The Indians: Histories of a Civilization 9789395853095

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ALEPH BOOK COMPANY An independent publishing firm promoted by Rupa Publications India First published in India in 2023 by Aleph Book Company 7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj New Delhi 110 002 Introduction copyright © G. N. Devy Afterword copyright © Vinay Lal This edition copyright © Aleph Book Company 2023 Copyright in the individual essays vests in the respective authors The views and opinions expressed in this book are those of the authors and the facts are as reported by them, which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publisher is not in any way liable for the same. The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Aleph Book Company. ISBN: 978-93-95853-09-5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

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 1 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 breathcatching 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, subnationalities, 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 noninstitutional 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 humanlike 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 TibetoBurman 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 malerestricted 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 (~50003000 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 IndoEuropean 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 supereruption 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 newlyarrived 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 macrotopography, 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 IIIF24 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 multicropping 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 Lower Palaeolithic/Acheulian culture (with three phases) Middle Palaeolithic Upper Palaeolithic

Age in Years (Before Present) 15,00,000–1,50,000 1,50,000–45,000 45,000–10,000

Mesolithic (terminal phase) (followed by Agropastoral/Neolithic– Chalcolithic period)

10,000–6,000

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 cakelayers 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 brightcoloured 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 IndoEuropean 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 MidHolocene 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 PreHarappan 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 villagebased 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 IndusSarasvati 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 subspecies 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 midthird 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 Midto 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 midDeccan; 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 (microlithusing 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 doubleperforated 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 preurban 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 IndoGreek 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 midthird 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 nonpartisan 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 deSanskritized 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 GhaggarHakra 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.

ii.

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. The biggest argument against the old Ghaggar’s being the naditam Sarasvati comes from the position of the Satluj. If the old Ghaggar is

 

 

  iii.

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: 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.

v.

vi.

vii .

vii i. ix.

x.

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. 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. 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). 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. In the region of the Rig Vedic Sarasvati, there are other sisterly rive 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. 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. 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

xi.

xii .

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. 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. 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 1,300kilometre 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 technologicallyrestricted 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. ii. iii . iv.

The stage when the Satluj and Yamuna flowed into the Ghaggar was lo over before the Harappan times. 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. 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. 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. IndoAryan, 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 ProtoIndo-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 IndoEuropean, 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 PostVedic, 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 IndoIranian

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 IndoIranian 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 IndoEuropean 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 IndoEuropean 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-IndoEuropean, 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-IndoEuropean 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

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 IndoEuropean 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. BCE,

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 avowels through regular sound changes. Only by reconstructing Proto-IndoEuropean 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 IndoEuropean 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 microgeographies 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 subregister. 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 IndoEuropean 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 (nonsacrificers), 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 IndoAryans. 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, AlBiruni, 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 preVedic 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 0element 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 socalled 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 agenitive 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-nirūpakabrāhmaṇa-niṣṭha-SAMPRADAṆAtva-nirūpaka-dhana-niṣṭha-KARMAtvanirūpaka-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 substreams: 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 MakkhaliGosala (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 selfmortification. 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 presentday 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 protocanonical 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 preChristian 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 twentyfour 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 socioreligious 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 longlasting 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 fourteenthcentury 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 AdvaitaVedanta 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 (Buddhavacana) 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 religiophilosophical 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 Aramaicspeaking 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 Brahmibased 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 IndoEuropean 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 IndoEuropean 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 ancestorlanguage, 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 IndoEuropean 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 GrecoRome 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 nonEuropean 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 IndoEuropean, 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 IndoEuropean 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 IndoAryan 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 protoDravidian 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 Postnasal Plosives in Dravidian (1969) must be mentioned here.

