The wonder that was india

THE WONDER THAT WAS

INDIA

A survey of the history and culture of the Indian

sub-continent before the coming of the Muslims.

A. L. BASHAM

Professor of Asian Civilization in the

Australian National University, Canberra.

6/10/2012 1 Sanjay Ranade, Head,DCJ, UoM

• The ancient civilisation of India grew up in

a sharply demarcated sub-continent

bounded on the north by the world‘s largest

mountain range – the chain of the

Himalayas, which, with its extensions to

east and west, divides India from the rest of

Asia and the world.


• The importance of the Himalayas to India is

not so much in the isolation which they give

her, as in the fact that they are the source of

her two great rivers – the Indus and the

Ganga.

• Of the two river systems, that of the Indus,

now mainly in Pakistan, had the earliest

civilisation, and gave its name to India.


• The Indians knew this river as Sindhu, and the Persians, who found difficulty in pronouncing an initial ‗s‘, called it Hindu. From Persia the word passed to Greece, where the whole of India became known by the name of the western river.

• The ancient Indians knew their sub-continent as Jambudvipa (the continent of the Jambu tree) or Bharatavarsa, the Land of the sons of Bharata, a legendary emperor).

• With the Muslim invasion the Persian name returned in the form Hindustan, and those of its inhabitants who followed the old religion became known as Hindus. The form Hindusthan, popular in modern India, is an Indo-Iranian hybrid with no linguistic justification.


• More than two thousand years before Christ

the fertile plains of the Punjab (Five Rivers)

watered by the five great tributaries of the

Indus – the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and

Satlaj – had a high culture, which spread as

far as the sea and along the western

seaboard at least as far as Gujarat.


• The basin of the Indus is divided from that of the Ganga by the Thar, or desert of Rajasthan, and by low hills. The watershed has been the scene of many bitter battles since at least 1000 B.C.

• The western half of the Ganga plain, from the region around Delhi to Patna, and including the Doab, or the land between the Ganga and its great tributary river Yamuna, has always been the heart of India. Here, in the region once known as Aryavarta, the land of the Aryans, her classical culture was formed.

• At its mouth in Bengal the Ganga forms a large delta, which even in historical times has gained appreciably on the sea; here the Ganga joins the Brahmaputra, which flows from Tibet by way of the Valley of Assam, the easternmost outpost of Hindu culture.


• South of the great plain is a highland zone, rising to the chain of the Vindhya mountains that form a barrier between the North, formerly called Hindustan, and the Peninsula, often known as the Deccan, meaning simply ‗South‘.

• Most of the Deccan is a dry and hilly plateau, bordered on either side by long ranges of hills, the Western and Eastern ghats.

• Of these two ranges the western is the higher, so the most of the rivers – Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna, Kaviri flow eastwards to the sea. Two large rivers, Narmada and Tapti flow westwards.


• The south-eastern part of the Peninsula forms a larger plain, the Tamil country, the culture of which was once independent and is not yet completely unified with that of the north.

• The Dravidian peoples of Southern India still speak languages in no way akin to those of the North, and are of a different ethnic character.

• Geographically Ceylone is a continuation of India, the plain of the North resembling that of South India, and the mountains in the center of the island the Western Ghats.


• From Kashmir to the North to Cape Comorin in the South the sub-continent is about 2,000 miles long, and the climate varies considerably.

• The most important feature of the Indian climate is the monsoon – The Rains!

To the Indian mind the coming of the monsoon corresponds to the coming of spring in Europe. For this reason thunder and lightning, in Europe

generally looked on as inauspicious, have no terrors for the Indian, but are welcome signs of the

goodness of heaven!


• It has often been said that the scale of

natural phenomena in India, and her total

dependence on the monsoon, have helped to

form the character of her peoples. India was

blessed by bounteous nature, who

demanded little of man in return for

sustenance, but in her terrible anger could

not be appeased by any human effort.


• The ancient civilisation of India differs from

those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece,

in that its traditions have been preserved

without a break down to the present day.

• India and China have, in fact, the oldest

continuous cultural traditions of the world.


• At most periods of her history India, though a cultural unit, has been torn by internecine war.

• In statecraft her rulers were cunning and unscrupulous.

• Famine, flood and plague visited her from time to time and killed millions of her people.

• Inequality of birth was given religious sanction, and the lot of the humble was generally hard.

Yet the overall impression is that in no other part of the ancient world were the relations of man and man, and of man and the state, so fair and

humane.


• In no other early civilisation were slaves so few in number.

• In no other ancient law book are their rights so well protected as in the Arthasastra.

• No other ancient law giver proclaimed such noble ideals of fair play in battle as did Manu.

• In all her history of warfare Hindu India has few tales to tell of cities put to the sword or of the massacre of non combatants.

