The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline
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The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline D. D. Kosambi Preface 1. THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 1.1. The Indian Scene 1.2. The Modern Ruling Class 1.3. The Difficulties Facing the Historian 1.4. The Need to Study Rural and Tribal Society 1.5. The Villages 1.6. Recapitulation 2. PRIMITIVE LIFE AND PREHISTORY 2.1. The Golden Age 2.2. Prehistory and Primitive Life 2.3. Prehistoric Man in India 2.4. Primitive Survivals in the Means of Production 2.5. Primitive Survivals in the Superstructure 3. THE FIRST CITIES 3.1. The Discovery of the Indus Culture 3.2. Production in the Indus Culture 3.3. Special Features of the Indus Civilisation 3.4. The Social Structure 4. THE ARYANS 4.1. The Aryan Peoples 4.2. The Aryan Way of Life 4.3. Eastward Progress 4.4. Aryans after the Rigveda 4.5. The Urban Revival 4.6. The Epic Period 5. FROM TRIBE TO SOCIETY 5.1. The New Religions 5.2. The Middle Way 5.3. The Buddha and His Society 5.4. The Dark Hero of the Yadus 5.5. Kosala and Magadha 6. STATE AND RELIGION IN GREATER MAGADHA 6.1. Completion of the Magadhan Conquest 6.2. Magadhan Statecraft 6.3. Administration of the Land 6.4. The State and Commodity Production 6.5. Asoka and the Culmination of the Magadhan Empire 7. TOWARDS FEUDALISM 7.1. The New Priesthood 7.2. The Evolution of Buddhism 7.3. Political and Economic Changes 7.4. Sanskrit Literature and Drama Preface IT is doubtless more important to change history than to write it, just as it would be better to do something about the weather rather than merely talk about it. In a free parliamentary democracy every citizen is supposed to feel that he, personally is making history when he elects representatives to do the talking and to tax him for the privilege. Some have now begun to suspect that this may not suffice, that all history may terminate abruptly with the atomic age unless a bit more is done soon. Much that has been talked about India's glorious past, unhampered by fact or common sense, is even more free than Indian elections. Discussion eddies around obscure dates and deservedly obscure biographies of kings and prophets. It seems to me that some something more might be achieved in the way of charting the main currents of Indian history, notwithstanding the lack of the kind of source material which, in other countries, would be considered essential by the historian. That, at any rate, is what this book attempts to do, with the minimum of scholarly display. I am especially grateful to Mr. John Irwin for special advice in making the book fit its avowed purpose, in choice of illustrations, and in seeing the work through the press. To him and to Professor A. L. Basham, my gratitude is also due for initiative in finding an English publisher. Mr. Sunil Janah was kind enough to permit the inclusion of a few of his brilliant photographs of Indian tribal and rural life, My thanks are due also to Miss Margaret Hall for her painstaking revision of maps and drawings; and to Mr. Semyon Tyulaev for tracing and photographing illustrative material in the USSR. Any claim this book may have to originality rests on fieldwork done as a free agent. To those friends and pupils who have shown faith in my methods and supported them with heart warming enthusiasm, I owe more than can be expressed in a few lines. House 803, D. D. KOSAMBI Poona 4, India, July 31, 1964. CHAPTER ONE The Historical Perspective 1.1. The Indian Scene A DISPASSIONATE observer who looks at India with detachment and penetration would be struck by two mutually contradictory features: diversity and unity at the same time. The endless variety is striking, often incongruous. Costume, speech, the physical appearance of the people, customs, standards of living, food, climate, geographical features all offer the greatest possible differences. Richer Indians may be dressed in full European style, or in costumes that show Muslim influence, or in flowing and costly robes of many different colourful Indian types. At the lower end of the social scale are other Indians in rags, almost naked but for a small loincloth. There is no national language or alphabet; a dozen languages and scripts appear on the ten-rupee currency note. There is no Indian race. People with white skins and blue eyes are as unmistakably Indian as others with black skins and dark eyes. In between we find every other intermediate type, though the hair is generally black. There is no typical Indian diet, but more rice, vegetables, and spices are eaten than in Europe. The north Indian finds southern food unpalatable, and conversely. Some people will not touch meat, fish, or eggs; many would and do starve to death rather than eat beef, while others observe no such restrictions. These dietary conventions