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Research, Script and Narration by Namit Arora
Producer: The Wire; Director: Natasha Badhwar; Camera: Ajmal Jami; Video Editor: Anam Sheikh
Made possible by a grant from The Raza Foundation and contributions to The Wire by viewers like you.
The story of India is one of profound and continuous change. It has been shaped by the dynamic of migration, conflict, mixing, coexistence, and cooperation. In this ten-part web series, I’ll tell the story of Indians and our civilization by exploring some of our greatest historical sites, most of which were lost to memory and were dug out by archaeologists. I’ll also focus on ancient and medieval foreign travellers whose idiosyncratic accounts conceal surprising insights about us Indians. All along, I’ll survey India’s long and exciting churn of cultural ideas, beliefs, and values—some that still shape us today, and others that have been lost forever. The series mostly mirrors—and often extends—the contents of my book, Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. Bibliography and transcript appear below. Go ahead and watch! —Namit Arora
After the decline of the Harappan Civilization, waves of Aryan migrants arrived from Central Asia between 2000–1500 BCE. A nomadic-pastoralist people of lighter skin, the Aryans were culturally different from the Subcontinent’s settled farmers and forest tribes of darker skin. They brought along an early Sanskrit, proto-Vedas, Vedic gods, a priestly class fond of fire rituals and oral chants, new social and gender hierarchies, the horse and chariot. Mixing with the locals forged a lighter-skinned elite that spoke Indo-European languages, or Prakrits. In the centuries ahead, larger political units led by tribal chiefs emerged in north India. War among Aryanized tribes like the Bharatas and Purus became common. From this substrate and its social conflicts came the early stories of the Mahabharata, c. 1000 BCE. Indo-Aryan culture and languages became dominant in Aryavarta, whose cultural and material qualities I'll explore in this episode. More than a thousand years after the Harappans, the next cities arose in the Gangetic Plain in mid-first millennium BCE. New states with money economies even flirted with democratic ideas. New hybrid cultures arose from the mixing of Indo-Aryans, post-Harappans, and ethnic groups whose ancestors had come to India much earlier. They forged new trades, lifestyles, and a thriving marketplace of spiritual and religious ideas. This prolific age—of the early Upanishads, the Buddha, Mahavira, Carvaka, Panini—would profoundly shape later Indians. | ||||
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| EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Hello and welcome to Indians. I’m Namit Arora. In the previous episode, we looked at the rise and fall of the Harappan Civilization in the northwest of the Indian Subcontinent. Its decline was most likely caused by regional climate change. A long spell of bad monsoons led to droughts and drove urban Harappans out of their towns and cities. By 1900 BCE, a lot of Harappans had migrated south and east, where they dissolved into the rural life of the subcontinent. Indo-Aryans and Their Culture
These Aryans, or Indo-Aryans, were mainly nomadic herders & their culture was profoundly different from that of the Harappans and their descendants, who were settled farmers. The Aryans rode horses and horse-drawn chariots; the Harappans never used horses. The Aryans had a three-tiered social stratification—between priests, warriors, and commoners—whereas no such division is known among the Harappans. The religious cosmology of the Aryans had mostly male gods, such as Indra, Varuna, Surya, Mitra, Agni, Vayu, Rudra. They had a few female ones too, such as Usha and Sarasvati—but their presence is quite insignificant compared to the presence of women in the artefacts of the subcontinent, as we saw in the previous episode. The Aryans spoke an early form of Sanskrit, called Vedic Sanskrit. Their oral tradition included early forms of the verses of the Rig Veda. A priestly class of Brahmins performed fire rituals and oral chants. They memorised and passed down their magical words and sounds with great precision. The Aryans sacrificed animals to their gods, including cattle, goats, and horses. The Ashwamedh yagya, a ritual performed by ambitious kings, usually ended with a horse sacrifice. Like other nomadic herders, the Aryans killed and ate male calves as well as older cows that no longer gave milk. As Swami Vivekananda wrote, ‘There was a time in this very India when, without eating beef, no Brahmin could remain a Brahmin’. But the milk-giving cow also had an elevated and protective status compared to other animals. In other words, the Aryans saw the cow as special, but they also slaughtered her when she was no longer useful. Her special status came from their Central Asian ancestors. Interestingly, the Aryans met the domesticated water buffalo in India, but denied her the same high status, despite being no less useful. Poor buffalo! As part of their rituals, the Aryans also had some fun. They drank an intoxicant called soma. Their gods, esp. Indra and Agni, are also described as drinking soma in large quantities. The psychedelic highs of soma were surely quite enjoyable, but for the most part, Vedic religion was ritualistic and sacrificial. It did not yet have ideas like the cycle of samsara, maya, karma, or moksha. From this Vedic religious substrate and the social hierarchy of the Vedic Aryans would later emerge Brahminism and the four-fold varna system. Indo-Aryans' Interactions With the Locals