• There was sporadic cruelty and oppression no doubt, but, in comparison with conditions in other early cultures, it was mild.

The most striking feature of ancient Indian civilisation is its humanity


CONTEXT OF INDIA‘S HISTORY

• Social

• Political

• Geographic

• Historical


PREHISTORY: The Harappa Culture

and the Aryans

• Like prehistoric Europe, Northern India experienced ice ages, and it was after the second of these, in the Second Interglacial Period, more than 100,000 years before Christ, that man first left surviving traces in India. These are the palaeolithic pebble tools of the Soan culture, so called from the little river in the Punjab where they have been found in large numbers.


• In the South there existed another prehistoric stone industry, which is not conclusively dated, but which may have been the approximate contemporary of that of the Soan valley – it is called the Madras Industry!

• While the Soan Culture, speculated to be the work of the proto-human anthropoids, resembles that of the Old World, spread from England to Africa and China, the Madras Industry has affinities with Africa, western Europe and southern England – a true Homo sapiens.

However, there are no human remains to be found from this period in India and we do not know who these people were

and what became of them.


• The Ganga Valley is one of the newest parts

of the earth‘s surface and geologists believe

that much of it was still a shallow sea at the

time of the two stone age industries.


• Homo sapiens continued in India, his skill

and technical equipment imperceptibly

improving down the ages.

• Palaeolithic man was a hunter and food

gatherer and lived in very small

communities. In India, as all over the world,

people lived thus for many thousands of

years.


• Not much earlier than 10,000 B.C. and perhaps as late as 6,000 B.C. man developed what Professor Gordon Childe calls ―an aggressive attitude to his environment‖ – he grew food crops, tamed animals, made pots and wove garments.

• Developed agriculture and permanent villages probably began in the 7th millennium B.C. in the Middle East.

In India the earliest remains of settled cultures are of little agricultural villages in Baluchistan and lower Sind,

perhaps dating from the 4th millennium.


• In the early part of the 3rd millennium,

civilisation, in the sense of an organised

system of government over a comparatively

large area, developed nearly simultaneously

in the river valleys of the Nile, Euphrates

and Indus.


• We know a great deal about the civilisations of

Egypt and Mesopotamia, for they have left us

written material which has been satisfactorily

deciphered.

• The Indian people, on the other hand, did not

engrave long inscriptions on stone or place

papyrus scrolls in the tombs of their dead.

Hence our knowledge of the Indus civilisation is

inadequate in many respects, and it must be

classed as prehistoric, for it has no history in the

strict sense of the term.



and the Aryans

Primitive Man in India

• No human remains-tools

• Prehistoric stone industry- Madras Industry

• Homo sapiens- improved, learned to fashion

microliths

• Microliths-Chronological relationship

unclear



and the Aryans

The First Villages

• Paleolithic man

• Aggressive attitude towards his

environment (10,000 B.C.-6000 B.C.)

• Indus valley –agriculturists

• Pottery and boxes

• Kulli culture and Mesopotamian civilization


• The civilisation of the Indus is known to the archaeologist as the Harappa Culture, from the modern name of the site of one of its two great cities, on the left bank of the Ravi, in the Punjab.

• Mohenjo Daro, the second city, is on the right bank of the Indus.

• Recent excavations on the site of Kalibangan, in the valley of the old River Sarasvati, now almost dried up, near the border of India and West Pakistan, have revealed a third city, almost as large as the two earlier known and designed on the same plan.


The area covered by the Harappa culture

thus covers some 950 miles from north to

south and the pattern of its civilisation

was so uniform that even the bricks were

usually of the same size and shape from

one end of it to the other.


• The regular planning of the streets, and the strict uniformity throughout the area of the Harappa culture in such features as weights and measures, the size of bricks, and even the layout of the great cities, suggest a single centralised state than a number of free communities.

• The unique sewerage system of the Indus people must have been maintained by some municipal organisation, and is one of the most impressive of their achievements. No other ancient civilisation until that of the Romans had so efficient a system of drains.


• The special attention paid by the people of

Harappa to cleanliness is hardly due to the

fact that they had notions of hygiene in

advance of those of other civilisations of

their time, but indicates that, like the later

Hindus, they had a strong belief in the

purificatory effects of water from a ritual

point of view.


The civilisation of Harappa, like

those of Egypt and Mesopotamia,

was theocratic in character.


• The Harappa people used implements of copper and bronze though they had not completely given up the use of stone tools. In many respects they were technologically backward in comparison with Mesopotamia.

• The Sumerians very early invented knives and spear heads with ribs in the middle for extra strength and axeheads with holes for the shafts.

• The blades of Harappa were flat and easily bent, while the axeheads had to be lashed to their handles.

