person
plural is present in Dravidian languages whereas in Sanskrit and other Indo-
Aryan languages such a distinction in the first person plural is absent.
The negative occurs pre-verbally in Indo-Aryan languages but in
Dravidian languages, it is post-verbal. The verbs in Dravidian languages are
conjugated for negative voice.
 The absence of relative pronouns in the construction of relative clauses
is a marked difference between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages.
Instead, the Dravidian languages use the relative participles in the
construction of relative clauses.
The use of appellative verbs in Dravidian languages is another
important distinction. Sanskrit lacks the class of appellative verbs.

POST-CALDWELL PERIOD
Caldwell laid a strong foundation for the comparative study of Dravidian
languages. In the history of comparative Dravidian languages, we must
mention the contributions of Thomas Burrow and Murray Barnson
Emeneau, who compiled The Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (1961,
1984), a monumental work. After Caldwell’s work, The Dravidian
Etymological Dictionary is a milestone in the history of comparative
Dravidian linguistics. Collected Papers on Dravidian Linguistics (1968) is
an important contribution of Burrow to the field of Dravidian linguistics.
He showed with clear and proper evidences, the borrowings of Sanskrit
from Dravidian. One of the important hypotheses was reconstructing the
voiceless stop series in proto-Dravidian. The gender system of proto-
Dravidian was another hypothesis. The voiced stops were not the phonemes
in proto-Dravidian and similarly, the gender system of Tamil, Kannada, and
Malayalam was the gender system of proto-Dravidian. Emeneau and
Bernard Bloch put forward another hypothesis advocating for the gender
system of Telugu and other central Dravidian languages as the gender
system of proto-Dravidian. It was elaborately discussed in Krishnmurti
(1961). Emeneau’s hypothesis India as a Linguistic Area (1956) is a path
breaking contribution in the history of Dravidian linguistics. A cursory look
at bibliography under Emeneau in Krishnamurti (2003: 509-510) makes us
feel the enormity of Emeneau’s contributions in the field of Dravidian
linguistics. He studied tribal languages such as Toda, Kota, Kolami, Brahui,
and his Dravidian Comparative Phonology: a Sketch (1970) was the
foundation for the later works in this area. Another significant contribution
is from Jules Bloch (1954) who published a monograph drawing more data
from the tribal languages of Dravidian concentrating more on various
aspects of Dravidian morphology.
INDIAN SCHOLARS IN DRAVIDIAN COMPARATIVE
LINGUISTICS
The contribution of Ramaswami Aiyar must be mentioned in the history of
comparative Dravidian linguistics. He published many papers on different
grammatical aspects of Dravidian languages dealing with the topics such as
‘Notes on Dravidian’, ‘Tulu phonology’, ‘Old Malayalam’, ‘Malayalam
phonology’, and ‘Tamil in various Dravidian languages’, etc., Since they
were published in the research journals of various universities and
organizations, they were not available to the scholars of Dravidian
linguistics. Recently these papers (mimeographed and circulated by the
Annamalai University) were edited by G. K. Panikkar, K. Rangan, and
Naduvattom Gopalakrishnan and published by the International School of
Dravidian Linguistics (2021). Similarly, K. V. Subbaiya (1909–11) and P. S.
Subrahmanya Sastri (1934, 1947) must be remembered for their role in the
development of Dravidian linguistics.

SCHOLARS OF POST-INDEPENDENCE PERIOD

Krishnamurti’s thesis, Telugu Verbal Bases: a Comparative and Descriptive
Study, published in 1961 by the University of California is another classic
work after the works of Caldwell, Bloch, Burrow, and Emeneau. In order to
understand the methodology and comparative Dravidian from a historical
point of view, one must go through this classic work. His discussion on the
reconstruction of voiceless stops as phonemes in proto-Dravidian and
different gender systems prevailing in Dravidian languages and the problem
of reconstructing the gender system in proto-Dravidian were all discussed
in depth. He reviewed the hypotheses of different scholars and then
presented his position. Another important work of Krishnamurti is The
Dravidian Languages (2003) published by Cambridge University Press. A
short monograph from Zvelebil on Dravidian Linguistics: An Introduction
(1990) was published by the PILC. It deals with the Dravidian phonological
system, the structure of Dravidian languages, the sub-grouping of Dravidian
languages, Indian areal linguistics, and the possible relationship of the
Dravidian family of languages with the Uralaltaic, Elamite, and Japanese
families of languages. It is a short but very informative work on the various
aspects of Dravidian languages. The Centre of Advanced Study in
Linguistics at Annamalai University, established by the UGC to promote
Dravidian studies, concentrated on the description of various aspects of
Dravidian tribal languages, especially in the Nilgiri areas. Simultaneously
the comparative study of Dravidian languages on various grammatical
aspects such as noun morphology (Shanmugam, 1971), verb morphology
(Subrahmanyam, 1971) and Kumaraswami Raja’s excellent work on Post-
nasal Plosives in Dravidian (1969) must be mentioned here.
 38

LANGUAGE FAMILIES OF INDIA OTHER THAN INDO-

ARYAN

Anvita Abbi
INTRODUCTION
Indian linguistic diversity is a tale of many tales that has originated due to
constant contact, conflict, and cohesion between migrants and locals. Today
(according to Census 2011), India represents 1,369 mother tongues from six
different language families. Some language families are very old, perhaps to
the tune of 5,000 years, and some are very new at only 700 years. One
language family represented in the Andaman Islands is perhaps the oldest in
the world. The members of this group are remnants of the first migration
out of Africa that took place 70,000 years ago. Where else can one find
such diversity and proof of ancient human habitat in the world? We are
proud to know that India has served as the major corridor of human
migration in the history of human evolution.
India represents six distinct language families spread over a large region
and spoken by more than one billion speakers (Abbi, 2006, 2018). The
presence of several language families, many languages, and their diversities
(commonly known as dialects), multilingualism, diglossia, and multiple
orthographic systems make India a linguist’s paradise.
Languages subsumed under a ‘family’ are related to each other
genealogically and are known to have originated from a common source/s.
They share several crucial linguistic features that can be identified as very
different from other languages of different language families. Thus, the
languages of a family are historically and typologically related too. India
represents the following language families, sub-branches, and isolates
spread over a large area from the Himalayas to the Andaman and Nicobar.
Attention also needs to be drawn to the Indian Sign language (ISL), used by
more than 1.5 million signers, but which does not figure as a language
family in any official record.

LANGUAGE FAMILIES OF INDIA 1. Indo-Aryan (North of

India)
2. Dravidian (South of India)
3. Austroasiatic
 • Mon–Khmer (Northeast) • Nico–Monic (the Nicobar Islands) •
Munda (Central, East) 4. Tibeto–Burman (Himalayan ranges)
5. Tai–Kadai (Assam and Arunachal Pradesh)
6. Great Andamanic (the Andaman Islands)
7. Indian Sign language (all over India)
8. Isolates
• Shom Pen (the Nicobar Islands) • Nahali/Nihali (Maharashtra) •
Angan ( Jarawa and Onge spoken in the Andaman Islands)
LANGUAGE FAMILIES OF SOUTH ASIA

All languages belonging to 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 are considered tribal languages.

The term tribal is used for administrative, judicial, and political purposes
and has no pejorative sense. Most of the languages of Tai–Kadai and
Tibeto–Burman are tonal languages. There are more unwritten languages
(around 800) in the country than written ones. The history of our spoken
languages is older than that of the written ones. These languages are
constantly evolving with time and give rise to new languages and their
varieties. They, by any standard, should not be considered inferior to the
written ones, as they are the storehouse of indigenous knowledge-systems,
ecological information, and the living oral documents of our history,
civilization, human culture, human evolution, and human migration.
The multiplicity of languages can be visualized by the presence of 574
languages in Indo-Aryan, 226 languages in Tibeto–Burman, 153 languages
in Dravidian, 65 languages in Austroasiatic, the small but extremely
vulnerable language families of Great Andamanic with only one language
(Jero) surviving at present, and six languages in Tai–Kadai and three
isolates. The Constitution of India recognizes only twenty-two languages
generally termed ‘Scheduled languages’ as they are listed under the Eighth
Schedule (called ‘Languages’), Articles 343–51 of the Constitution, and the
rest as ‘unscheduled’. The former are official languages of the Indian states.
South Asian Language Families

Not to scale: This map has been prepared in adherence to the ‘Guidelines for acquiring and producing
Geospatial Data and Geospatial Data Services including Maps’ published vide DST
F.No.SM/25/02/2020 (Part-I) dated 15th February, 2021

THE HISTORY OF INDIAN LANGUAGES

Genetic studies conducted on DNA samples have proved beyond doubt that
population structure in the subcontinent has been shaped by multiple
historical migrations and culturally mediated patterns of gene flow within
the subcontinent. This corroborates linguistic research to establish the
following migration routes and the dates of human dispersal to South Asia.
• Homo sapiens from Africa came around 70,000 YBP (years
before the present) and habited the Andaman Islands. These are
known as Great Andamanese. There seem to be two migrations
from different regions and at two separate times, the former of the
Great Andamanese and the latter of the Onge and Jarawa. They are
the First Indians or First Voices of India. The migrations imply that
India has served as a major corridor for dispersing modem humans
that started from Africa 100,000 years ago.
• Second migration comprised the Austroasiatic population around
20,000 YBP from the Southeast after the Last Glacial Maximum.
There seem to be two migrations from different regions and at two
separate times.
• Dravidian speakers came around 6,000 YBP from the southern
part of Asia, below Asia Minor/Mideast (disputed).
• Tibeto–Burman came around 6,000–5,000 YBP from the
Northeast.
• Speakers of the Indo-European languages came in several waves
from Western or Central Asia around 4,000 YBP.
• Speakers of Tai–Kadai languages came from the Southeast
around 700 YBP.

Migrant Speakers, primarily men of various language families intermingled

with the local population and created new languages which were distinct
from their source languages yet traceable to the mother language/s. Each
family tree grew on this soil with its branches extending wide and
ultimately touching the branches of other trees. Pollination of this contact
gave rise to many similar linguistic structures shared across Indian
languages. These features are known as areal features in the discipline of
linguistics. For instance, Duplicating a word twice is common in all Indian
languages • Hindi: jate jate ‘while going’
• Punjabi: munde munde’ boys boys’

Using two verbs at the end of a sentence where the second verb loses its
original meaning • Malayalam: kuppi potti poyi • Hindi: botal tuut gaii ‘the
bottle broke down’

Expressive morphology where duplication of syllables emotes several kinds

of sensations and feelings • Hindi: dhak dhak ‘throbbing of heart’, jhan jhan
‘tinkling of bells’
• Nepali: chul chul ‘unsteady’
• Tai Khamti: syen4–sok2-sok2 ‘very beautiful’
• Echo formations as • Hindi: chaay vaay ‘tea, etc.’
• Tamil: puli gili ‘tiger, etc.’

These and many more grammatical structures are shared across all the
languages of mainland India. From the areal point of view, the shared
semantic field/s represented by the same or similar structures, indicate
shared underlying cognitive ability, sharing of the single coherent
conceptual-semantic space and common interpretation across the speakers
of diverse languages of the country. To conclude there is no language ‘pure’
or ‘impure’. Admixture of various races and communities give rise to
‘mixed languages’ responsible for the genesis of modern Indian languages.
 PART IV

CULTURES, SUB-NATIONALITIES, AND

REGION
THE SOUTH
39
MEDIEVAL TAMIL INDIA PRE-VIJAYANAGARA PHASE

T. K. Venkatasubramanian

Tamil is perhaps the only case of a very ancient language that still survives
as mother tongue for over 10 million speakers. It is a body of knowledge
well documented in a continuous literary tradition going back to several
centuries. However, the cultural role of Tamil is not truly analogous to Latin
or Sanskrit in terms of the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’. David Shulman, in his
Tamil: A Biography (2016), discusses the beginnings of the language.
Evidences point out that the transition from prehistory to protohistory in
Tamil land takes place around the second century BCE (Tamil Brahmi
inscriptions, Ashokan inscriptions, Dravidian words, and syntactic
structures in Vedic Sanskrit, Megaliths, and beginnings of Iron Age have all
been used to describe the beginning). So far, there is no clinching evidence
to prove that ancient Tamil ever existed in some pure state, isolated from
Sanskrit or North Indian culture.

STAGES OF TAMIL HISTORY

Stage I: Sangam (Chiefdoms)

The concept of chiefdom deals with the process that underlies the origins
and evolution of a complex stateless society. In light of the ‘chiefdom
debate’, with special reference to subsistence strategies, control over
political economy and ceremonial legitimacy, Tamil chiefdoms should be
studied. Ecology, ethno-historical information on clans, chieftaincies,
vallals (patrons), ventu, political geography, kinship, Nadu formation, and
sociopolitical process all need utmost attention and care.

Stage II: Pallavas (Politics, Culture, Caste)

The study of early Indian polity shows that it is difficult to demarcate the
domains of political authority and power elite configuration. Religion was
an instrument of state policy and a means of buttressing political ends. The
patronage of deities, tirthas, brahmanas, and temples were mechanisms
resorted to by ruling lineages from the Pallavas onwards. The Pallavas
manipulated rituals and religious beliefs to strengthen their power and
legitimize their status as monarchs in a multi-clan society having ruling
lineages of Cheras, Cholas, and Pandyas before them. The cultural and
ritualistic dimensions of caste played a crucial role in organizing the polity
and economy of the Pallava political system. The following need deeper
study and understanding in the evolution of chiefdom to kingdom of the
Pallavas: clan to caste; Brahmin bard to court cult (Brahminism); sacrificial
traditions in the North vis-à-vis Tamil; role of Heterodox sects; significance
of symbols; and aspects of monumentality. The efforts of the Pallavas to
legitimize their status can also be listed as: a warrior in the Brahmin image;
claims of genealogy; attempts to establish divine kingship in place of
warrior–kingship; assumption of Abhisheka names; deliberate shift from
Brahma to Vishnu affiliation (androgyne); the dual role of Bhakti ideology
in the attempt at legitimization to begin with and assertion of the superiority
of the devotee to Brahmin.

Stage III: Cholas (State as Empire)

One of the merits of K. A. N. Sastri’s Cholas (1935) is that it is a massive

synthesis of prior scholarship, and a thorough engagement with existing
archives in the 1930s. It was conventional, the subject matter was
predominantly politico-military, its outlook was broadly nationalist with a
focus on the ‘greatness’ of the dynasty. Sastri also adopted a celebrated
hagiographical tone in characterizing the achievements of the period as one
of ‘civic peace’ and ‘cultural efflorescence’ achieved through an ‘almost
byzantine royalty’ (chapters six to sixteen) provides narrative details of the
dynasty and synchronic surveys on polity and economy. This model was
repeated for other dynasties like Pallavas and the Vijayanagara empire by
Sastri’s students.
Y. Subbarayalu’s Political Geography of Chola Country, an M.Litt
thesis in 1973 brought about a change. He adopted a cartographic approach
through empiricism and reconstructed areas of explicit concern using
territorial designations and a textured history of the relationships between
the classificatory power of the emergent Chola state. He also initiated a
data-driven social history, followed by concordance of names in Chola
inscriptions teaming up with Noboru Karashima. Thus, Tamil historical
study shifted from event to evidence (reliance on epigraphy) in keeping
with global historical practices of the 1960s. Land classification, revenue
terms, and social categories came to be projected across a scheme of
periodization. P. Shanmugam’s Chola Revenue System (1977) and
Subbarayalu’s South India under the Cholas (2012) completed this process.
Subbarayalu’s positions are: a) emergence of a stratified society in place of
a tribal society; b) breakdown of communal landholding in thirteenth
century (property?); c) steady growth of kingly power and efforts at
centralization in tenth and eleventh centuries; d) elaboration of bureaucracy
in land administration; e) survey and careful recording of land rights for
revenue collection; f) territorial organization; and g) control of temples and
Brahmin villages. Collaborative studies with Y. Subbarayalu and his own
studies explain the transition from ancient to medieval. His position is as
follows: a) private landholding began to spread throughout the Chola state
in the form of land grants to Brahmins and important officials, replacing, to
a certain extent, common landholding; b) the coincidental development of
maritime trade empowered artisans and merchants; c) ex-hill tribes who had
joined the Chola army as mercenaries joined the agrarian society as new-
jatis; and d) Brahmins and Vellalas begin to decline.

THEORIZING EFFORTS OF A ‘REGIONAL STATE’ AND

SOCIETY
Burton Stein, an American historian, attempted a comprehensive
theorization on ecological, social, and politico-moral axes. He saw Chola
kingdom as a phenomenon of time and space. Focussed on Nadu, the
micro-region, he argued that ‘sovereignty was shared’ within a layered and
overlapping ‘pyramidal’ structure and characterized the Chola state ‘as
segmental’. James Heitzman, in his Gifts of Power (1997), eschewed
feudalism framework and tried to focus on means and relations of
production only. He argued that temples benefited from 400 years of
donations, became important centres for resource redistribution in the most
strategic, economic, and political centres, then controlled Upper Shares
(Melvaaram). The driving force behind donations was the concept of
legitimization of authority, hence the title, ‘Gifts of Power’. Kathleen
Gough, in her Rural Society in Southeast India (1981), makes a case for the
Asiatic mode of production. Noboru Karashima confines his application of
the term ‘feudal’ to Vijayanagara only. He regards the Chola period as one
when the formation of a centralized state reached a certain degree of
completion, and therefore, feudalism could have come into existence after
the decline of the Chola state.
The prime mover is Chola Kuti, which ultimately succeeded in
mobilizing resources, connections, and power to establish an ‘Historical
Empire’ (state system) as well as spheres where chiefly formations were
apparently more resilient. In the process, the Chola Kuti adopted several
strategies. He demonstrates that the structural history of the ‘Imperial
Kingdom’ was an expression of the continuance of local power groupings,
and a stage-by-stage extension of the organs of central power. His final
position is that the Chola state was a ‘plural corporate state’, which tried to
maintain the common goal of Dharmic society through stage direction
rather than common will. By and large, the Chola Kuti succeeded in
converting loyalty of the people from clans, villages, and nadus to one of a
political system (state system) by tenth/eleventh centuries. One may have to
wait for the real image of the Chola state until one succeeds in imagining
each block that builds up the complex institutions.
40
EARLY KANNADA LITERATURE

Andrew Ollett and Sarah Pierce Taylor

The ‘regional’ is a key concept in the study of medieval India, from polities
to art to religion, and it is exemplified in the first place by regional
languages. Kannada, a South Dravidian language, was one of the first
regional languages to be used in inscriptions and written literature, and
hence has been important in discussions of medieval literary culture and
vernacularity. According to the model of vernacularization offered by
Sheldon Pollock (2006), some regional languages were first ‘literized’, i.e.,
used to write documentary inscriptions and for other non-expressive
purposes; subsequently they were ‘literarized’, i.e. used to write literature,
above all the poetic composition kāvya (belles lettres). One result of such a
process is a ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’, a regional language that has been
deliberately invested with the expressive resources of the cosmopolitan
language, namely, Sanskrit. Pollock’s influential model is based largely on
the history of Kannada, which he gives as a case study. This model can be
nuanced by examining the interfaces between ‘cosmopolitan’ literature in
Kannada, represented primarily by the campū, a literary form that uses both
verse and prose, and its others: popular literature, inscriptions, and
commentarial literature.
While Sanskrit and Middle Indic inscriptions in Karnataka date from the
third century BCE, the earliest surviving Kannada inscription, from Halmidi,
is from the fifth century CE (Venkatachala Sastry, 1979a). From this point
up to the beginning of the ninth century, about sixty-five Kannada
inscriptions are available. Some were associated with royal courts (who, on
the whole, continued to prefer Sanskrit for inscriptions at this time)
(Pollock, 2006: 332 n. 2) and some with more local cultures of
commemoration, including mortuary monuments for warriors and monks.
The language of the earliest inscriptions differs in several respects from the
literary standard of ‘Classical Kannada’ (e.g., the use of -uḷ instead of -oḷ,
and -or instead of (av)ar (see Narasimhia, 1941). But these inscriptions,
which already use Sanskrit loanwords extensively, are not devoid of literary
features. For example, the ‘Kappe Arabhaṭṭa’ inscription at Badami
commemorates a local hero in tripadi, a meter that would long be associated
with folk poetry (Chidananda Murthy, 1966; Venkatachala Sastri, 1979b).
We know that there were literary works written in Kannada in the eighth
and early ninth century thanks to references and quotations in later works,
but none have survived. During this period, Kannada was deliberately
invested as a literary language that performed some of the same functions
as Sanskrit, such as royal inscriptions and expressive literature. The number
of Kannada inscriptions, including literary inscriptions, increased
exponentially. At the end of the reign of the Rashtrakuta King
Amōghavarṣa (r. 814–878), Śrīvijaya composed the Kavirājamārgaṁ (Way
of the Poet-King), the earliest extant literary work in Kannada (see
Seetharamaiah, 1994). The Way offers a vision of Kannada literary
production based largely on Daṇḍin Kāvyādarśaḥ (Mirror of Literature). In
addition to the poetic topics discussed by Daṇḍin, Śrīvijaya gave guidelines
for Kannada grammar, usage, and style. Śrīvijaya also maps Dandin’s
notionally regional ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ styles onto the Kannada-
speaking regions, bringing grammatical features into Dandin’s discussion of
literary style. Although earlier grammars of Tamil, such as the
Tolkāppiyam, also exhibit a concern with both grammar and literary form,
the Way evinces no awareness of Tamil traditions. One of Śrīvijaya’s goals
is the proper calibration of Sanskrit and Kannada words (Ollett, Pierce
Taylor, and Ben-Herut 2022).
The ‘literarization’ of Kannada came to fruition a century later with a
wave of Jain authors who wrote ambitious poems in the campū literary
form. These texts realized the courtly ambitions of the Way while at the
same time integrating popular elements that had been excluded from it,
deliberately or not, such as verse forms like the ragaḷe and akkara. One type
of campū is based on either the Mahābhārata or Rāmāyaṇa and equates a
royal patron with a character from the story. This includes Pampa’s
Vikramārjunavijayaṁ (941), Ponna’s lost Bhuvanaikarāmābhyudayaṁ, and
Ranna’s Sāhasabhīmavijayaṁ (later tenth century). Another type is based
on themes and stories from Jain lore, namely, Pampa’s Ādipurāṇaṁ (941),
Ponna’s Śāntipurāṇaṁ (945), and Ranna’s Ajitatīrthakarapurāṇatilakaṁ
(993). Pampa came to be known as the (ādikavi) ‘first poet’ of Kannada and
Pampa, Ranna, and Ponna as the (triratna) ‘three jewels’ of the language.
The campū was the most common genre among what has survived until
about the twelfth century, but it coexisted with other genres of Jain writing.
The anonymous Vaḍḍārādhane (c. tenth century CE) is a Kannada
commentary and prose retelling of nineteen stories from Sivakoti’s
Bhagavatī Ārādhana in Prakrit (Upadhye 1943: 63–72). Similarly, the
Gōmmaṭasāraḥ by Nēmicandra is a collection of Prakrit verses with a
Kannada prose commentary on Jain metaphysics. It was composed for the
general Cavundaraya (alias Gōmmaṭa), who himself composed the
Triṣaṣṭilakṣaṇamahāpurāṇaṁ. or Cāvuṇḍarāyapurāṇaṁ (978 CE), a Jain
universal history in Kannada prose. All of these works have a
straightforward and relatively archaic style, preserving features of earlier
inscriptions, that stand in contrast to that of the contemporary campūs.
Most of the major authors of the tenth century were associated directly
or indirectly with the Rashtrakuta court, the fall of which in 973 shifted the
centre of literary production to the Chalukya court. If Kannada began as a
literary and inscriptional language under the Rashtrakutas, it was
deliberately restarted under the Chalukyas, in particular under Jayasimha II
(1015–1043) (see Gurevitch, 2022). The genres in which Kannada was
written expanded rapidly to include for the first time scientific works
(Madanatilakam. of Candrarāja, Jātakatilakaṁ. of Śrīdhara) and other
works by non-Jain authors (e.g., Karṇāṭakapañcatantraṁ of Durgasimha).
The Jain poet Nāgavarma, an official under Jayasimha, composed a campū
about Mahāvīra (Vardhamānapurāṇaṁ) as well as an ambitious work of
poetics, the Kāvyāvalōkanaṁ, continuing the project of the earlier (and
Rashtrakuta-affiliated) Kavirājamārgaṁ. After a hundred years of intensive
literary experimentation (941, the date of the Ādipurāṇaṁ, to 1043, the date
of Jayasiṁha’s death), every subsequent court in the region patronized
Kannada literature. The Hoysala court of the early thirteenth century
deserves special mention insofar as its poets took this literary project in new
directions. Aṇḍayya’s poetry (including the Kabbigarakāvaṁ) inaugurated
a new aesthetic by intentionally avoiding Sanskrit-identical words, and
Janna’s Yaśōdharacarite, based on a popular Jain story, innovatively . uses
the kanda verse form throughout. Mallikārjuna’s Sūktisudhārṇavaṁ is the
first anthology of Kannada verse, and the Śabdamaṇidarpaṇaṁ, composed
by his son Kēśirāja, remains the most popular grammar of literary Kannada.
 The literature we have surveyed above is considered ‘classical’, it
begins the Kannada literary tradition, and it ends with the lifetime of the
statesman Basava (later twelfth century), a charismatic Saiva reformer who
sought out sites for the cultivation of literature beyond the court. With
Basava and his followers, the genres of literature change radically,
including vacanas (free verse) and popular meters such as the ragaḷe,
ṣaṭpadi, and to a lesser extent, tripadi. The style and grammar of the
language undergoes similar radical change—inaugurating what scholars
would later call ‘Middle Kannada’—in which the social base of literature
expanded to include, as authors, women, and people of diverse caste
backgrounds.
41
MEDIEVAL KARNATAKA

Manu V. Devadevan

I want to flag a set of three specific issues in this note on the historiography
of the Kannada-speaking region in medieval times. The first of these has to
do with the question of periodization and the adequacy or otherwise of the
nomenclature thereof. The second issue is concerning the themes that have
preoccupied historians, literary scholars, and folklorists who have studied
the medieval in Karnataka. The last issue has to do with the different
directions that researches have taken in the histories written in English and
Kannada.
The medieval period in India is generally identified with the age
between the close of the twelfth century and the commencement of British
territorial conquest of India in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the
last four decades, the period between the fifteenth and the eighteenth
centuries has been increasingly referred to as the early modern, consigning
the medieval proper to the three preceding centuries. At the same time, the
centuries between 600 and 1200 CE, which were hitherto identified as part
of the ancient period, came to be designated as the early medieval as early
as the commencement of the 1950s, but increasingly so from the mid-1960s
onwards. The period before 600 CE continues to be called the ancient by a
few historians on aesthetic considerations, but most historians today
identify this age (with their linguistic perspicacity) as the early historical
period.
The new periodization is not without its set of problems. For instance,
bhakti or devotion as a historically significant religious expression spans an
extensive period from the early seventh century to the close of the
nineteenth century. It is mighty uncertain if expressions of bhakti before
1200 CE can be called early medieval, the ones from the next three centuries
medieval, those from the three centuries that follow early modern, and the
ones from the nineteenth century modern. Similar difficulties exist with
histories of literary traditions. Languages such as Kannada and Tamil have
had a rich history of literature before 1200 CE, but the same is not true of
Punjabi, Bangla, or Odia. Indian conventions in fields of science such as
mathematics and astronomy developed in a way that makes their
classification along the existing lines of periodization impossible.
It is now widely recognized that the making of regions in India—such
as Karnataka, Kalinga, Kerala, Vanga, Gurjaratra, and so on—was a long
drawn process that began in the early medieval times. The early historical
phase in the history of a region dovetails with—or at least, extends into—
what is otherwise called the early medieval period. Thus, a recent work on
the history of Kashmir, extending up to the twelfth century, has been called
The Making of Early Kashmir (2018). On the other hand, a work on
urbanization in Karnataka for the period 600–1200 CE is called Decay and
Revival of Urban Centres in Medieval South India. This issue is not specific
to Karnataka but extends to other parts of India as well.
There is no gainsaying that the existing scheme of periodization
borrows from the one that arose in the European context, even when it is
true that the contours, contexts, and contents of each period are laid out
differently on the basis of actually existing evidence from India.
Nevertheless, the inadequacies in the existing scheme of periodization are
too glaring to be overlooked, although it comes as a convenient way of
identifying specific periods in history.
The second issue of concern has to do with the themes that have
attracted scholarly research on the history of Karnataka. There has been an
undue preference for studying the early history of what is now called the
Lingayat or the Veerashaiva faith. The works of the pioneers of Vachana
literature in Kannada, viz., Basavanna, Devara Dasimayya, Akka
Mahadevi, Allama Prabhu, and others, and the literary and religious
conventions that they inspired in the following centuries have drawn
scholarly attention for over a century now, with the bulk of the works
appearing after the administrative reorganization of Karnataka in 1956.
Anglophone research into this history has been important although they can
hardly be thought to be substantial. On the other hand, scholars writing in
Kannada have been more or less fixated about this history, what with over
three-fourths of the writings on medieval Karnataka centring on it.
Research in English has also been greatly drawn towards works of
religious philosophy produced during the Vijayanagara times, especially in
Sanskrit. Of greater consequence in terms of the extent of Anglophone
research are the works on temple architecture. These studies span a longer
period, beginning with the Badami Chalukya times (mid-sixth to the mid-
eighth century) and extending into the Nayaka period (sixteenth and
seventeenth century).
The long and short of the story is that the history of early medieval and
medieval Karnataka is overwhelmingly biased towards the history of
religion. There have been important works on political and economic
history and the history of literature, but these can only be considered as few
and far between vis-à-vis the preference for the history of religious life.
Apart from caricatures or anecdotal collection of information, there isn’t a
compelling work on the history of agriculture and irrigation in the region, or
on the history of seafaring and maritime trade. Little is known of the history
of language and aesthetics, of labour and enterprise, and with a few notable
exceptions, of gender and sexuality. Even in the realm of religious history,
the stories that remain to be told of the history of Jainism, Buddhism, and
Islam are richer than the ones told until now.
The third issue that I propose to raise has to do with the divergent
concerns that animate the English and Kannada research. The writings that
have appeared in English have often paid greater attention to historical
details and have generally sought assistance from a comparative perspective
to explore their questions. At the same time, it is noticed that the tendency
to overspecialize—by which is meant the drive to know more and more
about less and less—has made them ill-equipped to understand longue
duree processes within the region or from neighbouring regions, even when
they tend to compare aspects of Karnataka history with developments in
contemporary Europe or the Arab world. Historians studying inscriptions
from fourteenth century Andhra or Odisha are oftentimes unfamiliar with
inscriptions from contemporary Karnataka, and vice versa, even while
waxing eloquent on the fourteenth century feudalism crisis in western
Europe.
An added difficulty with research in English is that they do not
normally approach the object of enquiry on its own terms, but treat it as a
case study to expand the horizons of understanding of a set of concepts that
are oftentimes decontextualized. These works have the advancement of an
existing body of theoretical propositions as their prime objective. For
instance, a study of early Kannada literature might for all its descriptive
richness tell us little about early Kannada literature per se as the study
approaches the Kannada texts as an instance and exemplar of early
literatures. Similarly, studies on statecraft are aimed at drawing conclusions
about state or power in general and commenting on the processes of
political legitimation. A study of the Rashtrakuta or the Vijayanagara state
might tell us little about the processes of statecraft that these states
embodied, as the purpose is to ascertain whether the former was a feudal
polity and the latter, a segmentary state.
Kannada scholars have, in marked contrast, shied away from research
that has a theoretical intent. Their method is usually text-centred and brings
together elements of facticity and amateur ethnography. The understanding
of the historical context is often weaker, but the engagement with literary
and epigraphic texts is more insightful and semantically deeper than the
ones seen in their Anglophone peers. They are also bolder and less prone to
be nuanced in making innovative propositions.
The Kannada research is closely connected to questions of Kannada
identity and contemporary political interests of castes, communities, and
monastic institutions. This has led scholars in the language to develop
conceptual vocabularies of their own, involving structural binaries such as
bayalu (void) and alaya (form), surya (solar/diurnal) and chandra
(lunar/nocturnal) traditions, marga (highway) and desi (place-bound), and
several more, many of which are drawn from the vocabulary of precolonial
linguistic practices. The knowledge that comes to be produced through
these categories has strong political repercussions, especially in the context
of caste assertiveness and resistance. This has enabled them to unearth the
histories, knowledge, literary and performance practices, and stories of
resistance from a number of traditions that are conspicuous by their near-
total absence in Anglophone writings. In this sense, the historical
knowledge that the Kannada scholars produce have a direct bearing on and
are constitutive of contemporary political concerns in Karnataka.
Research in Kannada and English have their own share of strengths and
shortcomings. There is much that the two can learn from each other. As it
turns out though, there has been a strong reluctance on the part of both
groups to engage with each other’s methods, concepts, and concerns. The
result is there for all to see. Few Kannada scholars are aware of or
interested in the perceptive works on Karnataka history that Gil-Ben Herut,
Phillip B. Wagoner, and Richard Eaton (2014) have produced. And there is
hardly an Anglophone scholar who can summarize the ground-breaking
works of Shamba Joshi, Kirtinath Kurtakoti, and M. M. Kalburgi (2010)
written in Kannada.
The issues identified here have their own situated histories. Addressing
them is an historical endeavour in its own right. And addressed they must
be at various levels for us to break free from the existing shells of historical
knowledge on what has come to be called medieval Karnataka.
42
LINGAYATISM

Shivanand Kanavi

A prolific efflorescence of Bhakti literature emerged in the form of Vachana

—short poetic prose or free verse poetry depending on how you look at it—
in simple Kannada in the twelfth century, in north Karnataka. To date about
12,000 such Vachanas of this period authored by over a hundred spiritual
seekers and saints which included over thirty women have been found.
They called themselves and each other ‘sharanas’. They hailed from almost
all classes of society, professions, and castes including outcastes or
“untouchables”.
They declared that they are a new community to which all those who
believed and practised certain foundational tenets could join on initiation.
These tenets included:

1) Equality and mutual respect of all sharanas no matter what their was past
caste or community or which section of society they came from before
joining the new sharana community.
2) Equality among seekers, the sharanas, without any gender
discrimination.
3) Form of worship was personal and private to a symbol they called Ishta
Linga and was primarily meditative and yogic.
4) They considered all forms of labour and means of livelihood (kayaka) a
form of worship, provided the honest earnings from kayaka are
primarily used for social redistribution called dasoha.
5) They stressed the importance of being a compassionate and socially
productive human being in this world and this life. They thus ignored
the otherworldliness of heaven and hell, and rebirth.
6) By asserting the importance of socially productive and honest labour as a
form of worship to attain spiritual enlightenment, sharanas also ignored
renunciation and ascetic sanyasa as the dominant and preferred path to
 enlightenment, as preached by the existing forms of Vedic, Agamic,
Buddhist, Jain, and other traditions. Thereby they showed a path to
spiritual enlightenment for all ordinary householders, and all working
men and women.
7) They insisted on eating together among sharanas without any caste
discrimination, as they are all spiritually equal.

They lucidly expressed their views in the people’s language of the region,
Kannada, on their spiritual pursuit and their devotion to their personal
‘God’ whom they primarily conceived as formless. They also critically and
incisively commented profusely on prevalent precepts and practices such
as: meaningless Vedic and Agamic rituals, animal sacrifices during such
rituals, and intermediation of priests in any worship. They also opposed
rituals associated with animism and polytheism.
They opposed social discrimination based on caste and profession; they
also rejected temple-based worship dominated by priests and rituals. They
opposed discrimination against women in the spiritual field and so on.
They broke the Brahminical taboos regarding women as inferior and
unfit for spiritual self-realization because of natural biological functions of
menstruation and childbirth.
Vachanakaras not only ridiculed the Karma Kanda or Vedic Agamic
rituals of Yajna, Homa, and Havana, animal sacrifice and elaborate temple
worship, but they also took on all those Vedantins and Advaitins who
merely spoke of the lofty ideas of everyone having the same atma but
blatantly practised caste and gender discrimination. Vachanakaras
frequently called them Vag-advaitins (Advaita only in words).
The Vachanakaras that stand out with their incisive commentary are
Basava (1105–1167), a twelfth-century statesman, and his contemporaries,
Allama Prabhu and Akka Mahadevi. Many other sharanas, running into
hundreds, also contributed to creating the new ethos and the new
community’s norms as well as its metaphysics.
What they advocated in words and deeds was spiritually liberating and
attracted a large number of working people of all castes and even
‘untouchables’, artisans, farmers, traders, and some enlightened Brahmins.
The popularity of the leading Vachanakaras led the poets in the nearby
regions to write hagiographies of sharanas within a few decades. In the
thirteenth century, notable works in this regard are Palkurike Somanatha’s
Basava Puranamu in Telugu and the great Kannada poet Harihara’s ragales
regarding Basava, Allama, Mahadevi, and many other sharanas. The
Kannada version of Basava Purana inspired by the Telugu Basava
Puranamu was written by Bhima Kavi in the fourteenth century.
These hagiographic works were still set in the Puranic and old Shaivite
tradition and not the new radical ideas and practices of Vachanakaras and
their Vachanas.
The new community formed by sharanas practised a form of personal
worship and meditation using a small Ishta Linga, which they were to carry
on their body so that they can worship it wherever they are without any
need for temples. Thus the new community came to be known as Lingayat.
There was growing popularity and numbers in this new community
whose membership was open and inclusive (unlike other sects of Hinduism,
one can become a Lingayat through initiation, despite being born into
another religion). Later this perhaps led to royal patronage in some
kingdoms like Vijayanagara.
This was so particularly during the reign of Devaraya II (r. 1422–46).
Later important royal dynasties became followers of Lingayatism. However
it is important to note that these kings and queens considered their faith a
personal matter and were equally patronizing all religions in their statecraft
as was prevalent practice.
For example, the Nayakas of Ikkeri or Keladi who started as vassals of
Vijayanagara but later ruled vast regions of present-day Karnataka and
outside (1490–1763). Haleri dynasty or the kingdom of Kodagu (1633–
1834). Similarly many other smaller kingdoms, among which the most
remembered is the Lingayat queen Rani Chennamma of Kittur (1778–
1829), known for her inspiring role in the anti-colonial struggle against the
British.
As Lingayatism attained the features of an established sect with elite
patronage, Lingayat literature, which also came to be known at that time as
Veerashaiva literature, flourished from the fifteenth century onwards.
The Vachanas and sharana teachings and the associated metaphysics
now resurfaced in the form of several compilations and at least four
commentaries in an anthology of Vachanas and dialogues of various
Lingayat saints known as Shunyasampadane (attainment of the void or path
to enlightenment). The declarative or discussive form of many Vachanas
lent themselves to be cast as utterings of the sharanas in a dialogue or a
discussion in a peer group. Such a forum of peers was not directly
mentioned by Basava or Allama in their Vachanas but it was later imagined
as a spiritual forum called Anubhava Mantapa (hall of spiritual experience).
Originally Vachanas were not written either by formal academic
philosophers or for such philosophers, but for ordinary people in their
mother tongue Kannada, in the simplest of forms. Neither were Vachanas
written as canonical texts or foundational sutras for a new darshana or a
philosophical school like Sankhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Purva
Mimamsa, or Vedanta, etc.
It should be noted that sharanas were respectful towards Tamil Shaiva
saints of an earlier period, known as Nayanars, and called them the ‘63
Puratanaru’ (sixty-three ancients) but went about constructing their own
radically new community.
Vachanas were utterings of mystics based on their spiritual experiences
and reflection. While some common tenets, concepts, and approaches can
be distilled from the Vachanakaras, one also finds great individuality and
diverse approaches among them in search of spiritual enlightenment as
opposed to a monolithic philosophical system.
The Vachana form continued to be popular among post-Basava mystics
till the eighteenth century so much so that we have an equal or more
number of Vachanas written in the later period (fifteenth to eighteenth
century).
The complete Vachana literature edited and published today by the
Kannada Pustaka Pradhikara under the general editorship of the late M. M.
Kalburgi (1937–2015) by the Karnataka government in two volumes has
over 20,000 Vachanas. The process of collecting manuscripts,
authenticating them, and weeding out spurious ones and editing that started
in the 1890s is now more or less complete.
In the century-long effort in this direction many institutions like
Karnatak University, Basava Samiti, and several Lingayat mathas have
given institutional support. Many scholars have contributed to interpreting
the meaning and intent of Vachanas. To name a few: F. G. Halakatti, C.
Uttangi, S. S. Basavnal, Siddheshwara Swamiji, S. C. Nandimath, R. C.
Hiremath, S. S. Bhusnurmath, M. M. Kalburgi, L. Basavaraju, H.
Tipperudraswamy, M. Chidananda Murthy, V. B. Rajur, N. G.
Mahadevappa, A. K. Ramanujan, H. S. Shiva Prakash, D. R. Nagaraj, O. L.
Nagabhushana Swamy, etc.
 The social, political, and economic circumstances which led to this
efflorescence in the twelfth century and the 900-year trajectory of this
community are still being explored. A significant modern contributor to this
multidisciplinary exploration is historian Manu V. Devadevan.
By the fifteenth century, the popular open community of spiritual
democracy initiated by Basava and other Sharanas started taking the form
of a ‘faith that one is born into’ rather than voluntarily initiated into.
Concomitantly high priests emerged to interpret the faith and carry out new
rituals along with a large mass of followers of the faith. As traders,
landowners, sections of contemporary elite, including some royal families,
started joining the faith, there was a move to achieve formal
‘respectability’.
It took two forms. One was to pay obeisance to Basava and Allama but
move away from their radical and experiential approach and instead evolve
a formal metaphysics and a spiritual path which can be cast in a familiar
tradition. This attempt then associated Lingayatism to some form of
Advaita, old or new (Shakti Vishisht Advaita was one such new label).
The other attempt was to claim antiquity of origin to Agamas and old
Brahminical Shaivism in precepts and practices. This trend denies the role
of twelfth-century sharanas as founders of Lingayatism and at best calls
them reformers of an older faith.
Along with these developments, the community also started calling
itself Veerashaiva along with Lingayat. This was contrary to the fact that all
forms of Shaivism worshipped a Puranic, anthropomorphic Shiva believed
to be resident of the mythical Kailasa, etc., as their deity. However, sharanas
of the twelfth century did not recognize the Puranic Shiva as their deity nor
the associated temples and pilgrim centres like Jyotir Lingas, etc. Though
the sharanas called their deity Shiva, it was a formless Para Shiva (they
identified it with void—Shunya, space-Bayalu, an omnipresent element that
is a part of every human being and not residing only in idols and temples,
etc.)
It is also to be noted that several Lingayat seers interacted with an open
mind with Muslim Sufis and saints in the medieval period. As a result,
Lingayat Mathas of Savalgi Shivalingeshwara, Shirahatti Fakeer Swamy,
Kodekal Basavanna, etc., even today have a large following among both
Lingayats and Muslims and both communities participate actively in the
annual jatras (Rath Utsavs).
 Now there are two major trends in present-day Lingayat community.
One is to go to the spiritual roots of the community in the radical teachings
of twelfth-century sharana Vachanakaras. Many in this segment also believe
that Lingayatism should not be idenitified with Vedic or Agamic Hinduism
but a separate way of life and religion like Sikhism. They draw on the
precepts of Vachanas of sharanas of the twelfth century as well as many
practices of the community which are radically different from traditional
Hindus. For example, all Lingayats bury their dead (it is not known when
this practice started) as against cremation among Hindus and so on. Of
course, Lingayat burial rituals are different from Islamic and Christian
burials.
Kalburgi, a prominent academic and researcher of Lingayatism and
Kannada culture and literature, strongly advocated the recognition of
Lingayatism as a separate religion and not a part of Hinduism. He was
backed by many Lingayat seers and intellectuals. There were several large
rallies held in different parts of Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Delhi during
2017–18 demanding recognition from the central government that Lingayat
is separate religion like Sikhism, etc.
The other trend in the community pays formal obeisance to Basava and
other Sharanas but adopts various practices of older Shaivism including
temple worship. It recognizes a Lingayat priestly class (called Aiyanavaru
or Jangamas) to perform rituals. This segment also practises caste
discrimination and endogamy within sub groups of Lingayats (based on
their former professions) like Jangama, Banajiga, Panchamasali, Sada,
Ganiga, etc. They also do not object to being part of traditional Hinduism.
Today Lingayats constitute a significant community in Karnataka and
also exist in significant numbers in Maharashtra, Telangana, and in smaller
numbers in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. They are found in all professions and
classes.
Lingayats were able to access modern education under British
colonialism due to the efforts of intellectuals and businessmen and
landowners in the community who started several schools and colleges.
Significantly, Lingayat swamijis (priests) and seers in their mathas played a
major role in the spread of modern education since the beginning of the
twentieth century.
Lingayat mathas are local community institutions supported by land
grants from devotees. Some are centuries old and some are more recent.
Many mathas have grants from landowners of different castes,
communities, and religions. The properties of the mathas are managed by a
committee appointed by surrounding devotees in the form of a trust. The
committee then invites seers trained in the theory and practice of
Lingayatism to provide the local community moral and religious leadership.
There have been cases of removal of a swamiji from a matha when the
devotees found him unfit to carry out his moral and religious leadership.
Lingayat mathas are spread all over Karnataka.
In the twentieth century, many mathas made special efforts to provide
free boarding and lodging for poor students in their Prasada Nilayas without
discriminating on the basis of caste all over Karnataka and continue to do
so. Thus over a century, lakhs of poor students could get modern school and
college education. These efforts have led to the presence of Lingayats in
very large numbers not only in the traditional professions of farmers,
traders, and artisans but also in modern professions such as medicine, law,
engineering, academia, and administration. Today, with their large presence
in the economy and academia, they play a significant role in Karnataka’s
political, cultural, and social life.
43
EARLY HISTORY OF KERALA IN SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE

Rajan Gurukkal

Kerala, a strip of land between the Western Ghats and the sea, was a
landscape ecosystem made up of forested hills, undulating red soil terrain,
numerous palaeo-fluvial channels, multiple rivers, flood plains, marshy
tracts, wetlands, and long littoral, in the hoary past after transgressions and
regressions.

BEGINNINGS
Signs of Palaeolithic tools on the river beds and a few Mesolithic paintings
in the rock shelters on the high ranges vouch for the assumption that
Kerala’s human occupation had its beginnings there, roughly around 20,000
to 30,000 years ago. Huge finds of microliths at some places along the low
altitude rocky hills surrounded by marshy and waterlogged areas show a
wider distribution of the Mesolithic people, whose antiquity is about 10,000
years ago.
Neolithic tools, very rarely found here and there, give the impression
that Kerala was mostly in the Mesolithic culture until the arrival of iron,
traced back to the first millennium BCE. Presumably iron smelting people
were Dravidian speaking agropastoralists, whose archaeological remains by
way of burial relics including megalithic monuments are spread along the
red soil region of rocky backwoods, wet dales, and stony arid tracts. These
remains, attesting agropastoral heroism generally assigned to between ca.
500 BCE and 200 CE, are the first most widely distributed composite culture
all over the peninsular India. However, the Tamil Macro region
distinguished itself as the core of the Dravidian culture in which Kerala
formed an integral part.

AGROPASTORAL
This culture of agropastoral heroism is best represented in the Tamil heroic
poems composed by bards, constituting a huge corpus of classified
anthologies, popularly known as the Sangam works. Some of these
compositions date back to second century BCE, while most of them belong
to the turn of the CE. Quite a few are of later times between the fourth and
eighth centuries CE. As the Tamil heroic poetics would characterize, the
material basis of this composite culture depended on forms of subsistence
possible in the five types of physiographic divisions and eco-zones—the
hilly backwoods with cultivable slopes, the wet dales, the pastoral arid
tracts, parched areas, and the wetland littoral. Forms of subsistence suited
these eco-types in the above order were hunting–gathering, shifting
cultivation, rice and sugarcane agriculture, cattle keeping, and fishing and
salt manufacturing. In addition to these, crafts production overlapped the
eco-types and converged at strategic points of exchange overland and
overseas.
Such strategic points of exchange, both in the interior and coast, were
towns of various crafts production evidenced by excavations. Local as well
as long distance merchants of different languages and cultures, like Arabs,
Persians, and Eastern Mediterraneans converged there for overland and
overseas exchanges. Writings of Graeco–Roman navigators and coins,
predominantly of the Roman emperors, testify this. Archaeological remains
and inscriptions vouch for the presence of Jain, Buddhist, and Ajivika
monks adjacent to the interior towns.
Settlements in these eco-zones were of descent groups under their
headmen, the smallest category of chieftains. Other categories were ranging
between those with predatory control over the settlements of a huge hill and
those commanding an extensive region consisting of multiple eco-zones and
a variety of descent groups over there. All of them were warrior chieftains
whose power varied according to the size of the chiefdom and the extent of
predatory control over the cattle wealth. Some of the chieftains had forest
products, sea goods, and agricultural crops as their resources. A few had
control over natural resources like metals, minerals, and gems important in
overseas exchange. They were obviously more powerful, thanks to the
resource benefits of overland and overseas exchange as exemplified by the
Cheras, Pandyas, and Cholas—the three major ruling lineages.
Despite the differentiation in the extent of predatory control, the
economy of all chiefdoms suffered from the problem of scarce resources.
Hence all the chieftains, small and big, had to resort to cattle raids and
booty redistribution, the main politics of agropastoral chiefdoms.
Interspersed with the descent groups, several Brahmin households existed
as agropastoralists and dependents of the predatory chieftains, who
sustained them with gifts for their ritual and advisory services.
Characterized in social formation perspective, we see the overall set as
an ensemble of several Dravidian-speaking descent groups with five
different forms of subsistence coexisting and interacting under the
dominance of agropastoral warrior chieftains, whose politics was plunder
and redistribution under the passionate culture of heroism. Hero stones and
a variety of Megalithic monuments vouch for the hegemony of the culture.

TRANSFORMATION
This social formation had certain inherent limitations such as descent-
group-centric settlements, kinship-based relations of production, predatory
politics of redistribution, and heroic culture preventing to scale the
economy and sustain the people. A negatively skewed system already in the
process of dissolution seems to have been suppressed by a major marauding
tribe called the Kalabhras, issued perhaps from the uplands of Karnataka. A
couple of rock inscriptions of late fourth to early fifth century CE, at
Ponnamaravati near Madurai, provide evidence of a new ruling lineage,
probably the Kalabhras, to have subjugated all the chiefdoms. These
inscriptions register a land endowment with the tiller family to a non-
Brahmin religious establishment after purchasing a small portion of some
land gifted to Brahmins by the kings. It is evident that Brahman gift-lands
with attached tiller families were already in existence and what we see in
the inscription is its iteration indicating the coming into vogue of a new
system of agrarian relations transcending kinship.
Gifting lands to Brahmins as an instituted practice of kings was steadily
rising in northern India since 300 CE, causing widespread tenancy in land
and subjection of peasants to servitude, a process of feudalization of the
economy and Brahminization of the juridic-political structure as well as
culture. This royal practice of land grants to Brahmins and the process of
Brahminization spread all over the peninsular India too. In the entire Tamil
region the rise of Brahman gift-villages under royal patronage involved the
construction of temples as a coeval movement.
AGGRESSIVE MOVE
Unlike elsewhere in the country, Brahmin villages in Kerala were not the
result of royal land grants. According to a Brahminical myth, Parasurama,
an incarnation of Lord Vishnu created the landmass called Kerala out of the
sea. A legend narrates the Brahmin settlements of Kerala as Parasurama’s
creation. He is said to have brought the Brahmins from the Punjab and
settled them with the people and climate essential for the cultivation of
paddy. Full of self-contradictions, the legend then says that Parasurama
appeased all sources of threat at the foothills, the sea, and everywhere; gave
martial training to some of the Brahmins, armed them with sword, and
blessed them as rulers of the land.
Instances of peaceful penetration apart, Brahmin occupation of Kerala
was predominantly aggressive, involving physical coercion and forceful
enslavement of the farming clan (Pulaya) for the hazardous task of turning
marshy deltas and waterlogged flood plains into paddy fields, which meant
taming a landscape full of reeds, peat bogs, fens, etc., and draining by
digging canals. Enslavement of the Pulaya over generations erased their
past and that accounts for the absence of the counter narrative to the
Brahminical legend.
Arguably, Aryanization elsewhere in the country too was not altogether
as peaceful as often made out to be. Executed under the royal order,
aggression was from the part of the ruling power in most cases. Organized
resistances from the local peasants were there, but the patron ruler quelled
them. In the case of Kerala, there was no ruler, but only clan heads and
local chieftains whom the Brahmins could easily overpower. Hence the
Brahmin occupation of the land was rapacious and aggressive.
In the process of the paddy economy becoming dominant, all arts,
crafts, and other occupations came under hereditary obligations, and the
juridic-political system became Brahminical. This stratified social ordering
based on Brahminical ideas and institutions was a long process of over two
or three centuries. It marked a fundamental systemic transformation—the
transformation of the agropastoral social formation into the stratified
agrarian social formation by the ninth century CE.
44
EARLY AND MEDIEVAL KERALA

Kesavan Veluthat

THE PREHISTORIC PHASE

In the beginning, there was no word. Literary evidence wanting, our
knowledge about the earliest periods of history is limited to what
archaeological relics tell us. And there have been few excavations in
Kerala. Much of what we can say depends on artefacts collected, by chance,
from the surface. Still the situation is not hopeless. Tools of the Old Stone
Age have been recovered from the high ranges of the Western Ghats, from
places like Marayur, Wayanad, and Nilambur. This corrects the earlier
notion that Kerala, with its heavy rainfall and thick forest cover, was
inhabited by humans only in the Iron Age. Subsequently, we start getting
tiny stone implements (‘microliths’) representing the Mesolithic, a phase
between the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age. River beds in the
plains yield evidence of the New Stone Age later, with its attendant
advances in living conditions such as farming, domestication of fire, and
pottery-making. Since datable relics such as organic material have not been
found in association with these implements, these horizons are dated by
comparing similar cultural assemblages in neighbouring Karnataka and
Tamil Nadu. They come down to the mid-first millennium BCE, or even
later.
By the middle of the first millennium BCE, we start getting burial
monuments called megaliths. These are characterized by structures of big
stone, built to encase funerary remains of those who mattered. There are
different types of them. They share a few common features with similar
monuments in the entire Peninsula. These include the presence of iron
implements, to begin with of war and later of agriculture, indicating a
quantum leap in technology. They are also associated with pottery called
Black and Red Ware (BRW), thus suggesting a cultural community of their
builders. In certain cases, such as Ummichippoyil in Kasaragod district, the
interface between the Neolithic and the Iron Age/Megalithic is documented.

EARLY HISTORICAL PERIOD

In a few cases, occasional potsherds with letters in ‘Tamil Brahmi’ have
been discovered from megalithic complexes, showing that this culture also
represents the passage from the prehistoric to the historical. Label
inscriptions dating from about the third century BCE, i.e., the age of the
Mauryan emperor Ashoka who used Brahmi for the first time, have been
found on rocks and stone slabs as well. Some of them mention chiefs
celebrated in early Tamil literature, as do a couple of Ashokan edicts.
Certain sites, such as Pattanam near Kochi, have been excavated. They have
yielded relics of Roman contacts. Other evidence of Roman contact in the
form of Greco-Roman accounts and Roman coins too turns up by the turn
of the millennium. All these—early Tamil heroic poetry, Greco-Roman
Classical Accounts, Roman coins, Ashokan edicts, Tamil Brahmi label
inscriptions, archaeology of Roman contacts as well as megaliths—give a
clear picture of the society in early Tamizhakam, a single socio-cultural unit
of which Kerala and Tamil Nadu were integral parts.
Early Tamil bardic poetry, usually called Sangam Literature, comprise a
rich collection of songs of love and war. It is very helpful to historians. A
symbolism of landscapes called tinais helps in reconstructing the modes of
subsistence in Tamizhakam: gathering food by hunting, gathering, fishing,
and plunder and marginally producing food by cattle-keeping and some
agriculture. All capable members of the family worked towards earning
food. Whatever was so earned was consumed. Exchange of products of
different regions, based on need and reciprocity, is in evidence. Notions of
profit and loss, pricing and monetary mediation, are absent there. Surplus
wealth did not exist—anything over and above the requirement of daily
bread was either redistributed or destroyed ritually in potlatch-like
ceremonies. Society was not differentiated based on unequal access to
wealth.
As in economic activities, so in social organization, family was the
basic unit. A few families of kinsmen constituted an ur (a village). Villages
had their headmen, ur-kizhan, often the most senior among the heads of
families. There are cases where a kizhan had control over groups of ur
settlements of varying sizes. Everywhere it was based on kinship, and those
who were closer to the kizhan had greater prestige in the group. This
structure answered to the anthropologist’s model of chiefdom-level
organization. The chiefs with their men sometimes plundered neighbouring
villages. The booty captured was redistributed among his kinsmen. They
also took occasional tributes from the people. Poet-singers sang their praise
and were duly rewarded. They also rewarded those who officiated in the
rituals of sacrifices—often Brahmanas from northern India. These enhanced
the chiefs’ prestige and legitimized their power and control, such as they
were.
The chiefs, who are immortalized in these songs, differed in prestige
and the extent of control they exercised. Some of them, such as the Cheras,
Cholas and Pandyas, had greater proximity to the river valleys where some
agriculture was practised, and surplus wealth was produced. These
resources, including Roman gold, which arrived through the ports in the
mouths of these rivers connecting the Western Ghats with the sea, were
either flaunted for greater prestige or redistributed for gaining greater
patronage. These chiefs are called Muventar (three kings). However, in a
society that was not stratified, ‘king’ is too big a word as state was
irrelevant there. There was no notion of territory, no impersonal extraction
of surplus, no body of ‘officials’ to whom administrative, judicial and fiscal
functions were delegated, no monopoly of coercive power in the form army
or police. Everything was based on kinship and all relations were at a
personal level.
It was not, however, a seamless world, sealed off from external
influences. Sailors from the Roman empire, i.e., West Asia and Egypt,
frequented the coast in order to procure pepper and other spices which were
heavily in demand in the Roman world. These wild products grew on the
fertile slopes of the Western Ghats, watered by the generous rains of the
monsoon and reached the plains on makeshift rafts along the numerous
rivers. The sailors from the West did see it as veritable trade, and paid for
what they took away in Roman coins. Since South India had no use for
coins, these shining pieces of yellow metal were used as prestige items of
socio-technic value, flaunted as ornaments or given away as gifts. The
Roman coins have holes at their edges and show no sign of wear and tear.
This shows that they were used less as money than as prestige items. Like
‘Roman Trade, there were also exchanges with the Ganga valley as well as
Sri Lanka, evidence of which is available in archaeology, epigraphy, and
literature.
These contacts also brought in new ideas and institutions. People had
earlier followed their own cults and practices, worshipping deities such as
hunter-gods, war-goddesses, god of the sea, cowherd-god and rain god,
appropriate to their landscapes and occupations. Gradually, Judaism and
Christianity (and Islam later) arrived from West Asia and established
themselves in small pockets. So also, Jain, Buddhist and Ajivika systems of
belief as well as Vedic cults and rituals found their way here. Of these, the
last seems to have had greater influence on account of the greater patronage
they received. Priests performed sacrifices for the chiefs and received huge
gifts as their fees (dakshina). Such fees included cultivable land in the river
valleys. So also, the poet singers. A number of agrarian settlements came up
during this period, many of them under the control of Brahmanical groups.
This introduced a new element in society: a class of non-cultivating
magnates placed above the peasantry. Agriculture being labour-intensive,
extra-kin labour had to be inducted. This brought about major changes such
as surplus production, its unequal distribution and social differentiation.
Society went through a great transformation and one of its symptoms was
the arrival of the state.

INTO THE MEDIEVAL

Large areas of land came under the plough after clearfelling or burning
down forests, levelling the ground, draining off water from low-lying areas
and so on. This brought about major changes in economy and society. There
was unprecedented production of surplus. Its unequal distribution led to a
differentiated, ‘class-divided’ society. Brahmanas and the Brahmanical
temple had come up with command over vast areas of land and functioned
as corporate bodies, with control over an army of tenants and workers and
the allegiance that all this entailed. This ensured their social status not just
ritually. Caste got accommodated snugly in this hierarchical society. All
details of their ideology of society were accepted, including the Kshatriya
model of kingship. The form of the state visible in the documents answered
to shastra prescriptions.
The old kizhan chiefs, who had already graduated into warlords,
emerged as huge, landed magnates. They controlled their territory known as
natus and started functioning as their lords (natu utaiyvar or natuvazhis). A
few natus had come up anew. Integrating these units somewhat, a monarchy
rose with the flood plains of Periyar as its core. This was presided over by
the Chera or Kerala dynasty with Mahodyapuram (modern Kodungallur) as
its capital. These lords paid allegiance to the Chera king known as the
Perumal, transferred part of their revenue to him and fought his wars. There
were also huge agrarian corporations centred on temples and trading centres
looked after by relatively autonomous ‘guilds’. Revenue as distinct from
occasional prestation, delegation of power on an impersonal level,
monopoly of coercive power, literacy, urbanism, monumental architecture
and other defining features of state society appeared. Trade, too, graduated
from barter to an instituted process, with notions of price and profit, trade
centres, and charters of privileges granted to them.
By the twelfth century ce, regions registered considerable progress and
gained autonomy. That the Perumal kingdom broke up and these lords
became rulers of independent principalities was simply putting a stamp of
recognition on a fait accompli. The identity of Kerala crafted under the
Perumal kingdom, however, continued with changes which were more
important than continuity. The fractured polity under the natuvazhis was
more warlike, with fighting groups growing with increased power and
resources. Songs and legends celebrating war and warrior heroes came to be
produced. The number of non-Brahmana landlords increased. The
Brahminical corporations lost their rigour and discipline and individual
Brahmana households became considerable landlords at the expense of
others. At the same time, many temple-centred settlements developed into
sanketams with immunity from the secular authorities. Landlordism typical
of Kerala, known as the Janmi System, came to stay. Temples became the
centres of high culture and considerable progress was made in liberal arts as
well as scholarly disciplines, the most important of which was arguably
mathematics.
Trade continued. There is evidence of brisk trade with the West Asian
and Chinese world. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam arrived in Kerala in the
merchants’ ships and a symbiotic relationship of some sort developed here.
It was a continuation of this trade that brought European players like the
Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English here, which was to turn
a new leaf in the history of the world.
45
EARLY TELUGU LITERATURE

Harshita Mruthinti Kamath

The southern language of Telugu, in its early attested history, underwent a

transition from ‘literization’ (language used for inscriptional purposes) to
‘literarization’ (language used for composing literary texts) in terms of the
work of Sheldon Pollock (2006). Inscriptions in Telugu begin to appear in
the sixth century CE (Mahadeva Sastri, 1969, 1; Nagaraj, 1995, 10;
Narayana Rao and Shulman, 2002, 2). Around the turn of the second
millennium, Telugu came to be used for literary texts, particularly the
retelling of the epic Mahābhārata. The early history of Telugu is closely
connected to its sister language, Kannada, which emerged as a literary
language somewhat earlier, using many of the same literary forms (see also
the essay on ‘Early Kannada Literature’).
The first extant literary work in Telugu is by Nannaya Bhaṭṭa, a
Brahmin court poet of the Vĕṅgi Cāḷ ukya king Rājarājanarendra, who ruled
Rājahmundry (present-day Rājamahendravaramu) from 1018–61 ce
(Narayana Rao and Shulman, 2002, 55; Kamath, 2021b). Nannaya, who is
often described as the ādikavi (first poet) of Telugu literature, undertook a
Telugu version of the Mahābhārata, referred to as Mahābhāratamu, and
completed the Ādi Parvamu (Book of Beginnings), Sabha Parvamu (Book
of the Assembly), and part of the Āraṇya Parvamu (Book of the Forest).
Nannaya’s successor, Tikkana (c. thirteenth century), was a minister to the
regional King Mānumasiddhi from Nĕllūru. Tikkana began his Telugu
Mahābhāratamu with the fourth book, Virāṭ a Parvamu (Book of Virāṭa’s
Court), and continued until the Svargarohana Parvamu at the end of the
epic. But he left untouched the small section remaining of Āraṇya Parvamu.
This section was only completed by Ĕṛṛā pragaḍa (c. fourteenth century).
These three poets are known as the kavitrayamu or the ‘Trinity of Poets’ in
the popular Telugu imagination and are foundational for the history of early
Telugu literature (Loewy Shacham and Kamath, 2023).
 Nannaya inaugurated a new literary style in Telugu by composing his
epic Mahābhāratamu in campu, a mixture of verse and literary prose.
Nannaya used a range of meters, both vṛtta (syllable-counting meters,
including rare Sanskrit meters) and jāti (mora-counting meters inherited
from Prakrit as well as regional meters). Nannaya’s campu style and
variegated use of meter became paradigmatic for generations of later
classical Telugu poets. Telugu literature continued to evolve after
Nannaya’s foundational work, as shown by the completion of the Telugu
Mahābhāratamu in the following centuries by his successors. Tikkana,
whose syntax and diction, pushed the boundaries of the vernacular through
his uniquely dramatic and conversational style (Kamath 2021b, 200–206).
Ĕṛṛāpragaḍa, by contrast, composed his section of Āraṇya Parvamu taking
on the name of Nannaya and even adapting Nannaya’s style
(Mahābhāratamu Āraṇya Parvamu 4.7.469–470).
It is likely that there were literary texts before Nannaya that are now
lost. Some scholars believe that a text on Telugu prosody,
Kavijanāśrayamu. attributed to Jaina author Malliya Recana of the tenth
century, precedes Nannaya’s Mahābhāratamu (Arudra, 1996, 101–103;
Recana, forthcoming; see also Kamath, 2021a). Nannaya himself is thought
to have written a grammar on Sanskrit, Āndhraśabdacintāmaṇi, although
this text likely dates to centuries after Nannaya’s lifetime (Narayana Rao
and Shulman, 2002, 55; Pollock, 2006, 381).
Telugu belongs to the Dravidian language family and is hence related to
Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam. However, as Velcheru Narayana Rao and
David Shulman rightly point out, Sanskrit had a profound influence on the
language from the very earliest documents available to us: ‘Unlike Tamil,
which absorbed Sanskrit texts and themes in a slow process of osmosis and
adaptation over more than a thousand years, Telugu must have swallowed
Sanskrit whole, as it were, even before Nannaya. The enlivening presence
of Sanskrit is everywhere evident in Andhra civilization, as it is in the
Telugu language: every Sanskrit word is potentially a Telugu word as well,
and literary texts in Telugu may be lexically Sanskrit or Sanskritized to a
degree, perhaps sixty percent or more’ (Narayana Rao and Shulman, 2002,
3).
The importance of Sanskrit is evident in the themes adapted by early
Telugu writers. Nannaya composed the Mahābhārata in Telugu, giving
credit to Vyāsa and Vālmīki before him (e.g., Mahābhāratamu Ādi
Parvamu 1.22-23). Following Nannaya is Nannĕcoḍa (c. twelfth century),
whose Kumārasambhavamu (Birth of Kumāra) adapts the theme from
Sanskrit. The distinction between Sanskrit as mārga and Telugu as deśi is
thematized at the beginning of that work: ‘Earlier, there was poetry in
Sanskrit called mārga. The Chalukya kings and many others caused poetry
to be born in Telugu and fixed it in place, as deśi, in the Andhra land.
(Kumārasambhavamu, 1.23; translated by Narayana Rao and Shulman,
2002, 24). The relationship between Sanskrit (mārga) and Telugu (deśi) is
evident in prosody, poetics, and narrative themes for centuries of Telugu
poets following Nannaya and Nannĕcoḍa.’
The final important poet of early Telugu literature is Pālkuriki
Somanātha (c. thirteenth century). Somanātha’s Basavapurāṇ amu, which is
composed in the Telugu dvipada (couplet) meter, is foundational to the
growing multilingual Vīraśaiva tradition of the second millennium
(Narayana Rao and Roghair, 2014; Ramanujan; 1973 and Ben-Herut, 2018).
Championed as an anti-caste, anti-Brahminical text for a burgeoning bhakti
community, Basavapurāṇ amu tells the stories of the Vīraśaiva saints and
the hagiography of Basava. But Somanātha also composed other Telugu
works, including Paṇḍ itārādhyacaritramu and Caturvedasāramu, which
exemplify the overlap between Sanskrit and Telugu literary and religious
realms (Fisher, 2021). However, unlike the case of Kannada, Vīraśaiva
literary production did not radically alter the development of Telugu
literature; instead, during the high period of classical Telugu literature,
particularly during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries CE, the style
inaugurated by Nannaya continued to find favour.
46
TELANGANA AN OVERVIEW OF THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD

Salma Ahmed Farooqui

The Telangana state was officially inducted as the twenty-ninth state in

India in 2014, but the history of the region goes back centuries in time. It
embodied a much larger area compared to its present jurisdiction. The
region of the Deccan of which Telangana or Tilang formed a major part has
always evoked interest and curiosity among scholars and commoners. With
Haroon Khan Sherwani spearheading extensive research on the Deccan in
the mid-twentieth century, there is now a flurry of Western scholars like
Richard Eaton, Benjamin Cohen, Emma Flatt, Helen Philon, George
Michell, Karen Leonard, Marika Sardar, Navina Haider, and Keelan
Overton who have been writing on various aspects of the region.
The Deccan Plateau saw the emergence of civilizations on the banks of
Rivers Narmada, Godavari, and Krishna which harnessed regional political
and economic traditions and social, religious, and cultural beliefs from the
pre-Satavahana times to the rule of the sultanates and colonial powers and
finally the Asaf Jahis. Languages and trade routes consistently allowed
people to exchange commerce and cultures. With these historical–political,
economic, and geographical linkages, the region of Telangana became an
important pathway of exchange.
Several indigenous trends were prevalent in the Deccan since the sixth
century BCE when one of the territorial kingdoms known as Asmaka was
established there. Then the Deccan saw settlements of the Mauryas in the
third century BCE before the coming of the Satavahanas in the second
century BCE followed by other smaller kingdoms. With the coming of the
Arabs from the eighth century, and the North Indians from the thirteenth
century, the Muslim community started to slowly trickle into the Deccan
after its annexation by Alauddin Khilji in 1310. The sultan’s policies that
were applied in North India influenced the political, social, and economic
life of the people in the Deccan. The immigrants from the North belonged
to various stocks: Turkish, Afghan, Perso–Aryan, and Indo-Aryan and
followed various occupations. They established institutions in the Deccan,
which closely resembled those at Delhi. Among this mass exodus were also
some Sufis who strongly influenced the shaping of the culture and
community relations in the Deccan. In addition to this populace, the
Deccan’s strategic location also beckoned traders and missionaries from
South India.
Telangana came under the rule of the Kakatiyas from the twelfth to the
fourteenth centuries followed by the Padmanayakas for a century. Then
came the Bahmanis who ruled over Telangana in the fourteenth century and
finally disintegrated into five successor states of which the Qutb Shahis
established their state in 1514 with their capital at Golconda. Remaining in
power until 1687, the sultanate was overpowered by Aurangzeb’s armies
leading to a brief interlude of Mughal rule in the Deccan before the Asaf
Jahis could establish themselves in 1724 until 1948.
The Indian Ocean trade routes, which linked the Persian Gulf with
South India, had encouraged migration of people and ideas between the two
areas. Along with Muslim traders and merchants, there was an influx of
small groups of Persian notables, administrators, military men, and literati
into the Deccan, when Iran was attacked by the Mongols in the thirteenth
century, and thereafter. The Persian elites had officially adopted Shiism as
their faith and when they came to the Deccan, they brought with them their
new conviction in Usuli Shiism, giving patronage to Friday congregational
prayer mosques and other Usuli Twelver institutions. Later, the diamond
trade also attracted many Persian merchants to the Deccan, which was
another factor that led to the local adoption of Shiism.
The kingdoms that came up in the Telangana region almost six centuries
ago recognized the need for cooperation and coordination between people
of varied backgrounds—both who resided here and those who came and
settled down from outside. This took various forms: it was the integration
and acceptance of the native Hindus, North Indians, Afaqis, Hadramis, and
Habashis into a common society; later it was also the acceptance of colonial
influences into the mainstream culture. Although there was military,
political, racial, religious, and regional conflict, medieval Dakhni societies
were engaged in promoting cultural diversity that stood against all forms of
religious, racial, and cultural hegemony. A structure was created in which
cultural and religious groups coexisted, and where outsiders were
welcomed to join the cosmopolitan culture and in the process strengthen it.
The migrations from Persia and from North India to the Deccan led to the
emergence of new sociocultural forms. With the influx of the Persians,
Africans, Dutch, English, and French the region witnessed assimilation and
acculturation of new trends that was based on the adapting and borrowing
of traits from other cultures as a result of prolonged contact.
The Telangana region thus emerged as a historical entity with the
evolution of political power that did not emanate in North India but was an
amalgamation of different streams from Persia, Turkistan, Arabia, North
India, and the region itself. As a result, the region gained a distinct identity
in terms of a unique culture—Dakhni culture—that impacted music,
literature, art, and architecture. Incorporation of Persian models of
statecraft, theories of kingship, character of administrative institutions,
ideals of government, new traits in art, architecture, literature, and religion,
support for the local languages, active promotion of vernacular literature
and encouragement of traditional arts and crafts made the region a coherent
cultural reality.
Telangana had turned into a hub attracting people from everywhere in
various capacities. It was a variegated space marked by hybridity, fluidity,
and cosmopolitan culture that it is only natural that it deserves a larger,
more in-depth and profound sweep in its share of interdisciplinary research.
47
CULTURAL HETEROGENEITY: TELANGANA

Bhukhya Bhangya

Telangana is known for its cultural heterogeneity from the early historical
period. Being a gateway to South India, it witnessed many political and
cultural invasions from North India, but it retained its core cultural ethos.
The distinct cultural heterogeneity of Telangana is very much rooted in its
heterogenic environment. The Telangana environment is characterized by a
sloppy terrain, gneissic plains, and sandy soils, which determines not only
the economy of the region, but also the food culture of the people. The soils
of Telangana are mostly reddish sandy and sandy loams, which were
popularly known as chalka. The chalka soils were mainly intended for dry
crops. The rocky landscape and red soil have thus given a physiographic
and ecological heterogeneity to Telangana. This geological heterogeneity
had analogues in the social formation of early society. That is why
Telangana has developed a distinct social formation. The Deccan Plateau
comprises distinct geological sub-regions broadly aligning with present-day
Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. Among all the
Deccan sub-regions, Telangana has witnessed an extraordinary ecological
diversity, and has thus accommodated widespread settlements over
centuries. However, Telangana has survived, assimilating those new
external cultural influences without losing its old cultural foundations.
External influences have always remained superficial because the
geological heterogeneity of Telangana has not allowed the complete
submergence of its culture into an external culture. The early settlements of
Telangana, which were founded on artisanal activities, are significant to
understanding the sociopolitical and economic culture of Telangana.
Pastoral activities along with a crafts-based economy have remained a
fundamental character of the Telangana economy down the centuries. The
availability of iron in the region has shaped the social formation and history
of Telangana, which has resulted in the emergence of a considerable
number of occupational social groups and communities. These economic
and social formations have been critical in both evading and assimilating
foreign influences within the region. The Telangana region was also able to
evade the influence of the Mauryan empire. The critical engagement of the
people of the region with foreign forces has kept Telangana’s identity intact.
The geographical and socio-economic formation of the region has
facilitated such a history.
One can even see a striking difference between North and South India
in terms of political formations. Unlike in North India, the Deccan did not
allow imperialistic politics to grow in the region. Imperial political
formations were resisted by not only the local chiefs, who enjoyed
considerable autonomy, but also by the people. This tendency also put
check to a centralized administration in the region. In almost all the South
Indian kingdoms, the local chiefs wielded considerable power and enjoyed
symbolic suzerainty over their territories.
The Deccan evolved into three politico-cultural regions by the thirteenth
century, namely the Maratha region under the Yadavas of Devagiri, the
Kannada region under the rule of the Hoysalas, and the Tilinga or
Telangana region under the rule of the Kakatiyas. This formation was
largely based on language. The Bahmanis tried to unite the Deccan by
creating an overarching culture called Deccani, which was Indo-Persian and
secular. Unlike the Delhi sultan, the Deccan sultans promptly adopted the
local culture and deepened new culture without disturbing the core culture.
The Deccan rulers frequently asserted their power in their respective region
based on its politico-cultural foundation.
The Deccan rulers indeed maintained tactical relations with the Delhi
rulers. From the beginning of history, it was a general practice among the
Deccan rulers that they would surrender to North Indian imperial power
when it was strong, and asserted their power when it weakened. The North
Indian imperial rulers too, knowing the autonomous tendencies of the
Deccan rulers, did not insist on merging Deccan territories into their own
empires. Instead, the imperial powers allowed the Deccan rulers to rule
their territories even after their defeat in war. They demanded that the
imperial suzerainty be accepted and annual tributes paid regularly. Those
empires which tried to merge the Deccan into their own did not last long, as
in the case of Mughal rulers. After they took over the Deccan, the Mughal
rulers lost their control over all the regions, including the Deccan, and were
confined to the surroundings of Delhi, as all the other regional powers
challenged their imperialistic politics and asserted their power in their
respective territories.
The Deccan states were slightly different from those of North India and
Tamil South India, where Brahminical ruling values were well established
and strong. Aryanization had gained momentum from the time of the
Pallavas in Tamil and coastal South India. By the time Aryan culture
reached central Deccan (Telangana), the local Shudra culture had come into
prominence. Although there is dispute among historians about the castes of
the Deccan rulers, all the dynasties which ruled Telangana were headed by
Shudra kings, except the Vakatakas. The strong presence of Buddhism and
Jainism in the region, too, did not allow for the Aryanization of Telangana.
The Deccan Shudra rulers did perform Brahminical rituals following their
coronation ceremony, but one has to see this as a diplomatic act to
legitimize their position as rulers within the broader Brahminical idea of
kingship. Performing sacrifices and granting land to Brahmins were
important gestures in statecraft. Interestingly, no Deccan Shudra king
aspired and claimed the Kshatriya varna within the four-fold varna system.
Before the spread of Buddhism, Telangana was inhabited by various
tribal groups that were headed by strong chiefs who ruled from their
fortified towns. They include the Asmakas in Nizamabad district, Sebakas
in Karimnagar district, Pulindas in Adilabad district, and Mahisakas in
Nalgonda and Mahbubnagar districts. These tribal groups were worshippers
of Yaksha, Naga, and mother goddesses; the Yakshas and other natural gods
such as the Snake and Sun are evident from the terracotta figurines found
here. Telangana has been home to a number of cults, beliefs, and religious
practices from the early historical period. Like any other society, the
Telangana society too worshipped natural gods and goddess before the
development of institutionalized religion.
The earliest belief system, during the hunting and food gathering stage
of history, involved humans worshipping nature and animals. It was
believed that nature had a superpower. When humans turned to food
production, mother goddesses were treated as a symbol of creation and
production. Thus, the practice of worshipping the Naga and mother
goddesses had spread across India, even before the coming of the Aryans.
Naga and Nagini worship, or serpent worship, are still prevalent in
Telangana: the aboriginal Gond community in the region worships Nagoba
(the Serpent god) with utmost ritual. Every indigenous clan has plants and
animals as totem, which are worshipped along with their family goddesses
and gods, and elders. This practice has been in prevalence from the Early
Historical period.
Archaeological evidence suggests that there was widespread worship of
mother goddesses in Telangana from the Megalithic period. A figure which
typically represents the present-day mother goddesses of Telangana has
been found at Peddabankur. Two types of figures have been discovered
here: one with upraised hands and the other holding a bunch of fruits, with a
parrot nudging the breasts. The Dhulikatta figure of the mother goddess
holds her two prominent breasts with her hands from below. A number of
terracotta figures of mother goddesses and animals have been found at
Peddabankur, Dhulikatta, Yeleswaram, and Nelakondapalli. A goddess is
shown standing naked in a pool of lotuses, bathed by two elephants. Along
with the worshipping of the mother goddesses, the early Telangana people
also participated in the Naga cult, considered to be the worship of powerful
supernatural beings. A figure of a snake made of iron has been found at
Peddabankur. Later, the figure of the naga was also associated with the
Buddha and Shiva. The Muchilinga Naga protecting the Buddhapadas, or
the entwining of the nagas around Buddhist stupas, shows the continuity of
the Naga cult even during the height of Buddhism in Telangana. The
worshipping of Mahishasur and Nandi (buffalo and bull) also continued in
Telangana. The trisula and sulam (iron rod with a sharp point), which have
been found in Telangana in large numbers, were associated with Shiva and
Durga in the later period. Thus, some of the early religious forms,
particularly of the mother goddess, Naga and Nandi, have remained the core
of the Telangana belief system, even after the strong tide of institutionalized
religions. Telangana belief system is very close to nature and production
system and simpler in practice. That is why early forms of Buddhism and
Jainism and reformed Vedic religion were welcomed in the region.
Buddhism and Jainism, from their birthplaces in eastern India, spread to
Telangana during the lifetime of their founders, Gautam Buddha and
Mahavira, respectively. According to Suttanipata, the great saint Bavari left
Kosala to settle in a village on the bank of the Godavari in Assaka
Janapada, which is now identified with northern Telangana. Bavari was the
first person to adopt Buddhism in the region. The village he lived in is
identified with modern-day Badankurti in Adilabad district. He sent sixteen
of his disciples to the Buddha in order to learn his philosophy and
teachings. Out of the sixteen, only Pingiya returned to Badankurti and the
rest, greatly influenced by the Buddha’s preaching, chose to continue their
life close to the Buddha. Bavari, upon learning the greatness of the
Buddha’s philosophy from Pingiya, converted to Buddhism. He was
responsible for the spread of Buddhism in Telangana.
Buddhism and Jainism have had a tremendous impact on the social and
cultural life of the Deccani people for about 1,500 years: Buddhism from
300 BCE to 600 ce, and Jainism from 700 to 1200 CE. Both the religions
were born out of the conflicting socio-economic and political developments
of sixth- and fifth-century BCE India. The archaeological findings suggest
that early Buddhism, or the Hinayana sect, was widespread in Telangana, as
early figures worshipped by the Buddhists have been found in the region in
abundance. The findings suggest that before the introduction of the image
of the Buddha around the middle of the second century ce, a variety of
symbols of the Buddha such as the Bodhi tree, Dharmachakra, Triratna,
throne, Swastika, Buddhapadas, and the chaitya or stupa were worshipped.
The chaityas were built to enshrine these symbols. Among all these
symbols, the Buddhapada was the most popular. They were generally
associated with either a throne, a lotus, or a flaming pillar. The Bodhi tree,
which symbolizes enlightenment of the Buddha, was also widely
worshipped.
Although Jainism and Buddhism disappeared from Telangana, they
have had a strong impact on the social and cultural values of the people.
Jainism was not purely a trading and ruling-class religion; it also reached
the masses through various programmes. Its proponents gave up all the
orthodox practices, including nudity, and began wearing white clothes. The
twelve vows, which were important if one wished to become Jain, were not
enforced too rigorously: meditation before the paramatma (God) for at least
forty-eight minutes a day, or the observance of twenty-four hours of fasting
at least once a year, was sufficient to free one from misery. Thus, bhakti
(devotion) had become central to Jainism. The use of local languages like
the Prakrits in the early times, and Kannada and Telugu in the early
medieval period, attracted the masses. Vows such as abstaining from
conscious injury to living things, abstaining from falsehood and theft, etc.,
brought in massive following from the trading and merchant communities.
The trading guilds particularly became staunch patrons of Jainism, for
example, the trading guilds of ayyavalis and mumuvidandas. The guilds as
well as individual traders gifted land and money to the Jinalayas and Satras
for their day-to-day maintenance. The Satras, which provided food and
shelter to the poor people, were crucial in attracting the masses to Jainism.
This practice was later appropriated by Shaivism. The Komatis, who were
the main trading community in the Telugu region, were initially followers
of Jainism. The term ‘komati’ is said to be derived from the gomata
tradition of worshipping the cow in Jainism. A worshipper of gomata is
called gomathi or komati. Of course, later, in the sixteenth century, the
Komatis embraced Shaivism, as narrated in the Vaisya Purana, which was
said to be articulated in the same century and claimed the Vaisya varna.
Even Brahmins, like the Kannada poet Pampa, who disliked Vedic rituals,
embraced Jainism. Although Jainism disappeared from Telangana, its
notion of charity lives on in many respects.
Buddhism also underwent many changes in philosophy and practice
over time, and became accessible to the common people. Although
craftspeople and merchant groups initially supported Buddhism, it
eventually gained the overwhelming support of the gahapatis or the rural
peasant classes as well. They donated to the monasteries generously. In
certain areas, they were the backbone of the sangha (monastery). Broadly
speaking, Buddhist followers were of two types: monks (bhikkus and
bhikkunis) who lived on alms, and lay followers who largely constituted
gahapatis and craftspeople. Donations from the second group were crucial
in meeting the day-to-day expenses of the monks living in the monasteries.
In the Deccan, epigraphic evidence suggests that these lay followers made
the largest donations, greater than even the merchant classes. They believed
that serving the monks would bring happiness, a long life, and strength.
They also followed the code of conduct and morality laid down by
Buddhism. The Buddhist monasteries, which were spread across the region,
played an important role in bringing the tribal and other lower castes into
the Buddhist fold. Every monastery was headed by a samiya (monk) or
mahasamiya (chief monk) and functioned with the help of a caretaker called
uparakkita. There was no rigid hierarchy within the monastery setup.
The social base of Buddhism soon widened further with the spread of
the Mahayana sect. Mahayana Buddhism had broken down the monopoly of
the monks as a means to attain nirvana; it preached that life lived within the
framework of dhamma would help attain nirvana. This assured followers
that anyone could potentially become the Buddha. The Mahayanas believed
that grihasta (family life) was not a hindrance to attaining nirvana, and this
attracted the cultivating communities in a big way. The spirit of
cosmopolitanism of sangha life led many of those belonging to the lower
varnas to embrace Buddhism. The use of the local Prakrit languages also
attracted the masses. After the decline of the Mauryas in the north, the
Deccan became the main centre of Buddhist activities. Nagarjunakonda
turned into the main philosophical centre and gave birth to several new
philosophies; the Buddhist sculptures produced in Nagarjunakonda as well
as in other parts of Telangana and Andhra were unmatchable. The
contribution of Buddhism to the development of crafts, trade, and
agriculture was tremendous. The social and spiritual morals transcended
into productive relations and paved the way for the overall development of
society.
Thus, Buddhist and Jaina philosophy and tradition have been central to
Telangana society. Both religions contributed to the flourishing of trade in
the region; that was the reason why the trading community was at the
forefront of the patronage of these religions. Besides promoting economic
activities, they played two immediate historical roles. During the early
historical period, Buddhism largely succeeded in putting a check to Vedic
religious practices in the Deccan, particularly in Telangana, while Jainism
rescued the newly emerging Shudra ruling class when it was struggling to
elevate its social status. By the early medieval period, a number of the
Shudra chiefs had asserted their power across the Deccan. Although they
were politically powerful, the Brahminical social system treated them as
inferior and did not allow them to improve their social status. In such a
situation, they embraced Jainism. However, from the thirteenth century,
they preferred Virasaivism over Jainism as a means of raising their social
status. Both Buddhism and Jainism were killed in the region by
Brahminism. When Brahminism evolved Puranic theism to check the
spread of Buddhism, the Buddhists made efforts to protect their followers
by broadening their practices. But the new form of the Buddhism, which
came in the form of the Mahayana philosophy, reduced Buddha as the ninth
incarnation of Vishnu. This argument gained currency, such that all the
great Mahayana philosophers, such as Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Bhavya,
Asanga, Vasubhandhu, Dinnaga, and Dharmakirti, were Brahmins.
However, it was two Brahmin scholars of the medieval period, Mallikarjuna
and Somanatha, who were responsible for the wipeout of Buddhism and
Jainism in the Telugu region. Buddhism and Jainism were replaced with
Shaivism, and this continues to this day.
The Shaiva cult has been widespread in Telangana from the early
historical period. All the famous temples in Telangana are Shaiva temples.
Shiva is said to be a primarily Dravidian god. He has been described in
Brahminical literature as Daksinamurti. However, the Shaiva cult is seen as
an amalgamation of the Vedic Rudra and the Indus Valley Pasupata
philosophies. Shaivism started developing more prominently in Telangana
from the period of the Vakatakas and Vishnukundis. From the seventh
century onwards, Shaivism had begun branching out into different sects on
the basis of deeksha (initiation in divinity). The deeksha culture, which
centred on an acharya, made Shaivism a popular religion. Each acharya
formed a matha and took up human welfare activities. This helped the
Shaiva pandits or acharyas reach out to the masses. Among the Shaiva
sects, Kapalika, Pasupata, Kalamukha, Aradhya-shaiva, and Veerashaiva
were important.
Veerashaivism was widespread in the Deccan between the eleventh and
the thirteenth centuries. Basaveshvara from Karnataka and Mallikarjuna
Panditaradhya from the Telugu region were preachers of this philosophy.
However, over the course of time, only Basaveshvara’s teachings came to
be known as Veerashaivism, while the Pandita teachings formed the
Aradhya cult. This cult was a manifestation of a new sect of Shaiva bhaktas
(followers) known as Virabhadras, Mailarabhatas, and Viramusthis, who
worshipped heroism in the Shaiva cult. The Veerashaiva movement, which
started about the close of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century
in northwestern Karnataka had a strong impact on the Telugu region. The
main supporters of this sect were priests, traders, peasants, and craftsmen.
The priests, who were called jangamas, were instrumental in spreading the
Veerashaiva philosophy among the masses. Because of its anti-Brahminical
and anti-caste philosophy, it caught on very quickly. However, it did turn
orthodox in the later period; particularly, Aradhya Veerashaivism preached
by Mallikarjuna Pandita accepted the caste system and the Vedas.
The Veerashaiva movement was, in fact, a response to the changed
socio-economic conditions of the medieval period. from the eighth century
onwards, a new political class had emerged among Shudras. Its members
were accommodated in the Rashtrakuta, Chalukya, and Kakatiya
administrations. The reformed Brahminism in the name of Veerashaivism
accommodated these Shudra peasant castes by offering them the Kshatriya
varna. Similarly, there was tension between Jaina and Brahmin traders who
emerged from the temple economy. From the early medieval period, the
whole of South Indian trade was dominated by Jaina trading guilds. This
had become a serious challenge for Brahmin traders, who took to attacking
Jaina traders in the name of a philosophical war between Veerashaivism and
Veeravaishnavism. The attacks on Jaina centres in the Tamil country, which
were started by the Alwars and Nayanars, gradually spread to the Telugu
region as well. Many Jaina centres were converted into Shaiva temple in the
Deccan including Telangana.
The Veerashaiva movement, started against Brahminical orthodoxy and
the caste system, ended up legitimizing the claims of the Shudras for a
higher position in the varna system. The development of the Telugu
language also came as a boon to neo-Brahminism, which came in form of
reformed Vaishnavism propagated by Ramanujacharya of the Tamil
country. Telugu poets and literary personalities—namely Nannaya, Ketana,
Tikkana, Nannichoda, Annamayya, Potana, Srinatha, Jakkana, Ramadus,
and Tyagaraju—were instrumental in spreading neo-Brahaminism in the
Telugu region.
However, the Vaishnava tradition was more popular in the Andhra
region, which was closer to Aryan culture; in Telangana, Shaivism was
more widespread. In Telangana, only the Velama chiefs of Rachakonda
followed Vaishnavism because of the influence of the Vijayanagara
kingdom, but it did not spread among the masses. It appears that they
worshipped Vaishnava gods besides their family god Mailaradeva. It
became fashionable among the newly emerged peasant warrior castes such
as the Reddys, Velamas, and Kammas to embrace either Veerashaivism or
Veeravaishnavism, in order to raise their social status. The Shaiva and
Vaishnava priest related their ancestry with an established royal lineage,
such as the Suryavamsa and Chandravamsa. Trading and crafts-based
castes, such as the Komatis, Padmasalis, Viswakarmas, and a few
Panchamas ( Jangamas and Maladasaris), were the main followers of
Veerashaivism and Veeravaishnavism. The Jangamas (mendicants) of these
cults further linked their origin with the Brahminical gods, which resulted
in the production of the Kulapuranas during the medieval period. The origin
of each community was narrated in its Purana, and these communities often
claimed higher position in the Brahminical varna system. In the process,
many local gods and goddesses were also assimilated into the Brahminical
fold.
Telangana’s spiritual culture is thus mainly rooted in the cult of mother
goddesses and that of Shiva, both of which were associated with Dravidian
culture. Although the Brahminical culture spread to the other parts of
Deccan, it did not impact Telangana much. Starting with the Satavahanas,
the ruling classes mostly belonged to the Shudra caste, and they adopted
and patronized one or the other form of the Brahminical religion. But this
was confined to the ruling classes. Reformed Brahminism, in the form of
Veerashaivism and Veeravaishnavism, did reach the lower castes, but not
for long. Some of the local goddesses and gods were appropriated by neo-
Brahminism, but the people continued to worship them in their own way.
The lower castes also articulated the mythologies of their caste origins in
newer ways, often claiming a higher position in the caste system. But those
claims were not respected by the dominant castes. However, the Shudra
peasant caste, which was associated with the state military and
administration, managed to negotiate a higher position in the varna system.
The neo-Brahaminism of the medieval period that attempted to assimilate
the Shudras into the Brahminical spiritual culture was not fully successful
in doing so.
The assimilation of Islamic culture into Deccan blended Telangana
culture further. Islam reached Deccan much before the sultanate rulers did.
However, the long Muslim rule brought the different sects and philosophies
from West Asia to the region. The Muslim rulers, irrespective of their
personal beliefs, patronized both the Sunni and Shia sects, as well as the
local religious practices. The Qutb Shahis were Shias, but Sufism, which
had sprung from the Sunni sect, reached its heights during their regime,
producing a new belief system, social practices, and language in the region.
Mystic Islam or Sufism was instrumental in creating a cultural synthesis.
The Sufi philosophy, which preached that ‘the mighty is one’, erased the
gaps between the cultures of the Muslims and the other non-Muslim local
people. The Sufi cult was very strong in the region right up to the twentieth
century. The Sufi saint Shirdi Sai Baba, who died in 1918, still draws a
huge number of devotees from Telangana. That Sufism is deeply entrenched
in the Telangana soil is evident from the dargah (tomb or shrine of a
Muslim saint) and pir (religious saint) celebrations, which are attended by
both Muslims and non-Muslims. Although Telangana represents a
heterogenic culture, there is an overarching cultural assimilation. This
distinguishes it from the other regions of India.
The Sufi saints played an important role in spreading popular Islam in
the Deccan. As a mystic form of Islam, Sufism prescribed the ‘love of the
absolute’, that is, Allah. Sufism was indeed a response to the growing
conservatism in Islam. Sufism developed a different devotional path
through which the devotee could seek mystical insight and directly
experience God. The devotional path of the Sufis, shaped over a period, is
based on the Quran’s message, the Hadith, and the preachings of the
Prophet’s intimate follower. Like the ascetic followers of the Prophet who
lived on a bare bench outside the first mosque in Medina, the Sufis
preached Islam by singing in local languages and through herbal treatment.
A similar parallel mysticism is also found in Veerashaivism and
Veeravaishnavism, and among Byzantine Christians during the medieval
period. Within sufism, there were different variations, each formed into a
separate silsila (order). The main Sufi sects popular in the Deccan included
the Chishti, Suhrawardi, Junaidi, Qadiri, and Naqshbandi orders. Most of
them were born in Persia, but were shaped in India, particularly the Chishti
and Naqshbandi orders, which developed in India.
Although there was an inflow of Muslims (as traders) in the Deccan
from the early medieval period, the political invasion by the sultanate rulers
accelerated this inflow. A large number of the local lower castes embraced
Islam because of the influence of Sufi saints, who acted as healers,
preachers of moral values, and entertainers. They adopted the local
language and culture in their daily preaching, and won the people’s hearts.
They are remembered and worshipped by devotees even after death. The
spread of Islam produced an overarching cultural synthesis. The
development of Urdu, the dargah culture, and urs and pirla pandaga
celebrations are some examples of cultural synthesis in Telangana.
Telangana has historically been a multilingual region, with several
social groups and communities inhabiting the land. From the early times,
each community has evolved and maintained its own language. Over a
period, with the formation of bigger states, these languages merged into the
language of the dominant tribe. The development of the written script, in
particular, saw the disappearing of several of the minor languages. Thus, the
Prakrit languages, which developed a script in the early historical period,
became the dominant languages in Telangana. However, some groups such
as Gonds, Koyas, Chenchus, and other nomadic communities have
managed to sustain their language. From the third century BCE, Sanskrit
progressively replaced the Prakrit languages in India. But by the seventh
century CE, it took a backseat with the development of the regional
languages. A similar pattern was also witnessed in the Deccan. The Telugu
language developed from the Prakrit languages. Prakrit was the lingua
franca of India during the Mauryan period; the Brahmi script, which was
used to write Prakrit, gave birth to the Telugu script.
There is a difference of opinion on the origin of the word ‘Telugu’ and
its association with Telangana. In most of the literature, attempts have been
made to prove that Telugu is the language of the Andhra people, and that
Telugu literature developed in the coastal Andhra region. However, recent
research has observed that the words ‘tilinga’ or ‘telinga’ would have been
derived from the term ‘telivahana’. The early Buddhist monks described the
Godavari River as telivahana; the people living in the Godavari Valley were
thus called telingas. The Vayu Purana also mentions the existence of the
telinga janapada. It is believed that the language of the telingas must have
developed as tilungu over a period.
Telugu took a literary form in the Renadu (Kadapa) region under the
Renati Chodas. The Kalyani Chalukyas, who spread their power over the
present Kannada- and Telugu-speaking regions, were responsible for the
development of the Kannada-Telugu language and script; their inscriptions
are written in this language and script too. The credit for the development
of Telugu goes to the Shudra peasant military chiefs and mercenaries, who
rose to power from the various tribal ethnic groups of the region. Among all
the chiefs, the Kakatiyas were the first to unite all the Telugu-speaking
regions, which resulted in the standardization of Telugu as the state
language. As the Telugu language and script developed with the support of
the local chiefs, the Chalukyas also used them in their inscriptions to reach
out to the masses. Religious institutions such as those run under Jainism and
Veerashaivism too contributed to the development of Telugu: they preached
in Telugu, as it was the language of the masses.
When Telugu had taken literary form, there were two parallel traditions
in Telugu literature: one represented by Sanskrit and Brahminic culture, and
the second represented by the desi (local) culture. The former was margi
(classical type) literature, spread mainly over coastal Andhra. The latter was
based on local songs, ballads, and lyrics, and was found in the semi-arid
regions of Telangana and Rayalaseema, where Brahminical influence was
mostly absent.
There were two dominant religious traditions in the early medieval
Telugu region, apart from Jainism: Vaishnavism and Shaivism. The trends
of these religions were reflected in Telugu literature. The Vaishnava group,
starting from Nannaya to Annamayya, was mainly engaged in translating
Puranic and Sanskrit texts, to bring Brahminism back into prominence after
it had weakened with the spread of Veerashaivism. This group brought
Sanskrit words, grammar, and genres to Telugu literature. The early
Sanskrit Telugu scholars thus gave a new shape to Telugu literature which
had a profound longterm impact on it. The Shaiva group on the other hand
wrote in local spoken Telugu, retaining its idioms and flavour.
Despite the influence of Sanskrit and Brahminism, Telangana retained
its original Telugu idioms and genres. Jainism and Veerashaivism had a
strong impact on Telugu literature in Telangana. It was scholars from this
tradition who produced the early Telugu literature in Janu Tenugu (plain
Telugu). Janu Tenugu was first used by Nanne Choda (a contemporary of
Nannaya) and Palkuriki Somanatha. From the beginning, there were
broadly two types of Telugu: the Sanskritized campu Telugu, and spoken
local or Janu Tenugu. Moreover, there was always a tension between the
two. As the Telugu literary craft was adopted by the Andhra Brahmins from
the prabandha period (sixteenth century), campu Telugu became the
standard Telugu, particularly in the districts of Krishna, Godavari, and
Guntur. On the other hand, the Telangana Telugu developed a different
flavour, with the influence of Urdu. It was mainly seen as desi and folklore.
However, the Telangana Telugu retained its desi character, and remained
achha (pure) Telugu.
Arabic, Persian, and Dakhni Urdu also influenced Telugu from the
fifteenth century. This influence was more apparent in Telangana, as many
Persian, Arabic, and Urdu words were borrowed into Telangana Telugu, and
vice versa. Persian and Dakhni Urdu became part of the Telangana literary
culture from the middle of the fourteenth century. Persian remained the
language of the royal courts and of the nobles in Telangana until the late
nineteenth century. However, the assimilation of Persian with the Dravidian
and Indo-Aryan languages and culture produced a new language called
Hindvi or Urdu. Urdu was the main medium of communication between
Muslims and non-Muslims of the region. Thus, the new language became
lingua franca in India in general, and in the Deccan in particular, as the
common people spoke it, and a considerable volume of literature was
produced in this language.
Telangana witnessed the evolution of several languages such as Prakrit,
Sanskrit, Janu Tenugu, campu Telugu, Dakhni, and Urdu. The prominence
of each language was associated with the social dominance of a particular
community or class. In the early historical period, the Shudra ruling class,
and Buddhism and Jainism, developed the Prakrit languages. But the
subsequent spread of Brahminism superseded it by encouraging Sanskrit.
The Shudra peasant warrior class promoted Telugu to put a check to
Brahminism. However, the Brahmin Sanskrit scholars took over Telugu
literature and brought back Brahminical domination through campu Telugu.
This domination continued up to the twentieth century. A similar trend was
also witnessed in the case of Urdu. The shift in Dakhni from secular to
religious themes, and the supremacy of North Indian Urdu over Dakhni,
was a response to the political developments in the region. But despite the
tension between the languages, Telangana witnessed the development and
survival of many languages, both literary and non-literary.
The cultural synthesis is more apparent in the arts of Telangana. Art and
architecture express the socio-economic, religious, and political ideas of a
society. In Telangana, since time immemorial, people have used cave
paintings, sculpture, architecture, portrait painting, miniature painting,
scroll painting, and other artistic works to express their ideas and
imagination. Religion has perhaps had the greatest influence on all art and
architectural works. Although secular art and architecture did exist in the
form of royal forts and palaces from the Early Historic period, it did not
survive for long. It was only from the late medieval period that huge
palaces began to be built. Art and architecture also constitute power
relation, as they exhibit the domination and subordination of particular
social groups or religions. This is evident in Telangana history too.
Buddhist art and architecture dominated the early historical period,
followed by Jaina, Shaiva, and Vaishnava, and then Islamic art and
architecture. However, throughout the prehistorical period, cave paintings
were the non-religious exhibits into the day-to-day life of the people and
their worldview. The spirit for such paintings was mainly drawn from
nature. Importantly, the materials used for sculpture and architecture were
drawn locally. For instance, structures in Telangana were largely made of
black granite, which was found in the region in abundance. North Indian
architecture, on the other hand, was mainly made of red sandstone. The
environmental heterogeneity of the Telangana region thus brought diversity
in the art and architecture. This style of art and architecture is generally
referred to as the Dravida and Deccani style, which is unique in many
respects.
Although there was a cross-pollination of ideas and traditions between
Telangana and its neighbouring regions, Telangana maintained its
specificity. The culture of protest of the Telangana people is very clearly
visible in its art forms too. Indeed, art has inspired several political and
social movements in the region, including the movement for separate
statehood. Such local art forms have not only kept the movement alive, but
have been crucial in achieving statehood for Telangana.
48
THE MODERN SOUTH