Within a few generations, the Indo-Aryans, and this new mixed elite with lighter skin, became a force to reckon with. In a way the Indo-Aryan strategy was very effective. Through mating, aggressive power, or cultural diffusion, they colonized the minds of a local elite to establish themselves, much like what the Turko-Persians and the British did later. This local elite then started championing Indo-Aryan culture, religion, and language. This became a path to upward mobility in the emerging social order. But it also seems natural that other locals must have resented the growing domination of the alien Indo-Aryan culture. There must’ve been conflicts, but we don’t know what form they took. In parallel, ethnic mixing and internal migration also continued for over a thousand years. This eventually produced a new social layer that still lives on, especially in the upper caste groups of north India. These groups derive as much as 30 percent of their paternal ancestry from the Indo-Aryans, compared to low single digits for Dalits and Adivasis of South India. The Roots of the Indo-Aryans
Indo-Aryan Patriarchy Several Yamnaya lineages, including the Indo-Aryans, are known to have valued Sati. This gory ritual of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands appeared not just in India but in many parts of the world, notably Europe. The father of Alexander the Great had a Thracian wife who, as part of a custom of her people, was burned on her husband’s funeral pyre. The first known mentions of Sati in India are also from the same timeframe: 4th century BCE. It’s just that other regions got rid of the practice of Sati long before Indians did. So it’s fair to say that the Indo-Aryans brought with them a far more subordinate idea of women than what had prevailed in the Subcontinent. The mixing of Indo-Aryans with local women had other outcomes too. One was that Vedic Sanskrit, spoken by Aryan men, began absorbing loanwords from the languages of their local wives. It also absorbed a specific set of sounds called retroflex (such as ट, ठ, ड, ढ, ण). You hear them in words like thik, danda, dhona, bara. These sounds are produced when the tip of your tongue curls upwards to touch the palate. These retroflex sounds are unique to the languages of the subcontinent, and they soon also entered Sanskrit. The Aryan Controversy Today Fortunately, the science of ancient DNA has now firmly resolved this so-called ‘debate’ about the origin of the Indo-Aryans. Scholars in the field, based on evidence from linguistics and archaeology, have long supported the Aryan Migration Theory. Now the study of ancient DNA has revealed our genetic lineages and migration patterns going back thousands of years. And today, there is little scholarly disagreement about this—Aryan Migration is a fact, not an opinion. What this also means is that to the extent the Rig Veda, Sanskrit, and priestly fire rituals are seen as the foundations of Hinduism, to that extent Hinduism too is an outsider religion, arriving with the Aryans from Central Asia. Here is a side note. It’s important to realize that the Aryan Migration Theory is different from the earlier model proposed by the British—the Aryan Invasion Theory—which was abandoned by scholars many decades ago. The Aryans, it’s now clear, came into India over the course of many centuries. And their incoming population was dominated by men. They came with their animal herds and settled across north India. Scholars do not see the patterns of a statist military invasion in it. In other words, the Aryans are best classified as migrants, not invaders, though they surely had many conflicts with the locals, and some locals may have experienced them as invaders. One thing we can be absolutely sure of: Never in their wildest dreams could these Aryans have imagined that three thousand and five hundred years later, people would be excitedly discussing them and fighting a culture war over their legacy! An Era of Cultural and Genetic Mixing From this substrate and its social conflicts came the early stories of the Mahabharata, around 1000 BCE. The earliest bards who told the Mahabharata story may have been charioteers, who served as drivers, confidantes, and bodyguards to the warriors. While on military campaigns, they recited stories around campfires. No wonder God was a charioteer in the epic! Even Karna was raised by a charioteer. Starting with a king and a fisherwoman as the founders of the Kuru clan, these stories would evolve over centuries, as they would be told and retold in countless venues. Each new generation of oral storytellers would add new and exciting masala into it—to a point where it’s now very hard to extract any reliable historical data from it. Despite that, the stories of the Mahabharata arguably contain a psychic record of the late Vedic Age. It records its evolving