• In one respect the Harappa people were technically in advance of their contemporaries – they had devised a saw with undulating teeth, which allowed the dust to escape freely from the cut, and much simplified the carpenter‘s task.


• Men wore robes which left one shoulder

bare. Beards were worn and men and

women alike had long hair.

• The coiffures of the women were often

elaborate.

• Pigtails were also popular, as in present-day

India.

• Women loved jewellery, and wore bangles

in profusion, large necklaces and earrings.


• As far as we can reconstruct it from our

fragmentary knowledge, the religion of the

Harappa people had some features

suggesting those characteristics of later

Hinduism, which are not to be found in the

earliest stratum of Indian religious

literature.


• The Mother Goddess, for instance, reappears only after the lapse of over a thousand years from the fall of Harappa. She was evidently the divinity of the people.

• The upper classes of Harappa seem to have preferred a god, who also shows features found in later Hinduism.

• There are a few terracotta of bearded nude men with coiled hair; their posture rigidly upright, with the legs slightly apart, and the arms held parallel to the sides of the body but not touching it, closely resembling the stance called by the Jainas Kayotsarga.


• The most striking deity of the Harappa cultures is the horned god.

• The god‘s body is nude, except for many bangles, and what appear to be necklaces, and he wears a peculiar headdress, consisting of a pair of horns, which may have been thought of as growing from his head, with a plant-like object between them. On the largest of the seals, on which this god is found inscribed, he is surrounded by four wild animals, an elephant, a tiger, a rhinoceros and a buffalo and beneath his stool are two deer – just as in the representations of the Buddha preaching his first sermon in the Deer-Park at Varanasi.

• The animals, the plant-like growth from the head and the fact that he is ithyphallic, indicate that he is a fertility god.

He is the Proto-Shiva: the god has much in common with the Shiva of later Hinduism, who is, in his most

important aspect, a fertility deity, known as Pasupati.


• Phallic worship was an important element

of Harappa religion.

• Certain trees were sacred.

• Animals played a big part in the religion of

the Indus people – especially the bull.

The cow, so revered in later Hinduism, is

nowhere depicted and the dead were

buried.


Who were the people who built this great

civilisation?

• It appears that some of the Harappans were people of the long-headed, narrow-nosed, slender Mediterranean type found all over the ancient Middle East and in Egypt and forming an important element of the Indian population at the present day.

• A second element was the Proto-Australoid, with flat nose and thick lips, related to the Australian aborigines and to some of the wild hill-tribes of modern India.

• A single skull of Mongolian type has been found and one of the short headed Alpine type.

• The modern south Indian is usually a blend of Mediterranean and Proto-Australoid, the two chief ethnic factors in the Harappa culture. Moreover, the Harappa religion seems to show many similarities with those elements of Hinduism which are specially popular in the Dravidian country.


The Dravidians

• Some experts claim that the Harappa folk were Dravidians and say their language was a very primitive form of Tamil.

• It is suggested that the Harappa people consisted of a Proto-Australoid element, which in time covered the whole of India, overlaid by a Mediterranean one, which entered India at a very early period, bringing with it the elements of civilisation.

• Under the pressure of further invasions, this Mediterranean element spread throughout the sub-continent, and, again mixing with the indigenous peoples, formed the Dravidians.

• A recent theory holds that the Dravidians came to India from the west by sea as late as the second half of the 1st millennium B.C.

All we can with certainty is that the inhabitants of the Indus cities were of a type widely found further to the west, and that their

descendents must survive in the present-day population of India.


• Even outside the Harappa culture, many peoples in the sub-continent had attained a considerable degree of cultural progress.

• Certain finds of copper implements in Ranchi suggest that the peoples of North India learnt the use of metal from Harappa.

• Certain pre-Aryan sites in the western half of northern India also give evidence of Harappan cultural influence on peoples at a lower cultural level.

• Material from places such as Hastinapura, Kausambi and the very recently excavated Atranji Khera near Aligarh, together with Deccan sites like Navdatoli and Nevasa, show that by the end of the 2nd millennium B.C. there were many settlements whose inhabitants lived in reasonably comfortable conditions, knowing the use of metal.

• As far east as Bengal there was at least one metal-using settlement in the 2nd millennium


Pre-Aryan India made certain advances

in husbandry for which the whole world

owes her a debt.

• Cotton was, to the best of our knowledge, first used by the Harappa people.

• Wild rice is known in Eastern India, and it is here, in the swampy Ganga valley, that it was probably first cultivated by the neolithic contemporaries of the Harappa people.

• The water buffalo, known to the Harappa people, may have been the first domesticated in the Gangetic Plain though some authorities believe that it originated in the Philippine Islands.