Rajmohan Gandhi

Influenced more by surrounding seas than the distant Himalayas, the South
Indian Peninsula has inherited a history that merits attention. However,
even as studies continue to illumine the histories of the Peninsula’s
numerous communities, states, and districts, the story of South India as a
whole remains largely unresearched. There is, of course, an obvious
question: ‘Where on an Indian map does South India begin?’ And a
connected query: ‘Are South Indians a distinct people the way speakers of a
single South Indian language, say Kannada, Kodava, Konkani, Malayalam,
Tamil, Telugu, Tulu, or something else, seem to be?’
In 1918, S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, a professor of history and
archaeology at Madras University, wrote of ‘South India: A Distinct Entity
in Indian History’ in his book The Beginnings of South Indian History
(Aiyangar, 1918). In 1955, K. A. Nilakanta Sastri’s classic History of South
India appeared. However, Sastri’s story ended well before the start of
India’s ‘modern’ times, which for good or ill are usually linked to the
European advent. In 1979, there were enlightening chapters on the modern
period in a three-volume History of South India written by P. N. Chopra, T.
K. Ravindran, and N. Subrahmanian.
However, a people’s history of modern South India awaits its
researchers and writers. Meanwhile, hoping to provoke attempts in that
direction, my Modern South India (2018) tried to capture fragments of the
story, over relatively recent times, of the hundreds of millions who inhabit
the Peninsula. Belonging to different religions (while the Muslims of
predominantly Hindu South India date back to the seventh century, its
Christians probably appeared even earlier) and speaking one or more of
several (largely Dravidian) languages, these millions live in a range of easy
or difficult relationships with one another.
 This study confirmed South Indians’ deep love for their language and
literature. Created in 1956, linguistic provinces released energy, yet
twentieth-century South India seemed willing to jettison the multilingual
skills noticed in the eighteenth century by a French priest, Jean-Antoine
Dubois (1765–1848). Spending three decades in South India, Dubois had
come across, he wrote, the poems of Vemana, ‘originally written in
Telugu… [and] translated in several other languages’ of South India
(Dubois, 1816) . Earlier, the East India Company had enlisted flocks of
multilingual South Indians as trading partners or employees after
establishing, in 1639, Fort St George in what would become Madras city.
In subsequent centuries, as European rule was established, opposed, and
eventually ousted, two deep thirsts seemed to drive South Indians. One was
for ending the alien rule, the other was for bringing social equality to the
native population. Both urges were caught in a line by the Telugu poet and
playwright, Gurujada Apparao (1862–1915). ‘Never does land/ Mean clay
and sand/ The people, the people/ They are the land’ (Gopal Krishna, 2009).
More than a thousand years before Apparao, a poet in India’s deep
south, Kaniyan Pungundranar, had come up with the Tamil words, ‘Yadum
Ooru, Yavaram Kelir’ (All Towns are One to Us, All People are Our Kin)
(Pope, 1997). Later, verses in the twelfth century by the Kannada poet-
statesman Basava—born near Bijapur (Vijayapura)—again demolished any
justification of inequalities. In the modern period, these stunning
recognitions from past eras were effectively recalled by the Malayalam
country’s Sri Narayana Guru (1854–1928) and by Periyar E. V. Ramasamy
(1879–1973) of Tamil Nadu’s Erode.
The boldness of this vision, native to South India, of all inhabitants as a
single community is undeniable. However, a student of modern South
Indian history runs into a stubborn defiance of this brilliant, equalizing
insight by harsh hierarchies on the ground, while also finding evidence of
continuing efforts to realize the vision.
Another interesting finding was of a South Indian reluctance to claim
all-India leadership, as distinct from national eminence. Thus Chakravarti
Rajagopalachari (1878–1972), for three decades a prominent face in the
independence struggle, became the first Indian governor-general after
freedom; P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004) and H. D. Deve Gowda (b.
1933) became prime ministers; and the Indian Republic has had six South
Indian presidents. However, an intentional South Indian bid to lead all of
India was not apparent.
This absence of India-wide goals and passions seems connected to the
failure of gifted South Indians to build solid alliances with their South
Indian neighbours. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the
British successfully extended their sway from coastal pockets to the entire
Peninsula, influential native princes in five neighbouring kingdoms
(Mysore, the Marathas, Hyderabad, Travancore, and Arcot) saw one
another, not the British, as their principal foe. It appears in the twenty-first
century that this history lesson is yet to be internalized by a critical mass in
the Peninsula.
49
THE KERALA OF NARAYANA GURU A HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVE OF IDEAS AND SOCIETY

George Thadathil

The literature around Sree Narayana Guru is a fast growing phenomenon. It

includes biographical, historical, sociocultural, and religio-philosophical
writings exploring the person, his contribution and continuing influence.
These include research works related to the person and his times, his
writings, the impact of the movements he set in motion and those seeking
the contemporary relevance of his ideological positioning in an increasingly
polarising world. His own immediate disciple, Nataraja Guru, one of the
twelve disciples who formed the Sree Narayana Dharma Sangham (1928)
and initiator of the Gurukula Foundation (1923) and the two successors,
Guru Nithya Chaitanya Yati (1924–99) and Guru Muni Narayana Prasad (b.
1938), with their cumulative commentaries keep alive the texture of the
unique positioning the guru movement has had in Kerala and beyond. The
Kerala of Narayana Guru’s times becomes significant in light of the
churning in society (especially of the majority community) that he brought
about and continues to disturb the conscience of the wielders of authority in
naming which defining a purely Hindu world for India.
The Kerala of Narayana Guru witnessed monarchy which was
entrenched in the imagination and sensibility of the time even as
subservience and acquiescence to authority was beginning to rattle. The
arrival of a people and their ways from far off shores was seen as the
immediate cause. The foreboding that something better and lasting is
elsewhere and the age-old sense of the good, the just, the ordered, and
normative positions began to seem not so definitive and certain anymore.
Into this sense of changes introduced from outside, there emerges an
original critical voice that challenges these old ways without necessarily
drawing inspiration from the external sources; rather from the sense of
propriety and egalitarianism that had survived in the land for over a
millennia but had been silenced not so long ago. The charisma of Sree
Narayana Guru (SNG) leaned on this egalitarian tradition that was liberal
and respectful of the other without being subservient to anyone. The
Pratishta (installation of an idol, 1888) associated with him is the fashioning
of the new which had many undercurrents: the consolidation of modern
Malayalam language; the opportunity of modern education, including for
girls; the equality in dress opportunity for lower-class women to wear the
upper cloth (like that of the upper-class women and those who became
Christian). These, in all, spread like the message of freedom, igniting a
revolt within the Hindu community and religio-cultural strongholds, and
having impact on other communities as well.
Politically, the threefold demarcation of the separate jurisdictions—
Malabar, Cochin, and Trivandrum—under the tutelage of the local kings
and their dewans on the one hand and a more direct British administration
on the other experienced the windfall of change. The political suzerainty of
a foreign power with domineering aspiration coming onto the scene and
subsequently, the adoption of newer ways of living got increasingly
manifested in the various cultural dimensions through the emergence of
community-based organizations, the arrival of the novel as a literary genre
and the slow realization regarding accessibility to democracy.
The new world and its vision exposed the blindness to the logic of
equality and injustice in the practice of caste that prevailed in the pre-
modern society. Therein the dominant fold expected service as a right and
legitimate expectation from the serving class, the agrestic slaves. The
slaves, despite it impinging on them negatively, succumbed to the religio-
cultural sanctioning of the practice as ‘legitimate’. This blind spot was
exposed with the arrival of modernity as ‘rationality’, ‘scientific spirit’, and
‘equality of human beings’ in the wake of the French revolution, when
ideas stemming from the Enlightenment began floating in the modern
world. This encounter of the pre-modern with the Enlightenment and the
resultant colonial modernity gave a new lease of life and opportunities to
innumerable caste communities across the country. Even as the Bengal
Renaissance and Enlightenment waves spread, the first challenge to
tradition from within indigenous sources was seen in the emergence of the
leadership of Sree Narayana Guru of Kerala. Many critical studies of
modernity in Kerala have positioned SNG’s socio-religio-cultural critique
alongside Christian education and Communist ideology, as having
awakened a people.
The awareness of a rightful place of respectability as having to do with
the basic right to freedom of speech, of movement, of worship, of
ownership of land, and of work besides just wage and amenities of a
labourer got circulated in a society that had hitherto seen only some as
having rights and others as having only duties. This awareness is not only
an outcome of Western education but also as a result of the retrieval of an
egalitarian heritage that had been clouded and overridden by the weight of
tradition—this is what the assertive arrival of SNG in the scene of modern
Kerala for the late nineteenth to the first quarter of twentieth century
brought about.
The progress the converted among the community were making with
the support of the missionaries and the administration—as Europeans more
than missionaries—emboldened the others too to demand rights to school,
employment, voting rights, and land from the state. It is in this background
of the petition (signature campaign known as the Izhava Memorial, 1895–
96) that there was a royal dictate supporting the status quo rather than the
progressive, reformist attitude of the community leaders. This in turn
emboldened the agitative path to a stronger resistance with a nuanced and
more subtle take on the apparent ‘purely liturgical’ challenge that SNG had
offered to the namesakes of tradition itself. The fear of the dominant in not
allowing SNG to attain his full stature is built around the insecurity of being
outwitted, outsmarted in the ideational level of defining who the modern
Hindu and the Indian is.
The movement led by Sree Narayana Guru finds resistance from the
new dispensation precisely because it envisages equality as the foundational
premise of society. His most known and quoted phrase, ‘Oru jathi, oru
matham, oru deivam manushyanu’ (One in kind, faith, and God, is
Man/Woman) radiates the power of equality and oneness of humankind and
all beings. Its rejoinders—‘Matham ethayalum manushyan nannayal mathi’
(Whatever be the religion Man/Woman should become better) and ‘Jathi
chothikaruthu, parayaruthu, chintikkaruthu’ (Don’t ask, speak or think
caste)—are a reinforcement to avoid and overcome the octopus-like
tentacles of ever-reinventing caste dynamics in the subcontinent. This basic
insight of human equality goes counter to the hierarchical principle on
which the caste system thrives. Re-conceptualizing society has been the
motive and the power principle behind all of Narayana Guru’s endeavours
during his lifetime and through his disciples and successors henceforth.
The ideal of Narayana Guru is a proposal to transcend caste, colour,
creed, sex, and any other limitations on human identity. Nitya Chaitanya
Yati quotes an instance where Narayana Guru refers to the inauthenticity of
dominant-caste Hindus asking for freedom from Britain when for centuries
they were instrumental in subjugating their own people in the name of
caste. It is this one challenge arising from the heart and depth of Indic
civilization represented in its new sage—Sree Narayana Guru—that the
makers of a new India can never succeed to subjugate. He, alongside
Ambedkar, challenges the logic of the RSS that only those who have their
janma bhoomi (land of birth) as their punya bhoomi (the land of birth of
one’s religious scriptures) can be genuine Indians. He challenges the
veracity and legitimacy of this claim not from the books of Thomas Mann
or Thomas Babington Macaulay but from the traditions of Jainism and
Buddhism that were alive in the land. While internationally the power
equations do need a change and the order of the day reversed, there is
equally the need to challenge by analysis the power wielders and the
dominant castes of India and their role in retaining the ‘hierarchical’ model
of society as it benefits them. The either/or option between ‘equality’ vs
‘hierarchy’ could be overcome if the problem of the ‘equal and yet unequal’
Western world order can be transcended, but not by giving into the ‘homo
hierarchicus’ model of reconstructing the world for sake of acquiescence to
one’s station and position in life. The path proposed is the Indic non-
Brahminic ‘advaitic-trinitarian’ model reinvented by SNG arising out of a
millennia-long history of harmonious co-living of more than three religions
with their worldview within the geographical precincts of Kerala. It
deserves scrutiny.
THE DECCAN AND THE WEST
50
CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA BEFORE THE PROTESTANT
EVANGELICALS

Ines G. Županov

Christianity has always been both a cosmopolitan and a ‘niche’ religion in

India. Regardless of why and how it travelled from a given source, it is only
when Christianity adapted to local culture and society that it became a
connective and connected source of religious commitment. In a sense, the
receptor language of the convert community had to rewrite its cultural
genetic code. In the short run, proselytizing and coercion-cum-economic
incentives are indispensable for religious conversion. In the long run,
religious convictions cannot take root in society unless they provide the
believers with a sustained appeal to its cognitive, cultural, social, and, at
times, economic advantages.
Historical sources for the Christian presence in India in the late
antiquity and the medieval period are scarce and covered by thick and
heavy layers of later accounts ranging from the first European and
Portuguese travel descriptions of the St Thomas Christians (cristãos de São
Tomé), as they called them, on the Malabar coast to mostly missionary and
ecclesiastical histories from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
While initially both the Portuguese colonizers and the Christians who called
themselves suriyani nasranikal (or Syrian Christians) rejoiced at the
prospect of alliance, the differences in their liturgical, linguistic, and
political objectives inaugurated centuries of fractured relationships ending
in disputes, violence, and ultimately court cases. Already in the first
decades of the Portuguese encounter with the Syrian Christians, the
Franciscans stigmatized their liturgy, written in Syriac, and their theology
and religious practices as heretical Nestorianism. In a word, in need of a
reform and Latinization.
In the sixteenth century, European Christianity in general was also seen
by some pious Christians as requiring reform, provoking dissent, and
religious wars. By the mid-sixteenth century, Catholic missionaries, most
prominently the Jesuits, in addition to Franciscans, Dominicans,
Augustinians, and later on joined by other religious orders, positioned
themselves as the defenders of the Catholic church against internal
(Protestant) and external (paganism and Islam) enemies, and as the
historians of global Christianity.
It is in this context, under the ‘church militant’ and under the royal
patronage (padroado) of the Portuguese Crown, that Christian conversion
took place in India and Asia from the sixteenth century onwards. The
padroado/patronato was an institution, established in the fifteenth century,
according to which the Papacy bestowed on the Portuguese and Spanish
kings, both of whom were involved at the time in overseas conquests, the
right to appoint bishops in the conquered lands and support Christian
missions. By the early seventeenth century, the Papacy regretted this
arrangement, and established the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith
in 1622 in order to reclaim its universal pastoral and evangelizing
jurisdiction. The Portuguese padroado was abolished only in 1890.
In addition, European ecclesiastical actors were divided along various
other lines (political and national), and they held antagonistic opinions
regarding the method of conversion of non-Christians and the means and
strategies to be employed. The church authorities in Goa, the capital of the
Portuguese Estado da Índia, acquired by conquest of Adil Shah’s territory in
1510, worked hand in hand with the secular administration, which had been
chronically understaffed and poorly organized. The infamous Holy Office
imported from Portugal in 1560, together with the printing press, was an
ecclesiastical court with power and authority that surpassed secular
institutions. Its goal was to uniformize social customs and prevent religious
dissent on this small speck of Portuguese colonial territory surrounded by a
subcontinent of religious and cultural diversity. The Goan Inquisition was
used primarily as a governance tool, and its autos-da-fe, or acts of faith,
were public rituals geared to impress, entertain, and intimidate.
While the first victims of the Inquisition were the so-called New
Christians or converted Jews, in the seventeenth century the ‘crimes of
paganism’ significantly increased and targeted ‘Cristãos novamente
convertidos’ (Newly Converted Christians), that is, the descendants of the
converted Hindus and Muslims (moors) in Goa. According to the
Repertório (Directory)—a rare document that survived the destruction of
the archives of the Goan Inquistion—between 1561 and 1623, 44 per cent
of the cases were directed against ‘gentilidade’ (heathenism) or crypto-
Hinduism. From the individual cases concerning the crimes of gentilidade,
we can see how difficult it was for the church authorities to distinguish
between rites and customs, on the one hand, and the religious meaning on
the other. This question is still a controversial point in intellectual debates
about religion.
If in Goa, in the territories called ‘Old Conquests’ (velhas conquistas)—
the islands of Tiswadi, Bardez, and Salcete—the ecclesiastical authorities
and the Inquisition enforced religious conformity with coercion more than
persuasion, the Catholic missions established mostly by the Jesuits beyond
the Portuguese administrative control, and later on in the territory of
Greater Goa or the ‘New Conquests’ (novas conquistas) the conversion
strategies varied.
From the 1540s until the suppression of the Society of Jesu in 1773,
Jesuit missionaries were the most important actors in the Christianization of
India, with the exception of Franciscans in Goa. Jesuits famously
introduced the method of accommodation into the debate about and the
practice of conversion. All through the seventeenth and the first part of the
eighteenth century, most of the Jesuit missionaries scattered in the missions
away from the Portuguese secular arm promoted some kind of adaptation of
Christianity to existing local devotional practices. In the coastal and
continental missions in today’s Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, at the
Mughal court and in Bengal, they established a conversion procedure that
started with apprenticeship of local languages and acquisition of knowledge
about cultures and the societies encountered in the mission. The first
analytical grammars and vocabularies of many vernacular Indian languages
were missionary work. In their first mission on the Fishery Coast among the
community of Parava pearl fishers and merchants, who nominally
converted in the early sixteenth century in order to secure Portuguese
protection from other pearl fishing communities in the area, Jesuit
missionaries organized a first school of Tamil language for the missionaries,
wrote the first modern Tamil grammar (arte) and translated and published
catechetical texts, a confession manual, and books about the lives of saints
before 1600, when Parava were already a staunch Catholic community.
Further inland, in the famous and notorious Madurai mission,
established by Roberto Nobili (1577–1656), the strategy of accommodation
to local elites, Brahmins, and kings entailed translations of the Biblical
stories and prayers into not only Tamil but also Sanskrit and Telugu.
Nobili’s method inaugurated a controversy that lasted a century under the
name of Malabar rites controversy. The question harks back to St Paul:
should one become Brahmin to convert Brahmins? Should one become a
Shaivite to convert Shaivites? Nobili’s justification of cultural
accommodation—in language and personal dress and behaviour—walked a
thin line between conversion and apostasy according to some European
theological opinions. His method also required profound learning of
(available) Brahminical and other literary texts, the reading of which was
facilitated and guided by the local religious specialists and literati that he
employed in the mission. Jesuit knowledge of local religious practices and
social customs, languages, and textual production is impressive, even when
tainted with their evangelizing opinions and intentions. They were cultural
brokers in the sense that they translated Christianity in its Catholic version
into Tamil, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Marthi, Konkani,
Bengali, Hindi, Persian, and classical Syriac, while at the same time
reflecting on cultural and literary diversity that is the hallmark of the Indian
subcontinent. Many Jesuit texts authored for this purpose found their way
later into the British Orientalist archives and were ransacked for
information about Indian society and culture, all the while surreptitiously
blending into British ethnographies and histories.
Some Jesuit translations became fiercely popular among the converts
and non-Christians such as Giuseppe Beschi’s versified epic poem
‘Tempavani’ (Life of St Joseph) and Thomas Stephen’s ‘Kristapurana’
(Discurso sobre a vinda de Jesu Christo) because they expressed Christian
topics in local prestigious and poetic idioms. These literary efforts are the
closest to what Christian theologians today call inculturation.
In some missions, such as the one at the Mughal court, in spite of the
Jesuits’ rich literary production in Persian and their promotion of Christian
art, there were no or very few converts. Sponsored generously, in the
beginning, by the Mughal kings, Akbar and Jahangir, in particular, the
Jesuits were unable to compete with various other Muslim and non-Muslim
religious specialists who were given equal treatment (Zoroastrians, Hindu
ascetics, Jains, etc.). Although, persuasion without some kind of nudge or
coercion from the secular authority did not work for the Indian elites
(Muslim and non-Muslim), except in Goa, Christianity had an appeal for
those socially ascending peoples who were shunned by or were outside of
the system of protection of the local kings and upper castes. The first
Protestant missionaries in Tranquebar in the early eighteenth century
decried a ‘high caste’ bias among the Jesuits. This did not stop them from
collecting and appropriating Jesuit knowledge and literary production
created with and for the Tamil elites.
51
GOA

Rochelle Pinto

‘The original forest has completely disappeared here, the stream of the
valley reduced to a thin trickle.’
Histories of the origins of civilization in Goa are usually shaped by
perspectives about belonging to the land. Agrarian cultivation in a settled
society that had written documents is often a sign of the beginning of
civilization and history. One could argue that a land-centric eco-poetics
links the identity of belonging to the land, to villages, castes, and shrines
and organizes history around it. Until recently, a myth around the repentant
avatar of Vishnu, Parasurama, who raised the western coast by shooting an
arrow into the sea, was treated as the founding story of Goa and acquired a
pan-regional dimension. Even though it had an exclusively Brahmin
identity attached to it, it found state acceptance in the late colonial and post-
annexation period. In this terrain framed by foothills, valleys, the sea,
rivers, and the disappearing forest, several villages have founding stories
linked to them, though these are not necessarily about cultivation. The
gaunkari, an ancient hereditary form of agrarian administration in each
village with continuity into the present was believed to be the foundation of
society, a society that in its original form was independent of any monarch.
This was validated in local legends as well as in legal and official records of
the Portuguese Crown which conquered the territory in 1510.
The coast and the sea appear in discussions of trade and pilgrim routes
that highlight the significance of Goa to Arab traders or to pilgrims leaving
for Mecca by the middle of the eleventh century. Conquest by the
Portuguese in 1510 altered the rules of sea trade and began a history of
colonial rule that extended to 1961. The identities of fishing communities,
aside from anthropological work, are visible only in connection to
environmental policies.
 By the nineteenth century, the idea of origin had shifted to the question
of who first inhabited the land, rather than agrarian settlement. The question
of belonging, though still defined in relation to land, expanded to include
non-dominant castes and then those outside the caste system, as the
disciplines of archaeology, race theory, and philology influenced each other.
Of late, the ancient history of the region has attracted archaeological
interest through the petroglyphs and rock carvings on the laterite plateaus
extending from Ratnagiri in Maharashtra into Goa, forming a substantial
corpus of carvings as signs of ancient habitations.
The historian whose work incorporated and interrogated these traditions
was D. D. Kosambi. It is difficult to think of any other history of India that
accords as much space to Goa as Kosambi’s work did. His text was written
before the territory was annexed in 1961, often the sole event through
which it appears in national histories. Kosambi examined myth, religion,
and caste through historical and materialist frameworks, placing Goa in a
wider historical and theoretical context. For instance, by simply stating that
Brahmins could not have settled the region without labour, he made varying
labouring groups and their relationship to caste and land visible, even as he
agreed that there was evidence for isolated village communities of the past.
One such group, the military, agrarian, and domestic slaves of Goa still do
not have a significant presence in Goan history. Another striking
contribution was his assertion that caste identities were fluid and had
emerged in relation to political and social contingencies. He dispelled an
idea that remains valuable to territorial caste-centric histories—of being
able to trace continuous genealogies from antiquity.
‘Most historians of India write about, or simply presume, coherent core
regions….’
Since it was on the periphery of kingdoms and dynasties whose centre
was further east or south, efforts to construct the ancient history of Goa
around a single political centre and physical space have encountered, as
Richard Eaton says in relation to the Deccan, a lack of a master narrative.
Explorations of periods preceding the arrival of the Portuguese such as
George M. Moraes’s history of the Kadambas and prior dynasties such as
the Bhojas and Satavahanas, and Fr Henry Heras’s conservation of Buddhist
remnants, placed the region within the ancient and medieval political
dynamics of the Deccan and the South. An emphasis in recent studies on
cultural practices emerging from travel and migration have developed a
history of western Indian Ocean networks, rather than defining time and
space through political centres alone.
Teotónio de Souza’s histories of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries
furthered some of Kosambi’s questions, presenting a vast range of archival
sources to counter colonialist self-narratives of Portuguese colonialism. To
this end, de Souza and Celsa Pinto’s work examined questions of economy
and trade from the perspective of Goan and local groups rather than its
significance for the interests of empire. Research based on missionary
records provided sophisticated readings of the nature of coercion and
transformation involved in the initiatives of the church–state apparatus. The
physical and epistemological erasure of Muslim communities and the
attempts to suppress Hindu belief systems through violence in the first two
centuries of colonial rule, also saw the emergence of Christian
communities, complemented in other realms by the merging of Iberian and
local practices to reorient rural spaces. New social traditions were created
by colonial intervention not least through the introduction of the printing
press in 1556 which generated textual traditions to counter prevailing
beliefs and to forge new ones in the three districts that were first conquered,
Bardez, Salcete, and Tiswadi.
Understanding social history in Goa therefore requires abandoning any
easy binary of foreign and indigenous, while recognizing distinctions of
power. Goan priests incorporated caste genealogies into Portuguese texts to
petition the church for or against the inclusion of specific castes, and
against racial discrimination. Architectural and art forms were mediated to
forge a distinct visual identity. Disputes over temple management, and the
legislation around the kalavant/bailadeira or devadasi, or the Catholic
regulation of prostitution reveal how sexuality, kinship, caste, and capital
produced forms of personhood that derive from the colonial experience.
Some cleavages and ruptures of the late eighteenth century had
consequences that have begun to be elaborated such as the radical
modernizing reforms effected by the prime minister to the king, the Marquis
de Pombal who expelled the Jesuits, suppressed missionary orders, and
introduced economic reforms. The other significant development is the
acquisition of the larger territories in the east of Goa, the New Conquests of
the late eighteenth century. Recent work has indicated how the metaphors of
wildness and otherness were used in these areas enabling an exploratory
and experimental approach allowing for forms of social engineering and
capitalist adventurism. Writing the history of these areas demands multi-
lingual skills as devotional and political documents in Marathi reveal links
to caste movements and to political associations with Maratha
chieftainships. Towards the east, the Sunda king, and the Bijapur sultanate’s
tax collection systems enabled the emergence of local feudal chieftainships
that are still to be fully explored.
Iberian constitutional conflicts define the nineteenth century. This
resulted in the simultaneous reintroduction of the printing press into the
colonies in 1821, and the election of Goan representatives to the Portuguese
parliament. A sign of a changed and volatile political landscape was the
appointment of a Goan, Bernardo Peres da Silva as prefeito, in the new
designation for the position of viceroy, the highest political position in Goa
in 1835. During his brief tenure of seventeen days, Peres da Silva effected
reforms before he was ousted by a coup. The conflicts over
constitutionalism and monarchy in Portugal produced diverse caste, racial,
and factional cleavages across the century which were debated in print.
By the latter half of the century, there were other significant
developments in print: a publicly articulated Hindu identity in newspapers
in Marathi and Portuguese, and a Goan migrant identity in bi- and trilingual
newspapers in Konkani. Concerns with educational opportunities for
Hindus, their political identity, questions of caste, land, and temple
management appear in the Marathi press, while Konkani print gave voice to
the world of an emergent working population across British colonies in
Bombay and elsewhere. By the late nineteenth century, Catholic Shudra
lawyers and newspaper owners posed challenges to caste hierarchies. The
declaration of the republic in 1910 saw the removal of barriers to education
and administration expanding the access of Hindus beyond the spheres of
commerce and banking. The republican period was short-lived however,
and with the declaration of the Salazarist regime, political gains of the
previous years stood threatened.
Studies have indicated how language has been a volatile index of
shifting political identities since the nineteenth century when the symbolic
relation between Konkani, Marathi, English, and Portuguese transformed
every two decades. Language in a small multilingual state signified multiple
positions through the transition from the idea of cultural difference as
effected by the former colonial state to the majoritarian post-annexation
one. One can highlight how dominant forms of history writing led to the
derecognition of defining processes in every period of Goan history. The
Goa Congress leader T. B. Cunha’s pamphlet, Denationalisation of Goans
(1945) denigrated Goan Catholics in racial terms indicating how an
internalized majoritarianism requires the performance of ambivalence, self-
rejection, or misrecognition of identity formation.
In the post-annexation period, the foregrounding of tribal, Bahujan, or
upper-caste Hindu cultural practices to combat the hegemony of the
Catholic elite has brought less visible histories into the public realm, but do
not always furnish unitary identities. The election of a non-Congress
Bahujan chief minister was viewed as a surprise after centuries of upper-
caste dominance, as Parag D. Parobo’s India’s First Democratic Revolution
argues. The event highlighted the extent to which Bahujan aspirations and
the workings of capital among non-dominant castes were formerly
inadmissible in public discourse. Yet, the popular rejection of parts of his
politico-cultural mandate, especially the support for a merger with
Maharashtra, or the adoption of Marathi as an official language, are signs
that singular identities are still unavailable to history.
Literary writing has often voiced those aspects of identity formation
suppressed within history. The twentieth-century migration to West Asia for
employment, the literal de-nationalization of Goans in Karachi, East Africa,
Aden, and even Bombay, who found themselves trapped between borders
and erased from history through the process of nation formation, are an
instance of this.
Little wonder then that the structural incorporation of Goans into
Portuguese and British colonies in Africa and Latin America, as state
officials, traders, priests, doctors, insurgents, and as labour, from the
seventeenth century on finds little mention outside of personal histories.
The debates around decolonization of African colonies finds little resonance
in Goa though its liberation from Portugal in 1961 was a symbolic moment
for later anti-colonial movements. The fact that race is not a category of
analysis, having been presumably subsumed by caste, elides a foundational
aspect of Goan history. While it erases the histories of slaves, Luso-
descendentes, and children of mixed-race unions, all of which were distinct
legal entities until the twentieth century, even the formation of Goa’s elite
can be made fully visible only through a combination of theories arising
from the colonial contexts of Latin American, Africa, and South Asia.
52
CULTURAL CONFLUENCE IN PRE-MODERN DECCAN

Shraddha Kumbhojkar

The peninsular part of South Asia consists of the volcanic plateau called as
the Deccan plateau. Dakshin is the word for South and indicates the region
south of the Narmada River in Central India. A number of trade routes
connected the coastal parts of the Peninsula to the North and as such, were
connectors of people, goods, as well as ideas. Cultural intermingling has
been an essential feature of the history of Deccan. Contrary to the popular
perception of an unchanging and self-sufficient rural landscape
predominated by the Hindu religion and patriarchy entrenched by the upper
castes, pre-modern Deccan exhibited a different and more textured picture.
While the society was indeed grappling with issues of inequality and unrest,
it should not be ignored that the seemingly insurmountable differences of
region, religion, caste, class, and gender were vibrantly and frequently
challenged throughout the pre-modern period in the history of Deccan. A
fuller understanding of pre-modern Deccan can be achieved by knowing
about the norms as well as the challenges to the established norms.
Castes in pre-modern Deccan were, as always, in a fluid state, splitting
and morphing as per the contemporary exigencies, maintaining the systemic
and oppressive divisions, but also tolerating a number of aberrations. While
the individual cases of transgressing caste boundaries met with a lot of
criticism and even punishments, collective migrations or occupational
changes seem to have been tolerated albeit grudgingly, by the political
authorities and eventually the local community. Drushtantapatha, a Marathi
text of the twelfth century, criticizes a high-born girl having a lover from a
lower caste and states that ‘she pollutes the family, community and her
times.’ Banka, a fourteenth-century saint and poet, apprehends that his
neighbours will beat him up and insult him if he dares to interact with the
high born. Individual caste transgressions were not uncommon, but were
dealt with severity.
 At the collective level, the rules were slightly flexible. The caste of
Kayastha, whose members played an important role in the Maratha
administration in medieval India, raised a number of disputes against the
Brahmins starting from the seventeenth century. They sought status and
religious rights by pleading with the religious authorities of Benaras, as
well as with the political authorities such as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj
and the peshwa. Most of these complaints, called gramanya, were addressed
with consensual negotiations.
Gender and patriarchy were important factors regulating individual and
social lives in pre-modern Deccan. Thousands of Sati stone memorials
strewn over the Deccan plateau bear testimony to the extremely unjust
patriarchal norms which advocated that the only honourable deed fit for a
widow is self-immolation. However, the people of Deccan actively sought
and found opportunities for subverting such norms. The Deccan, in the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, witnessed three widows
viz. Chandbibi, Jijabai, and Ahilyabai Holkar who were great rulers
acknowledged for their welfare policies. The subversion of categories had
historical precedents in the history of Deccan. Chakradhar, the founder of
the Mahanubhav sect, a Krishnaite Hindu denomination, had famously said
in the thirteenth century that a woman’s menstrual blood was not too
different than a running nose, and hence no particular stigma should be
attached to women. Janabai, the famous saint poetess, proclaimed that she
could not care less about her reputation nor chastity, as she was free to seek
unity with her god, Vitthal. Kamalakarabhatta, the author of
Shudrakamalakara, a seventeenth-century prescriptive text on rituals,
prescribed that men, women, and even the people belonging to the third
gender could rightfully make donations to the Brahmins and for public
welfare works, thus unwittingly recognizing their right to hold property.
Religion, even if the etymology denotes the verb religare, to bind
together, has more often than not, been blamed for strife and discord in the
society. Pre-modern Deccan witnessed religious discrimination and strife in
various shades. The Mahanubhav followers of Chakradhar were
discriminated against by the high-caste Hindus as well as the Mughal
officials. As mendicants, tax exemption from Jaziya tax was claimed by the
Mahanubhav people. They also pleaded for protection from the local chiefs
who would not let them use certain symbols of honour, such as an umbrella
or a palanquin. Their demands were endorsed by Aurangzeb’s Mughal
administration and they were granted protection. The strife and discord
were exceptions that have been highlighted in the historical source
materials. At the mass level, religious tolerance and coexistence were the
pragmatic choices of the medieval society in Deccan. The fundamental
differences between the Islam of North India and of the Peninsula cannot be
over-emphasized. Islam in the Peninsula was culturally congruent with the
local society. Even Christian missionaries such as Father Stephens won
local acceptance by writing beautiful Marathi poetry. Buddhist, Jain, Sikh,
Jewish, and Parsi people in the Deccan were amalgamated in the local
culture as well.
Dakhni language, culture, and religions were deeply rooted in the
composite cultural ambience. As such, admixture and compositeness were
the norm as far as religions were concerned. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s
grandfather named his two sons Shahji and Sharifji after the famous
Muslim saints—Shah and Sharif. Later in the eighteenth century, when the
marauding armies of the Brahmin general Parshurambhau of the peshwas
ransacked the holy shrine at Sringeri, the priest appealed to Tipu Sultan for
help. Sultan did not disappoint him, granting hundreds of rupees as relief
money, helping the shrine get rebuilt, even donating an elephant to the
shrine, and making sure that his asaf, an official, would execute his orders
for restoration.
The examples of admixture, compositeness, and a pragmatic choice of
peaceful coexistence show that the people of Deccan have inherited a
composite culture from their pre-modern ancestors. The compositeness is
not devoid of contestations, conflicts, and conservatism; but these are
superseded by transgressions, negotiations, and tolerance.
53
MAHARASHTRA BEFORE SHIVAJI

Rahul Magar

The Satavahanas, Vakatakas, Rashtrakutas, Yadavs, Bahmanis, Marathas,

etc., have left behind a rich political and cultural legacy in Maharashtra, as
well as in the history of India. It was Chhatrapati Shivaji and his kingdom
that provided Maharashtra with new motivations for fighting against
injustice. It is imperative to recognize the significance of the Shivaji’s fight
in building nationalism and self-esteem. Consequently, the traditional
division of history between ancient, medieval, and modern seems to be
changing in the story of Maharashtra. Because of the remarkable prowess of
Shivaji Maharaj, Maharashtra’s history is divided into Shivaji’s period and
pre-Shivaji period. It is widely acknowledged that many political powers
have contributed to the past glory of Maharashtra. It is also pertinent to note
that the Yadavas, Bahmanis, and the five Deccan sultanate dynasties of the
past and contemporary periods of Shivaji Maharaj played a significant role
in this development.
It is the geographical conditions of Maharashtra that have played a key
role in shaping its history. There has always been fierce competition among
political powers over the fertile areas of the Tapi, Narmada in the north,
Godavari flowing through Maharashtra, Krishna in the south, and Sahyadri,
which has always been a protective force for Maratha interests. In terms of
trade, the western Konkan coast proved to be advantageous. As a result of
these factors, Maharashtra has been able to prosper greatly.
Maharashtra’s history can be characterized by turning points, and just as
Shivaji Maharaj’s birth was a turning point in Maharashtra’s history, the end
of Yadava rule during the thirteenth century was likewise a turning point.
Maharashtra was occupied by the armies of North India for the first time in
the medieval period following the attack of Alauddin Khilji. As is evident
from a letter written by Shivaji Maharaj to Maloji Ghorpade in 1677, he
always intended to resist northern invasions. ‘The leadership of the South
should remain in the hands of the Dakhanis.’ In the advice given by Shivaji
Maharaj to Ghorpade, who was serving the Adil Shahi kingdom, it becomes
evident that the Deccan has an independent political existence. It is for this
reason that Alauddin Khilji’s entry into the Deccan is considered a crucial
episode in the history of Maharashtra. Accordingly, the purpose of the study
is to review the history of the period from 1296 until the birth of Shivaji
Maharaj.
It was in 1296 that Alauddin Khilji began his campaign in the Deccan.
We receive a variety of accounts of this campaign from different tawarikhs,
or historical records. Ramadeva, the Yadava king of Devagiri, had not
received any intelligence from the intelligence department at the time of
Alauddin Khilji’s arrival. As historians such as H. K. Sherwani and P. M.
Joshi have pointed out, if the Yadavas did have an intelligence system, it
was completely ineffective and inadequate. As a result of this victory, the
Northern powers were given a new path to follow, and for the next 350
years, Maharashtra was ruled by Muslim sultans. As long as Ramadeva was
alive, the Yadava king was associated with the Khilji dynasty. It was his son
Shankaradeva and son-in-law Harpal Dev who attempted an uprising after
his death, but Malik Kafur suppressed the revolt. Following the death of
Alauddin Khilji in 1316, Mubarak Shah Khilji succeeded him.
Nevertheless, he was not able to maintain power for long. Khusrau Khan
ruled for a short period of time in 1320, but Ghiyath al-Din Tughlaq led a
revolt that brought the Tughlaq dynasty to power. As a result of the reign of
Muhammad bin Tughlaq, a number of revolts took place in diverse areas of
the kingdom. In addition, several states became independent from the
Tughlaq kingdom. One such state was Bahmani, which was established by
Zafar Khan in 1347. At the time of his ascendancy, Zafar Khan assumed the
title Alauddin Hasan Bahman Shah Al Wali. A new independent sultanate
was established in the Deccan following the end of the Delhi Sultanate rule
which began in 1315.
While Maharashtra was liberated from the invasion of the sultans after
Bahmani rule was established, the expectation that stability would
accompany it proved false at times. Bahmani kingdoms had been plagued
by internal strife since the establishment of their rule. It is not clear who has
the right to inherit the state in Islam. Therefore, in the Bahmani period, new
sultans ascended the throne by slaughtering and killing their adversaries. In
quick succession, eighteen sultans ruled during a reign of 191 years. During
nearly a hundred years, Alauddin Hasan, Muhammad I, Muhammad II, Taj
ud-Din Firuz Shah, and Alauddin Ahmad II ruled the country together. In
addition to internal conflict, the struggle between ‘Dakhani’ and ‘Afaki’
Muslims was also characteristic of the Bahmani period.
Following the change of the capital by Muhammad bin Tughlaq, many
Muslim chieftains settled in Maharashtra and the Deccan area. They
gradually gained an understanding of the local customs and manners and
after a period of time, they became fully Dakhani. The term Dakhani was
also used to refer to some Hindu converts who became Muslims. In those
days, Fathullah Imad-ul-Mulk, the founder of the Imad Shahi of Varhad,
and Ahmad Nizam Shah, the founder of the Nizam Shahi of Ahmednagar,
were both converted Muslims but were regarded as members of the
Dakhani faction. In the Bahmani court, there were a high number of Afaqi
Muslims due to the fact that they had no local interests formed by coming
from foreign regions. Therefore, they were loyal to the Bahmani dynasty.
Furthermore, since there was a significant amount of scope for learned men
at the Bahmani court, numerous talented artists came to the Deccan for the
purpose of gaining fame and wealth. The group included a large number of
Iranians, Turks, and Arabs. Habshis and Siddis settled in large numbers in
Maharashtra. Malik Ambar and Siddi of Janjira are two well-known
examples. The Afaki Muslims did not view the Abyssinians (Habshi and
Siddi) as equals since they were black, ragged, and uncivilized in
appearance according to them. It was a matter of pride for Iranians, Turks,
and Pathans to be of a particular race or religion. Thus, Habshi and Siddi
people were viewed as inferior. There was always an atmosphere of
suspicion and jealousy in the Bahmani court because of the conflict
between the Dakhanis and the Afakis. As a result of the activities of both
groups to challenge one another’s supremacy, the Bahmani kingdom
suffered several defeats.
The Bahmani kingdom was divided into five kingdoms because of this
continuous conflict and factional politics in the court. Ahmad Nizam Shah
founded the Nizam Shahi of Ahmednagar (1496–1636). In addition to Pune,
Ahmednagar, Nashik District, North Konkan, Beed, Nanded, Osmanabad,
and Latur also belonged to the Nizam Shahi. The Nizam Shahi region
extended from Revdanda port in the west to Kandhar Nanded in the east, to
Ajantha Chalisgaon in the north and to the Nira and Bhima rivers in the
south. The founder of Adil Shahi (1489–1686) of Bijapur was Yusuf Adil
Shah. The Adil Shahis ruled parts of the South Konkan, Kolhapur, Satara,
and Sangli districts in south Maharashtra, as well as parts of the Osmanabad
and Latur districts. The territory of the Adil Shahis stretched from the
northern boundary of Nizam Shahi to the southern boundary of
Tungabhadra. Imad Shahi (1490–1574) of Varhad was founded by Fathullah
Imad Shah. Historically, the Imad Shahi ruled Buldhana, Akola, Washim,
Amravati, Yavatmal, and the eastern part of Nanded district, which is now
part of the Varhad region. The founder of Barid Shahi (1490–1619) of Bidar
was Amir Qasim. It is believed that this Barid Shahi controlled parts of
Nanded and Osmanabad districts. Sultan Quli was the founder of the Qutb
Shahi (1512–1687) of Gowalkonda. There was very little territory of
Maharashtra that belonged to Qutb Shahi. A small part of Nanded district
belonged to Qutb Shahi. It was between these five sultanates that the
territory of Maharashtra was divided. It was not only these sultanates who
were ruling in Maharashtra. In the Nashik district, the Bagul family ruled
the Baglan area. There was Gond tribal rule in eastern Vidarbha. There was
a large area of Khandesh under the rule of the Faruqi dynasty. The Gujarat
sultan controlled a large portion of Thane district and the islands of
Mumbai. Despite the fall of the Bahmani kingdom, the struggle continued.
Each of these five sultanates was constantly engaged in war. During the
Mughal conquest of the Deccan, the kingdoms of these sultanates were
conquered by the Mughals.
Despite the continued struggle during the Bahmani and Sultanate
periods, the state succeeded in creating a functional system of government.
Among the most important figures in this regard are Muhammad I,
Mahmud Gawan, and Malik Ambar. Even though Alauddin Hasan was the
founder of the Bahmani kingdom, Muhammad I made significant
contributions to its administrative foundation. On this foundation, the
Bahmani kingdom was built. Saifuddin Ghori, who was also Muhammad I’s
father-in-law, is said to have written Nisa’ihu’l Mulk. This instruction
addresses the sultan and discusses the qualities he should possess.
Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of selecting the right personnel.
The officer class is divided into two parts. Men of ‘sword and standard’,
and men of ‘knowledge and pen’. There is a discussion of high-ranking
officials including the wakil (prime minister), wazir (minister), dabir
(secretary), military officers such as the sarhaddar (warden of marches),
qilledar (commander of forts), bakshi (paymasters), judicial officers such as
qazis, muftis, and police officers such as kotwal, muhatsib. This book
describes the time of Muhammad I. Sherwani describes Muhammad I as a
disciplinarian sultan. As a result of his concerted efforts, Muhammad I
ended the long period of anarchy. Muhammad established peace in the
Konkan and brought stability to the lives of its people after realizing the
importance of trade on the west coast.
Mahmud Gawan was an Afaki Muslim who served in the Bahmani
court from 1463 to 1482. Gawan served as a wazir for the Bahmani power.
The state was able to expand to a large extent as a result of it. As a result of
Gawan’s conquests, the kingdom was extended to the borders of the entire
Konkan coast in the west and Goa, Andhra Desh in the east, Tungabhadra
in the south, Berar in the north, and Khandesh in the north. In the time of
Muhammad I, the four provinces of the country were expanded to eight
provinces.
The official class called tarfdars became extremely powerful during the
nearly hundred years between Muhammad I and Mahmud Gawan. In order
to prevent the tarafdar from building up a large military force, Gawan made
it a rule that they would control no more than one fort at any given time.
Furthermore, it was changed so that the sultan would be responsible for
appointing the fort officers. Among Gawan’s greatest contributions to the
Bahmanis was his ability to maintain a balance between power and
authority in the Bahmani court. As mentioned above, in the Bahmani
period, two groups emerged: the Dakhani Muslims and the Afaki Muslims.
In the conflict between these two groups, Mahmud Gawan maintained the
right balance. Gulbarga was given to chieftains such as Nizam ul Mulk who
had converted to Islam. Gawan himself was an Afaki Muslim, he was able
to maintain a balance of power by giving both factions a proper place
within the court. Nevertheless, Gawan was tricked by using his own seal,
and a forged letter was presented to the sultan as part of a court intrigue. It
is believed that Gawan was executed as punishment for his sealed letter
advising the king of Orissa to invade the state of Bahmani. A clear
indication of Mahmud Gawan’s importance can be found in the fact that
after his assassination, the Bahmani kingdom began to crumble.
Malik Ambar played an important role in shaping the pre-Shivaji
period. The fact that a Habshi boy, who was originally sold as a slave, could
become the de-facto ruler of Ahmednagar was surprising. In the face of the
aggressive policies of the Mughal empire, Malik Ambar secured a position
for the Nizam Shahi. In addition to Malik Ambar’s political work, he also
made significant changes to the land revenue system during the hostile
period that became a guide for Maharashtra in the coming years. In
Shedgaonkar Bakhar, written in the early nineteenth century and published
in Marathi in 1917, Ambar is described as having calculated the revenue on
the land in the state, determined the chavar and bigha lands by checking
village boundaries, and that same method is still used today. A number of
British documents refer to Malik Ambar’s agricultural revenue system,
which shows that Ambar’s system was prevalent during the British period
too. Malik Ambar, according to Tajkirat ul Mulk of this period, always
considered himself to be a guardian of the farmers when making decisions
regarding the land revenues.
There is no doubt that these three individuals from the Bahmani and
Deccan sultanates played a significant role in the formation of Maharashtra
before Shivaji. The emergence of many Maratha chieftains on the political
stage was also an important development during the pre-Shivaji period. The
Sardar class that emerged during this period made a significant contribution
to Maharashtra’s history. Important among them were Bhosale of Verul,
Nimbalkar of Phaltan, Mane of Mhaswad, More of Javali, Jadhav of
Sindkhed, and Ghorpade of Mudhol. The history of Maharashtra was
shaped by these families during the seventeenth century. The new Maratha
kingdom was founded by Chattrapati Shivaji and belonged to the Bhonsle
family of Verul.
Maharashtra had a long association with Islam even before the Khilji
power arrived in the South. During the Rashtrakuta period, Muslim
religious traders settled along the western coast of Maharashtra. Muslims
were also able to serve as government officials during the Rashtrakuta
period. However, this Muslim population was confined to the coastal
regions of the country. In the years following the rise of Khilji power in the
South, and particularly after the experiment of shifting the capital to
Devagiri, a significant number of Muslims arrived in Maharashtra.
Additionally, foreign Muslims known as Afaki began to settle in the Deccan
and Maharashtra regions. Furthermore, there is a debate regarding the role
played by the kingdom in the growth of the Muslim population. Historians
M. R. Kantak, G. T. Kulkarni, K. K. Chavhan, M. S. Mate, and U. R.
Ranade assert that there are natural causes for population growth.
According to them, the increase in population was caused by the migration
of Muslims from the North, foreign Muslims, the work of some Sufi saints,
and natural factors.
As rulers, did the Bahmani sultans make forced conversions through
state policies? This is an important topic for discussion. The answer to this
question can be found by reviewing what opinions have been recorded by
different scholars. In his assessment of the Deccan sultanates, Mahadev
Govind Ranade noted that he was not a fanatic or a bigot. However,
sultanate power remains a curse for Hinduism, thus Maharashtra dharma
was developed. As P. G. Sahastrabuddhe states, the Bahmani rule in
Maharashtra was a disaster, since the Maratha dynasty was destroyed by the
Muslims and the Bahmani sultans promised to destroy the Hindu religion of
the Marathas, their tradition, Maharashtra society, and the identity of the
Marathas during their reign. The historians M. S. Mate and G. T. Kulkarni
disagreed with these views. In Mate’s opinion, new Hindu sects would not
have arisen in Maharashtra if the Bahmani sultans had attempted to destroy
Hinduism as a state policy. It was during this period that the varakari
tradition—the customary pilgrimage among nomadic-pastoralist
communities since prehistoric times inherited by agrarian medieval folk—
flourished and a large number of religious texts were written in Marathi. G.
T. Kulkarni shares the same opinion. A very important point to be noted
here is that, despite the religious policies of the Deccan sultans, Patil,
Kulkarni, Deshmukh, and Deshpande were local chieftains during this time
period in Maharashtra. Moreover, most of these individuals were Hindus by
religion and the posts lived in the same house by lineage.
A great deal of political, religious, cultural, artistic, and architectural
heritage was accumulated by Maharashtra during the Bahmani and Deccan
sultanates. Although the Bahmani kingdom was established at Daulatabad,
the capital was initially located at Gulbarga (Kalaburagi) and later at Bidar.
Neither of these places is in Maharashtra today. Three Deccan sultanates
established following the fall of the Bahmani dynasty had their capitals in
Maharashtra. During this time, a city like Ahmednagar was established,
which still bears some characteristics of this period’s city structure. A
waist-high stone wall surrounds the settlement, with 12 to 15 feet of raw or
solid brick ramparts, the gates being of solid stone, arched. There are
several famous examples of architecture from this period, including the Gol
Gumbaz (dome) at Bijapur (Vijayapura), Saudagar’s Dome of Junnar, and
the qanat system at Golconda Fort. During the time of the Bahmani dynasty,
painting also developed. It is important to note that Tarikh-i-Husainshahi,
an important work in the development of painting, was initiated during
Hussain Nizam Shah’s reign. This book is considered to be the origin of the
pictorial style that later became known as the Dakhani qalam. There are
also many important literary works from the Bahmani period, but it is the
origin of Dakhani Urdu that distinguishes this period. As an example, Kitab
e Navaras is an important book on music that Adil Shahi Sultan Ibrahim II
wrote. Ibrahim II attributes the beginning and the end of this book to the
Hindu goddess Saraswati.
After Khilji came to power, Maharashtra underwent significant changes.
As a result of interactions between Hindus and Muslims in society, major
changes took place during the pre-Shivaji period. The names of individuals
were also affected by this cultural exchange, to mention a very small
example. It is through this influence that the names Subhanji, Sultanji,
Sahebrao, Bahadurji, Sharifji, Shahaji, etc., were born. The names of
official posts, such as amaldar, chitnis, phadnis, vaknis, and potdar, etc.,
became surnames. In addition to the names of individuals, the names of
deities have also changed. There are several examples of this, such as
Kanifnath, Khandoba, and Alam Prabhu.
The period between Khilji’s invasion and Shivaji Maharaj’s political
rise was a time of struggle for power. There are primarily Afaki and
Dakhani groups involved in this conflict. However, Maharashtra’s social
life and stability were not adversely affected. The majority of the subjects in
medieval India were Hindus, while the rulers were members of the minority
community. These were the years during which the Marathi Sardars stood
up and created their own influential groups. In addition, the local nobles
rose to prominent positions. In an environment where two different
traditions, Hindu and Muslim, come together, complex social and cultural
interactions were but natural. During the pre-Shivaji period, we observe the
same phenomenon. Political, religious, social, artistic, and architectural
results are evident. The history of Maharashtra takes on a new direction
after the rise of Shivaji Maharaj.
54
TRIBAL HISTORY OF MIDDLE INDIA

Shyamrao Koreti

The history of the pre-Shivaji period of Maharashtra has not became a part
of the mainstream. It is quite difficult to find well-researched history of the
four major Gond kingdoms and fourteen small feudal states of Gondwana.
The Gondwana region consisted of almost seven to eight states of present-
day middle–India. The Garha–Mandla kingdom dominated over the best
part of the upper Narmada valley and the adjacent forest areas. The
Deogarh–Nagpur kingdom commanded upper Wainganga Valley and the
heart of the Satpura range and southern slopes and plains up to Nagpur,
while the Sirpur–Chanda consisted of vast wild territory to the south, down
to the banks of the Godavari. The fourth kingdom Kherla was built in the
middle of Narmada Valley. The first mention of a king ruling in Kherla was
contained in a religious work called the Vivek Sindhu, which was said to be
the oldest document in Marathi language. This document was written by the
saint and ascetic Mukund Raj Swami, who lived probably at about the end
of the thirteenth century CE. These kingdoms maintained a relatively
independent existence until the middle of the eighteenth century. The Gonds
were the major tribes. In Maharashtra they were further subdivided into
forty-seven tribes. They speak Gondi and follow Gondi, Koya, or Koitur
culture. Most of these subdivided groups shared common ethnic origins.
Along with them resided other tribal communities.
Each of these Gond Raja kingdoms separately passed through three
successive stages: the first one of comparatively peaceful expansion and
consolidation; the second one of contact with Mughal emperors or their
subordinates and nominal allegiance to the Mughal empire; and the third of
internal dynastic struggles which eventually resulted in Maratha
intervention. These kingdoms were contemporary to the Delhi sultanate,
Mughal emperors, Maratha power, and lasted till British imperialism.
During this long period of their rule over the vast territory of Gondwana
they developed a rich culture. The royal Raj–Gond class (ruling dynasties)
had followed the mainland socio-religious and cultural values. They all
begin their polity with Gondi dharma, however, later some of them adopted
Muslim religion during the Mughal period and some adopted Hinduism.
They were the builders of most of the cities of middle India. They were also
known for the development of the best water management system. There
are fabled incidents of how Rani Durgavati of Garha–Mandla defeated the
mighty Mughals; the Bahmanis from the South were thrice defeated by
Chanda rulers, etc. The Chanda rulers used to possess diamond mines at
Vairagad and Kalamb in Maharashtra. These simple people expanded
agriculture extensively and invited people from adjacent states. Tax-free
land was allotted to whoever expanded the agriculture land and developed
water bodies. They provided asylum to traders and businesspeople—
Gondwana was prosperous during those years. Very low taxes were
collected from the peasants.
However, the Gond masses followed indigenous Gondi practices. The
Gond community was vast and scattered in middle India and somewhat
heterogeneous and nebulous, and yet there were common factors like
origin, history, and so on. It was divided into a number of sections. Those
sections were ordinarily endogamous and consisted of clans grouped into
exogamous phratries within them.
The Gondi dharma or religious life was never experienced and thought
of as something separable and narrowly distinguishable from the natural
world. All its objects and all its entities were involved in a system of mystic
cohesion and its order. The Gonds were expert in art and crafts. They were
also expert in beautiful wall paintings and floral designs that depicted
geometric designs and stylistic figures of plants and animals. They were
masters in the art of personal decoration.
The cultural forms of dance, music, dress, and food were different from
others. It is possible to get an idea of their cultural identity and
distinctiveness in their social organization, language, rituals, and festivals
and through their ornaments, art, and crafts. Affectionate hospitality,
undemanding ways of living, and earnest judgment of the opinion were
some of the traits that marked Gond culture. Their institutions i.e. Gotul had
inculcated a sense of discipline and cooperative endeavour among its
members. It was a centre of learning and had a religious purpose to it. The
members used to share stories, local idioms, wisdom, riddles, and talks on
ecology and forestry, medicines, and herbs, hunting and fishing, as well as
the resources available around. Thus they were mentally tough and
physically fit. Their cultural practices were transmitted through generations
without formal training.
In view of the above one may conclude that Gonds were rulers and
empire builders; they owned a large number of palaces and forts, and all of
middle–India is marked by the remnants of age-old palaces and forts.
However, with the advent of a more powerful enemy, they lost the glory of
their empires; the Gond rajas became tributaries and common masses, fled
to hills, mountains, and terrains in dense forest to protect themselves?
55
PROGRESSIVE THOUGHT IN MAHARASHTRA

Devkumar Ahire

From the eight century to the eleventh century, in different parts of India,
there was a churning in philosophical, literary, social, religious, economic,
and political trends. There was the rise of heretical thoughts, new religious
cults, the spread and rise in vernacular literature and crisis in centralized
state order. That is why this period is also known as ‘Siddha-Samant yuga’
or the age of heretical thoughts and feudal lords. According to G. B. Sardar,
‘After the decline of [the] Gupta empire, there was [the] challenge to
orthodoxy and [the] beginning of comprehensive renaissance in India and
with it there was rise of regional identities through vernacular languages.’
These three centuries created an intellectual, philosophical, social, and
religious atmosphere for the rise of progressive thoughts of the
Mahanubhav and Warkaris sect in Maharashtra. Mahanubhav and Warkari
sects have a socio-religious context and intellectual and philosophical
history. Before the rise of the Mahanubhav and Warkaris, the social
situation was highly influenced, controlled, and regulated by
Varnashramadharma and Vedic religion. The Yadavas patronized the
traditional Vedic religion, but that religion was no longer a living force.
Religious status had been monopolized by few Brahmin pundits, who
understood the Sanskrit language in which ancient religious texts were
available. Hemadri, who was minister of the Yadavas and a religious leader,
was busy writings of Chatuvargachintamani which prescribed ten rites for a
single day and 2,000 rites for 365 days. Through these rites, people like
Vidnyaneshwar, Bopadev, and Hemadri wanted to propagate progressive
thoughts like the religious rights of women, Shudras, and Atishudra, and the
use of vernacular languages.
Some important literature on the nature and rise of progressive thoughts
of the Mahanubhav and Warkaris includes Maharashtriya Sant Mandalache
Aitihasik Karya (1994) by B. R. Sunthankar, Sant Wangamayachi Samajik
Phalshruti (2010) by G. B. Sardar, and Marathi Santanche Samajik Kary
(2014) by V. B. Kolate. There are also many other books on each
sampradaya (sects) and important figures. In modern Maharashtra, scholars
from all ideological schools have interpreted the philosophy and thoughts of
saints in their own ways. For some people, saints were like the missionaries
of Hindutva, activists of the working class, and spokespersons of a non-
Brahmin party. Saints played an important role in the philosophical and
social mingling and churning of Maharashtra, but the legacy of saints is
complex.
Chakradhar and his Mahanubhav sect are very radical in the context of
caste and gender. He was against caste discrimination. He rejected the
authority of the Vedas and ideas of pollution. Kolate has argued that
Chakradhar was a social revolutionary but G. B. Sardar rejects this
argument, further he also underestimates the contributions of Chakradhar
and his philosophy because in his opinion the Warkari sect and their belief
system of Bhagawat Dharma is inclusive, easy, and unorthodox. Sardar
argued that in the Warkari sect there was also a difference between
Dnyaneshwar—Eknath and Namdev—Tukaram because their social
location is different but they also have commonalities like the use of
Marathi language, the right of bhakti to everyone, spiritual and moral
upliftment, and equality of caste and. On the one hand, Warkari saints
rejected the superiority of varna and gave religious rights to everyone and,
but on the other hand, they accepted the idea of Varnashramadharma
(system of four classes).
Saint Ramdas, however, wanted to established the authority of
Brahmins. Ramdas wanted to highlight social reality—hence he rejected
traditional ideas of religion, spread Maharashtra dharma, and used the
Marathi language instead of Sanskrit. The Mahanubhav sect and the
Ramadasi sect occupy two ends of the spectrum—the Warkaris occupy
middle ground. But all these sects have their own progressive thoughts.
Some recent works by Vidyut Bhagwat and Eleanor Zelliot on
untouchability and women saints like Chokhamela, Soyrabai, Janabai show
us the logical, critical, and rational arguments on these subjects. Janabai and
Soyrabai challenged patriarchy through their poems. Soyrabai said that the
body is polluted from within. Janabai declared that ‘I will let my saree slip
from my head to the shoulders, hold my head high and walk into the market
place.’ Marathi saints provided inspiration for Maratha swaraj that was
eventually established by Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and influenced
modern Marathi philosophical and intellectual discourses. Tukaram
Darshan, by Sadanand More, is an insightful book the influence of
Tukaram on the reformist and radical thinkers of modern Maharashtra.
Due to the colonial knowledge project, new forms of state, education
systems, printing press, spread of printed books, newspapers, Christian
missionaries, and indigenous people came together and new social and
cultural values flourished. These gave new perspective to look at political,
religious, economic, and cultural transformations. Matthew Lederle (1976)
has discussed the historical development of new thoughts and philosophies
in his book, Philosophical Trends in Modern Maharashtra. J. V. Naik and
Umesh Bagade respectively in their works Social Reform Movements in
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in Maharashtra and Maharashtratil
Jatvarga Prabhutva have also discussed the nature of social reforms and
social, religious, and philosophical discourses. Liberalism, universal
humanism, rationalism—all these ideologies found space in modern
Maharashtra. People like Lokahitawadi, Mahatma Phule, Justice Ranade,
and Aagarkar started social reform movements. During the colonial era, the
most influential social reformers and thought leaders of Maharashtra have
been Jotiba Phule, the Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur and Dr B. R. Ambedkar.
Humanism, justice, and equality have been the ideas at the heart of their
work and writings. R.D. Karve spent his whole career promoting sex
education, women’s reproductive health, and rationalism. Dr B. R.
Ambedkar and Pandurang Sadashiv Sane Guru fought for social equality
and the democratization of society. Ambedkar challenged caste and Sane
Guruji continuously spoke for Hindu–Muslim unity, the removal of
Untouchability, and gram swaraj.
After Independence, movements such as Ek Gaon, Ek Panawatha (One
Village, One Water tank), Vishamata Nirmulana Parishad (Committee of
Eradication of Discrimination), Andhashraddh Nirmulana Samiti
(Committee for Eradication of Superstitions), and Muslim Satyashodhak
Mandal, and persons like Lakshmanshastri Joshi, D. K. Bedekar, Narhar
Kurundar, Hamid Dalwai, Baba Adhav, Sharad Patil, G. B. Sardar, Nalini
Pandit, Ram Bapat, A. H. Salunkhe, and others spread progressive thought
across Maharashtra. Dr Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare sacrificed
their lives for the rationalist movement in Maharashtra. Today, there are
many small groups, organizations, and collectives which are spreading
progressive thought in different parts of Maharashtra. Thus in Maharashtra
the tradition of progressive thoughts is continuous from Chakradhar to
Dabholkar. Now, we see posters of popular slogan ‘Phule Shahu Ambedkar,
Aamhi Saare Dabholkar’ (‘Phule Shahu Ambedkar, we are all Dabholkar’)
in different parts of Maharashtra.
56
ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL GUJARAT

Aparna Kapadia

Gujarat is contemporary India’s westernmost state. In its modern form it

came into existence in 1960 when the larger Bombay State was bifurcated
into two linguistic states: Gujarat and Maharashtra. While its present
boundaries may be recent, the history of human settlement in Gujarat goes
back four millennia. Variations of the name Gujarat—Gurjaramandala,
Gujrabhumi, Gurjaradesh, Gurjarashtra—denoting the region, however,
came into use from around eleventh century CE.
Over these centuries, the term ‘Gujarat’ had come to encompass three
broad geographic and sociocultural regions. Of these, two peninsular
regions—the desert region of Kachchh and partially semi-arid, Saurashtra
or Kathiawad—flank the third integrated zone of north, central, and south
Gujarat. Even though Kachchh and Saurashtra had long independent
histories, from around 800 CE their fortunes were often closely linked to this
integrated central zone. This was also the zone from which much of Gujarat
would come to be ruled from cities like Patan and Ahmedabad for centuries.
Two main scholarly approaches have defined the study of Gujarat’s
ancient (100 ce to 940 CE) and medieval history (940 CE to 1450 CE). First,
nineteenth and early twentieth-century nationalist histories that drew their
ideas from the colonial histories of India. The writer–politician, K. M.
Munshi’s writings have had a particularly deep impact on the scholarly and
popular imagination of Gujarat’s past in this regard. Munshi viewed the
Chalukya or Solanki dynasty (940 CE to 1244 CE) as the ‘golden era’ of
Gujarat’s past. According him, it was under the Chalukyas that the region
developed an ideal cohesive identity. Consequently, he foregrounded their
rule in his historical and literary work while underplaying the history of the
other crucial ruling powers, especially the Gujarati or Muzaffarid sultans
(c.1403 to 1573 CE). Second, histories of ancient, and especially medieval
India, have tended to focus on North India’s Delhi-centric empires. As a
result, even though in medieval times Gujarat was an extremely prosperous
and socially complex region, its histories have been sidelined.
In the past two decades, a small but significant body of scholars have
challenged these limitations of political and historical research into Gujarat.
New studies have shifted the focus away from the narrow accounts that
glorified a single dynasty. Instead, these works take a more wide-ranging
approach to understand the complex forces that shaped Gujarat’s past
including its distinctive socio-economic configurations, its religious and
linguistic diversity, and global networks of trade and travel.
Historically, merchants and pastoralists were Gujarat’s most important
social groups. It was the movement of people—be it traders, nomads,
pilgrims, bandits, or saints over land, along the rivers, and the across the
seas—that distinguished Gujarat from other parts of northern India.
According to the historian Samira Sheikh, who has written extensively
about medieval Gujarat, it was the interchangeability between the two
identities and the interactions between them that fuelled the history of the
region.
Gujarat’s 1,600-kilometre coastline made it a key part of the widespread
and intricate web of Indian Ocean commerce. Ancient and medieval port
cities like Khambhat or Cambay and Bharuch hosted traders, shipbuilders,
and intellectuals from East Africa and East and West Asia—many of these
also had business interests in the hinterlands. And Gujarati merchants
traded with and often lived in places like Java and Sumatra in present-day
Indonesia, Aden and Mocha in Yemen, Hormuz in Persia, and other parts of
the oceanic trading world. These merchants, Hindus, Jains, and Muslims
alike, were also well established as bankers and providers of capital to
states and other businesses.
The centrality of trade is reflected in Gujarat’s flourishing cities like
Patan, Dahod, Ahmedabad, and Champaner. These cities developed as
administrative and production centres and sustained large, diverse
populations. Moreover, literature from the period attests that its rulers too
made every effort to provide security and facilitate commercial activities.
Gujarat also traded much more than just luxury goods. Its agricultural
prosperity allowed its merchants to trade in large quantities of cotton and
cotton textiles as well a variety of grains and other staples.
From the early centuries of the Common Era, the people of Gujarat, just
as other parts of India, practised multiple overlapping and interconnected
faiths. Buddhism and other non-Brahminical sects were popular. But a
notable feature of Gujarat from the fifth century was that Jainism witnessed
a remarkable growth. Gujarat became the centre of Shvetambara, or the
white clad, arm of the sect that merchants, especially in Saurashtra and
north Gujarat widely adopted; Svetambara Jainism continues to remain a
prominent faith in the state to this day.
Islam came to Gujarat as early as the late seventh century, along land
and sea trade routes, and through the Arab incursions in Sindh in the eighth
and ninth centuries. In the medieval era, as Indian Ocean links further
expanded and as Gujarat also became home to Muslim polities, Sufis and
scholars from across Africa and the Arab world also settled there. A
denomination that is particularly noteworthy in Gujarat, and was one of the
first to get a footing in the region through trading connections, was
Ismailism. This Shia sect gained a wide range of converts among the
pastoralists in Gujarat as well in the neighbouring Sindh and Rajasthan.
The evolution of the Gujarati language, just as other Indian languages,
is a combination of the what people spoke as well as the state-promoted
language of power such as Sanskrit or Persian. In ancient and medieval
times, various forms of Gujarati as well as other languages were a part of
the rich mix of people and cultures that made up the region. Different parts
of Gujarat also had their own linguistic and oral traditions: the official state
language today has its foundations in central and north Gujarat while, from
the earliest times, the people of Kachchh spoke Kachchhi. This is a
language that has a lot more affinity with Sindhi than with the dominant
form of Gujarati.
While Sanskrit was used for official communication, people spoke
various Prakrits or early forms of the vernacular in ancient Gujarat. Ancient
and medieval Gujarat’s Jain scholars were also especially prolific in
Apabhramsha as well as in Sanskrit. These literary languages were used in
other parts of North India too but the Jains’ contributions to Apabhramsha
literature in Gujarat, and its impact on the formation of various Gujarati
vernaculars is noteworthy. Moreover, poets in this time also composed
verses in the more orally adaptable Dimgal. This was a language that was
popular among the bards who often sang in praise of the various warrior
chieftains, or Rajputs, that made up medieval Gujarat’s sub-imperial
political landscape.
 As Arabic and Persian speakers settled in Gujarat, elements of these
languages were also interwoven into the spoken Gujarati of the times.
Gujarati even today reflects their influence but in the medieval era, the
region saw the emergence of Gujari, a language peculiar to Gujarat but
containing a mix of different linguistic elements. Gujari remained an
important regional language of literature and poetry as well as common
parlance in the medieval and early modern era that followed (1450–1750
CE). Persian as well as Gujari, and to some extent, Sanskrit, were also
patronized by the Muzaffarid sultans under whom the region’s diverse
geographical, social, and cultural elements acquired an unprecedented
coherence.
It was this region—a cultural and economic powerhouse—that later the
Mughals coveted too. In the 1570s, the Gujarati sultans and their often-
subordinate allies, the Rajputs, came together to fight the Mughal
incursions into Gujarat. Their eventual defeat and Akbar’s conquest of
Gujarat would change the fortunes of the budding empire.
57
NOMADIC COMMUNITIES IN WESTERN INDIA

Tanuja Kothiyal

Despite its dominant imaginary as an agricultural civilization, large parts of

India like the Thar Desert, Deccan Plateau, and Western Himalayas are
semi-arid and dependent on seasonal rains for meagre subsistence crops like
millets. These regions are inhabited by many nomadic communities like the
Raikas, Rabaris, Maldharis, Jats, Gujars, Gaddis, Bakarwals, Gollas, etc.
that have historically been engaged with nomadic pastoralism and
agropastoralism. Most of these groups have been practising short- or long-
range migrations along with their herds of cattle, sheep, goats, camels, etc.,
moving between pastures based on the availability of grazing. Apart from
nomadic pastoralist communities, in these regions there also exist several
other migratory groups like the Sansis, Baoris, Kanjars, Gadiya Luhars,
Banjaras, etc., that offer a large range of services to settled communities in
shorter migratory circuits, the latest being the migratory labour as became
evident by the reverse migrations witnessed during the Covid-induced
lockdowns in 2020.
In the histories of state formation in India at different times, focus has
largely remained on large states and on state apparatus that relied upon the
expansion of settled cultivation and appropriation of agricultural surplus.
This leaves the histories of non-agrarian populations and their roles in
processes of state formation on the margins of historical narratives. Unlike
Central and Western Asia and Africa where various studies have pointed
towards the presence of nomadic states which were based on the
management of pastoral wealth, pastures, as well as control of trade and
traffic, in Indian history, groups engaged in such activities are perceived to
be on the margins and in opposition to the state itself. This is even though
several studies suggest that even in large land-based empires like the
Mauryas or the Mughals, there remained large tracts of uncultivated land in
the form of forests, deserts, pastures, and swamps. However, a closer
perusal of the processes of state and societal formations in arid and semi-
arid zones allow us to evolve an alternative understanding of the histories of
these regions.
In western India where agricultural settlements were few and far, it is
animal wealth rather than agricultural surplus, that came to play a central
role in the political economy as well as in the emergence of social
structures. For example, in the local parlance in Rajasthan and Gujarat
regions cattle is referred to as dhan, vitt, maal—all terms meaning wealth.
We find cattle, war animals as well as draught animals figuring in treaties
between rulers. Apart from pastoral communities we also find numerous
references to communities like the Banjaras, Lowanas, etc., that were
involved in the trade and transportation of grain, salt, and other
commodities across long distances using draught animals like oxen in very
large numbers. The popular folklore of the region like that of Pabuji, Tejaji,
and Gogade Chauhan revolves around cattle protection, with these deities
being venerated by pastoral communities even now.
So, in such a context, why does the political history of the region not
reflect the position of pastoral nomadic communities in the region? To some
extent the political history of the region points towards long processes of
settlement of groups that established centres of power often close to water
sources. According to B. D. Chattopadhyaya (1998), in the post-Gupta
period, these groups focused on the expansion of agriculture and irrigation,
and established markets and fortresses. In this process they either
annihilated communities in surrounding regions or incorporated them
through strategies like cult appropriation, that often brought non agrarian
groups into the folds of agrarian and caste structures. New ruling groups
that became dominant in these regions could have emerged from older
lineages, migrations, or power struggles among older tribal and nomadic
communities. By the twelfth century we witness the rise of several such
groups that would go on to call themselves Rajputs, whose origins would
remain at the centre of fierce debates in the region.
The next three centuries witnessed the consolidation of these groups as
sedentary, land-based endogamous caste groups that projected themselves
as protectors of land, fortresses as well as of cattle-rearing communities. In
the shaping of these identities, genealogies and mythological accounts were
often used to obfuscate the question of origins, distinguishing ruling groups
from a larger pool of cattle herding and rearing communities in the region.
This is reflected both in accounts produced in royal courts as well as folk
accounts of the region, the contrast in which shows how the hegemony of
caste location operated in the region. While Rajput accounts traced their
origins from divine figures, sources of light like sun, moon, and fire, the
origin narratives of tribal and nomadic groups projected themselves as
Rajputs who had lost their caste locations because of proscribed acts. This
meant that among various claimants to power in the region, it is the claims
of sedentarized groups that dominated the way the history of the region was
shaped.
Further, nomadic–pastoralist as well as other mobile groups were
further stigmatized as well as criminalized with nineteenth-century British
policies that prioritized agrarian expansion. British accounts of this period
not only gave credence to Rajput histories, but they also characterized
mobile groups as lazy and insolent, uninterested in agricultural pursuits,
while positing agriculture and pastoralism in opposition to each other.
Several mobile communities like the Banjaras, Baoris, Kanjars, Sansis, etc.,
were notified as habitual criminals under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871,
with severe restrictions imposed on their mobility. While these communities
were denotified in 1952, with several reforms proposed subsequently, these
communities remain marginalized and stigmatized by both state and society.
Thus, despite their centrality to western Indian region, nomadic
communities were gradually pushed to the margins of state and society as
well as history writing in the region. While tribal and agropastoral groups
like Jats, Gujars, Minas, Patels, Marathas, etc., that became socially and
economically powerful have managed to create counter narratives, this has
not yet become a possibility for nomadic communities in India.
58
RA JASTHAN