values, morals, anxieties, as well as notions of dharma, time, honor, and so on. This great epic also contains echoes of a changing social order, which was moving away from tribal and clan-based units towards becoming hereditary kingdoms ruled by a warrior class. After the arrival of the Indo-Aryans, no cities arose in India for centuries. The Harappan script had disappeared along with their cities, and no other script has been found. It’s intriguing that the flame of a literate urban civilization wasn’t lit again for over a thousand years. Perhaps the lack of an urban civilization reduced the need for a script. But while there were no cities or scripts, many cultures kept evolving in the subcontinent. Archaeologists identify them through their pottery and other artefacts, such as Ochre Colored Pottery Culture, Copper Hoard Culture, and Painted Grey Ware Culture. The Pandavas and Kauravas of the Mahabharata would have used such Painted Grey Ware pottery. Aryavarta Emerges But there is no evidence yet of a caste system, which is about a hierarchy of endogamous groups. Endogamy means marrying within one’s own social group. The caste system emerged later when Aryanized notions of purity and pollution got mapped onto occupations and produced both endogamy and hierarchy. Beyond Aryavarta, on all sides, lived the barbarians, or the mleccha. This term included foreigners to the north as well as people south of the Vindhyas and forest peoples, who had very different customs and languages. In popular stories, such people were often imagined as subhuman creatures, grotesque rakshasas, fierce-looking demons, or talking monkeys! Evolution of Prakrits
In a way, Indian English is also a prakrit, created by upper-class Indian speakers of British English. Same process! By the late Vedic Age, prakrits were increasingly spoken by the middle and upper classes of the day, while the poor and rural folk continued with their old vernacular languages. Over time, the prakrits and Indo-Aryan culture gained in the north. By the medieval period, this process would practically wipe out all vernacular languages of north India, replacing them with various Indo-Aryan languages. Interestingly, we now call these Indo-Aryan languages vernacular in relation to English. Meanwhile, in the south, Dravidian languages and post-Harappan and other folk cultures became prominent. Something of this cultural divide still exists in India. Rise of Mahajanapadas
The thing is that if Greece can be called the mother of democracy, so can India. Truth is that both the Indian and the Greek experiments were closer to city scale and not very democratic by modern yardsticks. They were in fact closer to oligarchic republics. Yet, they both belong to a plural prehistory of democracy, whose examples can be found around the world, not just in India and Greece. What’s common to them is their taste for governance through discussion, debate & voting by a wider cross-section of people. Sadly, as in Greece, these early experiments in India soon collapsed and gave way to monarchies. Indians abandoned these early democratic instincts for 2500 years and embraced new social hierarchies. Only in modern times would a class of Indians re-cultivate a taste for democracy after India’s collision with Europe. India's Axial Age Even in hindsight, this was one of the most prolific and creative ages in India. Its own Axial Age that would profoundly shape later Indians. It was the age of the Upanishads, which departed from the earlier ritualistic and sacrificial Vedas. The Upanishads were more abstract, inner-directed, and contemplative. It was the age of the Buddha, who spoke of human suffering and compassion, injecting a huge moral dimension in Indian religious thought. It was the age of the Carvakas, the materialists who rejected all afterlife and the Vedas, which they claimed were designed to keep men submissive through fear and rituals. The Carvakas were atheists who mocked religious ceremonies, calling them inventions of the Brahmins to ensure their own livelihood. It was the age of Mahavira, who took the idea of non-violence to new heights. The age of Panini, the grammarian from Gandhara who forged the classical form of Sanskrit. The age of early medical surgeries that could reconstruct noses chopped off as punishment. Of course, one wonders why so many people had their noses chopped off to create a market for this surgical expertise. Chances are that it had something to do with the rise of new regimes of coercive power in centralized state societies, often at war with each other. The Brahmi Script
Still, it’s amazing to think that the entire Vedic corpus was composed and transmitted orally for over a thousand years! Their shlokas required precise pronunciation for their magic to happen, so the Brahmins invested a great deal in memorizing them precisely. They were passed down orally from father to son for over 50 generations! That’s an impressive feat of organized memory! A New Religious Landscape In the next episode, I’ll look at the invasion of Alexander the Great and the rise of the first mega empire in India, founded by Chandragupta Maurya. I’ll look at it especially through the eyes of Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to his court. See you next time! |