• Perhaps the most widely appreciated of prehistoric India‘s gifts to the world is the domestic fowl.



and the Aryans

The Harappa city culture

• Indus civilization- prehistoric

• Harappa culture- a single centralized state

• Conservatism and Theocratic

• Drains, Cleanliness, Harbour works

• Seals, artistic

• Human and animal figurines



and the Aryans

• Copper and bronze instruments

• Dressing

• Deity

• Animals

• Phallic worship

• Influence on the modern South Indian


The end of the Indus cities

• Migratory movements driven by the horse and horse driven

chariots.

• Military prowess gained by the use of a shafthole axe and the sword with a broad middle.

Did the Aryans destroy the Indus civilisation? There is not enough evidence to say with certainty that the destroyers of

the Indus cities were members of the group of related tribes whose priests composed the Rig Veda, but it is

probable that the fall of this great civilisation was partly due to the widespread migratory movements of

charioteering peoples which altered the face of the whole civilised world in the 2nd millennium B.C.


Indo-Europeans and Aryans

• The invaders of India called themselves Aryas, a word generally anglicised into Aryans.

• There are many theories about the Aryans and the origin of these people. One theory, more acceptable than the rest, suggests that…

• About 2000 B.C. the great steppeland stretching from Poland to Central Asia was inhabited by semi-nomadic barbarians, tall, fair, mostly long-headed.

• They had tamed the horse, which they harnessed to light chariots with spoked wheels, of a much faster and better type than the lumbering ass-drawn cars with four solid wheels.

• They were pastoral but practiced a little agriculture.

• They seem to have adopted some Mesopotamian innovations, notably the shaft-hole axe.

• Whether from pressure of population or desiccation of pasture lands or from other causes they were on the move and migrating in bands, moved westwards, southwards and eastwards.

• They brought with their patrilinear family system, their worship of sky gods, and their horses and chariots.


• These marauding tribesmen gradually merged with the older populations of the Middle East and the ancient civilisations, invigorated by fresh blood and ideas, rose to new heights of material culture; but the culture of the Indus, weakened by recurrent floods, could neither withstand nor absorb the invaders.

• The Aryan invasion of India was not a single concerted action, but one covering centuries and involving many tribes, perhaps not all of the same race and language.

• The invaders did not take to living in cities, and after the fall of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro the Punjab and Sind became a land of little villages, with buildings of wood and reed the remains of which have long since perished.

For centuries after the fall of Harappa this part of India is almost an archaeological blank, which at present can only be filled by literary sources like the Vedas, Brahmanas and the Upanishads.


Bhāratvarśa, the land of the sons of

Bharata

• Among the many peoples who entered India in the 2nd millennium B.C. was a group of related tribes whose priests had perfected a very advanced poetic technique, which they used for the composition of hymns in praise of their gods, to be sung at sacrifices.

• These tribes, chief of which was that of the Bharatas, settled mainly in East Punjāb and in the region between the Satlaj and the Yamunā which later became known as Brahmāvarta.


• The period of the Vedas, Brahmanas and Upanishads is a sort of transition from prehistory to history.

• If history, as distinct from archaeology, is the study of the human past from written sources, then India‘s history begins with the Aryans.

• The Vedas still live. The hymns composed by the Aryan priests were carefully handed down by word of mouth and early in the 1st millennium were collected and arranged.

• However, they tell us little about the great events of the time. Only on religion and thought is the historian more fully informed through the Vedas.

• For the period before the time of the Buddha we can only trace the general character of the civilisation which produced the Vedic literature and give a brief and tentative sketch of its expansion.


• It is probable that most of the Rig Veda was composed between 1500 and 1000 B.C.

• When the hymns were written the focus of Aryan culture was the region between Yamuna and the Satlaj, south of the modern Ambala, and along the upper course of the river Sarasvati. The latter river is now an insignificant stream, losing its strength in the desert of Rajasthan.

• The Vedic poets knew the Himalayas but not the land south of the Yamuna, and they did not mention the Vindhyas.

• To the east the Aryans had not expanded far beyond the Yamuna and the Ganga is mentioned only in one late hymn.


• Many hymns refer to battles between the tribes.

• Underlying the intertribal rivalry, is a sense of solidarity against the dark and ill-favoured, bull-lipped, snub-nosed, worshipers of the phallus and hostile speech-ed, Dasas and Dasyus. These were evidently survivors of the Harappa Culture and kindred peoples of the Punjab and North West.

• The Dasas were rich in cattle and dwelt in fortified places called pur. Indra, the Aryan war-god destroyed hundreds of these purs.

• The main work of destroying the settlements of the Dasas had been accomplished some time before the composition of the hymns and the great battles which must have taken place were already misted over with legend, but the Dasas were still capable of massing armies of 10,000 men against the invaders.