38 LANGUAGE FAMILIES OF INDIA OTHER THAN INDOARYAN 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 newjatis; 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 Kannadaspeaking 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 mideighth 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 neartotal 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 descentgroup-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 nonBrahmin 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 neoBrahminism, 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 poetstatesman 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 premodern 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 religiocultural 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 nonBrahminic ‘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 cryptoHinduism. 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 postannexation 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 multilingual 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, selfrejection, 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 uppercaste 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, Lusodescendentes, 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 presentday 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 nonBrahmin 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 oftensubordinate 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 longrange 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 semiarid 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 Marubhumi 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 PrabandhKosh ascribes the date of Vikram Samvastar 608 (CE 551) to Vasudev). The exploitation of salt at Shakambhari probably predated Vasudev, with smallscale 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—FaHsien 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-iMasumi, 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 transsub-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 cordimpressed 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 palaeobotanical, 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. Ethnoarchaeological 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 IndoAryan, 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 multiethnic, 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 preNamgyal 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 defacto 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 seventeenmember 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 fullfledged 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 betteroff 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 overrigid 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 Krishnabhakti 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 abovenamed 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 historywriting 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 nonBrahmins 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 worldfamous 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 eightvolume 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-iKul’. 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 clientstates, 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 deindustrializing 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 midnineteenth 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 protoIndo-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 indissociable 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 postfeudal 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 postEnlightenment ‘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 presentday 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 selfidentification 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 nonhierarchy 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 castebased 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 AsiaPacific, 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 millhands 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 Noncooperation 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 nonviolence 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 allencompassing 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 anticolonial 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 anticolonial 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 selfdetermination 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 twovolume 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 Hindudominant 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 selfdetermination. 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 noncooperation and civil disobedience movements helped Indians, both men and women, to come out of the pall of fear that enveloped the country. Nonviolence, 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 postpartition 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 preIndependence 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 Muslimmajority 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 noncooperation 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 modernday 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 willynilly 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 nationstate. 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 wellknown, 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 Punjabispeaking 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 postIndependence 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 semiautonomous 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 overcentralization 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 ‘micromovements’ 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 reestablished 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 nationstate 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 fiftyfour 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 lowerclass 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 CounterReformation, 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 colonialstyle 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 IndoAryan 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 neocolonialists 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 mid2022, 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 twopage 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 farreaching understanding of the dharma of Indian civilization. In its institutional form, it took the shape of an extraordinarily ecumenical prayermeeting 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.

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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. 6. D. Q. Fuller, ‘Ceramics, seeds and culinary change in prehistoric India’, Antiquity, 79, 2005, pp. 761–77. 7. D. Q. Fuller, ‘Finding Plant Domestication in Indian Subcontinent’, Current Anthropology, 52(S4), 2011, pp. S347–S362. 8. E. Asouti and D. Q. Fuller, ‘Trees and woodlands of South India: Archaeological Perspectives’, Institute of Archaeology Publications. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2008. 9. E. L. Harvey, Early Agricultural Communities In Northern And Eastern India: An Archaeobotanical Investigation, PhD dissertation, University College London, 2006. 10. L. Costantini, ‘The first farmers in western Pakistan: the evidence of the Neolithic agro-pastoral settlement of Mehrgarh’, Pragdhara, 18, 2008, pp. 167–78. 11. M. D. Kajale, ‘Current Status of Indian Palaeoethnobotany: Introduced and Indigenous Food 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. 13. P. Gepts, ‘Domestication of Plants’, in N. V. Alfen (ed), Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems, 2, San Diego: Elsevier, 2014. 14. P. Maheshwari and U. Singh, Dictionary Of Economic Plants In India, New Delhi: Indian Council for Agricultural Research, 1965. 15. S. S. Naik and V. G. Sontakke, ‘Plant Economy from Early Iron Age site 16. S. S. Naik et al., ‘Archaeobotanical Investigations at Agiabir, District Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh’, 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. 18. S. S. Naik, ‘Archaeobotanical Investigations from Adichchanallur, Tamil Nadu and Development of Agriculture in South India’, Man and Environment, XLVII(1), 2022, pp. 57–65. 19. S. S. Naik, Archaeobotanical Investigations from Harappan Site of Vejalka, Gujarat, scientific report submitted to M. S. University Vadodara, 2015. 20. S. S. Naik, Early Agriculture in Vidarbha: An Archaeobotanical Approach, unpublished research report submitted to Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), New Delhi, 2021. 21. S. S. Naik, Progress of Archaeobotanical Research at the Deccan College (2000-2020), Pune: Deccan College Post-graduate and Research Institute (Deemed to be University), 2021.