Rima Hooja

Rajasthan has an area of 3,42,274/3,42,239 square kilometres, and a long

cultural sequence, spanning the period from the Palaeolithic (Old Stone
Age, dating between 5,00,000 and 50,000 years ago) through to the
emergence of the modern-day state of Rajasthan. Geography, access to
water, movements of humans in and out of the area, establishment of travel
and trade routes, pastoralism and transhumance, and the availability of
resources like copper and various other metals and minerals (besides
aspects like wars and political histories of small and large states, and the
rise and fall of urban centres), have played a significant role in the region’s
pre and protohistory, as well as recorded history.
The region is synonymous to most with the great Indian Thar Desert
and the Aravalli Range, which divides Rajasthan into two distinct
geographical units. The western is arid to semi-arid and forms 60 per cent
of Rajasthan, while the eastern unit is fertile and semi-humid. The former is
mainly an expanse of sand dunes with isolated hills, often called Maru-
bhumi and Maru-sthali (desert). The main river is the Luni (literally ‘salty’).
The sparse vegetation—mainly shrubs, grasses, and low trees—fulfils needs
of food, medicinal herbs and seeds, fodder, fencing for livestock, and fuel.
Geological and archaeological evidence indicates that excessive aridity,
varying stages of desertification, and spells of plentiful rainfall have
fluctuated here through the ages.
Rajasthan’s second geographical unit lies to the east and southeast of
the Aravalli divide. The area is watered by a network of rivers, many of
them perennial, belonging to the Chambal–Banas and Mahi system.
Rainfall varies between 100 centimetres to 60 centimetres per annum.
Fertile tracts and valleys with alluvium, loam, and black soil are common.
Wheat, maize, sugar cane, cotton, millets, and oilseeds are among the major
crops grown. (Sheep and goat play an important role in the regional
economy both east and west of the Aravalli divide). The southern landscape
of this zone once had a high density of Bhils.
Climate is a defining feature of Rajasthan, and the impact of climate
and geography on regional history still requires continued studies. As does
the interactions and relationships between forest-dwelling groups like the
Bhils, Garasias, Saharaiya, or those labelled as tribal like Minas (Meenas),
and sedentary agrarian groups, especially from c. fifth century CE to c.
fifteenth century CE.
Water is another crucial factor that has influenced Rajasthan’s history.
Numerous water-collection and storage systems, like reservoirs, artificial
lakes, tanks (kunds), stepwells (baoris), wells, and ponds, etc., exist across
the region, which met the drinking water, irrigation, agricultural, and
industry-related needs of the people even in years of poor rainfall.
Destruction of water sources whether through enemy intervention in
thirteenth to fifteenth century forts like Jalore, Siwana, etc., or Shekhawati
in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, or as part of a defensive ‘scorched
earth’ policy, made a crucial impact on history. Thus, many of the
remembered histories and stories of Rajasthan, oral and written, are centred
on water, as much as on battles, wars, and kingdoms.
Natural saltwater lakes like Sambhar, Pachpadra, etc., became sources
for making salt and trading in it over short and long distances resulting in
economic benefits. Sambhar (Shakambhari) became linked with the most
prominent branch of Rajasthan—the Chauhan—following King Vasudev
Chauhan establishing a settlement in seventh century CE. (The Prabandh-
Kosh ascribes the date of Vikram Samvastar 608 (CE 551) to Vasudev). The
exploitation of salt at Shakambhari probably predated Vasudev, with small-
scale local salt-making—possibly by semi-nomadic specialists. Some
traditions hold that during the reign of Vasudev’s son, Manikya-dev (also
called Samanta), the process of making salt was discovered by Kalptaji
‘Kayastha’, to whom was given the title of ‘Manikya-bhandari’. King
Manikya-dev made him state treasurer, granting him and his descendants
rights in perpetuity over a share of salt. This ‘bharti kharch’ right was paid
by the Banjaras and other traders in salt to Kalptaji’s descendants until the
British took over salt-production at Sambhar Lake through a treaty in 1870
CE.
This brings us to another linked issue that had a major influence and
impact on the trajectory of the region’s history—namely the use of copper,
iron, lead, and alloyed metals, and eventually the unique distillation of zinc
in the Zawar area near present-day Udaipur city. The availability of local
chalcopyrite ore was tapped between the third to second millennia BCE,
leading to production of copper objects as known archaeologically from
Kalibangan and the Ghaggar valley of northern and northwestern Rajasthan,
the Ahar culture of southeastern Rajasthan, and the Jodhpura–Ganeshwar
complex. Later emerged the knowledge of iron technology as early as 1300
BCE (or possibly earlier), in the region. Evidence of Rajasthan’s iron-using
‘cultures’ include Painted Grey Ware, iron-using group of sites; and still
later the early historical, Mauryan, Buddhist, Indo-Greek, Yaudheyas,
Sunga–Kushan, etc., period remains, and sites with Northern Black
Polished Ware (NBPW). Metal technology and access to metal and mineral
resources became another defining aspect in the history of Rajasthan.
Swords of certain kingdoms gained reputation because of their
manufacturing technique based on the availability of resources. Access to
cannons and gunpowder played its own drastic role on battles like those
fought at Khanua in 1527, and musket-fire at the siege of Chittor in 1568.
Zinc production in Rajasthan is an area where further research is
required. Lead and silver workings were known in southern and
southeastern Rajasthan from early historical times. There were zinc mines
at Dariba and Potlan in Bhilwara district, too, but little is known about their
dates and working. In the Zawar area, remains of ancient mines, iron
chisels, and pestle-like hammers were noted in-situ at ancient workings in
the Mochia mine. Remains of wooden stairways and haulage scaffolds
survive in some mines. Samples taken for radiocarbon (C14) dating from a
scaffold and leet in the Zawar Mala mine have given C14 dates of 170 +- 60
BCE, and CE 30 +- 50. These are dates comparable to other ancient
silver/lead workings at Rajasthan’s Rajpura-Dariba and Rampura-Aguncha.
The Samoli Inscription of 646 CE records that mining was done in
Mewar in the seventh century CE. Later, some mines were abandoned, and
rediscovered between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Work in the
Zawar mines area has led researchers from the MS University Baroda, the
British Museum, and Hindustan Zinc Ltd., Udaipur, among others, to state
that an indigenous process of zinc distillation and extraction was known
here as early as at least in the fourteenth–fifteenth century CE, predating zinc
production in Europe. It is held that originally only silver and lead was
worked at Zawar, with zinc smelting a later development. Zinc extraction
and smelting at the Zawar mines developed into a major industry in the
sixteenth century and continued to flourish until the late eighteenth century.
This is attested by the vast slag heaps at Zawar Mata, 25 miles southeast of
Udaipur, along with zinc retorts, disused furnace sites and remains of old
structures and temples over a large area. More study is required and
available data needs wider dissemination.
Domesticated and wild animals were important right from the
Mesolithic times, but the special importance of camels and fine locally-bred
horses also requires additional work insofar as when camels are first evident
in historical records, and the many breeds of horses, role of horses in
expansion of boundaries, cattle raids on neighbours and territorial
expansion through the centuries.
Migrations into and out of the area also is an important shaper of the
trajectory of local histories. The process happened in many centuries and
involved numerous communities. The issue requires further study. In a like
manner, the issue of local and regional powers becoming part of pan-India
empires and having a symbiotic relationship with stronger neighbours or
kingdoms needs to be understood better: rather than in simplistic terms. The
process is seen from the Mauryan period onwards, through the periods of
large empires under the Guptas, Kanauj Pratihars, Mughals, and the British.
Numismatics, inscriptions, architecture, and iconography, etc., helps
understand this political process, just as much as it throws up fresh
questions, and is an area that still requires further future research.
Among the other areas where future research is required include
understanding the emergence and disappearance or amalgamation of
religious and philosophical sects (e.g., Lakulish, forest deities, and yaksha
worship), training in deciphering scripts (early Brahmi, for example), and
semi-lost histories of groups like the Nagas of or tiny chiefships described
in early historical Yupa pillars.
In conclusion, one may state that a lot is known of the numerous
histories of the Rajasthan area from prehistoric times onwards, but several
issues still require further study.
59
SINDH

Manan Ahmed

The history of Sindh gains colonial attention at the beginning of the

nineteenth century. The urgency at the moment is driven by the need to
chart the course of the Indus River, to buffer Punjab (and Kabul farther
afield) and to open up a port onto the Indian Ocean (Karachi).
Subsumed under this mishmash of geographic and tactical concerns was
another search for origins—that of Islam’s arrival to the subcontinent and
the establishment of the first Muslim polity in the early eighth century in
Sindh by Muhammad bin Qasim. A series of British East India Company
political agents, most notably Thomas Postans, Richard F. Burton, Edward
Eastwick served in and wrote about Sindh until its annexation by the British
East India Company in 1843 under Charles Napier. In this colonial corpus,
Sindh was christened ‘Young Egypt’, making a parallel not only to the great
rivers of Indus and Nile but to the monumentality of past and forgotten
civilizations. The search for the latter was specifically focused on India’s
Buddhist history and spurred by the translations of fifth through eighth
century travel accounts of India by Chinese (and Korean) Buddhists—Fa-
Hsien and Xuanzang in the 1830s, and later Hye Ch’o. This would prompt
the foundation of the Archaeological Survey of India and digs in Harappa,
first under Alexander Cunningham and then later, lead to the unearthing of
Mohenjo Daro under John Marshall in 1922.
The colonial rendering of Sindh rested on a variety of source-materials:
on historical texts (such as the Persian history from the thirteenth-century
Chachnama), on the engravings and carvings on mausoleums and grand
mosques, on ‘ethnographic’ observations of ‘tribals’ conducted by British
colonial political agents, and on the understanding of political rulers of
Sindh in Hyderabad. Sindh was thus read discursively across mediums,
authors, peoples, and landscapes into a coherent whole, best summed up by
British political agent and noted philologist, Richard F. Burton as the
‘Unhappy Valley’. Undoubtedly, the colonial reading was one fuelled by
animus, prejudice, and exploitative capitalism. Colonial orientalists,
philologists, and archaeologists imagined Sindh’s history, even its
geography, from outside Sindh. In this paradigm, Sindh comes into
historical or cultural view as a space only when agentive history interacts
with it in the form of Alexander the Great or Jalaluddin Akbar or the
Portuguese or British colonial forces.
The Partition of 1947 prompted a mass migration (spread over the first
decade) of Hindu Sindhis to various parts of India (largely to Gujarat,
Maharashtra, and Karnataka). The partitioning border ran through
Tharparkar and Nagarparkar and fractured much of the cultural memory, the
patterns of pilgrimage and worship, the specific histories of families and
communities in almost as brutal a fashion as the physical drawing of
borders across Punjab and Bengal did in 1947. The colonial port city of
Karachi emerged in 1948 as a haven for the displaced and the migrated
across the borders (a large segment came from Uttar Pradesh in India and
were called Muhajir or migrants afterwards). Karachi was the first capital
city of Pakistan and would go on to become the most populated metropolis
of post-Independence Pakistan (though it would never rival the cultural
centrality which its twin port city Bombay would have for independent
India). A new dynamic would emerge in Sindh’s history as Karachi, now
booming with migrants and industry, becomes awkwardly set against rural”
Sindh, prefiguring other fractures: Sindhi versus Urdu, Hindu versus
Muslim, Mohenjo Daro versus Metropolis.
The creation of Bangladesh in 1971 from erstwhile East Pakistan forced
a reconfiguration of much of Pakistan’s national story. The idea that
Pakistan was a safe harbour for Muslims of the subcontinent could scarcely
survive a nation’s own (Muslim) army destroying its own (Muslim) cities
and killing and raping its own (Muslim) civilians. Over the course of 1970s,
as Sindhi history would develop (against a nascent independence movement
for Sindhu Desh), so would the urgency for assimilating Sindhi history into
Pakistan. By 1979, under the dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the
sixth president of the country, Pakistan’s own history would dovetail with
the history of Sindh as a ‘first’ point of entry for Islam—in the political as
well as proselytizing sense. The pivot towards a ‘new’ history for Pakistan,
thus, relied upon Sindh and the coming of Muslim polities to this territory
in the early eighth century CE. Muhammad bin Qasim, the conquering
general of Sindh in 712 CE, would become the ‘First Citizen of Pakistan’,
and the idea of a martial, Arab–centred history of Pakistan would reign
supreme for many decades to follow.
The main contours for the study of Sindh were thus established over the
course of the nineteenth century under the following three rubrics. First, the
pre-Muslim history of the region focusing on the geography as seen through
Buddhist texts and Sanskrit epics. Second, the history of Muslim arrival as
a protoypical origin story (foreign conquest and domination). Third, the
Indus Valley Civilization. In the early to mid-twentieth century, much of the
scholarship on Sindh would be driven by British orientalists such as Henry
Cousens (1854–1933), Mortimer Wheeler (1890–1976), and Hugh Trevor
Lambrick (1904–1982). However, there were important Indian scholars
such as Mirza Kalich Beg (1859–1929) and Umar Bin Muhammad
Daudpota (1896–1958) in the midst. Major scholarship on Sindh after
Partition was led by Hassam-ud-Din Rashidi (1911–1982), Muhammad
Hussain Panhwar (1925–2007), Nabi Baksh Khan Baloch (1917–2011),
Mohammad Rafique Mughal (b. 1936), and Kaleemullah Lashari (b. 1953)
among others. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Sindh Adabi
Society and the Sindhological Institute (based in Jamshoro) produced
critical editions of major Persian histories such as Chachnama, Tarikh-i-
Masumi, Tuhfat-ul Kiram, Tarkhan-nama, and Beglarnama among hundred
more important texts.
Since the 2000s, the scholarship on Sindh has focused on its role as an
important cultural and religious centre for Indian Ocean World and trans-
sub-continental networks. The Sufi centre at Sehwan Sharif, Makli, Uch
Sharif, and the thoughts and poetry of figures such as Shah Abdul Latif
Bhittai (1690–1752), Sachal Sarmast (1739–1829). Following the work of
Annemarie Schimmel (1922–2003), Michel Boivin, Juergen Wasim
Frembgen, Jürgen Schaflechner Claude Markovits, and others have focused
specifically on the histories of Sufism, Bhakti, and lived traditions of
mysticism in Sindh. Major scholarly interventions in the histories of
architecture and archaeology are driven by the works of Finbarr Flood,
Alka Patel, and others, and have prompted new scholarship connecting
Sindh to Rajasthan, Gujarat, and the broader Indian Ocean World.
Additionally, scholars are looking into the life of Arabic textual practices
and communities in Sindh.
 Looking ahead, scholars need to focus specifically on engaging the
centuries of coexistence and flourishing of varied faith communities—from
the embeddedness of Sita to Guru Nanak in the folklore and sacral
geography of Sindh. The burden of Partition has cut Sindh off from its roots
and routes in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Aden. To rethink Sindh out of its
colonial paradigms as well of its nationalist is of utmost importance. A
model can be taken from the histories of capital and Sindhi diaspora led by
Claude Markovits. Much more work focusing on Sindhi communities can
be done. Some of the most exciting new names in scholarship on Sindh are
Munazzah Akhtar, Fatima Quraishi, Uttara Shahani, Shayan Rajani, Sohaib
Baig, Omar Kasmani, Saaz Aggarwal, Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro, and Rita
Kothari to name but a few.
THE NORTHEAST AND THE EAST
60
THE NORTHEAST: PREHISTORIC AND ANCIENT PAST

Manjil Hazarika

Sir Edward Gait, who is considered one of the pioneers to write a history of
Assam covering the ancient past till the British colonial period, begins the
introductory chapter of his celebrated book A History of Assam (1906)
stating the problem of the dearth of early records. He categorically
expressed: ‘The science of history was unknown to the early inhabitants of
Assam…. For several hundred years previously some scattered facts may be
gleaned from a few ancient inscriptions…. Before then nothing definite is
known and our only information consists of some dubious and fragmentary
references….’ (Gait, 1906:1). However, this problem of paucity of source
materials faced by the historians dealing with the region slowly improved
with the discovery and decipherment of several rock and copper-plate
inscriptions, manuscripts, coins, unearthing of archaeological remains of
prehistoric and historic periods, and correlation of archaeological and
literary data (Choudhury, 1985; Singh and Sengupta, 1991; Jamir and
Hazarika, 2014). The twenty-first century witnessed an increasing interest
among archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists in multidisciplinary
approaches to the study of the region’s prehistoric and ancient past. The
application of various scientific disciplines in these studies has proved to be
of extreme significance.
India is often considered a major crossroad of movements of prehistoric
ancestors from Africa, the cradle of humankind, to the far east. While
discussing the dispersal routes of these early humans through South Asia,
Northeast India is considered a narrow strategic corridor between the
gigantic high Himalayas in the north and the Bay of Bengal and the Indian
Ocean in the south. However, the sub-recent alluvial deposits in the river
valleys of the region and vigorous sedimentation might have covered any
deposits bearing 2-million-year-old antiquity, if there ever were any. Hence,
the foothills of the Himalayas and other hills south of the Brahmaputra and
the coastal regions adjoining Bangladesh, Tripura, Mizoram, and Myanmar
have greater chance of being rewarding in this regard, and thus warrants
immediate attention.
For understanding the earliest remains of human habitation in Northeast
India, one needs to look at the hilly areas which have so far produced some
important prehistoric sites. Many Stone Age sites dating back to the
Palaeolithic–Mesolithic period have been recorded from the uplands of
Garo, Khasi, and Jaintia Hills, Manipur, and Tripura. Although the region
has not yielded any evidence of Lower Palaeolithic cultures, some of these
stone artfacts have been equated with the Hoabinhian or similar industries
of Southeast Asia that fall within the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene
geological period. Hoabinhian is a technological tradition of prehistoric
hunter–gatherers–fishers that existed approximately during the last 43,000
to 7,000 YBP in a broad region from southern China, northern Vietnam,
Malaya, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Sumatra, Taiwan, and Northeast India.
These sites in Northeast India need detailed investigations regarding their
cultural and chronological contexts. Artefacts made on silicified fossil
woods (Fig. 1) are widely found in Tripura, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.

Figure 1: Axes made on fossil wood in the Sonai area of west Tripura
The next important phase is the Neolithic period starting roughly at around
4,500 YBP. The most important excavated Neolithic sites of the region are
Parsi-Parlo and Daporijo in Arunachal Pradesh; Daojali Hading, Sarutaru,
and Bambooti in Assam; Nongpok Keithelmanbi and Napachik in Manipur;
Selbalgiri 2, Pynthorlangtein, Lawnongthroh, and Myrkhan in Meghalaya;
Chungliyimti, Purakha, Zolapkhan, and Photangkhun Longkhap in
Nagaland and Sonai in Tripura (Hazarika, 2017). Apart from these
excavated sites, there are large numbers of localities which have reported
stone artefacts and pottery in abundance on the surface as well as in in-situ
contexts. These suggest an extensive Neolithic occupation in Northeast
India. There is no clear-cut evidence of Chalcolithic culture in the region
due to the paucity of copper ore. Iron was a precious metal smelted by the
late Neolithic communities. Prokop and Suliga (2013) reported the
stratigraphic evidence of iron smelting in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya in
2040 ± 80 YBP (353 BCE–128 CE), which may be considered the earliest
undisputed evidence of this metal in Northeast India.
Based on the surface as well as excavated materials, one can argue that
the important features of the Neolithic period of the region are the cord-
impressed or beater-impressed pottery, some ill-fired and plain pottery,
tripod wares, ground and polished tools particularly shouldered celts, and
incipient farming based on rice in the region. These Neolithic cultural traits
link the region with their Southeast and East Asian counterparts besides the
middle Ganga Valley and Vindhyan region of India. Northeast Indian
Neolithic culture definitely exhibits a close connection with the northern
Southeast Asian Neolithic, which was also a derivative of the Neolithic
culture in the Yangtze Valley. This period coincides with the advent of the
various Austro–Asiatic and Tibeto–Burman language-speaking groups from
neighbouring Southeast, East, and South Asian regions. These assumptions
are based on available archaeological, historical, linguistic, and human
genetic data (van Driem, 2021). Radiometric dates from some of the
excavated sites suggest that the Northeast Indian Neolithic complex appears
to be quite late, and a time range bracket from circa 2500 to 1500 BCE can
be deduced. Assam and other adjoining areas, until the beginning of its
historical period in the fourth century CE, remained in the Neolithic early
farming phase. Many of the Neolithic traits continued in certain pockets
where the impact of urbanization in the Brahmaputra Valley from the
beginning of the Common Era did not affect much.
 Archaeologists recognize the potential of Assam and other states of
Northeast India for understanding the early domestication of plants,
particularly rice. The essential requirements for early agriculture, such as
the availability of perennial water, uplands for growing tubers and roots and
lowlands for cereal crops such as rice, suitable seasonal rainfall and climate
all occur in the fertile lands of Northeast India, making a strong case for the
hypothesis that this region has played a crucial role in the early
domestications of rice.
As most of the early excavations at the Neolithic sites of Northeast
India were conducted at small scales and no emphasis was placed on
recording botanical remains, there is a dearth of evidence for reconstructing
the origins of agriculture in the region. However, recent
palaeoethnobotanical investigations at the sites of New Phor, Chungliyimti,
Khusomi, Khezakenoma, Movolomi, Phor, and Ranyak Khen (cave) in the
uplands of Nagaland have provided evidence of plant remains including
Oryza sp. (cf. officinalis, rufipogon, sativa). The findings of millets (Setaria
sp., Paspalum sp., and Echinochloa sp.) with wild and cultivated rice
suggest that these millet grasses were gathered/cultivated for consumption
(Pokharia et al., 2013: 1346). Botanical evidence from excavations at
Lawnongthroh and Myrkhan in the Khasi Hills include native
wild/domesticated rice, millets, Job’s tears, moong bean, and Ziziphus sp.
(Mitri and Neog, 2016) For a holistic understanding of the agricultural
origin in the region, focused archaeological research focusing on palaeo-
botanical, archaeo-zoological, and palaeo-environmental evidence is
extremely essential.
Northeast India is also well known for the widespread meglithic
structures found in different geographical and cultural contexts.
Interestingly, the construction of megaliths is also a living tradition among
many of the ethnic communities of this region (Fig. 2). Megalithic remains
of different shapes and sizes are found in a belt extending from the Khasi
and Jaintia Hills through Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao up to the Naga
Hills besides Manipur, Mizoram, and certain areas of Arunachal Pradesh
(Marak, 2019). The individual menhirs, the cluster of menhirs, menhirs
with a flat stone and dolmens, cists, and hollow monolithic jars are some of
the megalithic structures found across the region which are classified as
memorial or commemorative and funerary or ritualistic. Ethno-
archaeological studies based on these stone monuments and the present-day
communities who practise the megalithic tradition are gaining lots of
importance in recent years. However, establishing the chronology of these
monuments is still a challenge.
The transition from prehistory to history in the region is still in
ambiguity. In the late Neolithic period, several chieftain groups based on
different ethnolinguistic and cultural backgrounds emerged, slowly leading
to the formation of petite kingdoms occupying the hills and foothill areas.
The exchange of ideas, development of trade and commerce among them,
and arrival of newer groups of people from the Ganga Valley in the last part
of the first millennium BCE led to the rise of smaller principalities in the
Brahmaputra Basin and its tributaries. Intermittent trade between India and
China through the valley and surrounding areas provided a base for these
earliest state formations. The Brahmaputra River system acted as a
thoroughfare for the hinterland trade networks. The lower reaches of the
Brahmaputra which joins the Padma (Ganga) in Bangladesh is another
important cultural zone of ancient Bengal where urban centres flourished in
the early centuries of the Common Era. Moreover, areas like Goalpara in
the confluence of Krishnai, Dudhnoi, and Brahmaputra rivers, the regions in
and around Guwahati and Dhansiri-Doiyang Valley were some of the key
areas of historical development since the beginning of the early centuries of
the first millennium CE. Excavations at sites like Sekta in Manipur,
Bhaitbari in Meghalaya, Thakurani Tilla, Boxanagar, and Pilak in Tripura
have also provided valuable information on the art, iconography, and
historical developments in those areas of the Northeast.
Figure 2: Megalithic structures in Killing River Valley in Assam

The archaeological remains of Guwahati indicate a continuation of

human habitation from a distant past. Guwahati has been recognized as the
ancient Pragjyotishapura, the capital of the ancient Pragjyotisha kingdom.
The most significant evidence of historical archaeology comes from the site
of Ambari in Guwahati. From the first two seasons of excavation during
1969–70 and 1970–71, a brick structure and quite a few sculptures and
religious motifs of different sizes brought the site into the limelight. A good
amount of terracotta plaques and figures were also unearthed during these
excavations, including the sculptures of celestial and terrestrial beings,
mukhalingas, headdresses, tiles, beads, and sealing along with a variety of
ceramics such as Kaolin, Celadon, Rouletted, and Green Glazed pottery
(Dutta, 2006). Subsequently, several excavations yielded a huge number of
antiquities such as ornamental granite blocks and sculptures belonging to
the tenth–eleventh centuries, earthen lamps, cannonballs, carnelian beads,
and a plethora of ceramics, intact or otherwise. Beads of semi-precious
stones such as chalcedony, agate, carnelian, jasper, coral, amber, and jade
were also unearthed from the excavation (Sharma, 1989). Though the
excavators could not dig deeper due to their encounter with groundwater in
the upper level gushing forth from all directions, the discovery of a
terracotta lid of an inkpot (Ansari and Dhavalikar, 1971) belonging to the
Kushana period traced back the beginning of the habitation at Ambari to the
early centuries of the Common Era.

Figure 3: Early medieval sculpture of Surya recovered from Cotton University campus in Guwahati

In this regard, the latest excavation at Ambari has turned out to be

invaluable as it uncovered a huge brick staircase with eight steps leading to
what appears to be a water tank. In terms of dimension, the excavated
bricks of this stairway at Ambari essentially witness a resemblance with a
few sites of the Gangetic valley which could be dated to a period between
the second century BCE and the third century CE. A fragment of a terracotta
figurine recovered from the same trench with typical Sunga-Kusana
features is another significant marker. The excavations at Ambari and the
material remains belonging to Sunga-Kushana and subsequent periods not
only helped in broadening our understanding of the cultural growth of the
Brahmaputra Valley since the beginning of the Common Era but also paved
the way for fresh hypotheses.
The Varmans of ancient Pragjyotishpura-Kamarupa had close ties with
the Gupta and Vardhana dynasties ruling in a large part of north, central,
and east India. With a more organized way of administration, trade, and
cultural exchange reflected in the inscriptions, coins, pottery, stone
sculptures (Fig. 3) including rock-cuts (Fig. 4), and brick and stone
structures, most areas of the lower and middle Brahmaputra Valley were
brought under a more homogenized cultural and political structure during
the ninth to twelfth centuries CE under the Pala dynasty.

Figure 4: Early medieval rock-cut sculptures at the Urvashi Island in Guwahati

61
ASSAM: THE LONG VIEW

Arupjyoti Saikia

A long view of Assam cannot begin without comprehending the power of

geography and the environment. Both of these play an equally crucial role
in shaping its long historical evolution. Tucked within the highly dynamic
eastern Himalayas, the Patkai Ranges, and the Bay of Bengal (in the distant
south), Assam’s historical progress had long been dependent on these
geographical forces. Less harsh winter and long spells of southwest
monsoon-induced rainfall uniquely shaped its biological world. The
environmental features played a crucial role in determining the region’s
political developments.
By the nineteenth century, Assamese intelligentsia had a reasonable idea
about Assam’s long political lineage in the first millennium CE. Several
scholars, based on their study of Hindu epics and the Puranas, could
assemble the long political view of the region. Such perspectives gained
further currency in the early twentieth century with the discoveries of
inscriptions and other archaeological remnants.
More than half of the long second millennium of Assam’s political
history (c. thirteenth century to early nineteenth century) was critically
controlled by the Ahom kings. The Ahoms, belonging to the Tai-Shans,
migrated from northern Burma in the early thirteenth century. Their success
in emerging as the most powerful political system resulted from their ability
to overpower and integrate smaller communities and their political systems.
The latter was part of varieties of political cultures. None had displayed any
signs of aggressive imperial ambitions. These smaller states had limited
military capacity. They evolved through the art of intricate negotiations to
cohabit in a highly amphibious environment. Here, one had to master the art
of conquest of the water, highlands, and lowlands equally.
The Ahom rulers helped evolve an intricate political system to govern
and control a vast expanse of land and people. Their political thoughts were
drawn from diverse social and cultural milieus. Their military bureaucracy
was among the many crucial elements that helped fortify Ahom’s state
system. Officials of the kingdom enjoyed military power under the
supervision of the kings. (Throughout its long spell, it was only in the
eighteenth century that Ahom queens had partially risen to authority.) These
officials established a complex system to extract revenue from their
subjects. Ahom state’s heavy tax demands also ensured a continuous but
slow expansion of agriculture. An elaborate network of custom checkpoints
from this period indicates the importance of commercial transactions across
diverse geographies.
Nor were the Ahoms the only political masters of these vast
geographies. Since the thirteenth century, the Ahom kings, stationed mainly
in the eastern part of modern Assam, remained engaged in continuous
military engagements to gain westward and southward expansion. In the
fifteenth century, at least three powerful political dynasties—the Koches,
the Bhuyans, and the Ahoms—ruled the present-day Brahmaputra Valley
apart from many minor rulers.
Residents of these vast areas spoke many tongues drawn from Indo-
Aryan, Tibeto–Burman, and Austro–Asiatic language families. More from
the Dravidian language families joined them later. This happened mostly in
the nineteenth century. The presence of many tongues meant languages
evolved by borrowing and learning from other tongues. These multilingual
environs did not become an obstacle to the rise of Assamese literary culture.
Assamese literary historians have carefully recognized the importance
of oral literary cultures. The fourteenth century witnessed the growth of
Assamese verses. Works of a religious–literary nature had flourished since
then. These literary activities gained extraordinary momentum in the
following century. The most towering figure behind this spectacular growth
was Sankaradeva (d. 1568), the saint scholar who propagated Assamese
Vaishnavism. Considered a child prodigy, Sankaradeva travelled
extensively across northern and eastern India. His long sojourns in places of
Indian scholarship helped him to master extensive bodies of texts on Hindu
religious orders and Indian philosophical systems. The outcome of this was
not only limited to his propagation of a new religious order, but also the rise
of a new era of Assamese literary culture.
In the seventeenth century, Mughal rulers struggled to expand the limit
of the northeastern frontier of the empire. A series of military campaigns
produced only partial success. Part of the Ahom kingdom was briefly
brought under the Mughal rule, but the military conquest could not be
permanent. This was mainly due to the Ahom state’s ability to maintain a
vast military force and the creative use of its environment for building its
military strategies. The Mughal empire failed to incorporate this lucrative
agrarian frontier into its territory, but it left behind a profound impact on
how future Ahom kings would govern its lands. Persian influence could
also be seen elsewhere, including Assamese vocabulary.
The Ahom rulers faced serious challenges in the second half of the
eighteenth century. Civil wars swept the entire kingdom from 1769 ce. The
fiercest resistance to the Ahom king was led by the lower strata of the
society living on the eastern outskirts of the kingdom. These rebels, many
of whom were disciples of a Vaishnava monastery, and inspired by its
egalitarian religious ideologies, overthrew the king. Their brief reign,
however, failed to garner support from cross-sections of the kingdom’s
residents. But despite these cracks in the new political developments, the
Ahom king could only be restored to his position thanks to the military
support of the government of the British East India Company, whose capital
was in neighbouring Bengal.
The first two decades of the nineteenth century did not bode well for the
Ahom government. Feuds among the Ahom nobility, weak state finances,
and the Burmese kingdom’s growing ambitions to exert its influence on its
western borders led to disastrous consequences for the Ahom kingdom. A
series of Burmese military invasions since 1816, with their short reign,
further undermined the Ahom kingdom. This eventually brought both the
governments of Burma and the British East India Company (EIC) into
military disputes. The first Anglo–Burmese war, primarily due to a
disagreement between Arakan in Burma and EIC-controlled Chittagong,
began in 1824. Through a military treaty concluded in 1826 CE, the
Burmese government transferred several of its occupied territories to the
control of the government of the EIC.
European traders had tried their luck in Assam long before these
military engagements. Few were luckier to amass profit from various
commercial activities across these diverse economic geographies. However,
the EIC’s conquest of Bengal sealed the fate of other European traders in
the region. The British traders were not alone; few traditional Indian
business families, from the larger Marwar region of western India, also
accompanied the former. They also played a crucial role in making credit
available for trade and procuring goods for export from this region. By the
mid-nineteenth century, these traders, increasingly known as Kyah or later
as Marwari, had become successful in establishing deep linkages in rural
and urban Assam.
The start of the EIC rule in Assam was not smooth. Some of the
noticeable resistance came from a section of the Ahom nobility. A section
of the general population also extended their support to the political actions
of these angry nobles. Despite the EIC’s success in suppressing these early
rebellions, it had to engage in protracted diplomatic and military advances
to add more territories. Most of the nineteenth century remained witness to
these processes.
As the EIC began to consolidate its control over Assam—the latter
became a chief commissioner’s province in 1874—remarkable
developments took place, which forever transformed the economic destiny
of Assam. Britain was desperate to end its critical dependence on Chinese
tea. Several years of experiments, achieved through an assemblage of
diverse expertise and bureaucratic and military assistance provided by the
EIC government, had led to a mercurial growth of tea production in Assam.
The list of items in the EIC trade pursuit was rather long; it included
minerals like coal or petroleum and other commodities like timbers,
elephants, and rubber.
The second half of the nineteenth century had also seen several
developments. Legal and bureaucratic systems were put in place to ensure
Assam’s deeper integration into the British colonial economy. These efforts
had benefitted the empire handsomely. Conversely, the social and cultural
fallout from these political and economic arrangements had far-reaching
consequences that commentators eloquently recounted elsewhere. Assam’s
twentieth-century destiny, and also the state’s political developments, have
been greatly shaped by these long historical developments.
62
SIKKIM

Anira Phipon Lepcha

Sikkim, a Himalayan state on the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga, is a multi-

ethnic, multilingual society. It is also known for its biological and cultural
diversity. Sikkim merged with India as the twenty-second state on 26 April
1975 by the Constitution of India, (Thirty-sixth) Amendment Act, 1975.
Sikkim came under the administrative and financial jurisdiction of the
North Eastern Council as its eighth member by amendment of the NEC Act
in December 2022. Sikkim, called Nye Mayal Renjyong Lyaang (a hidden
paradise) by the Lepchas, hBras-ma ljongs (valley of rice) and and Beyul
Demo Jong (the hidden valley of rice) by Bhutias, derives its name from the
Limbu word Su-Khim, now anglicized to Sikkim.
Twenty-nine Neolithic sites studied in Sikkim yielded ten axes, seven
adzes, fourteen celts, two perforated celts, one unfinished harvester, and one
unfinished sling ball. The Lepchas, autochthones in the area, consider
Mount Kanchenjunga as the womb of their creation. Though the region
originally belonged to the Lepchas, ‘the Limboo, the Magar, and the Bhutia
also are on record to have settled in Sikkim quite early’ (Kandell, 1971). An
egalitarian and casteless society, the Lepchas did not include a ruling
authority in its social and administrative structure. They regarded the most
senior or oldest member as their chieftain having the skill of hunting, being
courageous, and possessing supernatural powers like that of Boongthing
and Mun (priest and priestess). Such persons or the chief were given the
title of ‘Panu’. The period of Lepcha chiefs gradually ended with the
migration of other ethnic groups to their land. The Lepcha has a rich
tradition of orality which could greatly help them revisit the history of their
past and later stages.
The Chogyals from the Namgyal dynasty, who came from Tibet, started
ruling Sikkim from around 1642 till 1975. Historical accounts of the pre-
Namgyal regime are almost non-existent and have to depend on oral or folk
narratives. It is believed that the Tibetan lamas, with a motive to rule the
land, burnt the entire written heritage of the Lepchas and other such
documents when they first came into contact with the ‘Monpas’ or the
inhabitants of the lower Himalayas (Siger, 1967).
The Tibetans who first came in contact with the Lepchas of Sikkim are
known as Lhopos or Lhopas—people from the upper valley. According to
some accounts, a Tibetan chief of Kham province in Tibet visited Sikkim in
the thirteenth century CE and made a bond with the Lepcha chief, Thekong
tek, which is known as the Treaty of Blood Brotherhood. This treaty marks
the beginning of the end of the Lepcha era and the rise of the Bhutia as the
royal masters. This treaty or agreement is said to have opened a wide gate
for the Tibetans to enter Sikkim and established their authority. Since the
early period, Sikkim has attracted many settlers from the neighbouring
regions. The Limboos and the Magars from the west started to settle in
Sikkim with the Lepchas. Their superiority as a group and urge for
autonomy was evident during their encounter with the Bhutias.
During the reign of the fourth ruler Gyurmed Namgyal (1717–1733 CE),
the Limboos called off their allegiance and broke up with Sikkim due to the
denial of their share of power. In the process, they mingled with Nepal from
the western part of Sikkim and formed their principality, and called it
Limbuan, (Namgyal et al., 1970) which presently falls in eastern Nepal.
History reveals that the Limboos gradually emerged as a group in Sikkim
and made their presence felt by other groups as time moved on. During the
time of coronation in 1642, the Bhutia administration was compelled to sign
the agreement of Lho-Mon-Tsong-Sum, a treaty made between the Bhutias,
the Lepchas, and the Limboos (Report-GoS, 1998). Likewise, the Magars
are also known for revolting against the Bhutia kings and are said to have
taken positions in different parts of the country. The Magars did not come to
terms with the Bhutias as they did not accept Tibetan Lamaism, the faith of
their royal masters. The Magars are known for constructing forts,
commonly known as Dzongs in the Tibetan language. The rule of the
Bhutias began in Sikkim in 1642 CE when Phuntsog Namgyal arrogated the
throne of Sikkim as the first king (Risley, 1894). History points out that the
Tibetan/Bhutia migration to Sikkim was actuated by the infighting between
the Red Hat sect and the Yellow Hat sect of the Lamas of Tibet’s
theological kingdom.
KAZIHOOD AND SIKKIMESE POLITY
Sikkimese political culture gradually gave birth to an intricate system of
Kazi aristocracy (Bulletin of Tibetology, 1995). The institution of the
Kazihood and the Lamaist Church were the two pillars on which the
Sikkimese theocratic rule of the Chogyals was enshrined. The system of
government during the Namgyal dynasty was essentially based on absolute
monarchy with feudalistic roots. The king was aided by an assembly of
monks and laymen called Lhade-Mede (assembly of elders).
Over the years, the political scenario changed, but the bureaucracy,
including the recruitment pattern, continued to be traditional, i.e. relatives
of royal interest for personal gain continued to dominate the bureaucracy
(Gurung, 2011) . After the Tibetan incursion and establishment of central
authority over Sikkim, the Bhutanese marched over Sikkim in 1700–11 CE
and the Bhutanese army seized the palace of Rabdentse and compelled Raja
Chador to flee to Tibet (Risely, 1894) . The mediation initiated by the then
Dalai Lama of Tibet gave safe passage for Raja Chador to return to Sikkim.
The Bhutanese agreed to retire and evacuate Sikkim, i.e. west part of
Teesta, but continued to maintain their position at the Damsang fort and
retained what is now called Kalimpong till 1865. This incident led to the
first partition of the Sikkimese kingdom. After the Bhutanese, the Gurkhas
attacked Sikkim. The incursion, which took place in the last part of the
eighteenth century, brought in a wave of Nepalese settlers to the zone. The
major incursion occurred in 1788–89 under the leadership of Purna Ale, a
Magar commander, and Johar Singh (Pradhan, 2009). The force under
Purna Ale advanced to Reling and Karmi in Darjeeling and Chyakhung in
West Sikkim, whereas another force moved under the commandership of
Johar Singh towards the southwest of river Teesta and occupied many
places there. The Lepcha minister Chothup [Chuthup]—son of a previous
prime minister, Karwang—who commanded the southern army of the
Sikkim defence force that resisted the Gorkha invasion (1775–80) and won
the title ‘Satrajit’ for his seventeen victories in Sikkim Terai. Sikkim, by the
time of the Gurkha raid and Nepalese settlement in the last part of the
eighteenth century, was an established sovereign country with a defined
political boundary. As such, the opposition to the Nepali settlement was
mainly from the ruling class. The Gorkha incursion also led to the loss of
many historical documents and records.
 The establishment of British predominance, effectively from 1817,
heralded the beginning of the erosion of Chogyal hegemony. The beginning
of a formal relationship between the British East India Company and
Sikkim can be traced back to 1814, when the company was involved in a
war with Nepal. The company became interested in establishing its
relationship with Sikkim because of its strategic importance. To establish
sound relations with Sikkim, the British restored all the territories between
Mechi and Teesta to Sikkim by signing the treaty at Titalia on 10 February
1817. However, the British reserved the right to arbitrate in any dispute that
might arise between Nepal and Sikkim. The signing of the treaty of Titalia
marked the beginning of the end of Sikkim’s independence in general and
Chogyal’s role and influence in particular. Later on, the British also got
involved in settling the dispute between the Sikkim king and the Lepchas of
Illam in Nepal, who had fled Sikkim due to the assassination of their prime
minister, Chenzod Bolek, in 1826 by the lamas of Sikkim. On 1 February
1835, the grant of deed was signed by the king and Darjeeling was ceded to
the British administration. In 1839, Campbell was transferred to Darjeeling,
which he converted into a sanatorium. Several European houses with a
bazaar, a jail, and buildings for the accommodation of the sick were built
around 1849. Around this time, a British mass settlement came up in
Darjeeling. By establishing a sanatorium, the organization led to the growth
of employment opportunities and, hence, population increase. By 1852,
there were seventy European houses in Darjeeling town. During the 1850s,
the king of Sikkim retired to Chumbi, and Dongyer Namgyal took over the
administration of Sikkim. In March 1859, in the name of the king, he sent a
deputation to the British government in Bengal demanding the payment of
an increased annual allowance or, as an alternative, the restoration of
Sikkim’s confiscated territory in 1850. The Bengal government rejected the
request, which was followed by raids into Darjeeling that led to the capture,
detainment, or enslavement of British Indian subjects in Sikkim by
Dongyer. Immediately after this, Campbell entered Sikkim with force but
withdrew because of Dewan Namguay’s sudden attack on them. The British
took advantage of the situation and forced a treaty upon Sikkim on 28
March 1861 at Tumlong. The treaty was signed on behalf of the
Government of India by Ashley Eden and Raj Kumar Sidkeong Namgyal,
the son of Raja Tsugphud Namgyal. This treaty cancelled all the provisions
made in the earlier treaties and made Sikkim a de-facto protectorate of
India. The officer-in-charge of Darjeeling was given the responsibility of
looking after the affairs of Sikkim. The raja was made a nominal head, and
the entire administration’s responsibilities were taken over by the political
officer who became the de-facto ruler. When India was liberated from the
clutches of the British Raj in 1947, Sikkim, which had come to be the de-
facto protectorate of India in 1861 via the treaty of Tumlong, witnessed a
nascent urge for democracy. The Nepalese, the Lepchas, and even a section
of Bhutia commoners revolted against the system and exploitative practices
of Kalo-bhari, Jharlangi, and Kurua—forms of forced, unpaid labour.
The end of British rule in India was the beginning of a new era in the
political history of Sikkim. This was the era of democratic movements,
rights, and freedoms, and political agitations calling for liberation from the
bondage of exploitation. The Chogyal’s indifferent attitude and also
helplessness to stop the suppression carried out by the Kazis upon the
commoners led to a mass agitation for democracy in Sikkim. The peasant
agitation broke out in 1949, followed by the short-lived ‘popular ministry’
of Tashi Tshering and support from the Government of India for the
progressive association of the people of Sikkim in the government, which
accentuated the demand for representative governance in Sikkim (Gurung,
2011). The tripartite meeting held in 1951 between the Durbar, BL, and
Nepalese representatives tried to find a solution for the equal representation
of the entire ethnic group in the state council. In the year 1953, a seventeen-
member State Council was formed, and elections have been held for every
term since. The number of seats on the council was raised from seventeen
to twenty-four in 1967. In 1963, the Chogyal of Sikkim, Sir Tashi Namgyal,
died, and Palden Thondup Namgyal was sworn-in as the Chogyal. The era
of Palden Thondup Namgyal remained chaotic as the people’s movement
became more and more vibrant. On 26 October 1972, a new party called
Sikkim Janata Congress was formed. The Sikkim Janata Congress was not
in favour of the merger of the country with India. Immediately after its
formation, the party declared that ‘Sikkim was not an Indian state but a
separate country’ (Datta Ray, 1984). The Janata Congress also demanded
the abolition of the parity formula signed in 1951 and the introduction of
democracy in Sikkim, with the Chogyal remaining constitutional head.
However, the demand for a democratic form of government was restrained
by the Durbar.
 In 1973 the democracy movement became more vibrant. Immediately
after the election of the Fifth Council in January 1973, a joint petition by
Sikkim Janata Party and Sikkim National Congress was handed over to
Chogyal. The parties demanded full-fledged democracy, a written
constitution, fundamental rights, universal adult franchise, and abolition of
the parity formula (Gurung, 2011). Later, a Joint Action Committee of two
parties with L. D. Kazi Khangsherpa was formed, but the Sikkim Durbar
was unwilling to succumb to the demand of the Joint Action Committee. As
a result, thousands of people demonstrated in the capital town of Gangtok
continuously for three days from 3 to 5 April 1973. The political parties and
the JAC immediately approached the government of India and the
government of India intervened to restore law and order in Sikkim. The
political officer of Sikkim persuaded Chogyal to appeal to India to take over
the administration of Sikkim until some workable formula was evolved. A
tripartite agreement was signed between the JAC, Chogyal, and the
government of India, which drastically reduced the power of Chogyal. As
agreed upon, the constituents’ assembly was formed, and the number of
seats was raised to thirty-two, of which fifteen seats were reserved for BL,
fifteen for the Nepalese, and one seat each for Scheduled Caste and Sangha,
the monk body. The assembly election held in 1974 was won by Sikkim
Congress with a thumping victory, winning thirty-one out of thirty-two
seats. The newly constituted Sikkim Assembly unanimously adopted a
resolution to take immediate steps for Sikkim’s participation in India’s
political and economic institutions (Rao, 1978).
One of the vital requests made to the government of India by the
popular government under L. D. Kazi was to provide representation for the
people of Sikkim in Indian Parliament (Gurung, 2011). After having a
careful and detailed study of the requests of the government of Sikkim, the
union cabinet of India took the crucial decision to accord Sikkim the status
of an ‘Associate State’ of India on 29 August 1974. In this regard, the
Constitution of India (Thirty-sixth) Amendment Act, 1975 was passed in
the parliament.
The unfolding of these events disappointed the chogyal of Sikkim. In
view of Chogyal’s endeavour to internationalize the issue, Sikkim
Assembly, on the 10 April 1975, unanimously adopted a resolution
abolishing the institution of the chogyal and declared Sikkim as a
constituent unit of India. The state assembly also conducted a special
opinion poll [referendum] on 14 April 1975, and according to the verdict of
the poll, the government of India decided to accord the status of a full-
fledged state of India to Sikkim. On 23 April, the Lok Sabha passed the
Constitution of India (Thirty-sixth) Amendment Act, 1975, providing
Sikkim with the status of the twenty-second state of India. The president of
India assented to the bill on 16 May 1975. The Thirty-sixth Amendment
Act also provided a special provision for the state of Sikkim under article
371 (F) of the Indian Constitution, which safeguards the old laws of
Sikkim, including the interest of the domiciled Sikkimese.
63
MULTILINGUAL PRE-MODERN BENGAL

Thibaut d’Hubert

The term ‘Middle Bengali’ (or madhyayuger bāṃlā, ‘Medieval Bengali’)

conventionally refers to the vernacular language recorded in written texts
from the fourteenth to the late eighteenth century (Chatterji, 1926/1993).
The very name suggests, in the case of ‘Middle Bengali,’ the identification
of this language as a forerunner to the modern Bengali language and an
association with the Bengali people; in the case of ‘Medieval Bengali’ it
suggests the study of this language as a means to an end, namely the study
of Bengal’s (allegedly) medieval past. An understanding of the idioms and
texts grouped under this label, however, requires us to suspend this
teleological framework and to try to understand the texts in their own terms
and in their own contexts. ‘Middle Bengali’ in this sense was a relatively
stable vernacular literary idiom over a geographical area—from the
Kathmandu Valley in Nepal to Mrauk U in Arakan—that far exceeds the
region where some form of Bengali was used as a spoken language. Middle
Bengali literature took shape in the intensely multilingual environment of
eastern South Asia, and it is linked by history to Sanskrit, Prakrit,
Apabhramsha, Persian, Arabic, Old Maithili, Awadhi, Braj, and Urdu
literary traditions, as well as Munda, Dravidian, and Tibeto–Burman oral
and written traditions.
During the Pala period (c. eighth to twelfth century), practitioners of
esoteric forms of tantric Buddhism used an eastern variety of Apabhramsha
to compose versified aphorisms (in the dohā meter) and used the regional
language (i.e., early Bengali) for songs (caryāgīti). Manuscripts of these
texts were discovered in Nepal by the Bengali scholar of Sanskrit and
cataloger, Haraprasad Shastri (1853–1931) in 1907, and their subsequent
publication along with a Sanskrit commentary in 1916 marked the
beginning of the philological study of ancient vernacular texts in Bengal.
The aphorisms were meant to convey striking, often provocative statements
that illustrate the antinomian esoteric creed of their authors. The songs are
the earliest specimens of a form that became immensely popular in later
centuries in courtly and devotional contexts: the pada. Padas are stanzaic
sung poems made of rhyming distiches, with an opening stanza (ārambha),
a refrain (dhruva), two or three alternative couplets (antarā), and an envoi
(ābhoga) that contains a signature line (bhaṇitā) with the name of the poet,
and sometimes his patron or the deity to whom the poem is dedicated.
These texts, however, were not transmitted in Bengal itself after the gradual
disappearance of Mahayana Buddhism in the region. From the same period,
we may add the example of a vernacular (laukika) riddle found in the work
of Dharmadāsa titled Vidagdhamukhamaṇḍana (Adornment of the
Connoisseur’s Mouth, c. eighth to ninth centuries CE). Dharmadāsa was
probably from the same milieu of Pala imperial Buddhist monasteries. The
vernacular riddle that he recorded in his treatise gives us a glimpse of the
use of Proto-Bengali outside the context of esoteric Buddhism (Hahn, 2013;
Ruis-Falqués, Kirichenko, Lammerts, d’Hubert, 2022).
A gap of about two centuries separates these Buddhist vernacular songs
from the next work of vernacular literature in the region available to us,
namely, Baṛu Caṇḍīdās’s Śrīkṛṣṇakīrtan. Apart from the obvious influence
of Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda (c. twelfth century CE), a product of the Sena
court, we know nothing about the context of the composition of this lyrical
narrative poem on the love games between the god Krishna and the
cowherdess Radha. Caṇḍīdās inaugurated the use of syllabic meters in
vernacular poetry (Vasu, 1968, 242–55). A note in one manuscript—found
in a cowshed in western Bengal in 1910—indicates that it was probably
kept in the library of the local raja of Bishnupur (Baṛu Caṇḍīdās, 1984, 17–
18), suggesting interest in and perhaps even the performance of the poem
up until the seventeenth century in Bengal (Kitada, 2021). Fragments of
songs from the Śrīkṛṣṇakīrtan were found in a manuscript in Nepal also
from the seventeenth century, affirming the importance of the Kathmandu
Valley—especially under the Malla kings—as a site of reception for Middle
Bengali literature (Brinkhaus, 2003; d’Hubert, 2018a; Kitada, 2021).
The next major phase in the making of vernacular literary traditions in
eastern South Asia involves the composition of song-poems (padas) in the
court of Mithila and their subsequent diffusion and imitation in the regional
courts of Bengal, Assam, Odisha, and Arakan. A foundational figure of
vernacular courtly literature in Mithila was the playwright, lexicographer,
and erotologist Jyotirisvara (c. fourteenth century CE). His farcical play
(prahasana) titled Dhūrtasamāgama (A Gathering of Scoundrels) circulated
in two different recensions: one exclusively in Sanskrit and another that
contains songs in Old Maithili (Jha ed. 1986, 1-80). He also compiled a
sourcebook of poetic topoi in Old Maithili called Varṇaratnākara. The
padas of Jyotirīśvara correspond in form to those of the Buddhist caryāgītis,
and the poetic conventions laid out in the Varṇaratnākara clearly prefigure
the lyric poetry of Vidyāpati (c. 1370–1460).
According to Locana’s seventeenth-century Rāgataraṅgiṇī, Vidyāpati
was one of a team of Brahmin poets, bards (reciters of purāṇa), and
musicians who were given the task to revitalize the music of the Oinwar
court of Mithila. Hundreds of songs have come down to us bearing the
signature of Vidyāpati, probably as a result of this endeavour. The meters of
his songs, which are arranged in rhyming couplets, share common features
with those of the Gītagovinda. Thematically these poems bear comparison
to Prakrit and Sanskrit lyric poetry. Vidyāpati’s songs were widely emulated
in eastern South Asia, especially in Nepal and Bengal (Sen, 1947).
Vidyāpati himself was a Shaivite, but his occasional introduction of
Vaishnava themes, especially of the love between Krishna and Radha,
inspired a proliferation of lyrics in an idiom called Brajabuli, ‘the idiom of
Braj’ (Sen, 1935; Smith, 1995). Devotional poets, usually associated with
courts, composed plays and poems about the games of the divine couple.
The influence of Vidyāpati, and of Old Maithili literature more generally,
can be observed in the plays of Śaṅkaradeva (1449–1569) and his followers
in sixteenth-century Assam, as well as in the courtly lyrics of the Bengali
sultanate and Arakan. But it is in the context of Gaudiya Vaishnavism that
Vidyāpati’s towering figure as a model became most evident. In fact, the
Gaudiya Vaishnavas were responsible for the collection and anthologization
of Vidyāpati’s songs, which seem to have previously been transmitted
among performers. These poets, and above all the poet Govindadās (d.
1613), modelled their own poetry on Vidyāpati’s, sometimes going as far as
to reuse his material in their own poems, ‘signing’ the poems as either his,
or theirs, or both (e.g. Vaisnavdas 1915, songs no. 261, 1640, and 1671).
The use of Maithili meters and grammatical forms, whether Vidyapati’s
own or in imitation of his, lent a Maithili flavour to these Middle Bengali
poems, thus leading to the creation of an artificial vernacular idiom almost
exclusively used for erotic and devotional lyric poetry in eastern South Asia
(d’Hubert, 2018a).
Anthologies of Brajabuli padas also contain verses in Middle Bengali
that exhibit no Maithili features and are composed in syllabic meters. These
represent a parallel lyric tradition that is associated with the name of
Caṇḍīdās found in the signature line of a large number of such padas
(Caṇḍīdās, 1960).
Within the language order of Bengal—where Sanskrit, Apabhramsha,
Maithili, and Persian were all used as literary languages—Middle Bengali
was most strongly associated with the pā̃cālī, a narrative poem composed in
syllabic rhyming couplets. Generally, these couplets are composed in paẏār
a meter of fourteen syllables with a caesura after the eighth; tripadī is found
in the more lyric and descriptive sections. The earliest pā̃cālīs are
adaptations from Sanskrit epics and puranic texts, namely Kr.ttivās’s
Rāmāẏaṇa and Mālādhar Vasu ‘Guṇarāj Khān’s’ Śrīkr.ṣṇavijaẏ. Both texts
were probably composed in the fifteenth century in the milieu of Hindu
dignitaries (mostly Brahmans, Vaidyas, and Kayasthas) in the service of the
sultan of Bengal. In addition to the adaptation from Sanskrit works, from
the same period we also have Vijaẏgupta’s Padmāpurāṇ (1495), a pā̃cālī
about the snake goddess Mānasa. This text is the earliest specimen of a
prolific genre in Bengal called maṅgalkāvya (propitiatory poems). By the
sixteenth century, the capacious and flexible form of the pā̃cālī was used
beyond narrative poetry: it turned into a composite form, in which one
could find narratives with didactic sections, or even full-fledged treatises
with no narrative components whatsoever, or the insertion of songs
composed in meters other than tripadī. In the absence of literary and
technical prose in Middle Bengali, the pā̃cālī was the default versified form
for a variety of non-poetical discursive modes.
In contrast to other cases of vernacularization in the subcontinent, the
development of Middle Bengali literature was strikingly independent from
Sanskrit: while authors of course drew on stories available in Sanskrit, the
literary forms, lexicon, and aesthetics of Middle Bengali were largely its
own. Middle Bengali came under the influence of Sanskrit forms slowly
and at a relatively late date (e.g., Bhāratcandra Rāẏ’s Annadāmaṅgal or In
Praise of Annada, eighteenth century). The same observation—reuse of
content but independence of form—holds for Persian and to a lesser extent
Arabic. A large part of Middle Bengali literature is made of adaptations of
Persian texts. One of the earliest and most prolific authors of Bengali
Muslim literature who drew from Persian and Arabic to build his oeuvre
was Saiẏad Sultān (who was active between 1630–45). His Nabīvaṃśa
(Line of the Prophets) was a monumental first attempt at providing a proxy
to religious narratives available in Persian and Arabic to a Bengali
readership in the rural areas of Chittagong (then within the kingdom of
Arakan) (Irani, 2021). In the main urban centre of the region, Mrauk U, the
poet Alaol (who was active between 1651–71) turned to the Persian and
Awadhi traditions to produce five narrative poems and a versified treatise
on the fundamentals of Islam and Muslim ethics.
Middle Bengali is usually written in a script called Bengali but largely
continuous with other local scripts, including those of Mithila and Assam.
But Middle Bengali texts were also copied using the Arabic script in
southeastern Bengal. An eastern form of the Kaithi script was used by
Muslims in the Sylhet region (Sylhet Nagari) for Middle Bengali texts as
well (d’Hubert, 2014a-b).
64
LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN BENGAL

Ujjayan Bhattacharya

Bengal in the late medieval period (1203–1575) acquired a composite

identity while completing a very long process of cultural and political
evolution. The region stood on the threshold of a phase of transition into
early modern history. The name Bengal refers to a province of British India
which was derived from the appellation Vangala adopted by the Muslim
rulers after the conquest of the region. Of the extant territorial divisions like
Harikela, Samatata, Chandradvipa, Pundrabardhana, and Gauda, only the
last had survived as a name denoting the whole province, though actually in
history it was only a part of it. Thus, according to eminent scholars, it is
prudent to accept Bengal as the territory where Bengali language is spoken
(Majumdar, 1971).

SOCIETY
The structure of Bengal society bore marks of local variation that
differentiated it from general typologies of Indian society. There was an
absence of the Kshatriya and Vaishyavarna amongst the sedentary Bengali
speaking people (Sanyal, 1981). The society was arranged vertically in a
hierarchical form, with Brahmins at the apex; but there was a profusion of
jatis or castes or professional communities arranged on a horizontal axis,
categorized not according to classical varna but in terms of their origin and
profession (Sanyal, 1981).
The authoritative sources refer to all castes other than Brahmins as of
mixed origin, and as Shudras. They were categorized as Uttamsankar,
Madhyamsankar, and Adhamsankar, or Antyaja. Brihaddharma Purana of
the twelfth century, Brahmabaibarta Purana, composed sometime between
the twelfth and the fourteenth century, and Chandimangala Kavya of the
sixteenth century mention agriculturist, artisan, and skilled artists as
belonging to the Madhyamsankar and Satsudra categories. The Shudras,
that is the bulk of the population, were thus classified in terms of their
purity and their potential for pollution, into groups called Navasakh or those
who could offer drinking water to clean Brahmins, Jalacharaniya who
received the services of degraded Brahmin priests but not the proper ones,
‘unclean’ Shudras who could not offer water to Brahmins, and the
‘untouchable’ or Antyaja who were treated as beyond the pale of
civilization (Sanyal, 1981).
The society in more secular terms was arranged into classes that had
connections with the agricultural economy, trade, and state power. At the
bottom of the social ladder were the peasants or krishaks, often mentioned
as raiyats in Persian literature, having small farms and tilling on their own;
poor professionals like hajam or barber, patni or ferrymen, and beruniya or
unskilled labourer (Raychaudhury, 1969; Ray, 2013). In a relatively better-
off position were the skilled manufacturers like kansari or ball-metal
workers, sankhari or conch-shell manufacturers, chamars who made leather
goods, and doms who made wicker-works. Higher up in the agrarian society
were the principal landholders and revenue collectors who were originally
designated as raja, raunaq, or samanta and under the Mughals acquired the
designations of zamindars and talukdars. Classes in direct relation with state
power were of different grades and were remunerated out of the surplus
generated by landed resources. They served the state as mansabdars in
different positions, high and low. Merchants, small and big, were vital
components of the economy. Most of the Bengali merchants were inland
traders.

CULTURE
Linguistic and historical research about a century ago had held that Bengal
was Aryanized at the beginning of the early medieval period (Chatterji,
1926). But archaeological and anthropological investigations have now
confirmed that even at that period the diffusion of Indo-Aryan culture was
uneven. The eastern part of the province was not very Hinduized, but a
pattern of regional state under the Pala and Sena patronized Buddhist and
Brahminical institutions. Islam intervened in this situation in the early
thirteenth century and withdrew state support to Hindu religious cults and
ended the culture of patronage to Hindu elites. The cultural autonomy of
Bengal was acquiring a definite shape, and as Richard Eaton has said, the
political expression of this autonomy was found in the emergence of the
independent Ilyas Shahi dynasty in the mid-fourteenth century. Bengal was
thought of as a ‘region distinct from India’.
The establishment of a new form of political authority did not impact
cultural life immediately. At the base of society, popular cults continued to
grow which found powerful literary expression in the mangal-kavya genre
of vernacular literature. At the elevated level of culture, Sanskrit-based
Bengali literature continued to flourish in centres like Kenduli, the home of
poet Joyadeva (twelfth century), the author of Gita Govinda. Joyadeva
inspired later generation poets like Chandidas of Nanur who converted to
Vaishnavism from the Shakta faith (Dutt, 1895). The theme of both the
poets was the love of Radha and Krishna, which Chandidas rendered in
simple native style expressing the feelings of the heart. Bidyapati, the poet
of Bihar in the fourteenth century, and Chandidas who followed his poetic
themes were major influences on Sri Chaitanya, the sixteenth-century
reformer. Bengali literary endeavours also touched upon sacred themes as in
Kashiram Das’s Mahabharata and Krittibas Ojha’s Ramayana, both in the
fifteenth century.
Sri Chaitanya was the product of an age of religious and intellectual
ferment in India. A precocious child who questioned the notions of
uncleanliness and the sacred body (Dutt, 1895), Chaitanya received his
education in philosophy at Nadia where he gathered a band of pupils and
followers. The core of his teaching consisted of the belief that salvation of
man depended solely on the faith in Krishna and the renunciation of rites
and ceremonies.
The Turks who wrested political control over Bengal had a notion of
legitimacy different to that of erstwhile Bengal kings. The Sufi saints of
Chishti and Firdausi orders, who shared notions of political authority with
the sultans, albeit with differences, played an important role in forging
relations between the state and the society at large. Nur Qutbi Alam and
Muzaffar Shams Balkhi of the thirteenth century expressed their views on
religion and politics in their writings. The emerging Muslim community in
Bengal was considerably influenced and shaped by Sufi ideas. The Sufis of
the Sultanate period formed a part of the urbane ashraf or elite Muslim
society, which according to Richard Eaton was distinctly different from the
society of non-elite Muslim artisans of the urban locales. However, by the
sixteenth century the Sufis engaged in forest clearing and land reclamation
in eastern Bengal, mobilized people around the Islamic faith, and became
the locus of moral and spiritual authority. That was the beginning of
Muslim devotional cults in Bengal which had a great syncretic influence.
The transition to the early modern during Mughal rule was marked by
the distinctive feature of Persianization of culture at the elite level of
society. In many ways the Mughal period was more distinct in the adoption
of this culture than the previous sultanate times. It was an aspect of
Islamicate culture according to Kumkum Chatterjee, but shaped Bengal’s
cultural environment even after the advent of British rule. The literate
gentry and the landed aristocracy studied Persian language as it opened
avenues for them in government service. They established schools for
teaching Persian language and literature. Persian culture spread to remote
frontier regions like Arakan. One of the important contributions of this
culture was the writing of Indo-Persian chronicles or the tarikh.
There was an economic context in which the society and culture of
medieval and early modern Bengal can be situated. Growth of urban centres
with a great amount of commercial exchange was a characteristic feature of
the entire period. Nadia, Lakshanavati/Gaur/Pandua complex, and Devkot
were existing urban centres at the time of Turkish conquest by Bakhtiyar
Khilji in 1204. Saptagram, since the mid-fifteenth century, was the major
commercial centre on the banks of Bhagirathi River connected to Gaur, the
capital of Bengal. Eastern Bengal centres which emerged in the fifteenth–
sixteenth centuries were Katar ( Jessore), Sonargaon (Dhaka), Bakla
(Bakharganj), and Chittagong. Chittagong was Bengal’s outlet into the
world of overseas commerce, also known as Porto Grande by the
Portuguese who had entered Bengal in the sixteenth century as a
commercial force.
Urbanization was sustained by external commerce in muslins and
horses, sericulture and cash crop production since the mid-fifteenth century
and pure silver coinage which had continued since pre-Sultanate days.
Bengal’s internal economy was characterized by abundant food crop output
and low prices of grain. Ports like Chittagong and Saptagram/Hooghly
(Porto Pequeno) became the hub of Asian commerce in luxury and staple
products, and also originating points in Indo-European trade. The Mughals
established a regime of order and security which helped Bengal to connect
with rest of India economically and politically. Economic connections and a
Persianate culture placed Bengal on the map of cosmopolitan regions of
Asia.
65
ODISHA IN PRE-MODERN TIMES

Pritish Acharya

Recently unearthed tools and artefacts dating back to the Middle and Late
Stone Age period were found on the southern fringes of Debrigarh Hill
Range in Bargarh district. The excavations point to the existence of early
human settlement in the region during the Middle Stone Age and Late
Stone Age period. The Neolithic tools such as hand-axe, cleaver, scrapper,
flaked pebbles used for digging, cutting, chopping, killing animals, and
scrapping animal skins are found in the hilly and forested areas of western
and northern Odisha. Food production may be regarded as the most
important change after the emergence of human settlements. Surplus food
production became the basis for further evolution of states and of complex
societies. The most important excavated sites where agriculture was
practized were Kuchai in Mayurbhanj district, and Golbai Sasan in Khurdha
district (see page 80, this volume). These sites are indicative of the
beginning of agriculture and domestication of animals in the forested and
hilly tracts of Odisha in around 2500 BCE.
There are missing historical links, but around the fourth century BCE,
Jainism spread to Kalinga, between the rivers Mahanadi and Godavari. For
long, Kalinga became the synonym of Odisha and its inhabitants were
known as the Kalingas. The pearls of the region facilitated trade and
commerce. The existence of a long coastline made the Kalingas skilful in
maritime trade and navigation. The material affluence attracted the Nandas
and Mauryas of the Magadha, finally leading to the well-known Kalinga
War in 261 BCE. The war transformed Ashoka, who resolved to abandon the
use of force in favour of a policy of cultural conquest as is reflected in his
policy of Dhamma. Toshali and Samapa became the provincial capitals of
the occupied Kalinga. Ashokan edicts found in Dhauli and Jaugada do not
mention the Kalinga War. It is believed that two local Buddhist
missionaries, Tapasu and Vallika, had given the message of Buddhism to
the remorseful emperor, which means Buddhism had reached Odisha before
the Kalinga War. However, the conquest accelerated the trading and
religious activities in the region, where the Mauryan empire’s punch
marked coins and many other elements of middle Ganga Valley’s material
culture are visible.
But change is only constant in history and with the decline of the
Mauryas, Kalinga became independent. In mid-first century BCE, Karavela
of Meghavahan lineage founded a powerful state. His rule was marked by
frequent military campaigns. Karavela’s military and other achievements
are engraved in the Hathigumpha (the Elephant’s Cave) inscription. This
would not have been possible without relative material prosperity and the
extraction of a huge amount of surplus from the cultivators through
revenue. Karavela, although himself a patron of Jainism, respected all sects.
He claimed to have invested much of his wealth in the welfare of his
subjects. The righteousness of a ruler, however, was just a ploy to gain
legitimacy for surplus extraction from the toilers. Karavela did not issue his
own coins, rather used the punch marked coins of the time. Excavations at
Shishupalgarh have yielded several Roman objects indicating trade contacts
with the Roman empire in the first and second centuries CE.
Between the fourth and the sixth centuries, states like the Matharas,
Vashisthas, Nalas, Manas, and Murundas emerged with their own system of
taxation, administration, and military organization. These states issued land
grants to the Brahmins and invited them from outside, which led to
agricultural expansion under the supervision of Brahmins. In the seventh
century, Odisha came under the rule of Harsha.
Three major developments could be witnessed since the sixth century
CE. First, the cultivators started to settle in new fertile areas. Second, the
formation of Odisha as a cultural entity seems to have begun. Third, many
dynasties with tribal origins sprang up. They used myths to legitimize their
power and authority. For example, the Shailodbhavas of Kangoda claimed
that their founder emerged from the splintering of a rock, by the grace of
lord Shiva. Similarly, the Bhanjas of Mayurbhanj and Kendujhar of
northern Odisha, claimed that their founder, Adibhanja, was born from the
egg of a peahen reared by the sage Vashishtha.
Between the ninth and eleventh century the Somavamshi rulers became
powerful. They consolidated their position in western Odisha, moved
northwards and conquered other kingdoms such as Kangoda and Utkal. The
Somavamshi king, Jajati Keshari is seen as the unifier of Odisha by military
means. He is credited with the building of the Lingaraj Temple and many
other temples around it during this period. The Jagannath Temple of Puri
and the Sun Temple of Konark were built by the Ganga kings in the
twelfth–thirteenth century. Flowering of a regional style in temple
architecture went side by side with the prominence of Brahmins in Odisha.
Jayati Keshari is believed to have held the dashaswamedha sacrifice in
Jajpur for gaining legitimacy. The Gangas (1038–1434 CE), with their origin
in Karnataka, built these temples in the name of popular regional deities to
derive political legitimacy. In turn Jagannath, originally a tribal god,
became the official deity and religion of Odisha and was appropriated by
the Brahminic tradition. The Ganga ruler Chodaganga built the Jagannath
Temple and Narasingha I built the Konark Sun Temple. There was greater
use of erotic sculptures associated with the fertility cult and some tantric
concepts in temple architecture at this time. From the seventh century,
Buddhist writings show a rudimentary beginning of Odia language.
Tantricism, which laid great stress on the use of magic rituals and admitted
both women and Shudras into its ranks, also had its presence.
With the decline of the Ganga rule, the Gajapati rulers emerged in the
fifteenth century. Like the Gangas, they used the suffix ‘deva’ (lord) to their
name to claim a divine status. The Gajapati rulers had uncertain control
over the other local rulers, but for their association with the rituals of Lord
Jagannath, they were seen as the chalanti pratima (living idols). The
Gajapati kings are claimed to be erudite scholars with literary works to their
credit. Sarala Das, known as Shudramuni wrote the Mahabharata in Odia
between the fifteenth and sixteenth century. When the Odia Bhagabata of
Jagannath Das was not allowed for reading in the temple complexes for
being written in the vernacular, low cost Bhagabata Tungis sprang up in
villages where Shudras were allowed to enter.
Odisha came under the Afghan rulers of Bengal and the Mughals from
1568 to 1751, followed by the Marathas till the British East India Company
took it over in 1803. This period witnessed frequent clashes over the
territory of Odisha. Increasing demand of revenue from the local rulers
often led to raids on the temples, including the Puri temple, because these
places of worship also symbolized local pride and identity. Culturally,
however, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed polished
writings in Odia. Samara Taranga of Brajanath Badjena and Baidehisa Bilas
of Upendra Bhanja need a mention.
The British rule led to a decline in the local salt industry, replacement of
cowrie shells by rupee currency for transactions and denial of traditional
forest rights to the tribes’ men. The Company transformed indigenous
agrarian social hierarchy and became the major claimant of agrarian social
surplus in comparison to all other previous claimants. This resulted in a
number of popular revolts, prominent among them the Paika Revolt of
1817. Subsequently, in the late nineteenth century, the newly educated class
strove for a linguistic and cultural identity and independence from foreign
rule using modern means of mass mobilization.
THE NORTH AND THE NORTHWEST
66
THE BHAKTI MOVEMENT PRE-COLONIAL SOCIAL
TRANSITION

G. N. Devy

Cultural forms developed in classical India from the third to the tenth
centuries started undergoing momentous changes at the beginning of the
second millennium. The most fundamental of these was the emergence of
new languages—bhasas—all over the Indian subcontinent. The new bhasas
expressed regional and heterodox aspirations in protest against the
hegemony of Sanskrit and the culture developed through that language—
sanskriti. A similar movement occurred in the South with respect to Tamil
which, after a continuous history of two thousand years, branched into
Telugu (eleventh century). Earlier, Kannada had already become an
independent dialect of Tamil (fifth century). Nine hundred years later, Tamil
and Kannada jointly gave birth to Malayalam (fourteenth century). In the
north, the regional dialects known as Apabhramsa asserted themselves as
independent languages. Consequently, the Middle Indo-Aryan dialect in the
east split into Bangla and Odiya (tenth century). Subsequently, Bangla gave
birth to Assamiya (thirteenth century). The northwestern dialect developed
into Kashmiri (thirteenth century), Sindhi (fifteenth century), and Punjabi
(fourteenth century). The western Apabhramsa of Middle Indo-Aryan
distributed itself into Hindi (which till the beginning of the nineteenth
century existed as several distinct dialects), Gujarati (eleventh century), and
Marathi (eleventh century). The Hindi family of dialects developed
autonomy in the fourteenth century. It also interacted with the Islamic
languages—Persian, which was spoken in India from the thirteenth to the
nineteenth centuries, and Arabic, in use from the eleventh to the nineteenth
centuries—and produced cantonment language, Urdu (thirteenth century),
which later became a great literary language. The origin of some of these
languages can be traced further back to earlier centuries. We are told that
Gujarati and Marathi, for example, existed in rudimentary forms as found in
stray inscriptions and isolated verses dating from the eighth century. Their
known literary traditions, however, do not seem to emerge until a century or
two after each language assumed a distinct identity. In any case, all bhasas
had become literary languages by the end of the fifteenth century. The
emergence and survival of mature literary traditions in so many languages
is the greatest phenomenon in Indian cultural history.
The earliest prose work in Marathi is Mhaibhata’s Lilacaritra
(completed in 1278). The earliest surviving poetic work is Mukundaraaja’s
Vivekasindhu (exact date disputed); Jnanadeva’s Jnanesvari (completed
1290) was the first Marathi classic to be critically acclaimed. The Gujarati
literary tradition was inaugurated by Hemacandra, poet-saint and
grammarian, who lived about the mid-twelfth century. He was a poet,
lexicographer, and theorist. His Kavyanusasana (completed 1140) is
considered to be a valuable contribution to Sanskrit poetics. It was written
in Sanskrit and was scholarly more than it was original in thought. The fact
that Hemacandra brought the whole tradition of Sanskrit knowledge
discourse to the threshold of Gujarati literary tradition is endorsed by his
modern commentators. Like Hemacandra, Mukundaraja, considered to be
the first Marathi poet, had an intimate knowledge of Sanskrit intellectual
traditions. Marathi and Gujarati had the advantage of founding their own
literary traditions upon intellectual developments in Sanskrit. Other bhasa
literatures too had the benefit of contact with Sanskrit.
The emergence of bhasa literatures coincided with, even if it was not
entirely caused by, a succession of Islamic rules in India. The Islamic rulers
—Arabs, Turks, Mughals—brought with them new cultural currents to
India and provided these currents legitimacy through liberal political
patronage. Their languages—Arabic and Persian, mainly, and Urdu which
developed indigenously under their influence—brought new modes of
writing poetry and music. This intimate contact with Islamic cultures
creates for the bhasa literatures new possibilities of continuous
development.
The tremendous wave of Bhakti poetry, which swept India across all
linguistic boundaries and over an extended temporal span, selected its
central symbolism by no accident. It was a choice that vindicated the
regional and sidesi elements of culture against the hegemonic, and over-
rigid amarga traditions. Of course, Krishna-bhakti was not the only kind of
devotionalism prevalent during that period. Poets like Tulsidaas in Hindi
and Raamdaas in Marathi felt inspired to follow Rama. The Sufii poets
wrote about an idealized feminine principle; and in Marathi a strong
tradition of Datta-cult literature also emerged. However, it cannot be denied
that the charismatic child god, Krishna, provided the main paradigm for
devotionalism. During the Bhakti period, many local variations on Krishna-
bhakti became popular in different regions of India. Various myths related
to Krishna’s life were enshrined in cults developed round the important
geographical focuses, Vrindavan and Mathura. In Maharashtra, the local
form of Krishna, Vitthal, or Vithobaa, was worshipped. It was around
Vithoba, the god in Pandharpur, that the Warkari sect grew, and assimilated
in its body of scriptures the poetry of Jnanadeva, Namadeva, Eknath and
Tukaram, by far the greatest Marathi poets. In most bhasas the story of
Krishna’s life, and isolated episodes from it, particularly those that
symbolized free play of libidinal and subconscious impulses, became a
source of inspiration to poets. Numerous poems were written, for instance,
on the romantic episode of Krishna’s wedding with Rukmini. This
tremendous upsurge of Bhakti literature was the visible index of complex
but fundamental changes taking place in Indian society during the high tide
of Islamic rule. Bhakti was not a movement restricted to any one area of
life. It was a composite concept and a pervasive movement, which medieval
India posed as an alternative to the hegemony of maarga traditions and to
the excessively sophisticated system of Sanskrit poetics.
Much of the literature of the pre-British bhasa period is still a living
heritage in India. The poetry of Namadeva (1270–1350) and Tukaram
(1598–1650) in Marathi, that of Narasimh Mehta (1408–80), and Akha
(1615–1674) in Gujarati, of Kabir (1440–1518) and Surdas (1483–1567) in
Hindi, of Guru Nanak (1469–1539) in Punjabi, and so on, have formed an
inalienable part of the Indian consciousness. Tukaram, Mira, Kabir, and
Basaveshwar, among others, have been some of the dream-images of
India’s cultural unconscious. The common term used to describe the above-
named pre-colonial poets is Bhakti—devotionalism, or saint poetry. The
term covers a vast period extending from the last part of the thirteenth
century ( Jnanadeva) to the early part of the seventeenth century. The music,
painting, dance, architecture, and poetry which emerged during this period
form a glorious chapter in India’s cultural history. Yet, no simple formula of
the relationship between living cultural traditions and great social problems
can explain the entire period satisfactorily. Rather, one encounters here a
paradox difficult to explain. Side by side with Marathi poet Tukaram’s
(1598–1649) redefinition of the traditional Hindu worldview, one finds
Jagannatha (1620–1665) concluding the long, tired line of poetics in
Sanskrit. On the one hand we see the development of a genre of history-
writing like the Assamiya Buraanji, on the other myth-making replacing in
Hindii after a robust questioning of ethics in the preceding century by Mira
(1498–1573) and Kabiir (1440–1518). It was in the seventeenth century that
Punjabi produced a great poet like Waris Shah, and Gujarati the equally
great Premanand and Akha; but the same period saw a rapid decline in
Telugu literature in spite of ample patronage given to the arts in Andhra.
The great Marathi poet Tukaram was Jagannatha’s contemporary. So were
two other major figures of the Marathi poetic tradition: Mukteshvar (late
sixteenth century) and Raamdaas (1608–1681). While Jagannaatha was
composing verses on Mughal courtiers in the tired metres of Sanskrit,
Tukaram had been creating a new social and spiritual discourse. Tukaram’s
vibrant and socially oriented poetry, written in a living language,
contributed substantially to the growing Maratha nationalism. When we
juxtapose Jagannatha with Tukaram, within their shared cultural context, it
would be possible to formulate the following two questions: i) What was
the exact historical sequence of the decline of the Sanskrit universe of
knowledge and the emergence of bhasa literatures? and ii) What was the
nature of the relation between the Great Tradition and the newly emerging
little traditions, between the marga and the desis?
A unique strategy evolved by the bhaṣa literatures to subvert the rigid
conventions of over-stylized Sanskrit poetry, to confront the Brahminic
monopoly of metaphysics and ethics, and to assert the identity of regional
aspirations, was the essence of bhakti. It brought with it a new social
philosophy, metaphysics and aesthetics. However, bhakti was a movement
and not a philosophical system. It had its own dynamics; but it never
attempted a systematic theorizing of the values it upheld. In reversing the
established relation of hierarchy between the marga and the desi traditions,
it rattled the bones of an already ossified society, and substantially changed
its complexion.
At the centre of Vedic society was the concept of Vak (speech as an act
and as abstraction) and its capacity to regulate the material universe.
Similarly, during the late classical period, the philosophy of Advaita
Vedanta was organized around the concepts of sphota and dhwani
(explosion and suggestion of meaning, or Meaning), especially in Sankara’s
(b. 788) Brahmasutrabhasya. His pronouncement, vacarmbhanam vikaro
(‘creating is seizing with speech’) has been commented upon by
innumerable Vedantins. Sphota was thus one of the most crucial concepts of
Sankara’s philosophy, which in turn was the most characteristic intellectual
product of the classical Hinduism. Like vak and sphota in the earlier
millennia, bhakti came to occupy the centre-stage of Indian culture for
nearly five centuries—from the fourteenth to the eighteenth. However, both
vak and sphota were products of the marga tradition, whereas bhakti
originated in desi traditions of the bhasa literatures.
It has long been recognized that languages and regionalism have been
interrelated in India, and that the relationships of any one region to Sanskrit
on the one hand, and to its own bhasa on the other, have been different in
nature. Sanskrit, used only for the purpose of higher pursuits ever since the
language naturalized itself in India, was distributed all over the country,
including those parts that were using Dravidian languages. It was spread
horizontally in a sense, all over India, without taking strong roots in any
specific region. During the Indo-Islamic centuries, the prestige of Sanskrit,
and its use, were further undermined. Communication through Sanskrit,
therefore, took place in extended geographic space but was confined to
small pockets of communities surrounded by non-Sanskrit speakers.
Sanskrit did not have the same speech culture as the bhasas had. In such a
situation, the spoken Sanskrit word was perishing fast. The regional
languages were ‘living’ languages, and communication through them was
intended for a living and compact society.
During the age of classical Sanskrit literature, literary texts were passed
on from generation to generation by committing them to memory. However,
the texts were preserved in written form by periodically reproducing the
manuscripts. With the advent of the bhasas these methods underwent a
sociological as well as a technological change. The sociological change
occurred because the class and caste structures came under heavy attack
from new sectarian movements, which, reflected in Bhakti poetry, did not
accept theological knowledge as a purely Brahminic monopoly. Many non-
Brahmins started preaching their own realization of religious knowledge,
through their poetry. In Marathi, Namadeva (1270–1350) was a tailor by
caste. He was surrounded by Gora Kumbhar (potter), Samvata Mali
(gardener), Chokha Mahar (‘low-caste’), Sena Nhavi (barber), and Janabai
(a maid). Many of these poets were illiterate and they composed poems for
the benefit of the illiterate classes. Therefore, they preferred ‘publishing’
the poems as oral compositions rather than as written texts. They sang their
poems to large gatherings in places of pilgrimage or in the streets. The
function of the text, and its place in the literary culture, had changed. The
technological change came with the use of paper for writing. Paper was
known in India by the twelfth century. By the early fourteenth century,
during the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1325–51), India was exporting
paper and books to Iran and other Islamic nations. It was now possible to
make copies of texts easily, as writing with ink on paper was easier than
with herbal dyes on leaves. The new technology was probably used more by
the elite Sanskrit writers whose appeal was limited to a small number of
readers. It widened the gap that already existed between elite poetry and
popular poetry.
Before the introduction of paper as a literary technology, the distinction
between elite literature and folk literature was based on the clear criteria of
‘written’ poetry and ‘oral’ poetry. The poetry of bhasas was neither entirely
written nor entirely oral. It was certainly consciously composed, and though
many poets continued to operate orally, some actually wrote down their
own verse. Given the long entanglement of the Sanskrit language with the
Brahminical social order, bhasa poetry could not completely replace either
the Sanskrit ‘written’ poetry or the regional ‘folk’ poetry. It was a cross
between the two, and was an altogether new category of poetry.
The development of Bhakti poetry was a natural consequence of the
emergence of the bhaṣa literatures. Bhakti unleashed an emotionalism
which classical Indian literature had held under the strict control of
conventions and rigidly defined social ethics. In revolting against them, and
in turning to an unrestrained emotionalism, Bhakti made itself incapable of
developing intellectual systems founded on rational thought. It had a
revolutionary social and literary drive which manifested symbolism and
mysticism but could not find the rational strength necessary to formulate
intellectual discourse. It tried every kind of experimentation with style and
diction and replaced every established convention of poetry; but it never
tried to formulate a statement of the new conventions of poetry. The
movement did not initiate a new theory of literature, primarily due to a
breakdown in the intricate network of the marga and the desi traditions.
Sociologically, devotional poetry was a challenge posed by the oppressed
classes to the Brahminical monopoly of cultural and scriptural knowledge.
The challenge, however, did not make a dent in the formal system of
knowledge transmission. The prevalent patterns of patronage intensified
this class war in literature. The political structures dominant during the
Bhakti centuries were feudalistic, and, though dissent within the overall
central structure of the subcontinent feature of political history, dissent at
the popular level was dreaded equally by all rulers. Bhakti literature,
therefore, was not welcomed by the class capable of providing political
patronage to literature. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that
the marga tradition accepted only the theological content of Bhakti,
neglecting its rebellious spirituality. Hence, the ruling classes continued to
provide uninterrupted patronage to Sanskrit-based formal education all
through the middle centuries. Persian and Arabic were added to Sanskrit
when the patronage was administrated by the Islamic rulers. In other words,
formal education belonged to marga, while the experience of life’s
complexities was perceived and articulated through desi idiolects. The gap
between lived experience and formalized knowledge was at the root of the
non-emergence of a large-scale transition to a modernity which Bhakti
literature might have achieved.
67
THE EMERGENCE AND SPREAD OF SUFI THOUGHT IN
MEDIEVAL INDIA