• Other enemies of the Aryans were the Panis, described as wealthy people who refused to patronise the Vedic priests, and who stole the cattle of the Aryans. They were not so strongly hated as the Dasas.

• The Aryans were not uninfluenced by the earlier inhabitants. The most lasting influence was that of language. All Indian languages, from Vedic to modern vernaculars, contain a series of sounds, the retroflex or cerebral consonants, which cannot be traced in any other Indo-European tongues, not even in Old Iranian, which is closely akin to Sanskrit.


• Even when the earliest hymns were composed the Aryans were not savages, but were on the fringes of civilisation.

• Their military technique was in advance of that of the Middle East, their priestly schools had raised the tribal sacrifice to a fine art, and their poetry was elaborate and formalised.

• On the other hand they had not developed a city civilisation.

The complete absence of any words connected with writing in the Rig Veda, despite its size and the many

contexts in which such words might be expected to occur, is almost certain proof that the Aryans were

illiterate.


• The Āryans looked on the king primarily as a leader in war, responsible for the defence of the tribe.

• He was in no sense divine at this early period, and had no religious functions, except to order sacrifices for the good of the tribe and to support the priests who performed them.

• The Ŕg Veda mentions several chieftains by name and around some of them alter tradition has embroidered very unreliable stories, but only one rājā is recorded as performing any deed of historical importance. This is Sudās, king of the Bharatas. Three poems of the collection describe the great ―Battle of the Ten Kings‖ at which Sudās defeated a coalition of ten tribes of Panjāb and the North-West, on the banks of the river Paruśńī, the modern Rāvī. The most powerful of these ten tribes was the Pūrus, who dwelt on the lower Sarasvatī and were the Bharatas‘ western neighbours; their king, Purukutsa, was apparently killed in the battle.

• In the succeeding age we do not here of either the Bharatas or the Pūrus, but a new tribe, the Kurus, controls the old land of the Bharatas and much of the northern Gangā-Yamunā and Doāb.

• In the traditional genealogy of the Kuru chiefs both Bharata and Pūru are occur as names of their ancestors, and they are referred to indiscriminately as ―sons of Bharata‖ and ―sons of Pūru‖.


• When the Aryans entered India there was already a class division in their tribal structure. Even in the earliest hymns we read of the Kshatra, the nobility, and the visha, the ordinary tribesman.

• By the end of the Rig Vedic period due to intermingling and intermarriage, society was divided into four great classes, and this fourfold division was given religious sanction and looked on as fundamental.

• The four classes, Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Sudra were crystallising throughout the period of the Rig Veda.

• The Sanskrit word used for them, Varna, means colour and suggests their origin in the development of the old tribal class structure through contact with people of different complexion and alien culture.

The term Varna does not mean and has never meant “Caste”, by which convenient word it is often loosely

translated. 6/10/2012 51 Sanjay Ranade, Head,DCJ, UoM

• The basic unit of the Aryan society was the family.

• The wife, though she enjoyed a respectable position, was definitely subordinate to her husband.

• Marriage was usually monogamous, and apparently indissoluble, for no reference to divorce or the remarriage of widows occurs in the Rig Veda.

• Cattle was currency and values were reckoned in heads of cattle.

• There is no evidence that the Aryans held cattle as sacred at this time – the cow in one or two places is given the epithet ―not to be killed‖, but this may only imply her economic importance.

• In any case it is quite clear that both oxen and cows were slaughtered for food during the Rig Vedic times.

• The Aryans were a wild, turbulent people and had few of the taboos of later India. They were much addicted to inebriating drinks, of which they had at least two, soma and sura.

• The Aryans loved music, played the flute, lute and harp to the accompaniment of cymbals and drums. They used a heptatonic (seven pitches per octave) scale.

• The Aryans delighted in gambling.


• There is no good reason to believe that iron was used in India at this period. Iron ore is common enough but its smelting demands higher skills than the Aryans had developed. Only at the very end of the 2nd millennium did the use of iron begin to spread widely over the civilised world.

• The Aryans lived without cities and therefore had no advanced economic system. There is no evidence of a regular class of merchants or moneylenders, though indebtedness is sometimes referred to.


The later Vedic Age • Between the composition of the Rig Veda and the age of

the Buddha, when we begin to trace the history of India with comparative clearness, a period of some four or five hundred years elapsed. During this period the Aryans pushed eastwards down the Ganga and their culture adapted itself to changed conditions.

• Recently Indian archaeologists have excavated parts of a few sites which belong to this period, such as Hastinapura, Ahicchatra and Kausambi.

• The town of Hastinapura was almost completely destroyed by flood at the end of its existence and little remains but shreds of painted grey pottery, a few copper implements and traces of houses of unbaked brick.