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and New World, Santa Fe: SAR Press/National Academy of Sciences, 2008, pp. 183–208. 11. J. M. Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998. 12. J. Marshall (ed), Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilisation, London: Arthur Probsthain, 1931. 13. J. Shaw and J. Sutcliffe, ‘Water Management, Patronage Networks and Religious Change: New evidence from the Sanchi dam complex and counterparts in Gujarat and Sri Lanka’, South Asian Studies, 19, 2003, pp. 73–104. 14. M. Jansen, Mohenjo-Daro: City of Wells and Drains: Water Splendor 4500 Years Ago, Bonn: Bergisch Gladbach Frontinus-Gesellchaft, 1993. 15. M. Madella and D. Q. Fuller, ‘Palaeoecology and the Harappan Civilisation of South Asia: A Reconsideration’, Quarterly Scientific Review, 25, 2014, pp. 1283–1301. 16. M. Staubwasser et al., ‘Climate change at the 4.2 ka BP termination of the Indus valley civilization and Holocene south Asian monsoon variability’, Geophysical Research Letters, 30, 2003. 17. M. Vidale and H. M. L. Miller, ‘On the Development of Indus Technical Virtuosity and Its Relation to Social Structure’, in M. Taddei and G. de Marco (eds), South Asian Archaeology 1997, Rome: Instituto Italian per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2000, pp. 115–32. 18. M. Wheeler, The Indus Civilisation, supplementary volume to the Cambridge History of India, third edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. 19. N. Lahiri, N., ‘Harappa as a Centre of Trade and Trade Routes: a case study of the resource-use, resource-acces and lines of communication in the Indus Civilisation’, Indian Economic and Society History Review, 27, 1990, pp. 405–44. 20. R. A. E. Coningham and R. Young, The archaeology of South Asia: from the Indus to Ashoka, c. 6500 BCE–200 CE, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 21. R. A. E. Coningham, ‘Dark Age or Continuum? An archaeological analysis of the second emergence of urbanism in South Asia’, in F. R. Allchin (ed), The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 54–72. 22. R. Law, ‘Inter-Regional Interaction and Urbanism in the Ancient Indus Valley: a geological provenience study of Harappa’s rock and mineral assemblage’, Linguistics, Archaeology and Human Past in South Asia, 11, 2011, pp. 1–800. 23. R. Meadow and J. M. Kenoyer, ‘Harappa Excavations 1998-1999. New Evidence for the Development and Manifestation of the Harappan Phenomenon’, in E. M. Raven (ed), South Asian Archaeology, Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1999, pp. 85–109. 24. R. P. Wright, The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society, Case Studies in Early Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 25. S. Cleuziou and M. Tosi, ‘Ra’s al-Jinz and the Prehistoric Coastal Cultures of the Ja’alan’, Journal of Oman Studies, 11, 2000, pp. 19–73. 26. S. Prasad et al., ‘Prolonged monsoon droughts and links to Indo–Pacific warm pool: A Holocene record from Lonar Lake, central India’, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 391, 2014, pp. 171–82. 27. V. N. Misra, Climate, a Factor in the Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilisation, in B. B. Lal and S. P. Gupta (eds), Frontiers of the Indus Civilisation: Sir Mortimer Wheeler Commemoration Volume, New Delhi: Books & Books, 1984, pp. 461–89. 28. Y. Dixit et al., ‘Intensified summer monsoon and the urbanization of Indus Civilization in northwest India’, Science Reports, 8, 4225, 2018. 18. Social Formation: Archaeological Scholarship of the Indus Civilization Sudeshna Guha 1. A. Green, ‘Killing the Priest-King. Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization’, Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol. 29, 2021, pp. 153–202.