Richard M. Eaton

Sufism—the Islamic tradition of attaining a greater awareness of, or even

presence within, divine reality—reached North India with the advent of
Indo-Turkish rule in the Punjab in the mid-eleventh century. For several
centuries before then, Sufis in the Middle East and Central Asia had been
developing special practices intended to achieve that greater awareness or
presence. By the eleventh century the disparate spiritual techniques of
individual Sufis had become thoroughly institutionalized. Sufis now sorted
themselves into mystical fraternities, or orders (tariqa), which adhered to
the particular mystical practices propounded by their founders, after whom
they were known (such as Qadiri, Suhrawardi, Naqshbandi, etc.). Master
Sufis (murshid) accepted disciples (murid) and issued formal documents
authorizing their most adept murids to become successors (khalifa), and
hence, murshids themselves. At the same time, tombs of especially
charismatic Sufi masters became centres of pilgrimage for ordinary people
who believed that the spiritual charisma of those masters adhered to their
tombs, rendering them conduits to divine reality. By the time of the advent
of Indo-Turkish rule, then, Sufism had already acquired the institutional
framework to propagate spiritual networks and to diffuse across space and
time.
That diffusion was driven by many factors, one of which was Sufis’
complicated relationship to political power. Seeking to deepen the roots of
their own legitimacy, sultans often patronized the construction of elaborate
tomb complexes for popular Sufi shaikhs. Moreover, some khalifas of
Delhi’s famous Shaikh Nizam al-Din Chishti (d. 1325) also happened to be
propagandists for the ruling dynasty of Tughluq sultans (1320–1413).
Consequently, as that dynasty expanded its authority across North India and
the Deccan, Nizam al-Din’s khalifas migrated to new provincial centres,
where they established their own spiritual centres. On the other hand,
sultans and Sufis could also repel each other. Jealous of Sufis’ popularity,
sultans sometimes made unreasonable demands on their loyalty, even
threatening their lives. For their part, Sufis understood that association with
the pomp and glitter of royal power could compromise their public posture
of world-rejection, which is why they often positioned their lodges at
comfortable distances from courts.
Khalifas residing at the lodges of great Sufi shaikhs also wrote out the
conversations (malfuzat) of their masters and preserved the latter’s
correspondence (maktubat) with distant devotees, thereby creating a
permanent, written record of the shaikh’s teachings that would be copied,
re-copied, and passed down through subsequent generations. Most of these
writings were in Persian, a pan-Indian language of poetic genres and
expressive discourse. But many Sufi poets, in common with contemporary
Shaiva or Vaishnava bhakti poets, wrote in regional languages such as
Hindi, Marathi, or Bengali with a view to making direct contact with the
people. In fact, the earliest genre of Hindi literature, the premakhyan, used
tales of a hero’s quest for his beloved to convey a Sufi’s quest for divine
reality. Composed in dialects of Hindi but using the Persian script, stories
like Candayan of Maulana Da’ud (1379), Mirigavati of Qutban (1503), or
Padmavat of Muhammad Jayasi (1540) drew on Indian poetic sensibilities
such as the notion of rasa (flavour) while being steeped in the flora, fauna,
and culture of the Indian countryside. Another vernacular literary genre
popular in the Deccan was the chakki-nama and the charkha-nama, simple
folks songs composed in vernacular Deccani, an early form of Urdu. Sung
by village women while milling grain on a grindstone (chakki) or while
working at a spinning wheel (charkha), these songs synchronized rhyme
and meter with the movement of a woman’s hand while engaged in
everyday, manual tasks. Since the subject matter of these songs consisted of
the same, internalized spiritual exercises (dhikr) that Sufis used while in
meditation, this vernacular genre brought Sufism’s high tradition of
spiritual practice to the level of everyday, village life. And since they were
sung in village homes with children nearby, they also facilitated the
infiltration of Sufi thought and sensibilities in the Deccan countryside.
All across medieval India, elaborate shrine complexes grew up around
the tombs of prominent shaikhs, attracting great numbers from the general
population regardless of their formal religious affiliation. In addition to the
shaikh’s tomb itself, these complexes might include public kitchens with
enormous pots for serving cooked rice, medical dispensaries, and libraries
that preserved the conversations, correspondence, or discourses associated
with the particular order to which the shaikh had belonged. Custodians of
these shrines, who were often direct familial descendants of the shaikh, also
sponsored institutionalized festivals, the most important of which was the
shaikh’s death anniversary, when pilgrims to the shrine celebrated the
shaikh’s ‘marriage’ (urs) with God. Participants at shrine festivals also
engaged in the ecstatic singing of poems, accompanied by musical
instruments. In short, Sufism in India’s medieval period had evolved from
something much more than a sophisticated technique for attaining nearness
to God. It had also become a complex institution that promoted the social,
physical, and spiritual welfare of ordinary Indians. For millions of
commoners, such shrines represented the liminal space connecting Heaven
and Earth.
Sufi ideas also spread across medieval India through the merging of
Sufi traditions of spiritual exercise with practices and techniques of Indian
yoga. Many Sufis were fascinated with yogic practices, breath control, and
the like, as is seen in their encounter with a famous Hatha Yoga text, the
Amrtakunda (The Pool of Nectar), which was translated into Arabic,
Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, their copies often replicating the illustrations of
yogic exercises that had appeared in the Sanskrit original.
Finally, Sufi orders established chains of authority that linked people
across time and space to the point in history when the Quran was revealed
to the Prophet Muhammad. It is no coincidence that a common term for a
Sufi order is silsila, meaning ‘chain’, in the sense of an unbroken series of
intermediate links, or persons, extending from the Prophet Muhammad
forward in time and outward in space. Even today, Sufi shrines in India
distribute printed genealogical charts (shajara) that name the intermediaries,
one for each generation, who had transmitted that order’s spiritual authority
from the Prophet down to the present day. Such charts connected the shaikh
whose tomb was the focus of the shrine with his spiritual ancestors
extending back to the Prophet of Islam, as well as with his spiritual
descendants extending down to the shrine’s present-day head. On the
bottom of the chart would be a blank space to be filled in with the name of
any new recruit to that particular order, thereby connecting that person both
horizontally with a living spiritual community and vertically with earlier
spiritual links in the chain, extending back to mid-seventh century Arabia.
In this way Sufi shrines functioned as nodes in interconnected networks
spanning vast swathes of space.
To conclude, Sufism spread across medieval India owing both to the
firm scaffolding of institutions it had inherited from the Middle East and
Central Asia, and to its ability to merge with Indian culture. The latter point
is seen in two references to the life and career of the founder of the Maratha
state, Shivaji Bhonsle (d. 1680). In any society, naming patterns reliably
reflect people’s cultural orientation, simply because parents generally give
their children names that they believe will respectably conform to the
broader contours of their immediate culture. By the seventeenth century,
moreover, the blessings of spiritually powerful Sufis in India were sought
by one and all, which explains why Shivaji’s grandfather, Maloji Bhonsle,
named his two sons the way he did. Believing that the intercession of a
local Sufi, Shah Sharif, had enabled the birth of the two boys, he named
them both after that shaikh—respectively Shahji, who was Shivaji’s father,
and Sharifji, Shivaji’s uncle.
Or again, in late 1686 while campaigning in the Deccan, the Mughal
emperor Alamgir (d. 1707) made a pilgrimage to Gulbarga where he spent a
week paying his respects to the shrine of the renowned Sufi shaikh,
Muhammad Gisudaraz (d. 1422) (Mustadkhan, 1947). For the
contemporary Hindu news writer Bhimsen, the emperor’s behaviour was
salutary and redemptive, exactly conforming to what one would expect
from a proper Indian ruler (Khobrekar, 1947). By contrast, in 1679 Shivaji,
the recently crowned king of the Marathas, plundered the town of Jalna,
home of a venerated Sufi named Jan Muhammad, whose servants he
harassed. In Bhimsen’s view, this reckless act, unbefitting a proper
sovereign, provoked Jan Muhammad’s curse, which Bhimsen considered to
have been the likely cause of Shivaji’s untimely death. As links between
Heaven and Earth, after all, Sufis and their shrines were considered
inviolate (Khobrekar, 1947). In short, both the naming of Shivaji’s father
and Bhimsen’s response to Shivaji’s raid on a revered shrine suggest how
thoroughly Sufi traditions had seeped into Indian society and culture.
68
INDIA’S TIES WITH THE ARAB WORLD AND IRAN

Abhay Kumar

India shares a historical and civilizational connection with the Arab world
and Iran. Its economic, social, cultural, and religious ties with them predate
the period when the so-called ‘Muslim invaders’ started attacking the
northwestern borders of India in the eighth century. The age-old relation is
testified by the fact that Iranian inscriptions dating fifth–sixth century BCE
are among the oldest sources that refer to the origin of the term ‘Hindu’.
While the Iranians define the term Hindu as a territorial unit, the communal
approach to Indian history that emerged in the colonial period
misappropriates it as the one denoting to a religious community. As the
term ‘Hindu’ was essentialized and given a religious connotation, all those
who were not Hindus were deemed the ‘other’. Not only that, but the
communal approach to history writing also created a binary between ‘us’
and ‘them’.
The coming of the colonial British rule dealt a death blow to Persian.
While it replaced Persian with English as the official language, it preferred
promoting vernacular languages including Urdu. Persian, which has been
‘an integral part of South Asian culture, and the life of northern India (or
Hindustan) in particular’ for almost 700 years from the twelfth to the
nineteenth century, was confined to a particular religious community and
painted as a ‘foreign’ language. The British policy of divide and rule and
looking at India exclusively through a religious lens prepared a fertile
ground for the classification of languages on religious lines. Persian, which
continues to exercise a huge influence on vernacular languages including
Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, etc., was demonized as a symbol
of ‘Muslim imperialism’ in the colonial period.
The communal approach to Indian history has deliberately erased the
‘secular’ character of Persian. The new generations are not being told the
truth that the language was mastered by both Muslims and non-Muslims
alike. Multan, Sindh, Punjab, and Lahore remained for long the important
centres of Persian poets and writers. Over time, a distinctly Indian style
developed. That is why we need to confront the gross generalization about
Indian history. The medieval period was in no sense a ‘dark’ period, nor
was it a symbol of ‘Islamic imperialism’. During this period, several
religious texts of Hindus written in Sanskrit were translated into Persian and
through these translations, Europeans came to learn about Hindu religion,
philosophy, and theology. The Mahabharata, the popular Hindu epic, was
translated into Persian as the Razmnahama. The historical evidence bears
witness to the fact that in the medieval period the syncretic Indo-Islamic
culture emerged, influencing every aspect of the Indian society from music,
literature, and philosophy to architecture. Addressing the Indian National
Congress session in 1940, Maulana Azad underscored the composite culture
of India, arguing ‘Everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour. Our
languages were different, but we grew to use a common language. Our
manners and customs were different, but they produced a new synthesis….
No fantasy of artificial scheming to separate and divide can break this unity
—Islam has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism.’
Similarly, Indians had a historical connection with Arabs. Centuries
before Mohammad ibn Qasim, the Arab general, led his army towards
Sindh in the early decades of the eighth century, the Arabs had trade and
cultural ties with Indians. In some Hadith (a collection of traditions and
sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and Tafsir (the commentary and
explication written to explain the Quran), references have been made that
Hazrat Adam, after being expelled from the Heaven, descended upon the
land of India. Since the Adam put his first step on the subcontinent, the area
had a special place in the hearts of the Arabs. Apart from faith and religion,
there has been close cooperation in the material field as well. Since ancient
times, the Arabs were interacting with the Indians through trade and
commerce. The trade also allowed Arabs and Indians to learn about each
other’s cultures. Gradually, the process of interdining, intermarriage,
settlement, and resettlement started, contributing to the evolution of a
composite culture. We, therefore, need to go beyond looking at Hindu–
Muslim relations from the exclusive lens of war and religious conflicts. The
chapters of the so-called Muslim invaders attacking Sindh and establishing
their rule in the northwestern part of India is just one event in the long life
of Arab–India ties. With time, the relationship got further deepened.
 Several historians have shown that the Umayyad and the early Abbasid
periods were intellectually very fertile when the Arabs were appreciating
knowledge from different sources. At that time, the strategic location of
Sindh facilitated the mutual learning between India and the Arab world. For
instance, in the middle of the eighth century, several Indian texts were
translated into Arabic. The Indo-Arab intellectual partnership reached its
‘height’ during these periods. The Arabs have shown a keen interest in
Indian sciences, mathematics, medicines, pharmacology, veterinary
sciences, philosophy, astrology, toxicology, etc. It was because of the Arab
and Indian ties that made Indian numerals (al-ruqum-al-Hiniyyah) spread
all across the world. In the field of medicine, India was recognized in the
Arab world. Indian doctors were highly regarded in Baghdad. Several
Indian medicines found their way into Arab vocabulary. For example,
atrifal, originally tri-phall, became part of Arab pharmacopeia. The world-
famous stories of Arabian Nights were influenced by the Indian styles. The
Panchatantra was rendered in Arabic as Kalila wa-Dimna. Even games
such as chess and chausar were brought to the Arab world from India. In
brief, much of the Indian literature, culture, philosophy, and sciences were
brought to the eyes of the world through Arab mediation. The Arab
influence on Indian culture, literature, and sciences is also so deep that they
are still felt now in every walk of life. In our day-to-day life, for example,
hundreds of words originating from the Arabic language are spoken by
Indians, even though many of them are unaware of their origin.
While the historical accounts point to the evolution of composite and
syncretic Indo-Islamic culture, the colonial historians, obviously for
political and imperial interests, distorted history and spread the myth of
centuries of Hindu–Muslim religious conflicts. The colonial distortion of
history is so durable that seventy-five years after Independence, it continues
to affect our thinking. While the communal approach to history was
invented by the British colonial historians, it was uncritically adopted by
the Hindutva forces such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh.
The distortion began when the empire began to construct the history of
India. To learn about Indian history by the colonial historians was much less
an intellectual exercise than a strategy to know the subjects and perpetuate
their exploitation. The first thing they did was the periodization of Indian
history on religious grounds. Publishing The History of British India in
1817–1818, James Mill divided Indian history into three periods: (i) Hindu
civilization (ii) Muslim civilization, and (iii) the British period. While
studying the Indian society, the British historians gave undue importance to
religion to the exclusion of other factors such as social, historical, and
economic. For example, Henry Elliot and John Dowson published an eight-
volume edition of The History of India, as told by its own historians
between 1867 and 1877 and reduced Indian history to religious conflicts
between Hindus and Muslims. Note that these volumes were English
translations of the selected Arabic and Persian materials from the medieval
period. The purpose of taking up such a big task was to simply justify
colonial rule by demonizing its predecessors and rivals. The Muslim rulers
were accused of being ‘fanatic’ and inspired by the ideas of establishing an
Islamic state, converting non-Hindus and spreading Islam. Apart from
errors in translations, these volumes made ‘purposefully literal’ translations
of Arabic and Persian sources and mostly highlighted conflict, war, and
bloodbath among Hindus and Muslims. The volumes were not willing to
appreciate the dominant current of harmony and composite culture. Nor
were the volumes open to looking at how the confluence of Indo-Islamic
culture has been taking place over the centuries. The out-of-context, literal,
and politically biased translation not only served the colonial purpose but
created a ground for religious and sectarian conflicts. A section of
communalists grabbed these opportunities to serve their selfish interests in
the name of ‘the interest of their community’. In other words, the colonial
historiography not only justified the imperial rule but also created a fertile
ground for the communalists to use the plank of sectarian conflicts.
By the nineteenth century, several myths about Indian history were
created by the colonial historians. For example, India was essentialized to
be a land of the Hindus while Muslims were projected as the ‘invaders’.
The Vedic culture, Brahminism, and Sanskrit were given importance and
they were associated with India, while Islam, Muslims, Arabic, and Persian
were deemed to be ‘foreigners’. Even the nationalist historians, who were
critical of colonial rule, however, accepted much of the colonial narration of
India as being essentially a land of Hindus. History writing continued to
privilege religious conflicts and involved dynastic rulers and kings.
Consequently, economy, society, and the historical processes were largely
missed out. The non-Brahminical traditions such as Jainism, Buddhism,
Dravidian culture, and Adivasi history were ignored; because such
historical narratives had the potential to break the essentialized construction
of the so-called ‘Hindu’ India. The class conflicts, the caste question, and
gender inequalities were largely not touched upon. As late as the early
decades of the twentieth century, the narration was limited to the Hindu–
Muslim binary and glorification of the past.
Even the nationalist historians largely upheld the colonial narrative by
accepting the ancient Indian civilization as essentially ‘Hindu’ and the
Muslims as ‘invaders’. However, the emergence of the Allahabad School of
history writing and later Marxist historians from the Aligarh School made a
big departure from the colonialist and nationalist historiography. They
looked at history from the secular and rational point of view. The liberal
framework adopted by Allahabad School and the Marxist approach taken
up by Aligarh School made a big correction of the narrow and communal
approach of the previous decades. However, their limitation lies in the fact
that their secularist-integrationist approach did not give them enough scope
to raise fundamental questions about nationalism, class, caste, and gender
composition of the postcolonial ruling classes. Nor was the dark side of the
nation-building processes interrogated.
The officially left-leaning historians were more comfortable in
operating with the tropes of nationalism versus imperialism and secularism
versus communalism. It cannot be denied that Arab and Iran’s influence on
Indian culture is as significant as India’s influence on Arab and Iranian
society.
69
ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIA

Reyaz Ahmad

Islam originated in Arabia. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was born 570 ce

in Mecca. The story of the arrival of Islam in India is very interesting and to
some extent controversial. But in spite of all this, the arrival of Islam in
India also brought changes according to the ethos of India and India also
accepted Islam with an open heart. In India, there are followers of all major
religions.
Arab merchants were in contact with India even before the birth of the
Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). At that time they used to come to the west
coast of India to trade with spices, gold, and African goods. But after the
conversion of Arabs to Islam, they started coming to India with their new
religion. Due to this the inhabitants of the western coasts of India were
introduced to Islam.
The first mosque in India was built in 629 CE in Kerala. Its name is
Cheraman Juma Masjid. It was built by the first converted Muslim of India,
Cheraman Perumal Bhaskara Ravi Varma. It is the second mosque in the
world where Juma prayer was started.
Trade between India and Arabia continued uninterrupted and Islam
spread through the cities and towns of coastal India through immigration
and conversion.
Although the image of Muslims in India and especially in North India is
presented as attackers who came to India with the intention of plundering,
the truth is that Muslims did not enter India as invaders but as merchants.
They came as travellers and religious preachers.
Many historians say that Muslim rulers forcibly converted Hindus to
Islam. The Muslim state of medieval India converted them at the point of
the sword. But renowned historian Harbans Mukhia argues, in the Indian
Express:
 A look at the demographic distribution of the Muslim population in medieval or undivided
India clearly locates them in their highest density in the four geographical peripheries of
the subcontinent: Present-day Pakistan in the west, Bangladesh in the east, Kashmir in the
north, and the Malabar region of Kerala in the south.’ These were also mostly the political
peripheries of the medieval Indian state where its hold was sporadic and often tenuous,
with Kerala always outside its ken. We are thus faced with the queer logic that the Muslim
state over-exerted itself to forcibly convert people in regions where its presence was the
weakest or short-lived and in the heartland of the longlasting empire, East Punjab, Delhi,
UP, and Bihar, [where] the Muslim population at its height was less than 12 to 15 per cent.
It follows then that conversions to Islam in different regions were inversely proportional to
the hold of the Muslim state. More interestingly, Bishop Heber, visiting India in the 1830s,
observes that one in every six Indians was a Muslim. In the 1941 census just before the
Partition, the Muslim population was recorded at 24.7 per cent. There was thus a 50 per
cent rise in Muslim population in these 110 years when the British were the rulers. It
becomes hard to hold on to the view that conversions were a one time or two-time massive
event where the state was its chief agency. In fact, it was a very long drawn process
stretching over centuries where many agencies, including the state, and many reasons, were
involved (Mukhia, 2018).

‘Regarding conversion,’ Swami Vivekananda says that, ‘most of the

conversions took place to get rid of the oppression of the caste system. The
Shudras adopted Islam in the hope of achieving social equality’
(Vivekanand, Collected Works, 1998).
As far as the conquest of India by Muslims is concerned, the invaders
came in three phases to India. The first invasion was by Muhammad bin
Qasim in 712 CE. He defeated Raja Dahir and laid the foundation of the first
Muslim rule in Sindh. Muhammad bin Qasim was an Arab from Hejaz.
Other attacks occurred in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. This
was led by Subuktigin and Mahmud of Ghazni. These people were Turks.
The third and final phase that led to the establishment of Muslim rule in
India was the invasions of Muhammad Ghori, which took place 200 years
later.
‘The process of Muslim conquest of India was very slow. It took them
600 years to reach the southern part of India. The religion of the rulers of
the medieval period was Islam, but the state was not Islamic because the
state did not follow the holy texts Quran and Hadith or Sharia’ (Pandey,
2008).
We must remember that this was perhaps the first time in the history of
the Islamic state that a large proportion of their subjects were followers of
other religions. The Muslim rulers had to take different measures for this
unique situation in the Indian subcontinent. It was realized by the Muslim
rulers in India that the Islamic laws declared for the Arab society of Medina
could not be implemented at all in the conditions of India at that time.
There is a debate between Alauddin Khilji and Qazi Mughisuddin, in
which Alauddin tells Qazi, ‘Whatever I consider to be in the interest of the
government, and I find according to the demand of the time, I order it. I do
not know what Almighty God will do to me at the time of judgment.’
Ziauddin Barani was an adviser in the court of Muhammad bin Tughlaq.
His greatest contribution is ‘state law’ or ‘zawabit’, which is his unique
concept. These state laws gave the sultan the right to violate the principles
of religion wherever and whenever necessary to maintain control over his
territory. Ziauddin Barani was clearly of the view that ‘In the case of a
dispute between political wisdom (Siyasat) and religious obligations
(Shariah), political wisdom should be given importance.’
Being a multireligious country, India has its own special status. Keeping
this in mind, the Mughal emperor Akbar also adopted the policy of ‘Sulh-i-
Kul’. He said that, ‘like God, the king should also have mercy on everyone
without any discrimination.’
In principle the character of the state in medieval India was Islamic, but
in practice they followed religious tolerance with few exceptions. There
was no difference in the life of common people, whether they were Hindus
or Muslims. Non-Muslims were also appointed to high posts. Muslim kings
married Hindu princesses. But the instances of Hindus marrying Muslim
women were rare. The reason for this was because they had to strictly
follow caste endogamy.
With the arrival of Islam in India, it mingled with Indian culture.
Initially there was a stir when the two met. But a new type of culture arose
out of the union of the two, which is called Ganga—Jamuni tehzeeb—a
shared, syncretic culture. Indian literature was translated into Arabic and
Persian, similarly Arabic and Persian literature were translated into Indian
languages. This led to the exchange of knowledge. A new style of painting,
architecture, and sculpture was born.
Another important contribution of Islam is Sufism. However, there is
evidence of the presence of Sufis in India from the eighth century. But still,
after the Turkish conquest in the twelfth century, a large number of Sufis
came to India. Sufis believes in equality. They do not believe in caste
hierarchy. They spoke in the language of the common people. They gave
the message of peace, harmony, and brotherhood. Their message was
accepted by the common people.
In the contemporary context Muslims have the same Constitutional
rights and duties as other Indians have. They fought shoulder to shoulder
with the rest of their compatriots in the freedom struggle of India. Muslims
are as much Indian as the rest of the Indians. The credit of writing the first
patriotic poem goes to Amir Khusrau, which he wrote in 1318. ‘Nuh Sipihr’
describes the people of Hindustan as talented, it praises the country, and
suggests that India is loved.
One may recall a couplet by Abdul Malik Isami in 1350, as quoted by
famous historian Irfan Habib in his speech titled ‘Building the Idea of
India’ at the Kennedy Auditorium in Aligarh Muslim University on 7
October, 2015:
Mulk-e- Hindustan ki azmat ko salaam

Jiske phoolon ke baaghichon se bahisht ko bhi rashk hai.

Praise be to the splendour of the country of Hindustan

Even the paradise is envious of the beauty of its flower garden.

70
PUNJAB

Rajkumar Hans

The Persian word ‘Punjab’ (five waters, meaning the Land of Five Rivers)
finds its first mention in the book Tarikh-e-Sher Shah (1580), while talking
about the construction of a fort by ‘Sher Khan of Punjab’. In the ancient
times, it was known as Sapt Sindhu or in the Avesta as Hapta Hendu, the
land of seven rivers. Located in the northwest of the subcontinent, it
became the cradle of the Harappan Civilization. Although during those
times some people from Iran had already become part of its inhabitants, the
Punjab subsequently served as an open door to various ethnic communities
in different roles, from across the Hindu Kush. While becoming a melting
pot of diverse people, languages, and traditions, its inhabitants continuously
resisted, accommodated, and adapted to the new ways of life. Aryans
settled here after the decline of civilization but remained a small minority.
The characterization of the period as early Vedic and Vedic is questionable
as local people continued their own ways of living. Indeed, hierarchical
Vedic varna ideology came to be countered by a popular movement of
egalitarian Buddhist thoughts as the world’s oldest university was also
established at Taxila, or Takshshila, on the eastern side of the Indus. Here
the Greek, Syrian, Iranian, Bactrian, Chinese, and other Asian students
came for their studies. Pāṇini, Charak, Kautilya, and a host of other
luminaries were products of Takshshila.
Taking a quick view of political developments around 550 BCE, with the
growth of agricultural economy arose territorial states. Besides Gandhara
on the western frontier and Kuru in the Satlej–Yamuna area, there were a
large number of small states. Some of these were eliminated with the
expansion of the Achaemenid empire into the Punjab and some more came
to an end when Alexander invaded the Punjab in 326 BCE. Soon after
Alexander’s invasion, a vast empire was established in India under the
Mauryas, which included the trans-Indus territory of Gandhara. The
Mauryan empire reached its zenith under Ashoka in the third century BCE
with India witnessing unprecedented growth in trade and industry as well as
agriculture. The provincial capital Takshashila was linked with Pataliputra
by an imperial highway, and it served as the most important centre of trade
with Iran and the Mediterranean world. It became a cosmopolitan centre of
art and learning.
In the second century BCE, the Greek king Menander ruled over the
Punjab up to the Ravi. In the century following, however, the Shakas
established their hold over the Punjab to be replaced by the Kushanas in the
first century of the Common Era. Under Kanishka, the Punjab became part
of an empire that covered much of northern India, Afghanistan, and Central
Asia, with its capital near Peshawar. The successors of Kanishka submitted
to the Sassanian emperor Ardashir in the early third century CE. This period
was marked by a flourishing foreign trade, minting of coins, new forms of
art and architecture, and the spread of Buddhism beyond the Hindu Kush.
In the fifth century CE, the Punjab was run over by the Huns who destroyed
Taxila. In the early seventh century, Harshvardhana (606–647 CE)
established his influence up to the Beas River. The kings of Kashmir
established their influence over the upper portions of the remaining doabs,
while the lower parts were covered by the powerful kingdom of Taka. In the
ninth and tenth centuries, the Hindu Shahis became dominant in northwest
Punjab. The Arabs established a kingdom in Multan.
In the eleventh century, western Punjab became a part of the Ghaznavi
empire. Under the sultans of Delhi, Punjab was divided into a number of
provinces till its conquest by Babur. For more than two centuries then it
remained a part of the Mughal empire. Opposition to state oppression and
injustice transcended religious affiliation or difference. The best example is
a heroic peasant movement, led by Dulla Bhatti, a Muslim rebel, against
Akbar. In the eighteenth century, Nadir Shah invaded in 1739 and there
were more than eight invasions by Ahmad Shah Abdali. In the late
eighteenth century, the plains between the rivers Indus and Yamuna came
under the Sikh rule. Maharaja Ranjit Singh consolidated his hold over the
former Mughal provinces of Lahore, Kashmir, and Multan, while the
chiefdoms of the Yamuna–Sutlej Divide became subordinate to the British.
In 1849, the British province of Punjab covered nearly the entire region.
In the last two and a half millennia, if Punjab was in constant political
change, it witnessed slow but drastic changes in all facets of life. Its
language, art, architecture, literature, music, and cuisines became a fusion
of practices from Western and Central Asia as people kept pouring in and
settling down. The greatest cultural influence came from Buddhism; its
protagonists used Prakrit as the chief medium of communication. Moreover,
the kings of foreign tribes became patrons of Buddhism largely because
they could become a part of the recognized social order. They also
patronized Buddhist art and architecture in Punjab. The great importance of
Buddhism in Punjab in those times has not been properly appreciated by the
historians.
By the seventh century, Buddhism was on the decline. Yuan Chwang
provides fascinating information on the state of Buddhism in Punjab. Its
monasteries and scholars were still very important, but its main ideas
survived among Jogis and Siddhas. Shaivism and Vaishnavism were
coming to the fore. The epics and Puranas gradually became the more
important scriptures. The Turks introduced new traditions of theology and
law while Sufi or Shaikh mystics advocated new theosophical ideas and
religious practices. Slowly a large number of the indigenous people
appropriated these practices and converted to Islam. The plurality of
cultural affiliation was enriched further by the use of new scripts. While the
Brahmins used Sanskrit in Devanagari script for religious purposes, the
ulema (Muslim scholars) used Arabic, and the administrators used Farsi.
The Persian also gradually became the medium of poetical, historical, and
religious literature. The common people took increasingly to Lande or Takri
script. In the twelfth century, the spoken language of the people of the
central Punjab was identified as Lahauri. The different dialects of Punjabi
language appear to have taken roots in its various parts after the fall of the
kingdom of Harsha in the seventh century and before the establishment of
the Delhi sultanate in the thirteenth.
The emergence of Punjabi as a literary language was a result of the
recognition which the creative writers of Punjab gave to the rural people of
Punjab. The first significant contributor, Shaikh Farid, still holds the
imagination of a large number of people in Punjab. He was a scholar of
Arabic and Farsi but he chose to address the common people in their own
language in the early thirteenth century. The Nathpanthis or Jogis and
Siddhas preferred addressing the people in their own language. By the
fifteenth century, bards had started singing tales of heroism and love in
people’s language. In the early sixteenth century, Guru Nanak started using
familiar forms in the language of central Punjab and his legacy was
reinforced by his successors. The Sufi writers now took up the new literary
language with greater fervour and enthusiasm. Like Shaikh Farid, Shah
Husain, Sultan Bahu, and Bulle Shah made Sufism completely indigenous
to the Punjab.
The plurality of religious culture in the Punjab during the formative
centuries of Punjabi language and literature was reflected in the plurality of
scriptural traditions. The Sufi writers used Arabic script, now known as
Shahmukhi, and borrowed their vocabulary freely from the Farsi language.
The Sikh writers wrote in Gurmukhi script and used the vocabulary of Sant
Bhakha or what Ramchandra Shukal called Sadhukkadi, a language used by
spiritual leaders in North India, during medieval times. Both the Sufi and
Sikh writers used indigenous forms, making new experiments at the same
time. With the passage of time, new forms evolved with an increasing
tendency towards secular literature. Waris Shah in the eighteenth century
adapted the Persian masnavi form to the needs of a tribal folk tale for a
panoramic portrayal of Punjabi life. Punjabi non-conformism and heroism
is reflected in its celebrated love-lores, called qissas, like Heer–Ranjha,
Sohini–Mahival, and Mirza–Sahiban, etc. The British as rulers also ignored
Punjabi and imposed Urdu as the official language. From the eleventh to the
mid-nineteenth century, the state language of the Punjab was Farsi.
Nonetheless, Punjabi literature managed to flourish largely without the
patronage of the state. This only reflects independence and the vigour and
vitality of people.
In the twentieth century, Punjab and its people suffered heavily in the
Partition and afterwards in the 1980s. Their contribution in the freedom
struggle movement, in the army, sports, literature, music, and films has
been noteworthy. Paradoxically, the decline in character has manifested
loudly in corruption, violence, drug abuse, and degradation in educational
and health standards. Since the Sikh religion has played a significant role in
modern history, a few features must be kept in mind. Growing out of the
powerful anti-Brahminical Sant tradition of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries North India, the Sikh variant of Nanak and his successors evolved
into an organized religious movement in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries Punjab. It became a rallying point for the lower castes and
untouchables for a respectable and redeemed social existence. As a young
vibrant religion of the subcontinent it has witnessed high and low points in
its journey of 500 years. State persecution of the Fifth and Ninth Gurus in
the seventeenth century resulted in the militarization of its followers.
Although it was in keeping with the historical tradition of heroism, Guru
Gobind Singh infused a new spirit by the creation of the Khalsa towards the
end of the century. The divisive practices of caste hierarchies were shed in
practice and soon after his death, the Sikhs gathered around Banda Singh
Bahadur in shaking the Mughal rule in Punjab in the first quarter of the
eighteenth century. Eventually it led to the formation of an independent
Punjabi state under Ranjit Singh at the end of that century. But the political
power and other factors led to the degeneration of radical Sikh ideas;
casteism and untouchability got reinforced to an unprecedented scale in the
nineteenth century. Even though the institutions of langar and seva have
continued, quite against Gurus’ ideology, the Dalits are marginalized and
oppressed. In the present Indian Punjab, the Dalits constitute more than
one-third of its population but their social and economic condition remains
despicable, raising questions for historical investigation and reinterpretation
of Punjab’s pasts.
71
THE WESTERN HIMALAYAN REGION

Chetan Singh

In popular imagination, the Himalayas has always been a towering,

mountainous region that defined the northern fringe of the Indian
subcontinent. It enticed people of all manner: explorers, exiles, migrants,
mendicants, seekers of refuge, and even wanderers. It is an enigma that has
fascinated scholars. Geographers, geologists, botanists, anthropologists,
sociologists, and historians have studied and understood the region in
disparate ways. Be that as it may, their work is connected—albeit
unintentionally—by the assumption that ecology and human society were
especially interconnected in the mountains. While this interface is important
in every place, its impact on the culture and society of the region has been
crucial. The western Himalayas emerged as a meeting point of three great
cultures and religions represented by Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Such
enduring developments underlying historical processes are of the essence
that we know so little about. Much of the available literature, however, is a
story of political events.
The search for the origins of early man in the western Himalaya has not
revealed much. Archaeologists have, however, discovered a variety of
Palaeolithic chopping and scraping tools produced over a long period of
time at numerous sites in the smaller valleys. Evidently, humans have long
inhabited the region. Neolithic sites, too, have yielded axes, chisels, picks,
etc. This marks the transition from hunting–gathering to food production:
the clearing of forests, the beginning of cultivation, and the domestication
of animals. Unfortunately, no fossil remains of those who left behind these
artefacts have been found. A couple of sites in Una and Solan districts hint
at linkages with Late Harappan culture.
The tribal republics (janapadas) were, perhaps, the earliest form of large
sociopolitical organization in the region. Numismatic sources reveal that
janapadas such as Audumbaras, Trigarta, Kulutas, Kunindas, and later the
Yaudheyas controlled different river valleys and the lower Shivalik range
between second century BCE and fourth century CE. Cryptic legends on some
coins mention the name of the ruler, but these republics were at best
incipient monarchies. The Himalayan republics were periodically subject to
the suzerainty of powerful empires but enjoyed interludes of independence.
The Gupta empire held sway over the region from the mid-fourth century
CE till its decline in the mid-sixth century CE. Thereafter, the region briefly
asserted its freedom, though its eastern parts succumbed once again to the
power of Harshavardhana (606–647 CE).
The collapse of the Vardhana empire was followed by a period of
conflict between fragmented mountain polities led by chieftains who called
themselves ranas/rajanakas or samantas and thakurs. Later inscriptions in
Chamba point towards the distinct political identity of the ranas and their
domains. Folk tradition is replete with stories of feuds between petty chiefs
that preceded the rise of powerful rajas. The complex process of state
formation that ensued created two kinds of polities. The first was created
where weaker ranas became feudatories of a larger chiefdom that retained
the simpler clan-based organization of a thakurai. Examples of this are the
numerous thakurais—Bara (Twelve) Thakurais and Athara (Eighteen)
Thakurais—that survived into modern times and were later constituted by
the British into the ‘Shimla Hill States’. The second kind of polity emerged
when a dominant ruler (raja) militarily subjugated ranas and thakurs and
created a monarchical system legitimized by Brahminical concepts of
kingship. The terminology used in the genealogies (vamsavalis) of these
rulers, and in the land grants made to temples and Brahmins suggest that
some of these states had become monarchies quite early. Kangra (former
Trigarta), Chamba, and Kulu were among such states. But this was an
ongoing process. Some important states expanded sporadically through the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like other Indian monarchs, the rulers
of Mandi, Kulu, and Bushehr adopted the symbolism of religious festivals
and trade fairs to buttress their political authority. Despite the veneer of
orthodoxy that the rajas now adopted, the village communities retained
some of the heterodox beliefs and practices of an earlier period. The
coexistence of diverse beliefs, social customs, and political practices has
been an important characteristic of western Himalayan society. Few
scholars have attempted to understand or explain this phenomenon that is so
integral to the region even today.
 Kalhana’s history of Kashmir, Rajatarangini (completed in 1150 CE)
refers to Kashmir’s relations with the adjoining Chamba and some other
states. No such work exists for the western Himalayan states. Local
vamsavalis along with folk tradition seek vainly to serve this purpose. The
region’s later political history is written largely on the basis of mainstream
chronicles and literary sources. Dhameri (Nurpur), Kangra, Guler, and
Jaswan and others states in the lower hills—abutting the northwestern route
into India—were strategically important. Invaders raided them whenever
possible. Powerful rulers in Delhi tried to coerce them into obedience and
loyalty. This was never easy. Rebels and renegades fleeing the wrath of the
Delhi sultans, too, sought refuge in the mountain principalities of the
Shivalik range. Mahmud Ghazni raided Kangra area in 1008 CE. His
successors garrisoned important forts here almost till the mid-eleventh
century. In the fourteenth century, the Tughluqs captured and controlled the
fort and territory of Kangra for some time. The inexorable Amir Timur
forayed through the lower hills in 1398. Akbar brought much of Kangra
under his control; though not its fort. It was his son, Jahangir, who captured
the fortress in 1620. The kingdom was annexed and administered by the
Mughals till the mid-eighteenth century. Rulers of the entire region
accepted Mughal suzerainty. Some of them became courtiers and important
officials in the imperial court. A few rebelled occasionally but were
suppressed with a heavy hand. By the early decades of the eighteenth
century, the Mughal empire was waning. The devastating incursions of
Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Durrani were death blows to the old order.
The rise of Sikhism in neighbouring Punjab had important political
consequences for the hill region during the early modern period. The Sikh
gurus, from Guru Hargobind onwards, had for long resided in the foothill
territories of friendly hill principalities. Their relations were cordial despite
the inevitable tensions in the triangular power equation between the hill
rajas, the Sikhs and the Mughals. It was Guru Gobind Singh who nurtured
the military skills of his followers that enabled them to dominate the entire
region to the north-west of Delhi. The period of uncertainty under
contesting Sikh misls (warrior units) ended when Maharaja Ranjit Singh
captured Lahore in 1799. Far in the mid-Himalaya, another power had also
risen. Nine years earlier, in 1791, the armies of the expanding Nepali
kingdom had crossed into the territories of Kumaon. They had then battled
their way westward over hundreds of miles of mountainous terrain. By
1804, Nepal controlled the western Himalayan principalities between the
Yamuna and Sutlej rivers. Encouraged by this success, and prompted by the
ruler of Kahlur for support against Sansar Chand of Kangra, Amar Singh
Thapa the Gorkha general, crossed the Sutlej. He defeated the Kangra ruler
in a battle in 1806 and besieged Kangra fort. A desperate Sansar Chand
turned to Maharaja Ranjit Singh for support. The latter agreed and thus
brought the Sikhs and Nepalis face to face. After pushing the Nepalis back
across the Sutlej in 1809, Ranjit Singh occupied Kangra Fort. By 1816, he
had either annexed the hill states situated west of the Sutlej or reduced them
to tribute-paying subsidiaries. The region was now controlled by two
external powers: the Sikhs and the Nepalis.
As the Gorkha generals tried to consolidate their rule east of the Sutlej,
the panic-stricken Sutlej rulers sought and obtained British support. The
Gorkha armies were defeated in the hard-fought Anglo-Gorkha war (1814–
15), and the treaty of Sagauli November 1815 formally ended the Nepali
occupation of the region. Then, followed the long saga of colonial
domination. The British reinstated the hill rulers to their territories. But
some areas required for establishing cantonments, hill stations, health
asylums, etc., were, however, either annexed or transferred to more
supportive chiefs. Sanads (decrees) were issued to the rajas that laid out
their duties and obligations. They were also to provide begaris (unpaid
labourers) to the British whenever required. The next stage of British
expansion came only after the death of Ranjit Singh (1839). The kingdom
of Lahore—weakened by internal dissentions—was defeated by the East
India Company in the Battle of Sabraon (1846). The principalities situated
across the Sutlej came under British control. While many of these, too, were
restored to their traditional rulers, Kangra and its affiliates were annexed. A
string of British cantonments sprang up on elevated ridges overlooking the
plains. For more than six months every year till 1947, the British Indian
empire was ruled from Shimla, a hill station in the western Himalaya. It was
from this strategic vantage point that the British played the ‘Great Game’
involving Russia, Central Asia, and Tibet and China.
The subsistence-oriented agropastoral society of the mountains offered
little economic benefit to the British. Trade with Tibet and Central Asia was
not of a scale that yielded substantial profit. So, they exploited the region’s
enormous timber resources ruthlessly. Forest reserves were created and the
peasantry were denied access to pastures, fodder, and construction timber.
Shepherding and agriculture, both, suffered and livelihoods were
threatened. The rajas, however, received handsome royalties from timber
companies. The restraining pressure that peasants once exerted on their raja
to prevent exploitation no longer worked. The new source of income and
the backing of the colonial administration encouraged the rajas to disregard
the peasantry. Touring officials requisitioned increasing numbers of begaris
(forced labourers) to carry their baggage and collect fuel and fodder. The
life of the western Himalayan farmer became more difficult than ever
before.
British officials implemented their colonial agenda through local rulers.
The larger struggle to expel the British, therefore, coalesced with local
agitations against the exploitative impositions of the hill states. This was
compounded by a stir for social reform. By the late 1930s, subjects of many
native states in the region had formed praja mandals to push their demands.
These included the abolition of begar and the lowering of land revenue.
They also sought the elimination of miscellaneous taxes imposed by the raja
on marriages, deaths, and festivals. Less vocal, but more desperate, were
landless families who were subject to beth (free labour extracted from
tenant farmers) and lived in grinding poverty. An issue of social reform,
raised by several local caste groups and sabhas (organizations), was the
abolition of the custom of reet (bride-price). Though bride-price was the
norm in several parts of India, the largely upper-caste social reformers and
Hindu organizations (perhaps more familiar with dowry) viewed reet as
demeaning and comparable to the sale of women. Recent research, on the
other hand, sees the reformers as unconsciously representing a patriarchal
mindset. The matter, however, is far more complex and has yet to be fully
explored. Be that as it may, reet continued in many parts of the region till
well after 1947. One might mention, in passing, that gender equality in
mountain and tribal societies has usually been greater than elsewhere. In
religion too, western Himalayan society saw no contradiction in accepting
the overarching prescriptions of orthodox religion while invoking the
village gods who controlled the drift of daily life.
The region has throughout history, connected with mainstream
sociopolitical developments. It has simultaneously retained a distinct
regional identity without overriding the considerable internal diversity that
sub-regions even today jealously protect. This is a phenomenon that
requires further enquiry; for herein, perhaps, lies the explanation of the
region’s ability to accommodate change and still retain its essential
character.
72
NORTHERN INDIA: MEDIEVAL AND COLONIAL

Hitendra K. Patel

In the thirty years’ time after the death of Aurangzeb, India’s political map
changed dramatically. In fact, by 1720 national imperial Mughal rule was
practically over with. It was reduced to a pathetic state in 1739 when Nadir
Shah invaded North India. The Mughal empire had started facing serious
challenges in the last years of Shah Jahan and the crisis further intensified
during Aurangzeb’s tenure, but politically the Mughal empire remained
intact till Aurangzeb was there. It has to be noted that politically the
Mughal structure remained powerful not merely due to the presence of a
powerful king, as is commonly believed, but also due to the existence of
nobility which kept the structure of the administration intact. How court
politics led to the division of nobility and thereby the disintegration of
national power is the most important subject to be taken into consideration.
The Mughal control over the countryside was due to long standing
agreements between the Mughal state and the local zamindars. With the
loosening of control, the regional powers and local zamindars got the
opportunity to be reluctant to pay the Mughal central authority their
revenues regularly. With this, the crucial support which sustained the
empire for two centuries was gone. The decline of peerage led to a division
in nobility—one section defined itself as ‘children of the soil’ and
Hindustani (Indo-Muslim party) and the other a ‘Mughal’ group. There was
further division into groups of Turani and Irani party.
Another factor which worsened the situation was the attempt of
Aurangzeb to give a new ideological basis for the Mughal kingdom.
Aurangzeb tried to change or revitalize the Mughal state ideology by
turning towards Islamic orthodoxy. Historians have pointed out that a new
class of rural and urban families, a gentry, emerged. This gentry was more
interested in safeguarding their own interests. This new gentry was open to
negotiations with new forces to see their own survival.
 In the post Aurangzeb phase, the internecine struggle among the various
claimants to the seat of imperial head also opened up possibility of what is
known as regional powers in entire Northern India. Among them most
important were the Marathas, the Rajputs, Sikhs, Rohillas, Jats, the Bengal
nawabs, Awadh, Karnataka, and Deccan. Some of these emerged soon after
the death of Aurangzeb while others became seats of regional powers in the
second half of the eighteenth century.
In Northern India, the Mughals had started their rule in the real sense
after the Battle of Panipat in which a young Akbar defeated the army of
Afghans in 1556. Akbar ruled from Agra and Fatehpur Sikri. In the post
Aurangzeb days, due to the imperial crisis in the centre, regional powers
started showing signs of independence.
The crisis of the Mughals was a crisis of national level. In all parts of
the Mughal empire, the regional powers had been showing signs of getting
independent. The Rajputs and Jats were quick to challenge the Mughals.
The Mughals were never given a respite once the regional powers started
revolting. When the Rajputs were about to be crushed, the Sikhs revolted
and the Mughals had to opt for a hasty compromise. After Rajputs, the
Sikhs gave immense trouble to the Mughals till 1715. Meanwhile,
devastating raids from the Marathas considerably affected the Mughals; it
enfeebled Mughal control in Aurangabad, Khandesh, Bijapur, and Berar. In
Bengal, the revenue kept coming till 1727 when Murshid Quli Khan was
there but thereafter the Mughals lost much of their support in Bengal.
There is another approach to understand the post Aurangzeb phase of
disintegration in national imperial authority. In northern India there were
forces which tried to counter the Mughals even when they were powerful.
Rajputs were the first. But they were basically fighting for their honour and
once they were given respect by Mughals during the tenure of Akbar,
Rajputs became part of the imperial forces. Other groups followed. Among
them the Marathas were most successful. The Marathas created a bigger
social base and lower castes came together to support it. Further, a kind of
cultural renaissance took place and the pressure of varnashrama loosened.
Due to this Marathas progressed and at one point they went up to the
Punjab in the north and up to Bengal in the east. But they also could not go
beyond a point as they failed to remove the internal social division. The
Sikhs went further. They gave their followers more social cohesion and won
lands up to Kabul. They were crushed once but due to their wider social
support they gained power and remained a great power till mid-nineteenth
century. Among other groups who fought against the Mughals were the
Satnamis and Jats. Satnamis were warriors who belonged to depressed
castes. They were crushed militarily. But Jats could not be crushed as they
fought differently, and they could hide in areas where enemy forces could
not go. Jats under Surajmal achieved military success. Jats followed Rajputs
and they were aggrieved that unlike Rajputs they did not get Kshatriya
status. Jats also helped Marathas.
In this context, there were landlords, most of whom were Brahmins, of
the region now in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who fought against the Rajputs
and the Muslims. The Brahmin landlords who originally belonged to the far
south had control over the areas in Tirhut and Palamau. The Chero rajas, for
example, were popular and continued their presence with popular support
and military tactics (such as changing their capitals). Some tribals tried to
project themselves as Rajputs.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the Marathas invaded Uttar Pradesh.
They defeated the Rohillas. Later, in 1788, the victory of the Marathas was
complete. But, with the defeat of the Marathas in 1803–04 with the Second
Anglo–Maratha War, the region fell under British control.
According to an estimate there were 200 zamindaris in Uttar Pradesh
and Bihar which were fighting against imperial authority. When the British
started their political campaign these independent zamindaris saw in them a
helping force. They could not foresee that in near future the British would
turn against them and swallow them. The presence of so many independent
forces struggling for their own estates certainly helped the British who
could manipulate the situation to their advantage. The crisis was such that
in northern India there was a kind of three rulers at the same time. In a
brilliant study of Benares region Bernard Cohn has shown a trend which is
significant. He says that with the break-up of the Mughal empire in the
eighteenth century, three political systems emerged—first, the Mughal
(‘national’), second, the regional, and the third, the local. The British played
their tricks and ultimately put the local against the regional to their
advantage. British imperial interests and the fairness of the means that were
used to get what the British wanted can be seen by their handling of Chait
Singh. Chait Singh tried his best to keep the British satisfied so that he
could remain in power but the demands were so overwhelming that
ultimately he was forced to go against the British. The trial of Warren
Hastings shows clearly that Chait Singh was not treated fairly by Hastings
and he was ultimately punished for not obeying the unfair financial
demands of Hastings.
In the new system which was brought in by the British, the real
beneficiaries were ‘new men’ in which the Bhumihars and Kayasthas were
most significant. Later, the land started to be owned more and more by the
‘new men’. By the middle of the nineteenth century, about 40 percent of the
land in the Benares region had changed hands. Old landlords became
peasants. In the entire process the British clearly favoured Bengalis,
Kayasthas, Brahmins, Baniyas, and Bhumihars in the Benares region. Cohn
has also given some interesting statistics. He has shown that most of the
large revenue payers in the Benares region in 1885 were ‘new men’. The
largest Rajput landlord in this region was the Raja of Dumraon, all of whose
holdings were obtained after the British annexation of Benares.
Bhagawati Charan Verma in his great novel, Bhule Bisre Chitra, ‘had
shown that in the colonial period only those classes flourished economically
who had the backing of the British system. A careful reading of three
remarkable novels of Amritlal Nagar—Shatranj ke Mohre, Karwat, and
Amrit aur Vish have also shown similar trends in colonial northern India.
The old aristocracy simply could not absorb the political pressure that came
with the advent of the British system. And the ‘new men’ took over the
power from them. The real national power remained in the hands of the
British but local power changed hands from the old aristocracy to ‘new
men’.
73
MEDIEVAL UTTAR PRADESH

Mayank Kumar

As historians we are resisting the periodization of the past in terms of

ancient, medieval, and modern. Such a periodization is legacy of colonial
historiography which unfortunately equated ancient with golden era,
medieval was depicted as dark ages, and modern with progress in the
context of European history. However, while imposing the same
periodization, ancient was equated with the Hindu era and was depicted as
the golden age and medieval was depicted as an era of Muslim rule and
dark ages for the Indian civilization, whereas modern was portrayed as an
era of emancipation from the Muslim rule under British rule. Recent
historiography has very emphatically challenged this tripartite division and
has pointed out that the depiction of Muslim rule or so called ‘medieval
period’ has been very vibrant and cosmopolitan in terms of social, political,
cultural, and economic activities and its portrayal as dark was part of British
strategy to malign the Muslim rule and thereby justify their colonial
domination.
Let me also point out that the term Uttar Pradesh was not in use prior to
the twentieth century, therefore, let me broadly spell out what is meant by
Uttar Pradesh for this article, especially during the centuries between the
thirteenth and nineteenth. Culturally this area has been very divergent
where Bundelkhand has its own distinct cultural identity, Braj area had its
own literary-religious-cultural identity, and Awadh initially derived its
identity in terms of literary-religious-cultural attributes but with the
emergence of Faizabad and Lucknow as major centre of cultural activities,
the religious pluralism became more pronounced. The celebration of
Muharram in Awadh has been a great example of religious pluralism
especially during Nawabi rule.
Like any other era of world history in general, Indian subcontinent
during middle centuries, in particular, witnessed tremendous exchange of
ideas in diverse fields cutting across regions and/or religious considerations.
We can map the exchange of ideas in the field of astronomy, sciences and
technology, religious philosophy, literary traditions, etc. Introduction of
cementing material (gypsum and lime mortar), which contributed on the
one hand in the construction of canals leading to expansion of agriculture,
and on the other in the more refined ways of extraction of indigo; a product
which was a major item of export till the introduction of synthetic indigo in
the late nineteenth century. It also helped in better distillation. Similarly,
spinning wheel makes a definite presence in India in the middle centuries.
Although Indians were aware of the paper since early centuries of the
present era, paper manufacturing is attested in Delhi only from the
thirteenth century onwards. Another unforgettable cultural exchange has
been the prolific use of vault, arch, and dome in architecture, which had
redefined the character of buildings in large parts of India during the Middle
Ages.
Exchange of ideas was never one way and the field of astronomy offers
one of the best example. If Indian astronomy got access to the rich corpus
of knowledge consisting of the legacy of the Greeks, with all the substantial
additions to it made in Arabic, then Al-Biruni is credited with introducing
rich astronomical and mathematical knowledge of India to the West.
Several important text were translated in Persian from the Sanskrit
especially during the reign of Firuz Shah Tughlaq.
The mutuality of the exchange of ideas was most prominently seen in
the field of literature and religious practices which extensively borrows
from Persian literary traditions, and at the same time Persian literature also
borrowed liberally from the Indic traditions. Uttar Pradesh of the middle
ages offers multiple examples of ideas of exchange. In the middle ages we
witnessed the spread of Sufi traditions which resulted in prolific interaction
and exchange of ideas. Numerous Sufis settled in different parts of Uttar
Pradesh and it was but natural for them to speak in the local language
borrowing the sensibilities of local literary traditions. It is not only the
Awadhi premakhyan tradition which aptly captures this exchange but local
vernacular tradition, especially in Brij Bhasha including riti kavya, that also
demonstrates the amalgamation of ideas and thoughts. Though a later
development, lest we forget the contribution of literature in Urdu; adab of
Urdu was celebrated by Bollywood till very recently. It will be erroneous to
suggest that Sufi premakhyan literature was written solely by the followers
of Islam, as was suggested by Ram Chandra Shukla. There is a very long
list of literary works which were produced by poets cutting across religious
lines. For example, if we have Malik Muhhamad Jayasi (1477–1542), who
is known for his Padmavat (1540), and Kutuban (b. 1515) for Mrigavati,
(date uncertain) then we also have Ishwar Das, who wrote Satyawati Katha,
Swargarohini Katha (1558), Jatmal Nahar, who wrote Prem Vilas, Premlata
Katha (1613), Narpati Vyas, who wrote Nal Damyanti Katha (1685), and
Chaturbhuj Kayasth, who wrote Madhumalti (1836), etc.
Kutban belonged to the Suhrawardi sect and he produced his
masterpiece Mrugavati in the Jaunpur court of Sultan Husain Shah in 1503.
Manjhan wrote Madhumalti in 1545. Most famous in the tradition has been
Padmavat, written by Jayasi around 1520. A brief discussion on the content
of the premakhyan will illustrate the exchange of ideas and sensibilities
across literary genre. Aditya Behl very eloquently elaborates this
assimilation and emergence of a syncretic literary tradition. He says, ‘This
Islamic literary tradition marks the full indigenization and assimilation of
Islam into an Indian cultural landscape. Indigenization accounts for the
Indian elements in Indian Islamic culture as the result of conscious and
purposeful adaptations made to the local environment by agents who
remained Muslim in their religious orientation….
These poems are distinct both from Persian and from the older classic
traditions of India, and Indian Islamic creation which emphasizes its double
distance from these older canons even while borrowing important ideas and
conventions from them.’ The amalgamation of Islamic and local
architecture could also be seen in the architecture of the temples built
during the Middle Ages and subsequently, a tradition which was most
eloquently utilised in the buildings of Fatehpur Sikri and the mausoleum of
Akbar at Sikandra.
74
DELHI: THE LAST MILLENNIUM

Sunny Kumar

Delhi has been the imperial centre of the Indian subcontinent for most of
the last millennium. Rulers of various empires have chosen it as a site for a
succession of cities such as Qila Rai Pithora (1052 BCE); Siri (1303);
Tughlaqabad (1321); Jahanpanah (1334); Ferozabad and Kotla (1354);
Dinpanah, Sher Shahabad (1530, 1540); Shahjahanabad (1648), and lastly
New Delhi (1931). Various factors acted in Delhi’s favour. Being
surrounded by the ridge cliff on two sides and the Yamuna River on the
third, it was seen as a secure location from a military standpoint, especially
against incursions from the west. It also gave strategic access to expand
across or patrol the regions towards the east or the south. And finally, it
quickly attained unparalleled prestige and an imperial aura of its own which
induced the desire in prospective rulers to associate themselves with it.
Historians are divided on whether it was the Tomar prince Raja
Anangpal or Prithviraj Chouhan who first chose Delhi as his capital and
constructed Qila Rai Pithora, which Shihab-ud-Din Ghori later took over.
Iltutmish chose it, as the nucleus of his city, Dihli-i-Kuhna or ‘Old Delhi’
and built the Qutb Minar, Jama Masjid, and a new fort (Hisar-i-Nau). It was
Lahore, and not Delhi, which was the first choice of Ghori and his
successors. Yet sustained pressure from the Mongols meant they had to give
up on Lahore and set themselves up in Delhi. A positive consequence of the
Mongol pressure was an influx of bureaucrats, soldiers, scholars, artisans,
and mystics, etc., who fled from Khurasan and Central Asia and settled in
Delhi. As Mongols repeatedly attacked Delhi, a new fortified city was built
at Siri by Alauddin Khilji. The story of Delhi’s evolution was briefly halted
when Muhammad bin Tughluq decided to transfer his capital to Daulatabad
in the Deccan. His successor, Firuz Shah Tughluq, made his mark on Delhi
by constructing a new capital city at the bank of Yamuna, Firuzabad.
 ‘Delhi, the protector of faith and of the world! It is a garden of paradise
—and so, may it flourish!’ These words were written by Amir Khusrau
when Delhi emerged as one of the world’s most prominent centres of the
Sufis. It was Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki, a Sufi from Ferghana sent by
Hazrat Moinuddin Chishti, who was the first to establish his dargah in Delhi
in the early thirteenth century. Almost simultaneously, Hazrat Shah
Turkman Bayabani also moved to Delhi and wandered in its isolated
wilderness. The next big dargah was established by Muhammad
Nizamuddin Auliya, which emerged as one of the biggest Sufi centres in the
Islamic world. His students and successors like Amir Khusrau and
Naseeruddin Chirag-e-Dehlvi kept the lamp of Chishti Sufi Silsila burning
in Delhi in the fourteenth century.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw a stagnation, if not decline, in
the political importance of Delhi. The factors ranged from Timur Lane’s
sacking of Delhi in 1398–99 to the waning of the Delhi sultanate’s power
with the emergence of rival polities across the subcontinent. As the
Mughals established their might in the era of Akbar and Jahangir, their
preference for Agra over Delhi as their capital also marginalized Delhi’s
political importance. Yet even in these centuries, Delhi retained its
metropolitan status, commercial vibrance, and bazaars. It was finally in
1638 that Shah Jahan decided to shift his capital back to Delhi and
constructed a new city, Shahjahanabad.
Touted as the most glorious city of the world, Shahjahanabad did not
receive enough attention from Aurangzeb and his successors as they mostly
stayed away owing to their political ambitions and compulsions. It
remained unprotected against the repeated attacks of Nadir Shah and
Ahmad Shah Abdali in the eighteenth century, taking the sheen off the
shining new city and breaking the backbone of its patron, the Mughal
empire. Yet as the political importance of Delhi was diminishing, it
witnessed tremendous cultural effervescence. While Shahjahan patronized
artists and expressed keen interest in their works, Dara Shukoh was himself
an intellectual of some repute. In due course, a class of connoisseurs of art,
music, and literature emerged in Delhi, comprising the families of political
elites from across the subcontinent. Simultaneously, Delhi also developed
into a centre of manufacturing and commerce.
It was at this juncture that the East India Company’s army led by
General Lake defeated the Marathas in the Battle of Patpadganj in 1803 and
took over the city. The Company, which ruled under the Mughal name,
restricted the emperor’s jurisdiction to the Red Fort and placed a resident
who oversaw the administration in Delhi. The idea was to cause the least
economic and cultural disruption and develop a warm relationship with the
city’s population. As a result, a modern publishing industry in Persian and
Urdu began to flourish, and a historic institution of Anglo–Oriental
learning, Delhi College, began to develop.
The rebellion of 1857 came as a rude shock for the British, who saw the
participation of Delhi’s inhabitants in it as a betrayal. After the reconquest
of Delhi, the British showed their full vengeance, and thousands, especially
Muslims, were plundered, injured, killed, or evicted out of the city. Many
Mughal buildings were destroyed or disfigured. Later, the officers relocated
from Shajahanabad to a newly set up Civil Lines. As the British resentment
towards Delhi lessened with time, its symbolic importance was again
recognized, and the decision was taken to transfer the capital from Calcutta
to Delhi in 1911–12. Massive land acquisition was undertaken, and a team
led by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker was assembled to construct a new
capital city, New Delhi. The new city was a repudiation of Indo-Saracenic
architecture in favour of European classicism, signifying the superiority of
British civilisation. In a decade and a half after New Delhi was inaugurated,
the British were forced to grant India independence and leave but the
violence of Partition marred the celebrations of this momentous event.
Delhi saw massive organized and spontaneous rioting, especially targeting
the Muslim population that was forced to flee to Pakistan. The
administration was mainly either ineffective or complicit in the spread of
violence. By October 1947, only 1.5 lakh of Delhi’s 5 lakh Muslims
remained in their homes.
75
THE IDEA OF DELHI

Narayani Gupta

Ik roz apni ruh se poochha

Ki Dilli kya hai?

Tho yun jawab mein kah gaye

Yah duniya mano jism hai

Aur Dilli uski jaan

Mirza Asadullah ‘Ghalib’

Delhi is more than a geographical site, more than a political centre point. It
is also identified with a language and a spiritual tradition, it is a member of
a family of international architecture, as well as being associated with
distinctive genres of music and dance, and a culinary tradition. None of the
other cosmopolitan settlements in South Asia has carried such a wealth of
significances for over a millennium.
In the 1880s, people in Delhi looking north on a clear post-monsoon
day could see the glimmering white Himalaya peaks. Standing at a high
point in the city they could see the silver ribbon of the Yamuna to the east,
and the curving spine of the Aravalli hills to the south and west, pinned
down by the twelfth-century Qutb Minar. The Aravalli and the Yamuna
enclosed a sub-region called the ‘Delhi Triangle’. But these were not
frontiers. The river was easily forded to reach the Yamuna–Ganga Doab.
The southern Aravalli was easily crossed to reach the plains and desert
which crystallized into the ‘Rajput’ kingdoms, Haryana to the west and
Punjab, the Afghan states, and Kashmir to the north. Looking at the city
from a more distant perspective, it was in the interfleuve between the
Sindhu system and the Ganga system, halfway along the trunk route that
sloped from Kabul to the Ganga–Meghna Delta. The names of Delhi’s city
gates in the nineteenth century were a geography lesson—Calcutta Gate,
Delhi Gate, Ajmeri Gate, Lahore Gate, Kabul Gate, and Kashmir Gate.
 Official public works projects made the hinterland of the town suitable
for agriculture and for pastoral farming. Seasonal streams flowing from the
Ridge to the Yamuna were supplemented by large tanks (hauz) and, from
the fourteenth to the nineteenth century by a network of canals (nahar,
which explains the suffix ‘Nehru’ to the name of Jawaharlal’s grandfather,
canal superintendent) coaxed from the river’s upper reaches; this was at the
behest of rulers learning from Persian technology, and it sustained a wealth
of orchards and highway trees.
Delhi’s political story for the millennia of ‘prehistory’ and till the tenth
century ce is disjointed, based on stone tools, some pottery, some ruins of
walls. There is reason to think that the Indraprastha of the Mahabharata was
located on the right bank of the Yamuna at Delhi (there is no archaeological
evidence so far), based on the persistence of the name into the sixteenth
century CE.
From the second millennium CE we are on firmer ground, with
substantial built remains, documentary allusions, and dynastic histories.
From 1192 to 1526 CE there was a political entity called the Delhi sultanate.
Ruled by Turco–Afghan dynasties, it was one of a clutch of sultanates in
India, nominally under the Khalifa of Baghdad till 1258. In the nineteenth
century, when amateur British historians started to explore Delhi’s history,
their textual base was Tarikh-e-Ferishta, the work of Mahomed Kasim
‘Ferishta’ (1560–1620), which was translated from Farsi into English in
1829 by Colonel John Briggs, as The Rise of the Mahomedan Power in
India (1829).
Ten years after the Portuguese established a ‘colony’ in Goa, the
sultanate in Delhi was replaced by the Timurid (miscalled ‘Mogul’ by the
Portuguese, and by others thereafter) badshahat. Delhi was one of its four
great cities, with Lahore, Agra, and Ilahabad (Allahabad). The fourteenth
and the seventeenth centuries were the great ages of Delhi—in terms of the
extent of the empire, its relations with other kingdoms of India and West
and Central Asia; its wealth became legendary, its cultural achievements—
in architecture, textiles, metalware—were celebrated. Scholars from all
parts of West and South Asia were welcomed at its many madrassas. Many
languages were heard on the city streets, and its own languages evolved—a
blend of the local Khari Boli, of Turki and Farsi—which had many
registers, from the refined language of the court and of poetry, to the
vigorous Urdu (the esperanto evolved by the many ethnic groups employed
in the ordu/imperial army). At the literary level, from the eighteenth
century, it inspired good-humoured competition at mushairas between the
writers of Delhi and those of the subsidiary nawab’s court at Lucknow. This
evolving language of ‘Urdu’/’Hindustani’ meant that the language, written
in two scripts, one derived from Farsi, the other from Devanagari was seen
as that of all North India, not as Dehlavi (= of Delhi). This was what led
Gandhiji to suggest it be the national language of India.
The famed wealth of Indian towns had led to the Turko–Afghan attacks
from the eleventh to the fourteenth century; after a spell, the famed wealth
of the Mughal court led to attacks by Iranians, Afghans, Marathas, Jats, and
the East India Company in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Their victories led to loot but not devastation, and to the creation of client-
states, with the Mughal emperor accepting ‘protection’ from Rohillas from
Bareilly, Marathas from Pune and Gwalior, and the British East India
Company. The resultant cosmopolitanism was seen in costume, cuisine,
terminology, scholarship, social camaraderie. The literati of Delhi were
remarkable for welcoming English classes at their chief madrassa, Delhi
College, without making it a substitute for Persian and Arabic. The
nineteenth century saw an efflorescence of poetry and works of philosophy
and science in Farsi and Urdu, as well as a project of translating European
classics into Urdu. This atmosphere was shattered by sudden political
violence; for four months (May–September 1857) soldiers deserting the
Indo-British army tried to persuade the octogenarian badshah, Bahadur
Shah (better known by his nom-de-plume as poet ‘Zafar’) to fight the
British and restore his own power. The sequel was harsh retribution: from
1858 Delhi was publicly humiliated—the badshah was banished to Yangon,
where he died three years later, Delhi district was attached to the recently
conquered Punjab, the city was bisected by a railway line driven through
the fort, and many neighbourhoods destroyed to create security cordons.
Delhi to many has been, from the twelfth century till the present, a
sacred (hazrat) city—the Chishti Sufi tradition beginning with the
establishment of the shrine of Bakhtiyar Kaki in Mehrauli in the thirteenth
century was strengthened by that of Nizamuddin Auliya in the fourteenth,
followed by that of Roshan Chiragh-e-Dehli. All of them, as well as many
smaller shrines, account for a steady pilgrim traffic, some culminating at
Delhi, others continuing west to Ajmer, to the shrine of the founder,
Moinuddin Chishti. In a sense, there were two figures of authority at any
given time—the sultan and the Chishti shaikh. The mausoleum of the
Humayun was located so as to be within the aura (barkat) of Nizamuddin
Auliya’s mazhar.
Delhi is also part of other circuits, as viewed by tourists—that of
Mughal architecture, where it is linked to Lahore and Agra; and that of
imperial British architecture, where New Delhi has similarities of
monumental design, ceremonial avenue, and street layout with the capitals
of other commonwealth countries such as Canberra, Ottawa, and
Johannesburg.
The spaces between the two capitals of Shahjahanabad and New Delhi
are now more densely built, and have extended in all directions. The Delhi
triangle is no longer easy to recognize. Some sections of the rural and forest
lands have been formalized as parks. The metro network links Delhi to parts
of the National Capital Territory in the surrounding states. The metropolis
continues to be a magnet, less for scholars or aspiring bureaucrats, more for
entrepreneurs and people of business. Its universities and other institutions
welcome people from all over the country. It is the most open of India’s
cities, and the most cosmopolitan. The urban culture of the shehar (city) has
its counterpoint in the politico-bureaucratic New Delhi, as well as in the
rural areas even though shorn of their fields. Upper-class mansions and
farmhouses, middle-class neighbourhoods, and cramped auto built slums
form a mosaic without any obvious order, despite the overarching power of
the Delhi Development Authority.
Inevitably, its famed tehzeeb, the hallmark of an urban culture shared by
all classes, has been bruised by brashness, the love of poetry and music
muffled by the addiction to mobile phones, the gentle pace overtaken by
speeding cars…but one can still come across scattered traces of ‘Dilliyat’,
all the more precious for being hard to find.
 PART V

COLONIALISM
76
THE IMPACT OF COLONIAL RULE ON THE INDIAN
ECONOMY

Sunny Kumar

The Indian economy underwent a structural transformation during the

British era, but the assessment of this transformation has been debated since
the days of the regime. On the one hand, there are those who believe that
British rule dragged the Indian economy backward by systematically de-
industrializing and pauperizing it. On the other hand, the critics of this
theory list a host of economic, institutional, and infrastructural changes
introduced by the British government as measures intended to modernize
the Indian economy. They blame the lack of expected growth on the
entrenched structural flaws in the Indian economy. This essay attempts to
provide an overview of this debate and highlight key features of the Indian
economy in the nineteenth century.
In the eighteenth century, India was primarily an agricultural economy
but so was the rest of the world, including most of Europe. Indian
commodities were one of the most sought after and were the driving force
behind the birth of European trading companies and naval missions. Around
1750, India produced about a quarter (24.5 per cent) and China produced
about a third (32.5 per cent) of global commodities. It was Britain’s
determination to rid itself of its over-reliance on the imported Indian cotton
textile which prompted its first wave of industrialization. A combination of
British industrialization and its colonization of India ensured that by 1938
India’s share fell to 2.4 per cent. Although the British followed other
Europeans to India primarily seeking Indian products, their mission to
colonize India followed from their desire to have monopolized access to
Indian goods and to pay for them with exacted Indian land revenue rather
than British sterling. Hence, from the outset, the purpose was not to
establish a prosperous Indian empire but to use Indian prosperity solely to
guarantee the East India Company’s and subsequently the private trader’s
profit.
One of the earliest impacts of British colonialism was the
commercialization of Indian agriculture which integrated the rural economy
with the world and enhanced its profitability. But it was not the peasantry
but the East India Company, British planters, traders, and village
moneylenders who retained control and reaped the profits from these
developments. For example, the cultivation of opium was controlled and
monopolized by the Company in order to balance the payments made for
the purchase of silk and tea from China. Similarly, the plantation of tea and
indigo was controlled by European planters. The peasants were advanced
cash loans and forced to sell on a predetermined rate. Since the mid-
nineteenth century, the cultivation of commercial crops like sugarcane,
cotton, and later, jute spread where the Indian peasants had no control over
the sale of the produce. Even then, the need for high capital investment,
sales in distant markets, and the increasing burden of tax led to the
dominance of traders and moneylenders over peasants. The requirement for
cash advances and lack of state-sponsored credit provisions resulted in a
vicious cycle of rural indebtedness and pushed them to the brink of famine
which recurrently ravaged the peasant economy.
The Charter Act of 1813 revoked the Company’s monopoly over Indian
trade which opened the gates for English industrial goods, especially cheap
cotton textile to invade Indian markets. Being outpriced in India and
abroad, the traditional Indian handlooms were being replaced by the British
and not by the Indian textile industry. Hence, the colonial state ensured that
India deindustrialized, while contributing to the industrialization at work in
Britain. This resulted in the transfer of population from the once thriving
artisanal sector in India to the now overburdened agricultural sector. This
thesis has been questioned by scholars, especially the unreliability of the
census and pre-census data and its flawed interpretation, which inflates the
loss of jobs for handloom weavers. Recent research has shown that the
adverse impact of the lack of both, investment and a protective tariff, were
different in different sectors. Indian weavers adapted to the challenge of the
British industrial textile by shifting to either finer handiwork for the elite
customers or coarser khaddar for the vast poor population. Slowly, new
technologies were introduced including the fly-shuttle, power loom, new
techniques of plating and polishing of brassware, and use of power in the
plating of the wires in zari production, etc. Other sectors like leather works,
carpets weaving, and pottery, etc., also survived and grew, but sluggishly.
Also, not all regions bore the brunt of economic stagnation equally. While
the Gangetic Plains were tremendously affected, regions like parts of
Punjab, Western Uttar Pradesh, and coastal areas witnessed positive growth
in certain parts of the economy.
Apart from the lack of industrial investments, Indian economy also
experienced what Dadabhai Naoroji conceptualized as a phenomenon of
drain of wealth from India. It was the transfer of money from India to
Britain under various heads, including the expenditure on maintaining the
imperial government and bureaucracy (home charges), Company’s foreign
debts, the expenditure on military, return on imperial investment on
railways, canals, roads, transports etc. Critics have questioned the
calculation of the amount. Yet even the most conservative estimate (2 per
cent of Indian exports) accumulated over two centuries deprived India of a
considerable amount of investable surplus.
Critics of the ‘drain theory’ call this expenditure indispensable in any
government and see it as having played a central role in modernizing the
Indian state and economy. It was through the imperial army and
bureaucracy that various regions of the Indian subcontinent were politically
and economically integrated and the borders secured. Imperial investments
in railways, telegraph, and roads were necessary for its transition to an
industrialized society. But then why did India not transition to an
industrialized society during the two centuries of British rule? Rather than
blaming it on the drain of wealth, revisionist historians like Tirthankar Roy
blame it on the backwardness of Indian agriculture, which, unlike in
Britain, could not be completely commercialized and made as productive.
Even though Roy concedes that the British did not do enough to transform
Indian agriculture, he contests the narrative that the Indian economy did not
modernize during the British rule and that it was the British policies that
held it back.
77
THE ASIATIC SOCIETY AND ITS IMPACT ON INDIAN
HISTORY

Thomas Trautmann

Sir William Jones, sent to Calcutta as a judge for British India, founded the
Asiatic Society in 1784, the success of which led to similar societies being
founded at the other presidencies of Bombay (1805) and Madras (1812).
Through them Britons, and the pandits and munshis of India with whom
they engaged through language learning and study, formed places at which
the scholarship of India and of Europe came face to face at a deep level.
The most revolutionary outcome of such interactions was the discovery,
expressed by Jones, that Sanskrit is so closely related to Latin and Greek
that ‘no philologer could examine them all three’, without concluding that
they descended from a common ancestor language, ‘now perhaps lost’; and
that the same could be said of old German (of which English is a
descendent), Celtic, and old Persian. These six languages, then, are sister
languages of a family, the descendants of a hypothetical ancestor language;
the family is now called Indo-European and the ancestral language proto-
Indo-European. Study of the Indo-European concept developed rapidly and
its success made it a model upon which other, different language families
were posited.
The formation of the historical linguistics of Indo-European was a true
discovery in the sense that it was completely unexpected and formed an
entirely new understanding of world history based on hitherto unknown
historical connections among peoples, new to both parties to the intellectual
exchanges from which it arose.
In this way India became the site of important further discoveries in
linguistic history. At Madras, Francis Whyte Ellis, Sankararyya Shastri, the
chief of staff to Ellis at the collectorate of Madras, and Pattabhirama
Shastri, the Telugu master at the college of Fort St George—where newly
arrived junior servants of the Company learned the languages of India—
composed papers to show that the languages of South India (mentioning
Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Kodagu, Tulu, and Malto) were historically related
to one another and, although they contain many loanwords from Sanskrit
and other Indo-Aryan languages, the core vocabularies are derived from a
set of roots different than the roots from which Sanskrit words are formed.
This newly discovered language family is now called Dravidian. The first
publication on what is now called Polynesian, and the relatedness of the
language of the Roma or Gypsies of Europe to the Indo-Aryan languages of
India, both were shown in papers published by William Marsden, in the
employ of the East India Company.
Why was India so very fruitful for the new linguistics? Colonial rule
brought British speakers of English who were educated in ancient Greek
and Latin to a knowledge of Sanskrit, all of them historically related
members of the Indo-European family of languages. But in addition to that
purely accidental fact that the languages of colonizer and the colonized
happened to belong to the same language family, we need to look to the
components of the two intellectual traditions brought face to face with one
another that entered into the new linguistics. They were two. On the
European side there was the historical character of the collective project of
comparing languages, through word lists of core vocabulary (essential
words, such as terms for numbers, relations of kinship, parts of the body
and so on, thought to be most ancient and unlikely to be loanwords) to infer
their genealogical connection. On the Indian side there was the extremely
early formation of structuralist linguistics for the study of the Veda, soon
taken up by Buddhists and Jainas, and in South India for Tamil (the
Tolkappiyam grammar). More especially, phonology (pratishakya) for the
exact rendering of the sounds of Sanskrit offered a sharp tool for the new
international linguistics that was to make so many rapid improvements to
the understanding of early history. It took advantage of the exactness of
phonological analysis of Sanskrit to model a scheme of transliteration of
languages worldwide, which evolved into an international standard for
phonetics in use today. This combination of European and Indian
intellectual traditions has been very fruitful and continues to add to our
knowledge of historical linguistics.
This was but the most recent example of the linguistic science of
ancient India supplying its sharp tools for the philological study of other
languages. In ancient China, because of the non-phonetic nature of its
script, the sounds of the ancient classics came to be lost, and poetry that
once rhymed no longer did so. Through Indian Buddhists at the Chinese
court the Indian phonological analysis of ancient India was brought to the
use of Chinese philology, composing rhyming dictionaries by which the
ancient phonology of Chinese was recovered, and the rhyming sounds of
the classics were determined. In other Asian countries this effect of Indian
phonological analysis was embedded in the Brahmi script and its offshoots,
and the formation of over a hundred scripts for various languages.
78
INTERACTION WITH COLONIAL IDEAS

Pradip Datta

The relationship between the colonial regime/s of ideas and the creative
responses of the colonized to these was preceded by a period of early
modernity. The fifteenth to the eighteen centuries were marked—among
others—by unprecedented levels of travel, discoveries, and trade an
emphasis on the individual and historical consciousness together with new
literary forms, scepticism, secular texts of governance, and a preoccupation
with reason. Many of these elements were re-disseminated under
colonialism. But colonial rule and its ideas were shaped by a self-conscious
sense of externality to the world of the ruled. Paradoxically, the built-in
alienation produced a mode of modernity that was marked by creative and
distinctive responses of the colonized to ideas that were imposed or made
available by colonial rule.
The initial period of colonial rule overlapped with the ideas of the early
modern. The rapid adoption of print and the easy social concourse of
Europeans and Indians disseminated republican ideas, together with liberal
and utilitarian concepts—and even radical, non-conformist ones. The new
concept was that of the citizen-subject which demanded accountability to its
freedoms and welfare from the government. The idea of rights was
introduced and over time it changed the meaning of adhikar, a word that
was hitherto rooted in hierarchical meaning. Rammohun Roy, in particular,
dovetailed these new concepts with an inherited Indo-Persian climate of
rational and scholarly arguments that led him to formulate a ‘natural
religion’ which was anti-clerical and anti-idolatory. His campaign against
sati, which he redefined as widow-burning, recognized the personhood of
the woman and the social discrimination practised against her. Equally
significant was his cosmopolitan solidarity with republican struggles
globally.
 The uprising of 1857 against the East India Company led to the
simultaneous tightening and expansion of the sovereignty of the British
Crown—as well as a propensity to rule through local notables and chiefs.
Both these impacted the nature of colonial liberalism, which now avoided
reforms and justified its despotism by presuming that the colony required
exceptional modes of governance. The double nature of rule corresponded
to a hybrid power that drew on the interactions between two orders of
power. Domination was exerted through the colonial idea of order which
sought to rationalize social life by administering public health and so on, as
well as disciplining the poor by forcing them to work at the tea gardens, do
public works. This corresponded to the local idea of danda, the power of
punishment that belonged to the sovereign, the representative of which was
the local landlord. Persuasion was achieved through the idiom of
improvement which included education, reports on working conditions.
This corresponded to the local notion of dharma, understood as virtuous
action by performing caste duties.
Actually, the very notion of law was rendered hybrid by colonial rule
from its beginning. Till the second half of the nineteenth century, customary
law, which varied according to regions, was replaced by the classic texts of
Hindus and Muslims which were interpreted by pandits and maulvis. This
standardized and reinforced Brahminic law across the country on the model
of the Roman Law, a process exacerbated by the use of translated texts from
the 1860s, instead of relying on religious interpreters. Further, the multiple
and overlapping boundaries of local communities were altered by the
census. The use of religious categories for the census produced bounded
communities of Hindus and Muslims. Colonial policies that linked
population to quotas in representation and educational institutions
introduced a sense of competition between religious communities that was
intensified with the impact of social Darwinist ideas of the struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest. At the same time, castes were
regarded as fixed and unalterable; the history of caste mobility was
overlooked. The caste census changed the nature of caste. From being
purely local, ascriptive categories, they were articulated by caste
associations that were extra-regional and combined voluntary membership
with ascriptive status. Both religious and caste identities became politicized.
Colonial liberalism justified itself as providing a neutral government
that adjudicated between different community interests. Its despotism
created conditions for its rejection by thinkers like Mahatma Gandhi and
Muhammed Iqbal. Steeped in both European and non-Western traditions,
both grounded their thought on the ethical basis of the self. This amounted
to a clear rejection of the self-possessive and socially disembedded
individual as figured in possessive individualism. Both produced original
ideas that led to mutually different paths. Through concepts of swaraj and
satyagraha, Gandhi conceptualized the individual as an ethical entity whose
distinction lay in mastering the self. Further, the individual was in-
dissociable from social relations. Gandhi proposed small communities that
could govern themselves with their own laws in contradistinction with the
state that was held to be violent and impersonal. Further, Gandhi was
against the consequentialism of utilitarianism: for him, the means were as
important as the ends. Iqbal privileged the idea of khudi, a notion that
equated the self with the will. Instead of the autonomous and given
individual of liberalism, Iqbal insisted on a notion of the self that had to be
achieved. Khudi was sought to be achieved through submergence in the
universality of God. In political terms this meant the rejection of
nationalism and the embrace of a pan-Islamic community. For Iqbal, Islam
had to be necessarily based on the spiritual qualities that liberalism
attenuated through the public-private divide.
Liberalism is of course a large family of ideas. Many of its elements and
implications operated independently of colonial liberalism. It could be
aligned to social conservatism. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan sought to imprint it
on Islamic ideas to reconcile it with European reason and science. He
emphasized the importance of liberal ijtihad (interpretation) while
downgrading the position of taqlid or conformity with legal schools. On the
other hand, liberalism could, in the thought of people like Jawaharlal
Nehru, combine the importance of the individual property rights by the
need to recognize collective social rights. Above all, liberalism also
possessed a critical edge that we saw being deployed by Rammohun Roy.
Liberal notions were used to invoke personal liberty against a despotic
state. Above all, the critical elements of liberalism were shaped—and were,
in turn, reshaped—by thinker-activists from the peasantry, from low castes,
and women.
The idea of labour as the basis of landed property originates with John
Locke but is also something that grounded the ideas of liberal intellectuals
in Bengal as well as the peasantry. In colonial Bengal, improvements made
on land by cultivators were regarded as eligible for rent. On the other hand,
landlords were regarded, for this reason, as simply rent receivers and
possible moneylenders. Peasant improvement literature identified self-rule
with that of the property-owning peasantry. This, of course, left out the
landless labour and sharecroppers, segments that were sought to be included
in a common front by invoking the sense of a Bengali Muslim community.
Liberalism also collaborates in producing a new selfhood for Dalits.
The very idea of the Dalit is one introduced by Babasaheb Ambedkar to
designate the experience of deprivation and marginalization. At the same
time, it was counterposed against the Gandhian use of Harijan to index the
will to liberate oneself from that condition. The ideas of Tom Paine, of
Protestant non-conformists, and European radicals had impacted Jotiba
Phule; in addition, there was also the anti-clerical/idolatory traditions that
could be traced to Roy but which was present more immediately in
movements such as the Paramhans Mandali. But it was also the new
educational opportunities that made these early leaders reflect critically on
experiences of discrimination. The result was the fashioning of an identity
that was secular in nature, being defined by segregation, public exclusion,
and civic disabilities. While Phule traced this discrimination to colonization
by Aryans, Ambedkar attributed it to a form of historical discrimination and
not a racial one. By doing this he defined the Dalit as a community of
suffering. Equally important was the attempt by the Dalit leaders to produce
a notion of minority that would not be defined by religion. This was
necessary, for a religious identity would club them as a minority within
Hindus. This, of course, meant that Dalits were prepared to work within the
framework of the colonial liberal state even as they drew on their
experiences, their politics, epistemic differences from upper castes as well
as their ethical commitments.
While the utilitarian proclivities of colonial administrators aided gender
reforms in the early part of the nineteenth century, by the second half,
women reformers found themselves confronting opposition from both elite
male activists as well as the colonial machinery. Social reforms by males
provided the initial enabling conditions. Roy’s campaign on sati was taken
forward by the mid-century debate on widow-remarriage which introduced
the word ‘equality that would haunt the subject of gender relations
subsequently. By the second half of the century, women took the lead in
actively addressing their condition. The initial wave of feminism critiqued
the grounds of faith which provided ritual sanction to marginalization of
women. Pandita Ramabai noted the impossibility of women to take
responsibility for their spiritual condition since their only object of worship
was their husband. Tarabai Shinde blamed priests for putting women in an
inferior position and proposed that women should determine the content of
tradition and custom. The two new categories that were introduced in the
course of the movement were that of strijati and bhaginivarga. The first was
not just a description of the female gender but was defined against the
purushjati to denote a condition of inferiority that needed to be rectified. On
the other hand, bhaginivarga denoted the collective self-awareness of
sisterhood. The power of these concepts lay in their performance. Thus
bhaginivarga was actualized in the course of the Rukhmabai Case which
was based on the demand for divorce and the consequent right of women to
their own choices and to their bodies. Faced with vociferous opposition
from male leaders including the highly respected and influential Lokmanya
Tilak, the women came together to form the Rukhmabai Defence
Committee.
It is evident that colonial interactions took multiple forms with creative
results, some of which can only be sampled here. K. C. Bhattacharya, the
philosopher, denied that any original thought had been produced in
modernity and pressed for the production of categories that would bear the
sign of true originality. While Bhattacharya denied the value of Indian
thought under colonialism—even as he was engaged in producing it—
thinker activists like Swami Vivekananda proposed relationships of cultural
exchange with the West. For Vivekananda it meant the spiritualization of
the West by the East, while Hinduism would acquire the values of physical
action and seva (service), the practical implementation of which bore the
marks of Christian missionary influence. Tagore posed the difference
between the East and West as that between the value of samaj/society and
of the nation respectively. Samaj was the sphere of differences, the logic of
which worked autonomously (although needing correction); the West
represented the rationalization of human relationships propelled by the
unbounded accumulation of wealth and power.
In conclusion it may be observed that the attitude to the West to a great
extent shaped the vision of the country itself. For Tagore, Nehru, and many
others (including to a great extent, Gandhi)–India was built on an openness
to the ‘foreign’. The founding concepts of India were not fixed but in a
continuous process of formation and reformation. This process was
continuously activated by the introduction of the foreign. For Tagore,
foreign elements introduced a shock to the self that led to its reconstitution
through self-criticism and assimilation. It was here that the real
distinctiveness of India lay, that is, in its dynamic capacity to deal with
difference.
79
PRINT TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY

Urvashi Butalia

In the 1440s that Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, printer and

publisher from the city of Mainz, started to experiment with printing from
movable types. The use of metal types that could be assembled to form
words—a technology that the Chinese and Koreans had used as early as
1254—and Gutenberg’s adaptation of the wooden screw press (earlier used
for oil pressing and grape crushing, among other things) to print books
changed the face of printing in Europe and made it possible to print large
numbers of books, and more cheaply. The numbers of printed books in
Europe increased exponentially in the next few centuries.
In 1556, a little over a hundred years after Gutenberg’s press
revolutionized printing in Europe, the first printing machine arrived in
India, in Goa. The story goes that the press was actually bound for
Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia), ordered by missionaries there who
wished to produce publications to spread the Gospel. On its way (its
journey began in Portugal) the ship carrying the machine was lost at sea and
found its way to Goa where it remained and was installed in St Paul’s
College. Soon, a printer was found, and the press began to print. The first
books were, predictably, spiritual compendiums on Christian life, with the
very first document printed being loose sheets or theses called Conclusoes,
which were meant for the training of priests in St Paul’s College.
From there, printing spread to different parts of India, much of it being
focused on Christian doctrines, which gradually began to be printed in
Indian scripts, the first among these being Tamil (1558), then Malayalam
(1578), and later Konkani and Marathi. In or around 1712, the setting up of
a printing press in Tranquebar further increased the numbers of books that
were coming out, although the focus remained, by and large, on religion,
more specifically the Christian religion. In subsequent years, printing
spread eastwards to Bengal.
 The growth and development of printing was not universally welcomed.
For alongside the missionaries, India now saw another growing presence,
the East India Company whose purpose was commerce, and they frowned
upon the missionary ‘education’ of the ‘natives’. When the Company
transformed into a colonizing power, the British began to see the need for
an educated band of Indians whose services they could use to run their
empire, and this was how formal education began to spread, a notable
development being the setting up of the Serampore Mission Press by
William Carey in 1800.
Although the arrival of printing presses radically transformed the world
of printing and took the written word to more and more people, the
production and dissemination of knowledge in India had begun centuries
earlier. The wisdom and learnings contained in India’s multiple and rich
traditions of stories, mythological tales, folk narratives, oral traditions, and
more were evident in the large numbers of manuscripts, painted,
illuminated, handwritten, and calligraphed that were created on cloth and
palm leaf. Unlike in many parts of the world, vellum, a thin, beaten leather
on which books were printed did not find much popularity in India.
Manuscripts were created by writers, publishers, often by rulers and
sometimes by private people, also by families, priests, monks and even
today India has a rich storehouse of manuscripts from Buddhist, Jain,
Hindu, and later the Sikh religions. In 2003, India set up the National
Mission of Manuscripts under the Culture Ministry. Its search for
manuscripts across India yielded thousands of manuscripts, and these
represent only a fraction of what is available.
The arrival of the Mughal rulers in India heralded a new moment in the
history of printing and publishing. Existing narratives were supplemented
with the stories and memoirs of the rulers and the reforms they brought
about, the conquests they made, the buildings they created. The Mughals
brought paper with them—it has travelled from China via the Arabs to
Europe—and they also brought the exquisite tradition of illuminating
manuscripts, often using things like real gold and colours made from stone,
like lapis. In addition to the art of making beautiful books, the Mughals also
expanded the scope of the content of books: memoirs, histories of rule,
proclamations, but also stories of hunting, sport, and music all became
legitimate subjects for books, as did women, their pursuits, and indeed
stories of love and desire.
 Publishing and printing grew exponentially during colonial times in all
languages. For example, in the early part of the nineteenth century the
Bombay government sponsored the publication of textbooks in English and
Indian languages. Roughly at the same time, an American mission set up in
Bombay also began to publish textbooks. The late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries saw the growth of publishers and books in several
Indian languages, including Hindi where names like Nawal Kishore, Gita
Press, and others became popular.
It is against this background too that we need to see the growth of
education in India. For the longest time, because formal education was
pushed by the British, textbook publishing followed the trajectory set by it
and more and more books began to come out. Education, however, even
though it became something increasing numbers of Indians aspired to, was
not so easily available to anyone, especially those on the margins of society.
Women, for example, were often denied an education and were coerced into
staying at home. In Maharashtra in the mid-nineteenth century, Peshwa rule
favoured only the upper castes and Dalits, women, widows, and others on
the margins were not permitted to study. It was around this time that a
young, fourteen-year-old girl called Muktabai Salve found she was unable
to, and that her community, the Mangs and the Mahars, were not given the
right to get educated. Muktabai was able to fulfil her dream of an education
because of the work of three people: Savitribai Phule, her husband Jotiba
Phule, and a woman called Fatima Sheikh, who together set up schools for
Dalits and women in Maharashtra. And while in this school, Muktabai
wrote an essay that was a searing critique of the upper-caste monopoly of
education. In later years, after the British finally left India, education spread
across the country and publishers followed suit, publishing books to cater to
the ever-growing demand. That is a story that remains to be told.
80
PERCEPTIONS OF COLONIALISM (1800–1950)