• One event, not definitely recorded in the

contemporary sources, but so strongly

remembered that it must have been very

important, was the great battle of Kurukshetra, not

far from modern Delhi.

• This battle, magnified to titanic proportions,

formed the basis of the story of the greatest of

India‘s epics, the Mahabharata.

• According to the legend the whole of India, from

Sind to Assam and from the Himalayas to Cape

Comorin, took part in the war, which arose

through a dynastic dispute in the great Kuru tribe.


• The names of many of the heroes of the Mahabharata may genuinely be those of contemporary chieftains, but we must regretfully record that the story is of less use to the historian even than the Iliad or most of the Norse and Irish saga literature.

• According to the most popular later tradition the Mahabharata War took place in 3102 B.C., which in light of all evidence is quite impossible.

• More reasonable is another tradition, placing the war in the 15th century B.C. but this is also several centuries too early in the light of our archaeological knowledge.

• Probably it took place around the beginning of the 9th century B.C. such a date seems to fit well with the scanty archaeological remains of the period.


• From this time onwards the centre of culture and political power shifted to the Gangetic Doab, and the Kuru capital, Hastinapura or Aasandivant.

• Throughout most of the later Vedic period the Kurus and their neighbours the Panchalas were the greatest and the most civilised of Indian peoples.

• Early in this period the Aryans pressed further eastwards and set up kingdoms in Kosala to the east of the Doab and in Kasi, the region of Varanasi.

• The former, which grew in importance with time, was the realm of Rama, the hero of the second of the great Indian epics, the Ramayana.


• For all his later fame the literature of the period ignores Rama and his father Dasharatha completely, so we must conclude that both were comparatively insignificant chieftains, whose exploits were by chance remembered, to be elaborated and magnified by later generations of bards until, around the beginning of the Christian Era, they received their final form.

• It is not even certain that Rama was a king of Kosala at all, for the earliest version of the legend that we posses makes him a king of Varanasi, which was for a time a kingdom of some importance, but was conquered by Kosala towards the end of this period.


• Another important kingdom was Videha, to the east of the River Gandak and north of the Ganga.

• A legend in the Brahmanas, speaks of how Agni, the fire God moved eastwards followed by a chieftain Videgha Maathava.

• The legend is important because it the only significant account of the process of colonisation in an approximately contemporary source. In the progress of Agni, burning up the earth, we see not only the gradual eastward expansion of the Aryan fire cult, but also the clearing of jungle and waste by burning, as bands of migrating warrior peasants founded new settlements.


• Though Rama is ignored in the literature of the period his traditional father-in-law, Janaka king of Videha, is more than once mentioned and is clearly a historical figure.

• He was a great patron of the hermits and wandering philosophers who propagated the new mystical doctrines of the Upanishads and he himself took part in their discussions.

• By the time of the Buddha the kingdom of Janaka had disappeared and his capital city Mithila had lost its importance. The kingdom was replaced by the tribal confederacy of the Vrijjis, headed by the Liccchavis, who may have been Mongols from the hills, but were more probably a second wave of Aryan immigrants.


• South of Videha, on the right bank of the Ganga, was the region known as Magadha, then of little account. It was not wholly Aryanised but bands of nomadic renegade Aryans called Vratyas, who did not follow the Vedic rites, roamed the land with their flocks and herds.

• Only in the times of the Buddha, under the great king Bimbisara, did Magadha begin to show the energy and initiative which were to lead to the setting up of the first great Indian empire.


• To the east of Magadha, on the borders of the modern Bengal, the small kingdom of Anga had arisen, while, beyond Anga, Bengal and Assam were still outside the pale of Aryan civilisation.

• Thus the texts of the period are mainly concerned with the region from the Yamuna eastwards to the borders of Bengal.

• While the Aryans had by now expanded far into India their old home in the Punjab and the North-West was practically forgotten. Later Vedic literature mentions it rarely and then usually with disparagement and contempt as an impure land where the Vedic sacrifices were not performed.

• This later Vedic period was materially much in advance of that of the Rig Veda.

• The period saw a great development of the sacrificial cult which took place with rising royal pretensions.

• Most famous and significant of these sacrifices was the ashwamedha or horse sacrifice, wherein a specially consecrated horse was set free to roam at will for a year, followed by a chosen band of warriors. Chieftains and kings on whose territory the horse wandered were forced to do homage or fight and if it was not captured by a neighbouring king it was brought back to the capital and sacrificed at the end of the year.


It was the ambition of every important king

to perform the horse-sacrifice and the

evil effects of the sacrifice on inter-state

relations were felt to the end of the Hindu

period.


• The Aryans now had nearly all the equipment of a civilisation of the ancient type.