2. A. Morning, ‘And You Thought We had Moved Beyond All That: Biological Race Returns to the Social Sciences’, Ethnic and Racial Studies Review Vol. 37, No.10 (September), 2014, pp. 1676–86. 3. B. B. Lal, The Earliest Civilization of South Asia (Rise, Maturity and Decline), New Delhi: Aryan Books, 1997. 4. B. Chase, ‘Family Matters in Harappan Gujrat’, in D. Frenez, G. M. Jamison, R. W. Law, M. Vidale, and R. H. Meadow (eds), Walking with the Unicorn: Social Organization and Material Culture in Ancient South Asia ( Jonathan Mark Kenoyer Felicitation Volume), Oxford: Archaeopress, 2018, pp. 104–19. 5. C. A. Petrie, ‘Diversity, Variability, Adaptation and ‘Fragility’ in the Indus Civilization’, in N. Yoffee (ed), The Evolution of Fragility: Setting the Terms. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2019, pp. 109–34. 6. C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, ‘The Indus Civilization: The Case for Caste Formation’, Journal of East Asian Archaeology, 1, 1999, pp. 87–113. 7. D. Frenez, ‘Private Person or Public Persona: Use and Significance of Standard Indus Seals as Markers of Formal Socio-Economic Identities’, In D. Frenez, G. M. Jamison, R. W. Law, M. Vidale, and R. H. Meadow (eds), Walking with the Unicorn: Social Organization and Material Culture in Ancient South Asia ( Jonathan Mark Kenoyer Felicitation Volume), Oxford: Archaeopress, 2018, pp. 166–93. 8. G. L. Possehl, Indus Age: The Beginnings, New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing, 1999. 9. G. L. Possehl, Sociocultural Complexity without the State: The Indus Civilization, in G. M. Feinman and J. Marcus (eds), Archaic States, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1998, pp. 261–292. 10. H. M. Miller and J. M. Kenoyer, ‘Invisible Value or Tactile Value? Steatite in the Faience Complexes of the Indus Valley Tradition’, in D. Frenez, G. M. Jamison, R. W. Law, M. Vidale, and R. H. Meadow (eds), Walking with the Unicorn: Social Organization and Material Culture in Ancient South Asia ( Jonathan Mark Kenoyer Felicitation Volume), Oxford: Archaeopress, 2018, pp. 389–94. 11. J. M. Kenoyer, ‘The Indus Civilization’, In C. Renfrew and P. Bahn (eds) The Cambridge World Prehistory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 407–32. 12. J. M. Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998. 13. J. Marshall (ed), Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilisation, London: Arthur Probsthain, 1931 pp. 64-78. 14. P. A. Elstov, From Harappa to Hastinapura: A Study of the Earliest South Asian City and Civilization, Boston/Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2008. 15. R. P. Wright, The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 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). 4. “Of the early and mature Harappan periods, only two sites each are found on the Satluj, both near Ropar where the river emerges from the Siwaliks. Of the late Harappan period, only seven sites are found in this river, all of then in the upper reaches close to the hills. There is a complete absence of sites, once the river enters the plains.” (Misra 1994: 5 14). 5. A. A. Macdonell and A. B. Keith, Vedic Index of Names and Subjects, 2 Vols., New Delhi: Motilal Banarasi Dass, 1982. 6. A. Basu, N. Sarkar-Roy, and P. P. Majumder, ‘Genomic reconstruction of the history of extant populations of India reveals five distinct ancestral components and a complex structure’, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 113, 2016, pp. 1594–99. 7. A. Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologie, translated by S. R. Sarma, New Delhi: Motilal Banarasi Dass, 1990. 8. B. N. Sastri, The Wealth of India: Raw Materials, Vol. 3, New Delhi: Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, SBE 0879-1910) Sacred Books of the East, 0879-1910) 50 volumes, New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1988. 9. G. Possehl, Radiometric Dates for South Asian Archaeology, Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press. 10. George Watt, Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, Vol. 3, Calcutta, 1889 11. H. Falk, ‘Soma I and II’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 52, 1989, pp. 77– 90. 12. H. Nyberg, ‘The problem of the Aryans and the Soma: The Botanical evidence’, in: The IndoAryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997. 13. J. Brough, ‘Soma and Amanita Muscaria’, Journal of School of Oriental and African Studies, 34, 1971, pp. 331–62. 14. J. Di Cristofaro, E. Pennarun, S. Mazie`res, N. M. Myres, A. A. Lin, S. A. Temori, M. Metspalu, E. Metspalu, M. Witzel, R. J. King, P. A. Underhill, R. Villems, and J. Chiaron, ‘Afghan Hindu Kush: Where Eurasian sub-continent gene flows converge’, PLoS ONE, 8, e76748, 2013. 15. J. J. Modi, The Religious Caremonies and Customs of the Parsees, second edition, Bombay: Society for the Promotion of Zoroastrian Knowledge and Education, 1995. 16. J. L. Brockington, The Sacred Thread: A Short History of Hinduism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. 17. K. F. Geldner, Der Rig Veda, Vol. 3, Cambridge: Harvard Oriental Series, 1951. 18. M. Day, ‘If you cannot beat them, join them’, New Scientist, 160, 2155, 1998, pp. 18–19. 19. R. G. Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972. 20. R. T. H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rigveda, New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1976. 21. V. I. Sarianidi, ‘South-West Asia: Migrations, the Aryans and Zoroastrians’, Information Bulletin of the International Association for the Study of the Cultures of Central Asia, 1994, pp. 44–56. 22. V. I. Sarianidi, ‘Temples of bronze Age Margiana : Traditions of ritual architecture’, Antiquity, 68, 1994, pp. 388–97. 23. W. D. O’Flaherty, ‘The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant, in: Wasson, 1986. 20. Varna and Jati: Consolidation of Social Hierarchy G. N. Devy 1. B. R. Ambedkar, Who Were The Shudras: How They Came To Be The Fourth Varna in the IndoAryan Society, 1946, Bombay: Thackers, Spink and Co., 1970.

