India: A History

by John Keay

India’s Aryans were therefore originally immigrants, and to judge by their exploits as recorded in the Vedas, highly combative ones. Aided and encouraged by deities like the fire-breathing Agni and the thunderbolt-throwing

Indra, the Aryan conquistadors were seen as having hurtled down the passes from Afghanistan to career across the plains of the Panjab. Dealing death and destruction from fleets of horse-drawn chariots, they subdued the indigenous peoples and appropriated their herds. As dasa or dasyu, these indigenes or aborigines were characterised as dark, flat-nosed, uncouth, incomprehensible and generally inferior. The Aryans, on the other hand, were finer-featured, fairer, taller, favoured above others in the excellence of their gods, their horses and their ritual magic, and altogether a very superior people.

In time, however, the purity of the Aryan race had become hopelessly diluted; manliness, creativity and drive had succumbed to the enervating effects of an intolerable climate

and an insidious social system. Hence no serious resistance had been offered either to the thrust of Islam or to the advent of the colonial powers. India had slumped into seemingly irredeemable decadence and degeneracy.

Then, in the nick of time, out of the west came the British. No less fair, no less manly and no less confident of their superiority, they were the neo-Aryans, galvanising a naturally lax people into endeavour and industry, showering them with the incomparable benefits of a superior civilisation and a h...

An Aryanised society may be defined as one in

which primacy is accorded to a particular language (Sanskrit), to an authoritative priesthood (brahmans) and to a hierarchical social structure (caste). To establish these three ‘pillars’ of Aryanisation in, say, Kerala or Java no sizeable relocation of people would have been necessary. As will be seen, the process appears

simply to have been one of gradual acculturation requiring neither mass migration nor enforced concurrence. A small admixture of fortune-seekers, traders or teachers who happened to be in possession of a superior technology and of a persuasive ideology could and did, if prepared to compromise...

without apparently antagonis...

Basically the Vedas and the epics portray the concerns, and celebrate the exploits, of a society consisting almost entirely of well-born clansmen. Known as ksatriya and rajanya, these warrior families acknowledged a chief with whom they shared a common ancestor. The chief was their raja, a term rich in potential for misunderstanding in that it later came to mean a king in the monarchical states and an elector, or a participant in government, in the republics. Thus Vaisali, the capital of the Licchavi gana-sangha in northern Bihar,is said to have housed 7707 rajas, or in another account ‘twice 84,000 rajas’. As well as the leadership of their rajas, the ksatriya also acknowledged the ritual insights and sacerdotal authority of a non-ksatriya priesthood, the brahmans. The latter, their profession becoming hereditary and exclusive through emphasis on their descent from certain ancient risis or seers, assumed the status of a parallel caste with well advertised rights and taboos derived from their monopoly of sacrificial lore, of religious orthodoxy and of academic jargon. To these two castes was appended a third, possibly to differentiate clansmen of less

distinguished descent who had forsaken their warrior past for agriculture and other wealth-generating pursuits. Vaisya, the term used to describe this caste, derives from vis, which originally meant the entire tribal community. They were thus considered to be of arya descent and, like the brahman and ksatriya, were dvija or ‘twice born’ (once physically, a second time through initiation rituals). As the ksatriya, literally ‘the empowered ones’, assumed military, political and administrative powers within the new state structures, the unempowered remainder of the erstwhile vis, that is the vaisya, continued as gramini and grhpati, villagers and household heads. Their role was that of creating the wealth on which the ksatriya and brahman depended or, as the texts have it, on which ksatriya and brahman might ‘graze’. In pursuit of this productive ideal many vaisya accumulated land holdings while others invested in trade and industry. Much later, just as the ksatriya in recognition of their martial status would be equated with ‘rajputs’, so the vaisya would be identified with the essentially mercantile ‘bania’. Beyond the pale of the arya were a variety of indigenous peoples like the despised dasa of the Vedas. All were, nevertheless, subject to varying