• The Rig Veda only mentioned gold and copper or bronze. The later Vedic texts mention tin, lead, silver and iron.

• The elephant was tamed though little used in war.

• The Aryans cultivated large range of crops, including rice, and understood something of irrigation and manuring.

• Several crafts are referred in this period – jewellers, goldsmiths, metal-workers, basketmakers, ropemakers, weavers, dyers, carpenters and potters.

• Various types of domestic servant are mentioned.

• A rudimentary entertainment industry existed and acrobats, fortune-tellers, flute-players and dancers are referred to.

• References to usurers and merchants are found.


There is still no mention of coined money or writing.

• Coinage may have introduced towards the end of the 6th century B.C., through Persian influence.

• It is doubtful however whether we should accept the negative evidence of later Vedic literature to show that writing was wholly unknown for this literature was intended only for a limited audience of priests, who had developed a unique system of memory training, and who may well have looked on writing as an objectionable innovation.

• There is evidence of faint contact with Mesopotamia and it is possible that Semitic merchants or Indian merchants returning from the West, brought an alphabetic system of writing, which was gradually taken up by the learned and adapted to the phonetics of Indian speech, to become the Brahmi script of Mauryan times.


• The most important developments of this age were religious.

• Culturally the period of the later Vedic literature saw Indian life and thought take the direction it has followed ever since.

• The end of this shadowy age, with its kings growing in power, its priests arrogating to themselves ever greater privileges, and its religious outlook rapidly changing, marks the beginning of the great period of India‘s culture in which the pattern of society, religion, literature and art gradually assumed something of its present shape.


The Aryans in India. The Proto-Historic

period

• Chief- Bharatas

• Hymns composed by priests- Brahmans

• Rig Veda

• Glittering mantles of legend

• General character of civilization


Chapter II. PREHISTORY: The Harappa

Culture and the Aryans

The culture of the Rig Veda

• Possibility (1500 B.C.- 1000 B.C.)

• Indigenous inhabitants not subjugated

• Underlying tribal rivalry

• Non Aryan influence- culture and religion

• Fringes of civilizations




• Chief- Raja

• Responsibility- protection

• Not divine, no religious

limitation

• Hereditary kingship

• Sabha and Samiti

• Class division hardened

gradually

• Four classes

• Family- basic unit

• Patriarchal

• Patrilinear

• Economy- pastoral and

agricultural

• Not advanced

• Cattle- currency

• Music, gambling and

technically well equipped




• Sacred texts-Vedas, Upanishads, Brahamanas only

• Epics-Mahabharata and Ramayana

• Videha- legend

• Aryan fire cult and clearing the jungle

• Vrijjs headed be Lichhavis-second wave of Aryan immigrants Advanced Culture

• Ratnins

• India's culture was taking a certain direction

The Later Vedic Age


Chapter III. HISTORY: Ancient and

Medieval Empires

Sources of History

• Not much information is available

• Dates are uncertain

• Few evidences of how the empires fell or

rose to power.


• It is perhaps unjust to maintain that India had no

sense of history whatever, but what interest she

had in her own past was mainly concentrated on

the fabulous kings of a legendary golden age,

rather than on the great empires which had risen

and fallen in historical times.

• The early history of India resembles a jigsaw

puzzle with many missing pieces; some parts of

the picture are fairly clear; others may be

reconstructed with the aid of a controlled

imagination; but many gaps may remain, and may

never be filled.


• It is in the 6th century B.C. that Indian

history emerges from legend and dubious

tradition.

• Our sources for this period, the Buddhist

and Jaina scriptures, these texts were passed

down by word of mouth for centuries, but

unlike the Vedas, they evidently grew and

altered with time.


• The age in which true history appears in India was one of great intellectual and spiritual ferment. It produced not only philosophers and ascetics, but merchant princes and men of action.

• The focus of civilisation had shifted eastwards, and four great kingdoms, outside the earlier area of Brahmanic culture, had eclipsed the old land of the Kurus in both political and economic importance – Kosala, Magadha, Vatsa and Avanti.


• Kosala, the home of the legendary Rama, was already in decline. The king Prasenajit (in Pali, Pasenadi), was indeed still a mighty monarch, ruling an area little smaller than France; but from fleeting references in the Buddhist scriptures it seems that he was inefficient, and squandered his time and wealth on holy-men, both orthodox and heretical.

• His kingdom was infested with robbers, was loosely controlled through tribal chieftains and vassal kings.


• Bimbisara of Magadha, was a resolute and energetic organiser, ruthlessly dismissing inefficient officers, calling village headmen together for conferences, building roads and causeways and travelling over his kingdom on tours of inspection.

• He seems to have been a man of peace and in good terms with kingdoms as far away as the Gandharas on the upper Indus.