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22. Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Ancient Dialects Madhav Deshpande 1. A. M. Paczkowski, Towards A New Method for Analyzing Syntax in Poetry - Discriminating Grammatical Patterns in The Rigveda, PhD dissertation, University of Georgia, 2016. 2. B. Smith, ‘The Dialectology of Indic’, in J. Klein et al. (eds), Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo–European Linguistics, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017, pp. 417–47. 3. C. Watkins, ‘The Indo–European Background of Vedic Poetics’, 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. 245–56. 4. E. K. Thornton, The Double-Voiced Rig Veda- Poetics and Power Dynamics of Formal Structuring Devices, PhD dissertation, University of California, LA, 2015. 5. F. Kielhorn (ed), Patañjali, Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya, translated by K. V. Abhyankar, Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1962. 6. G. A. Grierson, ‘Progress of European Scholarship, No. X’, Indian Antiquary, Vol. 17, 1888, pp. 321–28. 7. G. C. Tripathi, ‘The Poet and the Poetry in the Ṛgveda,” in Sanskrit Vimarśaḥ, Journal of Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan’, World Sanskrit Conference Special, 2012, pp. 1–16. 8. G. Pinault, ‘Reflets dialectaux en rgvédique’, in C. Caillat (ed), Dialectes dans les Litératures Indo–Aryennes, Paris: Collège de France, Institut de Civilization Indienne, 1989, pp. 35–96. 9. G. V. Devasthali, ‘Prakritism in the Rgveda’, in R. N. Dandekar and A. M. Ghatage (eds), Proceedings of the Seminar in Prakrit Studies, Pune: University of Pune, 1969, pp. 199–205. 10. H. H. Hock, ‘Sanskrit and Pāṇini, Core and Periphery’, Sanskrit Vimarśaḥ, Journal of Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, World Sanskrit Conference Special, 2012, pp. 85–102. 11. H. Scharfe, ‘Two on a Swing: A New Perspective on the Rgveda’, in J. E. M Houben et al. (eds), Vedic Śākhās, Past, Present, Future, Proceedings of the Fifth International Vedic Workshop, Bucharest 2011, Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora, 9, Cambridge: Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University, 2016, pp. 431–57. 12. J. E. M. Houben, ‘Linguistic Paradox and Diglossia: the emergence of Sanskrit and Sanskritic language in Ancient India’, Open Linguistics, 4, 2018, pp. 1–18. 13. K. C. Raja, Poetic Philosophers of the Rgveda, Vedic and Pre-Vedic, Madras: Ganesh & Co. Private Ltd, 1963. 14. L. Kulikov, ‘Language vs. grammatical tradition in Ancient India: How real was Pāṇinian Sanskrit? Evidence from the history of late Sanskrit passives and pseudo-passives’, Folia Linguistica Historica, 34, 2013, pp. 59–91. 15. M. A. Mehendale, ‘Upaniṣadic Etymologies’, Munshi Indological Felicitation Volume, Bharatiya Vidya, 20–21, 1963, pp. 40–44. 16. M. B. Emeneau, ‘The Dialects of Old India Aryan’, in H. Birnbaum and J. Puhvel, Ancient Indo– European Dialects: Proceedings of the Conference on Indo–European Linguistics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966, pp. 123–38. 17. M. Deshpande, ‘Pāṇini as a Frontier Grammarian’, in CLS Papers from the 19th Regional Meeting, 19, Chicago Linguistic Society, 1883, pp. 110–15. 18. M. Smith, ‘The Mahabharata’s Core’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 95(3), 1975, pp. 479–82 19. M. Witzel, ‘Early Sanskritization. Origins and Development of the Kuru State’, Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies (EJVS), 1995, pp. 1–26. 20. M. Witzel, ‘Notes on Vedic Dialects’, ZINBUN, 25, 1990, pp. 31–70. 21. 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.