degrees of Aryanisation. Some, perhaps in recognition of their numerical superiority in regions newly penetrated by the clans, were actually co-opted into the three dvija castes while their cults and deities were accommodated in the growing pantheon of what we now call Hinduism. Others obstinately retained forms of speech and conduct which disqualified them from co-option and, perhaps as a result of conquest, they were relegated to functional roles considered menial and impure. Dasa came to denote a household slave or rural helot and dasi a female domestic or slave-concubine. Slavery was not, however, practised on a scale comparable to that in Greece or Rome, perhaps because most of these indigenous peoples were in fact assigned an intermediate status as sudra. The term is of uncertain origin and see...

The first occurrence of the word sets the trend. It makes its debut in an inscription found at Persepolis in Iran, which was the capital of the Persian or Achaemenid empire of Darius I, he whose far-flung battles included defeat at Marathon by the Athenians in 490 BC. Before this, Darius had evidently enjoyed greater success on his eastern frontier, for the Persepolis inscription, dated to c518 BC, lists amongst his numerous domains that of ‘Hi(n)du’. The word for a ‘river’ in Sanskrit is sindhu. Hence sapta-sindhu meant ‘[the land of] the seven rivers’, which was what the Vedic arya called the Panjab. The Indus, to which most of these seven rivers were tributary, was the sindhu par excellence ; and in the language of ancient Persian, a near relative of Sanskrit, the initial ‘s’ of a Sanskrit word was invariably rendered as an aspirate – ‘h’. Soma, the mysterious hallucinogen distilled, deified and drunk to excess by the Vedic arya, is thus homa or haoma in old Persian; and sindhu is thus Hind[h]u. When, from Persian, the word found its way into Greek, the initial aspirate was dropped, and it started to appear as the route ‘Ind’ (as in ‘India’, ‘Indus’, etc.). In this form it

reached Latin and most other European languages. However, in Arabic and related languages it retained the initial ‘h’, giving ‘Hindustan’ as the name by which Turks and Mughals would know India. That word also passed on to Europe to give ‘Hindu’ as the name of the country’s indigenous people and of what, by Muslims and Christians alike, was regarded as their infidel religion.

Buddhism was not a belief system, not a rival faith to the post-Vedic cults and practices which prevailed under brahmanical direction, but more a complementary discipline. About gods, worship, offerings, prayers, priests and ritual, the Buddha claimed no special knowledge. He offered merely heightened insight, not divine revelation. It was his followers in the generations to come who would elevate the Buddha and other semi-enlightened ones (Boddhisatvas) into deities, thus claiming for Buddhism the authority and the supernatural paraphernalia of a religion.

But it was Bimbisara’s patronage that would prove crucial. When the Buddha died (at Kushinara in the Malla republic), it was Bimbisara’s Magadha which made good its claim to most of his hotly contested relics and, immediately afterwards, it was in the Magadhan capital of Rajagriha that the first Buddhist council was convened. Magadha’s economic expansion provided a social ambience particularly favourable to Buddhism. In the wake of Magadha’s political expansion Buddhism would prevail over most of the other heterodox sects (although not brahmanical orthodoxy) and spread throughout the subcontinent.

Alexander’s great achievement was not invading India but getting there. A military expedition against the Achaemenid empire, originally planned by his father, became more like a geographical exploration as the men from Macedonia triumphantly probed regions hitherto undreamed of. Anatolia, the modern Turkey, was overrun in 334–3 BC. To protect his southern flank before invading Persia, Alexander then swept down through Phoenicia (Syria and Palestine) to claim Egypt and Libya. That was in 333–2. In 331–0 the last Achaemenid ruler was chased from his homeland and Persepolis was sacked. The twenty-five-year-old Alexander was now master of all that had comprised the largest empire the world had yet seen – all, that is, except for its easternmost provinces, including Gandhara and ‘India’.