are not matters of taste but of religion. In climate also the country offers the full range. Perpetual snows in the Himalayas, north European weather in Kasmir, hot deserts in Rajasthan, basalt ridges and granite mountains on the peninsula, tropical heat at the southern tip, dense forests in laterite soil along the western scarp. A 2,000-mile-long coastline, the great Gangetic river system in a wide and fertile alluvial basin, other great rivers of lesser complexity, a few considerable lakes, the swamps of Cutch and Orissa, complete the sub-continental picture. Cultural differences between Indians even in the same province, district, or city are as wide as the physical differences between the various parts of the country. Modern India produced an outstanding figure of world literature in Tagore. Within easy reach of Tagore's final residence may be found Santals and other illiterate primitive peoples still unaware of Tagore's existence. Some of them are hardly out of the food-gathering stage. An imposing modern city building such as a bank, government office, factory, or scientific institute may have been designed by some European architect or by his Indian pupil. The wretched workmen who actually built it generally use the crudest tools. Their payment might be made in a lump sum to a foreman who happens to be the chief of their small guild and the head of their clan at the same time. Certainly these workmen can rarely grasp the nature of the work done by the people for whom the structures were erected. Finance, bureaucratic administration, complicated machine production in a factory, and die very idea of science are beyond the mental reach of human beings who have lived in misery on the margin of over cultivated lands or in the forest. Most of them have been driven by famine conditions in the jungle to become the cheapest form of drudge labour in the city. Yet in spite of this apparent diversity, there is a double unity. At die top there are certain common features due to the ruling class. The class is the Indian bourgeoisie, divided by language, regional history, and so on, but nevertheless grouped by similarity of interests into two sections. Finance and mechanised factory production are in the hands of the real capitalist bourgeoisie. Distribution of the product is dominated primarily by the petty-bourgeois class of shopkeepers, formidable by reason of their large number. Food production is overwhelmingly on small plots. The necessity of paying cash for taxes and factory goods forces the peasant into a reluctant and rather backward wing of the petty-bourgeoisie. The normal agrarian surplus is also in the hands of middlemen and money- lenders who do not generally rise into the big bourgeoisie. The division between the richest peasants and moneylenders is not sharp. There are cash crops like tea, coffee, cotton, tobacco, jute, cashew, peanuts, sugarcane, coconuts and others tied to the international market or to factory production. These are sometimes cultivated by modern capitalist owners by mechanised techniques on large plots of land. High finance, often foreign, determines their prices and skims off the main profit. On the other hand, a considerable volume of consumer goods, especially utensils and textiles, is still produced by handicraft methods and has survived competition with factory production. The political scene is dominated entirely by these two sections of the bourgeoisie, with a class of professional (lawyers, etc.) and clerical workers as the connecting link with the legislatures and the machinery of administration. We must note that, for historical reasons, the government is also the greatest single entrepreneur in India. Its assets as a large capitalist equal those of all private Indian capitalists together, though concentrated in particular types of investments. Railways, air services, posts and telegraphs, radio and telephone, some banks, life insurance, and defence industries are entirely in the hands of the state, as to some extent are the production of electricity and coal. Oil wells are state owned. The major oil refineries are still in the hands of foreign companies, though state refineries will soon be in full production. Steel was mostly in private ownership, but the state has begun its own large-scale iron and steel production. On the other hand, the state does not produce food. When scarcities (often artificially created by shopkeepers or middlemen) threaten to drive cheap labour out of the cities the state distributes imported grain by rationing in the major industrial centres. This satisfies both the large and the petty bourgeoisie without interfering with the profits of either. The obvious cure and stabiliser for the uncertain food situation would be to collect agricultural taxes in kind, with storage and distribution of food effectively in the hands of the government.