22. N. J. Shende, Kavi and Kāvya in the Atharvaveda, Pune: Publications of the Centre of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, Class B, No. 1, University of Pune, 1967. 23. O. Böhtlingk, ‘Ditransitive Constructions in Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya’, in The Journal of Oriental Research, Vols. LVI-LXII, Professor S. S. Janaki Felicitation Volume, 1992, pp. 41–50. 24. O. Böhtlingk, Pāṇini’s Grammatik, Leipzig: Verlag von H. Haessel, 1997. 25. P. Tedesco, ‘The supposed Rgvedic present marate’, Language, 20(4), 1944, pp. 212–22. 26. R. L. Turner, A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo–Aryan Languages, London: Oxford University Press, 1966. 27. R. V. Tripathi, Atharvaveda kā Kāvya, Banaras: Vishvavidyalaya Prakashan, 2007. 28. S. Pollock, The language of the gods in the world of men: Sanskrit, culture, and power in premodern India, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. 29. S. S. Bahulkar, Medical Ritual in the Atharvaveda Tradition, Pune: Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapith, Shri Balmukund Sanskrit Mahavidyalaya Research Series No. 8, 1994. 30. S. W. Jamison and J. P. Brereton, The Rigveda: the earliest religious poetry of India, translated by Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 31. S. W. Jamison, ‘Sociolinguistic Remarks on the Indo–Iranian *-ka-Suffix: A Marker of Colloquial Register’, Indo–Iranian Journal, 52, 2009, pp. 311–29. 32. S. W. Jamison, ‘Women’s Language in the Rig Veda?, in L. Kulikov and M. Rusanov (eds), T. Y. Elizarenkova Memorial Volume, Book 1, Moscow: Indologica, 2008, pp. 153–65. 33. S. W. Jamison, Sacrificed Wife Sacrificer’s Wife: Women, Ritual and Hospitality in Ancient India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 34. T. Burrow, The Sanskrit Language, London: Faber and Faber, 1945. 35. T. G. Mainkar, The Rgvedic Foundations of Classical Poetics, Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1977. 36. T. Y. Elizarenkova, ‘About traces of a Prakrit dialectal basis in the language of the Rgveda’, in C. Calliat (ed), Dialectes dans les Litératures Indo–Aryennes, Paris: Collège de France, Institut de Civilization Indienne, 1989, pp. 1–17. 37. T. Y. Elizarenkova, Language and Style of the Vedic Rṣis, New York: State University of New York Press, 1994. 38. W. D. Whitney, The Roots, Verb-Forms, and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language, Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1885. 39. W. Petersen, ‘Vedic, Sanskrit, and Prakrit’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 32(4), 1912, pp. 414–28. 40. Yāska Nirukta with the commentary of Durgācārya, Volume 1, Ānandashrama Sanskrit Series 88, Pune: Anandashrama, 1921. 23. Contact with Indo-European/ Indo-Iranian languages Meera Visvanathan 1. A. Basu et al., ‘Genomic reconstruction of the history of extant populations of India reveals five distinct ancestral components and a complex structure’, PNAS, 2016, pp. 1594–99. 2. A. Parpola, ‘Royal “Chariot” Burials of Sanauli near Delhi and Archaeological Correlates of Prehistoric Indo–Iranian Languages’, Studia Orientalia Electronica, 8(1), 2020, pp. 175–98. 3. B. P. Masica, ‘Aryan and Non-Aryan Elements in North Indian Agriculture’, in M. M. Deshpande and P. E. Hook (eds), Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, Ann Arbor: Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, The University of Michigan, 1979. 4. B. P. Masica, The Indo–Aryan Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 5. D. Q. Fuller, ‘Non-human genetics, agricultural origins and historical linguistics in South Asia’, in M. D. Petraglia and B. Allchin (eds), The Evolution and History of Human Populations in South Asia: Inter-disciplinary Studies in Archaeology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistics and Genetics, Dordrecht: Springer, 2007, pp. 393–443.