Mohinder Singh

It is an interesting fact of history that the concept of civilization emerged in

northwestern Europe in the same decades of 1750s and 1760s during which
the foundations of the colonial regime were laid in India after the East India
Company’s successive victories in the battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar
(1764) (Febvre, 1998). While initially emerging as a concept to refer to and
theorize the emergent modes of civility and urban sociability of the post-
feudal bourgeois world in Europe, civilization soon came to be used as a
key ideological and political concept for the legitimation of the European
colonialism. The latter usage emerged along with the category of the West
and the concomitant binaries of East–West and Orient–Occident during the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The eighteenth century is
also the period during which the geographical contours of Europe and other
continents are marked clearly through the use of new cartographic practices.
By the early nineteenth century, Europe is firmly placed on the ‘top of the
world’ not just in the new cartographic regime, but also, metaphorically,
through the claims of civilizational superiority. This combination of
discursive representations became important determinants of the
perceptions of colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
It is important to begin with a brief introduction to the concept of
civilization as most of the perceptions of and responses to colonialism in
the colonized world were framed in civilizational terms. These perceptions
and responses can be gleaned from a variety of literary sources:
autobiographies, travelogues, literary genres of fiction like novels, stories,
plays, genres of satire, and the great texts of political thinking produced
during this period. Before the Battle of Plassey, the Mughals and the elites
linked to the Mughal rule—both Muslims and Hindus—treated the East
India Company as one among the several firangi companies present in the
subcontinent since the early seventeenth century. They did not have an
appreciative view of several of their civilizational practices including their
cleaning and toilette practices. The mutual comparison of the respective
cultural and other practices between the Europeans and the Indian elite
happened broadly on the basis of equality. Similarly, the travelogues written
by the Indian visitors to Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth century
—by visitors like Mirza Shaikh Ihtishamuddin and Mirza Abu Taleb
Ispahani—reveal that though they appreciated several scientific,
technological, and political achievements of the Europeans, they did not
exhibit any sense of civilizational inferiority. The appreciation was
accompanied by criticism (Chatterjee, 2012; Majeed, 2007).
This perception began to change drastically and decisively in the early
decades of the nineteenth century, particularly among the new Indian elites
exposed to Western education. This change in perception corresponds to the
change in attitude and policies of the colonial government from relatively
non-interventionist approach to a more reformist approach to the social and
religious practices of the ‘natives’, reflecting the self-conscious post-
Enlightenment ‘civilizing mission’ that the utilitarian liberals favoured.
Consequently, the propagation of the theme of ‘moral and material
progress’ of the West became more aggressive in the colonial discourse.
Gradually, the colonial power came to acquire a psychic life that would tend
to affect the deepest level of the psyche of educated Indians, a power that
Ashis Nandy has described as ‘intimate enemy’ in his classic work on the
‘loss and recovery of self under colonialism’.
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century (Nandy, 1983),
this change in perception of colonialism gets reflected in the change in
perception among the Indians about their own traditions. This new
perception, exhibiting a level of self-doubt was substantially different from
the one found in the eighteenth-century Indian travel accounts discussed
above. The nineteenth century Indian social and religious reformers—both
Hindu and Muslim—like Syed Ahmad Khan, Mahadev Govind Ranade,
Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Keshav Chandra Sen, and early nationalists
like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in different
ways reflect this change in perception. One of the main features of this
perception was the recognition of the historical need to reflect weaknesses,
drawbacks, and failures of the Indians in the mirror of the Western progress.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century there is an attempt to reverse
the hierarchy of the binaries of the East and the West. Yet, the binaries
constructed by the colonial discourse get accepted at a deeper level. The
most prominent representative of this approach is Swami Vivekananda’s
nationalist discourse, in which the West stands for the achievement in the
domain of material progress and the East comes to be the depository of the
spiritual powers of humanity.
Some of the leading Indian social reformers and nationalists in the
nineteenth century regarded British rule as ‘providential’ that connected
India to the global forces of civilization and progress. Yet, at the same time,
the powerful economic critique of the colonial rule developed in the late
nineteenth century also began to consider British rule as primarily
exploitative and was in a relation of immanent contradiction with its own
putative claims. By the early twentieth century, the dominant discourse of
nationalism is able to resolve these apparently conflicting perspectives in
these terms: India as a nation should try to emulate the West by following
the Western models of economic, political, scientific, and technological
progress while maintaining its distinct cultural identity. This is the argument
that Partha Chatterjee has made in terms of the nationalist division of the
outer and inner domains (Chatterjee, 1993). In the early twentieth century,
Japan emerged as an Asian giant that provided the model for the viability of
this sort of resolution. The dominant nationalist idea of self-rule or swaraj
in the early twentieth century was articulated in these terms.
By the early twentieth century, the Western claims of civilization and
progress began to unravel globally as the Western nations were shown to be
involved in destructive imperialist wars culminating in the World Wars.
Around the same time, the Marxist critique that considered colonialism and
imperialism as products of the logic of capitalism was becoming popular
through the spread of working-class movements globally. In India this
critique was taken forward in communist, socialist, and Nehruvian political
perspectives. However, these perspectives were also based on historicist
assumptions of the colonial rule, whereby, though founded on exploitative
motives, the colonial rule also worked as a historical force [an ‘unconscious
tool’ of history in Marx’s words] that put India on the historical march
towards a liberated socialist humanity.
Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar too broadly agreed with the Left nationalist
assessments of colonialism as a fundamentally exploitative system that was
out of tune with the spirit of the times. Again, along similar lines,
Ambedkar also thought of colonialism as having played a historical role of
putting India in contact with modern civilization with its conceptions of
liberty, equality, and fraternity and made Indian society reflective of its own
shameful hierarchical social divisions and the religious–legal codes
sustaining them. This historical contact in turn had—from the perspectives
of the untouchable castes—opened up liberatory possibilities for them in
secular terms (Geetha, 2021).
In many regards, Mahatma Gandhi’s and Rabindranath Tagore’s
perspectives on colonialism were radically different from all the others
discussed earlier insofar as their responses went much deeper in questioning
the West’s claim to civilizational superiority. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, written
and published in 1909, was the first major frontal attack on modern Western
civilization represented by colonialism by a non-Western thinker. Tagore’s
critique can be found in his essays on nationalism written and published in
the middle of World War I. In addition, he wrote essays directly critiquing
the notions of civilization and progress in the 1930s, including his last
essay, ‘Crisis in Civilization’, questioning the foundational claims of
Western modernity.
Both Gandhi and Tagore refused to rehash the nationalist material–
spiritual binary. Though they did work with the categories of East and West,
they were both careful in emphasizing that it was the modern industrial
civilizational that was their main target of critique. For Gandhi, civilization
i.e., modern civilization is defined by its ability to increase physical comfort
and material prosperity. This civilization, he noted, didn’t care about ethical
questions of good and bad or good and evil. It is just a quantitative measure
of material progress. But the main characteristic of a ‘true civilization’
Gandhi argued, was the promotion of good conduct and mastery over mind
and passions. Similarly, for Tagore, one of the most disturbing aspects of a
commerce-based civilization was its tendency to reverse the hierarchy of
human values. While in earlier civilizations, ‘lower passions’ like
selfishness were subordinated, the modern civilization respected no such
hierarchy, often glorifying the lower passions instead. Tagore believed that
such fundamental reversal in the hierarchy of human values had a
deadening impact on human sensibilities and led to the loss of touch with
what truly made human beings human.
However, not the entire range of perceptions and responses to
colonialism is covered by this mode of engagement, i.e., within the form
and the terms set by the Western colonial discourse itself. A whole range of
responses fall outside it, primarily those connected to the subaltern groups
—peasants, workers, and the tribal communities. These groups were the
worst victims of colonialism and important actors in resistance to it,
including in the most widespread anti-colonial revolt of 1857. Since the
subaltern discourse is primarily characterized by the absence of literary
sources, historians have struggled to develop appropriate techniques of
recovering the subaltern ‘voice’. Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak,
and other Subaltern Studies historians made important breakthroughs in
historiography in this regard building on which scholars have taken the field
further. One of the methods pioneered by Guha is to read the colonial
official sources—‘the prose of counterinsurgency’—that record the
subaltern acts of resistance in their own narrative framing, i.e., ‘against the
grain’ or through a rigorous deconstruction of these sources to get as close
as possible to recovering the subaltern voice.
Similar reading techniques have been used by folklore historians insofar
as folklores, though important sources of the subaltern perception of
colonialism, were also collected primarily by colonial ethnographers and
language surveyors. What the historians of subaltern resistance and the
folklores are able to distil through their critical reading techniques is that
the colonial government was clearly placed among one of the main enemies
along with the with the other local exploiters—the landlords and the
moneylenders. In addition, the colonizers were also identified as the racial
‘other’: as in the expression ‘pale-faced invaders’ used for the British rulers
by the 1857 rebel farmers in North India. The 1857 rebels specifically
targeted the structures associated with the British rule—telegraphs, post
offices, and police stations. Several popular folklores represented the
British as manifestation of evil spirits. Instances of popular rumours about
the ‘evil’ intentions of the colonial government; for instance the spray of
DDT being interpreted as poisoning of the wells. Such instances of radical
‘othering’ of the foreign colonizers would eventually help in the emergence
of the category of ‘Indian people’, despite the internal distance and
differences with the educated elite. By the early decades of the twentieth
century, however, the subaltern masses of the people are successfully
mobilized in the anti-colonial struggle for national freedom, which was
primarily led by the educated elites.
81
COLONIAL FOREST LAWS AND THE FOREST-DWELLERS

Dhirendra Datt Dangwal

People living in rural areas were dependent on forests to meet their various
needs and they, by and large, enjoyed free access to forest resources until
the late nineteenth century. The colonial government started exercising
control over forests when timber emerged as an important resource. Teak of
the Western Ghats was being used by the British for shipbuilding for the
Royal Navy from the late eighteenth century. From the middle of the
nineteenth century, railway expansion required a large number of wooden
sleepers. The government brought forests under its control to ensure
uninterrupted supply of sleepers, though contended that control was
essential for conservation and scientific management of forests. Hence, the
first Forest Act was passed in 1865 and an amended version in 1878. These
acts significantly redefined and curtailed the customary rights enjoyed by
the people in forests.
Under the 1878 Act forests were classified as reserved, protected, and
village forests. Reserved forests mainly comprised of commercially viable
species and rural people were allowed very limited rights in them. In
protected forests there were restrictions on cutting of only certain tree
species; villagers could enjoy other rights in these forests. Progressively,
most protected forests were brought under the reserved category. The forest
department did not take any initiative to constitute village forests.
Scholars in the last three to four decades have extensively studied the
impact of forest legislations on the life of the people in Indian subcontinent.
The impact was most visible on the people living in the hilly and
mountainous regions and the tribal belt. Rural communities traditionally
exercised various rights in forests like collecting firewood, timber, wood for
agricultural implements, fodder, grass, leaves for manure, variety of roots
and fruits, honey, etc. Forests were used for hunting–gathering and shifting
cultivation as well. Grazing in forests was crucial for agriculturists, who
kept livestock, as well for pastoralists. Further, agricultural communities
living in hilly and mountainous regions got humus and rich soil from forests
regularly in their terraced fields, which sustained the productivity of their
cultivated land. Massive commercial felling and consequent degradation of
forest resulted in decline in the quality of these inputs.
Tribal communities had the most difficult time under the new forest
regime. These people mostly lived in forests, practising hunting–gathering,
shifting cultivation, and collecting various produces of forests. Forests were
closely connected to their cultural and religious practices as well. A large
number of tribal communities, living in various parts of India, practised
shifting cultivation, which was restricted or banned, as it was found
inconsistent with the objectives of commercial forestry by the forest
department. This seriously undermined the tribal community’s way of life.
The hunter–gatherers like Chenchus of Hyderabad, the Rajis of Kumaun,
and the Kadars of Cochin were not allowed to hunt leading to their further
marginalization. Artisanal tribe like the Agarias were not allowed to smelt
iron ore in forests due to the fear of forest fires. Many artisans found it
difficult to secure raw material or had to pay high prices for them. The
forest policy made slow inroads in Northeastern India, but the impact was
as severe as in the rest of the country.
Communities practising pastoralism were required to travel long
distances to use pastures, often in forests. Several restrictions were imposed
by the forest department on their mobility. Many were encouraged to
sedentarize and many tribes were declared ‘criminal tribes’, making it
difficult for them to live their traditional ways.
People opposed the curtailment or denial of their rights in forests. They
gave petitions to the government to restore their rights. But when the
government did not heed their appeals they often engaged in acts of
‘everyday resistance’. The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha was one of the first
organizations which publicly raised forest grievances of the peasants of the
Bombay Presidency in the late nineteenth century. Jotiba Phule also wrote
in 1881 about how communities were being affected by the forest acts. In
the absence of sympathetic consideration of their appeals by the
government, people chose the path of direct confrontation as well. People of
the present-day Uttarakhand launched an agitation which culminated in
1920–21, when people burnt a large number of government forests and
attacked forest officials. People demanded abolition of forest laws during
Gandhi’s visit to Cudappah in September 1921. During the civil
disobedience movement, the Central Provinces saw massive protests on
forest issues.
Tribal communities violently protested at regular intervals, against
forest and other grievances. The Gudem and Rampa hill tracts of present-
day Andhra Pradesh, inhabited by the Koya and Konda Dora, constantly
saw protests (called fituris) from the 1880s to 1920s. The Munda of
Chhotanagpur protested in the 1890s, culminating in the ulgulan (great
tumult) of Birsa Munda in 1899–1900. Many other tribes of present-day
Jharkhand protested in the 1920s and 1930s. Gonds and Kolam tribes of
Adilabad district of Hyderabad state violently protested in 1940. The Saoras
of the Ganjam Agency opposed ban on shifting cultivation. There was
hardly any tribal region where there were no protests, and this hostile
relation with the forest department continued after the end of colonial rule.
 PART VI

TOWARDS FEDERALISM—SOCIAL AND

POLITICAL MOVEMENTS
82
ADIVASI MOVEMENTS IN SANTAL AND MUNDA REGIONS

Vasundhara Jairath

The Chhotanagpur Plateau and Santhal Parganas that today make up the
state of Jharkhand have historically been home to a large number of Adivasi
communities including Santhals, Mundas, Hos, Bhumij, Uraon, Kharia, and
several others. However, beginning with the colonial period their numbers
have dwindled significantly in comparison to non-Adivasi communities.
Classified by the Indian state as Scheduled Tribes, they constitute about 26
per cent of the population of Jharkhand as per the latest Census of 2011 and
are amongst the most marginalized populations across the country as well
as in the region. Much of the historical work on this region focuses on the
story of loss, dispossession, and marginalization of Adivasi communities
alongside that of resistance and movements challenging the structures that
have led to their exploitation and oppression.
Thrust on the written word for the historian’s craft has meant that
histories of this region often begin with the colonial period owing to the
absence of written records of the preceding period. The bulk of archival
material, therefore, is found in colonial documents, records, reports, and
ethnological and anthropological works by colonial administrators,
missionaries, and anthropologists. For this reason, writings on Adivasi
communities have been shaped by colonial tropes of ‘primitivity’,
‘backwardness’, ‘wildness’, the ‘ecologically noble savage’, and other such
disparaging stereotypes that find its roots in colonial racial ideologies of
scales of civilization. The ‘tribal’ or ‘aboriginal’, both colonial
classificatory categories, found itself at the bottom of the civilizational
scale.
A shift in the framework from ‘tribe’ to ‘Adivasi’ and more recently to
‘indigeneity’ has brought about an important shift in how the region has
been studied. Principally, it saw a move away from the essentializing and
ahistorical tendency of colonial anthropology in its treatment of Adivasi
communities. In its place, historians pointed to the manner in which
identities and social relations, with other communities but also with land
and other natural resources, were constructed through history, neither
natural nor primordial but contingent on historical processes, political
struggles, and material conditions. Much of this work comes in the context
of a long tradition of Adivasi-led struggles in the region to defend their
rights over land, water, and forests on which they depend for their
sustenance. Within these movements, Adivasi assertion of identity and
cultural markers such as language and religion, their relationship to the land
and to the environment, and memorializing past struggles and leaders such
as Birsa Munda, brothers Sidhu and Kanhu, Tilka Majhi, and many others
have occupied an important place. It is in this context that much of the
historical as well as recent anthropological work has concerned itself with
studying the nature of relationship of Adivasis to land and the environment,
and its implications for identity assertion.
Historians and anthropologists alike have debated the appropriateness of
the terms used to address these communities. While the term ‘tribe’ is seen
to carry derogatory connotations of primitivity, collectives such as the
Indian Confederation of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples or Tribal Intellectual
Collective India indicate an appropriation of the administratively and
historically significant term by communities who self-identify as such.
However, we also see western, central, and eastern India scholars
increasingly use the term ‘Adivasi’ as the preferred term of self-
identification in this region. It was in fact in Jharkhand that the earliest
political articulation of an Adivasi identity as an umbrella term of several
ethnicities was seen with the formation of Chhotanagpur Unnati Samaj
(Chhotanagpur Improvement Society) in 1915. The more recent frame of
‘indigeneity’ has come in the wake of an increasing articulation of Adivasi
politics with a global indigenous politics and while some scholars challenge
its use as an anthropological and classificatory category, others argue for its
political relevance and an alignment of shared historical experiences and
contemporary context.
Scholarship on Adivasi communities in Jharkhand has been principally
occupied by debates about how to engage with an Adivasi political identity
—as a colonial invention or based in a precolonial difference, although
always mediated by its colonial representation. Further, are they to be
understood as an autonomous people with distinct systems of social,
economic, and political organization or as rural and marginalized
communities that strategically deploy a discourse of indigeneity in order to
safeguard their rights and interests? These debates come in the wake of the
heterogeneity of communities that fall under the umbrella term of Adivasi
or tribal. Despite this diversity, we observe the colonial period inaugurated
a long tradition of the systematic and systemic exploitation and oppression
of Adivasi communities in Jharkhand, as in other parts of India,
transforming them from a people who were largely autonomous and outside
of complex state systems to being forcibly integrated into the mainstream
colonial economy and polity at the bottom of the ladder.
Even as scholars recognize the profound impact the colonial regime had
over the lives and future trajectory of communities that came to identify as
Adivasis, they debate the validity of ‘Adivasi’ as an identity based on which
claims to land and resources can or should be made. The debate has
consequences particularly for the legitimacy of contemporary struggles of
Adivasi communities. In this context, scholars point to the constructed yet
real character of an Adivasi identity that has been built through the
dialectics of domination and resistance. Further, historians and
anthropologists have pointed to evidence of pre-colonial separation between
upper-caste Hindu and Muslim societies and Adivasi communities.
Sanskritic texts that refer to Adivasi communities with demeaning words as
das, dasyu, rakshasa, asura, and pulinda, among other terms, indicate a
hostile relationship between upper-caste Hindus and Adivasis. Similarly,
scholars point to the movement of Adivasi communities into the forested
hills of Chhotanagpur and Santhal Parganas as a consequence of avoiding
confrontation and subjugation by neighbouring states in order to maintain
their freedom and autonomy, indicating a separation that already existed.
Further, colonial officials often drew on upper-caste Brahminical sources to
build their understanding of society in the subcontinent, and this influenced
the shape of knowledge produced by the colonial regime significantly.
Colonization for Adivasi communities involved the systematic loss of
land, loss of sovereignty to the extent that their systems of rule were
supplanted by an alien system of governance through the forceful
integration into the colonial polity, their cultural and linguistic markers
where simultaneously reified but also accorded the status of ‘backward’ or
‘savage’, and their bodies were racialized, as ‘coolie’ labour for instance, in
order to aid the colonial project of exploitation of labour. Together this
transformed the relationship between upper-caste Hindu and Muslim
societies and Adivasis from one of fear and hostility that sustained Adivasi
autonomy to one of subjugation and marginalization. Several scholars have
written of tribal and Adivasi movements during the colonial period,
including the Chuar rebellions between 1769 and 1784, the revolt led by
Tilka Majhi from 1781 to 1784, the Chero revolts of 1800 and 1817, the
Tamar revolts between 1782 and 1820, the Kol rebellion of 1819–20, and
then again in 1831–32, the Ho rebellion of 1820–21, and then again in
1830, the Bhumij revolt of 1832–33, the Santal Hul of 1855–56, the
Kherwar movement of 1874–81, and Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan of 1899–1900.
Each of these rebellions can be located within the renewed conditions
inaugurated by the colonial regime. While they were anti-colonial
movements, they were equally positioned against the newly empowered
classes of upper-caste Hindu and Muslim landlords, moneylenders, lawyers,
and police officials who began to move into this region with the
establishment of the colonial state’s paraphernalia. These classes were then
the face of colonial rule in present-day Jharkhand. They wreaked havoc for
Adivasi communities and were often the targets of attack in the revolts and
rebellions of the colonial period, giving rise to the figure of the diku or
outsider–exploiter.
Postcolonial Jharkhand was marked by a continuation of colonial
relations of power. Marxist scholars have termed this as ‘internal
colonialism’ where the region continued to be dominated by dikus, and
racialized ideologies of labour continued to ensure the super exploitation of
Adivasi workers alongside a precarious agrarian structure that lent a central
role to the figure of the moneylender. Outrageously high usury rates led to a
continuation of the trend of Adivasi land alienation. Testament to the
exploitative conditions was the forcible paddy harvesting movement (dhan
katai andolan) in the early 1970s led by Shibhu Soren in Dhanbad district to
wrest back lands lost to moneylenders-cum-landlords due to unpayable
debt. In recounting a history of Jharkhand and the movement demanding a
separate state, which was formed only in 2000, scholars have pointed to the
importance of several smaller and larger movements across the state,
garnering different constituencies—Santhal and other Adivasi cultivators,
Kurmi farmers, Bihari and Adivasi mine workers, forest dependent
communities—that coalesced into the singular demand for autonomy.
Moving from a predominantly electoral arena, the movement for a separate
state took on a more militant turn by the 1970s and was brutally repressed
and crushed by the early 1990s. For a few years in the mid-seventies under
the banner of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, a radical alliance was forged
between many of these groups. However, a persistent cleavage between
Adivasi mobilization and non-Adivasis, especially Bihari migrant workers,
organized under leftist trade union politics led to the weakening of such a
broad-based alliance.
Meanwhile the advance of the newly independent and modernizing
Indian state for the Jharkhand region meant an onslaught of large projects of
national development. These projects that began right from the 1950s
onwards have taken large amounts of land from the people—predominantly
Adivasi lands—and have been an important contributor of Adivasi land
alienation in the postcolonial period. Scholars, writers, and political
thinkers of the region have used different frameworks to understand and
theorize the structural inequalities that mark this region. While some
Marxist thinkers have used the framework of ‘nationality struggles’ to
understand Adivasi assertion in the region, others view it as principally a
working-class struggle with an ethnic composition. Ecological historians
have read the region through the way in which its forests and landscapes
were constructed and how Adivasi communities have built a relationship
within them through time. Postcolonial scholarship has emphasized the role
of the colonial state in shaping identities and social relations in the region
that continue into the present day. Others critical of an over-emphasis on the
colonial state point to a dynamic and dialectical relationship between
domination and resistance, such that Adivasi communities’ appropriate
colonial knowledge forms through historical experience to speak back to
structures of power relations. Together, the debates have moved forward to
emphasize the agency of Adivasi communities in history, in fashioning their
identity, in telling their history, in being agents in history and in producing
knowledge about themselves, the state and systems of domination, and
about the nation at large. This is a desirable trend and as more work
emerges from the region and by scholars from within Adivasi communities,
the discussions are likely to raise new questions, new perspectives, and
throw open new challenges.
83
CASTE AND REFORMS: MODERN PERIOD

Rinku Lamba

Attempts to delineate the unfolding of a modern social imaginary in India

will be incomplete without focusing on issues of caste and reform.
Caste, as a system, separates people and places them in a birth-based
graded hierarchy. To be sure, premodern India witnessed a rich and
sustained commentary about caste. The Bhakti tradition, from Basava to
Kabir, Ravidas and Tukaram, included within its conceptual repertoire
bases for normative opposition to conventional hierarchies. The tradition is
marked by focused and robust attempts to persuade people, through poetry
and music, to review hierarchies associated with caste orders. And yet, it
must be noted, almost no Bhakti poet-saint appealed to earthly rulers to
transform the norms sustained by caste orders. Assuming that reform refers
to restructuring or transforming something, the move to address caste (and
gender) hierarchies via a turn to the law and state, then, is a crucial site for
locating shifts toward modernity in the Indian subcontinent. That is, the
ideas and practices related to the reform of caste can shed light on some
aspects of Indian modernity. These include (i) how the concern for the
liberty of individuals is mediated by attention to group-structured
inequalities; (ii) the feature that discourses about freedom and non-
hierarchy stem not only from non-religious doctrines such as liberalism but
also from conceptions of religion that are irreducible to conventional
religious doctrines (consider Gandhi’s understanding of religion, or
Ambedkar’s notion of a religion of principles); and (iii) the important place
of the state and law in removing the burdens of socially sanctioned
hierarchies.
In different, complex, and even conflicting ways, modern Indian
thinkers ranging from Jotiba Phule, Pandita Ramabai, and M. G. Ranade to
Rabindranath Tagore and B. R. Ambedkar endorsed the political choice in
favour of a law-governed order to address injustices perpetuated by caste
hierarchies. Some of them recalled, construed, translated, or rejected
elements of the persuasion-oriented Bhakti tradition to power their political
visions. For many of the reformers, the institution of ‘right relations’
(Roderigues, 2002) among persons entailed prioritizing the elimination of
injustice over the fulfilment of loyalty to other ‘national’ causes. For
Ambedkar, in fact, ‘Political tyranny is nothing compared to social tyranny,
and a reformer who defies society is a much more courageous man than a
politician who defies government’ (Ibid).
M. K. Gandhi was less interested in the legal apparatuses of the state as
suitable instrumentalities to rectify caste injustice. His faith lay in what can
be called the ‘law of love,’ whereas Ambedkar emphasized reliance on the
force of man-made law to annihilate caste. Yet, it may be better to approach
the insights in their respective visions of social change in less adversarial
ways, and D. R. Nagaraj gestures nicely toward the possibilities in that
reconciliatory direction. But why might it be better to approach their
insights in convergent ways? Because, like many liberal democratic
jurisdictions, India is still grappling with the problems of unequal social
power, and the jury is still not out on whether to settle on love or law for
addressing systems that separate persons from one another—something that
appealed neither to Gandhi nor to Ambedkar. It is becoming increasingly
evident that the turn to law alone may not be a sufficient bulwark against
caste-related injustices. Perhaps that is why Ambedkar paid attention to the
issue of religious conversion and even saw it as required to pursue the
notion of democracy as a ‘mode of associated living’ that is unimaginable
without an important place for persuasion (Ibid).
The abiding importance of a legal and constitutional framework, with
provisions like Article 17 of the Indian Constitution, is indisputable. And it
is also important to acknowledge that the workings of competitive
democratic politics have transformed caste in the electoral domain, from
being primarily a vertical arrangement groups to one that has assumed a
more horizontal expression (Bhargava, 2000; Mehta, 2003). Further, there
can be no denying that access to political power and representation has
augmented the self-respect of Dalits—‘there is a sense in which they can
being to call the state their own’ (Mehta, 2003). And it may well be that
these important goods themselves push in the direction of keeping caste-
based identification alive, giving new force to necessity-based reasons to
retain caste. And it may also explain Mehta’s observation that since
independence, India has witnessed not anti-caste but ‘anti-upper-caste’
movements (Ibid).
Consequently, transformation via politics has been limited; ‘It is a
politics of positional change not structural reform.’ More fundamentally, he
points out, there may be ‘limits to what the state can achieve by way of
creating new opportunity for Dalits and other marginalized groups.’
According to Mehta, marginalized groups will be in a position for more
robust social advancement when ‘they acquire the capacities to navigate a
market economy successfully’ (ibid). The state’s ability to distribute power
is limited, and Dalit groups which have gained some access to power ‘are
often keener on preserving the privileges of their sub-caste vis-à-vis others
than in advancing general welfare’ (ibid). The ‘division of labourers’ that
Ambedkar associated with caste seems unabated, and caste continues to
function as a ‘graded system of sovereignties,’ even if the social
composition of groups that oppress Dalits in contemporary times stands
altered (Roderigues, 2002).
But expressions of the will to dominate through an imposition of
violence on vulnerable groups continue to impede civility across and within
groups in Indian society. And the continuation of endogamy
(notwithstanding the phenomenon of migration for marriage in states like
Haryana) too blocks a vital avenue for change. Legal and institutional
efforts since independence to address caste-based marginalization, through
reservation in forums of political representation, as well as in state-sector
jobs and in educational institutions, have produced new perceptions of
victimhood in the polity. Affirmative action schemes for vulnerable groups
retain their normative relevance but have become sites for severe political
contestation. And this is producing separationist adversarial social rivalries
among citizens.
To be sure, public schemes to address historical injustice must not be
given up. But, recalling Judith Shklar, it may be wise to note that addressing
public injustice and acknowledging the ‘outrage of victims’ must not
translate into a stance that victims ‘are always right when they perceive
injustice. We often blame ourselves and each other for no good reason. We
scapegoat, we accuse wildly, we feel guilty for acts we never performed, we
blame anyone who seems more fortunate than ourselves…. To cast blame
may offer some much needed relief, but it is unjust, though hardly
blameworthy’ (Shklar, 1990). The point here, I think, is to pay attention to
the moral psychology of guilt, victimhood, blaming (self or others), that can
attach to perceptions of injustice and to schemes for remedying them. The
task is to somehow strive for a public culture that can address injustices
without causing a spill over in the directions of blame and guilt, for these
may sharpen unhelpful adversarial stances and, regrettably, make a politics
centred on love appear even more remote.
India is still a caste-ridden society, and older forms of separation are
getting re-entrenched by newer versions of numbing and polarizing
ideologies. Fortunately, social reform is ongoing process, even if a slow and
chequered one. It may help to conclude by returning to D. R. Nagaraj. He
presciently underscores an already existent value-based commonality in the
approaches to caste in the perspectives of Gandhi and Ambedkar; both
perceived the Dalit and caste question as ‘a problem of value’ (Nagaraj,
2014). Nagaraj traces the ‘militant history’ of viewing phenomena like
‘untouchability as a problem equally related to both Dalit and caste Hindu
societies’ requiring changes in ‘the value systems of both these societies’ as
one that goes back ‘several centuries begging with the Bhakti movement’
(Ibid). But most importantly, Nagaraj highlights the political desirability of
combining Ambedkarite activism with a Gandhian militantism to enable
change through a process that insists on ‘clinging to the other (Ibid),
thereby seeking to change the other.’ Without this, a fundamental ‘basic
change’ in the orientations that sustain caste cannot occur (Ibid). And I
think Gopal Guru would agree somewhat with the spirit of Nagaraj’s
interventions because Guru too is concerned about the ‘lack of proximity’
that attaches to the ‘social tension between the touchable and the
untouchables’ (Gopal Guru, 2008). Things have changed drastically since
the time of Gandhi and Ambedkar. Their reflections on social reform, taken
together, might yet contain conceptual resources for addressing the
fundamental problem of separation and disconnection within a political
community that the system of caste perpetuates.
84
B. R. AMBEDKAR AND THE MAKING OF MODERN INDIA

Rahul Kosambi

While discussing the formation of modern India, it becomes inevitable for

us to discuss the contribution of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. His contributions
in social, economic, religio-cultural, political, and theoretic-academic
spheres can be considered unique. Even considering his education; his
desire for higher education and his powerful use of the English language for
expression visibly speak of his commitment to modern values. His
persistence to get higher education seems revolutionary against the
backdrop of a traditional caste society where Dalit castes are barred from
getting any education, let alone a modern one. The traditional attire of other
leaders of the freedom movement of the time and Babasaheb’s deliberate
three-piece suits testify to his insistence on looking modern rather than
being Western. He saw it as a modern alternative to the traditional
stereotypes typifying of high and low-caste statuses about wearing clothes.
On the occasion of the Mahad Satyagraha, the speech delivered to the
satyagrahis, mainly women, on the second day after the burning of
Manusmriti, should be re-read while situating it in the historical context to
understand his philosophy of attire. In India, which had a caste-based social
system, when the British gradually started providing a minuscule opening to
very selective Indians who fulfilled certain conditions, to be part of
functioning of the government new paradigms and demands regarding
future democratic social structures started to be strongly expressed by
different social groups.
First of all, the discussion revolved around the religious identities of
Hindus and Muslims, and it was from this that the two-nation theory took
momentum. As the British also saw its advantage for their political stability,
they also legitimized this theory in different ways (Chandra, et al., 1988).
But this religious discourse did not reflect the emancipatory aspirations of
the largest masses of the population, the Dalits, victims of the
multidimensional exploitation of the caste system. Even Gandhi considered
untouchability as a stain/blot on Indian society (Swaminathan, 1966).
But it was only Ambedkar who brought the issue of untouchability and
exploitation of the untouchables to the centre of the popular discourse on
minorities in the freedom struggle, which was otherwise dominated by
Hindu–Muslim religiosity and achieving ‘self-rule’ as the ultimate political
aim and not necessarily in an all-representative democracy. Even though
Gandhi had consciously touched the issue of untouchability, due to the
aggressive insistence of Babasaheb, he considered this issue as important
and tried to solve this issue through actual activities. Thus, by giving
centrality to the issue of untouchability, Ambedkar took the discussion of
minorities beyond religion, gave it a caste dimension, and established a new
identity of ‘Dalit’ in the political arena. A new emancipatory vitality was
created in the Dalits. Such a single-handed igniting of such a large mass of
people who had been the inhuman victims of the caste system for five
thousand years was nothing short of a revolution.
Ambedkar waged a long political struggle for the human rights of
Dalits. For this, he alone continued to struggle at the triple levels of
theoretical formulation, social movement, and electoral politics. He founded
the Independent Labour Party in August 1936. Later he dissolved the same
and started the All India Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF) and Dalit
Federation in Maharashtra in 1942. And in 1956 he was planning to start
the Republican Party of India (RPI). But because of his sad demise his
followers later transformed the SCF to RPI in 1957.
When any country adopts a modern democratic model, the issues
regarding defining nation, nationalism, citizenship, and the rights and duties
that come with it have to be discussed and clarified. Babasaheb highlighted
the issue of Dalits and contributed to the discussion of all the above issues
by adding a new dimension to it. He has made a radical contribution to the
making of modern India by initiating a scholarly discussion of the historical
contribution of Dalits in the making of India as country, their share in its
natural and sociocultural resources, their rights and duties as citizens of a
democratic self-government, and the existential necessity of the Dalit
community in establishing India as a democratic nation-state. A discussion
of India’s development is a discussion of its poverty eradication. And the
discussion of poverty in India goes hand in hand with the discussion of the
backwardness of Dalits and Adivasis. That is, the development of the
country of India becomes impossible without the real all-round progress of
Dalits and Adivasis. That is why Babasaheb consistently emphasized that
the discussion on the upliftment of Dalits and Adivasis is the real discussion
in the development of modern Indian society.
Caste system is the biggest obstacle in India’s modernization.
Ambedkar concluded that each caste is a separate nation. And are therefore
detrimental to the formation of a united nation. They also hinder the
creative and multidimensional development of humans. Since there is a
specific traditional occupation associated with each caste and it is
obligatory for the next generation to pursue the same occupation, the
sprouts of innovation do not burst. The caste system, because of its inherent
values, is a threat to democracy based on the triple values of modernity—
liberty, equality, and fraternity.
But Babasaheb was the first ever to discuss the caste system as a
‘problem’ and that too at a serious theoretical level. Earlier the British had
tried to understand the caste system from different perspectives and
objectives—orientalist, missionary, and administrative. Indian scholars also
gave this colonial understanding of discourse of caste as a high-caste
reaction. But Babasaheb, even in the year 1915 in Columbia University,
read his seminal paper in Dr A. A. Goldenweizer’s seminar, ‘Castes in
India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’, and initiated a
discussion on caste as a ‘problem’ from the ‘perspective from below’ from
the standpoint of a person who suffered the brunt of actual untouchability
(Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol. I). This discussion led
to what we might call the declaration or manifesto of the Indian revolution,
Annihilation of Caste. His seminal books, The Shudras: Who They Were
and How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna of the Indo-Aryan Society
(1946) and The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became
Untouchables? (1948), can also be seen as his unique theoretical
contribution to the understanding of caste system.
Without education it would be difficult to imagine any modern country
striving to disseminate scientific temperament. It has already been
mentioned in the beginning that Babasaheb’s passion for education at a
personal level was unprecedented considering the historical restrictions and
plight of Dalit castes.
As the representation of Dalits in higher education was negligible
during his time, he insisted on reservation in higher education and later
when he was the labour minister in the viceroy’s cabinet, he introduced
quota system in reservation in education and jobs (Bhole, 2006).
Apart from that Ambedkar established ‘Siddharth’ College in Mumbai
and ‘Milind’ College in Aurangabad to propagate higher education among
Dalits. Taking time out from his hectic political engagements, he built these
colleges with the best faculty.
In the construction of a modern democratic India, religious identities
like Hindu–Muslim started to be locked in a power struggle for influence in
independent India. The British officially viewed India as a country of
religious communities. Therefore, Ambedkar tried hard to get a separate
minority status for the untouchable Dalit community going beyond the
monolithic identity of Hindus. Not only as a political necessity, but he
believed that we should give this community a different religion than
Hinduism, to claim the minority status as a separate religious community,
and this very new religion which would give this different community a
morality, started to strengthen in his political plans since 1935. He also said
that ‘Even if I am born as a Hindu, I will not die as a Hindu’ in a conference
at Yeola, Nashik in October 1935. After studying many religions, he
embraced Buddhism in October 1956 in Nagpur along with millions of
followers.
Before that he wrote the book Buddha and His Dhamma (1954) and is
said to have started a navayana (new wheel of Buddhism). He discussed at
length the philosophical analysis of traditional religion and this new
dhamma elsewhere. Due to illiteracy, superstition, and poverty, even in
modern India, Dalits can become degressive. Ambedkar hoped that this new
Buddha dhamma would bring about the scientific enlightenment they
needed to progress with others in the social and economic spheres.
Buddhism does not support the caste system and Ambedkar believed it will
help in promoting equality and brotherhood among Dalits. Furthermore,
Ambedkar was sure that the values of democracy and their reflection in
social interaction and the new Buddhism would complement each other and
ultimately be very useful in building a modern democratic India. While
reflecting on why he adopted indigenous Buddhism instead of any other
non-Indian religion, it has been argued that it was to maintain unity and not
create any factions in Indian society (Mahanirvan, special issue).
Some modern institutions and initiatives which he started as member in
the Bombay Provincial Legislature and later as labour minister in the
viceroy’s legislature laid the foundations of India as a modern country.
Finally, his contribution as chairman of the Constitution Drafting
Committee can be said to be extraordinary. His aim of giving democracy a
socialist foundation was more or less successful. He insisted that the
physiognomy of modern Indian democracy should be socialist. He had
already stated that capitalism and Brahminism are the biggest threat to
Indian democracy and development. He identified Shethjiism and Bhatjiism
as the main enemies of Dalits, workers, and tribals. His insistence on
constitutional morality in the context of Indian democracy can be said to be
a testimony of his vision. Parliamentary democracy and the federal system
kept Indian democracy entrenched at the grassroots level. At the same time,
the development of Indian democracy is more visible in view of the
political crisis of other independent countries towards dictatorship or
military rule in the later period.
Acknowledging that journalism is a very important factor in the fabric
of modern society, Babasaheb started the fortnightly Mooknayak in 1920. It
had to be closed when he went abroad for higher education. Later in 1927
he started the paper Bahishkrit Bharat with the financial help of Chhatrapati
Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur. After that he bought Bharat Bhushan Printing
Press with the help of people’s contribution and started the newspaper Janta
in 1930. And then in February 1956, he renamed the same newspaper
Prabuddha Bharat.
Finally, without discussing Babasaheb’s contribution to the upliftment
of women, his contribution to the building of modern India will remain
incomplete. In his first theoretical article, ‘Castes in India…’ mentioned
above, he argued that ‘women are the gateway to the caste system’. He
notes that the patriarchal caste system survives through control over
women’s sexuality. The Hindu Code Bill was introduced in Parliament to
free women of all castes and religions in India and from their oppressive
customs and traditions. But unfortunately, it could not be converted into
law. And on the same issue he resigned as law minister in September 1951.
We can still expand the discussion of these direct and numerous indirect
contributions of Babasaheb Ambedkar in the building of modern India. But
from the above analysis we get a glimpse of his unique and invaluable
contribution.
85
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI

Tridip Suhrud

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) was born in Porbandar, a

coastal town, in a devout Vaishnava family with eclectic religious beliefs
and hereditary expertise in managing the politics of feudal principalities as
their administrators. He would recall and record later, sometimes with
‘double’ shame, his adolescence, his need to submit to convention, and his
urge to transgress. During his adolescence he married Kastur (1869–1944),
his youthful passion for her was to gradually transform in deep and abiding
partnership where he would come to admit that her ‘capability, equipoise,
generosity, fortitude, and steadfastness’ astonished him.
Youthful ennui and desire to find a meaningful place in the perceptibly
changing order brought on by the colonial encounter led him to London
(1888) and the Inner Temple from where he was called to the bar (1891).
During these three years he acquired, apart from a deep understanding of
the structures of law and jurisprudence, an ethical conviction about
vegetarianism and his religious sensibilities widened by engaged study of
Christian theology and his contact with the Theosophical Society. These
years were significant also for his sense of who he was as a person. His
capacity to keep true to a vow—in fact three that he had given to his mother
before sailing—became central to his life’s motivations.
His long stay in South Africa from 1892 to 1915 saw him being
transformed from a hesitant ‘coolie barrister’ into a deep thinker, a
charismatic leader of communities and peoples, and innovator of the
political realms. He both experienced and became viscerally aware of the
injustice and inhumanity of racial discrimination and of the pernicious
system of extraction-bonded human labour in form of the system known as
girmit. His response was unique, so unprecedented that it had no name.
Satyagraha came to him in a public meeting called to protest unjust laws
(1906). Satyagraha as a mode of thought and practice required abiding faith
in Truth as God, in the transformative possibility of a dialogue, and in the
belief that self-suffering was morally superior to inflicting pain on others. It
made not only the relationship between means and ends inviolable but
emphasized on the purity of both and that of the satyagrahi. Gandhi’s life
was henceforth a search for purity, including though not only through the
acts of fasting and through the observation of brahmacharya. South Africa
afforded him the possibility to experiment with and experience community
life, a community of co-practitioners, who through their personal strivings
gave meaning to the community. Gandhi was to claim later that the ashram
was his most significant contribution, one that he would like to be judged
by. The ashramic existence was based on the imperative of bodily labour. It
was in South Africa that Gandhi learnt to think with his hands. His editorial
and publishing work at the Indian Opinion made Gandhi a significant
innovator in the emerging realm of print cultures in South Africa, the Asia-
Pacific, and the Indian subcontinent; Navajivan, Young India, and the
Harijan papers cultivated public opinion and helped forge the idea of being
one people. Hind Swaraj (1910) is remembered as a text that shook the
foundations of the empire, not because it advocated the overthrow of the
empire, but it seditiously questioned the very foundations of modern
civilization with its search for meaning and fulfilment in and through
objects that lay outside the human person. It evoked swaraj both as self-rule
and rule over the self as a civilizational pursuit worthy of India.
By 1915 when he came to inhabit India, Gandhi was already a person
who had begun to capture the attention of leaders of Indian society and
polity. It was through his incessant travels, untiring letter writing, and his
work with the peasants of Champaran (1917), Kheda (1918), and the mill-
hands of Ahmedabad (1918) that Gandhi came to be lodged in the
consciousness of Indian people, dressed as one of them. His call of
noncooperation with evil and his call for Hindu–Muslim amity as necessary
condition for obtaining swaraj would soon be seen as seditious and grant
him a lodgement in the prison or temple as he had come to recognize it as.
Before that he was to show rare political morality by withdrawing the Non-
cooperation Movement at the instance of violence in Chauri Chaura (1922).
His search for collective non-violence would be a defining aspect of his
political life.
In 1930 Gandhi would walk to Dandi and freedom in a rare act of
political mobilization and defiant non-violence. He would soon sail into the
heart of Europe (1932) to warn it of the perils of violence, of its reliance
upon the machinery of war. He also wished to send a message that India had
understood that commerce was the fulcrum of colonialism and that she
would assert her freedom through swadeshi, both in products and in ideas.
The decade of 1930s was spent in a search to atone for the ‘sin’ of
untouchability. He longed to be a scavenger and a sandal maker, a spinner, a
weaver, and a farmer. He needed to be reminded by Dr Babasaheb
Ambedkar (1891–1956) that untouchability was not a matter of choice and
that Gandhi’s quest of atonement was both futile and inauthentic. And
despite this his relentless need for atonement continued, making
untouchability a sin for many Indians similarly placed in the caste hierarchy
as him.
The Quit India Movement (1942) was his call for effervescence of
freedom amid a devastating war. As independence and inevitability of the
division of the country loomed Gandhi made one last attempt (1946–1948)
to lead people away from an orgy of retaliatory violence that we as people
had turned to. His work in riot-ravaged Noakhali, Calcutta, Bihar, and
finally Delhi provided a moral compass to the nascent Indian state and to
the society and civilization. It taught us the need and the salience of moral
action, the imperative for a civilization to choose virtue as the only true and
good path.
This action alone was sufficient to give him a permanent place in the
conscience of the Indian people, be a Mahatma. Why did we assassinate
him then?
Gandhi had sought to alert Indian civilization to the pathologies of both
the Indic world and modern world. He worked tirelessly to establish the fact
of poverty as an act of violence, asked us to be trustees of wealth and the
earth and not have a rapacious relationship with fellow humans and nature,
insisted that food eaten without performance of bodily labour was stolen
food; sought to establish like none before him the imperative of non-
violence as norm governing not only private life but public sphere, spoke of
the need for atonement of our collective sin of untouchability and in an act
without precedent sought to create a modern people who were united by an
ethical core while retaining their forms of belief and worship. He was the
exemplar of seva, in its root sense of saha eva, ‘together with’, and his
brahamcharya was for him conduct that leads one to Truth. His
autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth and his many public
and private acts of fasting were a testament to his need and ability to hear
the voice of anataryami, the dweller within, and submit to that voice. He
introduced the salience of the spiritual in the realm of the political. He
innovated the form of congregational prayer about all forms of belief and
worship in a way that it transcended all sectarian divisions. His ability to
read religious texts—the Gita, the Bible, and the Quran a way that gave
primacy to the voice of conscience opened ancient orthodoxies to new
authority. His presence in our midst was and continues to be a reminder of
civilizational possibilities and potentialities that lie latent within us.
His was an attempt to introduce Indian society and polity to sudhar, the
good and the righteous path. We needed to assassinate him for all these
reasons but principally as someone who sought to reform the Indian
civilization.
86
AMBEDKAR AND GANDHI VISIONS FOR MODERN INDIA

Nishikant Kolge

Ambedkar’s experiences of growing up as a member of the Mahar

community—as an untouchable—and Gandhi’s experiences of growing up
as a member of an upper-caste community of India—as a colonized subject
—played a formative role in the fashioning of their respective perspectives.
The two therefore necessarily saw the world differently, had their own
distinct vocations, and dharma. Therefore, it is only fair to assume that they
have disagreements. Their differences and disagreements exhibit a clear and
consistent pattern, with Ambedkar pressing for more room for modernity,
and for a less traditionalist view, and Gandhi emphasizing on a traditional
way of life, and for a less modernization. Since their differences sprang
from their different life experiences and philosophy of life, it would be
useful to explore how they have played out in determining their vision for
modern India.
The vision of India that Ambedkar put forward was an all-
encompassing vision, with economics, social life, and religious morality
linked together with the modern themes of liberty, equality, and fraternity
founded in the ancient Indian tradition of Buddhism. In Ambedkar’s
modern India, key industries would be owned by the state and agricultural
land would also be nationalized and run as collective farms. In such a
nation, state ownership would be essential for rapid industrialization and
rapid economic growth and the latter in turn could solve the problem of
poverty. In Ambedkar’s vision of India there would be not just the
democratic government, but society would also be democratic. Therefore,
any discrimination based on religion, caste, and/or gender would be
unacceptable and there would be constitutional provisions for the protection
of the weaker sections of the society from such practices. Social life would
be based on the principle that everyone should be treated with equality and
respect. Thus, everyone should have the same possibilities/opportunities to
actualize their potential. Ambedkar also envisaged that there would be unity
and free flowing/unhindered interactions among different social groups. In
his vision of modern India, he also envisioned that women will have an
equal status and therefore share equal power in designing public policies
and thereby will have more prominent role, share, and access in deciding
social and political life of the country. In Ambedkar’s vision of modern
India, Adivasis will be able to preserve their deistic culture and will have
enough presence in every domain of national life.
In the India of Ambedkar’s vision democratic form of government
would be democratic in the true sense. It means that it will not be the rule of
majority where minority interests are often not represented. For Ambedkar,
like Albert Camus, democracy is not the law of the majority, but the
protection of the minority. Therefore, in modern India, minority rights
would be sufficiently protected. Buddhism will have an important role to
play in the modern India of Ambedkar’s vision. Buddhism would play a
critical role in enhancing the moral fabric and ethical citizenship and will
also help in developing the scientific temper of citizens. Religion is also
important in Ambedkar’s scheme as he believed that religion gives hope to
human beings in a way that Marxist dogma cannot, and without this hope,
progress in matters important for human beings is likely to fail. In brief,
Ambedkar’s modern India will be based on the universal and progressive
democratic ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and it will be religion
and the law of the state which would help sustain equality and liberty and
the maintenance of fraternity in the country.
Decentralized and self-sufficient villages are the centre of Gandhi’s
vision of modern India. Gandhi maintains a suspicious attitude towards the
growth of a highly centralized and bureaucratic modern state in India which
he believed was a necessary product of modern civilization. Hence, he
visualized a decentralized administration of the state where each village
must have equal and full autonomy. Gandhi also dreamt of self-sufficient
village economies where villages are fully independent economic units. He
dreamt of an economic system which is based on the revival of rural
industries that use locally available raw materials and local technology. He
believed that such a local economic system will create enough job
opportunities to support the entire village. In the India of Gandhi’s dream,
people of different religions, castes, sex, and different economic
backgrounds live together in society with love, harmony, and peace. There
will be no conflict among Hindus, Muslims, and other religious
communities. All communities will live in perfect harmony. In every aspect
of public life, no Hindu would be permitted to deprive other Hindus of their
public rights on grounds of caste and untouchability. Women will play a
complementary role in the society and they will scale the highest peaks of
life in the female domain. In the India of Gandhi’s dream, no one will be
able to take Adivasis’ land from them and there will be no displacement of
Adivasis in the name of development.
Gandhi dreamt of an India where people will resolve their conflict
peacefully through discussion and by addressing each other’s concerns and
without resorting to any form of violence. Gandhi envisaged an India where
everyone will be able to receive basic education in craft, health, and
hygiene. In Gandhi’s modern India there would be no business of
intoxicating drugs and drinks, etc. In such a modern India nobody will be
allowed to be idle or to wallow in luxury. Everyone will have to do manual
labour and everyone will have to master in the art of sanitation. In brief, the
India of Gandhi’s dream is a union of self-contained village republics where
every village will have to be capable of managing its own affairs.
87
EMERGENCE OF THE IDEA OF FREEDOM (1900–1947)

Mohinder Singh

The idea of freedom was rigorously thought in every Indian tradition—

orthodox Vedic and heterodox Jaina, Buddhist and Ajivikas—either in the
theological framework of liberation (mukti) or in the philosophical debates
around free will versus causal determination. The modern conceptualization
of freedom that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was in
significant ways different. While the older theological idea continued to
exist in both elite and popular forms of theological and philosophical
engagements, the historical context for the modern conceptualization of the
idea of freedom was provided by the global interactions of ideas opened by
colonialism. The interaction had momentous historical consequences, the
most prominent being the emergence of India as a modern nation-state,
itself a product of a mass political movement, often referred to simply as
‘freedom movement’. One could note here that the very idea that freedom
could be a predicate of a collective subject ‘We, the people/nation’ was
itself a conceptualization of collective freedom in the global context of the
emergent collective singular entities like the nation and the people; concepts
with overlapping yet conceptually distinct contours. In the purely negative
sense as freedom from, this movement collectively imagined freedom as
political independence from colonial regime. Yet, at the same time, during
this movement, freedom was also thought in positive terms—‘freedom to be
and do what?’—both as a collective and as individual members of this
collective. These questions emerged as crucial in the modern Indian
political discourse of freedom.
The intellectuals, social reformers, and politicians connected to the
socio-religious reforms and political movements—from different regions
and religious traditions—critically engaged with the important thinkers of
the modern West—namely Herbert Spencer, Stuart Mill, Jean Jacques
Rousseau, and Karl Marx—and modern political ideologies like liberalism,
conservatism, and socialism. At the same time, they also creatively and
critically engaged with the indigenous traditions—with Vedanta, and with
Buddhist and Islamic texts. These intellectual engagements—the works of
Rammohun Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Narayan Guru, M.
K. Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, Dr B. R. Ambedkar,
and others—proved to be extremely significant for the modern Indian
contributions not only to the concept of freedom but also several other
important political concepts such as equality, social justice, nation, and
community. However, these intellectual engagements took place in the
context of the struggles for freedoms at the ground level. Some of the
important steps were already taken in the nineteenth century. Beginning
with Rammohun Roy, the defence of liberal freedoms—of press, of
associations, of religious conscience—became an important part of debates
in the elite public sphere. The nineteenth century social reform movements
advanced the cause of individual freedom and gender justice by taking up
the cause of restructuring the institution of the family. Some of these
agendas were continued in the twentieth century and the new ones added.
The demand for self-government (swaraj) through representation in
government was vastly expanded, culminating in the demand for complete
independence (poorna swaraj) by the Indian National Congress in 1929.
By the early decades of the twentieth century, freedom emerged as one
of the key concepts in Indian political discourse expressed in both English
and Indian language terms such as independence, self-rule, swaraj,
swadheenata, swatantrata, mukti, azadi, and other such terms. At the same
time, like all important discursive concepts, freedom was also a fiercely
contested concept across the political spectrum. However, the distinctive
Indian contribution to the concept of freedom can arguably be located in the
conceptual term swaraj; a semantically rich term that primarily referred to
freedom as self-rule, in turn referring simultaneously to both collective and
individual subjects of self-rule. The term was prevalent in the Indian
political discourse before the publication of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj in 1909,
wherein it primarily referred to self-government within the framework of
the British empire. In the Hind Swaraj, the question of swaraj is posed
beyond mere political independence towards deeper and more positive
conceptualization of the meaning of freedom both at the individual and the
collective level.
 Several important debates on the meaning of freedom in the Indian
political discourse in subsequent decades revolved around some of the
questions raised in this text. Like in other parts of the world during this
period, the modern concept of freedom in India was interpreted in close
association with the concept of equality. Thus, addressing the glaring
inequalities of Indian society became an important component of the
twentieth century Indian political discourse. The question of caste was
brought into the social question as its essential component for the
substantial realization of freedom. Under the influence of Gandhi the
Congress did include the campaign against untouchability as part of its
programme. However, in this regard, it was Dr Ambedkar’s efforts that
sought to push the caste question to the centre of the political discourse.
Ambedkar critiqued the hitherto prevalent social reform discourse for its
narrow focus on the institution of family and for its exclusion of the caste
question from the social reform agenda. Another important addition to the
cause of substantive freedom was the importance of economic
independence and prosperity beginning with the discourse of swadeshi and
continuing in debates around the economic models of development and the
uses of technology for economic prosperity. Jawaharlal Nehru, Ambedkar,
the socialists, and the Gandhians made important contributions in these
debates.
Most of these agendas found formal expression in the new Constitution
in the framework of the fundamental rights after rounds of intensive debate
in the Constituent Assembly (1946–49). However, some of the astute
participant observers of Indian politics, like Dr Ambedkar, on the eve of
promulgation of the new Constitution, thought of the work of freedom in
India—reflected in the achievement of political democracy—as only
partially achieved. The foremost task to be accomplished in independent
India was the realization of freedoms at the social level, if these freedoms
were not to remain trapped in the rarefied elite legal and political realms.
88
THE FREEDOM STRUGGLE: THE EARLY PHASE

Vinay Lal

The conventional history of the freedom struggle in India generally

commences either with the rebellion of 1857–58 and sometimes with the
founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Neither account is
wholly satisfactory to some historians: if some would like to push the
narrative back to the early nineteenth century, there is perhaps equally good
cause to argue that not until the 1890s did Indians begin to initiate anti-
colonial activity. Whatever the origins of the freedom struggle, what
conception of ‘freedom’ did political activists have? If they were attempting
to free themselves of the yoke of colonial oppression, what conception of
the ‘nation’ did they seek to put into place? If it is perhaps true that anti-
colonial movements all over the world are rooted in the fact that people are
averse to being ruled by foreigners, can one say that the struggle for self-
determination in India was likewise animated by the desire to expel the
foreigner (firangi)? But is the foreigner always unequivocally marked as
such?
The Indian rebellion of 1857–58, known to several generations as the
Sepoy Mutiny, was famously described by the ideologue Vinayak Damodar
Savarkar as ‘the First War of Indian Independence’. Savarkar commenced
his history with the grievances of the peshwa, Nana Sahib, and the rani of
Jhansi, Lakshmi Bai, to suggest that the great rebellion was rooted in the
British failure to recognize the legitimacy of Indian rulers and their
aspirations. He overlooked the earlier history in the nineteenth century—
beginning with the 1806 Vellore Mutiny, a significant and large-scale
uprising of sepoys of the Madras army of the East India Company—of
jacqueries, peasant revolts, hools, and other palpable demonstrations of
rebellion. Many such uprisings and disturbances were prompted by what
peasants perceived as exorbitant revenue demands from the East India
Company and zamindars alike, the monopolistic activities of grain dealers,
the usurious rates of interest charged by moneylenders, the anxieties
generated by missionary activity, and the depressed state of the economy
that would induce over a million Indians to leave the country as indentured
laborers in the nineteenth century. Agrarian distress was acute; before there
was the rebellion of 1857–58, there was the Santhal Revolt of 1855–56,
directed as much at the East India Company as at oppressive zamindars and
sahukars.
Nevertheless, in characterizing the 1857–58 as the ‘First Indian War of
Independence’, Savarkar sought to tilt the balance in favour of viewing it as
primarily anti-colonial in nature, and though even the Hindu nationalist
historian R. C. Majumdar would many decades later bitingly remark that
none of the terms in Savarkar’s designation had any merit, it is fair to say
that Savarkar’s interpretation has largely triumphed. Only a few sites—
Delhi, Lucknow, Meerut, Kanpur [Cawnpore], perhaps Jhansi—are
remembered at all, and the tremors were, at least in respect of military
engagement, not even remotely experienced in the Deccan. Many Indians
even fought alongside the British to suppress the rebellion. On the other
hand, there was, as happens often in war, brutality on both sides, and, taking
place as it did on the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Plassey, which
is conventionally marked as the moment that inaugurated India’s
subservience to the Company and later the British crown, the rebellion
stoked many rumours on the end of British rule and millenarian fervour was
at its height.
The rebellion had started with a revolt of the sepoys on 10 May 1857 in
Meerut, and Delhi was soon taken by the rebels; but a sustained assault by
Company troops, aided by reinforcements of troops from Britain, in
September led to the recapture of Delhi by the British. The titular king of
Delhi, otherwise known as the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was
put on trial on charges of sedition and treason, found guilty, and exiled to
Rangoon. Among the most notable leaders of the rebellion, Tatya Tope held
out long after the rebellion had been decisively crushed and was hung at the
gallows in April 1859. The peshwa, Nana Saheb, eluded capture for many
years. In 1874, the British illustrated news magazine, The Graphic, reported
that a man produced in chains was ‘the alleged Nana Saheb’, but no
decisive conclusion can be drawn about how he met his end. Perhaps the
most inspiring figure to emerge from the rebellion, one whose name
resonates to this day, is Lakshmi Bai, the rani of Jhansi, whose stiff
resistance to the British is the stuff of legend. In north India, generations of
school children have grown up with these lines from Subhadra Kumari
Chauhan’s poem, ‘Bundeley Harbolon key munh hamney suni kahani thi,
/Khoob ladi mardani woh to Jhansi wali rani thi’ (‘From the mouth of the
Bundelas and the Harbolos we had heard the story, / this gallant manlike
fighter was none other than the rani of Jhansi’).
The East India Company ceased to exist in the aftermath of the rebellion
and India was transferred directly to the British crown in 1858. The
subsequent three decades are often described as a period when Indians were
generally quiet, if not obedient and submissive, perhaps chastened by their
defeat and the retribution visited upon them, particularly Muslims, by the
victorious British. It was a period when India was, allegedly, put on the path
to modernization—numerous large-scale irrigation schemes were launched,
universities were established, railway tracks were laid, and a postal service
sought to link the country—though, in truth, the country would be wracked
by epidemic diseases, pestilence and plague, and famine. Indeed, as I have
elsewhere argued, the half century from 1875 to 1925 was a period of
catastrophic death.
The instinct for freedom among a conquered people must arise at some
point. The institutional beginning was perforce modest: in 1885, a few
dozen Indian men—mostly Hindus, some Parsis, a sprinkling of Britons—
constituted themselves into an organization called the Indian National
Congress with the intention of seeking a greater voice for Indians in the
political sphere and a modicum of self-representation. The British capital in
India had been Calcutta and it is among the bhadralok (literally, ‘genteel
folk’) that an appetite had developed for Western learning and culture. If the
progenitors of what is called the Bengal Renaissance looked up to the ideals
of the Enlightenment, and the writings of those who expounded on the
blessings of liberty, free speech and expression, and the notion of the
supreme dignity of the individual, they were bound to demand such
freedoms for themselves. Even liberalism, however, had its limitations: as
the greatest exponent of liberty in the Anglophone world in the nineteenth
century, John Stuart Mill, put it, the colonized, among them Indians, had not
yet reached a sufficient stage of intellectual and political maturity to
demand ‘representative government’ in any measure.
The modus operandi of the Congress was petitioning the colonial state
and raising public consciousness. Both in Maharashtra and in Bengal, the
two greatest centres of Indian political activity, some of the young had had
enough of this and thought fit to resort to arms to rid India of the British. By
the mid-1890s, British government officials began to be targeted for
political assassination, and in 1902 alone four secret societies were formed
in Bengal to promote political extremism and to procure funds through
armed robberies and dacoities. However, a number of other developments
were critical in advancing the struggle for freedom. Newspapers and
magazines had seen a major explosion by the late nineteenth century and
the ‘revolutionaries’ likewise brought out weekly or monthly magazines, as
well as pamphlets to promote anti-colonial sentiments. The British
responded, not surprisingly, with censorship and with renewed efforts to
crack down on militancy. Meanwhile, Dadabhai Naoroji, in Poverty and
Un-British Rule in India (1901), and Romesh Chunder Dutt, in his two-
volume Economic History of India (1902), laid the groundwork for
economic nationalism. Naoroji became associated with the theory that the
British had ‘drained’ India of its wealth and similarly Dutt offered a
trenchant account of the pauperization and de-industrialization of India
under British rule. In the hands of Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), a
young monk who had become the principal disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, a
late nineteenth-century Bengali mystic who was the cynosure of all eyes in
Calcutta, the argument against British rule was shifted to another terrain.
Though India had become captive to the British, and its material civilization
was unquestionably backward in comparison to the modern West, it was
still possible for India to refuse the seductions of the West because in the
spiritual domain it reigned supreme. Vivekananda called for the
reawakening of India and sought a place for his country, which he deemed
to be the principal spiritual repository of humankind, in the global pantheon
of nations that the rest of the world might emulate one day.
The Partition by the viceroy, Lord Curzon, of the province of Bengal in
1905, ostensibly on the grounds that its huge size made it ungovernable,
provoked outright opposition from Indians who did not doubt that the
partition was animated by the desire to foment divisions within India. The
partition appeared to divide Muslim-dominant East Bengal from Hindu-
dominant West Bengal, though ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’, if we suppose them
to be, as the British did, monolithic communities, were scattered through
Bengal. Out of this opposition arose the Swadeshi movement, which
anticipated, in some of its characteristics—among them the spirit of non-
cooperation, the boycott of British goods, the use of hartals to paralyze the
government—the nation-wide call to non-cooperation which would be
instigated by Mohandas Gandhi in 1920. In Maharashtra, the militant
nationalist and intellectual, ‘Lokamanya’ Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–
1920), had brilliantly mobilized the masses when he revived the memory of
the Maratha leader, Chhatrapati Shivaji (1630–1680), and similarly
instrumentalized the worship of the god Ganesh to launch the Ganpati
festival as a political platform to foment dissent. For his efforts, Tilak
would be rewarded with two prison terms (1897–98 and 1909–15). It is,
however, to the credit of the Swadeshi movement that it made the Indian
masses a motive force in politics and history; its appeal was broad-based,
and it did not speak in the idiom of religion. Its success may be gauged by
the fact that it forced the British to revoke the partition of Bengal; even
more importantly, perhaps, it introduced the language of swadeshi and
swaraj into Indian politics.
A complete inventory of the different strands of the freedom struggle
before the arrival of Mohandas Gandhi on the Indian landscape is scarcely
possible here. There were important developments elsewhere in India: the
Tamil poet Subramania Bharati (1882–1921), a prodigious writer who also
advocated vigorously for Indian self-determination, is often overlooked in
histories which dwell largely on Bengal and North India. There is a
tendency to view V. O. Chidambaram Pillai (1872–1936), who founded the
Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company, only as an enterprising
businessman, but Pillai was convicted on charges of sedition and died in
penury. In the Punjab, Dayananda Saraswati (1824–1883), launched a
reform movement that would be known as the Arya Samaj and stoked a
revival of the Vedas. Though he and Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), often
dubbed the Father of the Bengal Renaissance and indeed of ‘modern India’,
differed fundamentally in some respects, it may be said that both turned to
Protestant Christianity in an attempt to transform Hinduism into a
purportedly more ‘rational’ and less chaotic religion. This, too, must be
seen as a part of the history of the freedom struggle, rather than only as
chapters in the social and cultural history of India, since there can be no
doubt that Rammohun and Dayananda Saraswati were inspired by the
thought that rankled every thoughtful Indian: just what had made India, an
ancient civilization, so vulnerable to foreign rule?
 On the eve of the outbreak of World War I in late July 1914, and six
months before Mohandas Gandhi would return to his motherland for good,
the struggle for freedom was in a precipitous stage. The political landscape
was divided, as the conventional narrative goes, between the ‘moderates’
who sought gradual political change and sought to work within the
parameters of the legal structures of colonial rule in India, while the
‘extremists’, impatient for change, sought more radical political reform and
signs that the British would be willing to move the country towards self-
determination. Some among the ‘extremists’ had evident sympathies with
the armed revolutionaries whose contribution to the freedom struggle,
though much lauded by some, is easily overstated if only because guns tend
to make noise. Indeed, World War I introduced new complications as
Indians sought to take the struggle overseas, and the Ghadar Conspiracy
was the most palpable outcome of the strategy of creating a worldwide web
of Indian revolutionaries who valiantly sought to overthrow British rule
with grand schemes, a few thousand recruits, very few arms, and much
rhetoric. It is into this mix that Mohandas Gandhi, a one-time barrister who
had grown up in Porbandar and spent twenty years in South Africa, stepped
in and, within a few years, radically transformed the social and political
landscape of India.
89
THE FREEDOM STRUGGLE: THE FINAL PHASE

Vinay Lal

Writing about the freedom struggle in the aftermath of independence,

Jawaharlal Nehru and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay were among the
stalwarts of the movement who were unambiguously clear that the arrival of
Mohandas Gandhi altogether altered the Indian political scene. He came,
Kamaladevi recalled in her memoirs, as a comet and everything that had
preceded him disappeared from public memory. In some accounts, he
obliterated, if not by design, all opposition; others speak of him as the
virtual ‘dictator’ of the Congress. Gandhi had returned to India in early
1915 after two decades in South Africa: as Nelson Mandela was to put it
much later, he arrived in Natal as Mohandas and left as the Mahatma. If, as
British liberal commentators were wont to believe, Indian nationalists had
derived their notions of freedom from Blackstone, Locke, Mill, and other
European philosophers and political theorists, the very first laboratory of
satyagraha was also crafted overseas—in South Africa. In South Africa,
however, the Indians were but a minority, and Gandhi had not involved the
African population in the struggle. India was to furnish a different testing
ground.
Gandhi, now in his native land, first sought to reacquaint himself with
the country he left when he was in his early twenties. Only a year after his
arrival, he signalled, with a stirring speech at the Banaras Hindu University
that raised a furore, that he was determined to make his presence felt: it was
superfluous to ask for independence from Britain, and in the end get a
brown sahib in place of a white sahib, if Indians were not prepared to put
their house in order and liberate themselves from the shackles of mental
servitude. Of what use was freedom, Gandhi asked, if educated Indians
were embarrassed to use an Indian language to speak in public? In the
following years, partly in an attempt to familiarize himself with the
struggles of peasants and the working class, he would involve himself in
local struggles in Champaran and Ahmedabad. Meanwhile, though World
War I was not India’s war as such, India contributed handsomely to the war
effort as part of the British empire but got only brickbats in return. The
government armed itself with extraordinary powers of political repression,
arguing that the resort by Indian revolutionaries to armed violence against
the state necessitated the curtailment of ordinary liberties, and Gandhi
devised upon an extraordinary and novel response in the form of a call for a
nationwide day of prayer and boycott. With this stroke of political genius,
Gandhi came to the attention of the country: where before Bengal and
western India in particular were the arenas of political activity, for the first
time much of the country appeared to have a stake in the struggle for
freedom. In the Punjab, where the colonial state assumed the Indian masses
were inert, indifferent to politics, and likely to look upon colonial rulers as
their mai-baap (benevolent masters), the British responded to the call for
self-determination with panic and ferocity. Villages were strafed from the
air, and students and disobedient people were flogged in public, but in
Amritsar the retribution for defiance took more unusual and draconian
forms. In the incident of the ‘crawling lane’, the humiliation of an
Englishwoman was avenged by having Indians crawl on their bellies, and at
the Jallianwala Bagh, near the Golden Temple, Brigadier General Reginald
Dyer, commanding a regiment of Indian troops, ordered firing upon a large
crowd of unarmed Indians that left at least 379 dead and a thousand people
injured.
Gandhi’s ascendancy to the helm of nationalist politics would be swift.
He launched the Non-cooperation Movement in 1920 and, as archival
records suggest, succeeded in paralysing colonial administration in parts of
north India. He had transformed the Congress, a nationalist organization
comprised largely of elites with very modest aspirations for some form of
‘representation’, into a mass organization with over a million paid
members. It was Gandhi’s singular achievement to bring the ‘masses’ into
the public sphere throughout the country and make them into a motive force
of history. In 1922, however, at the small market town of Chauri Chaura, an
incident of ‘mob’ violence in which twenty-two policemen were burned or
hacked to death, made Gandhi suspend the movement—much to the
consternation of his fellow Congressmen, among them Motilal Nehru, his
son Jawaharlal, Lajpat Rai, and C. R. Das, who thought that they had the
British licked. It may be said that Gandhi’s suspension of the Non-
cooperation Movement, though mistakenly decried by many as a colossal
political blunder, is one of the supreme moments in modern global political
history as it underscored, for the first time, the view that there can be no
principled politics without ethics. To the British, Gandhi appeared to have
lost nerve; they used the opportunity to convict him on charges of sedition
and he was sentenced to a six-year term in prison. The ‘Great Trial’, where
Gandhi issued a stinging denunciation of colonial rule, is one of the most
iconic moments of the freedom struggle, and it demonstrated, as did other
political trials in colonial India, such as those of Sri Aurobindo, Bhagat
Singh, the communists, and other political leaders, the mastery of the
courtroom achieved by Indians. Thus, as the British would learn at a heavy
cost, the very instrumentalities of ‘law and order’ would be turned against
them.
Though the most pivotal movements in the history of the freedom
struggle were initiated by Gandhi, they acquired a momentum of their own
and came to be claimed by the masses. The Salt Satyagraha (1930), which
brought the story of the Indian independence movement to doors and
rooftops around the world, was as much spectacular political theatre as it
was the most ingenious defiance of oppressive rule ever witnessed in
history. Gandhi marched to the sea to break the salt law and left everyone
astonished at the sheer simplicity and audacity of his move, and the
uncanny awareness that he showed of the power of the symbolic universe
that we inhabit. Tens of thousands went to jail, many willingly, and the Salt
Satyagraha brought women into the streets in large numbers. In his
deployment of non-violence in this fashion, Gandhi opened a new chapter
in the evolution of human consciousness, though, then and now, some
critics saw in him nothing more than a charlatan. One of the most distinct
characteristics of the freedom struggle as it was conceptualized and waged
by Gandhi is that it inspired debates of the highest intellectual and ethical
order, as can be witnessed in the intense exchange between Gandhi and
Rabindranath Tagore. Gandhi admired ‘Gurudev’ as much as Tagore
lionized the ‘Mahatma’, but this did not prevent them from airing their
differences with intellectual rigour. Tagore decried what he called ‘the cult
of the charkha’, the blind submission of the masses to Gandhi’s own
dictates, and the negativity attached to ‘non-cooperation’; for his part,
Gandhi averred that Tagore appeared to have a suspicion of the masses, a
dread of the negative, and an unawareness of manner in which a people
who had long been inert had been aroused to fulfil their political destiny.
Tagore did not live to see India acquire independence, passing on
exactly a year before Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement in August
1942. Gandhi was prepared to see India descend into ‘ordered anarchy’
rather than have the British stay in India and he prepared the country for the
final upheaval with the mantra, ‘Do or Die’. The government responded
with oppression and nearly the entire leadership of the Congress was taken
into jail and only released after two years. But Gandhi’s call was interpreted
by many to resort to whatever means they thought fit to resist British rule.
Some political rebels engaged in sabotage of railway tracks and government
properties to disrupt lines of communication. Other activists went into
hiding and the intrepid Usha Mehta (1920–2000) broadcast from the secret
Congress Radio. From the standpoint of the Congress, at least, the All-India
Muslim League, now headed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, engaged in another
more insidious form of sabotage by rendering political cooperation to the
British. Certainly, if 1942–44 was a period of political wilderness for the
Congress, it was for the Muslim League a time when it assiduously
advanced its own interests and was able to make substantial headway in
successfully placing the demand for a separate nation-state for Indian
Muslims before them.
While the Congress spearheaded the freedom struggle, Indians of other
political persuasions sought freedom from the oppressiveness of British rule
in their own fashion. Though the Muslim League had been founded in 1906
with the aim, to which the British gave every encouragement, of increasing
Muslim participation in the political life of the nation and representing the
interests of Muslims, the Congress continued to attract the support of the
vast majority of Muslims well into the 1930s. Muslim leaders such as
Shaukat Ali and his brother Muhammad Ali, who were staunch
Congressmen and supported Gandhi’s non-cooperation program much as he
lent his name to the Khilafat campaign, gradually drifted away from the
Congress and Shaukat Ali formally joined the Muslim League in 1936.
However, this may have also had the effect of pulling some Hindus away
from the Congress, and those who viewed themselves as nationalist Hindus
started gravitating towards the Hindu Mahasabha, founded in Nagpur in
1915. Another faction within the Congress itself developed in 1936 into the
Congress Socialist Party (CSP), whose members cavilled at the Congress
Party’s disinclination to embrace a more explicit socialist program and its
reluctance to push for more sweeping land reforms.
Long before the CSP came about, the Bolshevik Revolution had already
animated those Indians who dreamt of freeing Indians both of colonial rule
and the conservatism of a bourgeois social order. The Communist Party of
India was founded in December 1925 and it played a considerable role in
mobilizing peasants throughout the countryside and promoting trade union
activity. Armed revolutionaries continued to operate clandestinely but with
the emergence of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA)
they were able to offer more concerted resistance to the colonial state and
were a source of much discussion and anxiety in official circles. Though the
HSRA was short-lived, surviving for less than a decade, its luminaries such
as Chandrasekhar Azad, Sivram Rajguru, Sukhdev, Asfaqullah Khan, and
Ram Prasad Bismil, all killed in their manhood in the resistance movement,
were nationally celebrated figures. None was more legendary than Bhagat
Singh, who was not all of thirty before he was sent to the gallows, and
whose fame is said to have rivalled that of Gandhi’s for a short period of
time. The HSRA’s ideological platform suggests a fidelity to socialism,
secularism, and the rights of the working class; though the HSRA did not
repudiate non-violent resistance as such, its members claimed a
complementary place for violent methods as expounded in their manifesto,
The Philosophy of the Bomb. Unlike the HSRA revolutionaries, Subhas
Chandra Bose was a Congressman, but he was similarly not averse to armed
resistance to the colonial state. Bose would go on to become the leader of
the Indian National Army (INA), comprised of Indian recruits from
Southeast Asia and prisoners of war from the British India army, and the
INA would see limited if unsuccessful military engagement in northeast
India and Burma during World War II. A few commentators allege that it is
Bose who finally pushed the British to quit India, though this view is more
wishful thinking than evidence of a reasoned consideration of the course of
the freedom struggle.
Following the conclusion of the war, lengthy negotiations by the British
for their withdrawal from India ensued with the Congress and the Muslim
League, but the vivisection of India and the creation of the Muslim-majority
state of Pakistan could not be averted. Though India became free on 15
August 1947, Gandhi at least was certain that the freedom thus gained was
not what he had envisioned. India had become an independent nation-state,
Gandhi was to write just before his assassination on 30 January 1948, but
its people still had to acquire economic, cultural, and social rights. In like
fashion, we may say that the narrative of the freedom struggle cannot be
written wholly in the idiom of politics. A more comprehensive narrative
would have to take stock of how artists, writers, students, craftsmen,
women, and ordinary people contributed to the struggle for the liberation of
India, and similarly it would have to be attentive to efforts, fledgling as they
may have been, to ‘decolonize the mind’. What is also equally critical, all
the more so because conventional histories have been largely impervious to
such considerations, is the efforts, by the likes of Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru,
Subhas Bose, and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, to forge transnational links
with other colonized peoples and intellectuals of ecumenical dispensation in
the West. There can be little doubt that, whatever one’s estimation of
Gandhi and of the idea of satyagraha, the freedom struggle in India was
wholly unique and constitutes not merely a chapter in the global history of
anti-colonialism but even more so a singularly distinct chapter in the still
evolving history of nonviolence and man’s ascent into higher levels of
consciousness.
90
INDIA’S STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE THE LAST
PHASE

Sucheta Mahajan

One way of characterizing the writings on Independence is as colonial,

nationalist and those from the Left tradition. The colonial writings, both by
officials and by later day historians, presented Independence as a gift of
self-government and Partition as the result of the centuries old divide
between Hindus and Muslims, which the British claimed to have tried to
bridge. For the nationalist historians Independence was the culmination of
the freedom struggle, while Partition was a consequence of imperial policy,
in particular the policy of divide and rule. Some writings on the Left
characterized Independence as a mere transfer of power, an alleged deal
between the imperial ruling class and the local political elite, with partition
being the price paid by the people.
Academic works on Independence began to be published with the
opening up of the archives and collections of private papers of the leaders
by the 1970s. The initial focus was on the how and why of the withdrawal
of the British from India. The very title of R. J. Moore’s book, Escape from
Empire (1883), suggests that the British wanted to withdraw from India as it
had become a liability by the end of World War II. Other books took up the
issue of Partition, such as the The Sole Spokesman (1985), on Jinnah and
the demand for Pakistan, by the Pakistani born historian from Cambridge,
Ayesha Jalal. which argued that it was Congress which wanted Partition,
Jinnah did not want it. It was asserted that Jinnah put forward the demand
for Pakistan only as a bargaining counter to get better representation for the
Muslims at the centre.
Anita Inder Singh’s significant work (1987) on the origins of the
Partition of India contradicted Jalal’s assertion that the Pakistan demand
was kept vague as it was merely a bargaining counter. Singh shows that in
fact the resolution of the Muslim League at Lahore in March 1940 was clear
that Pakistan would be a sovereign state. Another important book was by
Salil Misra (2001) on the communal politics of the crucial United Provinces
during the 1930s when the League under Jinnah adopted a strategy of mass
communalization of politics after its poor showing in the elections of 1937.
Misra and Singh both contradict a popular myth about Partition, namely
that it could have been avoided if the Congress had formed a coalition
government with the Muslim League in the United Provinces in 1937
(Hasan, 1993). Both show why this was a non-starter. For one the political
and class interests of the followers of the two parties were extremely
different. Secondly, Jinnah withdrew approval of the coalition talks. This
dispels the popular belief that Nehru was the one who had asked the
Congress leaders to step back.
On the fiftieth anniversary of freedom it was felt in some quarters that
we had mostly been celebrating Independence rather than mourning the
tragedy of Partition (Nandy, 1997). Over the last twenty-five years,
Partition studies have outnumbered the writings on Independence. While it
is important to map various aspects of the tragedy of Partition, what worries
me is that this focus on Partition sometimes ends up eclipsing the
revolutionary nature of the transformation that marked the end of
colonialism in 1947.
Nationalism was questioned from another direction, namely by
subaltern historians advancing ‘history from below’ to counter what they
saw as the prevailing ‘history from above’. Imperialism, nationalism, and
communalism were dismissed as grand narratives and a case was made for
a people’s history drawing more on memory and creative writing. In
Remembering Partition (2010), Gyanendra Pandey was extremely critical
of the existing writings on the Independence of India for subordinating
Partition to Independence. The so called binary between nationalism and
communalism was also questioned, with serious consequences for the
Indian people’s continuing struggle for a secular, democratic, and socially
just vision of the nation.
The Cambridge school, the subaltern historians, and communal
interpretations of history share common ground in denying legitimacy to
the secular nationalist anti-colonial movement. Even a British Marxist like
Perry Anderson, the renowned Marxist, would have it that the idea of India
was a European and not a local invention (Anderson, 2013). This is no
different from the argument made by imperialist writers that unity was a gift
of the British. In reality, the conception of Hind as a cultural and political
entity goes back to the medieval period, as Irfan Habib points out (Habib,
2015).
Historical writings in the past seventy-five years since Independence
have made huge strides in deepening our understanding of the national
movement in terms of constituent and associated identities and approaches
of class, caste, gender, region, and community (Misra, 2001; Batabyal,
2005; Kothari, 2007; Shah, 1998; Gilmartin, 2000, Ahmed, 2005). I would
say that the main problem with the historical writings on Independence is
that seventy-five years hence, we are still in the thrall of the colonial
interpretations of this period of our history, and worse, the communal
interpretations that are complicit with them (Gallagher, 1973; Brown, 1972;
Chatterjee, 2002 & 2007; Nair, 2011).
The last phase of our freedom struggle was distinguished by mass
struggle under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. Participation in the non-
cooperation and civil disobedience movements helped Indians, both men
and women, to come out of the pall of fear that enveloped the country. Non-
violence, ahimsa, meant that the lack of arms was no longer an issue, a
weakness. The power of masses on the move, be it in the iconic Dandi
March or jathas of the Akalis or marches of the kisans and strikes by
workers, was to slowly erode the hegemony of colonial rule. Officials
charged with repressing anti-colonial movements expressed their hesitation
to use force on an unarmed people. Gandhi’s call to government officials to
leave their jobs and join the national movement had a good response. By
the end of World War II the writing on the wall was clear for the imperial
rulers. It was time to quit. The issue was when and how.
Freedom and Partition can be seen as two sides of a coin (Mahajan,
2000). If Independence reflected the success of our freedom struggle in
bringing together different social groups to make a nation, Partition implied
the weakness of our freedom struggle in that a relatively smaller number of
Muslims were drawn into this nation—to the extent that some responsibility
for Partition devolved on to the Congress. In the main, Partition was the
consequence of the policy of divide and rule pursued by the colonial state as
part of its strategy of countering our national movement. The establishment
of the Muslim League was encouraged as an organization which would
work to counter the Congress. When the Muslim League came up with the
demand for a separate homeland for the Muslims in 1940, the colonial state
encouraged this demand despite being aware of the danger it posed to
Indian unity. When they finally decided to withdraw from India in the face
of the widespread nationalist challenge to their rule, the British divided and
quit, imposing the model of imperial retreat, which was tried and tested in
Ireland. On the Congress’s side the weaknesses were of omission rather
than commission. The Congress leaders did not wage a struggle against
communalism until it was too late. When civil war enveloped large parts of
the country in the spring of 1947 the leaders of our freedom struggle
accepted Partition as a measure which would end the violence and give the
Indian people some more time to work for unity. Gandhi appealed to his
countrymen to not accept Partition in their hearts. However not only did
partition become a reality, communal forces dealt a second blow within six
months of 15 August 1947 in the assassination of the Mahatma (Mahajan,
2007).
 PART VII

INDIA SINCE INDEPENDENCE

91
THE RISE OF IDENTITY POLITICS

Amir Ali

The history of identity politics and its rise in twentieth-century India is one
of successive and successful affirmations of varying regional, religious,
linguistic, caste, gender, and other identities. The rise of identity politics in
twentieth-century India can be neatly divided into the pre- and post-
partition phases. The first half of the twentieth century was dominated and
suffused by the freedom struggle against the British and attempted to craft
an overarching, almost Archimedean Indian identity as citizens of a
sovereign, independent, and democratic country. Yet even as the freedom
movement was struggling to craft this catch-all overarching identity, there
were many other forms of identity that were lurking and could sometimes
work at apparent cross purposes to the concerns of the Congress-led
freedom movement. The most crucial of identity concerns in pre-
Independence India that was considered to disrupt the harmony required by
the national movement was the majority Hindu and minority Muslim
identity. There was also the development of a powerful Dalit identity
influenced by the presence of B. R. Ambedkar. The freedom movement led
by Gandhi and the Congress were especially dismissive of giving
recognition to identities in the form of separate electorates that were
considered divisive. Hence the Congress’s opposition to separate electorates
for Muslims recommended under the Morley–Minto Reforms and Gandhi’s
standoff with Ambedkar resulting in the Poona Pact of 1932.
As a result of the bitter experience of the Partition, provisions for
minority rights in the constituent assembly were often debated in the light
of tendencies of separatism and secession. The familiar minority rights
provisions in the Indian Constitution, Articles 29 and 30 were a result of
discussions in the Constituent Assembly, that while retaining these
provisions decided to exclude furthermore capacious provisions for the
protection of minority rights. These excluded provisions were felt to be
inappropriate in the light of concerns from the recent Partition of the
country. The Indian Constitution of course made provisions for reservations
in government employment for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
and this has been one of the most powerful instances of affirmative action
in the world.
In terms of linguistic identity, a series of political decisions taken very
soon after Independence had significant consequences. One of these was in
relation to English as a link language, especially keeping in mind the
concerns southern states expressed towards Hindi. The result has been
English becoming a language of power, creating a sharp rift between an
elite conversant and fluent in English and a large section of Indian society
not so conversant. This latter section has also given rise to a more grounded
elite not conversant in English and that is often at loggerheads with the
English-speaking elite. The linguistic reorganization of states was another
significant step in this regard. A further decision concerning language was
the promotion of a Sanskritized Hindi rather than Hindustani that could
have retained a vital, yet distancing bridge with a Persianized Urdu. The
result has been the slow, gradual, and painful demise of Urdu as another one
of India’s unique hybrid languages. Increasingly, Urdu became associated
as the language exclusive to Muslims and became an exaggerated
component of a rather narrowly constructed Muslim identity.
As the twentieth century came to an end and communal mobilization on
the grounds of religion became more intense, identity politics in India stood
at an impossibly difficult culmination. This situation arose from the very
modality of identity politics. Identity politics tends to seek out the attention
of a state that can often be receptive to such demands in their affirmation,
yet lax in terms of their transformation. In other words, the modality of
identity politics and its interaction with the state was a halfway house of the
affirmative that did not graduate to the more crucial level of the
transformative.
Numerous identities that have historically affirmed themselves
successfully, now confront the political ascendance of the Bharatiya Janata
Party’s Hindutva nationalism. Many may now wilt in the face of a political
discourse whose force and presence seeks to deny the very legitimacy of
many of those identities by positing an impregnable oneness of the nation.
This is especially true of the Muslim identity whose acute problems also
reveal the limitations of identity politics. The increasingly dominant BJP
has tended to dismiss any mention of Muslim disadvantage by stating the
need to be agnostic to different identities. From the BJP’s perspective any
referencing of a deprived Muslim identity becomes the grounds for a
politics of ‘appeasement’ that is attributed to the many years of Congress
rule in the country. However, in an intriguing development the ruling BJP
has tended to emphasize to a significant degree the identity of vulnerable
groups within Muslims. In other words, while being generally dismissive of
minority rights, the BJP does seem to look favourably upon ‘minorities
within minorities’. An instance would be its proactive stance on the
question of divorced Muslim women resulting in the enactment of the
Triple Talaq Bill. Recently, references have been made to the need to
cultivate the pasmanda (socially and economically backward) sections
among Muslims by the BJP.
The assertion and affirmation of identity politics in India, especially
when it comes to religious identities, has been supported by a patchy
commitment to India’s official secularism on the part of the country’s ruling
elite, especially during times of Congress rule. Another aspect of the
successful assertion of identities has been the presence of a liberal spirit
among sections of the upper echelons of India’s judiciary, bureaucracy,
executive, and the media. During the twentieth century, one form of identity
assertion that was not so vociferously articulated was sexual identity. This
is a situation that has changed in the twenty-first century.
The fallout of the many assertions of twentieth-century identity politics
indicates the failures and limitations of identity politics, most notably an
inherent superficiality that merely affirms vulnerable identities but is
singularly incapable of transformative changes of the underlying structures
that create the disadvantage and discrimination in the first place. Quite
paradoxically the very success of identity politics may prove to be its
undoing.
92
THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA

Rajmohan Gandhi

The broad picture is clear enough. Though widely backed, the

independence movement led by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress
failed to win the cooperation of the Muslim League, which in March 1940
demanded the separation of Muslim-majority areas. Finally compelled to
leave (because of India’s struggle and their own post-war exhaustion), the
British refused, however, to transfer power over all of India to the Congress,
which had no wish or ability to coerce Muslim-majority areas into
remaining with India. While desiring a single, Hindu-controlled India, the
Hindu Mahasabha lacked the strength to enforce its vision. Hence the 1947
Partition.
Other questions remain. A major one, largely unaddressed, is why, in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, periodic Hindu–Muslim alliances for
freedom were only rarely joined by efforts for closer people-to-people
relations. On the political front, attention remains to be given to certain
questions.
For example, why was the remarkable Hindu–Muslim unity of 1919–22
permitted to evaporate? In later years, success eluded four unity attempts
largely ignored by scholars. One was at Jinnah’s end—the 1928 bid in
Kolkata for an all-parties’ accord. The second was a similar attempt, in
November 1932, by a ‘unity conference’, held in Allahabad, of Hindu and
Muslim leaders. The third was Gandhi’s September 1944 bid, in Mumbai,
for a settlement with Jinnah, when the two talked to each other fourteen
times. Finally, there was Gandhi’s proposal, in March–April 1947, of a
Jinnah-led, Congress-backed ministry for preserving a united India.
Unsuccessful as these attempts were, they merit study.
Pre-Partition Bengal, Punjab, and Sindh also deserve greater attention.
After World War II began, and the Indian National Congress said it would
support the war provided independence was assured at its end, London
responded in August 1940 by saying that it ‘could not contemplate transfer
of [power] to any system of government whose authority is directly denied
by large and powerful elements in India’s national life.’ With that statement,
Britain was reminding the Congress that elected ministries opposed to the
Congress were governing Bengal, Punjab, and Sindh.
By this time, the Jinnah-led Muslim League, which won office in
Bengal and Sindh in 1937 and to which Punjab’s ruling Unionists, victors in
their province over both the Congress and the League, had ceded authority
on ‘all-India’ matters, had asked for Pakistan. Although the Indian National
Congress had succeeded in the preponderantly Muslim North-Western
Frontier Province, its failure in 1937 to win in the other three Muslim-
majority provinces helps explain Partition.
Most Partition accounts omit the fact that from the start of the twentieth
century, Punjab’s Hindu leaders, generally affiliated to the Congress, had
opposed the demand for reservations by Muslim Punjabis, who were
significantly poorer than Hindu Punjabis and also greatly underrepresented
in the schools, colleges, and government departments created under British
rule. Secondly, most Congress leaders at the national level as also within
Punjab had resisted an understanding with the Unionist Party. Although the
Unionist Party was a vehicle of the feudal right, it was not communal.
Prominent Sikhs and Hindus were among its leaders. More importantly, the
Unionists commanded a large Muslim following in rural Punjab, inclusive
of small peasants, farmworkers, and artisans.
Later, in March 1946, following elections in the 1945–46 winter, a
Congress-Unionist-Akali ministry led by the Unionist leader, Khizr Hayat
Tiwana, took office in Punjab. After a year in office, it collapsed in 1947’s
heated climate. Had a Congress-Unionist-Sikh understanding been reached
in 1939, Punjabi Muslims might not have backed the Pakistan call.
In Bengal, in an opposite scenario, the Congress missed out by failing to
ally with the Muslim Left. Although it was in Dhaka that the Muslim
League had been founded (in 1906), many Bengali Muslims saw the
League as a nawab-dominated party. Since Muslim poverty in Bengal was
even more acute than Hindu poverty, the province offered scope for a
progressive Hindu–Muslim alliance capable of overtaking the Muslim
League.
In the summer of 1947, only weeks before Partition, Sarat Chandra
Bose, Netaji’s older brother, sought such an alliance, but the initiative again
came late in the day. By this time Bengal was almost completely polarized
along Muslim–Hindu lines, and Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s campaign
for partitioning Bengal to produce a Hindu-majority West Bengal had
attracted considerable support.
Another major Partition-related question needing further research is the
chain of Hindu–Muslim killings that began in mid-August 1946 in Kolkata
and spread in the following eighteen months to East Bengal, Bihar, western
Uttar Pradesh, and West Punjab. In April 1947, the killings spread to both
halves of Punjab, rising to massive levels in August and September, and
producing mass migrations in both directions. There were killings
elsewhere, too, including the North-Western Frontier Province, Sindh,
Mumbai, and Delhi. A complete and credible survey of this tragic sequence
of killings is yet to be put together.
Over a ninety-year period, India’s British rulers had recruited and
trained lakhs of Punjabi soldiers, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu, but discouraged
them from bonding with one another. In 1947’s fateful summer, when a
British-led Punjab Boundary Force was organized to quell communal
violence, the force’s Muslim soldiers refused to target Muslim killers, while
its Hindu and Sikh soldiers only shot at Muslims.
Earlier that year, in March, Lieutenant General Frank Messervy, then
chief of British India’s northern command, visited areas of violence near
Rawalpindi and Attock and noted that ‘ex-soldiers and pensioners [of the
British-controlled Indian army] had been heavily involved’ in the killings,
and that ‘savagery was carried out to an extreme degree’. Ex-soldiers
continued to be involved, along with others intoxicated by revenge calls, in
subsequent killings in both halves of Punjab.
The empire and the nation it was governing had both fallen. Mercifully,
Punjabis willing to kill were outnumbered by fellow Punjabis ready to
protect, who saved countless individuals and helped them migrate across a
border that had suddenly descended from nowhere.
93
THE PARTITION OF INDIA

Sugata Bose

The Partition of India in August 1947 at freedom’s dawn from the dark
night of British rule was a classic case of the failure to negotiate equitable
power-sharing arrangements in a postcolonial state. Scholarship on this
momentous and tragic event in modern South Asian history has analysed
the historical forces that led to the division ostensibly on religious lines and
recorded the grim experience of violence that accompanied the British
decision to divide and quit. The Urdu short story writer Saadat Hasan
Manto lamented that ‘Human beings in both countries [India and Pakistan]
were slaves, slaves of bigotry…slaves of religious passions, slaves of
animal instincts and barbarity’.
Unity quite as much as complete independence was a cherished goal of
the Indian freedom struggle. It had been articulated eloquently at the Lahore
session of the Indian National Congress in December 1929. A decade later
in March 1940 the All-India Muslim League put forward an alternative
demand at its Lahore session. With some prodding from the British viceroy
Linlithgow, it resolved that the Muslim-majority provinces in the northwest
and east of British India should be grouped to constitute independent states.
However, the resolution also spoke of a constitution in the singular that
would govern minority rights throughout the subcontinent. It mentioned
neither the word ‘partition’ nor the name ‘Pakistan’.
The colonial masters were naturally anxious to divide and deflect the
united force of the anti-colonial movement. From the late nineteenth
century, the British had defined majority and minority by privileging the
religious distinction. Separate electorates were granted in 1909 in the very
limited representative institutions established by the colonial state.
Mahatma Gandhi circumvented these limitations by launching a mass
movement between 1919 and 1922 and building Hindu–Muslim unity based
on respect for cultural differences. He skilfully linked non-violent non-
cooperation with the cause of the Khilafat.
From the late 1920s the term communalism acquired a pejorative
connotation as the lesser other of the noble sentiment of nationalism that
became increasingly monolithic as defined by the Congress. Mohammad
Iqbal complained in his presidential address at the Allahabad session of the
Muslim League in 1930 that there were ‘communalisms and
communalisms’ and that his proposal for a consolidated Muslim state in the
northwest within India was ‘not inspired by any feeling of narrow
communalism’.
The Muslim League took its stand in favour of safeguards for minority
rights until 1940 when Mohammed Ali Jinnah claimed that the Muslims of
India constituted a nation. As he put it, the term nationalist had become a
‘conjurer’s trick’ in politics. The claim to nationhood, however, was not an
inevitable overture to separate and sovereign statehood. The interests of
Muslims in provinces where they were in a minority were not the same as
those of Muslims in the majority provinces of the northwest and the east,
which sought a high degree of autonomy. The Muslim League faced an
insurmountable challenge in trying to resolve these contradictions. When
Rajagopalachari offered a Muslim state based on the partition of Punjab and
Bengal in 1944, Jinnah dismissed it as ‘a shadow and a husk’, ‘a maimed
and mutilated’ version of their demand.
During World War II Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was able to forge a
remarkable unity among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians in his
Azad Hind movement. That spirit of solidarity was widespread within India
during the Red Fort Trial of the three Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh officers of
the Indian National Army during the winter of 1945–46. The British finally
recognized that they would have to quit India. The Cabinet Mission arrived
in the spring of 1946 to hold talks. It seemed possible that the unity of India
could be preserved within a federal arrangement of three groups of
provinces proposed by it. Once the Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru
hedged its acceptance of the grouping scheme, the Muslim League under
Jinnah called for direct action to achieve Pakistan.
After the British announcement on 20 February 1947, of their intention
to depart by 30 June 1948, the Hindu Mahasabha was the first to call for the
partition of Punjab and Bengal. On 8 March 1947, the Congress demanded
the partition of Punjab and added that the principle of partition may have to
applied to Bengal as well. Conceding Pakistan based on the partition of
these two crucial Muslim-majority provinces enabled the Congress high
command to inherit the unitary centre of the British raj. A final attempt was
made to preserve the unity of Bengal by the more far-sighted Hindu and
Muslim leaders, but that plan was vetoed by Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel.
The last viceroy Louis Mountbatten announced the partition plan on 3 June
1947.
The two dominions Pakistan and India did not know precisely where
their borders lay when they came into being on 14–15 August 1947. The
Radcliffe decision on the partition lines was not announced until 17 August.
Nearly two million people were killed in horrific violence while at least
fourteen million refugees fearfully crossed the newly demarcated borders.
Having abdicated all responsibility for maintaining order, Mountbatten
congratulated himself on having carried out one of the greatest
administrative operations in history.
In Punjab there was an almost wholesale forced exchange of population
in 1947. The violence directed against vulnerable religious minorities had
little to do with religion as faith. The scramble over the possession of zar,
zameen, and zan—wealth, land, and women—within the patriarchal
structure of rural society shaped the unprecedented convulsions of violence
in Punjab. In Bengal the migratory flows continued in fits and starts
between 1947 and 1971, leaving significant religious minorities in both
Bengals. The spectre of a great religious divide in 1947 masked centre–
region tensions and contributed to centralization of state power in both
postcolonial India and Pakistan, stifling the voices calling for a healthier
dose of federalism.
Mahatma Gandhi and a handful of principled leaders of the freedom
struggle tried unsuccessfully to avert the human tragedy of Partition.
Gandhi spent 15 August 1947, quietly in Calcutta, away from the festivities
surrounding independence in Delhi. ‘Let us permit ourselves to hope,’ he
said on 26 January 1948, ‘that though geographically and politically India is
divided into two, at heart we shall ever be friends and brothers helping and
respecting one another and be one for the outside world.’ The decisions of
expediency in 1947 continue to haunt the quest for equal citizenship in
South Asia. Seventy-five years after freedom the people of the subcontinent
owe it to themselves to finally heal the wounds of Partition.
94
LINGUISTIC STATE FORMATION (1900–2000) Asha Sarangi
Most of the writings in this area have concentrated on providing details
about the political and historical staging of the language-related protest
movements and agitation over the last hundred years. A number of scholars
have focused on establishing the relationship between political and cultural
aspects of the languages emphasizing their symbolic and material
significance in mobilizing the idea of regions and nation/nation-ness since
the late nineteenth century. The major works in this area have drawn
attention to the arbitrary realignment of political and cultural borders and
boundaries of regions and states by the British colonial state in order to
undermine the collective cultural and linguistic capital of the people. The
colonial state used languages as commands of imperial authority as evident
in the works of Cohn, Windmiller, Harrison, and Brass. Starting from the
partition of Bengal in 1905 along with historical events such as the creation
of Andhra Province and Orissa in 1917 and 1936 respectively,
reorganization of Provincial Congress Committees in the 1920s on the basis
of their linguistic affinities and the subsequent events leading to the
formation of linguistic states since 1948 onwards in independent India
reveal a much complex story of the relationship between languages and
their historical–cultural and political mapping and nationalization of their
regional identities. Since Independence, particularly from the years of
1953–56 with the setting up of the States Reorganization Commissions and
its recommendations for the formation of linguistic states in the following
years in 1956, 1960, 1966, 1970s, 2000, and 2014 brought about the
reconfiguration of linguistic territorialization of the Indian nation. There are
still demands for several new states and their geo-linguistic remapping
raised from time to time by various political parties and communities.
The existing writings in this area have remained focused on establishing
the relationship between political mapping and making of the territories
during and after the British colonial rule in India. What is still intriguing
and missing from the available scholarship on this subject is the lack of
understanding about the complex and intricate relationship between
languages, histories, cultures, and their impact on the making of the
political boundaries of states in India in particular and South Asia in
general. The framework of methodological pluralism taking into account
the complex interface between languages and their cultural–political capital
in the imaginaries of nation-states boundaries would be significantly
relevant in the contemporary times. The historical trajectory of hundred
years from 1900–2000 is a period of watershed in analysing the historical
break as well as conjunctures in establishing these correlations while
considering questions of political autonomy, sovereignty, and democratic
devolution of the state authority and legitimacy during and after the colonial
state. In just less than ten years ago in 2014, the formation of Telangana
state put forth the questions pertaining to the regional consolidation of state
power and its cultural autonomy beyond the narrow confines of language/s.
95
THE WORKING OF THE CONSTITUTION

Nivedita Menon

In April 2019, on the eve of the general elections that would bring the
Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party into power for a second term,
performance artist Maya Rao staged an event at a women’s march.
Ceremoniously she stripped herself of her sari, and then slowly re-clothed
herself with cloth inscribed with the values of the Preamble to the
Constitution—equality, liberty, fraternity. This performance invokes the
scene from the Mahabharata, of the stripping of Draupadi in the royal court,
and her being saved from public nudity by the god Krishna who
miraculously lengthens her strip of cloth indefinitely. Here Rao draws on
the wellspring of Hindu culture to subvert it, and to indicate that the
protection of the powerless will today emanate from the Constitution.
The Indian Constitution was enacted on 26 January 1950, after three
years of deliberation in the Constituent Assembly (CA), which was
indirectly elected by the legislative assemblies brought into government in
1946 on the basis of a restricted franchise, under the colonial Government
of India Act (1935), which had been strongly criticized by nationalist
parties and leaders. The Muslim League boycotted the CA as their
condition of compulsory grouping of six states, including Assam and
Bengal, was not met. Princely states initially were not part of the CA, but
almost all of them were involved in it by the end of the process.
Despite these factors however, it would be inaccurate to understand the
Constitution as produced by elite discussions in a homogeneous body based
on restricted franchise. A study of the debates in the CA shows that it
reflected a variety of political opinions from the Left to Right, emerging as
it did from a mass anti-imperialist struggle, and it tried to balance many
opposing values—individual and community, equality and special
provisions for historically disadvantaged groups, the drive towards
industrialization, and rights of the peasantry. The Indian Constitution thus,
does not express a singular will and a singular order. The mid-twentieth
century moment in which it emerged was very different in time and space
from that which produced the constitutions of the West, which marked a
closure of, and an end to political ferment. The Indian Constitution on the
contrary, was seen by all those who participated in its production as the
beginning of a journey towards what the preamble promised.
Further, recent scholarship shows that hundreds of individuals and civic
organizations were involved in the process, and wrote to the Constituent
Assembly with requests for ‘representation of their group, religion, caste,
tribe, or profession in the assembly’s advisory committee, or with demands
to be recognized as minorities in the constitution.’ People’s engagement
with the drafting of the Constitution continued throughout the three years of
this process (Ornit Shani, 2022).. Within months of its enactment, many
groups, including socially marginalized ones, claimed the Constitution as
legitimation in courts to protect their rights to practices and livelihoods
(Rohit De, 2018).
Gautam Bhatia terms it a ‘transformative constitution’ that first,
transformed the subjects of a colonial regime into the citizens of a republic
and second, sought to transform society itself. This second goal is linked to
the recognition that citizens needed protection not only from a despotic
state but from traditional and feudal authorities (Bhatia, 2019).
The spirit of the Constitution is best illustrated by its First Amendment
passed in 1951, five months before the first general elections. At this time,
the CA was functioning as the interim parliament and its composition was
exactly the same. Thus this amendment can be seen as concluding the
unfinished business of the CA, and the debates over it tell us more about the
making of the Constitution than the debates in the CA.
A series of judgements from courts had held up constitutional
provisions on state acquisition of land and special provisions for
disadvantaged citizens, and struck down state government actions curbing
freedom of speech as unconstitutional (Austin, 1999). It was in order to deal
with this situation that the First Amendment made three significant changes
and the debates over these in the CA/interim parliament tell us much about
the complexities that underlie this document (Lok Sabha Debates, May
1951).
a) The addition of Clause 4 to Article 15, which enabled the
government to make special provisions for backward classes of citizens.
Jawaharlal Nehru outlined a complex understanding of group rights as
defensible in a democracy, but the understanding that animates the
amendment is B. R. Ambedkar’s view that the Dalit identity was not borne
by individual citizens, but by a community. Rights borne by historically
marginalized communities are not constraints on the power of the state,
rather they are legal entitlements protected by the state, which constrain
other members of society. The state therefore had the power to redefine the
cultural practices of an inegalitarian society, in line with constitutional
values (Baxi, 1995).
b) The insertion of 31a and 31b, by which government acquisition of
land was protected from the challenge of inadequate compensation, and
which created the Ninth Schedule, in which land reform legislation was
placed, protecting it from judicial review. While using the rhetoric of
justice, the real imperatives in abolishing zamindari were, as explicitly
stated, to prevent dangerous revolutionary movements and to end feudal
relations in land. That these reforms were not meant to weaken modern
property rights was spelt out by T. T. Krishnamachari in a letter to Nehru
during discussions on the Fourth Amendment later in 1954—‘We have to
move to the left on agricultural land, but moving left in industry will
prevent expansion’ (Cited in Austin, 1999:104). This amendment was thus
about bringing about a modern, individualist, capitalist regime of property.
However, in one of the many instances of internal tension in the
Constitution, the Fifth Schedule protects collective ownership of tribal
lands. The Fifth Schedule has been reanimated in the twenty-first century
by the Pathalgadi movement of tribals invoking it to resist state takeover of
their lands to hand over to corporates.
c) Clause c was added to Article 19, by which government could limit
freedom of speech ‘in the interests of the security of the state.’ This was a
wider formulation than the earlier ‘overthrow of the state’. Nehru
repeatedly laid stress on two factors necessitating greater curbs on freedom
of speech. First, the ‘moral problem’ posed by irresponsible journalism. The
second, ‘great peril and danger to the state’, for which the context is
Telangana, where the armed peasant insurrection led by the CPI was in full
force. An impeccably liberal argument opposing these restrictions was
made by the Hindu nationalist leader, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, perhaps
because the Hindu right was so thoroughly crushed and marginalized by the
Indian state at the time. But B. R. Ambedkar supported these restrictions on
the freedom of expression on entirely different grounds, neither immorality
nor the need to protect state security. Rather, he focused on ‘public order’
and ‘incitement to offence’, mentioning ‘concrete cases’—social boycott of
Scheduled Castes by caste Hindus in a particular village and the prevention
of a Scheduled Caste person from using a well.
The fundamental rights had already established that both individual and
community rights were protected. So another productive tension in the
Constitution that has often played out in courts is between the rights of
individuals and the rights of communities to their ‘culture’which could
discriminate against for instance, certain castes, and women. The rights of
communities are nevertheless protected in order to ensure against
majoritarianism.
The Indian Constitution, therefore, is not a simple seal of legitimacy on
ruling dispensations of caste, class. and gender. It is a document that
emerged from the acute conflicts and contestations in the anticolonial
struggle outside, and from the contentious debates inside the Constituent
Assembly. Its vision, therefore, was never singular. Rather, it became a
manifesto of a future state of affairs, a porous document with one foot in the
future, where the ethos of egalitarianism would be decisive.
96
NEHRUVIAN INDIA

Vinay Lal

Jawaharlal Nehru commenced his long stint as the first and, to this day, the
longest-serving prime minister of India in exhilarating and yet difficult and
unusual circumstances. His speech as the country’s chosen leader on 14–15
August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly famously spoke of India’s ‘tryst
with destiny’. It was a moment long wished for, but Nehru recognized that
the man whom he knew to be the principal architect of the freedom
struggle, Mohandas Gandhi, was not there to celebrate India’s
independence. Gandhi had lodged himself in Calcutta in an effort to bring
peace to the riot-torn city. The blood feud between India and Pakistan
would leave a long trail of dead and wounded, generate the world’s largest
flow of refugees, traumatize tens of millions of people, and even send the
two countries to war. Less than six months later, the Mahatma would be
felled by an assassin’s bullets, and the nation would be plunged into grief. If
the newly minted leader of a fledgling state had not enough on his hands in
trying to keep the country together and comfort the afflicted, he now had
the unenviable task of presiding over the funeral of a person who had
become a world historical figure and was being apotheosized as a modern-
day Buddha and Christ. It is said that, in the midst of the elaborate and
taxing preparations for the last rites to lay Gandhi to rest, Nehru, who was
habituated in seeking Gandhi’s advice at difficult moments, at one point
turned to some of the men around him and said, ‘Let us turn to Bapu and
seek his guidance.’
The task before Nehru was immense. The leaders of other colonized
nations had doubtless their own challenges, but the challenge before India
under Nehru was greater. Over 300 million Indians, living in half a million
villages, towns, and cities encompassed a staggering diversity—whether
with regard to religion, caste, the mother tongue, cultural inheritance, or
socio-economic standing. Most Indians, moreover, were desperately poor,
itself a damning indictment of two hundred years of unremittingly
exploitative rule of India, and to most witnesses and commentators the
political institutions that India inherited from the colonial ruler had
seemingly been designed for vastly different circumstances. There was
really no precedent in history for catapulting such a country into what the
Constitution of India, itself crafted over a year-long intense and at times
brilliant debate in the Constituent Assembly, called a modern ‘sovereign
democratic republic’. There was much else that was singular to India:
alongside undivided British India, there were 562 native states presided
over by hereditary rulers, and the vast majority of these states had willy-
nilly to be ‘absorbed’ into India. Students of Indian history have described
this process as the ‘integration of Indian states’, but it would not be
incorrect to say that the task before Nehru and the ruling Congress party
was yet greater—the consolidation of the idea of India as a modern nation-
state.
One might, in a more exhaustive survey of the nearly seventeen years
during which Nehru shepherded India into modernity and the global stage,
rightfully offer an inventory of his triumphs and failures. One cannot
underestimate, for instance, the enormity of the accomplishment
represented by the first general election held in India between 25 October
1951 and 21 February 1952. As a democratic exercise in universal
franchise, there was nothing in the world that approached its monumental
scale, all the more remarkable in that the traumas and wounds of Partition
were still everywhere present. Nearly 106 million people, or 45 per cent of
the electorate, cast their votes—and this in a country where the literacy rate
in 1951 was just over 18 per cent. The same exercise was carried out in
1957 and 1962, the last general election before Nehru’s death in May 1964,
and certainly the same cannot be said of almost any other country that went
through the process of decolonization. If this alone can be summoned as an
instance of Nehru’s propensity to observe democratic norms, it is
nonetheless also true that he imposed President’s rule on eight occasions,
and his dismissal of the elected communist government in 1959 led by
E.M.S. Namboodiripad in Kerala is often cited as the instance of his
inability to tolerate dissent.
One may go on in this vein, but it would be far more productive to
delineate, howsoever briefly, the idea and ethos of India under the
Nehruvian dispensation. India had inherited parliamentary institutions from
the British and, under Nehru, these institutions were further nurtured,
sometimes with an intent of making them more responsive to Indian
conditions and even reflecting an Indian ethos or sensitivity to the history of
social institutions in India. Democratic institutions, on the whole, showed
stability and maturity: the higher Indian courts displayed a capacity for
independent judgment, and the press largely exercised its freedoms without
hindrance. The Lok Sabha debates of that period show that, though the
Congress exercised an overwhelming majority in Parliament, the opposition
was no walk-over and Nehru and his ministers were often put to the test.
The office of the election commissioner was established before the first
general election to oversee the fair conduct of elections. The stability of
political institutions can be gauged by the fact that, unlike in neighbouring
Pakistan, or (say) in Indonesia which had acquired its independence from
Dutch rule, the military was prevented from exercising any influence over
the civilian government. In this respect, Nehru rigorously ensured, as any
democracy must do so, that the military would follow the civilian
authorities.
While India was not entirely free of communal disturbances during
Nehru’s period, after the Partition killings had subsided in the early part of
1948, Nehru’s own adherence to the idea that the minorities should feel safe
in India cannot be doubted. Most communal incidents were minor, and not
until 1961 can one speak of a fairly significant outburst of communal
violence in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, where the rise of a successful
Muslim entrepreneurial class generated some anxiety in the Hindu
community. Nehru’s own courage in trying to stem communal violence has
been widely documented, and the eminent American writer Norman
Cousins was among those who witnessed Nehru boldly intervening
personally to put a halt to communal altercation, sometimes placing himself
between rioters on the street. It may be argued that Nehru was
fundamentally committed to the idea of the dignity of each individual,
irrespective of caste, religion, sex, socioeconomic status, and so on. In this,
I daresay, he took his cue not merely from the liberal tradition but, more
importantly, from India’s numerous saintly traditions and the example of
Gandhi. The cynics and critics may argue that the rights of the untouchables
—as they were then known—barely advanced under Nehru, but such a view
is not sustained by a close study. It is, however, certainly the case that,
notwithstanding the constitutional safeguards offered to the Dalits, their
progress in being accepted as full members was far slower than envisioned
and hoped by B.R. Ambedkar himself. Indeed, India is far from having
made the progress in this matter that one could consider as even minimally
acceptable even today.
Speaking retrospectively, it also seems to be indisputably true that, in
addition to Nehru’s own belief in the inherent worth of each individual,
India was a more hospitable place under Nehru than it would be under his
successors. Nehru could be intolerant and authoritarian, as I have suggested
apropos of his dismissal of the Kerala government, but one must distinguish
between the political choices that he made on the one hand, and the culture
of tolerance and debate that was fostered in Nehruvian India on the other
hand. There was a serious investment in the cultural sphere, as manifested
for instance by the creation of various national academies of art, music,
dance, and literature, just as there was an effort to promote higher learning.
Nearly every account of Nehru references his determination to make India
modern, and even to turn India into a scientific powerhouse, and the
establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology—Kharagpur (1951),
Bombay (1958), Madras (1959), Kanpur (1959), and Delhi (1961)—is often
touted as his greatest achievement. Certainly, these original IITs remain
India’s most well-known form of cultural capital in the world of higher
learning today, besides some departments at a handful of universities such
as Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, though his
contribution in this respect must be measured in other terms, namely in his
endeavour to cultivate ‘the scientific temper’ among his countrymen and
women. The scholar Johannes Quack, in his study of Indian rationalism
‘and the criticism of religion in India’, has even termed Nehru a ‘rationalist’
but this is also misleading in that he retained throughout a sense of wonder
about India’s long tryst with traditions of spirituality and philosophical
explorations in the realm of transcendence.
The culture and ethos of hospitality to which I advert had other
dimensions, none more important than Nehru’s firm and resolute adherence
to the notion of secularism. It is increasingly being said that Nehru was too
Anglicized and ‘out of touch’ with the masses to understand the common
Indian’s allegedly unquenchable thirst for religion, but this argument is
preposterous just as it is insensitive to the fact that Nehruvian secularism
did not at all disavow the place of religion in Indian public life. Rather, such
secularism as Nehru embraced was rooted, not in the repudiation of
religion, but rather in the explicit disavowal of turning India into a Hindu
nation state or in appearing to convey the impression that the Hindus would
be given preference over the adherents of other religions in jobs, university
seats, and so on. It is for this reason that in 1951, on the occasion of the
inauguration of the newly reconstructed Somnath temple, Nehru was
appalled to hear that Rajendra Prasad, who as the president of India
represented all Indians and not merely Hindus, had accepted the invitation
to preside over the occasion.
Nehru’s unequivocal embrace of secularism is perhaps only the most
evident reason why in contemporary India he has increasingly come under
assault both from the ideologues of Hindu nationalism and the Indian
middle class. Some have even pronounced him anti-Hindu; others have
speculated on just exactly how he was able to establish an unusual rapport
with Gandhi who declared himself a believer in sanatan dharma even as he
retained an enduring faith in the equality of all religions. There is a
complicated story to be told, though not here, about the relationship of these
two men, and the more germane part of it is that they also differed widely
on the course that India might pursue in the radical transformation of Indian
society and the development of the nation. For long it was believed that
there was no place for Gandhi’s views in an India striving to be a modern
industrialized nation, and the middle-class declared itself relieved that the
country had been placed under the charge of someone who understood the
languages of science, technological prowess, and industrial growth;
however, over time the criticism of Nehru has mushroomed. As is well-
known, Nehru chose to emulate the Soviet Union at least in setting targets
for planned development articulated in Five-Year Plans. It has now become
fashionable to argue that the economic policies he advocated were an
unmitigated failure and he is mocked, to use a phrase of the economist
Krishna Raj from some decades ago, for keeping India tethered to the
‘Hindu rate of growth’. Whatever the merit of this criticism, what is
overlooked is the enormity of the challenge that lay before Nehru as he
ushered a desperately poor India which had been severely under-developed
under two centuries of British rule into a modern world sharply divided
between the haves and have-nots. It may certainly be conceded that, with
respect to such measures as the alleviation of poverty, increasing the rate of
literacy, and providing universal access to health care, the gains under
seventeen years of his administration were somewhat limited.
 In any consideration of India under Nehru, one must not be oblivious to
his conception of India in the world. Here, too, a contemporary assessment
of this question in India has become well-nigh impossible owing to the
relentless hostility towards Nehru both in the present Indian government
and in large swathes of the middle class who have been animated by the
notion that it is time to assert the prerogatives of Hindu India. The view that
is now being peddled by some is that India under Nehru was ‘irrelevant’ in
world politics, and there are apocryphal stories of the Indian prime minister
having foolishly abandoned a promised UN Security Council seat in favour
of the Chinese—who, on this view, returned the favour with an unprovoked
attack on India in November 1962 that mightily contributed to the heart
attack from which he died eighteen months later. What is, rather,
indisputably a fact is that, after Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948,
it was Nehru who was easily the public face of India to the world: no Indian
came remotely close to having the kind of influence that he wielded on the
public stage, and he did so not, as some would rather believe, merely
because he was Westernized, charming, learned, and in every way a suave
and even effete gentleman. Critics scoff at his many friendships with
leading intellectuals, writers, and even scientists around the world, viewing
them as part of his affect and his eagerness to cultivate an international
audience, but such friendships—with Albert Einstein, Paul and Essie
Robeson, and Langston Hughes, among others—are a testament to his
ecumenism and catholicity of thought.
To speak of India under Nehru, therefore, is also to speak of India’s
place in the world at the time. The very idea of what is today termed the
‘Global South’ was, in considerable measure, the outcome of Nehru’s keen
desire to cultivate relations with other countries that had been colonized, to
forge links of solidarity among coloured peoples, and to renew
conversations among the colonized that would not have to be routed
through the metropolitan capitals of the West. The 1955 Bandung
Conference of Asian and African countries, where Nehru had a prominent
role, was the most well-known manifestation of that worldview. It was also
the leading milestone in what was known as the Non-alignment Movement
of which Nehru was doubtless a principal architect. Nehru positioned India
during the Cold War as a country that would ally itself neither with the
United States nor with the Soviet Union, though, given the constraints that
geopolitics imposes, in actuality India often had to lean one way or the
other, and most often, or so the conventional opinion holds, leaned towards
the Soviet Union. His choice of non-alignment, it may be said, reflected his
Gandhian outlook and a decided preference for a third path or space in the
international sphere. If India was, on the whole, a much gentler place under
Nehru than it has been in recent decades, it may well have been because the
shadow of Gandhi was always there to remind Nehru of the imperative to
adhere to the ethical life even in the grim and grime-ridden world of
politics.
97
INDIA AND THE MAKING OF BANGLADESH

Srinath Raghavan

The emergence of an independent Bangladesh in 1971 was the most

significant geopolitical event in the subcontinent since its partition in 1947.
At one stroke, it led to the creation of a large and populous state in the
region and tilted the balance of power between India and Pakistan steeply in
favour of the former. The consequences of the 1971 crisis and war continue
to stalk contemporary South Asia. The Line of Control in Jammu and
Kashmir, the nuclearization of the subcontinent, the political travails of
Bangladesh—all can be traced back to those fateful months of 1971.
India played a vital role in the emergence of Bangladesh. Without the
Indian decision to support the Bangladesh liberation movement and
eventually to embark on a war, the outcome would have been rather more
protracted and perhaps different too. India’s decisive victory against
Pakistan has, unsurprisingly, led to a triumphalist historical narrative—one
that portrays the outcome both as retrospectively vindicating the superiority
of India’s secular nationalism against the ‘two-nation’ theory that created
Pakistan and as the consequence of clear-sighted and decisive strategic
leadership under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. There is a modicum of truth
in both claims, but it tends to be considerably overstated. In fact, India’s
policies, and choices in 1971 evolved more fitfully and in response to
unforeseen events. Emphasizing chance and contingency is not tantamount
to underplaying India’s crucial role. Rather it underscores how the creation
of Bangladesh was difficult and precarious historical process. There was
nothing inevitable about it.
The first general elections held in December 1970 resulted in a clear
majority for the East Pakistani party, Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman. This outcome was deeply unsettling to the military and political
classes of West Pakistan that had dominated the country since its creation.
The next three months saw a protracted attempt by them to block, if not
thwart, the political ascendance of the Awami League. Eventually, the
military regime used massive force to crush the Bengalis. The crackdown,
which began on 26 March 1971, led to the exodus of nearly 10 million
refugees to India by the end of that summer.
Before the crisis erupted, Indian decision-makers were divided in their
assessments of the situation in East Pakistan. While they welcomed the
Awami League’s electoral victory, they were apprehensive about this
morphing into a full-scale movement for independence. In December 1970,
both the Indian high commissioner to Pakistan and the foreign secretary, T.
N. Kaul, argued that India should do nothing to encourage the secession of
East Pakistan. An independent Bangladesh, they were concerned, might
actually kindle demands for a united Bengal that included West Bengal too.
The head of India’s external intelligence agency Research & Analysis
Wing, R. N. Kao, argued that Mujib would be hemmed in by popular
sentiment and had already sent feelers to India for support. Eventually, the
government decided to consider limited support to the Awami League, but
to wait and watch. The Pakistani crackdown actually came as a surprise to
New Delhi.
Popular legend has it that Indira Gandhi was keen to embark on an
immediate military operation but was counselled by the army chief, General
Manekshaw, to give time for preparation. In fact, the documents now
available clearly show that Mrs Gandhi and her principal secretary, P. N.
Haksar, were from the outset opposed to any hasty military action. Nor
were they willing to formally recognize the provisional government of
Bangladesh, which had been formed by the leaders of the Awami League
who had fled to India with the support of the R&AW. They were open to
providing limited military training and assistance to Bengali fighters but felt
that the key to the crisis lay in convincing the international community to
put pressure on Pakistan to take back the refugees.
Over the following months, India embarked on a major diplomatic
campaign. But the central problem was the unconditional support being
extended to the Pakistan military regime by the United States of America.
President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger,
were engaged in a secret outreach to communist China. This move was kept
under wraps from their own colleagues too. The Pakistani military dictator,
General Yahya Khan, was their secret conduit to Mao’s China. To preserve
this channel and subsequently to assure the Chinese that they would stand
by their friends and allies, Nixon and Kissinger deliberately turned a blind
eye to the massacres unleashed by the Pakistan army against the Bengalis.
Eventually, the new strategic nexus between Pakistan, China, and the
United States forced India to turn towards the Soviet Union. A treaty of
friendship was signed between New Delhi and Moscow in August 1971—a
move that was against India’s ostensibly non-aligned international position.
Contrary to popular memory in India, though, the Soviet Union did not give
unconditional support. In fact, when Mrs Gandhi decided in October 1971
that war was the only option left, she had to travel to Moscow for lengthy
meetings with the Soviet leadership and convince them that there was no
alternative. Only then did the Soviets come on board.
Over the following weeks, the Indian military began pushing deeper
into East Pakistan in support of actions by the Bengali freedom fighters.
This covert military intervention led the Pakistani military regime to attack
Indian airbases on 3 December, triggering the formal onset of the war. Even
at this stage, India’s strategic plans were limited. The Indian military plans
only envisaged capturing major towns near the borders, installing the
Bangladesh government there, and then carrying on a longer campaign to
pressure the Pakistan army to pull out of the country. But Indian military
successes came rather more rapidly than Mrs Gandhi or General
Manekshaw had imagined. At the same time, the United States dispatched
the Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal to coerce India to cease its military
offensive. Paradoxically, it ended up convincing the Indian leadership to
authorize the push towards Dhaka. On 16 December 1971, the Pakistan
army surrendered to the Indian forces. Bangladesh was a free country.
98
URBANISM IN INDIA

Narayani Gupta

In India ‘urbanization’—the increase in the ratio of urban to rural dwellers

—began from the 1930s, but there has been ‘urbanism’ (settlements with
urban features) for the past five millennia.

WRITING CITIES
The study of cities in terms of typologies by the German sociologist Max
Weber (The City was published posthumously in 1921) was followed in the
1920s by the Chicago sociologist Robert Park, who analysed the ethnic
composition of towns. In the 1950s the Australian archaeologist Gordon
Childe listed the criteria for ‘civilizations’. H. J. Dyos at the University of
Leicester used the term ‘urban history’ for a multidisciplinary approach to
the study of the histories of towns in a region or as individual studies. In
India a similar initiative was the formation of the Urban History
Association of India in 1978.
Despite the contribution of the social sciences to urban studies, there
continues to be a tendency to attribute values to towns, seeing them as
enterprising/visually striking/happy/aggressive, something not seen in other
aspects of history. Descriptions of cities in anthropomorphic terms appear in
texts as far apart in time as the Tamil Sangam poems of the third century ce
and the chronicles of Abul Fazl in the seventeenth century ce. A marked
change appears from mid-nineteenth century. Europeans describe Indian
towns as crowded, prone to disease, with the possibilities of protests and
violent behaviour—stereotypes transferred from fears generated by
industrializing towns of the West; these views were echoed by upper-class
Indians, since then the connection of ‘urban’ with ‘problems’ has become
common. A more recent development has been that towns are now seen not
as landscapes, but as real estate. In view of this, it is important to have a
sense of the history of towns, and to respect them as sites of democracy and
equity.
The raw material is to be found in various, sometimes unexpected,
caches. By contrast to revenue and agricultural history, where records are
systematically maintained, records for towns are scattered—censuses begin
only from the mid-nineteenth century, references to schools and hospitals
are minimal, literary and cultural material is rich but random, seldom
archived, maps were ‘classified’ (i.e. not available for scholars) till the
1990s, photographs are more of individuals than of places, streets and
buildings have been often demolished or altered. Literature has not been
sufficiently mined, nor have treatises on architecture, which have been
classified as Sanskrit texts. The significance of these and their timing have
not been discussed—from the seventh century ce the minimal principles
laid down in the Agni Purana are detailed in two traditions—the southern
(that of the ‘Asuras’) according to the architect Maya, and the northern (that
of the ‘Devas’) according to Vishwakarma. The latter is abundant, in many
redactions, till the thirteenth century, and in many languages (including a
shastra for building a mosque). The one scholar who used the parallel
volumes of the Shilpa Shastras to great effect was Stella Kramrisch, writing
her magisterial work on the Hindu temple.
Our history remains pigeonholed into ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, and
‘modern’, and the secondary material tends to follow the language of the
primary researchers—the early period townscapes are described in the
technical language of archaeologists, medievalists emphasize administrative
details (and surprisingly do not work on architectural clues enough), the
modernists again emphasize government, and occasions of political tension.

THE NARRATIVE
Most of today’s major ports, central places, and ‘sacred’ cities have a very
long history. Also, the regional variations have persisted over time because
these variations are caused by geography, which shapes routes. It must also
be borne in mind that the courses of rivers, and coastlines can change over a
long period, so that some busy ports have been swamped by the seas.
Rajasthan, Saurashtra, Kerala, Assam, and the Northeast have been
characterized by small city-states (many came into existence in the period
between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries) because the land is broken up
by hills and river-channels. Gujarat and Tamil Nadu have networks of small
and medium towns (from the medieval kingdoms through the sultanates and
Vijayanagara); the Ganga Valley is characterized by a few large cities
(Delhi, Agra, Allahabad, Patna, Munger) and many small ones, but not
medium towns; Bengal, shaped by its waterchannels, tends to have one
primate city (Tamralipti, Gaur, Murshidabad, or Kolkata), and many small
ones.
The story of towns till the first millennium ce is a fragmented one. So
far there is no evidence of links between the Harappa towns of Sindh and
Gujarat, and the Porunai sites near Madurai. The latter develop the mature
Sangam Tamil, describing a vibrant and hedonistic life, while the few
hieroglyphs of Harappa remain undeciphered. The small community in
Baluchistan speaking Brahui, a Dravidian language, is still a mystery. The
later Vedas give the names of a number of towns, but these are not backed
by archaeology, since the practice of using baked bricks had given way to
using sun-dried bricks. The early references to the Sapta–Sindhu (the seven
rivers of Afghanistan and Punjab) are supplemented by reference to the
Madhyamadesa (the middle country), as settlements moved along the trunk
road leading to the Ganga Plains (Uttara patha), and later bifurcated to
curve down to the southern route (Dakshina patha).
Terminology for towns became more varied. Initially the Vedas referred
to gramas (villages defined by communities more than sites), but when
Pāṇini (fourth century BCE) listed more than 500 towns, he referred to them
as nagaras (towns) and rajdhanis (capitals, which Buddhist texts called
mahanagaras). The points where a river was easy to ford, called a tirtha,
over time came to mean a sacred place, where a shrine was built. Towns
which became collection and distributing points for primary products and
crafts were called pattanam/patan. Smaller ones, as in the Rajputana desert,
were haats. Trade with West Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean, and with
Southeast Asia, with some breaks because of political exigencies, continued
through the millennia. Over-concentration on political history has meant
that the continuity of trade and the resultant prosperity of Indian merchants,
has not been sufficiently highlighted. In the second millennium ce the great
routes, from West Asia down the Indus, and from the dozens of ports on the
western coast, along the Ganga to its delta and then to Southeast Asia, made
India’s wealth legendary, and led to the desperate search for alternate routes
when the Red Sea link to Europe was snapped by the expansion of the
powerful Ottoman (Uthman) empire in the mid-fifteenth century.
India’s urban merchant guilds (in the Chola empire, in the nadus
(districts), and brahmadeyas (land gifted to Brahmins) in nagarams won the
right to collect taxes, similar to European guilds in later centuries. The
towns had sections demarcated for people and institutions performing
different functions, but were clearly multi-functional (‘mixed-use’ in
today’s terminology)—with a temple complex, the palace, markets,
craftsmen’s quarters, a city centre, water channels, and often a city wall.
Around the beginning of the second millennium ce, the use of stone created
monumental architecture—palaces and temples, public works like dams and
bridges. Technological knowledge was shared freely, and with the migration
of people from West Asia in North India, hydrology was developed—with
Persian wells, kanaats, and canals, all helping sustain larger urban
populations. New areas came under cultivation with the grants called
madad-e-maash lands. The prosperity of the towns came with a price. They
became objects of greed, and repeatedly, from the twelfth century to the
nineteenth, cities were plundered for territory or material wealth. But the
setbacks were never for long. The towns recovered fast. There were fierce
battles between different Rajput states, between Turks and Afghans,
between Vijayanagara and the Bahmani sultanate, between Cholas and
Pallavas, the Persian and the Mughal–Maratha army, between the
Portuguese and Dutch merchants in their fortified enclaves; followed by the
English and the Dutch, then the French and the English Company. Forts
were destroyed, but precious objects were salvaged as ‘loot’. The hardier
objects found their way to European museums, documents and paintings for
most part did not survive.
In the interstices, when peace prevailed, the courts were generous and
competitive patrons of the arts. What is labelled ‘classical’ music and
dance, and literature, were able to thrive; as the central authority of the
Mughals waned in the eighteenth century, the regional courts encouraged
the development of local languages, while the cities of the Mughals were
united by Urdu, essentially urban in its themes and metaphors.
The political map of India was frozen after 1858, when the British
Crown, backed by accurate cartography, defined its provinces, and
promised not to take over any independent kingdoms. This continued till
1947. Each state had its capital, and British India had its provincial capitals,
and district towns (with their lineage going back to the Mughal subas and to
Chola nadus). A permanent network of cantonments and of ‘civil lines’ was
set up. Cities, British–Indian and Indian, remodelled their towns to
incorporate some features of British towns such as railway stations,
townhalls, universities, libraries and museums, public parks, while putting
older secular buildings to use as offices or as showpiece—‘monuments’. As
public places, these supplemented the street bazaars, places of worship, or
cult centres. The dwellings continued in the patterns developed over
centuries, as dense mohallas and autonomous havelis in North India, a
pattern similar to towns in West Asia, and spread-out homes reminiscent of
the vastu principles, in South India; Kerala’s landscape was an exception,
because here town and village were a continuum, not distinct categories.
The railways, criss-crossing the Peninsula from the 1860s, were
primarily prompted by needs of overseas commerce and of security. But
they have been a continuous factor in promoting long-distance migration in
search of employment, linking impoverished areas to cities, where
unfamiliarity with the local language or with specific skills was no
deterrent. It also made possible all-India conferences, which were needed
before all-Indian nationalism could become a realistic objective.
Like the last glow before the candle sputters was the government’s
decision to crown the empire with a brand-new capital. Calcutta, which had
grown out of a ‘factory’ established in the seventeenth century, was to be
replaced with an addition to Delhi, a major city from the thirteenth century.
World War I delayed its completion, but when inaugurated in 1929, it joined
the capitals’ club of Canberra, Ottawa, and Johannesburg, and to some
degree surpassed them in grandeur. Following the sovereign’s initiative, the
princes in India also built new palace complexes in the 1920s. The cities of
India from the 1930s became spectacle as well as sites of resistance, as the
nationalist movement gathered pace.
In the West, the increasing population in towns led to a multi-pronged
movement for ‘improvement’, with a strong belief in the efficacy of town
planning. A generation later, this was adopted in India—first through city
improvement trusts, then through departments of ‘Town and Country
Planning’. In the 1950s, the ‘Country’ part of the name (inspired by Patrick
Geddes) was dropped, the ideology shifted from British to American, and
the template was something not in the Indian idiom, to divide the city into
‘zones’, which hastened the use of motorcars at a frenetic pace. ‘Mixed
land-use’ did continue, not officially but where people shaped their own
milieu. It is an irony that the Delhi Development Authority published its
master plan in 1962, a year after the publication of Jane Jacobs’ Death and
Life of Great American Cities, which had an urgent message not just for the
United States but for India too.
The word ‘urban’ is often found as an adjective for ‘problems’, many of
which are similar to those in other ‘developing’ countries. Undirected
immigration, ‘illegal’ building by both rich and poor, the absence of equity,
as well as ignoring the need to ensure the city’s aesthetic elements and
building mindlessly and monumentally, and lack of sensitivity for elements
that link us with the past are things which should concern all of us. It is
worth re-reading our literatures of the past to regain the sense of joy in our
pedestrian galis, in our small eateries, in an impromptu adda on a pavement,
the values implicit in the term ‘urbane’. The city must belong to the people.
99
IDENTITY POLITICS SINCE INDEPENDENCE

Aditya Nigam

Although our concern here is with ‘identity politics’ since Independence, a

little bit of history is necessary before that. This exercise becomes
indispensable because our very ways of being have been transformed in
fundamental ways by the interventions of colonial government. We think of
‘India’ today as a country of immense diversity of languages, cultures,
beliefs, and practices. This is not a knowledge one gains by simply living
and interacting in small, face-to-face communities—or as some scholars
have put it, ‘‘back-to-back’ communities, in the Indian context. We may get
some sense of such diversity from the accounts of travellers who have spent
time in different parts of India, with different kinds of communities, but
even those too give us, at best, only impressionistic pictures. Our present
sense of the diverse ‘identities’ that constitute India is actually constituted
through censuses that were undertaken by the colonial government in order
to govern a subject population. Many scholars have shown that the censuses
did not simply ‘count’ the population, in accordance with some pre-existing
‘factual’ situation—for the very work of counting and classifying actually
produced new identities. This happened in two ways.
Firstly, it brought into being what Sudipta Kaviraj has called
‘enumerated’ communities, as distinct from the ‘fuzzy’ pre-modern
communities. If ‘fuzzy communities’ had no clear boundaries and people
could move contextually, from one identity to another, they were also
unconcerned about how many of them there were. ‘Enumerated’
communities were clearly demarcated, counted, and thus susceptible to
calculations of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’. Huge body of anthropological
research exists that shows that people, in non-modern or pre-modern
contexts, do not define themselves as either X or Y or Z but could
contextually identify themselves as speakers of a particular language,
members of a particular biradari or samaj (i.e. smaller caste groups), or
sometimes as belonging to a particular religion. This brings us to the second
way in which enumeration changed the situation. Actually, there were no
given communities that were to be simply quantified and tabulated: because
there were any number of them that did not identify themselves as either X
or Y, they had to be fitted into one category or the other, in order to be
counted. So communities were made one-dimensional via census
operations. What is more, since there weren’t any clear-cut definitions, the
very exercise of defining produced new entities.
As a result of these two changes, community identities became
available for political mobilization by elites in search of permanent
majorities by perversely deploying the democratic logic of majority rule. A
lot of politics, subsequently, came to revolve around mobilizations by
groups seeking ‘majority’ status or some other privilege by manipulating
responses regarding one’s religion or language in censuses. The case of
Hindu identity and Hindi language are pertinent cases to bear in mind,
where for instance, there was a massive campaign to see that Punjabi-
speaking Hindus write Hindi as their mother tongue during the 1951 and
1961 censuses.
It is worth emphasizing that despite over a century of such mobilization,
a survey by anthropologist K. Suresh Singh, as late as 1994, showed, there
were still over 400 communities that claimed more than one religious
identity. Overlaps in religious practices of communities recorded as
‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ had been noticed by colonial census takers from
the beginning, but such is the nature of the operation that boundary-making
in the name of counting had to go on.
Some of the big movements in the post-Independence period revolved
around the demand for the linguistic reorganization of states in the early to
mid-1950s. Movements like the Samyukta Maharashtra movement,
Vishalandhra, or the Aikya Keralam movements, led by broadly leftist and
democratic forces, expressed the democratic demands of the unification of
regional linguistic communities. The Samyukta Maharashtra movement
also led to violent conflict in the face of government procrastination that
ended in police firing leading to the death of 106 people. The Punjabi Suba
movement led by the Akali Dal, on the other hand, got vitiated because of
the communal divide and campaign for disowning Punjabi and declaring
Hindi as the mother tongue, first by the Arya Samaj and then by the Jan
Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha. By and large, however, these movements
aimed to advance the larger cause of ‘nation-building’ by also bringing into
being new states based on linguistic commonness and contiguity, as these
would also be more conducive to matters like providing education in the
mother tongue and also making more administrative sense.
Big problems emerged later, however, as the reorganization of states
was done without actually working out a commonly agreed way of sharing
of ‘natural resources’ like river waters between the erstwhile common
administrative entities. They became emotive mobilizational issues in the
context of the new electoral democratic system that came to replace earlier
colonial arrangements. Independent India was never able to work out an
alternative democratic grammar of sharing of common resources once
colonial arrangements were dismantled and they remain a challenge today.
Religion, especially the Hindu–Muslim conflict, has of course remained
a permanent fault line ever since colonial censuses solidified these identities
and gave them an all-India character. It remained a difficult problem
throughout the anticolonial struggle and the Partition at Independence,
rather than creating a closure, made it a permanent festering sore across the
subcontinent. A large body of in-depth work by scholars has underlined that
much of the imagination of the ‘virile, villainous Muslim’, out to
outnumber Hindus simply by reproducing in larger numbers and luring
Hindu women (e.g., ‘love jihad’) has continued from the late nineteenth
century to this day with no basis in facts. Neither data on polygamy nor
population growth, for instance, actually lend any credence to any of these
ideas.
Scholars have also pointed out that from the outset, the ‘communal’
problem was a way of displacing internal problems of the Hindu
community—that was only taking shape by displacing its endemic caste
conflict—on to the Muslim Other. Caste oppression has actually been the
most fundamental issue among Hindus and one can almost map the
correlation of the rise of a strident Hindu identity discourse whenever the
threats to upper-caste dominance emerge.
Upper-caste dominance, it needs to be emphasized, is not about the past
alone—nor does it reside only in villages. It is equally about continuing
upper caste domination in, and control of, modern institutions over seven
and a half decades of independence. The turning point in post-Independence
Indian politics actually comes with the onset of the 1980s and reaches a
crescendo in the beginning of the 1990s, when with the end of the
Emergency, we see the beginning of the end of Congress dominance. Not
only was the Janata Party (JP) that replaced it briefly for two years (1978–
1980) a combination of a number backward caste (Other Backward Classes
or OBCs) and socialist parties, it also opened a new chapter in post-
Independence history in this respect. Though the Jan Sangh (precursor to
the BJP) and other right-wing parties too were part of the JP, there were two
developments that were crucial to that moment. The JP had promised
implementation of the Kaka Kalelkar Commission report that had
recommended reservations for OBCs as well, in education and public
employment and was in cold storage since 1956. Massive resistance to its
implementation by the right-wing parties led to the constitution of the
Mandal Commission, which tabled its report in 1980. The JP government
fell soon after that and this report too went into cold storage for the next ten
years, till the then prime minister V. P. Singh implemented it in 1990. It was
also in 1978 that the Backward and Minority Communities Employees
Federation (BAMceF), precursor to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was
formed by Kanshi Ram. The articulation of a larger ‘Bahujan’ identity by
Kanshi Ram and the BSP, was a direct challenge to upper caste hegemony
and an attempt to draw sections other than Dalits into the fold of the new
movement.
The implementation of the Mandal Commission report stirred up the
apparently calm waters of Hindu society’s calm and civilized exterior, as
violent protests in defence of privilege and domination swept large parts of
the land. But the dice had been thrown and there was no going back.
Retaliation came in the form of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement—which
was also an attempt, not entirely unsuccessful, at mass mobilization of
lower-caste youth for the demolition of the Babri Masjid. On the one hand,
the decade of the 1990s became the decade of the unprecedented rise of
Dalit Bahujan politics in North India and also announced the arrival of an
all-India Dalit and Bahujan identity. On the other hand, it was also the
decade of the BJP and RSS’s more aggressive attempts to establish Hindu
unity by drawing OBCs and Dalits into their fold. That battle between these
two tendencies continues well into the third decade of the twenty-first
century.
Among other aspects of ‘identity politics’ in the post-Independence
period, the most important strand was that of sub-national movements for
autonomy—sometimes at the state level, sometimes at even smaller levels.
Some of these movements like the Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, and the
Jharkhand movements eventually managed to achieve independent
statehood, while others like Gorkhaland in West Bengal or Bodoland in
Assam managed to achieve different degrees of autonomy or semi-
autonomous government. Then there were the two big movements of the
1980s that could be called ‘separatist’ movements—in differing degrees—
like the Khalistan movement in Punjab and the Assam movements, which
was directed against those the movement described as ‘foreigners’. It has
been argued that some of these at least, were the consequence of over-
centralization of powers in the Indian state. This can certainly be said of
Punjab, where the demand for autonomy was raised by the Akali Dal in the
Anandpur Sahib Resolution (1973), which was simply dismissed as
‘separatist’ leading to the emergence of an actual separatist movement—the
Khalistan movement. The Assam movement has more complicated
genealogies going back to the colonial-era plantation economy, internal
migration for jobs, and subsequent redrawing of the administrative (Assam
from the erstwhile Bengal Presidency) and political boundaries (Partition,
making East Bengal another nation state) and the turning of entire
populations into ‘foreigners’. These are far more complicated issues than
can be dealt with in this brief note but it is worth keeping in mind that the
repeated emergence of what is called ‘identity politics’ is linked to the
failure of the nation to be—for all nations seek to establish themselves by
obliterating all difference, giving rise to more and more communities
wanting to take their destiny ‘in their own hands’.
100
PEOPLE’S MOVEMENTS SINCE INDEPENDENCE

Krishna Menon

Social movements provide a platform for people’s collectives to come

together assert their rights. Such movements could engage in various types
of collective action, from peaceful protest demonstrations to acts of political
violence, employing various dramatic and conventional methods of protest.
India has a rich and complex heritage of social movements of various kinds,
of which people’s movements hold a special place (Snow, 2019), this note
will focus on the people’s movements that have emerged in India as a result
of the intersections between global and national development agenda in the
post 1970s period.
Asef Bayat in his book on the urban poor in Iran identifies the 1970s as
a time when the urban poor begin to become more and more visible and
came to be seen by the state as villains of development rather than as
victims of a mal-development, only to be courted by the Islamic
Revolution. The urban poor were projected in a populist vein by the Islamic
revolutionaries as the true representatives of the traditional values
deploying the Quranic term of Mustazafin (people who are in chains to
poverty and oppression), only to be attacked and discarded when the
revolution succeeded in consolidating state power (Bayat, 1998).
The period of economic crisis and structural adjustment in the 1980s
and early 1990s was characterized by the weaking of historic labour and
other progressive movements across the globe. Populism, disjointed from
the earlier social movements devoid of grassroots collective action replaced
the erstwhile radical movements. Such movements were often pulled into
defending neoliberal restructuring of economies and societies.
Simultaneously in the 1980s, countries like India saw the neoliberal
development paradigm being challenged by people who were being ousted,
displaced, and dispossessed in aid of the new development projects.
 These stirrings resulted in new forms of social mobilization. The sway
of the older political parties and ideologies began to wean and large masses
of people in rural and tribal India, and later the urban poor, began to come
together in what has come to be described as people’s movements—central
to these movements is a mobilization of the most marginalized people who
have been dispossessed and displaced in the name of national development.
Many issue-based movements—sometimes known as ‘micro-
movements’ dot the democratic landscape of contemporary India. These
movements highlight the distinct yet interrelated experiences, challenges,
and strategies to deal with the coercive models of development. These
people’s movements have challenged different aspects of the ‘development’
paradigm in different ways and with varying intensity.
Some of the most well known and inspirational of these People’s
Movements are the Chipko Movement, Narmada Bachao Andolan,
Chattisgarh Mukti Morcha, Protect Silent Valley, and so on. These
movements advocated an alternative vision of society and politics by
maintaining a studious distance from the conventional political parties,
processes, and ideologies. Many of them drew inspiration from
environmental, feminist, anti-caste, and Gandhian struggles in India and
elsewhere.
A closer look at the Narmada Bachao Andolan and other similar
movements against large dams and other mega ‘development’ projects have
been spearheaded by people who have been displaced, dispossessed, and
drowned out (Ghosh, n.d.). Ghosh quotes Gayatri Spivak who urges us to
remember the ‘people who have not moved’—the indigenous peoples
whose lives are disrupted by their unwilling and coerced insertion into
global networks of coerced development. These projects are contingent
upon the creation of new administrative categories such as ‘oustees’ who
need to be resettled. They are sometimes described as ‘encroachers’ since
many traditional communities living by the river, or in the forests are unable
to furnish satisfactory documentation to establish their claims of
‘ownership’ (Modi, 2003).
With the introduction of the new economic policy in 1991, millions
were uprooted from villages, towns, and cities across India to make space
for Special Economic Zones (SEZ), private cities, high speed trains and
motorways, corporate mining, or nuclear projects. People’s movements in
India from the 1990s have championed the cause of such people. These
uprooted people are very often converted into cheap labour in the same
projects that uprooted them. Land became a key component, in both city
and countryside, to attract private sector investment. The state facilitates
this by framing new legalities. As part of the new development governance,
several NGOs and journalists engage in convincing the people of the
efficacy of private–public partnership projects (Trevor Ngwane, 2013).
The quest of the dispossessed and displaced peoples for a dignified,
just, and equitable life has led them to question the current development
paradigm—a paradigm that the state upholds with its coercive and
ideological might. This renders all dissenters and critics of the paradigm
‘anti-national’. Thus the development strategy of the state is weaponized to
arrest and hound leaders and activists who participate in the various
people’s movements.
The new paradigms of modernism came to be countered by the people’s
movements by positing alternatives drawn from local cultures and
knowledge. Thus people’s movements in India have initiated an
epistemological revolution along with a political revolution. The movement
against the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River, for instance,
energized the people of areas around the river in Madhya Pradesh and
adjoining areas, including garnering transnational support.
These people’s movements stemmed not only from criticism of
implementation strategies of various development projects but were critical
of the very notions of development that came to be imposed on large
sections of unwilling people who were not consulted. Such movements
resisted increasing commodification and monopolization of natural
resources like land, water, and forest resulting in unequal and exploitative
consequences.
This wide range of people’s movements in India have managed to
integrate democratic and human rights, equality, justice, and environmental
sustainability with the larger concept of development. Development has
come to be understood as a political process since each conception of
development upholds certain kinds of power distribution. Hence, the
people’s movements in India are fighting for more than land, water, or
forests, rather it is a fight for a democratic and just future for the peoples of
this land.
Many of these people’s movements have, over time, morphed and taken
on new forms and identities and have been a subject of great academic
curiosity and interest. Scholars have pointed out the takeover of these
movements by ‘outsiders’, NGOs, middle-class intellectuals, and so on. For
instance, the NBA has moved from being a local resistance by the Adivasis
to a broader inquiry into models of development and later of privatization
and globalization, while trying to retain a rather static and by now iconic
image of the initial stages of the movement.
People’s movements raise many important and long-term questions for
the future of politics in India. A group of thinkers represented by Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri favour such movements as they see these as being
the repository of democratic politics that dismiss top-down power
relationships and work through a multitude of social agents who collaborate
equally and directly through horizontal or rhizomatic networks, producing
autonomous ideas and programmes uninfluenced by conventional political
parties. They identify these as an innovation of democratic praxis initiated
by the biopolitical ‘multitude’ and expect them to usher in social and
political transformation. On the other side, political theorists such as
Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek offer a different thinking
on how to oppose and replace global dominance of neoliberal regimes.
Žižek, for instance, emphasizes the role of particular subjective
engagements in the socio-economic arena rather than the philosophers Giles
Deleuze or Felix Guattari inspired multitudes of people (Alexandros
Kioupikiolis, 2014; Piven, 1979).
It would be rather misplaced to celebrate all forms of resistance, for
instance, 2011 witnessed the massive ‘India against Corruption’ led by a
group of social activists who claimed to abjure political parties. Their
central demand was the enactment of legislations against corruption, while
remaining silent on the question of the nature of development. Interestingly,
some of the main participants of this movements subsequently joined
mainstream politics through political parties such as Bharatiya Janata Party,
Aam Aadmi Party, and so on.
However it would also be wrong to ignore the possibility of many of
these people’s movements creating a formidable platform for strong
democratic and liberatory struggles. This is the challenge—can such
movements, disparate as they might be, create a sociopolitical ethos that
fosters a commitment to justice, freedom, dignity, and equity (Guha, 2017)?
101
INDIA SINCE LIBERALIZATION

Kumar Ketkar

The year 1991 changed not only the Cold War history and geography, but
radically transformed the socio-ideological structure of the world and
uprooted the economic foundation that appeared to be polarized and yet
stable. The two ends of that polarization, ideological, political, and
economic were the United States of America and Soviet Union.
The capitalism led by the United States and the socialism of the USSR
were the broad contours of that divide. That delicate balance of power
crashed symbolically on 9 November 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and
then followed by the collapse and geopolitical disintegration of the Soviet
Union, on 25 December 25 1991. That led to creation of fifteen new
republics, thus changing the geography of Europe and Asia. We are
witnessing today in the Russia–Ukraine War the horrible result of that
disintegration.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the ‘anti-hero’ head of the USSR, passed away at
the age of ninety-one, mourned more by the West than by his own
countrymen. Most Russians felt that he was responsible for the ‘ruin’ that
has irreversibly changed the economic perspective of the world. The same
year 1991 had seen, right at the start of the year in January, the revolt and
unilateral declaration of independence by the Baltic states—Lithuania,
Estonia, and Latvia.
The era of liberalization, privatization, and globalization
(euphemistically known as the inflammable LPG!) emerged from the ruins
of that tectonic change. The curtains came down on the turbulent and
violent twentieth century, not on 31 December 2000 as it were, but in the
period 1989–91. Even India, radically changed, for good as well as bad,
from prior to 1991 to today’s roller coaster rides we are experiencing today.
The same year, 1991 saw the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait by the US air
force and later army, ostensible to liberate Kuwait, which had been taken
over by Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein. The US forces won the war and re-
established its hegemony over the Middle East, thereby controlling the
largest oil–gas resource in the region. The Gulf War also gave rise to a new
menace of fundamentalism and terrorism.
These two developments impacted India immensely. India had rupee–
rouble trade relations with the Soviet Union. The collapse of that country
and also its currency forced India to interact internationally, including the
new Soviet states, in dollars. India’s exports and imports from not only
USSR but the whole of Eastern Europe had to be redefined in price terms.
The West and the US declared themselves as the victors of the Cold War
and the argument that capitalism won over socialism gained currency.
Francis Fukuyama declared these developments as the ‘end of history’ and
others said that the world of ‘borderless markets’ was born.
Let us also not forget that the same year saw brutal murder of Rajiv
Gandhi. Rajiv represented the continuation of certain liberal legacy of
Jawaharlal Nehru, including the Fabian economy. With the death of Rajiv,
there was a change of guard in India. Narasimha Rao as prime minister and
Dr Manmohan Singh as finance minister. Both of them had a tough task on
their hands—to steer economy in the complex international order. The
public opinion, mainly of the intellectuals, media, and academics quickly
gave up the idea of Fabian welfarism and socialism. Thus the canvas for
liberalization, privatization, and globalization was set. India had the task of
integrating ideas of welfare and socio-economic justice along with the new
confidence of free warket World.
The liberalization transformed economies from a progressive social
egalitarian approach to individualistic consumerism. From consumerism to
hedonism was just a small step. What liberalization was supposed to
achieve? Mainly to remove the bureaucratic clutter and administrative
corruption and open up avenues for distribution of resources. Rajiv Gandhi
is often quoted to have said that of the 100 rupees sanctioned for the
welfare, only 15 rupees reach the presumed beneficiary. The rest 85 rupees
are gobbled up by the system, which includes corruption.
Economic liberalization was supposed to clear such bottlenecks for
achieving social and economic justice. The second objective was to liberate
the hidden enterprising spirit of the people and expand the micro, small, and
medium industry. This was supposed to help this sector to free them from
the oppressive control of the corporate monopoly business houses. Often
even the big public sector companies behaved in the same manner as
private corporations. That led to brazen exploitation of the small
businessmen. it was believed that liberalization would encourage the
initiatives of the craftsmen, small producers, the small and medium farmers
who wanted to diverse into related activities like animal husbandry, chicken
or fish farms, etc.
China’s liberalization policy achieved that which India could not. India
then got trapped in competition with China. But because of China’s
communist control, their government had better administration of the policy
of liberalization. India, on the other hand, instead of managing the
economy, promoted Hindu fundamentalism and promoted hatred to divide
the Hindu and Muslim communities. That further ruined the economic
management. The failure of liberalization is entirely because of the
government’s total mismanagement.
Sooner rather than later, the entire liberalization strategy was hijacked
by the big corporate sector. The clubbing of liberalization with privatization
—or rather the interpretation of the liberalization process as privatization or
denationalization—led to crony capitalism. In simple terms, crony
capitalism means using the political–bureaucratic ruling class to promote
big business. The idea of individual enterprising initiatives was thus
crushed. The public and private sector banks, instead of supporting the
MSME sector (Micro-Small-Medium Enterprise) started funding big
businesses.
The massive Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) of the banks have led the
banking industry close to bankruptcy, even as the profits of the corporates
are rising. No wonder the Sensex in stock market was rocketing up and up
even as the economy as a whole was degenerating. Inflation, fall in exports,
investment famine, closure of industrial units, rising prices, farmers’
suicides, even climate crisis are all related to this distortion of economy.
This distortion is not natural. It is a consequence of disastrous economic
policies and the opportunistic interpretation of the idea of liberalization.
However, the government understood one thing. Or rather the ruling
class calculated that if the degeneration of economy was allowed to
snowball, it can cause mass discontent. Therefore, it evolved a two-pronged
strategy. At one level, encourage crony capitalism to create illusion of
growth and provide substantive financial gains to the middle classes. If the
middle classes are kept in reasonably comfortable zones, then the
government need not worry about electoral defeats.
As a result, the sixth and seventh pay commission sanctions,
retrospective payment of dearness allowance, perks and facilities coupled
with easy bank loans for housing, for cars, and for various luxury items in
homes, for the education of children, for travels and tours and so on. The
huge shopping malls, IMAX theatres, fashionable clothing, beauty
pageants, and of course the newer and newer models of mobile phones with
multiple fancy aspects have brought about a kind of hedonistic wave of
sorts in the middle class.
The middle class is of course not a monolith. It has four identifiable
layers—i) The upper higher; ii) The higher middle; iii) The middle-middle;
and finally iv) the lower middle class. While the lower middle class does
come under pressure from the rising prices, closing of businesses, and huge
increases in educational fees and other expenses, this layer also has a large
segment of aspirational families, who hope and have illusions that the tide
is turning in their favour.
All said, these four classes have the demographic size of nearly 50
crores, that is more than one-third of the population. As a result this class
rises in support of the ruling alliances. Liberalization has led to both, the
actual benefits as well as great illusions. So the government, with the
support of the crony capitalism, has a clear base of 30 to 35 per cent of the
electorate. That is enough to get a clear majority in parliament and form the
government. The other two-thirds of the population can be neglected as
they do not belong to any identifiable economic class.
Today, it is this vast and substantially stable multilayered middle class
that has become a ‘new ruling class’, rather a sort of ‘crony ruling class’.
This class is a direct product of economic liberalization and the vacuum in
the ideological foundations.
The future, therefore, of the economies of the world and India is
uncertain.
AFTERWORD
BETWEEN THE NATION-STATE AND CIVILIZATION:
DIVERSITY AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY IN INDIA

Vinay Lal

I. THE NATION-STATE AND THE FLATTENING OF DIVERSITY

It is a characteristic and disturbing feature of our time, the time of what is

generally called modernity—even if, as some thinkers have it, we are still
not quite modern, while yet others were describing, as much as four
decades ago, the ‘postmodern condition’ in which we are immersed—that
the nation-state is the principal if not the only vehicle of the political
aspirations of people around the world. The nation-state itself sits at the
cusp of what might reasonably be described, as shall be seen shortly, as two
wholly contradictory impulses. The nation-state is thought by most scholars
to have its origins in the Peace of Westphalia, which brought to an end the
Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) that had erupted when Ferdinand II, the king
of Bohemia and soon to be crowned as the Holy Roman Emperor, sought to
impose Roman Catholic absolutism on all his domains and thereby
provoked a revolt among the Protestant nobles of Austria and Bohemia. By
the early 1630s, large areas of central, western, and northern Europe—
present-day France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands,
among other political entities—had been drawn into the conflict, which is
conventionally thought to have pitted Roman Catholicism against
Protestantism, more particularly Calvinism and Lutheranism. The various
ways in which the balance of power in Europe was radically altered at the
end of the conflict is not of concern to us, but what is called the Peace of
Westphalia—a province in Germany ravaged by long, drawn-out conflicts
—would birth the principle of ‘Westphalian sovereignty’ and the modern
nation-state system. As the master of realpolitik, the malignant Henry
Kissinger has explained, ‘The Westphalian peace reflected a practical
accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system
of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic
affairs…each state was assigned the attribute of sovereign power over its
territory. Each would acknowledge the domestic structures and religious
vocations of its fellow states and refrain from challenging their existence.’1
This rather unremarkable if not idealistic representation of the nation-
state system disguises far more than it reveals, and this is apart from the
consideration that imperial powers down to our times have scarcely ever
bothered to respect the sovereignty of other states. It is almost a truism to
aver that the principle of sovereignty, throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, was (to take a line from Hamlet) ‘honoured more in the
breach than in the observance.’ We may leave aside for another time the
argument, variously advanced by various European powers as they romped
through the world, obscenely fattening themselves on the natural resources,
mineral wealth, and labour of colonized peoples, that the territories they
annexed and ruled by fiat could barely be construed as ‘states’ and that they
were therefore in no manner bound to observe the protocols of law and
moral behaviour which to some extent bound them to respect the
sovereignty of European states. To take but one notorious illustration of the
doctrine of terra nullius, European cartographers, at least until the time of
the Berlin Conference (1884–85), where European powers sought to
legalize the ‘scramble for Africa’ and merrily carve up Africa amongst
themselves, routinely depicted much of Africa as uninhabited, empty, or
‘unclaimed’ land. Whatever the restoration of order wrought by ‘The Peace
of Westphalia’ in Europe, it was but a signal, and charter, for Europe to
unleash havoc elsewhere in the world, just as the ‘order’ imposed by the
Berlin Conference was a prelude to the genocides that the Europeans would
perpetrate in the Congo, German Southwest Africa, and wherever else on
the continent the Europeans had planted themselves. Time and again, as the
more recent history of the aftermath of World War II—followed in quick
order by the war in Korea, the restoration of French imperialism in
Vietnam, and the wholesale massacre of communists in Indonesia at the
behest of the Americans— illustrates only too well, the peace of Europe has
been an unmitigated disaster for everyone else. When Europe and the
United States have been at war, it has spelled misery for the rest of the
world—if only because the rest of the world is perforce dragged into these
wars; but when they are at peace, it is still bad for the rest of the world:
truly, as the Roman historian Tacitus would have it, and here he is
paraphrasing the Caledonian chief Galgacus, an enemy of Rome, ‘these
robbers of the world [the Romans], having by their universal plunder
exhausted the land they rifle the deep [oceans]. If the enemy be rich, they
are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion…. Alone among men
they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter,
plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude [desert]
and call it peace.’2
The nation-state has been the most potent of the many poisons that
Europe has shared with the world, not least of all India. What the banal
description of Westphalian sovereignty and the supposed ‘world order’
peddled by Kissinger and others of his ilk occludes is the brutal fact that the
nation-state has never been birthed except at the anvil of extreme violence.
The nation-state becomes one by bludgeoning its subjects—and they are
subjects before they become citizens—into obedience and compliance, by
railroading them into an acceptance of some common purpose, and by
forging a national identity to which everyone is expected to render their
homage—by paying reverence to the ‘national flag’, taking pride in the
‘national anthem’, and, of course, by the supreme sacrifice of shedding their
blood for the nation. The late Eugen Weber, in his masterful study, Peasants
into Frenchmen (1976), described in detail the process whereby France
became one whole entity and Paris in turn came to represent the essence of
French national identity. It is sometimes supposed that French national
identity was forged centuries ago, but Weber cogently argues that the ‘unity
of mind and feeling’ necessary to create a nation-state was barely present
even in the second half of the nineteenth century. Well over a quarter of the
population spoke not French but ‘the various languages, idioms, dialects,
and jargon of the French provinces’, and the people in rural areas, generally
farmers, peasants, and labourers, were viewed by the genteel folks in the
cities as ‘vulgar, hardly civilized, their nature meek but mild’; it would take
roads, trains, and schools to shape them into a singular people, into
Frenchmen and Frenchwomen.3
The burden of Weber’s argument is to establish the indubitable fact that
the nation-state is the motor of homogeneity—a homogeneity wrought in
the face of, to use his words, an ‘inescapable’ reality: ‘And the reality was
diversity.’4 Thus, while ‘towns were becoming more alike, country people
continued to show a remarkable diversity from one region to another and
even from one province to the next’,5 and similarly the linguistic
homogenization sought by the mandarins in bureaucratic-minded Paris,
such that France might become French-speaking, continued to elicit
resistance from the provinces almost into the beginning of the twentieth
century. Had the Jacobins themselves not delineated that the universalism of
the revolution would brook no particularisms: ‘Reaction speaks Bas-Breton
[lower Brittany]’, they had hissed, ‘The unity of the Republic demands the
unity of speech. …Speech must be one, like the Republic.’6 Weber
describes how ‘French marched through the Breton peninsula, moving
slowly but surely along the highways, then the railways’, and it would
remain for schools, and that infernal object called the textbook, to drill into
students the idea that the ‘fatherland is not your village, your province, it is
all of France. The fatherland is like a great family.’7 What was true of
France was true of every other European state: the process may have been
centuries in the making in England, where, as the brilliant historical
sociologists Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer argued in a seminal book in
1985, the tendencies towards centralization were present from early
medieval times,8 or they could have, as in Germany, been achieved with
remarkable alacrity in the aftermath of the German unification in 1871 even
as the steps for such unification were beginning to be taken by Otto von
Bismarck, the Prussian Prime Minister, in the early 1860s.
If the nation-state was everywhere achieved through homogenization,
through a brutal flattening of diversity, it is remarkable that in the imaginary
of the modern, the nation-state, the modular form of imagining the political
community, is today viewed as the purveyor of diversity. There are
immense problems at hand for those who dream of a just and equitable
society: they turn to the state in the hope and expectation that it will be the
guarantor of rights, indeed of a rapidly expanding universe of rights, many
of them arising in turn from an increasingly widening conception of
diversity, but it is also a fact that in many countries the state itself is the
most egregious violator of rights and the greatest purveyor of violence. We
cannot have enough of ‘diversity’: poets, writers, activists, policy makers,
social workers, educators, and many others celebrate it, and politicians sing
paeans to it—even those who, judging from their actions, are
constitutionally averse to diversity and have created the conditions, in
whatever country over which they preside or which they help to run, that
are conducive to its elimination. Even authoritarian leaders, as I had
occasion to write over two decades ago, are now required to undergo
diversity training, much as corporate honchos and business executives must
of necessity trade in the language of ‘corporate social responsibility’. It
would surely be difficult, and even ethically irresponsible, to argue that
diversity should not encompass the recognition of, and genuine care for,
those who in whatever fashion—whether on account of their class, gender,
religious affiliation, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, caste, age, physical
appearance, mental or physical disability, and often political disposition—
may be termed subaltern, and who encounter outright discrimination or
social opprobrium.
However, the onset of the nation-state, which coincided with European
expansion around the world, the scientific revolution, the advent of social
theory in the West, and the Enlightenment idea that the natural and social
worlds could be mapped, dissected, and categorized in their minutest
details, produced another and far more insidious form of the flattening of
diversity—a flattening of knowledge systems. To this day, most of the
world has remained impervious to this form of flattening or homogenizing
of diversity which, unlike regnant notions of discrimination grounded in
procrustean conceptions of identity, cannot be legislated. More than
anything else, Europe carved out an empire of knowledge: in this empire,
the white man’s history would become the template for everyone’s history,
the white man’s neuroses and psychoses became everyone else’s neuroses
and psychoses, and the white man’s nation-state became the ideal form of
political community for people around the world. Aimé Cesaire, Albert
Memmi, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Edward Said, and Ashis Nandy are among
some of the more prominent intellectuals and scholars who would delineate
the particular contours of such a colonization. The ‘Orient’ or Africa that
was produced in consequence of the vast apparatus of knowledge, which by
the nineteenth century had been disciplined—thus the academic disciplines
—and branched out to specialists, often revealed little about the ‘Orient’ or
Africa as such and far more about the cultural and intellectual milieu that
had shaped the investigator. The supposition remained throughout that the
knowledge that was being produced was not merely for consumption by the
educated in the West, but for the ‘natives’ themselves. Europe, after all,
knew India far better than Indians could know themselves. Though this
premise is naturally no longer widely accepted, and is even deeply resented
(as indeed it should be), it is also the case that the social sciences as they are
practiced in India and much of the global South remain, in their
fundamentals, in a position of deep epistemological servitude to research
universities in the United States and Europe; moreover, in the forms in
which the findings of the social sciences permeate into the wider public
sphere, the epistemological framework that informs the social sciences in
the West has become the very framework through which the educated
middle classes everywhere make sense of the world. To this extent, the
present exercise suggests the immense challenge, which has been accepted
by many of the contributors to this volume, in thinking afresh about the
politics of diversity and history in India.
II. RELIGION AND THE CONTOURS OF DIVERSITY IN INDIA

It may be a form of hubris to believe, as many Indians do, that India is the
most diverse country in the world. The Australian Census of 2021, to take
one example, lists 8,12,728 people, from a total population of around 25
million, who self-identified as ‘indigenous’, that is as Aboriginal or Torres
Strait Islanders, and only 76,978 of these people reported speaking an
indigenous language at home; yet, remarkably, over 150 Aboriginal or
Torres Strait Islander languages were actively spoken in 2021, though
twenty-four of these languages had only 1–10 speakers and another fifty-
four had only 11–50 speakers.9 Papua New Guinea furnishes equally
striking and perhaps even more conclusive evidence of extraordinary
linguistic diversity: according to the scholarly source Ethnologue, this
country in the Pacific, comprised of the mainland and 600 offshore islands,
is home to 9.1 million people and a staggering 839 living indigenous
languages, twenty-three of which are used as languages of instruction in
school.10 The similarly prolific linguistic diversity of Indonesia, where over
700 living indigenous languages have been recorded,11 might be attributed
in part to the fact that the Indonesian archipelago consists of some 17,000
islands, and that many communities developed in isolation; at the same
time, what is now called Indonesia has been at the crossroads of cultural
exchange and trade for centuries, and this in turn contributed to linguistic
borrowing and mixing. India, of course, dwarfs Papua New Guinea and has
six times as many people as Indonesia. The 2011 Census of India mentions
19,500 ‘languages or dialects’ that are spoken in India as mother tongues,
but only 121 of these languages had speakers in excess of 10,000;
moreover, 96.71 per cent of the population reported speaking one of the
twenty-two scheduled languages, twenty of which are each spoken by at
least a million people.12
Still, even as these cases suggest that India is far from being unique in
exhibiting linguistic heterogeneity, there can be no disputing the fact that it
is apposite to think of India as among the linguistically most diverse
countries in the world; moreover, if one takes, as one must, a more
capacious view of diversity, there is a good case to be made for describing
India as almost sui generis. Four of the world’s major religions—Hinduism,
Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—originated in India. Islam has a had a
presence in India since the late seventh century CE and Muslims are by far
the largest minority in India. Undivided India was the largest home to
Muslims in the world and India still has the world’s third largest Muslim
population. India is said to have been introduced to Christianity by Thomas
the Apostle somewhere around 52 CE, just two few decades after the
crucifixion of Jesus, and there are nearly 30 million Christians in India
today. Statistics capture only part of the story, and in some respects the least
interesting part of it: though there are presently fewer than 3,000 Jews in
India, their numbers having dwindled from around 30,000 in the early
twentieth century, scholars of Judaism agree that the Jewish experience in
India represents a uniquely ecumenical and inspiring chapter in the global
history of the Jewish people.13 Even this small community was not singular,
characterized by notable differences between Cochin Jews, Baghdadi Jews,
Sephardic Jews, the Bene Israel, and lately Jews from Mizoram and
Manipur claiming to be among the ten lost tribes of Israel. Nor should one
forget the nearly 2,000 European Jews, largely from Poland, who found
refuge in India. One might speak in the same vein of the Parsis, or
Zoroastrians, a small minority whose impress can be felt everywhere in
Mumbai—a minority that, dare it be said, often moved around with the
confidence of a people in the majority. When it comes to a sociological
profile of India, no narrative is complete without the institution of caste:
with something like 25,000 castes and endogamous sub-castes, the country
presents a form of diversity that is all but opaque to the outsider—and
generally to most Indians as well. The Constitution of India, additionally,
designates over 700 different tribal (Adivasi) groups: the 1951 Census listed
over twenty-three tribal languages, each of which had over 1,00,000
speakers, with Santhali having as many as 2.8 million speakers,14 and over
200 tribal languages are still in use.
 All this still offers a very little understanding of the enormous
complexity and variance of registers in which the history of diversity in
India might be written. The papers assembled in this volume speak
persuasively, and often eloquently, to this point about the cultural,
linguistic, social, and religious heterogeneity that has been the hallmark of
the Indic world, and it would be invidious to highlight one or more papers
among the hundred odd contributions to this unique volume. Let me,
therefore, proceed with a few illustrations and observations of my own,
beginning with Indian Islam—if only to indicate that one must always be
wary of conflating India with Hinduism, or supposing that to speak of India
is preeminently, and always, to speak of Hindu India. Islam is thought to be
far more homogenous than Hinduism, though obviously both practitioners
of the religion and scholars recognize differences between Sunnis and
Shias. There are distinct Muslim communities, such as the Khojas and
Bohras, but historical and anthropological studies of Indian Muslim
communities convey a picture of still greater complexity. The present
liberal view, once we move past the commonly voiced thesis that all
religions have had their share of tolerance and intolerance, is more
favorably disposed toward the part of Islam that is accommodated under the
rubric of ‘Sufism’, and Sufi traditions in the Indian subcontinent are
recognized as extremely heterogenous. There are recent scholarly inquiries,
such as a scintillating study of the legend of Salar Masud, otherwise known
as Ghazi Miyan, which offer a palpable demonstration of the difficulties in
accommodating figures from the past into the framework of known
religious categories.15 A cult developed around Ghazi Miyan, alleged to be
a nephew of the Muslim invader Mahmud of Ghazni, by the thirteenth
century: much like his uncle, whose rapacious conduct has earned him the
undying hatred of many Hindus, the holy Muslim warrior is said to have
butchered hundreds of Hindus. Oddly enough, however, Ghazi Miyan is
also celebrated as a protector of cows whose veneration for the bovine
creature cost him his very own life, and his dargah (mausoleum) attracts as
many Hindus as Muslims.
Ghazi Miyan’s story is far from being anomalous; indeed, as the writer
M. Mujeeb documented in a remarkable study, not only is the world of
Indian Islam pluralistic but it interacted with the world of Hinduism in ways
that beggar the imagination. Throughout India, he found scholars and
administrators reporting many instances of Muslim communities where
there were ‘people of unimpeachable orthodoxy’, though ‘the beliefs of the
vast majority of the population were more or less tainted with credulity’.16
In the Purnea district, the line dividing the religious practices of ‘the lower-
class Hindus and Muslims was very faint indeed’, and prayers were offered
in every Muslim home in which the names of both Allah and Kali were
used; across the country, in Ahmednagar, the Baqar Qasabs and Pinjaris
‘still worshipped Hindu gods and had their idols in their houses, while in
nearby Bijapur ‘the Baghans (gardeners), Kanjars, poulterers, rope-makers,
pindhras, and grass-cutters, while professing to be Muslim, had such strong
leanings towards Hindus that they did not associate with other Muslims and
openly worshipped Hindu gods.’17 There is some literature on whether the
thousands of such instances are best understood as forms of acculturation,
religious hybridity, ecumenism, or syncretism,18 but the most germane point
is that, unlike the far more (rather hackneyed) and frequently cited
examples that draw upon the propensity of the Mughal emperors to take
Hindu princesses as their wives—examples that are often impervious to the
consideration that the most powerful in every society allow themselves
prerogatives that are generally unavailable to those belonging to the lower
strata—these illustrations point to shared forms of religiosity among
common people across religious communities.
As I argued some years ago, the colonial ethnographers, such as those
responsible for drawing up the huge series of district and state gazetteers,
‘went looking for difference’, intent on drawing up sharp lines of
demarcation and differentiating unequivocally between adherents of
different faiths, but everywhere—nowhere more so than in Gujarat, though
scarcely anyone could believe that today given the intense and even brutal
communalization of the state in our times—they stumbled upon
communities which described themselves as equally Hindu and Muslim and
whose religious practices filled the ethnographers with bewilderment and
sometimes abhorrence.19 One such community that they encountered in
Gujarat, which must have seemed to the ethnographers as akin to such
Hindu deities as Shiva in his form of Ardhnarisvara (half female, half male)
or Vishnu in his form of Narasimha (man-lion), were the ‘Husaini
Brahmans’ who called themselves ‘followers of the Atharva Veda’ but took
their ‘title from Husain, the grandson of the Prophet’: ‘The men dress like
Musalmans the women like Hindus.’ The ethnographer continues: ‘Except
that they wear the Hindu browmark tila [tilak], that they often give their
children Hindu names, that they do not circumcise, that a priest of their own
class marries them, and that their dead are buried sitting, their customs,
even to observing the Ramazan fast, are Muhammadan.’20 I suspect that
few orthodox Muslims would have construed the various ways in which the
Husaini Brahmins marked their distance from Islam—perhaps most
prominently, their failure to practice circumcision—as marginal to the faith,
though the ethnographer’s almost nonchalant attitude, indicated by the ease
with which the divergences are merely signified through the casual use of
the word ‘except’, seems to suggest otherwise. It is perhaps the
ethnographer’s own unease with the phenomenon to which he is witness
which makes him inclined to undermine the vitally important respects in
which the Husaini Brahmins, while having embraced some crucial aspects
of Islam, including the observance of the holy month of fasting, continued
to mark their observance of Hindu practices. It is of these Husaini Brahmins
that it has been said in the Punjab, where also they are found, ‘Wah Datt
Sultan, Hindu ka dharma, Musalman ka iman, adha Hindu adha Musalman’
(‘Well, Datt Sultan, declaring Hindu dharma but following Muslim practice,
half Hindu and half Muslim’).
From Islam, we may turn to the example of Hinduism. Though one can
dispute the characterization that in comparatively recent times has been
offered of Hinduism as an ‘invented religion’—and this is apart from the
question, which cannot be taken up here, whether ‘religion’ as it is
commonly understood is a category of Western thought, and just how
precisely Protestant Christianity became the template for a proper religion21
—there is no gainsaying the fact that Hindus never thought of themselves as
Hindus until, quite likely, the eighteenth century. Here, again, on so
complex and vexed a matter, it is not possible to entertain more than the
briefest discussion, but it is now understood that those who are termed
Hindus viewed and described themselves for centuries as Vaishnavas,
Saivites, Shaktos, Tantrics, and so on. There is no recorded use of the word
‘Hinduism’, first used by British colonial administrators, until around 200
some years ago, and even the word ‘Hindu’—thought to derive from the
Sanskrit ‘sindhu’, which in turn is a reference to the river Indus—was first
used by outsiders rather than by the people of India.22 As Christians,
British, and other European commentators writing on India were more than
well aware, given the bitter history of the Reformation and Counter-
Reformation, not to mention earlier histories of sectarian violence among
Christians in late antiquity, such as Constantine’s persecution of the Arians
in the fourth century CE, or later (1209–1229) the Albigensian (Cathar)
crusade led by Pope Innocent III against the gnostics, that the adherents of
Christianity came, so to speak, in many hues and colours. Christianity also
had, in its own fashion, much to show by way of diversity. Nevertheless,
what is striking in the colonial-era European commentaries on India is that
they remained dazzled, perplexed, and annoyed by the clearly
incomprehensible plurality of religious life in India: here was difference on
a magnitude that they could recognize even as it was incomprehensible.
British Orientalists, scholars, and commentators never tired of remarking,
often with palpable exasperation, on the 330 million gods and goddesses
that were thought to populate the Hindu pantheon—not that they had ever
conducted a census of the gods and compiled an inventory!23 The religious
literature of the Hindus was likewise a veritable jungle, much like the
country itself, swamped by hundreds if not thousands of religious texts—
and each of these seemed to exist in multiple versions. All this would birth
those quintessentially colonial projects, now inherited, often unthinkingly,
by scholars steeped in epistemological assumptions about the authorial
voice, the authoritative text, and much else: the quest for the ur-text, the
critical edition, and the desirability of order. Christians had their Bible,
Jews their Hebrew Bible, Muslims their Quran: why should not Hindus
have a singular text? I suspect that when Charles Wilkins translated the
Bhagavad Gita into English,24 a translation that received not merely the
patronage but the vividly expressed approbation of Governor-General
Warren Hastings whose epistolary remarks are still received with delight by
Hindus of liberal disposition who revel in the seeming validation of their
faith by the rational European mind, he did so not only because he
discerned similarities between Christ and Krishna, and between Christian
monotheism and the apparent ‘monotheism’ of Krishna’s teachings, but
because he both thought the Gita could suitably occupy the same place in
Hinduism that the New Testament did in Christianity and because he could
instill order in the highly diffused world of the Hindu faith. The jungle that
was Hinduism might yet be transformed into an English-like garden.
The city of Madurai is home to the glorious Meenakshi Amman temple
with its tens of thousands of sculptures and towering gopurams. A group of
Indian American students, keen on discovering their heritage and the
ancestral roots of their faith, whom I escorted to this temple some twenty
years ago gazed at this monument to Hinduism with awe and pride. Less
than ten kilometres away from the Meenakshi temple stands a ramshackle
structure known as Pandikoil or the Pandi Kovil temple dedicated to Pandi
Ayya, a local deity also known as Lord Pandi Muneeswaran. He is a
popular folk deity among working-class Tamilians: fifteen years ago, while
doing field work in Butterworth, a town in Penang state, Malaysia, where
Tamilians were brought as indentured labourers to work on rubber
plantations, I found a number of temples where Muneeswaran was the
reigning deity. Offerings to him from devotees often included alcohol and
tobacco. On the day of our visit to Pandikovil, which marks the spot where
a hundred some years ago Muneeswaran appeared in a dream to an old
woman by the name of Valliammai, and where his idol was found buried
deep into the ground, a number of people were cooking a chicken which
they had slaughtered on the spot in one corner of the temple; in the temple’s
courtyard, a number of women appeared to be tearing out chunks of their
hair and were swaying frenetically. The students recoiled at this sight; they
had no words to describe what they had seen: just what, they asked me, is
this phenomenon that we are witnessing and why have we been brought
here? The women are in a trance, I explained, adding that this was a chapter
in their education in Hinduism, to which they replied: this cannot be
Hinduism—for to them Hinduism was the Gita, the story as narrated by
Valmiki of Ram and the vanquishing of Ravana, the Shiva Lingam, the idea
of moksha, perhaps something called the ‘Vedas’, and the rituals that they
associated with temples in their neighborhoods. Not all of them were
vegetarians; but even those who were not were shocked to see meat being
cooked on the temple premises. This, too, I reiterated, is Hinduism.25
There is but no question that Hinduism is the most apposite religion just
as is the Indic world more broadly for the internet age. There is no diversity
without radical uncertainty, chaos, and diffused authority: there’s the rub
and there’s no getting away from it, even if the modern-day discourse of
diversity, which in turn is tethered to the bare fact of the nation-state,
exhibits no awareness of its own shallowness and its stage-managed texture.
As a highly decentralized faith, Hinduism can match the internet’s
playfulness: its proverbial ‘330 million’ gods and goddesses are a
resounding testimony to the intrinsically polycentric, polyphonic, and
polyvocal nature of the faith, and they find correspondence in the
worldwide web’s billion points of origin, intersection, and dispersal.
Hinduism, and the Indic world as a whole, has thus appeared to anticipate
many of the internet’s most characteristic features, from its lack of any
central regulatory authority and anarchism to its allegedly intrinsic spirit of
free inquiry and abhorrence of censorship. It is all the more astonishing,
then, the Euro-American world should today be lecturing the rest of the
world on multiculturalism and the virtues of diversity. The modern world—
and perhaps the nation-state system, to suggest an alternative chronology
which diverges from the Westphalian moment—began, one might say, with
the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula in 1492, the immediate
expulsion of Jews unless they agreed to convert to Roman Catholicism, and
the beginning of the long process of the expulsion of Muslims; but 1492
was also the year that Christopher Columbus, having persuaded Ferdinand
and Isabella to finance his Atlantic voyage, made landfall in the Caribbean
and so inaugurated the holocaust that would decimate the indigenous
populations of the Americas. England shipped off its convicts to Australia
and, much earlier, its religious dissenters to its colonies on the Atlantic
coast, and the European colonists and their descendants everywhere proved
far more than adept in exterminating indigenous populations.
Europe dumped its disempowered, dispossessed, and embittered people
on the colonies where they made a home for themselves by looting and
dispossessing the indigenous people when not booting them into extinction.
The implications should be clear enough: diversity and dissent were largely,
often utterly, alien to Europe, and whatever diversity European societies and
the settler colonies such as the United States and Australia can claim today
is as a consequence of deliberately and yet grudgingly tilling their soil with
multiculturalism. The formerly colonized use more striking language to
describe the colouring of Europe: it is the empire striking back. A
multiculturalism that has had to be fostered top-down, as a mandate of state
policy, was never quite the case in India: in common parlance, the diversity
was there on the ground and shaped the ethos of what would emerge as
‘Indian civilization’. The story, whether apocryphal or otherwise, that is
often told of the arrival of Zoroastrians—or, as in time they would come to
be known, Parsis (from Pars, Parsa, or Persis, the name by which the
Greeks described the people of Persia, the Iranian plateau)—in India in the
eighth century CE is suggestive of the wholly different climate of
‘multiculturalism’ that informed the Indian worldview. It is said that when
the local ruler of the Indian dominions in Gujarat, Jadi Rana, was told of
their arrival at his border, he presented the suppliants with a jug brimful of
milk to signify that his country was already over-populated and could not
accommodate more people. The Parsis, who fondly relate this story,26 say
that the Parsi priest who led the refugees added some sugar to the milk to
suggest that they would not only dissolve into the local population but
would sweeten the country with their very presence. It is rather fortuitous
that the Parsis arrived in India when they did: it was a country where,
though many words existed for the foreigner, some of which over time
would take on derogatory overtones, the ethos of hospitality still flourished.
The foreigner who comes to live in the midst of Indians today receives a
very different reception than did the Parsis a millennium ago.
III. THE INDIAN PAST AND THE TERRAIN OF HISTORY

If 1492 was the year that launched the age of European expansion,
adventurism, and the genocides that would lead for centuries to the
oppression of ‘coloured’ people around the world, it was also the year when
Europe initiated a new regime of epistemicide. On 16 January, the day after
Columbus met with Ferdinand and Isabella, Elio Antonio de Nebrija
published his grammar of the vernacular language, Castilian, in
Salamanca.27 Nebrija understood well how language could be deployed as a
tool of empire. His prologue outlines the nexus, mediated by colonization,
between language and power: when Isabella asked him what purpose his
grammar might serve, he says that the Bishop of Avila answered in his
stead: ‘Soon your Majesty will have placed her yoke upon many barbarians
who speak outlandish tongues. By this, your victory, these people shall
stand in a new need; the need for the laws the victor owes to the
vanquished, and the need for the language we shall bring with us.’28 His
grammar, Nebrija points out to Isabella, is calculated both to aid in the
conquest of territories abroad and the suppression of vulgar, unregulated,
and possibly rebellious speech at home. ‘This our language,’ he writes to
the Queen, ‘followed our soldiers whom we sent abroad to rule.’29
Colonialism was never only a matter of the acquisition of overseas
territories, economic exploitation, the imposition of ‘law and order’, and the
—to invoke the perennial metaphor—‘opening up’ of a country, where the
land was allegedly lying waste or unclaimed, to the blessings of civilization
and capitalism alike. There is no colonialism without the conquest of
knowledge: in every domain, the British in India sought a radical
transformation of the social terrain, the categories through which Indians
sought comprehension of the world, and the landscapes of the mind. It is
commonly understood, and I shall in the remaining part of this essay stay
with the example of the British in India and postcolonial India, that the
British bequeathed a great many of the institutions that became the bedrock
of the Republic of India. One can speak, in this vein, of the institutions of
parliamentary democracy, governance, and higher education—and, of
course, of entire legal codes, administrative modalities, and much else.
More crucially, however, after the last colonizer has left the shores of the
land, the structures of thought and even the structures of feeling remain.
Gandhi famously pronounced, a few days before his death, that the
‘Congress has won political freedom, but it has yet to win economic
freedom, social and moral freedom.’30 He could have added, though
unquestionably he had it in mind when he adverted to ‘moral freedom’,
intellectual freedom. He had laid out the conditions of such a freedom in
Hind Swaraj (1909), and every fibre of his being resonated with the idea of
a radical decolonization of knowledge. There was to be no swaraj without
the decolonization of the mind.
This present enterprise, the outlines of which Professor Ganesh Devy
has set out in his introduction to the volume, and to which the assembled
papers contribute in mighty measure, can be construed as one such attempt
at decolonization, offering a perspective—perforce partial and limited—on
the vast expanse of the Indian past and the country’s social, political,
religious, and intellectual history that is free of the taint of both colonial-
style Orientalist histories and the attempt by Hindu nationalists and
xenophobes to inscribe deliberately misleading, obscurantist, and often
fraudulent histories. ‘The genesis of this book’, Devy writes, ‘lies in the
contestation unfolding before us in recent years between the scientific view
of history and the ideologically charged attempts to distort the history of
South Asia.’ He adverts to a committee set up by the Ministry of Culture in
2016–17 that was charged with revisiting the ancient Indian past or, in the
terms framed for the committee, engaging in the ‘holistic study of [the]
origin and evolution of Indian cultures since 12,000 years before [the]
present and its [sic] interface with other cultures of the world.’31 The
twelve-member committee apparently did not get down to conducting any
business until January 2018, when it met to discuss ‘how to rewrite the
history of the nation’. It became clear enough that, in the first instance, the
committee was determined to establish decisively, as the ideologues of
Hindutva had been arguing for some decades, that the Aryans are
indigenous to India and that, as a corollary, essentially all the principal
developments in Indian civilization can be attributed to ‘the Brahminical
mind’ and the Sanskrit language as the principal fount of Indian culture.
The distinguished Indian historian, Romila Thapar, has put the matter
bluntly: ‘The intention of Hindutva history is to support the vision of its
founding fathers—Savarkar and Golwalkar—and to attribute the beginnings
of Indian history to what they called the indigenous Aryans. This
contradicts the existing archaeological and linguistic evidence of Indo-
Aryan speakers.’32
What may be described as the RSS view of history, which the Modi
government-appointed committee endorses and which this volume seeks to
contest authoritatively, extends of course to the entire Indian past, but the
essays in the first three parts of this volume, informed by a deep and
scientific understanding of the past aided by the study of ancient history,
genetics, archaeology, botany, linguistics, anthropology, demography, and a
number of other scholarly fields should certainly put to rest the notion that
the Aryans were indigenous to India.33 The country to which the Aryans
came in successive waves of migration was home to a literate and
sophisticated urban civilization, and the civilization that in turn emerged
was forged from this complex past and some degree, which cannot be
decisively established, of intermingling. If the Aryans came as ‘foreigners’,
wherein lies the difficulty in accepting that the Muslims too came as such
but, over time, Indianized themselves? The RSS view, as the writings of
their ideologues have made it all to clear, is insistent on viewing the Muslim
in India as a perpetual foreigner, one who can stay in India only at the
sufferance of the ‘indigenous Aryan’. The Hindutva attempt to establish the
Aryan foundation of Indian civilization is thus not only a dispute over
‘origins’, but an ideological intervention to determine who in the present
moment belongs to the nation and who must forever remain an outsider.
Where else in the world, except perhaps in al-Andalusia, did the interaction
of Islam with another culture yield anything like the syncretic or composite
Indo-Islamic culture that is embodied in the phrase, ‘Ganga-Jamuni
tehzeeb’? But the ideologues of Hindutva barely recognize this; they would
much rather, as the writer Saeed Naqvi has dramatized in a recent work of
considerable power, make the Muslim ‘vanish’.34
What the appointment of the ‘committee to rewrite history’
demonstrates, above all, is the fact that history has become the fundamental
terrain around which everything pivots in the Hindutva universe. Before
turning to this point for a brief elaboration, a number of related observations
seem to be in order. It must perforce be recognized, if only to highlight the
difficulty of the task before the contributors to this volume, that what Devy
has correctly identified as the ‘ideologically charged attempts’ to rewrite the
history of ‘South Asia’—this, too, is scarcely an innocent category, derived
as it is from the geopolitical reconfiguration of the world attempted by the
Americans in the wake of their overwhelming world dominance at the end
of the Second World War—are also seen by their proponents as inspired by
decolonization.35 To the very limited extent that one can speak of Hindutva
intellectuals, it is not insignificant that they all present themselves as
dedicated to freeing contemporary India from the shackles of colonial
thought. This is a clever hermeneutical ploy: it casts their detractors as neo-
colonialists possessed of what Hindutva’s contemporary ideologues call
‘the colonial mindset’. They speak of decolonization and decoloniality as
though they were the first persons to think of decolonizing history and
(though fewer still are those who can speak to this subject) the
epistemological frameworks of modern Western thought. The Indian prime
minister has, in recent years, been speaking about the ‘1200 years of
slavery’ from which India is now, with his ascendancy to power in 2014,
finally been liberated; indeed, in the RSS worldview which has informed
his thinking, and which may be surmised from remarks he tendered on 25
November 2022, the writing of Indian history has thus far merely promoted
the idea that Indians were sunk in ‘slavery’ and has overlooked the
‘countless stories of victory over tyranny during the long period of
repression.’ ‘Even after independence’, Modi went on to say, the history
that continued to be taught represented India only as a country sunk in
slavery.36
The ‘resurrection of the martial imaginary’, as I have described it in a
very recent study, itself has a long past, dating back to the late nineteenth
century when writers and later printmakers took it upon themselves to
reimagine the history of India through the lives of those figures who, it was
argued, had offered heroic resistance to foreign invaders—and especially
the marauding and despotic Muslim conquerors who swept through India
and eventually brought much of India under centuries of Muslim rule.37
There is nothing wholly unexceptional about this endeavor as such, and
nationalism elsewhere, too, has fallen prey to such tendencies, though the
argument advanced by RSS ideologues, beginning with Vinayak Savarkar
and his own attempts to invoke the martial pasts of Hindus in works on
Shivaji and the ‘first war of Indian independence’,38 resonates very much
with Hindus who have long harboured anxieties about the effeminacy
imputed to them by generations of British writers.39 But let us leave aside
these matters for a point of greater critical significance: there may be
something of a consensus across the ideological divide about the virtues of
anti-colonialism with regards to British rule in India, but under what
presumption should one construe the period beginning with the Ghaznavids
(c. 1000) and extending through the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) and the
Deccani sultanates to shortly after the death in 1707 of the last great
Mughal ruler, Aurangzeb, as similarly a period under which Indians
suffered under something akin to colonial servitude? The tripartite division
of the historical past into three periods—ancient, medieval, and modern—
was inherited from the British and has remained for the most part, if
increasingly being challenged as it should be, the cornerstone of most
historical scholarship on India. Most crucially, since Europe’s own
medieval age was construed by its own historians as Europe’s ‘dark ages’—
a period when Europe was wracked by religious warfare and immersed in
superstition and blind faith, severed from the learning of the Greeks, its
cities in the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule—European writers ipso
facto assumed that India’s own ‘medieval’ age was likewise the darkest
period of the Indian past. It required no great feat of the mind to draw the
connection between India’s ‘medieval’ age and Muslim rule. It meant little
to those who actively sought such a connection that the centuries-long
period during which India was under Muslim rule saw, for instance, the
flowering of most of India’s languages and the efflorescence across the
country of a devotional and yet resistant and at times even insurrectionary
literature which is unmatched for its luminescence, beauty, poetic majesty,
and ethical insights. Whether it is willful ignorance or malicious
obfuscation which inspires the RSS view, there is no doubting that the
Hindutva conception of the Indian past and of the enterprise of history alike
is dangerously impoverished.
 Let me, however, return to a very brief elaboration of the inescapable
problem to which I adverted before, namely the ascendancy of history in the
Indian imaginary in late colonial India and the unrivalled position it holds
for many middle-class Indians and particularly those, including people
serving in the present government, who advocate for Hindu nationalism. It
is a subject to which I devoted a book, The History of History: Politics and
Scholarship in Modern India (2003), two decades ago and I can only direct
the reader to it for a fuller exposition of the argument which will unfold
now in but a few words.40 It is not only that Hinduism is mainly a religion
of mythos rather than a religion of history: that is very much the case, and it
is scarcely anything that should disturb the Hindu who is cognizant of the
nature of his faith, though the middle class Hindu, smitten by the
attachment that the nation-state has to the idea of history, construes any
such argument as derisive of Hinduism and an admission that Hinduism
rests on an insecure foundation. Quite to the contrary, whatever
distinctiveness Hinduism has had derives largely from its status as a
religion of mythos. Yet the stronger argument, however, is that much of
Indian society has had, until relatively recent times, no use for history. This
is not to say that it has had no use for the past: history is but one way of
accessing the past, as is myth. The dispute over the Babri Masjid, which
nationalist and militant Hindus claimed as the Ramjanmasthan, the birth site
of Rama, and which they succeeded in destroying on 6 December 1992,
illustrates well the nature of the problem. Historians and archaeologists
came to the fore: some argued that the site bore evidence of a Hindu temple
that had evidently been destroyed, though many more disputed, with
doubtless more cogency and ‘scientific’ credibility, all such claims and
dismissed them as myth.41 The only certainty is that most of the Indian
public displayed indifference to both camps of historians. By far the most
creative response emanated from the hand of the philosopher Ramchandra
Gandhi, who eschewed altogether the language of history in his attempt to
find a way to recall the past in a language that resonates with Indians and
with the structures of feeling that have informed the Indian sensibility.42
Ashis Nandy, in a radical exposition of the colonization effected by the
modern turn to history, has explained that the ‘historical consciousness is
very nearly a totalizing one, for both the moderns and those aspiring to their
exalted status; once you own history, it also begins to own you.’43 It would
not be too much to say that history now owns Indians and has made them
strangers to themselves.
IV. STRANGERS TO OURSELVES AND THE DHARMA OF A PEOPLE

The problem of the ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’ has, in greater or lesser

measure, persisted in every part of the world for as long as there has been
recorded history. There are people who stay in one place, and there are
people who are on the move; and though there are countless ways in which
we divide people, such as liberals versus conservatives, rich versus the
poor, idealists versus realists, or, more interestingly, lumpers versus
splitters, one of the ways in which the world appears to us is as divided
between the moved and the unmoved. Increasingly, people are on the move
—either as immigrants, exiles, political refugees, climate refugees, nomads,
or as willful transients in a world where nothing is permanent except the
irrevocable certainty of death. Though we do not have comparable data for
the period before World War II, at least in the period since then the number
of people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes had, in mid-
2022, reached a record high. The UN High Commission for Refugees
(UNHCR) has placed the number at a staggering 103 million.44 Many
others have, of course, moved of their own accord. However, some readers
will surmise that I use the terms ‘moved’ and ‘unmoved’ metaphorically as
well: in a world of growing affluence, at a time when the middle class is
undoubtedly greater than it has ever been since the middle class first began
to emerge in England with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, many
people remain unmoved by the plight of the poor and refugees, as well as
the plight of our planet. The past, it is sometimes said, is a foreign country;
the poor, I would add, are foreigners to those who are more fortunate. It is
an ominous sign of our times that everywhere, and once again at a time
when we are supposedly ‘modern’, more educated in the aggregate than
ever before, partake of rights-talk, and have to a greater extent than in the
past left behind our prejudices, the foreigner, the immigrant, and the refugee
are being viewed with suspicion and often unabashed hostility.
The increasing tendency under the ruling dispensation to exclude wide
swathes of the country’s population from public life, participatory
citizenship, and the possibilities of enhancing their prospects in life is
particularly painful in India. It is a truism that there are no permanent
friends or enemies in a world grounded in realpolitik, and today China is
emerging, from the standpoint both of Indian foreign policy and the
country’s middle class, as India’s greatest enemy. Such a view suggests how
far the civilizational ethos has been replaced by the gaze of the nation-state,
occluding the long history of the links that bound the two countries
together.45 Similarly, though I can do little more than make the point at this
juncture, and hope that others will pursue this line of inquiry, India’s history
of links with east Africa, the Gulf, Southeast Asia, west and central Asia,
and Iran has also been obscured by its relatively more recent history of
‘encounters’ with the West. Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to China as an
honoured guest in the 1920s points to the various ways in which China
looked up to India, and that too at a time when India was under British rule,
as an ‘elder brother’ and as a fount of civilizational wisdom and
resilience.46 What Tagore had to say in one of his lectures to his Chinese
audience is not less remarkable: in trying to capture for his listeners what he
took to be the distinctiveness of India, Tagore pointed to what he called
dharma. Drawing upon his own experience, Tagore related to his audience
how, on a motoring trip in the Bengal countryside, the engine of the car in
which he was traveling heated up every now and then; and though there was
a drought in every village that he passed through, the villagers at every turn
readily parted with the little water that they had and refused to accept
payment. What made them do so, Tagore asks? Had they followed ‘the
inexorable law of demand and supply’, they could have made a tidy sum of
money; but to sell water would be ‘like asking them to sell their life.’ They
were impelled, one might say, by certain traditions of hospitality; and, yet,
there is more to it: they are driven by their dharma, and there is something
endearingly simple in their conception of dharma—‘but that simplicity is
the product of centuries of culture.’ Far away, at the other end of the
country, it is the same notion of dharma that made it possible for Masud
villagers, who had been bombed from the air by an English pilot, to shelter
and nurse to health the very same pilot when his plane caught fire and he
had to do a crash-landing which left him injured.47
I have already recounted, in the previous pages, a few instances of
Hindu–Muslim syncretism and made bold to venture forth the argument that
India’s experience with those who came from outside has been singularly
distinct. It would be superfluous to enumerate at length some more of these
more or less familiar instances, whether one has in mind the Indo-Islamic
synthesis that was so spectacularly on display at the court of the last nawab
of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah; the devotion to Saraswati of supremely gifted
musicians such as Ustad Bismillah Khan and Ustad Allauddin Khan who
remained devout Muslims; the cosmopolitanism of the largely forgotten
courts of the Deccan such as Ahmednagar and Bijapur which were centers
of political, economic, cultural, and intellectual exchange where Telugu,
Kannada, Persian, and Arabic were spoken and written; or a seventeenth
century Mewar Muslim artist’s luminous miniature paintings of every verse
of the Gita.48 It is, however, necessary to anticipate the obvious objection
that would be forthcoming from those who would like both to resist the idea
that India’s experience with the foreigner has been distinct and Tagore’s
conviction that the distinctiveness of the Indian ethos is best captured by the
idea of dharma. There have been many terms by which the foreigner,
especially Muslims—Turks, Mongols, Arabs, Afghans, Siddis or Africans
—have been designated in India, among them Yavanas, Turuskas, Tajikas,
Shakas, and mleccha. It is only later, however, that many of these terms
became associated with Muslims; as Romila Thapar notes, it is ‘striking
that initially none of these terms had a religious connotation.’49 It has not,
in any case, been the burden of my argument that relations between
different religious communities, not just Hindus and Muslims, but even
Vaishnavas in relation to Saivites, and Vaishnavas and Shaktas in relation to
Buddhists and Jains (or, in the language of scholars, the adherents of
Brahmanism in relation to the adherents of the various sramanic traditions),
were never conflictual or agonistic. Some would like to believe, to take one
of these examples, that what is called the ‘disappearance’ of Buddhism
from India can be attributed solely or at least largely to their persecution by
the Brahmins, but the scholarly work suggests a markedly more complex
interpretation in which the cunning tyranny and ruthlessness of the
Brahmins plays at best a little part.50
What is above all most germane to my argument is the unfortunate, not
to mention extremely disturbing, fact that the ‘foreigner’ has become, in the
political discourse of contemporary India, the lynchpin around which the
idea of India as a Hindu rashtra revolves. Since the present government
derides the testimony of foreign human rights organizations as malicious
propaganda directed at India and as a form of ‘colonial baggage’, let us
forgo what Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the European
Union, and other international entities have had to say about the precipitous
decline of human rights in India. At his trial on charges of sedition in 1922,
Gandhi offered a withering indictment of colonial rule: ‘No sophistry, no
jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in
many villages present to the naked eye.’51 Let us be equally clear that
nothing can controvert the evidence laid bare before the naked eye: the
lynching of Muslims, the outrages committed against African students, the
ostracism of Dalits and Muslims, the humiliations heaped upon the people
of northeast India, the designation of citizens of the country as ‘termites’
and ‘vermin’ by some of the highest officials in the land, even the open
calls to genocide by some Hindu leaders—all this being done with utter
impunity and without the slightest remorse on the part of the perpetrators of
these crimes. But there are many other ways in which the Muslim can be
eviscerated, banished, made to vanish: entire chunks of the Muslim period
can be and have been slashed from school textbooks and the Mughals have
been made ‘to disappear’, though there are no mothers here to mourn their
missing progeny. ‘The Class VII [history] textbook’ authorized by the
Maharashtra State Education Board, one newspaper reports, ‘completely
expunges portions about the Mughals and the Muslim rulers before them
including Razia Sultana and Muhammad bin Tughluq’,52 and more recently,
in 2022, the textbooks for Classes 6–12 approved by the country’s premier
educational body, the National Council of Educational Research and
Training [NCERT], have been stripped of several pages, ‘including a two-
page table detailing milestones and achievements of Mughal emperors such
as Humayun, Shah Jahan, Babur, Akbar, Jahangir and Aurangzeb.’53 It is
childish if not churlish to eradicate wholesale Muslim names from buildings
and institutions, and confer Hindu names on cities founded by Muslim
rulers, but there is a different and one should say pathetic kind of sophistry
involved in partaking of the discourse that pits the ‘good Muslim’ against
the ‘bad Muslim’. What else can explain why a major thoroughfare in the
country’s capital long named after the emperor Aurangzeb, reviled by many
Hindus as an alleged enemy of their faith and destroyer of ‘thousands’ of
Hindu temples, has now been renamed after the former President A. P. J.
Abdul Kalam whose reported fondness for the Gita endeared him to many
Hindus. There is obviously more than one committee that has been
appointed to rewrite Indian history!
The advocates of a Hindu rashtra, the foot-soldiers whom they have
deployed on the streets and on the byways and alleyways of the internet,
and many in the middle-class who nurture a deep sense of grievance about
the 1,200 years (or more) of alleged servitude under which their ancestors
served, have been so busy in identifying, shaming, pounding, and
terrorizing those they imagine as foreigners or traitors amongst themselves
that they have become foreigners to themselves. They are incapable of
recognizing the dharma of their civilization. Mohandas Gandhi believed
himself to be a devout Hindu and openly characterized himself as an
adherent of the sanatan dharma, but he bequeathed to the country his far-
reaching understanding of the dharma of Indian civilization. In its
institutional form, it took the shape of an extraordinarily ecumenical prayer-
meeting with which he had started experimenting in South Africa and
which evolved into a call for inter-communal harmony the serenity of
which would be shattered willfully by his assassin on the evening of 30
January 1948; in the form of his own religious belief, Gandhi’s
understanding of the dharma of India entailed the notion that the Muslim
was incomplete without the recognition of the Hindu within him just as the
Hindu was incomplete without the recognition of the Muslim within him.
We remain strangers to ourselves unless we learn to tolerate if not cultivate
the otherness of the other in ourselves. I would like to think that the papers
in this volume make Indians aware of who they have been, where their
dharma has led them as a people and as the carriers of a certain
civilizational ethos, and the past that they must call to mind to keep their
ethical grounding and prevent the dharma of their very being from being
spirited away from them.
CONTRIBUTORS
Abhay Kumar is a writer, journalist, and activist based in Delhi. He writes in English, Urdu, and
Hindi. He has holds a doctorate from the Centre of Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
Delhi.
Aditya Nigam is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Society, Delhi.
Ajay Dandekar is the chairperson of the Center for Public Affairs and Critical Theory and a professor
at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi.
Akinori Uesugi is a professor at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Civilizations and Cultural
Resources, Kanazawa, Japan.
Amir Ali is an assistant professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
Andrew Ollett is an assistant professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisation,
University of Chicago, USA.
Anira Lepcha is an assistant professor at Sikkim University, Gangtok.
Anvita Abbi is a former professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
Aparna Kapadia is an assistant professor of history at Williams College in Williamstown,
Massachusetts, USA.
Arati Deshpande-Mukherjee is an assistant professor in the Department of Archaeology at Deccan
College, Pune.
Arupjyoti Saikia is a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.
Asha Sarangi is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
Bhukya Bhangya is a professor and the head of the Department of History at the Central University
of Hyderabad.
Bishnupriya Basak is an associate professor in the Department of Archaeology at the Calcutta
University.
Chetan Singh is a former professor of history at Himachal University, Shimla.
Devkumar Ahire is an associate professor in the Department of History at Savitribai Phule
University, Pune.
Dhirendra Datt Dangwal is a professor of history at Ambedkar University, Delhi.
Dorian Q. Fuller is a professor in the Institute of Archaeology at University College London,
London, UK.
G. N. Devy is the Obaid Siddiqi Chair Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata
Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore.
George Thadathil Fr. is the principal of Salesian College, Darjeeling.
Gwen Robbins Schug is a professor of biology at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA.
Hans Henrich Hock is a professor emeritus of linguistics and Sanskrit at the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, USA.
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath is the Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor in Telugu
Culture, Literature, and History in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at
Emory University, Atlanta, USA.
Hitendra Patel is a professor in the Department of History at the Rabindra Bharati University,
Kolkata.
Ines Županov is a permanent research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique in
Paris and is currently serving as the director of the Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud.
Jennifer Bates is a professor in the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Seoul National
University, South Korea.
K. Paddayya is an archaeologist, professor emeritus, and the former director of Deccan College,
Pune.
K. Rangan is a retired linguist and was formerly at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore.
Kesavan Veluthat is the former chairman of the Department of History at Mangalore University.
Currently, he is a visiting professor at the University of Hyderabad.
Krishna Menon is a professor of gender studies and is currently the dean of the School of Human
Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi.
Kumar Ketkar is a member of the Rajya Sabha and a former journalist.
Lata Deokar is a professor in the Department of Pali at Savitribai Phule University, Pune.
Madhav Deshpande is a professor of Sanskrit and Hindu studies in the Department of Asian
Languages and Cultures, with a joint appointment in the Department of Linguistics, at Michigan
University, USA.
Mahesh Deokar is a professor and the head of the Department of Pali and Prakrit at Savitribai Phule
University, Pune.
Manan Ahmed is an associate professor in the Department of History at Columbia University, New
York, USA.
Manjil Hazarika is an assistant professor in the Department of Archaeology at Cotton University,
Guwahati.
Manu Devadevan is an associate professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the
Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi.
Mayank Kumar is an associate professor of history at the School of Social Sciences, Indira Gandhi
National Open University, Delhi.
Meera Visvanathan is an associate professor in the Department of History at Shiv Nadar University,
Delhi.
Mohinder Singh is an assistant professor at the Centre for Comparative Politics & Political Theory,
School of International Studies, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
Mugdha Gadgil is an assistant professor in the Department of Sanskrit at Savitribai Phule University,
Pune.
Naina Dayal is an associate professor of history of St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi.
Narayani Gupta is a historian and former professor at Indraprastha College, University of Delhi.
Nishikant Kolge is an associate professor of history at the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, Delhi.
Nivedita Menon is a professor of political thought at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
Partha Pratim Majumder is a distinguished professor at the National Institute of Biomedical
Genomics, Kolkata.
Paul Dundas was until his death in April 2023, a senior lecturer in Sanskrit language and the head of
Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
Pradip Datta is a professor of politics and was the head of the Department of Political Science at the
University of Delhi and chairperson of the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory,
School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
Pradip Gokhale is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Savitribai Phule University, Pune.
Pritish Acharya is a reader in history at the National Council of Educational Research and Training
(NCERT) and is presently posted at the Regional Institute of Education, Bhubaneshwar, a constituent
of NCERT.
Rahul Kosambi is an assistant professor at the Maharashtra National Law University, Aurangabad.
Rahul Magar is an associate professor in the Department of History at Savitribai Phule University,
Pune.
Rajmohan Gandhi is a biographer, historian, and has been a research professor at the Center for
South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Rajan
Gurukkal is the vice-chairman of the Kerala State Higher Education Council, Thiruvananthapuram.
Rajesh Kochhar was Professor of Astrophysics, and Director, National Institute of Science,
Technology and Development Studies, New Delhi. An astrophysicist turned historian and sociologist
of science, he was the President of ‘Commission 41 on History of Astronomy’ of the International
Astronomical Union.
Rajkumar Hans is a former professor of history at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda.
Ravi Korisettar is a former professor of archaeology at Karnataka University, Dharwad.
Reyaz Ahmad is an independent researcher, translator and columnist. His interests lie in history,
theology, and minority studies.
Richard Maxwell Eaton is an eminent historian, currently working as a professor of history at the
University of Arizona. USA.
Rima Hooja is an archaeologist, historian, heritage consultant, and writer, currently working as a
consultant director at the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum, City Palace, Jaipur and the
managing trustee of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation.
Rinku Lamba is an associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive
Policy at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.
Rochelle Pinto is an independent researcher and author who focuses on nineteenth-century land
disputes in Goa and is a specialist in Goan history and society.
Salma Farooqui is a professor and the director of the H. K.Sherwani Centre for Deccan Studies,
Hyderabad.
Sarah Pierce Taylor is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, USA. Her
areas of research include religion, literature, and visual culture.
Satish Naik is a researcher and in-charge of the Palaeobotany Lab in the Department of Archaeology,
Deccan College, Pune.
Shivanand Kanavi is an adjunct faculty member at the National Institute of Advanced Studies,
Bangalore. He is a former business journalist.
Shraddha Kumbhojkar is a professor in the Department of History at the Savitribai Phule University,
Pune.
Shrikant Bahulkar was formerly at the Deccan College in Pune, the Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth in
Pune, and the Central University of Tibetan Studies (CUTS) in Sarnath. He is a senior fellow at the
Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies of Oxford University, UK.
Shyamrao Koreti is an associate professor and chairman of board of studies for history at Rashtrasant
Tukadoji Maharaj University, Nagpur.
Sridhar Vajapey is a genetic archaeologist.
Srinath Raghavan is a professor of history and international relations at the Ashoka University,
Sonepat.
Stalin Rajangam is academic, thinker, and public intellectual specializing in Tamil Studies.
Subhash Walimbe is a former professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Pune
University.
Sucheta Mahajan is a professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
Delhi.
Sudeshna Guha is a professor in the Department of History at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi.
Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. He is a
former member of the parliament of India.
Sunny Kumar is an assistant professor of history at Miranda House, University of Delhi.
T. K. Venkatasubramanian is a former professor of history at the University of Delhi.
Tanuja Kothiyal is a lecturer in history at the Government Girls PG College, Jhalawar, Rajasthan.
Thibaut d’Hubert is an associate professor at the Division of Humanities, South Asian Languages,
and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, USA.
Thomas Trautmann is a historian, cultural anthropologist, and professor emeritus of History and
Anthropology at the University of Michigan, USA.
Tony Joseph is a journalist and former editor of Businessworld magazine. He is also the author of the
best-selling book Early Indians.
Tridip Suhrud is an eminent Gandhian scholar, writer, political scientist, cultural historian, and
translator from Gujarat. He is currently the provost and director of archives at CEPT University,
Ahmedabad.
Ujjayan Bhattacharya is a professor in the Department of History at Vidyasagar University, West
Bengal.
Urvashi Butalia is scholar, publisher, feminist activist, public intellectual, and founder of Zubaan, an
independent feminist publishing house based in Delhi.
V. J. Varghese is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Hyderabad
and a scholar-in-residence at the Kerala Council for Historical Research, Thiruvananthapuram.
V. N. Prabhakar is from the Archeological Survey of India. He is currently on deputation to the
Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar.
Vasundhara Jairath is a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.
Vinay Lal is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles,
USA.
 NOTES AND REFERENCES

Introduction
G. N. Devy

1. The scientists who co-authored the paper on the formation of human populations in South and
Central Asia included: Vagheesh M. Narasimhan, Nick Patterson, Priya Moorjani, Nadin
Rohland, Rebecca Bernardos, Swapan Mallick, Iosif Lazaridis, Nathan Nakatsuka, Iñigo Olalde,
Mark Lipson, Alexander M. Kim, Luca M. Olivieri, Alfredo Coppa, Massimo Vidale, James
Mallory, Vyacheslav Moiseyev, Egor Kitov, Janet Monge, Nicole Adamski, Neel Alex, Nasreen
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Boivin, Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Douglas J. Kennett, Michael Frachetti, Ron Pinhasi, David
Reich.
PART I: THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANS AND THEIR LIFE CONDITIONS

1. The Early Indian Population and Population Admixture

Partha Pratim Majumder

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2. The Oxygen Isotope Stages: Human Adaptations during the Last 200,000 Years
Ravi Korisettar

1. Oxygen Isotope Stages or Marine Isotope Stages are the alternate glacial-interglacial or cold and
dry-warm and humid climatic episodes reconstructed from marine sediment cores. They
represent the standard stratigraphic scale and are used to correlate Quarternary climatic
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modern human occupation and change at the Jwalapuram Locality 9 rockshelter’, Antiquity, 83,
2009, pp. 326–48.
5. Implications of Microlithic Industries of Late Pleistocene from Mahadebbera and Kana, Purulia
district, West Bengal’, Current Science, 107, 7, 2014, pp. 1167–71.
6. K. Akhilesh, S. Pappu, H. M. Rajapara, Y. Gunnell, A. D. Shukla, A. K. Singhvi, ‘Early Middle
Palaeolithic culture in India around 385-172 ka reframes out of Africa models’, Nature 554,
2018, pp. 97–101.
7. K. Paddayya, B. A. B. Blackwell, R. Jhaldiyal, M. D. Petraglia, S. Fevrier, A. R. Skinner, ‘Recent
findings on the Acheulain of the Hunsgi and Baichbal valleys, Karnataka, with special reference
to the Isampur excavation and its dating’, Current Science, 83, 2002, pp. 641–47.
8. M. C. Langley, N. Amano, O. Wedage, S. Deraniyagala, M. M. Pathmalal, N. Perera, N. Boivin,
M. D. Petraglia, and P. Roberts, ‘Bows and Arrows and Complex Symbolic Displays 48,000
Years Ago in the South Asian Tropics’, Science Advances, 2020.
9. M. D. Petraglia et al., ‘Middle Palaeolithic Assemblages from the Indian Subcontinent Before and
After the Toba Super-Eruption’, Science, 317, 2007, pp. 114–16.
10. M. D. Petraglia, C. Clarkson, N. Boivin, M. Haslam, R. Korisettar, G. Chaubey, P. Ditchfield, D.
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 Arnold, ‘Population increase and environmental deterioration correspond with microlithic
innovations in South Asia ca. 35,000 years ago’, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 106, 2009, pp. 12261–66.
11. M. D. Petraglia, R. Korisettar, M. Kasturi Bai, N. Boivin, J. Bora, C. Clarkson, K. Cunningham,
P. Ditchfield, D. Fuller, J. Hampson, M. Haslam, S. Jones, J. Koshy, P. Miracle, C.
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the Pleistocene and Holocene of South India: Recent investigations in the Kurnool District,
Andhra Pradesh’, Eurasian Prehistory, 6, 2009, pp. 119–66.
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Archaeological and Genetic Evidence for the Dispersal of Homo sapiens into the Indian
Subcontinent’, Beyond Stones and More Stones, 2017, pp. 117–49.
13. O. Wedage, A. Picin, J. Blinkhorn, K. Douka, S. Deraniyagala, N. Kourampas, N. Perera, I.
Simpson, N. Boivin, M. Petraglia, P. Roberts, ‘Microliths in the South Asian rainforest ~45-4
ka: New insights from Fa-Hien Lena Cave, Sri Lanka’, PLoS ONE, 14,10, 2019, e0222606.
14. P. Roberts, E. Delson, P. Miraclef, P. Ditchfield, R. G. Roberts, Z. Jacobs, J. Blinkhorn, R. L.
Ciochon, J. G. Fleagle, S. R. Frost, C. C. Gilbert, G. F. Gunnell, T. Harrison, R. Korisettar, and
M. D. Petraglia, ‘Continuity of mammalian fauna over the last 20000y in the Indian
subcontinent’, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 16, 2014, pp. 5848–53.
15. Picin, O. Wedage, J. Blinkhorn, N. Amano, S. Deraniyagala, N. Boivin, P. Roberts, and M. D.
Petraglia, ‘Homo sapiens Lithic Technology and Microlithization in the South Asian Rain Forest
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63–116.
20. R. Korisettar, ‘Towards Developing a Basin Model for Palaeolithic Settlement of the Indian
Subcontinent: Geodynamics, Monsoon Dynamics, Habitat Diversity and Dispersal Routes’, The
Evolution and History of Human Populations in South Asia: Interdisciplinary Studies in
Archaeology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistics and Genetics, edited by M. D. Petraglia and
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Subcontinent since At Least 45 Ka: Implications for the Dispersal of Modern Humans’ 2013,
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Pleistocene presence of Acheulian hominins in south India’, Science, 331, 2011, pp. 1596–99.
25. T. Smith, J. Koshy, P. Aravazhi, ‘Excavating Limestone Caves in India: The Billasurgam
Experience’, Beyond Stones and More Stones, pp. 310–22.

3. The Migrations that Shaped Indian Demography

Tony Joseph
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5. H. McColl et al., ‘The Prehistoric Peopling of Southeast Asia’, Science, 361, 2018, pp. 88–92.
6. I. Lazaridis et al., ‘Genomic Insights into the Origin of Farming in the Ancient Near East’, Nature,
536, 2016, pp. 419–424.
7. Onalde et al., ‘The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe’,
Nature, 555, 2018, pp. 190–96.
8. J. F. Jarrige, ‘Mehrgarh Neolithic’, paper presented at the International Seminar on First Farmers
in Global Perspective, Lucknow, 2006.
9. K. Akhilesh et al., ‘Early Middle Palaeolithic culture in India around 385-172 ka reframes out of
Africa models’, Nature, 554, 7690, 2018, pp. 97–101.
10. K. Westaway et al., ‘An Early Modern Human Presence in Sumatra 73,000 to 63,000 Years Ago’,
Nature, 548, 2017, pp. 322–25.
11. M. E. Allentoft, ‘Population Genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia’, Nature, 522, 2015, pp. 167–72.
12. M. Haslam, S. Oppenheimer, R. Korisettar, ‘Out of Africa, into South Asia: A Review of
Archaeological and Genetic Evidence for the Dispersal of Homo sapiens into the Indian
Subcontinent’, Beyond Stones and More Stones, pp. 117–49.
13. M. Lipson et al., ‘Ancient Genomes Document Multiple Waves of Migration in Southeast Asian
Prehistory’, Science, 361, 2018, pp. 92–95.
14. M. Silva et al., ‘A Genetic Chronology for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-biased
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15. M. Slatkin and Fernando Racimo, ‘Ancient DNA and Human History’, PNAS, 2016.
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Iranian Farmers’, Cell, 179, 2019, pp. 729–35.
21. Wolfgang Haak et al., ‘Massive Migration from the Steppe was a Source for Indo–European
Languages in Europe’, Nature, 522, 2015, pp. 207–11.

4. Rock Shelters and Caves: Prehistoric Settlements

Ravi Korisettar

1. C. Clarkson et al., ‘The oldest and longest enduring microlithic sequence in India: 35000 years of
modern human occupation and change at the Jwalapuram Locality 9 rockshelter’, Antiquity, 83,
2009, pp. 326–48.
2. M. D. Petraglia, R. Korisettar, M. Kasturi Bai, N. Boivin, J. Bora, C. Clarkson, K. Cunningham, P.
Ditchfield, D. Fuller, J. Hampson, M. Haslam, S. Jones, J. Koshy, P. Miracle, C. Oppenheimer,
R. Roberts, K. White, ‘Human occupation, adaptation and behavioral change in the Pleistocene
and Holocene of South India: Recent investigations in the Kurnool District, Andhra Pradesh’,
Eurasian Prehistory, 6, 2009, pp. 119–66.
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5. Microliths before the Holocene

Bishnupriya Basak

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Implications for the Dispersal of Modern Humans’, Plos One 8(7), 2013, pp. 1–14.

6. Post-glacial Climate Change and its Impact on Life: 18000 YBP to present
Gwen Robbins Schug
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19. U. Rad, ‘A 5000-Yr Record of Climate Change in Varved Sediments from the Oxygen Minimum
Zone off Pakistan Northeastern Arabian Sea’, Quaternary Research, 51, 1999, pp. 39–53.

7. Weather Patterns
Sridhar Vajapey

1. Carlson, ‘The Younger Dryas Climate Event’, The Encyclopedia of Quaternary Science, 3, 2013,
pp. 126–34.
2. Alan Buis Milankovitch, ‘(Orbital) Cycles and Their Role in Earth’s Climate’, NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, 27 February 2020.

8. Holocene Climate from the Perspective of South Asia

Dorian Q. Fuller

1. P. Dimri et al., ‘Monsoon in history and present’, Journal of Palaeosciences, 71(1), 2022, pp. 45–
74.
2. Ponton et al., ‘Holocene aridification of India’, Geophysical Research Letters, 39(3), 2012.
3. Q. Fuller and M. Charlene, ‘Agricultural origins and frontiers in the Indian Subcontinent: a current
synthesis’, in R. Korisettar (ed.), Beyond Stones and More Stones, Vol. 2, Domestication of the
Indian Subcontinent, Bangalore: The Mythic Society, 2018, pp. 15–94
4. Q. Fuller, ‘Agricultural origins and frontiers in South Asia: A Working Synthesis’, Journal of
World Prehistory, 20(1), 2006, pp. 1–86.
5. G. Larson et al., ‘Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies’, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 111(17), 2-14, pp. 6139–46.
6. J. J. García-Granero et al., ‘Millets and herders: the origins of plant cultivation in semiarid North
Gujarat (India)’, Current Anthropology, 57(2), 2016, pp. 149–73.
7. L. Giosan et al, ‘Neoglacial climate anomalies and the Harappan metamorphosis’, Climate of the
Past, 14, 2018, pp. 1669–86.
8. N. Riedel et al., ‘Monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in
peninsular India’, Scientific Reports, 11(1), 2021, pp. 1–13.
9. N. Roberts, The Holocene: An Environmental History, London: John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
10. S. L. Lewis and M. A. Maslin, ‘Defining the anthropocene’, Nature, 519(7542), 2015, pp. 171–
80.
11. V. S. Kale and V. R. Baker, ‘An extraordinary period of low-magnitude floods coinciding with
the Little Ice Age: palaeoflood evidence from Central and Western India’, Journal of Geological
Society of India, 68(3), 2006, p. 477.

PART II: FOUNDATIONS, EMERGENCE, AND THE DECLINE OF CIVILIZATION

10. Primeval Hunter–Gatherer Societies of India
K. Paddayya

1. Taphonomy is the study of how organisms decay and become fossilized or preserved in the
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3. The author is grateful to the authorities of the Deccan College for providing all necessary facilities
to carry out this study. He is indebted to Prof. K. Paddayya for his continuous encouragement
and invaluable suggestions. He is also grateful to Prof. Ganesh Devy for inviting him to write a
paper on domestication of plants.
4. A. Shryock and D. L. Smail (eds.), Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, Berkeley:
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of Hunting‒Gathering, Bengaluru: The Mythic Society, 2017.
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Indian Society’, Eastern Anthropologist, 57(1), 2004, pp. 1–30.

11. Domestication of Animals in India

Arati Deshpande-Mukherjee

1. At Bhirrana the earliest level has provided mean 14C age of 8.35± 0.14 ka YBP (8597 to 8171
YBP) making it the oldest IVC settlement.
2. A. Deshpande-Mukherjee and P. Goyal, ‘A Potential Early Cattle-Based Faunal Economy from the
Indus Valley Civilization Evidence from the Harappan Settlement of Bhirrana in Northern
India’, in E. Wright and C. Ginja (eds), Cattle and People: Interdisciplinary Approaches To An
Ancient Relationship, Columbus: Lockwood Press, 2022.
3. A. Deshpande-Mukherjee et al., ‘Faunal exploitations patterns during the Iron Age period in the
Vidarbha region of Maharashtra with special reference to Mahurjhari’, in K. K. Basa, Megalithic
Traditions in Archaeology, New Delhi: Aryan International Publications, New Delhi. pp. 426–
44.
4. A. Deshpande-Mukherjee et al., ‘Human Animal Interactions during the Harappan Period in the
Ghaggar Region of Northern India, Insights from Bhirrana’, in N. Marom et al. (eds.) Bones and
Identity: Zooarchaeological Approaches to Reconstructing Social and Cultural Landscapes in
Southwest Asia, Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2016, pp. 247– 64.
5. A. Deshpande-Mukherjee, ‘Further Insights into Harappan animal based subsistence from Recent
Faunal Studies in the Ghaggar region of Northern India’, Purattava, 40, 2010, pp 112–18.
6. A. Deshpande-Mukherjee, ‘Marine Shell Utilisation by the Chalcolithic Cultures of the Western
Deccan Region of India in Molluscs in their Former Environment’, London: Oxbow Books,
2005, pp.174–84.
7. K. Patel et al., ‘South Asian Contribution to Animal Domestication and Pastoralism: Bones, Genes
and Archaeology’, in U. Albarella et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Zooarchaeology,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp.280–304.
8. Sarkar et al., ‘Oxygen Isotopes in Archaeological Bioapatites from NW India: Implications to
Climate Change and Decline of Bronze Age Harappan Civilisation’, Nature Scientific Reports,
6, 2016.
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11. G. L. Badam, ‘Quaternary Vertebrate Paleontalogy in India’, in S. Settar and R. Korisettar (eds.),
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College, 1979.
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1988.
14. G. L. Possehl, The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective Lanham: Altamira Press,
2002.
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Pleistocene contexts of peninsular India and Sri Lanka’, Quaternary International, 192(1),
2008, pp. 20–42.
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Settar and R. Korisettar (eds), Protohistory Archaeology of the Harappan Civilization, Vol. 2,
Delhi: Manohar Publications, 2002, pp. 409–420.
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(ed), Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism and Predation, London: Unwin
Hyman, 1989, pp.108–12.
19. P. P. Joglekar et al., ‘Faunal Diversity during the Harappan Period in Haryana: A Review’,
Heritage: Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies in Archaeology, 1, 2013, pp. 262–87.
20. P. P. Joglekar, ‘A fresh appraisal of the animal based subsistence and domestic animals in Ganga
Plains’, Pragdhara, 18, 2008, pp. 309–21.
21. R. B. S. Sewell et al., ‘Zoological Remains’, J. N. Marshall (ed), Mohenjo-daro and the Indus
Civilisation: Being an O’ficial Account of Archaeological Excavations at Mohenjo-Daro
Carried out by the Government of India between the Years 1922 and 1927, London: Arthur
Probsthain, 1931, pp. 649–73.
22. R. Meadow, ‘Early Animal Domestication in South Asia: A First Report on the Faunal Remains
from Mehrgarh, Pakistan’, in H. Härtel (ed), South Asian Archaeology 1979: Papers from the
International Conference of the Association of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe,
Leiden: Brill Publishers, 1981, pp. 143–79.
23. T. Sengupta et al., ‘Did the Harappan settlement of Dholavira (India) collapse during the Onset of
Meghalayan stage drought?’ Journal of Quaternary Science, 2019, pp. 1–14.
24. V. Sathe and K. Padayya, ‘The faunal background of the stone age cultures of Hunsgi and
Baichbal valleys, southern Deccan, Bulletin of the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research
Institute, 72, 2013, pp. 79–97.

12. The Nomadic Pastoralists in Prehistory and Protohistory

Ajay Dandekar

1. A. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, Vol. 1994, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1984.
2. A. Rao and M. Casimir, Nomadism in South Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
3. L. S. Leshnik, ‘Pastoral Nomadism in the Archaeology of India and Pakistan’, World Archaeology,
4, 1972, pp. 150–66.
4. M. K. Dhavlikar, ‘Farming to Pastoralism: Effect of Climate Change in the Deccan’, In J. C.
Brock (ed), The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, 1989, pp. 156–66.
5. M. L. K. Murty and G. D. Sontheimer, ‘Prehistoric Background to Pastoralism in the Southern
Deccan in the Light of Oral Traditions and Cults of Some Pastoral Communities’, Anthropos,
73, 1980, pp. 163–83.
6. R. Heredia and S. Ratnagar, Mobile and the Marginalized Peoples: Perspectives from the Past,
New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 2003.
7. S. F. Ratnagar, ‘Pastoralists in the Prehistory of Baluchistan’, Studies in History, 7(2), pp. 181–93.

13. Domestication of Plants: Origins and Development of Agriculture

Satish Naik

1. D. Q. Fuller, ‘Fifty years of archaeobotanical studies in India: laying a solid foundation’, in S.

Settar and R. Korisettar (eds), Indian archaeology in retrospect, Archaeology and Interactive
Disciplines, Vol. 3, New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 2002, pp. 247–363.
2. D. Q. Fuller and E. L. Harvey, ‘The archaeobotany of Indian pulses: identification, processing and
evidence for cultivation’, Environmental Archaeology, 11, 2006, pp. 241–68.
3. D. Q. Fuller et al., ‘Dating the Neolithic of South India: new radiometric evidence for key
economic, social and ritual transformations’ Antiquity, 81, 2007, pp. 755–78.
4. D. Q. Fuller et al., ‘Early agricultural pathways: Moving outside the “core area” hypothesis in
Southwest Asia’, Journal of Experimental Botany, 63, 2012, pp. 617–33.
5. D. Q. Fuller, ‘Agricultural origins and frontiers in South Asia: a working synthesis’ Journal of
World Prehistory, 20, 2006, pp. 1–86.
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52(S4), 2011, pp. S347–S362.
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Institute of Archaeology Publications. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2008.
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Archaeobotanical Investigation, PhD dissertation, University College London, 2006.
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settlement of Mehrgarh’, Pragdhara, 18, 2008, pp. 167–78.
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Plants with a Discussion of the Historical and Evolutionary Development of Indian Agriculture
and Agricultural Systems in General’, in J. Renfrew (ed), New Light on Early Farming: Recent
Developments in Palaeoethnobotany, Edinburgh: University Press, 1991, pp. 155–90.
12. N. Boivin et al., ‘First farmers in South India: the role of internal processes and external
influences in the emergence and transformations of South India’s earliest settled societies’,
Pragdhara, 18, 2008, pp. 179–200.
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15. S. S. Naik and V. G. Sontakke, ‘Plant Economy from Early Iron Age site
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Man and Environment, XLIV(1), 2019, pp. 73–81.
17. S. S. Naik et al., ‘Palaeoethnobotanical Investigations at Kaundinyapura’, Heritage: Journal of
Multidisciplinary Studies in Archaeology, 2, 2014, pp. 201–11.
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of Agriculture in South India’, Man and Environment, XLVII(1), 2022, pp. 57–65.
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report submitted to M. S. University Vadodara, 2015.
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14. Prehistoric Agriculture
Ravi Korisettar

1. The Ahar–Banas culture is a Chalcolithic archaeological culture on the banks of Ahar River of
southeastern Rajasthan state in India, lasting from 3000 to 1500 BCE, contemporary and
adjacent to the Indus Valley Civilization.
2. Paul et al., ‘Holocene Climate Variability’, Quaternary Research, 64, 2004, pp. 243–55.
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More Stones, Bengaluru: The Mythic Society, 2017, pp. 180–88.

15. The Ideology of the Indus Civilization

Akinori Uesugi

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4. Uesugi, A. 2018. Ceramics and Terracotta Figurines from Balochistan of the Katolec Collection.
Katolec, Tokyo.

16. Rise of Urban Habitats

Jennifer Bates

1. B. Allchin, ‘The End of Harappan Urbanism and its Legacy,’ in F. R. Allchin (ed), The
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17. Decline and Transformation of Urban Habitats

Jennifer Bates
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18. Social Formation: Archaeological Scholarship of the Indus Civilization

Sudeshna Guha

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19. The Pre-Vedic and the Vedic Sarasvati 101

Rajesh Kochhar

This essay originally appeared in R. Kochhar, Vedic People: Their History and Geography, New
Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2001.

1. In the legend of Satluj the earlier name of the river is not given as the Rigvedic Sutudri, but merely
as descriptive Haimavati (“flowing from the mountains”). In the preceding passage (Adiparvan
167 S), even the Rigvedic name Vipash is attributed to Vasishtha.
2. Hillebrandt (1927, [1:346]) identifies the Rgvedic Sarasvati of mandala 6 with the Arghandab.
However, he considers the Sarasvati of the third tend seventh mandalas to be ‘’the small river in
the Madhyadesa which was considered sacred in later periods”, even though the Sarasvati of
 (7.95-96) is as mighty as the river of the sixth maqdala. Bur row (1973b:126) and Kosambi
(1975:89) both consider Harahvaiti to be the original pre-Rgvedic river. While Kosambi
identifies it with the Helmand, Burrow does not commit himself.
3. See Mughal (1992b).
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Ropar where the river emerges from the Siwaliks. Of the late Harappan period, only seven sites
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20. Varna and Jati: Consolidation of Social Hierarchy

G. N. Devy

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 PART III: THE LANGUAGE MIX AND PHILOSOPHIES IN ANCIENT INDIA
21. Sanskrit, its History, and its Indo-European Background
H. H. Hock

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22. Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Ancient Dialects
Madhav Deshpande

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23. Contact with Indo-European/ Indo-Iranian languages

Meera Visvanathan

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12. R. Thapar, ‘The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics’, Social Scientist, 24(1),
1996, pp. 3–29.
13. T. Joseph, Early Indians: The Story of our Ancestors and Where We Came From, New Delhi:
Juggernaut Books, 2018.
14. T. R. Trautmann (ed), The Aryan Debate¸ New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.
15. V. Shinde et al., ‘An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or
Iranian Farmers’, Cell, 179, 2019, pp. 729–35.

24. Vedic Tradition

Shrikant Bahulkar

1. E. C. Sachau, Alberuni’s India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography,

Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030, London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1914.
2. H. H. Hock, ‘Out of India? The linguistic evidence’, in J. Bronkhorst and M. Deshpande (eds),
Aryan & Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, interpretation, ideology, New Delhi: Manohar
Publications, 1999, pp. 1–18.
3. J. F. Staal, Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, Berkely: Asian Humanities Press, 1983.
4. J. F. Staal, Nambudiri Veda Recitation: Vol. 5 of Disputations Rheno-Trajectinae, The Hague:
Mouton, 1961.
5. M. Witzel and Q. Wu (eds), The Two Oldest Veda Manuscripts: Facsimile Edition of Vājasaneyi-
Saṃhitā 1–20 (Saṃhitā and Padapāṭha) from Nepal and Western Tibet (c. 1150 CE),
Cambridge: Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University, 2019.
6. M. Witzel, ‘On the Current Situation of Vedic Śākhās (Materials on Vedic Śākhās 9)’, In: J. J. E.
M. Houben et al. (eds), Vedic Śākhās: Past, Present, Future (Proceedings of the Fifth
International Vedic Workshop Bucharest 2011), Cambridge: Department of South Asian Studies,
Harvard University, 2011, pp. 1–95.
7. M. Witzel, ‘Tracing the Vedic dialects’, in C. Caillat (ed), Dialectes dans les Litératures Indo–
Aryennes, Paris: Collège de France, Institut de Civilization Indienne, 1989, pp. 97–266.
8. P. Thieme, ‘The ‘Aryan’ Gods of the Mitanni Treaties’, Journal of the American Oriental Society,
80, 1960, pp. 301–17.
9. S. Talageri, The Rigveda and the Avesta: The Final Evidence, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2008.
10. U. Jha (ed), Yājñavalkya Śikṣā of Yogeshwara Yājñavalkya, Varanasi: Chaukhambha Publishers,
1998.
11. W. Howard, Veda Recitation in Varanasi, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2003.

25. Vedic Divinities

Mugdha Gadgil
1. A. Hillebrandt, Vedic Mythology, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1981.
2. E. Benveniste and L. Renou, Vṛtra et Vṛtraghna: Étude de mythologie indoiranienne, Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale, 1934.
3. F. M. Mueller, India: What it can teach us?, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000.
4. G. Dumézil, Mitra-Varuṇa, Paris: Leroux Books, 1948.
5. H. Lüders, Varuṇa, edited by L. Alsdorf, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1951–59, A.
Macdonell, The Vedic Mythology, Strassburg: Trübner, 1897.
6. J. L. Whitaker, Strong Arms and Drinking Strength: Masculinity, Violence, and the Body in
Ancient India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
7. J. P. Brereton, The Ṛgvedic Ādityas, New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1981.
8. M. Witzel, ‘Slaying the Dragon across Eurasia’, in J. D. Bengtson, Hot Pursuit of Language in
Prehistory: Essays in the Four Fields of Anthropology, In Honor of Harold Crane Fleming,
Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s, 2008, pp. 263–86.
9. M. Witzel, ‘Vedic Gods’, in K. A. Jacobson (ed), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Leiden: Brill
Publishers, 2009.
10. M. Witzel, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
11. R. N. Dandekar, ‘Vedic Mythology: A Rethinking’, in M. Witzel, Inside the Texts, Beyond the
Texts, New Approaches to the Study of the Vedas, Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora, 2,
Cambridge: Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, 1997, pp. 39–48.
12. R. N. Dandekar, Vedic Mythological Tracts, New Delhi: Ajanta Publication, 1979.
13. U. Chakravarty, Indra and Other Vedic Deities, New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 1997.
14. W. B. Bollée, ‘The Indo-European Sodalities in Ancient India’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen
Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 131, 1981, pp. 172–91.
15. W. E. Hale, Asura in Early Vedic Religion, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986.
16. Euhreism refers to the theory that gods arose out of the deification of historical heroes.

26. Scientific Achievements of Traditional India

Hans Henrich Hock

1. A. Jones and L. Taub (eds), The Cambridge History of Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2018.
2. A. K. Tirthaji, Vedic mathematics, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1965.
3. A. L. Basham, The wonder that was India, New York: Macmillan, 1954.
4. A. Michaels and C. Wulf (eds), Science and scientification in South Asia and Europe, London:
Routledge India, 2020.
5. A. Michaels, ‘Mathematics and Vedic Mathematics’, in Michaels & Wulf (eds) 2020: Chapter 3.
6. A. Mishra, ‘Sanskrit and computer science’, In Michaels & Wulf (eds) 2020: Chapter 2, 2020.
7. A. Montelle, ‘Mathematics in early India (1000 BCE – 1000 CE)’, in Jones & Taub (eds) 2018:
Chapter 26.
8. A. Wujastik, The roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit medical writings, New Delhi:
Penguin India, 2001.
9. D. Pingree, MUL.APIN and Vedic astronomy. DUMU-E2-DUB-BA-A: Studies in honor of Åke
W. Sjöberg, edited by Hermann Behrens, 439-445. Philadelphia: University Museum, 1989, pp.
439–45.
10. F. Staal, ‘ On the origins of zero. Studies in the history of Indian mathematics’, edited by C. S.
Seshadri, New Delhi: Hindustan Book Agency, 2010, pp. 39–54.
11. G. C. Pande, The dawn of Indian civilization (up to c. 600 BC), (= Vol. 1:1 of History of science,
philosophy and culture in Indian civilization, edited by D. P. Chattopadhyaya.) New Delhi:
Centre for Studies in Indian Civilizations, 1999.
12. G. Cardona, Pāṇini: A survey of research, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1995.
13. G. Cardona, Pāṇini: His works and its traditions, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1997.
14. H. Chatley, ‘The lunar mansions of Egypt, Isis, 3(2), 1944, pp. 394–97.
15. H. H. Hock, ‘Sanskrit and Pāṇini – Core and periphery’, Samskṛta Vimarśa, 6, 2012, pp. 85–102.
16. H. H. Hock, ‘The Sanskrit phonetic tradition and western phonetics. Sanskrit and development of
world thought’, edited by V. Kutumba Sastry, New Delhi: Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan/D. K.
Printworld, 2014, pp. 53–80.
17. Hock, Hans Henrich. 2016. Indo-Aryan grammatical traditions (Sanskrit and Prakrit). The
languages and linguistics of South Asia: A comprehensive guide, edited by Hans Henrich Hock
and Elena Bashir, 707-716. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
18. J. Bronkhorst, ‘The relationship between linguistics and other sciences in India’, History of the
language sciences/Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaften/Histoire des sciences du langage, 1,
edited by Sylvain Auroux et al., Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000, pp. 166–173.
19. J. Bronkhorst, Greater Magadha: Studies in the culture of Early India, Leiden/Boston: Brill,
2007
20. J. N. Sinha, Features of mathematical sciences in India during the Second World War. Indian
Journal of the History of Sciences 50 (3): 521–32, 2015.
21. K. G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India: Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery,
Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1998.
22. K. G. Zysk, Religious healing in the Veda, with translations and annotations of medical hymns
from the ‘Ṛgveda’ and the ‘Atharvaveda’ and renderings from the corresponding ritual texts,
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1985.
23. K. Plofker, ‘Astronomy and astrology in India’, in Jones & Taub (eds), 2018: Chapter 25, 2018.
24. K. Plofker, Mathematics in India, Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009.
25. M. Deshpande, ‘Pāṇ ini as a frontier grammarian’, Papers from the 19th Regional Meeting of the
Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 1983, pp. 110–16.
26. M. Devi, Medicinal trees and plants of the Atharvaveda and their uses in various diseases.
Prācya, 7(1), 2015, pp. 125–30.
27. P. A. Maas, ‘Indian medicine and ayurveda’, in Jones & Taub (eds) 2018: Chapter 27.
28. P. V. Sharma, ‘Development of Āyurveda from antiquity to AD 200’, in Pande (ed.) 1999: pp.
719–58, 1999.
29. R. Briggs, ‘Knowledge representation in Sanskrit and artificial intelligence’, AI Magazine, 6 (1),
pp. 32–39.
30. S. A. Paramhans, ‘Foundations in Indian mathematics and geometrical ideas in the Śulba Sūtras’,
in Pande (edited), 1999, pp. 665–97
31. S. Kak, ‘Astronomy and its role in Vedic culture’, in Pande (ed) 1999, pp. 615–34.
32. S. Kumar, ‘Hindu nationalists claim that ancient Indians had airplanes, stem cell technology, and
the internet’, Science, 2019.
33. S. N. Jha, Vedāṅga astronomy, in Pande (ed), pp. 699–717, 1999.
34. S. R. Arjuna, and Amba Kulkarni, ‘Analysis and graphical representation of Navya-Nyāya
expressions: Nyāyacitradīpikā’, in Sanskrit and computational linguistics, edited by Amba
Kulkarni, New Delhi: D. K. Publishers, 2016, pp. 21–52.
35. W. S. Allen, Phonetics in ancient India, Oxford/London: Oxford University Press, 1953.
36. Y. Ohashi, ‘Development of astronomical observation in Vedic and post-Vedic India’, Indian
Journal of History of Science, 28, 1993, pp. 185–251.
37. During its development, the term Caraka traditions came to refer to several non-Brahmanical
ascetic religions parallel to but separate from the Vedic religion.

27. Buddhism
Pradip Gokhale
1. D. Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy, Continuities and Discontinuities, New Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 2011.
2. F. R. Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism: A social history from ancient Benares to modern Colombo,
Oxford: Routledge, 2006.
3. G. C. Pande, Śramaṇa Tradition: Its History and Contribution to Indian Culture, Ahmedabad: L.
D. Institute of Indology, 1978.
4. Rhys Davids (Tr.), Dialogues of the Buddha, Vol. I, Part I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

28. Buddhism in Early India

Naina Dayal

1. The author would like to thank Dr Uma Chakravarti and Professor Kumkum Roy for their
suggestions.
2. E. Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Śaka Era, translated by Sara
Webb-Boin, Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988.
3. G. Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology,
Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1997.
4. Liu, Xinru, Early Buddhist Society: The World of Gautama Buddha, Ranikhet: Permanent Black,
2022.
5. R. Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
6. U. Chakravarti, The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1987.

29. Non-Pali Buddhist Literature

Lata Deokar

1. B. Jain and P. Jain, Bauddha Dohakosa-giti, Nagpur and Varanasi: Sanmati Research Institute of
Indology and Kala evam Dharma Shodha Sansthan, 2007.
2. D. Dimitrov, The Buddhist Indus Script and Scriptures. On the so-called Bhaiksuki or Saindhavi
Script of the Sammitiyas and their Canon, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2020.
3. D. L. Snellgrove, The Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study, Sanskrit and Tibetan Texts. London
Oriental Series 6, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.
4. F. Edgerton, ‘On Editing Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit’, Journal of African and Oriental Studies,
77(3), 1957, pp. 184–92.
5. F. Edgerton, ‘The Prakrit Underlying Buddhistic Hybrid Sanskrit’, Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies, 8(2/3), 1936, pp. 501–16.
6. H. Isaacson and F. Sferra, ‘Tantric Literature’, in J. A. Silk et al. (eds), Brill’s Encyclopedia of
Buddhism, Volume I, Literature and Languages, Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2015, pp. 305–19.
7. J. A. Silk et al. (eds), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Volume I, Literature and Languages,
Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2015.
8. J. A. Silk et al. (eds), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Volume II, Lives, Leiden: Brill Publishers,
2015.
9. J. Brough, ‘The Language of the Buddhist Sanskrit Texts’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies, 16(2), 1954, pp. 351–75.
10. J. Upadhyaya, Vimalaprabhaṭika of Kalki Sri Puṇḍarika on Sri Laghukalacakratantraraja by Sri
Mañjusriyasa, Sarnath: Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, 1986.
11. O. Hinüber, ‘Languages: Indic’, in J. A. Silk et al. (eds), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism,
Volume I, Literature and Languages, Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2015, pp. 907–916.
12. P. Skilling, ‘Epigraphic Pali as a Southeast Asian Geographic Zone’, Journal of Bhutan Studies,
2021, pp. 37–52.
13. R. Salomon, The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara: An Introduction with Selected
Translations, Sommerville: Wisdom Publications Inc., 2018.
14. S. S. Bahulkar and M. A. Deokar, ‘Ideology and Language Identity: a Buddhist Perspective’, in
C. Watanable et al. (eds), Samskṛta-sadhuta: Goodness of Sanskrit, Studies in Honour of
Professor Ashok N. Aklujkar, New Delhi: D. K. Printworld. 2012, pp. 37–53.
15. S. S. Bahulkar, ‘Refutation of Caste-Class Discrimination in Buddhist Tantric Literature’, in
Dhiḥ, 41, 2006, pp. 39–50.

30. The Emergence and Spread of Jainism

Paul Dundas

1. J. Bronkhorst, Greater Magadha: Studies in the Cultures of Early India, New Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 2013.
2. P. Dundas, The Jains, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2017.
3. P. S. Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1996.

31. Philosophy through Controversies and Commentaries

Pradip Gokhale

1. B. R. Ambedkar, ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’, in H. Narke et al. (ed), Dr. Babasaheb

Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, 3, New Delhi: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014, pp. 151–
240.
2. V. Bhattacharya (ed), The Āgamaśāstra of Gauḍapāda, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1943.
3. D. Chattopadhyaya, What is Living and What is Dead in Indian Philosophy, New Delhi: People’s
Publishing House, 1976.
4. P. P. Gokhale, Inference and Fallacies Discussed in Ancient Indian Logic with Special Reference
to Nyāya and Buddhism, Delhi: Sat Guru Publications, 1992.
5. P. P. Gokhale, The Yogasūtra of Patañjali: A New Introduction to the Buddhist Roots of the Yoga
System, London: Routledge, 2020.
6. S. Patil, Primitive Communism, Matriarchy, Gynocracy and Modern Socialism, Pune: Mavlai
Prakashan, 2010.

32. Early Inscriptions

Andrew Ollett

Online Databases:
1. Catalogue of Gandhari Texts (inscriptions), available at: <https://gandhari.org/catalog?
section=inscriptions>, last accessed on 25 April 2023.
2. Sri Lanka Inscriptions, available at: <https://www.inscriptions.lk/>, last accessed on 25 April
2023.
3. Early Inscriptions of Āndhra Deśa, available at: <http://hisoma.huma-
num.fr/exist/apps/EIAD/index2.html>, last accessed on 25 April 2023.
Texts:
1. B. Barua, Old Brahmi Inscriptions in the Udayagiri and Khaṇḍagiri Caves, Calcutta: University
of Calcutta, 1929.
2. D. C. Sircar, Select Inscriptions Bearing on Indian History and Civilization, from the sixth century
B.C. to the sixth century A.D., Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1965.
3. E. Hultzsch, Inscriptions of Aśoka, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum I, New Delhi: Indological
Book House, 1925.
4. H. Falk, ‘Owners’ Graffiti on Pottery from Tissamaharama’, Zeitschrift für Archäologie
aussereuropäischer Kulturen, 6, 2014, pp. 45–94.
5. H. Falk, Aśokan Sites and Artefacts: A Source-Book with Bibliography, Mainz: Von Zabern, 2006.
6. H. Lüders, Appendix to Epigraphia Indica and Record of the Archælogical Survey of India Volume
X: A List of Brahmi Inscriptions from the Earliest Times to About 400 A.D. with the Exception of
Those of Asoka, Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1912.
7. J. Hanlon, Jain Monks, Merchants, and Kings in Early History South India, PhD dissertation,
University of Chicago, 2018.
8. K. R. Norman, ‘The Aśokan Inscriptions and Prakrit Dialect Geography’, in N. N. Bhattacharyya
(ed), Jainism and Prakrit in Ancient and Medieval India: Essays for Prof. Jagdish Chandra
Jain, New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1994, pp. 51–57.
9. K. Rajan and V. P. Yatheeskumar, ‘New Evidences on Scientific Dates for Brahmi Script as
Revealed from Porunthal and Kodumanal Excavations’, Prāgdhārā, 21–22 2013, pp. 279–95.
10. K. Rajan, Early Writing System: A Journey from Graffiti to Brahmi, Madurai: Pandya Nadu
Centre for Historical Research, 2015.
11. L. Renou, Histoire de la langue sanskrite, Lyon: Éditions IAC, 1956.
12. I. Mahadevan, Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D.,
Chennai: Cre-A, 2003.
13. R. Salomon, Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the
Other Indo-Aryan Languages, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
14. T. Damsteegt, Epigraphical Hybrid Sanskrit: Its Rise, Characteristics and Relationship to
Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, Leiden: Brill Publishers, 1978.
15. V. Dehejia, Early Buddhist Rock Temples: A Chronology, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.

33. Pali Language and Literature

Mahesh A. Deokar

1. A. Gornall and A. Ruiz-Falqués, Scholars of Premodern Pali Buddhism, Volume 2 – Lives, in J. A.

Silk et al. (eds), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers, 2019,
pp. 420–36.
2. A. Gornall, Buddhism and Grammar: The Scholarly Cultivation of Pāli in Medieval Laṅkā, PhD
dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2013.
3. A. S. Upadhyaya, Pāli Sāhitya kā Itihāsa, Prayag: Hindi Sahitya Sammelana, 1994.
4. D. Dimitrov, The Legacy of the Jewel Mind: On the Sanskrit, Pali, and Sinhalese Works by
Ratnamati, A Philological Chronicle (Phullalocanavaṃsa), Napoli: Università degli studi di
Napoli, 2016.
5. G. P. Malalasekera, The Pali Literature of Ceylon, New Delhi: Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, 2010.
6. J. Matsumura, The Rasavāhinī of Vedeha Thera: Vaggas V and VI: The Migapotaka Vagga and the
Uttarojiya Vagga, Osaka: Toho Shuppan, 1992.
7. K. R. Norman, A Philological Approach to Buddhism, Lancaster: The Pali Text Society, 2006.
8. K. R. Norman, Pāli Literature: Including the Canonical Literature in Prakrit and Sanskrit of All
the Hīnayāna Schools of Buddùsm, 7(2), in J. Gonda (ed), A History of Indian Literature,
Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1983.
9. M. A. Deokar, Technical Terms and Technique of The Pali and The Sanskrit Grammars,
Miscellaneous Series XXIII, Sarnath: Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, 2008.
10. M. H. Bode, The Pāli Literature of Burma, London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909.
11. M. Kosambi, Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010.
12. M. Winternitz, History of Indian Literature, New Delhi: 1991, pp. 601–05.
13. O. H. Pind, ‘Pali Grammar and Grammarians From Buddhaghosa to Vajirabuddhi’, Bukkyo
Kenkyu Vol. XXVI, 1997, pp. 23–88
14. O. Hinüber, On the History of the Name of Pāli Language, 76–90. Selected Papers on Pāli
Studies, Oxford, PTS, 1994.
15. P. Skilling, ‘Epigraphic Pali as a Southeast Asian Geographic Zone’, Journal of Bhutan Studies,
2021, pp. 37–52.
16. R. Gombrich, ‘Introduction: What is Pāli?’ in W. Geiger, A Pāli Grammar, Oxford: The Pali Text
Society, 1994, pp. xxiii–ix.
17. R. Gombrich, Buddhism and Pali, Oxford: Mud Pie Books, 2018.
18. S. S. Bahulkar and M. A. Deokar, ‘Ideology and Language Identity: A Buddhist Perspective’, in
Chikatuni Watanbe et al. (ed), Samskṛta-sādhutā: Goodness of Sanskrit Studies in Honour of
Professor Ashok N. Aklujkar, New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, pp. 37–53
19. T. Oberlies, Pāli: A Grammar of the Language of the Theravāda Tipiṭaka, New Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal, 2012, esp. pp. 1–16.
20. V. Sarang, Vilas, ‘jagātalyā sarvapratham kādambaryā’, lihityā lekhakāca vācan, Mumbai:
Shabda Publication, 2015, pp. 118–54.
21. W. Geiger, A Pali Grammar, translated by B. K. Ghosh, edited by K. R. Norman. Oxford: The
Pali Text Society, 1994.
22. W. Geiger, Pāli literature and Language, Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1968.

34. Prakrit Literature

Andrew Ollett

1. A. Ollett, ‘Pālitta and the History of Prakrit Literature’, in P. Flügel and N. Balbir (eds), Jain
Studies: Select Papers at Bangkok and Kyoto, Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 2018.
2. A. Ollett, Language of the Snakes: Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India,
Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.
3. C. Chojnacki, ‘Charming Bouquet or Wedding Garland? The Structures of the Jain Heroine
‘novel’ in Prakrit from Kuvalayamālā (779) to Maṇoramā (1082)’, Asiatische Studien / Études
Asiatiques, 70(2), 2016, pp. 365–98.
4. J. C. Jain, Prakrit Narrative Literature: Origin and Growth, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal,
1981.
5. K. R. Chandra, A Critical Study of Paumacariyam, Vaishali: Research Institute of Prakrit,
Jainology and Ahimsa, 1970.
6. L. Nitti-Dolci, ‘The Prākrita Grammarians’, translated by Prabhakara Jha, Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1972.
7. P. Dundas, ‘The Second Phase of Prakrit Kavva: Towards Contextualising Pravarasena’s
Setubandha’, Bulletin d’Ètudes Indiennes 35, 2022, pp. 49100.
8 P. Khoroche and H. Tieken, Poems on Life and Love in Ancient India: Hāla’s Sattasaī, Albany:
Excelsior Editions, 2009.
9. S. Pollock, Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Pre-
modern India, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

35. The Brahmi Script and Indian Languages

Thomas Trautmann

1. B. Karlgren, Bernhard, Philology and ancient China, Oslo: H. Aschehoug & Co, 1929.
2. B. Karlgren, Compendium of phonetics in ancient and archaic Chinese, Goteborg: Elanders
Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1963.
3. D. Lorenzen, ‘Marco della Tomba and the Brahmin from Banaras:
4. D. Pingree, ‘History of mathematical astronomy in India’, in C. C. Gillispie (ed), Dictionary of
Scientific Biography, 15(1), 1978, pp. 533–633.
5. E. G. Pulleyblank, ‘Chinese traditional phonology’, Asia Major, 12, 1999, pp. 101–37.
6. E. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures in the history of philosophy, translated by E. S. Haldane and F. H.
Simson, London: Bison Books, 1896.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the philosophy of history, translated by J. Sibree, London: G. Bell and
Son, 1878.
9. J. C. Kuipers and R. McDermott, ‘Insular Southeast Asian scripts’, in Daniels and Bright, pp. 474–
84.
10. J. S. Smith, ‘Japanese writing’, in Daniels and Bright, pp. 209–17.
11. L. Van der Kuijp, ‘The Tibetan script and derivatives’ in Daniels and Bright, pp. 431–41.
12. Missionaries, Orientalists, and Indian Scholars’, Journal of Asian Studies, 65, 2006, pp. 115–43.
13. O. Neugebauer, The exact sciences in antiquity, New York: Dover, 1969.
14. P. T. Daniels and W. Bright (ed), The World’s Writing Systems, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996.
15. Pingree, David 1963. Astronomy and astrology in India and Iran. Isis 54: 229-
16. R. King, ‘Korean writing’, in P. T. Daniels and W. Bright (ed), The World’s Writing Systems,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 218–27.
17. T. Jacobsen, ‘Very ancient linguistics: Babylonian grammatical texts’, in D. Hymes (ed), Studies
in the history of linguistics: traditions and paradigms, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1974, pp. 41–74.
18. T. R. Trautmann, ‘The missionary and the Orientalist’, in I. Bannerjee-Dube and S. Dube (ed),
Ancient to modern: religion, power, and community in India, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
19. T. R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 1997.
20. T. R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian proof in colonial Madras, Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2006.
21. W. H. Baxter, ‘Where does the “comparative method” come from?’, in F. Cavoto (ed), The
linguist’s linguist: a collection of papers in honour of Alexis Manaster Ramer, Munich: Lincom,
2002.
22. W. H. Baxter, A handbook of old Chinese phonology, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992.
23. W. Jones, ‘A dissertation on the orthography of Asiatic words in Roman letters’, Asiatic
Researches, 1, 1788a, pp. 1–56.
24. W. Jones, ‘The third anniversary discourse, delivered 2 February, 1786, by the President. (On the
Hindus)’, Asiatic Researches, 1, 1788b, pp. 415–31.
25. W. Jones, Manuscript notebook of Sanskrit, Jones Collection, Harry Ransome Library, University
of Texas, Austin.
26. W. S. Allen, Phonetics in ancient India, London: Oxford University Press, 1953.
27. The author would like to thank Bill Baxter, Ian Moyer, Christian de Pee, and Miranda Brown for
comments on an early draft of this article, and Anshuman Pandey for the chart of the Brahmi
script.

36. Ideas and Metaphysical Foundations of ‘Dravidian’

Stalin Rajangam

1. G. Aloysius (ed), Iyotheethasar Sindhanaigal (Thoughts of Iyothee Thass), Volumes 1 & 2,

Palayankottai: Folklore Research Centre, St. Xavier’s College, 1999.
2. S. Rajangam, Iyotheethasar: Vaazhum Boudham (Iyothee Thass: Living Buddhism), Chennai:
Kalachuvadu Pathipagam, 2016.
3. R. A. Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages,
London: Harison, 1856.
4. Masilamani, Varuna Betha Vilakkam (Explanation on the Varna System).

37. Dravidian Language Family

K. Rangan

1. Bloch, Jules. 1954. The Grammatical Structure of Dravidian Languages (translated by

Ramakrishna Ganesh Harshe). Poona: Deccan College.
2. Burrow, T. 1968. Collected Papers on Dravidian Linguistics. Annamalainagar: Annamalai
University.
3. Burrow, T. and M.B. Emeneau, 1961. A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (DED). Oxford:
Clarendon press
——— 1984. A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (DEDR). Oxford: Clarendon press
4. Caldwell, Robert. 1961. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of
Languages. Madras: University of Madras (Fourth edition, Reprint. First published in 1856.) 5.
Emeneau, M.B. 1970. Dravidian Comparative Phonology: a Sketch. Annamalainagar:
Annamalai University Krishnamurti, Bh. 1961. Telugu Verbal Bases: A Comparative and
Descriptive Study. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California.
——— 2003. The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6. Zvelebil, Kamil V. 1990. Dravidian Linguistics: An Introduction. Pondicherry: Pondicherry
Institute of Linguistics and Culture.