6. D. W. Anthony and Don Ringe, ‘The Indo–European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives’, Annual Review of Linguistics, 2015, pp. 199–219. 7. E. F. Bryant and L. L. Patton (eds), The Indo–Aryan Controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history, London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 8. F. C. Southworth, Linguistic Archaeology of South Asia, New York: Routledge, 2005. 9. F. Staal, Discovering the Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008. 10. J. Menon, ‘In the aftermath of the Harappan period (c. 2000-500 BCE)’, in Romila Thapat et al. (eds), Which of us are Aryans?, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2019, pp. 94–118. 11. P. O. Skjærvø, ‘The Avesta as Source for the Early History of Iranians’, in George Erdosy (ed), The Indo–Aryans of South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1995, pp. 155–76. 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 VājasaneyiSaṃhitā 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: , last accessed on 25 April 2023. 2. Sri Lanka Inscriptions, available at: , last accessed on 25 April 2023. 3. Early Inscriptions of Āndhra Deśa, available at: , 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 Premodern 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: 22916. 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. 17631912)’, 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.

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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-SāhityaPariṣat, 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-SāhityaParishad-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 anticaste 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 crossregion 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: , 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: , 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. 19001940’, 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. 44. Available at: , last accessed on 31 March 2023. 45. For a fuller discussion of these links, see my note: Vinay Lal, ‘Framing a Discourse: China and India in the Modern World’, Economic and Political Weekly 44, no. 2, 10 January 2009, pp. 41– 45; for a lengthier scholarly exposition, see Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2003 and India, China, and the World: A Connected History, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield

Publishers, 2017; and see also India-China Cultural Relations: Proceedings of the International Seminar, eds. Ganganath Jha and K. G. Siddhartha, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 2003. 46. Portions of this paragraph draw upon a recent published essay of mine, ‘Foreigners to ourselves: dharma and adharma in India’, Seminar, no. 761, January 2023. 47. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Talks on China’ [1924], in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 4: Essays, edited by Mohit K. Ray, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2007, pp. 741–805. 48. Amaresh Misra, Lucknow: Fire of Grace—The Story of Its Revolution, Renaissance and the Aftermath, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1998; Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji, New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2020; and Alok S. Bhalla and Chandra Prakash Deval, The Gita: Mewari Miniature Painting 1680-1698, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2020. 49. Romila Thapar, ‘The Tyranny of Labels’, in The Concerned Indian’s Guide to Communalism, edited by K. N. Panikkar, New Delhi: Viking, 1999, pp. 133 at 11. 50. For a clear exposition of this subject, see: Padmanabh S. Jaini, ‘The Disappearance of Buddhism and the Survival of Jainism: A Study in Contrast’, in Studies in History of Buddhism, edited by A. K. Narain, Delhi: B. R. Publishing Co., 1980, pp. 181–91. 51. M. K. Gandhi, speech at ‘The Great Trial’, Young India, 23 March 1922, reproduced in CWMG 26: 377-86. 52. PTI, ‘Mughals disappearing from textbooks across the country as history seems subject to change’, Firstpost, 7 August 2017. 53. Ritika Chopra, ‘Textbook revision slashes portion in history on Islamic rulers of India’, Indian Express, 20 June 2022.

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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.