38. Language Families of India Other than Indo-Aryan

Anvita Abbi

1. A. Abbi, ‘Areal Typology, Convergence Models, and Gene Linguistics’, Indian Linguistics, 2005,
pp. 1–13.
2. A. Abbi, Endangered Languages of the Andaman Islands, Munich: Lincom Europa GMBH, 2006
3. A. Abbi, ‘A Sixth language family of India: Great Andamanese, its historical status and salient
present-day features’, in R. Mathrie and D. Bradley (eds), Dynamics of Language. Plenary and
Focus Lectures from the 20th International Congress of Linguists, Cape Town: UCT Press,
2018, pp. 134–52.
PART IV: CULTURES, SUB-NATIONALITIES, AND REGION
39. Medieval Tamil India: Pre-Vijayanagara Phase
T. K. Venkatasubramanian

1. D. Shulman, Tamil: A Biography, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

2. J. Heitzman, Gifts of power: lordship in an early Indian state, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1997.
3. K. A. N. Sastri, Cholas, Madras: University of Madras, 1935.
4. K. Gough, Rural Society in Southeast India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
5. P. Shanmugam, The revenue system of the Cholas, 850-1279, Madras: New Era Publications,
1987.
6. Some of the works resulting out of the above mentioned research pertains to—trade and
urbanization (Kenneth Hall, R Champakalakshmi, Meera Abraham, Vikas Kumar Verma);
kingship (Burton Stein, Ogura Yasushi, Whitney Cox); women (Leslie Orr); cult (Rajeswari
 Ghose); religion (R. Champakalakshmi); philosophy (Whitney Cox, Lorenzen, David Shulman);
monumentality (S. R. Balasubramanyam, KR Srinivasan, Richard Pierre); murals (P. S.
Sriraman); karanams (Padma Subramanyam); music (T. V. Kuppuswami, T. K.
Venkatasubramanian, M. Arunachalam); and art (Vidya Dehejia, Padma Kaimal, Ying Jiang).
7. T. K. Venkatasubramanian, ‘Chiefdom to State: Reflections on Kaveri Delta Social Formations’,
Proceedings of the Indian History, 57th Session, Chennai, 1994.
8. Y. Subbarayalu, South India under the Cholas, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.

40. Early Kannada Literature

Andrew Ollett and Sarah Pierce Taylor

1. A. N. Narasimhia, A Grammar of the Oldest Kanarese Inscriptions, Mysore: University of

Mysore, 1941.
2. A. Ollett, S. P. Taylor, and G. Ben-Herut, ‘A Mirror and a Handlamp: The Way of the Poet-King
and the Afterlife of the Mirror in the World of Kannada Literature’, in Y. Bronner (ed), A
Lasting Vision: Dandin’s Mirror in the World of Asian Letters, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2022, pp. 92–140.
3. E. Gurevitch, Everyday Sciences in Southwest India, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago,
2022.
4. M. Chidananda Murthy, ‘Tripadi: Adara Svarūpa mattu Itihāsa’, in Samśōdhana Taraṅga, 1,
Mysore: Sarasa Sahithya Prakashana, 1966, pp. 205–41.
5. R. Narasimhacharya, History of Kannada Literature: Readership Lectures, New Delhi: Asian
Educational Services, 1940.
6. S. Pollock, ‘A new philology: From norm-bound practice to practice-bound norm in Kannada
intellectual history’, In J. Chevillard (ed), South Indian horizons: Felicitation volume for
François Gros, Pondicherry: École française d’extrême-orient and Institut française de
Pondichéry, 2004, pp. 389–406.
7. S. Pollock, Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern
India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

41. Medieval Karnataka

Manu V. Devadevan

1. A. Farooqui, ‘Indian History: The Dilemma of Periodization,’ Marxist, 34(4), 2019, pp. 41–60.
2. B. Kalgudi, Madhyakālina Bhakti Mattu Anubhāva Sāhitya Hāgū Cāritrika Prajñe, Bangalore:
Karnataka Sahitya Academy, 1988.
3. M. Adiga, The Making of Southern Karnataka: Society, Polity and Culture in Early Medieval
Karnataka, AD 400-1030, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006.
4. M. M. Kalburgi, Mārga, Bangalore: Sapna Book House, Bangalore, 2010.
5. M. Torri, ‘For a New Periodization of Indian History: The History of India as Part of the World,’
Studies in History, 30(1), 2014, pp. 89–108.
6. M. V. Devadevan, A Prehistory of Hinduism, Berlin: DeGruyter, 2016.
7. R. M. Eaton and P. B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites in India’s Deccan
Plateau, 1300-1600, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014.

42. Lingayatism
Shivanand Kanavi

It is important to read Vachana literature as primary sources of Lingayatism. There have been many
translations into English. The most recent one is from Basava Samitis publication of a volume of
2500 selected Vachanas under the general editorship of M. M. Kalburgi into over twenty languages
including English.

1. A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva, New Delhi: Penguin, 1973.

2. H. Ishvaran, Comparative Study of Lingayat, Jain and Brahmin Mathas, Thiruvananthapuram:
Priyadarshini Prakashana, 1997.
3. J. P. Schouten, Revolution of the Mystics: On the Social Aspects of Vīraśaivism, New Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1995.
4. M. M. Kalburgi (ed), Vachana, translated by O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy, Bengaluru: Basava
Samiti, 2012.
5. M. V. Devadevan, A Prehistory of Hinduism, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.
6. N. G. Mahadevappa, A primer of Lingayatism, to be published.
7. P. B. Desai, Basaveshwara and his Times, Dharwad: Kannada Research Institute, Karnatak
University, 1968.
8. S. C. Nandimath, A Handbook of Virasaivism, Dharwar: Literary Committee, L. E. Association,
1942.
9. Today, almost all the Vachanas are available on the internet in a searchable database called
Vachana Sanchaya due to the efforts of a team led by O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy
(https://vachana.sanchaya.net/).

43. Early History of Kerala in Social Perspective

Rajan Gurukkal

1. H. Gundert, Kēraḷolppatti, translated by Madhava Menon, Thiruvananthapuram: Dravidian

Linguistics Association, 2003.
2. R. Gurukkal and M. R. R. Varier (eds), Cultural History of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram:
Department of Cultural Publications, 1999.
3. P. Rajendran, Unravelling the Past: Archaeology of Keralam and the Adjacent Regionsin South
India, New Delhi: Heritage Publishers, 2017.
4. Y. Subbarayalu, ‘The Socio-Economic Milieu of the Pulankurichi Rock Inscriptions’, in his South
India under the Cholas, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 27–37.
5. M. R. R. Varier, Kēraḷolppatti Granthavari, Kottayam: National Book Stall, 2016.
6. K. Veluthat, Brahman Settlements of Kerala, Thrissur: Cosmo Books, 2013.

44. Early and Medieval Kerala

Kesavan Veluthat

This is only indicative, not exhaustive.

1. E. Pillai, Studies in Kerala History, Kottayam: National Book Stall, 1969.
2. K. Veluthat, The Early Medieval in South India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009.
3. K. Veluthat, The Political Structure of Early Medieval South India, Delhi: Orient Blackswan,
2013.
4. M. G. S. Narayanan et al., Kerala Through the Ages, Thriuvananthapuram: Department of Public
Relations, Government of Kerala, 1976.
5. M. G. S. Narayanan, Perumals of Kerala, Thrissur: Cosmo Books, 2013.
6. R. Gurukkal, Social Formations of Early South India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.

45. Early Telugu Literature

Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
1. A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva, New Delhi: Penguin, 1973.
2. A. Ollett, Language of the Snakes: Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India,
Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.
3. Arudra, Samagra āndhra sāhityam, 1, Hyderabad: Telugu Akademi, 2002.
4. D. Shulman and V. Narayana Rao, ‘The Story of Nala’, in S. W. Wadley, Damayanti and Nala:
The Many Lives of a Story, New Delhi, Bangalore: Chronicle Books, 2011, pp. 13–37.
5. E. Fisher, ‘The Tangled Roots of Vīraśaivism: On the Vīramāheśvara Textual Culture of
Srisailam’, History of Religions, 59(1), 2021, pp. 1–37.
6. G. Ben-Herut, The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu, Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
7. H. M. Kamath, ‘A Guide for Poets: Debating the First Poet of Classical Telugu Literature’, South
Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (April), 2021, pp. 1–20.
8. H. M. Kamath, ‘Three Poets, Two Languages, One Translation: The Evolution of the Telugu
Mahābhāratamu’, in N. Hawley and S. S. Pillai, Many Mahābhāratas, Albany: SUNY Press,
2021b, pp. 191–212.
9. I. Loewy Shacham and H. M. Kamath, ‘Dangerous to Auspicious: Vernacular Transformations of
a Telugu Epic’, South Asian History and Culture, 2023, pp. 1–18.
10. K. L. Ranjanam, ‘Preface’, in K. L. Ranjanam and D. Venkatavadhani (eds), Andhra
Mahabharatamu, Volume I, Hyderabad: Osmania University, 1968.
11. K. M. Sastri, Historical Grammar of Telugu with Special Reference to Old Telugu c. 200 B.C. –
1000 A.D., Anantapur: Sri Venkateswara University, 1964.
12. M. Recana, Kavijanāś rayamu: A Guide for Poets, translated by R. V. S. Sundaram and H. M.
Kamath, Mysuru: Center for Excellence for Studies in Classical Telugu, to be published.
13. Nannayabhaṭṭ a, Śrīmadāndhra mahābhāratamu ādiparvamu, 1(1), commentary by N.
Ramakrishnamacharya and edited by G. V. Subrahamanyam, Tirupati: Tirumala Tirupati
Devasthanams, 2013.
14. Nannayabhaṭṭ a, Śrīmadāndhra mahābhāratamu āraṇyaparvamu, 5(2), commentary by N.
Ramakrishnamacharya and edited by G. V. Subrahamanyam, Tirupati: Tirumala Tirupati
Devasthanams, 2013.
15. S. Nagaraju, ‘Emergence of Regional Identity and Beginnings of Vernacular Literature: A Case
Study of Telugu’, Social Scientist, 23(10/12), 1995, pp. 8–23.
16. S. Pollock, Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in
Premodern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
17. V. Narayana Rao and D. Shulman, Classical Telugu Poetry: An Anthology, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002.
18. V. Narayana Rao and G. H. Roghair, Siva’s Warriors: The Basava Purana of Palkuriki
Somanatha, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
19. V. Narayana Rao, ‘Multiple Literary Cultures in Telugu: Court, Temple, and Public’, in V.
Narayana Rao, Text and Tradition in South India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016, pp. 27–93.

46. Telangana: An Overview of the Medieval Period 275

Salma Ahmed Farooqui

1. B. Latif, Forgotten, London: Penguin Books, 2010.

2. Chandraiah, Hyderabad-400 Glorious Years, Hyderabad: Chandraiah Memorial Trust, 1998.
3. E. J. Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
4. I. Austin, City of Legends—Story of Hyderabad, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992.
5. J. D. B. Gribble, History of the Deccan, 2, New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2002.
6. K. I. Leonard, Locating Home: India’s Hyderabadis Abroad, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2007.
7. N. Haidar and M. Sardar, Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy, New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.
8. R. Eaton, Essays on Islam and Indian History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.
9. Raza Ali Khan, Hyderabad: 400 years (1591-1991), Hyderabad, New Delhi: Zenith Books, 1991.
10. S. A. Farooqui, Multicultural Dimensions of Medieval Deccan, New Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan,
2008.

47. Cultural Heterogeneity: Telangana

Bhukhya Bhangya

1. A. S. Parasher, Settlement and Local Histories of the Early Deccan, New Delhi: Manohar
Publishers, 2022.
2. A. S. Parasher, Social and Economic History of Early Deccan. Some Interpretations, New Delhi:
Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 1993.
3. A. Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice. Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.
4. B. Bhangya, A Cultural History of Telangana. From the Earliest Times to 1724, Hyderabad: Orient
Blackswan, 2021.
5. G. Yazdani, The Early History of the Deccan, I and II, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint
Company, 1982.
6. H. K. Sherwani and P. M. Joshi (eds), History of Medieval Deccan, I and II, Hyderabad:
Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1974.
7. H. K. Sherwani, History of the Qutb Shahi Dynasty, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal
Publishers, 1974.
8. J. F. Richards, Mughal Administration in Golconda, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
9. K. A. N. Sastri. A History of South India. From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975.
10. K. S. Datla, The Language of Secular Islam. Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India, New Delhi,
Orient Blackswan, 2013.
11. K. Satyanarayana, A Study of the History and Culture of the Andhras: From Stone Age to
Feudalism, I, Hyderabad: Visalaandhra Publishing House, 1999.
12. K. Satyanarayana, A Study of the History and Culture of the Andhras, II, New Delhi: People’s
Publishing House, 1983.
13. K. V. V. Sastry, The Proto and Early Historical cultures of AP, Hyderabad: Government of
Andhra Pradesh, 1983.
14. M. R. Sarma, Temples of Telangana, Hyderabad: Osmania University, 1972.
15. M. Rao, Religion in Andhra. A Survey of Religious Developments in Andhra from Early Times
Upto A.D 1325, Gunture: Welcome Press Pvt. Ltd, 1973.
16. P. P. V. Sastry, Rural Studies in Early Andhra, Hyderabad: V. R. Publication, 1996.
17. P. P. V. Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal, Hyderabad: Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1978.
18. R. Champakalakshmi, Religion, Tradition, and Ideology. Pre-colonial South India, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2011.
19. R. M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
20. R. M. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978.
21. R. N. Nandi, Religious Institutions and Culture in the Deccan, New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas
Publishers, 1973.
22. S. A. Farooqui, Multicultural Dimensions of Medieval Deccan, New Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan,
2008.
23. S. Bayly, Caste Society and Politics in India. From the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
24. S. Pollock (ed), Literary Cultures in History. Reconstructions from South Asia, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003.

48. The Modern South

Rajmohan Gandhi

1. F. Hamilton, A Journey from Madras though the countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, three
volumes, London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807.
2. G. U. Pope, Tamil Heroic Poems, Chennai: International Institute of Tamil Studies, 1997.
3. J. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, New York: Cosimo, 2007.
4. J. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, New York: Cosimo, 2007.
5. N. Karashima, A Concise History of South India: Issues & Interpretations, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2014.
6. P. G. Krishna (ed), Diaries of Gurujada, Hyderabad: Oriental Manuscripts Library and Research
Institute, 2009.
7. P. N. Chopra, T. K. Ravindran, and N. Subrahmanian, History of South India, three volumes, New
Delhi: S. Chand, 1979.
8. R. Gandhi, Modern South India: A History from the 17th Century to Our Times, New Delhi: Aleph
Book Company, 2018.
9. R. M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005.
10. V. N. Rao, D. Shulman, and S. Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India,
New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001.

49. The Kerala of Narayana Guru: A Historical Perspective of Ideas and Society
George Thadathil

1. B. R. Mani, Debrahmanising History: Dominance and Resistance in Indian Society, New Delhi:
Manohar Publishers, 2015.
2. G. Thadathil, Vision from the Margin: A study of Sree Narayana Guru Movement in the literature
of Nitya Chaitanya Yati, Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 2007.
3. I. Wilkerson, Caste: The Lies that Divide Us, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2020.
4. N. Guru, The Life and Teachings of Narayana Guru, Varkala: Narayana Gurukula Foundation,
1990.
5. R. Rajan, ‘Backwater Disclosure: Ontological Politics and the Dialectics of Intercommunality’, in
V. Lal and R. Rajan (eds), India and the Unthinkable: Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics
and Politics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016.

50. Christianity in India before the Protestant Evangelicals

Ines G. Županov

1. A. B. Xavier and I. G. Županov, Catholic Orientalism, Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge

(16th-18th Centuries). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015.
2. A. Chakravarti, The empire of apostles: religion, accommodatio, and the imagination of empire in
early modern Brazil and India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018.
3. C. Lefèvre and I. G. Županov (eds), ‘Cultural Dialogue in South Asia and Beyond: Narratives,
Images and Community (16th-19th centuries)’, Journal of Economic and Social History of the
Orient, 55, 2012, pp. 215–19.
4. I. G. Županov, Disputed Mission – Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in
Seventeenth-Century India, New Delhi: Oxford University, 1999.
5. I. G. Županov, Missionary Tropics – The Catholic Frontier in India (16th-17th centuries). Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005.
6. J. W. O’Malley, The Jesuits: A History from Ignatius to the Present, Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2014.
7. M. Certeau, The Writing of History, translated by T. Conley, New York: Columbia University
Press. 1988.
8. M. Trento, Writing Tamil Catholicism: Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth
Century, Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2022.

51. Goa
Rochelle Pinto

1. A. B. Xavier, A Invenção de Goa: Poder Imperial e Conversões Culturais nos Séculos XVI e XVII,
Lisboa: European University Institute, 2003.
2. A. Chakravarti, The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio, and the Imagination of Empire
in Early Modern Brazil and India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018.
3. A. Kanekar, ‘Architectural History Exposes the False Claims about Goa’s Mosques and Temples’,
Scroll.in, 10 June 2022.
4. D. D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Bombay: Popular Prakashan,
1956.
5. J. K. Fernandes, Citizenship in a Caste Polity: Religion, Language and Belonging in Goa, New
Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2020.
6. J. M. M. Ferreira, ‘As Novas Conquistas: Florestas, Agricultura e Colonialismo em Goa (c. 1763-
1912)’, Programa Interuniversitário de Doutaramento em História, 2021.
7. L. Oliveira, ‘A consagração dos naturais’, Repositorio Universidade Nova, 2015.
https://run.unl.pt/handle/10362/16336.
8. M. J. Magalhães, Pequenos reis e grandes honras culto, poder e estatuto na Índia ocidental,
Lisbon: University Institute of Lisbon, 2013.
9. P. D. Parobo, India’s First Democratic Revolution: Dayanand Bandodkar and the Rise of the
Bahujan in Goa, New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2015.
10. P. S. Faria, ‘O Pai dos Cristãos e as populações escravas em Goa: zelo e controle dos cativos
convertidos (séculos XVI e XVII)’, História, 39, 2020.
11. R. Robinson, ‘Cuncolim: Weaving a Tale of Resistance’, Economic and Political Weekly, 32(7),
1997, pp. 334–40.
12. R. Trichur, Refiguring Goa: From Trading Post to Tourism Destination, Goa: Goa, 1556, 2013.
13. S. A. Lobo, O Desassossego Goês - Cultura e Política Em Goa Do Liberalismo Ao Acto
Colonial, Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2013.
14. T. R. de Souza, Medieval Goa: A Socio-Economic History, Panaji: Broadway Book Centre, 2009.

52. Cultural Confluence in Pre-modern Deccan

Shraddha Kumbhojkar

1. A. K. Sastry, Records of the Sringeri Dharmasamsthana, Shringeri: Sringeri Matha, 2009.

2. G. H. Khare (ed), Persian Sources of Indian History (Aitihasika Farsee Sahitya), Volume II, Pune:
Bharat Itihasa Samshodhan Mandal, 1937.
3. K. S. Thackeray, ‘Gramanyacha Sadyanta Itihasa’, Prabodhankar Thackeray Samgra Vangmay,
Volume V, Maharashtra Rajya Sahitya ani Sanskruti Mandal, 2007.
4. Kamalakarabhatta, Shudrakamalakara, Mumbai: Nirnaysagar Press, 1928.
5. Kharat Shankarrao (ed), Chokha Melyacha Vidroh, Pune.
6. N. B. Bhawalkar and N. H. Nene (eds), Shri Sarvajnya Chakradhara Nirupit Drushtantapatha,
Nagpur: Madhya Pranta Samshodhan Mandala, 1937.

53. Maharashtra before Shivaji

Rahul Magar

1. A. S. Altekar, Rashtrakuta and their times, Poona: Oriental Book, 1934.

2. B. G. Tamaskar, The Life and Work of Malik Ambar, New Delhi: Idarah-adabiyat-i-dilli, 2009.
3. Bharat Itihas Ssanshodhak Mandal, Pune: Varshik Itivrutta Shake, 1837.
4. G. H. Khare, Musalmankalin Maharashtra, Nagpur: Vidarbh Sanshodhan Mandal, 1976.
5. H. K. Sherwani and P. M. Joshi (eds), History of Medieval Deccan, I and II, Hyderabad:
Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1974.
6. H.K. Sherwani, The Bahamanis of the Deccan, Hyderabad: Krishnavas International Printers,
1953.
7. Ibrahim II, Kitab-e-Navras, edited by Nirmala Joshi, New Delhi: The Caxton Press, 1956.
8. J. N. Choudhary, Malik Ambar: A Biography Based on Original Sources, Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar
and Sons, 1933.
9. M. G. Ranade, Rise of Maratha Power, Bombay: Punalekar and Co. 1961.
10. M. K. Ferishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India: Till the year of 1612 A.D.
II, edited by John Briggs, Calcutta: Oriental Booksellers and Publishers, 1908.
11. M. S. Mate, Madhyayugin Maharashtra Samajik ani Sanskrutik jivan, Mumbai: Maharashtra
Rajya Sanskruti Mandal, 2002.
12. P. G. Sahastrabuddhe, Maharashtra Sanskriti, Pune: Continental, 1979.
13. Vinayak Lakshman Bhave, Bakhar of Shrimant Maharaj Bhosale, Pune: Varada Books, 2021.
14. Y. Phadke, M. R. Kantak, G. T. Kulkarni, M. S. Mate, Shivacharitra Itihas ani Charitra Khand I,
Chennai: Macmillan, 2001.

55. Progressive Thought in Maharashtra

Devkumar Ahire

1. G. B. Sardar (ed), Maharashtra Jeevan: Parampara, Pragati Aani Samasya, Pune: Joshi Aani
Lokhande Prakashan, 1960.
2. P. G. Sahastrabuddhe, Maharashtra Sanskruti, Pune: Continental Prakashan, 2011.
3. P. Shriaknt, R. Dikshit, C. R. Das (eds), Western India: History, Society, and Culture, Bombay:
Itihas Shikshak Mahamandal, 1997.
4. R. Vora (ed), Aadhunikta aani Parampara-Ekonisavya Shatakatil Maharashtra, Pune: Pratima
Prakashan, 2000.
5. S. Belvalkar, Lilacharitratil Samajadarshan, Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2009.
6. S. More, Tukaram Darshana, Ahmednagar: Gaaj Prakashan, 1996.
7. S. P. Sen (ed), Social contents of Indian Religious Reform Movements, Calcutta: Institute of
Historical Studies, 1960.
8. U. Bagade, Maharashtratil Prabodhan aani Vargajati Prabhutva, Pune: Sugava, 2021.
9. V. Bhagwat, ‘Marathi Literature as a source for Contemporary Feminism’, Economic and Political
Weekly, April 1995.

56. Ancient and Medieval Gujarat

Aparna Kapadia

1. J. G. Balachandran, Narrative pasts: the making of a Muslim community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650,

New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2020.
2. A. Kapadia, In praise of kings: Rajputs, sultans and poets in fifteenth-century Gujarat,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
3. A. Patel, Building communities in Gujarat: architecture and society during the twelfth through
fourteenth centuries, Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2004.
4. S. Sheikh, Forging a region: sultans, traders, and pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200-1500, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2009.

57. Nomadic Communities in Western India

Tanuja Kothial

1. B. D. Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1998.
2. G. N. Devy, A Nomad Called Thief: Reflections on Adivasi Silence, New Delhi: Orient Longman,
2006.
3. A. M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, translated by Julia Crookenden, Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.
4. D. H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of Military Labour Market in
Hindustan 1450-1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
5. T. Kothiyal, Nomadic narratives: A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian Desert,
New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
6. M. Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History: Criminal Tribes and British Colonial Policy New
Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001.

58. Rajasthan
Rima Hooja

1. B. D. Chattopadhyaya, ‘The Emergence of the Rajputs as Historical Process in Early Medieval

Rajasthan’, in K. Schomer et al. (eds), The Idea of Rajasthan, II, New Delhi: Manohar
Publications, 1994, pp.161–91.
2. B. L. Bhadani, Peasants, Artisans and Entrepreneurs: Economy of Marwar in the Seventeenth
Century, Japiur: Rawat Publications, 1999.
3. Bankidas, Bankidas-ri-Khyat, edited by N. D. Swami, Jodhpur: Rajasthan Oriental Research
Institute, 1956.
4. D. A. Low, Britain and Indian Nationalism: The Imprint of Ambiguity 1929-1942, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
5. D. C. Shukla, Early History of Rajasthan, Varanasi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1978.
6. D. Sharma, Rajasthan Through the Ages, Bikaner: Rajasthan State Archives, 1966.
7. F. H. Taft, ‘Honour and Alliance: Reconsidering Mughal-Rajput Marriages’, E. L. Schomer et al.
(eds), The Idea of Rajasthan, II, American Institute of Indian Studies, New Delhi: Manohar
Publishers, 1994, pp. 217–41.
8. F. L. Mehta, Handbook of Meywar and Guide to its Principal Objects of Interest, Bombay: Times
of India Steam Press, 1888.
9. G. C. Verma, History of Education in Rajasthan, Jaipur: Sabd Mahima, 1984.
10. G. H. Ojha, Bikaner Rajya ka Itihas, Ajmer: Vedic Yantralaya, 1940.
11. G. H. Ojha, Jodhpur Rajya ka Itihas, Ajmer: Vedic Yantralaya, 1938.
12. G. H. Ojha, Rajputane ka Itihas, Ajmer: Vedic Yantralaya, 1927.
13. G. H. Ojha, Sirohi Rajya ka Itihas, Jodhpur: Rajasthani Granthagar, 1911.
14. G. N. Sharma, ‘Rajasthan’, in M. Habib and K. A. Nizami (eds), A Comprehensive History of
India, V, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1970, pp.763–845.
15. G. N. Sharma, Mewar and the Mughal Emperors (1526-1707 A.D.), Agra: Shiva Lal Agrawala &
Co. (Pvt.) Ltd, 1962.
16. G. N. Sharma, Rajasthan Through the Ages, Bikaner: Rajasthan State Archives, 1990.
17. G. N. Sharma, Social Life in Medieval Rajasthan (1500-1800 A.D), Agra: Lakshmi Narain
Agarwal, 1968.
18. H. L. Maheshwari, History of Rajasthani Literature, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1980.
19. J. N. Asopa, Origin of the Rajputs, New Delhi: Bharatiya Publishing House, 1976.
20. J. Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan or, the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India, I
and II, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1929.
21. K. C. Jain, Ancient Cities and Towns of Rajasthan - A Study of Culture and Civilization, New
Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1972.
22. K. Singh, The Relations of the House of Bikaner with the Central Powers: 1465-1949, New
Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1974.
23. L. M. Eshwar, Sunset and Dawn: The Story of Rajasthan, New Delhi: FACT Publication, New
Delhi, 1968.
24. M. L. Sharma, History of the Jaipur State, Jaipur: Rajasthan Institute of Historical Research,
1969.
25. M. Nainsi, Marwar-ra-pargana ri Vigat, edited by Narain Singh Bhati, Jodhpur: Rajasthan
Oriental Research Institute, 1968.
26. M. Nainsi, Muhata Nainsi ri Khyat, Volumes 1–4, edited by B. P. Sankariya, Jodhpur: Rajasthan
Oriental Research Institute, 1960–67.
27. M. S. Jain, Concise History of Modern Rajasthan, New Delhi: Wishwa Prakashan, 1993.
28. N. K. Singhi and R. Joshi (eds), Religion, Ritual and Royalty, Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 1999.
29. N. N. Vyas, R. S.Mann, and N. D.Chaudhury (eds), Rajasthan Bhils, Udaipur: Manikyalal Verma
Tribal Research and Training Institute, 1978.
30. P. T. Craddock and M. J. Hughes (eds), Ancient Smelting and Furnace Technology, London:
British Museum Occasional Paper, 1985.
31. P. T. Craddock, I. C. Freestone, L. K. Gurjar, K. T. M. Hegde, and V. H. Sonavane, ‘Early Zinc
Production in India’, Mining Magazine, January 1985, pp. 45–52.
32. R. Hooja, A History of Rajasthan, New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2006.
33. R. Hooja, Maharana Pratap: The Invincible Warrior, New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2018.
34. R. Hooja, Rajasthan: A Concise History, New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2018.
35. R. Hooja, The Ahar Culture and Beyond, Oxford: BAR Publishing, 1988.
36. R. Jeffrey, People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely
States, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1978.
37. R. Sinh, History of Shekhawats, Jaipur: Publication Scheme, 2001.
38. Rajasthan State Gazetteer, Volume 2, History and Culture, Jaipur: Directorate District Gazetteers,
Government of Rajasthan, 1995.
39. Rajasthan State Gazetteer, Volume 3, Economic Structure and Activities, Jaipur: Directorate
District Gazetteers, Government of Rajasthan, 1996.
40. Rakesh Hooja, Rima Hooja, and Rakshat Hooja (eds), Constructing Rajpootana-Rajasthan,
Jaipur: Rawat Books, 2009.
41. Ram Pande, Bharatpur Upto 1826, Jaipur: Rama Publishing House, 1970.
42. S. H. Rudolph and L. I. Rudolph, Essays on Rajputana: Reflections on History, Culture and
Administration, New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1984.
43. S. Mayaram, Resisting Regimes - Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
44. S. N. Dube (ed), Religious Movements in Rajasthan – Ideas and Antiquities, Jaipur: Centre for
Rajasthan Studies, University of Rajasthan, 1996.
45. S. S. Ratnawat and K. G. Sharma, History and Culture of Rajasthan, Jaipur: Centre for Rajasthan
Studies, 1999.
46. T. Chand, History of the Freedom Movement in India, four volumes, New Delhi: Publications
Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1961–76.
47. T. D. La Touche, ‘Geology of western Rajputana’, Memoirs of the Geological Survey of India,
35(1), 1911, pp. 1–116.
48. U. B. Mathur, Folkways in Rajasthan, Jaipur: The Folklorists, 1986.
49. V. C. Misra, Geography of Rajasthan, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1967.
50. V. Joshi, Polygamy and Purdah: Women and Society among Rajputs, Jaipur: Rawat Publications,
1995.
51. V. K. Vashishtha, Bhagat Movement: A Study of Cultural Transformation of the Bhils of Southern
Rajasthan, Jaipur: Shruti Publication House, 1997.
52. V. P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States, New Delhi: Orient Longman,
1956.
53. V. S. Bhargava, Marwar and the Mughal Emperors (A.D 1526-1748), New Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal, 1966.
54. V. S. Bhargava, The Rise of the Kachhawas in Dhundhar ( Jaipur), Ajmer and New Delhi: Shabd
Sanchar, 1979.
55. V. S. Bhatnagar, Life and Times of Sawai Jai Singh, New Delhi: Impex India, 1974.

59. Sindh
Manan Ahmed

1. C. Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Traders from Sind to Bukhara
to Panama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
2. M. A. Asif (ed), ‘Sindh: Towards the Philology of a Place’, Philological Encounters, 7(1–2),
2022.
3. O. Kasmani, Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan,
Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
4. S. Quraeshi, Sacred Spaces: A Journey with the Sufis of the Indus, Cambridge: Peabody Museum
Press, 2010.

60. The Northeast: Prehistoric and Ancient Past

Manjil Hazarika

1. ‘IAR 2008–2009’, Indian Archaeology: A Review, New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India,
2009.
2. A. K. Pokharia, T. Jamir, et al., ‘Late first millennium BC to second millennium AD agriculture in
Nagaland: A reconstruction based on archaeobotanical evidence and radiocarbon dates’, Current
Science, 104(10), 2013, pp. 1341–53.
3. E. Gait, A History of Assam, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1906.
4. G. Van Driem, Ethnolinguistic Prehistory: The Peopling of the World from the Perspective of
Language, Genes and Material Culture, Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2021.
5. H. N. Dutta (ed), Ambari Archaeological Site: An Interim Report, Guwahati: Directorate of
Archaeology, 2006.
6. J. P. Singh and G. Sengupta (eds), Archaeology of Northeastern India, New Delhi: Vikas
Publishing House, 1991.
7. M. Hazarika, Prehistory and Archaeology of Northeast India: Multidisciplinary Investigation in
an Archaeological Terra Incognita, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017.
8. M. Mitri and D. Neog, ‘Preliminary Report on the Excavations of Neolithic sites from Khasi Hills
Meghalaya’, Ancient Asia, 7, 2016, pp. 1–17.
9. P. Prokop and I. Suliga, ‘Two thousand years of iron smelting in the Khasi Hills, Meghalaya,
North East India’, Current Science, 104(6), 2013, pp. 761–68.
10. Q. Marak, Megalithic Traditions of North East India, New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company,
2019.
11. R. D. Choudhury, Archaeology of the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam: Pre-Ahom Period, Delhi:
Agam Kala Prakashan, 1985.
12. T. C. Sharma, ‘Excavations at Ambari (Guwahati) – Its Problems and Prospects’, Proceedings of
NEIHA, 10th session (Shillong), 1989, pp. 21–24.
13. T. Jamir and M. Hazarika (eds), 50 Years After Daojali-Hading: Emerging Perspectives in the
Archaeology of Northeast India – Essays in Honour of Tarun Chandra Sharma, New Delhi:
Research India Press, 2014.

61. Assam: The Long View

Arupjyoti Saikia

1. H. K. Barpujari, Assam in the Days of the Company, 1826–1858, Guwahati: Lawyer’s Book Stall,
1963.
2. S. K. Bhuyan, Anglo-Assamese Relations, 1771-1826: A History of the Relations of Assam with
the East India Company from 1771 to 1826, Guwahati: Lawyer’s Book Stall, 1974.
3. P. C. Choudhury, The History of Civilization of the People of Assam to the Twelfth Century A.D,
Guwahati: Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies in Assam, 1959.
4. E. Gait, A History of Assam, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1926.
5. A. Guha, Medieval and Early Colonial Assam: Society, Polity, Economy, Kolkata: K.P. Bagchi,
1991.
6. N. Lahiri, Pre-Ahom Assam: Studies in the Inscriptions of Assam between the Fifth and the
Thirteenth Centuries AD, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1991.
7. M. Neog, Sankaradeva and His Times: Early History of the Vasinava Faith and Movement in
Assam, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1985.
8. A. Saikia, The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press. 2019.

62. Sikkim
Anira Phipon Lepcha

1. ‘Report of OBC Commission’, Gangtok: Government of Sikkim, 1998.

2. ‘State Socio-Economic Census’, Gangtok: DISME, Government of Sikkim, 2006
3. A. C Sinha, Studies in the Himalayan Communities, New Delhi: Books Today, Oriental Publishers,
1983.
4. A. Foning, Lepcha My Vanishing Tribe, Kalimpong: Upasak Brothers, Chyu Pandi farm, 1987.
5. Alex Mckay, The Mandala Kingdom, Gangtok: Rachna Books, 2021.
6. Alice Kandell, Sikkim, The Hidden Kingdom, Garden City: Double Day, New York, 1971.
7. B. K. Roy Burman, ‘Human Ecology and Statutory Status of Ethnic Entities in Sikkim’, Review of
Environmental and Social Sector Policies, Plans and Programmes (CRESP), published by
Department of Information and Public Relations, Government of Sikkim, 2009.
8. A. C Sinha, Politics of Sikkim, A Sociological Study, New Delhi: Thomson Press (India) Limited,
1975.
9. C. A. Bell, Portrait of a Dalai Lama: The Life and Times of the Great Thirteenth, New Delhi:
Wisdom Publications, 1987.
10. C. De Beauvoir Stocks, Folklore and Customs of the Lepchas of Sikkim, New Delhi: Asian
Educational Service, 1925, reprinted in 2001.
11. C. U. Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanad, Calcutta: Central Secretariat
Library,1909.
12. D. C. Roy, Dynamics of Social formation Among the Lepchas, New Delhi: Akansha Publishing
House, 2005.
13. D. Dahal, Sikkim ko Rajnaitik Ithihas, Gangtok: Subbha Prakashan, 1974.
14. E. K. Santha, Democracy in Sikkim – An Untold Chronicle, Gurgaon: The Alcove, 2021.
15. G. B, Mainwaring, A Grammar of the Lepcha language, New Delhi: Manjusri Publishing House,
1876, reprinted in 1971.
16. H. H. Risley (ed), The Gazetteer of Sikhim, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1894.
17. H. Siiger, The Lepchas: Culture and Religion of a Himalayan People Part-I, Denmark:
Copenhagen National Museum, 1967.
18. J. R. Subba, History, Culture and Customs of Sikkim, New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2008.
19. K. P. Tamsang, The Unknown and Untold Reality about the Lepchas, Kalimpong: Mani Printing
Press, 1983.
20. K. Pradhan, The Gorkha Conquests, Kathmandu: Himal Books, 2009, p. 144.
21. K. Pradhan, The Gorkha Conquests, Kathmandu: Himal Books, 2009.
22. K. Sharma, Eastern Himalayas, New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 1999.
23. L. B. Basnet, A Short Political History of Sikkim, New Delhi: S. Chand & Co., 1974.
24. Lyangsong Tamsang (ed), ‘King Gaeboo Achyok’, A Lepcha Bilingual Magazine, Kalimpong,
2005.
25. N. Sengupta, State Government and Politics in Sikkim, New Delhi: Sterling Publication, 1985.
26. P. K. Mishra, Archaeological Exploration in Sikkim, New Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan, 2008.
27. P. R Rao, Sikkim: The story of its integration with India, New Delhi: Cosmos Publications, 1978.
28. Percy Brown, Tours in Sikkim, Calcutta: W. Newman, Calcutta, 1944.
29. R. Rahul, The Himalayan Borderland, Vikas Publications, Delhi, 1970.
30. R. Sprigg, ‘The End of an Era in the Social and Political History of Sikkim’, Bulletin of
Tibetology, 1826.
31. S. K. Datta Ray, Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim, New Delhi: Vikas Publications, 1984.
32. S. K. Gurung, Sikkim Ethnicity and Political Dynamics, New Delhi: Kunal Books, 2011.
33. S. Kharel, Urbanisation in Sikkim, PhD dissertation, University of North Bengal.
34. S. P. Sen, The Sino-Indian Border Question-A Historical Review, Calcutta: Sage Publications,
1971.
35. Saul Mullard, Opening the Hidden land: State Formation of Sikkim and the Construction of
Sikkimese History, Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2011.
36. Thutop Namgyal and Yeshe Dolma, History of Sikkim, Gangtok: Sikkim Palace Archives, 1908.
37. U. Singh, Ancient Delhi, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999.
38. W. Singer, Creating Histories: Oral Narratives and the Politics of History Making, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
39. A Tibetan, KheBhumsa, came to Sikkim to seek blessing from Thekong Tek, a Lepcha wizard.
After receiving the blessing for offspring, a compact is said to have been entered between
KheBhumsa and Thekong Tek, where the blood of various animals was used to smear the feet of
the two participants to signify the compact/union. This act was supposed to bind the Lepcha and
the Bhutias as blood brothers.
40. ‘Lho-Mon-Tsong-Sum’ was an agreement done by the first Chogyal Phuntsog Namgyal in 1642
between the Lepcha, Bhutia and the Limboo, who are also known as the Tsongs. The date of this
agreement is not accurate and predates the installation of Phungtshog Namgyal.
41. It must be mentioned that a section of people, some of the youth, students, and educated class in
Sikkim then protested against the merger. E. K. Santha (2021) writes, ‘…those who stood for an
independent Sikkim was not a majority.’ See Santha, Sikkim An Untold Chronicle, p.251.
42. The domiciled Sikkimese are regarded as the original inhabitants of Sikkim. The person(s)
possessing a Sikkim Subject Certificate issued by the Chogyal in the 1960s, or his /their
legitimate descendent, who either possess Sikkim Domicile Certificate or Certificate of
Identification of Government of Sikkim are considered Sikkim Subjects or Sikkim Domiciled,
or the Local Sikkimese.

63. Multilingual Pre-modern Bengal

Thibaut d’Hubert

1. A. Irani, The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali
Islam, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
2. A. Ruis-Falqués, A. Kirichenko, C. Lammerts, T. d’Hubert, ‘A Faultless Science: Dandin and
Dharmadasa in Burma and Bengal’, in Yigal Bronner (ed), A Lasting Vision: Dandin’s Mirror in
the World of Asian Letters, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 362–411.
3. A. Vasu, Bāṃlā padāvalīr chanda, Bolpur: Pāramitā Prakāśan, 1968.
4. B. Candidas, Caṇḍīdāser padāvalī, edited by Bimanbehari Majumdar, Calcutta: Baṅgīẏa-Sāhitya-
Pariṣat, 1960.
5. B. Candidas, Singing the Glory of Lord Krishna: The Śrīkṛṣṇakīrtana, translated by M. H.
Klaiman, Chico: Scholars Press, 1984.
6. D. Zbavitel, ‘Bengali Literature: A History of Indian Literature’, 9, Modern Indo-Aryan
Literatures, Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1976.
7. Jyotirīśvara, Varṇa-ratnākara of Jyotiriśvara Kaviśekharācārya, edited by Babua Misra and Suniti
Kumar Chatterji, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1998.
8. K. Makoto, ‘Bar.u Caṇḍīdās Verses Found in the NGMPP Manuscript B287/2: A Revised Version
of my Two Previous Articles’, 2021.
9. K. Makoto, ‘The Drama Vidyāvinoda by Poet Śrīdhara Found in Nepal: Probably the Earliest
Bengali Version of the Vidyasundara Story’, 2021.
10. Locana, Rāgataraṅgiṇī, edited by S. Jha, 98, Patna: Maithilī Akādamī Prakāśan 1981.
11. M. Hahn, ‘The Middle-Indic Stanzas in Dharmadāsa’s Vidagdhamukhamaṇḍana’, Wiener
Zeitschrift Für Die Kunde Südasiens / Vienna Journal of South Asian Studies, 55, 2013, pp. 77–
109.
12. S. Jha (ed), Mithilā-paramparāgata-nāṭaka-saṅgrahaḥ: “Prabodhinī”maithilīvyākhyāsahitaḥ.
Darabhaṅgā: Kāmeśvarasiṃha Darabhaṅgā Saṃskrta Viśvavidyālayaḥ, .1986.
13. S. K. Chatterji, Origin and Development of the Bengali Language, Calcutta: Rupa Publications,
1993.
14. S. M. Śāhed, Natun Caryāpad: pāṭh o pāṭhāntar, Dhaka: Kathāprakāś, 2017.
15. S. Sen, A History of Brajabuli Literature: Being a Study of the Vaisnava Lyric Poetry and Poets
of Bengal, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1935.
16. S. Sen, Bangala sahityer itihas, Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, [1940] 2022.
17. S. Sen, Bhasar itivrtta, Calcutta: Ananda Pablisars, [1939] 1993.
18. S. Sen, History of Bengali Literature, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, [1960] 1992.
19. S. Sen, Vidyāpati-goṣṭhī, Bardhaman: Sāhitya Sabhā, 1947.
20. T. d’Hubert, ‘Dobhāshī’, in D. Matringe, E. Rowson, and G. Kramer, Encyclopaedia of Islam, III,
Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2014.
21. T. d’Hubert, In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Alaol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan,
South Asia Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
22. T. d’Hubert, ‘Literary History of Bengal, 8th-19th Century AD’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia
of Asian History, February, 2018.
23. T. d’Hubert, ‘Persian at the Court or in the Village? The Elusive Presence of Persian in Bengal’,
in N. Green (ed), The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2019, pp. 93–112.
24. T. d’Hubert, ‘Sylhet Nagari’, in D. Matringe, E. Rowson, and G. Kramer, Encyclopaedia of
Islam, III, Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2014.
25. T. d’Hubert, Meaningful Rituals: Persian, Arabic and Bengali in the Nurnama Tradition of
Eastern Bengal, Delhi: Primus Books, 2022.
26. T. K. Stewart, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination, Islamic Humanities, 2,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019.
27. T. K. Stewart, The Final Word: The Caitanya Caritamṛta and the Grammar of Religious
Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
28. Vaiṣṇavdās, Śrī Śrī padakalpataru, edited by Satīś Candra Rāẏ, Calcutta: Baṅgiya-Sāhitya-
Parishad-Mandir, 1915.

64. Late Medieval and Early Modern Bengal

Ujjayan Bhattacharya

1. H. R. Sanyal, Social Mobility in Bengal, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1981.

2. K. Chatterjee, The Cultures of History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture
in Bengal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009.
3. N. R. Ray, Bangalir Itihasa Adiparba, Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2013.
4. R. C. Dutt, The Literature of Bengal, Calcutta: Thacker Spink & Co., 1895.
5. R. C. Majumdar, History of Ancient Bengal, Calcutta: G. Bharadwaj & Co., 1971.
6. R. E. M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204-1760, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993.
7. S. K. Chatterjee, The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language Part I: Introduction,
Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1926.
8. T. Ray Chaudhuri Tapan and Irfan Habib, The Cambridge Economic History of India, I,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
9. T. Ray Chaudhuri, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir: An Introductory Study in Social History,
Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1969.

65. Odisha in Pre-modern Times

Pritish Acharya

1. G. N. Das, Hindus and Tribals Quest for co-Existence: Social Dynamics in Medieval Orissa, New
Delhi: Deccan Books, 1998.
2. A. Eschmann, H. Kulke, and G. C. Tripathi, The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of
Orissa, New Delhi: Manohar, 1978.
3. B. Pati, Resisting Domination :Tribuls and the National Movement in Orissa 1920-50, New Delhi:
Manohar Publishers, 1993.
4. P. Acharya, National Movement and Politics in Orissa: 1920-29, New Delhi: Sage Publications,
2008.
5. C. P. Sahu (ed), Iron and Social Change in Early India, Oxford in India Readings: Debates in
Indian History and Society, New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2006.
6. K. C Panigrahi, History of Odisha, Cuttack: Kitab Mahal, 1981
7. P. Acharya (ed), Odisha Itihas, Bhubaneswar: Ama Odisha, 2011.
8. H. Kulke, Kings and Cults: State Formation and Legitimation and in India and Southeast Asia,
New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1993.
9. B. C. Roy, Orissa under the Marathas, Calcutta: Kitab Mahal, 1973.
10. B. C. Roy, Foundations of British Rule in Orissa, Cuttack: New Students Store, 1960.
11. N. Mohanti, Oriya Nationalism Quest for a United Orissa, 1866-1936, New Delhi: Manohar,
1982.

67. The Emergence and Spread of Sufi Thought in Medieval India

Richard M. Eaton

1. E. Gerow, Indian Poetics, 5(3), in J. Gonda (ed), A history of Indian Literature, Wiesbaden: Otto
Harooswitz, 1976.
2. G. N. Devy, After amnesia: tradition and transformation in Indian literary criticism, Bombay:
Orient Longman, 1992.
3. Saqi Must`ad Khan, Maasir-i `Alamgiri, translated by Jadunath Sarkar, Calcutta: Royal Asiatic
Society of Bengal, 1947.
4. V. G. Khobrekar (ed), Tarikh-i-Dilkasha (Memoirs of Bhimsen Relating to Aurangzib’s Deccan
Campaigns), translated by Jadunath Sarkar, Bombay: Department of Archives, Government of
Maharasthra, 1972.

68. India’s Ties with the Arab World and Iran

Abhay Kumar

1. Al Rfouh, F. Odeh, Indian and the Arab World: Retrospect and Prospects, New Delhi: History and
Society India International Center & Shipra Publications, 2003.
2. K. Chatterjee, Contours of Relationship : India and the Middle East, New Delhi: KW Publishers,
2017.
3. K. M. Mohamed, ‘Arab Relations with Malabar Coast From 9th To 16th Centuries’, Proceedings
of the Indian History Congress, 60: 1999, pp. 226–34.
4. P. N. Chopra, ‘India and the Arab World : A Study of Early Cultural Contacts’, India Quarterly,
39(4) (October-December 1983), New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1983, pp. 423–31.

69. Islam in South Asia

Reyaz Ahmad

1. B. N. Pandey, Islam aur Hindutva ka Sangam, Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library,
2008.
2. H. Mukhia, ‘Fluid faith, medieval time’, Indian Express, 28 July 2018.
3. I. Habib, ‘The Idea of India’, speech delivered at Aligarh Muslim University, 7 October 2015.
4. S. Tharoor, The Battle of Belonging, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2020.
5. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Belur Math: Advaita Ashrama.

70. Punjab
Rajkumar Hans

1. B. Prakash, Evolution of Heroic Tradition in Ancient Panjab, Patiala: Punjabi University, 1971.
2. B. Prakash, Glimpses of Ancient Punjab, Patiala: Punjabi University, 1983.
3. B. Prakash, Political and Social Movements in Ancient Punjab, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,
1964.
4. I. Ahmed, The Punjab Bloodied Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy
Through Secret British Reports and First Person Accounts, New Delhi: Rupa Publications,
2011.
5. J. S. Grewal, Social and Cultural History of the Punjab: Prehistoric, Ancient and Early Medieval,
New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2004.
6. J. S. Grewal, The Sikhs: Ideology, Institutions, and Identity, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2009.
7. K. Singh, Punjab, Punjabis and Punjabiyat: Reflections on a Land and its People, New Delhi:
Aleph Book Company, 2018.
8. M. Ejaz, People’s History of Punjab, Virginia: Wichaar Publications, 2020.
9. N. Sukh, Dharti Panj Daryaee, Punjabi, transliteration from Shahmukhi to Gurmukhi by Paramjit
Singh Meesha, Amritsar: Sachal, 2020.
10. S. Singh, Medieval Panjab in Transition: Authority, Resistance and Spirituality c.1500 –c.1700,
New Delhi: Routledge, 2022.
11. S. Singh, Oral Traditions and Cultural Heritage of Punjab, Patiala: Punjabi University, 2016.
12. S. Singh, The Making of Medieval Panjab: Politics, Society and Culture c. 1000–c. 1500, New
Delhi: Routledge, 2020.
13. T. Joseph, Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came, New Delhi:
Juggernaut Books, 2018.

71. The Western Himalayan Region

Chetan Singh

1. C. Singh, Himalayan Histories: Economy, Polity, Religious Traditions (SUNY series in Hindu
Studies) > New York: State University of New York Press, 2020.
2. C. Singh, Region and Empire: Punjab in the 17th Century, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1992.
3. S. S. Charak, Charak History and Culture of Himalayan States, Volume 4: History and Culture of
Himalayan States, Minneapolis: Light & Life Publishers, 1983.

72. Northern India: Medieval and Colonial

Hitendra K. Patel

1. B. S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1987.
2. D. Kumar, The Cambridge Economic History, II c. 1757- 1970, New Delhi: Cambridge University
Press, 1983.
3. G. Bhadra, Iman O Nishan, Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1994.
4. R. C. Majumdar, H. C. Raychaudhuri, and K. Datta, An Advanced History of India, New Delhi:
Macmillan, 1991.
5. S. Chandra, Medieval India: From Sultanat to the Mughals, New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications.
1997.
6. S. Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707-1740, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2002.

73. Medieval Uttar Pradesh

Mayank Kumar

1. H. Mukhia, The Mughals, Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

2. I. Habib, Medieval India: The study of a Civilization, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2008.
3. J. R. I. Cole, The Roots of North Indian Shi’ism in Iran and Iraq, Berkely: University of California
Press, 1988.
4. M. Alam, The Language of Political Islam: India-1200-1800, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004.
5. M. Trivedi, The Making of Awadh Culture, New Delhi: Primus Books, 2010.
6. S. Bhardwaj, Contestations and Accommodations: Mewat and Meos in Mughal India, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2016.
7. T. Chand, Influence of Islam on Indian Culture, Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1936.

74. Delhi: The Last Millennium

Sunny Kumar

1. W. Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, New Delhi: Penguin, 2004.

2. N. Gupta, Delhi between the Empires: 1803-1931, New Delhi: Oxford University
3. Press, 1999.
4. E. Koch, ‘The Mughal Waterfront Garden’, in E. Koch (ed), Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 183–202.
5. S. Kumar, ‘Courts, Capitals and Kingship: Delhi and its Sultans in the Thirteenth and
6. Fourteenth Centuries CE’, in A. Fruess and J. P. Hartung (eds), Court Cultures in the Muslim
World: Seventh to Nineteenth Centuries, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 123–48.
7. N. Lahiri, ‘Commemorating and Remembering 1857: The Revolt in Delhi and its Afterlife’, World
Archaeology, 359(1), 2003, pp. 35-60.
8. G. D. Lowry, ‘Humayun’s Tomb: Form, Function, and Meaning in Early Mughal Architecture’,
Muqarnas, 4, 1987, pp. 133–48.
9. C. M. Naim, ‘Ghalib’s Delhi: A Shamelessly Revisionist Look at Two Popular Metaphors’, Urdu
Texts and Contexts: The Selected Essays, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 250–79.
10. T. Metcalf, Imperial Visions, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.
11. G. Pandey, Remembering Partition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
12. M. Pernau (ed), The Delhi College, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.
13. D. Pinto, ‘The Mystery of the Nizamuddin Dargah: the Account of Pilgrims’, in C. W. Troll,
Muslim Shrines in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 112–24.
14. U. Singh, Delhi: Ancient History, New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2006.
15. U. Singh, Ancient Delhi, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.
16. P. Spear, ‘Twilight of the Mughuls’, in The Delhi Omnibus, New Delhi: Cambridge University
Press, 2002.
17. E. Tarlo, ‘Welcome to History: A Resettlement Colony in the Making’, in V. DuPont (ed), Delhi:
Urban Spaces and Human Destinies, New Delhi: Manohar, 2000, pp. 75–94.

75. The Idea of Delhi

Narayani Gupta

1. M. Dayal (ed), Celebrating Delhi, New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2010.

2. V. Dupont, E. Tarlo, D. Vidal (eds), Delhi: Urban Space and Human Destinies, New Delhi:
Manohar Publishers, 2000.
3. N. Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires, 1803-1931, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981.
4. R. G. Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker, and the Making of Imperial Delhi, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1981.
5. U. Singh, Ancient Delhi, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.
PART V: COLONIALISM

76. The Impact of Colonial Rule on the Indian Economy

Sunny Kumar

1. A. K. Bagchi, Colonialism and Indian Economy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
2. A. K. Bagchi, ‘On Colonialism and Indian Economy’, Review of Agrarian Studies, 5(2), 2015.
3. A. K. Bagchi, ‘De-industrialization in Gangetic Bihar, 1809-1901’, in B. De (ed), Essays in
Honour of S.C. Sarkar, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1976, pp. 499–522.
4. P. Bairoch, ‘International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980’, Journal of European
Economic History, 11, 1982, pp. 269–333.
5. F. Buchanan, A Journey through the Counties of Madras, Canara, and Malabar, Performed under
the Orders of the Marquess of Wellesley, London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807.
6. D. Clingingsmith and J. G. Williamson, ‘India’s De-Industrialisation Under British Rule: New
Ideas, New Evidence’, NBER Working Paper 19586, National Bureau of Economic Research,
Cambridge, 2004.
7. J. Cuenca Esteban, ‘India’s Contribution to British Balance of Payments, 1757-2012’,
Explorations in Economic History, 44(1), 2007, pp. 154–76
8. J. Krishnamurty, ‘The Occupational Structure’, in D. Kumar and M. Desai (eds), The Cambridge
Economic History of India, Vol. 2, c.1757-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983,
pp. 533–50.
9. J. Krishnamurty, ‘De-Industrialisation in Gangetic Bihar During the Nineteenth Century: Another
Look at the Evidence’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 22(4), 1985, pp. 399–416.
10. D. Morris, ‘Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History’, Indian
Economic and Social History Review, 5(1), 1968.
11. T. Ray Chaudhuri, ‘A Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History?’, Indian
Economic and Social History Review, 5(1), 1968.
12. T. Roy (ed), Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India, New Delhi: Sage Publications,
1996.
13. T. Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857-1947, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
14. T. Roy, ‘The Economic Legacy of Colonial Rule in India: Another Look’, Economic & Political
Weekly, 15, 2015.
15. B. Simmons, ‘De-Industrialisation, Industrialisation and the Indian Economy, c. 1850-1957’,
Modern Asian Studies, 19(3), 1985, pp. 593–622.
16. D. Thorner, ‘De-Industrialisation in India, 1881-1931’, in A. Thorner and D. Thorner (eds), Land
and Labour in India, Bombay, New Delhi: Asia Pblishing House, 1965, pp. 70–81.

77. The Asiatic Society and its Impact on Indian History

Thomas Trautmann

1. F. W. Ellis, ‘Note to the Introduction’, in A. D. Camptell, A grammar of the Teloogoo language,

1816, pp. 1–20, Madras: College Press of Fort St. George. Reprinted in T. R. Trautmann,
Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras, Berkely: University of
California Press, 2006.
2. Shankaraiah Shastri (Śaṅkarāryya), summary of unpublished memorandum on Telugu, Tamil, and
Sanskrit in Trautmann, Languages and Nations, pp. 177–85.
3. T. R. Trautmann, ‘The Past in the Present’, Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study
of Ancient and Medieval Pasts, 1, 2011.
4. T. R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras, Berkely:
University of California Press, 2006.
5. W. Jones, ‘The third anniversary discourse’, speech delivered on 2 February 1786, Asiatic
Researches, 1, 1788, pp. 145–431.
78. Interaction with Colonial Ideas
Pradip Datta

1. A. Parel (ed), Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press,
1997.
2. A. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy:Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1983.
3. B. R. Ambedkar, ‘People Cemented by Feeling of One Country, One Constitution and One
Destiny Take the Risk of Being Independent’, in H. Narake, N. G. Kamble, M. L. Kasare, and
A. Godghate (eds), Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, 17(3), 2003.
4. D. Chakrabarty, ‘From Civilization to Globalization: The “West” as a Shifting Signifier in Indian
Modernity’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 13(1), 2012, pp. 138–52.
5. G. Bhadra, ‘Four Rebels of Eighteen-fifty-seven’ in R. Guha and G. C. Spivak (eds), Selected
Subaltern Studies, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988.
6. G. C. Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, in R. Guha and G. C. Spivak
(eds), Selected Subaltern Studies, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988.
7. G. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999.
8. J. Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
9. J. Nehru, The Discovery of India, New Delhi: Penguin India, 2004.
10. K. Chatterjee and C. Hawes (eds), Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern
Encounters, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008.
11. K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, New Delhi:
Kali for Women, 1989.
12. L. Febvre, ‘History and Civilization: Civilization: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas’, in
J. Rundell and S. Mennell (eds), Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization, London:
Routledge, 1998.
13. M. Pernau, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2019.
14. M. Pernau et al. (eds), Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
15. P. Chatterjee, The Black 80.Perceptions of Colonialism (1800–1950) Mohinder Singh Hole of
Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012.
16. P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993.
17. R. Tagore, ‘The Modern Age’, Selected Essays, New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2008.
18. R. Tagore, Nationalism, New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009.
19. R. Tagore, ‘Civilization and Progress’, Selected Essays.
20. R. Tagore, Crisis of Civilization and Other Essays, New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2003.
21. R. Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’ in R. Guha and G. C. Spivak (eds), Selected
Subaltern Studies, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988.
22. S. Bhattacharya, Talking Back: The Idea of Civilization in the Indian Nationalist Discourse, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.
23. S. Naithani, ‘An Axis Jump: British Colonialism in the Oral Folk Narratives of Nineteenth
Century India’, Folklore, 112, 2001.
24. V. Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, Chennai: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2021.
25. The author would like to express gratitude to Partha Chatterjee for a preliminary discussion on
the subject.
79. Print Technology and Modernity
Urvashi Butalia

1. A. Gupta, The Spread of Print in Colonial India Into the Hinterland, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2021.
2. F. Hammill and M. Husseu, Modernism’s Print Cultures (New Modernisms), London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2016.
3. Society Promoting Christian Knowledge, The History of Printing, Montana: Kessinger Publishing,
2010 [1885].

80.Perceptions of Colonialism (1800–1950)

Mohinder Singh

1. Anthony Parel (1997) (ed): Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, New Delhi: Cambridge
University Press.
2. Ashis Nandy (1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New
Delhi: OUP.
3. B. R. Ambedkar, ‘People Cemented by Feeling of One Country, One Constitution and One
Destiny Take the Risk of Being Independent’, in BAWS, Volume 17:3, 2003.
4. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012) ‘From Civilization to Globalization: The “West” as a Shifting Signifier
in Indian Modernity’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 13/1 (2012), 138–52; 5. Gautam Bhadra
(1988) ‘Four Rebels of Eighteen-fifty-seven’ in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Ed.) Selected Subaltern Studies. Delhi: OUP.
6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ in Ranajit
Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Ed.) Selected Subaltern Studies. Delhi: OUP.
7. Gyan Prakash (1999) Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999.
8. Javed Majeed (2007) Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
9. Jawaharlal Nehru (2004) The Discovery of India. New Delhi: Penguin.
10. Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes (Ed.) (2008) Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early
Modern Encounters. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
11. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.) (1989), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial
History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989).
12. Lucien Febvre (1998): “History and Civilization: Civilization: Evolution of a Word and a Group
of Ideas,” Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization, John Rundell and Stephen Mennell
(eds), London: Routledge.
13. Margrit Pernau (2019) Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
14. Margrit Pernau et. al. Ed. (2015) Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and
Europe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
15. Partha Chatterjee (2012) The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power.
Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
16. Partha Chatterjee (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 17. Rabindranath Tagore 2008: “The Modern Age,”
Selected Essays, Delhi: Rupa & Co.
— (2009): Nationalism New Delhi: Penguin Books.
— 2008: Civilization and Progress,” Selected Essays, Delhi: Rupa & Co.
— (2003) Crisis of Civilization and Other Essays. Delhi: Rupa & Co.
18. Ranajit Guha (1988) ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’ in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Ed.) Selected Subaltern Studies. Delhi: OUP.
19. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (2011) Talking Back: The Idea of Civilization in the Indian Nationalist
Discourse. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
20. Sadhana Naithani (2001) ‘An Axis Jump: British Colonialism in the Oral Folk Narratives of
Nineteenth Century India’ in Folklore, No. 112.
21. V. Geetha (2021) Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India. Chennai:
Palgrave Macmillan.

81. Colonial Forest Laws and the Forest-dwellers

Dhirendra Datt Dangwal

1. M. Gadgil and R. Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1992.
2. M. Rangarajan, Fencing the Forests: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central
Provinces, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.
3. R. Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.
PART VI: TOWARDS FEDERALISM—SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS
82. Adivasi Movements in Santal and Munda Regions
Vasundhara Jairath

1. M. Areeparampil, Struggle for Swaraj, Jamshedpur: TRTC, 2002.

2. R. D. Munda and S. B. Mullick (eds), The Jharkhand Movement: Indigenous Peoples’ Struggle for
Autonomy in India, New Delhi: IWGIA and BIRSA, 2003.
3. A. Prakash, Jharkhand: Politics of Development and Identity, New Delhi: Orient-Longman, 2001.
4. A. K. Sen, Indigeneity, Landscape and History: Adivasi self-fashioning in India, New Delhi:
Routledge, 2018.
5. N. Sengupta, Jharkhand: Fourth World Dynamics, New Delhi: Authors Guild Publications, 1982.
6. K. S. Singh, Birsa Munda and his Movement 1874-1901: A study of a millenarian movement in
Chotanagpur, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1983.

83. Caste and Reforms: Modern Period

Rinku Lamba

1. B. R. Ambedkar, The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar, edited by V. Rodrigues, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
2. C. L. Novetzke, ‘The Brahmin double: the Brahminical construction of anti-Brahminism and anti-
caste sentiment in the religious cultures of precolonial Maharashtra’, Religious Cultures in Early
Modern India, New Delhi: Routledge, 2014, pp. 106–26.
3. D. R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement in India, edited by P. D.
Chandra Shobhi, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014.
4. G. Guru, ‘Constitutional Justice: Positional and Cultural’, in R. Bhargava (ed), Politics and Ethics
in the Indian Constitution, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008.
5. G. Shah, H. Mander, S. Thorat, S. Deshpande, and A. Baviskar, Untouchability in Rural India,
New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006.
6. J. Keune, Shared devotion, shared food: equality and the bhakti-caste question in western India,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021.
7. J. Shklar, Faces of Injustice, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
8. P. B. Mehta, Burden of Democracy, New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003.
9. R. Bhargava, ‘Are there Alternative Modernities’, in N. N. Vohra (ed), Culture, Democracy and
Development in South Asia, New Delhi: Shipra Publications, 2000.
10. R. Kukreja, ‘Caste and Cross-region Marriages in Haryana, India: Experience of Dalit cross-
region brides in Jat households’, Modern Asian Studies, 52(2), 2018, pp. 492–531.
11. S. Kaviraj, ‘On the enchantment of the state: Indian thought on the role of the state in the
narrative of modernity’, European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie,
46(2), 2005, pp. 263–96.

85. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Tridip Suhrud

1. M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, critical edition

introduced with notes by T. Suhrud, New Delhi: Penguin Random House India, 2018.
2. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, bilingual critical edition annotated, translated, and edited by S.
Sharma and T. Suhrud, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010.

86. Ambedkar and Gandhi: Visions for Modern India

Nishikant Kolge

1. B. R. Ambedkar, Ambedkar Speaks Vol- I, II and III, edited by Narendra Jadhav, New Delhi:
Konark Publishers, 2013.
2. B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, New Delhi: Navayana,
2014.
3. B. R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma, New Delhi: Samyak Prakashan, 2019.
4. M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of my Experiments with Truth, translated by
Mahadev Desai, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 2009.
5. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, edited by A. J. Parel, New Delhi: Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
6. M. K. Gandhi, India of My Dreams, compiled by R. K. Prabhu, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust,
1947.

87. Emergence of the Idea of Freedom (1900–1947)

Mohinder Singh

1. A. Chakrabarti, ‘Free Will and Freedom in Indian Philosophies’, in K. Timpe, M. Griffith, and N.
Levy (eds), The Routledge Companion to Free Will, New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 389–404.
2. S. Kaviraj, ‘Ideas of Freedom in Modern India’, in Sudipta Kaviraj, The Enchantment of
Democracy and India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2011.
3. C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
4. D. Dalton, The Indian Idea of Freedom: Political Thought of Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo
Ghose, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, Gurgaon: The Academic Press, 1982.

88. The Freedom Struggle: The Early Phase

Vinay Lal

1. A. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1983.
2. M. Farooqui (translated and edited), Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857, New Delhi: Viking
Penguin, 2010.
3. R. C. Dutt, The Economic History of India [in the British period], two volumes, London: K. Paul,
Trench, Trübner, 1906.
4. R. I. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975.
5. S. Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India, Hyderabad: Orient
Longman, 2004.
6. S. Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-1908, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House,
1973; second revised edition, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2010.
7. V. D. Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence 1857, Bombay: Phoenix Publications, 1947.

89. The Freedom Struggle: The Final Phase

Vinay Lal

1. C. Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
2. J. Nehru, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru, Boston: Beacon Press,
1961[1940].
3. K. Chattopadhyay, Inner Recesses Outer Spaces: A Memoir, New Delhi: Niyogi Books & India
International Centre, 2014.
4. N. Desai, My Life is My Message, translated by T. Suhrud, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009.
5. R. Guha (ed), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1982.
6. R. Iyer (ed), The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1986.
7. R. Payne, The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, New York: Smithmark, 1995 [1969].
8. S. Bhattacharya (compiled and edited), The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and debates between
Gandhi and Tagore 1915-1941, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997.
9. S. Sarkar, Modern India 1885-1947, New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983.
10. V. Lal, Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India, New Delhi: Roli
Books, 2022.

90. India’s Struggle for Independence: The Last Phase

Sucheta Mahajan

1. A. Ahmad, ‘Frontier Gandhi: Reflections on Muslim Nationalism in India’, Social Scientist,

33(1/2), 2005, pp. 22–39.
2. A. I. Singh, The Origins of the Partition of India, 1936-1947, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1987.
3. A. Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Karachi:
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
4. A. Mukherjee, M. Mukherjee, and S. Mahajan, RSS, School Texts and the Murder of the Mahatma
Gandhi: The Hindu Communal Project, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007.
5. A. Nandy, ‘Too Painful for Words’, The Times of India, 20 July 1997.
6. B. Chandra, M. Mukherjee, A. Mukherjee, India’s Struggle for Independence, New Delhi: Penguin
India, 1988.
7. C. Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, New York: Columbia University Press,
1998.
8. D. Gilmartin, ‘A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationalism and the Election Process in Colonial
Punjab’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40(3), 1998, pp. 415–36.
9. G. Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, New Delhi:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
10. I. Habib, Building the Idea of India, lecture delivered at Aligarh Muslim University, 7 October
2015.
11. J. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, Indian Politics, 1915-1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1972.
12. J. Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
13. J. Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
14. J. Gallagher, G. Johnson, and A. Seal (eds), Locality, Province and Nation, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973.
15. M. Hasan (ed), India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilisation, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1993.
16. M. Hasan (ed), Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
17. N. Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011.
18. P. Anderson, The Indian Ideology, London: Verso Books, 2013.
19. P. Ghosh, Muhajirs and the Nation: Bihar in the 1940s, New Delhi: Routledge, 2010.
20. P. Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent, New Delhi:
Routledge, 2007
21. R. Batabyal, Communalism in Bengal: From Famine to Noakhali, New Delhi: Sage Publications,
2005.
22. R. J. Moore, Escape from Empire, The Attlee Government and the Indian Problem, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1983.
23. R. Kothari, The Burden of Refuge: The Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan,
2007.
24. S. Mahajan (ed), Towards Freedom: Documents on the Independence of India, 1947, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2013 & 2015.
25. S. Mahajan, Independence and Partition, Erosion of Colonial Power in India, New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2000.
26. S. Misra, A Narrative of Communal Politics: Uttar Pradesh, 1937-39, New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2001.
27. S. Wiqar Ali Shah, Ethnicity, Islam and Nationalism: Muslim Politics in the North West Frontier
Province, 1937-47, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
28. T. Y. Tan and G. Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, London: Routledge, 2000,
pp. 50–51.
PART VII: INDIA SINCE INDEPENDENCE
91. The Rise of Identity Politics
Amir Ali

1. Rajeev Bhargava (ed.) Secularism and its Critics, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998.
2. Tanweer Fazal, ‘“Being Muslim” in Contemporary India: Nation, Identity, and Rights’, in Robin
Jeffrey and Ronojoy Sen (eds.) Being Muslim in South Asia: Diversity and Daily Life, Oxford
University Press, 2014.
 Nancy Fraser, ‘From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’
Age, New Left Review, 212 July/August 1995.
3. William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India,
Cambridge University Press, Delhi, 2005.
4. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Languages of Secularity’, in Humeira Iqtidar and Tanika Sarkar (eds.) Tolerance,
Secularization and Democratic Politics in South Asia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2018.
5. Gurpreet Mahajan and D.L. Sheth (eds.), Minority Identities and the Nation-State, Oxford
University Press, Delhi, 1999.

92. The 1947 Partition of India

Rajmohan Gandhi

1. A. K. Azad, India Wins Freedom, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1959.

2. Accounts of the Punjab killings have been provided by I. Ahmed, The Punjab: Bloodied,
Partitioned and Cleansed, New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2011; G. D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning,
New Delhi: Oxford, 1989; and G. S. Talib, Muslim League’s Attacks on Sikhs and Hindus in the
Punjab, Amritsar: Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, 1950.
3. B. R. Ambedkar, Pakistan, Or the Partition of India, (1945, Bombay), was consulted (in an earlier
edition) by both Gandhi and Jinnah during their 1944 talks. It can be viewed online at
www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/ambedkar_partition/index.html, last
accessed on 28 April 2023.
4. C. Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to Pakistan, Karachi: Longmans, 1961.
5. C. M. Ali, The Emergence of Pakistan, Lahore: Research Society of Pakistan, University of the
Punjab, 1983.
6. M. H. R. Talukdar (ed), Memoirs of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Karachi: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
7. M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, volumes 70–90, available at:
<https://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-literature/collected-works-of-mahatma-
gandhi-volume-1-to-98.php>, last accessed on 28 April 2023.
8. N. Mansergh, E. W. R. Lumby (eds), The Transfer of Power, 1942-47, twelve volumes, London:
Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970–83.
9. R. Gandhi, Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company,
2013.
10. The 1947 Partition Archive, available at: <https://www.1947partitionarchive.org/>, last accessed
on 28 April 2023.
11. The RSS viewpoints are given in H. V. Seshadri, The Tragic Story of Partition, Bengaluru:
Jagarana, 1982.
12. U. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, New Delhi: Penguin,
1999.
13. Uncountable literary works on Punjab’s partition include Saadat Hasan Manto’s story, ‘Toba Tek
Singh’, Khushwant Singh’s novel, Train to Pakistan, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem, ‘Yeh Daag Daag
Ujala’, and Amrita Pritam’s ‘Ode to Waris Shah’.

93. The Partition of India

Sugata Bose

1. A. Jalal, The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India–Pakistan Divide,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
2. A. Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Karachi:
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
3. D. Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988.
4. J. Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
5. M. Hasan (ed), India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization, Themes in Indian History,
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
6. N. Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2011.
7. S. Bose, ‘Unity or Partition: Mahatma Gandhi’s Last Stand, 1945-1948, in S. Bose, The Nation as
Mother and Other Visions of Nationhood, New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2017.
8. V. Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1995.
9. V. F. Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries,
Histories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
10. Y. Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007.

94. Linguistic State Formation (1900–2000)

Asha Sarangi

1. A. Sarangi (ed), Language and Politics in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009.
2. A. Sarangi and S. Pai (ed), Interrogating Reorganisation of States: Culture, Identity and Politics in
India, New York: Routledge, 2011.
3. B. R. Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches Vol 1, compiled and edited by V. Moon, Bombay:
Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979.
4. B. R. Nayyar, National Communication and Language Policy in India, New York: F. A. Praeger,
1969.
5. B. S. Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and Language of Command’, in G. Kudaisya,
Reorganisation of States in India: Text and Context, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2014.
6. G. Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1973.
7. J. Dasgupta, ‘Ethnicity, Language Demands and National Development in India’, in N. Glazer and
D. P.Moynihan (ed), Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1975.
8. J. Dasgupta, Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and National
Language Policy in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.
9. J. Robinson, Regionalising India: Uttarakhand and the Politics of Creating States in South Asia,
South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies, 24(2), 2001.
10. M. J. Leaf, ‘Economic Implications of the Language Issue: A Local View in Punjab’, The
Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, XIV(1), 1976.
11. M. P. Singh, ‘A Borderless Internal Federal Space: Reorganization of States in India’, India
Review, 6(4), 2007, pp. 233–50.
12. M. Windmiller, Linguistic Regionalism in India in Pacific Affairs, 27(4), 1954, pp. 291–318.
13. P. R. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1974.
14. R. Isaka, ‘Language and Dominance: The Debates over the Gujarati Language in the Late
Nineteenth Century in South Asia’, South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies, 25(1), April
2002.
15. Report of the Linguistic Provinces Commission, New Delhi: Government Press, 1948, 1956.
16. S. J. Tambiah, ‘The Politics of Language in India and Ceylon’, Modern Asian Studies, 1(3), 1967.
17. V. B.Tharakeshwar, ‘Translating Nationalism: The Politics of Language and Community’,
Journal of Karnataka Studies, 1, 2003–2004.
18. V. K.Nataraj, ‘Kannadiga-Tamilian Nexus in Banglore’, Economic and Political Weekly,
February, 2001.
19. V. P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States, New Delhi: Orient Longman,
1956.

95. The Working of the Constitution

Nivedita Menon

1. G. Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
2. G. Bhatia, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts, New Delhi:
HarperCollins India, 2019.
3. Lok Sabha Debates, Part II, Vol XII, May 1951.
4. O. Shani, ‘The People and the Making of India’s Constitution’, The Historical Journal, 65, 2022,
pp. 1102–23.
5. R. De, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic, Princeton
University Press, 2018.
6. U. Baxi, ‘Emancipation as Justice’, in U. Baxi and B. Parikh (eds), Crisis and Change in
Contemporary India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995.

96. Nehruvian India

Vinay Lal

1. B. Chandra, M. Mukherjee, and A. Mukherjee, India since Independence, New Delhi: Penguin
India, 2008.
2. J. Nehru, Letters to Chief Ministers, 1947-1964, five volumes, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1988–90.
3. M. J. Akbar, Nehru: The Making of India, New York: Viking Books, 1989.
4. M. Khosla, India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020.
5. O. Shani, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise,
New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2018.
6. S. Khilnani, The Idea of India, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998.

97. India and the Making of Bangladesh

Srinath Raghavan

1. C. Dasgupta, India and the Bangladesh Liberation War, New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2021.
2. G. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide, New Delhi: Random
House, 2014.
3. R. Sisson and L. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India and the Creation of Bangladesh,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
4. S. Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh, Ranikhet: Permanent Black,
2013.

98. Urbanism in India

Narayani Gupta

1. H. K.Naqvi, Urbanisation and Urban Centres under the Great Mughals, Shimla: IIAS, 1971.
2. J. Heitzman, The City in South Asia (Asia’s Transformations), New York: Routledge, 2009.
3. R. Champakalakshmi, Trade, Ideology and Urbanisation: South India 300 BC – AD 1300, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
4. R. Ramachandran, Urbanisation and Urban Systems in India, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1989.
5. S. Ratnagar, Understanding Harappa – Civilisation in the Greater Indus Valley, New Delhi:
Tulika Books, 2017.

99. Identity Politics since Independence

Aditya Nigam

1. A. Nandy, S. Trivedy, S. Mayaram, and A. Yagnik, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi

Movement and Fear of the Self, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.
2. A. Nigam, The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular-Nationalism in India, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.
3. B. Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, An Anthropologist
Among Historians and Other Essays, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
4. C. Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Low Castes in North India. New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2003.
5. D. Gupta, The Context of Ethnicity: Sikh Identity in a Comparative Perspective, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
6. M. S. S. Pandian, ‘Notes of the Transformation of “Dravidian” Ideology: Tamil Nadu c. 1900-
1940’, Social Scientist, 22(5–6), 1994.
7. N. Sahgal, J. Evans, A. M. Salazar, K. J. Starr, and M. Corichi, ‘Religion in India: Tolerance and
Segregation’, Pew Research Center, 29 June 2021.
8. S. Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, in P. Chatterjee and G. Pandey (eds), Subaltern
Studies, VII, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.

100. People’s Movements since Independence

Krishna Menon

1. A. Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in the Narmada Valley,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
2. A. Bayat, Street Politics – Poor People′s Movements in Iran, Columbia University Press: New
York, 1998.
3. A. Kioupikiolis, Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today, Surrey: Ashgate
Publishing, 2014.
4. A. S. David, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, New Jersey: Wiley, 2018.
5. B. Ghosh, ‘We Shall Drown, But We Shall Not Move: The Ecologics of Testimonies in NBA
documentaries’, available at:
https://www.academia.edu/2955420/_We_Shall_Drown_But_We_Shall_Not_Move_The_Ecolo
gics_of_the_Narmada_Bachao_Andolan_DOCUMENTARY_TESTIMONIES_, ‘ast accessed
on 28 April 2023.
6. D. D. Diani, The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2016.
7. F. F. Piven and R. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: How They Succeed, Why They Fail, New
York: Vintage Books, 1979.
8. I. N. Trevor Ngwane, Urban Revolt: State Power and the Rise of People’s Movements in the
Global South, New York: Haymarket Books, 2013.
9. R. Modi, ‘The River and Life: People’s Struggle in the Narmada Valley’, Journal of Refugee
Studies, 2003, pp. 109–11.
10. S. B. Guha, ‘The Nonadanga Eviction in Kolkata’, in T. Ngwane, I. Ness, L. Sinwell, Urban
Revolt State Power and the Rise of People’s Movements in the Global South, Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2017.
11. S. Sangvai, ‘The New People’s Movements in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2007.

Afterword: Between the Nation-State and Civilization: Diversity and the Politics of History in
India
Vinay Lal

1. H. Kissinger, World Order, New York: Penguin, 2014.

2. Tacitus, Life of Cnaeus Julius Agricola, c. 98 CE, translated by Alfred John Church and William
Kackson Brodribb, paragraph 30, Ancient History Textbooks.
3. E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 95, 4, 67.
4. Ibid., p. 9.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 72.
7. Ibid., p. 82, 333.
8. P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.
9. Australian Bureau of Statistics (2021), ‘Language Statistics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Peoples’, ABS Website, accessed 2 March 2023.
10. M. P. Lewis, G. F. Simons, and C. D. Fennig (eds), Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 24th
edition, Dallas: SIL International, 2021; see also W. A. Foley, The Papuan Languages of New
Guinea, Cambridge Language Surveys, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
11. J. Errington, ‘Indonesian among Indonesia’s Languages’, in Producing Indonesia: The State of
the Field of Indonesian Studies, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014, pp. 185–94; and the
writings of the linguist James Neil Sneddon.
12. PTI, ‘More than 19,5000 mother tongues spoken in India: Census’, Indian Express, 1 July 2018.
13. N. Katz, Who are the Jews of India?, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
14. Census of India (1951), Paper No. 6: Languages (1953), Table II, p. 8.
15. S. Amin, Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2016; and see also K. G. Scherwin, ‘The Cow-Saving Muslim
Saint: Elite and Folk Representations of a Tomb Cult in Oudh’, in Mushirul Hasan and Asim
Ray (eds), Living Together Separately: Cultural India in History and Politics, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 172–93.
16. M. Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1967, p. 12.
17. Ibid., p. 13, 18.
18. See, for instance, J. J. Roy Burman, ‘Hindu-Muslim Syncretism in India’, The Economic and
Political Weekly, 18 May 1996; Jackie Assayag, ‘The Goddess and the Saint: Acculturation and
Hindu-Muslim Communalism in a Place of Worship in South India (Karnataka)’, Studies in
History 9, no. 2, New Series, 1993, pp. 219–45; and Yoginder Sikand, ‘Shared Hindu-Muslim
Shrines in Karnataka: Challenges to Liminality’, in Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld (eds),
Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation and Conflict, New York: Routledge,
2018, pp. 166–86.
19. Vinay Lal, ‘On the Rails of Modernity: Communalism’s Journey in India’, Emergences 12, no. 2,
2002, pp. 297–311 at 305.
20. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Volume IX, Part II: Gujarat Population: Musalmans and
Parsis (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1899), p. 22.
21. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003; Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; Or, How
European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 2005; Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2013; 22. See the various essays in Hinduism Reconsidered,
edited by Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers,
2001, as well as D. N. Jha, ‘Constructing the Hindu Identity’, in Religion in Indian History,
edited by Irfan Habib, Delhi: Tulika Books, 2007, pp. 210–37.
23. In the colourful language of James Mill, ‘The popular religion of the Hindoos, consisting of a
gross mythology, and involving in its rites and ceremonies the worship of no less than three
hundred and thirty millions of gods and goddesses, was deemed by the Mahomedans, who
became masters of India, a fit object of contempt and abhorrence.’ See The History of British
India, London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817, Vol. 1, Ch. 2, Sec. 4. There are numerous
editions and reprints of this work with varying pagination. If the 300 million deities of the
pantheon were a ‘fit object of contempt and abhorrence’ for Muslims, ‘who became masters of
India’, we can imagine what kind of monstrosity they were to the mind of Mill, who thought the
Muslims equally superstitious, irrational, and deserving of contempt as the Hindus—not to
mention the fact that the British were now the ‘masters’ of both the Hindus and Muslims, and
therefore entitled to look down upon both. Mill had read William Jones, in whose essay, ‘On the
Gods of Greece, Italy, and India’, Asiatick Researches Vol. 1, chapter IX (1789), he had first
encountered the mention of ‘three hundred and thirty millions’ of gods. Jones’ essay is
reproduced in The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, pp. 195–245. One of the decisive characteristics
of Orientalist discourse is its iterative function: once some observation with seeming merit, or
curiosity, has been advanced, it is parrotlike repeated by scores of writers in subsequent years.
So, as another instance, we find Alexander Duff (1806–78) using language akin to Mill’s to aver
that ‘of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen man,
Hinduism is surely the most stupendous’. Hindus worship, Duff notes, ‘not the high and the
holy One that inhabiteth eternity, but three hundred and thirty millions of deities instead’. See
his 1839 work, India and Indian missions: Including Sketches of the Gigantic System of
Hinduism Both in Theory and Practice (reprint ed., Delhi: Swati Publications, 1988), p. 204,
212.
24. Charles Wilkins, The Bhagvat-Geeta, or, Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon, London: W. Bulmer
and Co., 1785.
25. A. Shrikumar, ‘In this Tamil Nadu village temple, biryani is served as “prasad” during annual
festival’, The Hindu, 17 January 2019.
26. The postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha, recalling the festivities surrounding the Parsi New Year
at his grandmother’s home when he was a child, says that they would drink ‘an absolutely
delicious milkshake-like drink, falooda, made of pink rosewater,’ and as he sipped his drink he
‘often recalled the founding story of the Parsis dissolving like sugar or rosewater in the milk.’
National Public Radio (NPR) in the US ran a feature called ‘Sugar in the Milk: A Parsi Kitchen
Story’, 20 March 2008. The story is invariably recounted in books on Parsi home cooking: see,
for example, Anahita Dhondy, The Parsi Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, New Delhi:
HarperCollins, 2021, and her shorter piece, ‘A sweet dish that symbolizes how Parsis made
India their home’, LiveMint, 6 October 2021. The earliest account of the flight of the Parsis to
Hindustan is a text attributed to Bahman Kaikobad Hamjiar Sanjana dated to around 1600 CE
 and known as the Kisseh-i-Sanjan (‘The Story of Sanjan’), translated into English by
Shahpurshah Hormasji Hodivala, Studies in Parsi History, Bombay, 1920, pp. 92–117. It offers
an extended account of the conversation purported to have taken place between the Indian ruler
and the Dastur, or high priest, who spoke for his people; however, the story of the sugar in the
milk does not appear in this text.
27. Elio Antonio de Nebrija, Gramatica de la lengua castellana, Salamanca, 1492; reprint ed.,
London: Oxford University Press, 1926.
28. Cited by Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and
Colonization, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995, 38, and see more generally
pp. 37–59.
29. Cited by D. P. Pattanayak, Multilingualism and Mother-tongue Education (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1981, 6.
30. M. K. Gandhi, ‘Congress Position’ (27 January 1948), first published in Harijan, 1 February
1948, and also in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [hereafter CWMG], 100 vols. (2nd
rev. ed., New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,
Government of India, 2001), p. 305.
31. Shreya Roy Chowdhury, ‘What the Modi government’s “committee to rewrite history” is really
studying’, Scroll.in, 10 March 2018.
32. Romila Thapar, ‘In Defence of History’, in her The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary
Identities Through History, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2014, p. 67.
33. Hartosh Singh Bal, ‘Indus Valley people did not have genetic contribution from the steppes:
Head of Ancient DNA Lab testing Rakhigarhi samples’, The Caravan, 27 April 2018.
34. Saeed Naqvi, The Muslim Vanishes, New Delhi: Vintage Books, 2022.
35. Shahid Tantray, ‘The plan is to depict a heroic regime: GN Devy on attempts to rewrite history’,
The Caravan, 9 April 2023; see also, ‘Introduction’ in this volume.
36. ANI, ‘Conspiracy distorted history, being rectified now; India leaving behind colonial mindset:
PM Modi’, Economic Times, 25 November 2022.
37. Vinay Lal, Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India, New Delhi: Roli
Books, 2022, Chapter III.
38. See Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence 1857, Bombay: Phoenix
Publications, 1947 [1909], and idem, Hindu-Pad-Padashahi or a Review of the Hindu Empire of
Maharashtra, reprint ed., New Delhi: Bharti Sahitya Sadan, 1971 [1925].
39. The locus classicus for the colonial view are the writings of Alexander Dow and, especially,
Robert Orme, ‘On the Effeminacy of the Inhabitants of Indostan’, in Historical Fragments of
the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes, and of the English Concerns in Indostan from the Year
MDCLIX, London: W. Wingrave, 1785; reprint ed., New Delhi: Associated Publishers, 1974,
pp. 299–303.
40. Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2003; 2nd rev. ed., 2005.
41. Ibid., Chapter 3, pp. 141–85.
42. Ramchandra Gandhi, Sita’s Kitchen: A Testimony of Faith and Inquiry, New Delhi: Wiley
Eastern Limited, 1994.
43. Ashis Nandy, ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’, History and Theory 34, no. 2, Theme Issue 34:
World Historians and Their Critics, May 1995.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editors would like to thank Prof. Rajmohan Gandhi, formerly Illinois
University, Urbana-Champaign; Prof. Hans Henrich Hock, University of
Urbana-Champaign; Prof. Vinay Lal, University of California, Berkeley;
Prof. Sudeshna Guha, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi; Prof. Mahesh Deokar,
Savitribai Pune University, Pune, and Prof. Andrew Ollett, University of
Chicago, for offering scholarly advise during the process of compilation of
this work.
They would like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance provided by
Prof. Om Damani, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and Prof.
Rashmi Sawhney, Christ University, Bangalore, in their capacity as Trustees
of the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, Baroda.
The report which forms the basis of this book was announced at Delhi
on the 9 October 2022, marking the birth anniversary of Acharya
Dharmanand Kosambi. The editors gratefully acknowledge the help
extended by Shri Ashok Vajpeyi and the Raza Foundation for enabling them
to hold the event.
G. N. Devy would like to express gratitude to Shri Sisir Chalsani for
providing generous help, enabling him to procure large number of books
and rare materials necessary for the work.