• His chief queen was the sister of Prasenajit of Kosala. He received a portion of Kasi in dowry from Prasenajit.

• His capital was Rajagraha, about 60 miles to the south east of present day Patna.

• He was deposed, imprisoned and murdered about 494 B.C. – about seven years after the death of the Buddha – by his son, Ajatasatru.


• Ajatasatru, after taking control of Magadha, attacked Prasenajit and gained complete control of Kasi.

• Meanwhile, Prasenajit‘s son, Virudhaka (in Pali, Vidudabha), deposed him. Presenajit died.

• Virudhaka attacked the autonomous tribe of the Sakyas, in the Himalayan foothills, and we here no more of the people which produced the greatest of Indians, the Buddha.

• We hear no more of Virudhaka except for an unreliable legend that says that he was destroyed by a miracle soon after his massacre of the Sakyas.

• A little later his kingdom of Kosala was incorporated in Magadha.


• The accounts of the reigns of Bimbisara and Ajatasatru give evidence of a definite policy, aimed at the control of as much of the course of the Ganga as possible.

• These were the first Indian kings to conceive the possibility of a far-flung empire.

• If there was any source of the inspiration of the two great kings of Magadha it must have been the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, whose founder, Cyrus the Great (558-530 B.C.), came to the throne about sixteen years before the accession of Bimbisara, and proceeded rapidly to build up the greatest empire the world had then seen.

• In an inscription of about 519 B.C. Darius I, the third of the Achaemenid emperors, claims possession of Gandhara, and in a slightly later inscription he also claims Hindush, or ―India‖, which according to Herodotus, became the twentieth satrapy of the Persian Empire. The extent of the Persian province of Hindush is not certain, but it probably included much of the Punjab.


The Medes and the Achaemenid

Persian Empire


• The Medes were an ancient Iranian people, who lived in the north, western, and northwestern portions of present-day Iran, and roughly the areas of present day Kurdistan, Hamedan, Tehran, Azarbaijan, north of Esfahan and Zanian.

• This abode of the Medes was known in Greek as Media or Medea, (adjective Median, antiquated also Medean). They entered this region in the second millennium BC.

• By the 6th century B.C., the Medes were able to establish an empire that stretched from the southern shore of the Black Sea and Aran province (the modern-day Republic of Azerbaijan) to north and Central Asia and Afghanistan, and which included many tributary states, including the Persians, which eventually supplanted and absorbed the Median empire in the Achaemenid Persian Empire.


• The principal explanation for the origins of the Medes is that they immigrated from somewhere in Eurasian steppes to Zagros mountains sometime about the end of second millennium BC.

• The Medes used to refer to themselves as Aryans.

• The Medes, people of the Mada, appear in history first in 836 B.C. Earliest records show that Assyrian conqueror Shalmeneser III received tribute from the "Amadai" in connection with wars against the tribes of the Zagros. His successors undertook many expeditions against the Medes (Madai).

• At this early stage, the Medes were usually mentioned together with another steppe tribe, the Scythians, who seem to have been the dominant group. They were divided into many districts and towns, under petty local chieftains; from the names in the Assyrian inscriptions, it appears they had already adopted the religion of Zoroaster.

• In the second half of the 7th century B.C., the Medes gained their independence and were united by a dynasty. The kings who established the Mede Empire are generally recognized to be Phraortes and his son Cyaxares.


• In 612 BC, Cyaxares succeeded in destroying the Assyrian capital, Nineveh; and by 606 BC, the remaining vestiges of Assyrian control.

• From then on, the Mede king ruled over much of Iran, Assyria and northern Mesopotamia, Armenia and Cappadocia.

• His power was very dangerous to his neighbors, and the exiled Jews expected the destruction of Babylonia by the Medes.

• Astyages succeeded his father Cyaxares in 585 B.C.

• Astyages inherited a large empire, ruled in alliance with his two brothers-in-law, Croesus of Lydia and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, whose wife, Amytis, Astyages' sister, was the queen for whom Nebuchadnezzar was said to have built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.


• The reign of Astyages was noted for its both its stability and for the growth of the eastern prophet-based religion, Zoroastrianism throughout his empire, at the same time that Croesus was overseeing an explosion of secular thought in the west (through the philosophers he patronized, Thales, Solon, Aesop), and Nebuchadnezzar was turning his city of Babylon into the greatest metropolis the world had yet seen.

• After thirty-two years of relative stability, Astyages lost the support of his nobles during the war with Cyrus the Great, resulting in Astyages', Croesus' and Babylon's overthrow and the formation of the Persian empire.


The Achaemenid Empire

• The Achaemenid Empire or "Achaemenid Persian Empire", was the first of the Persian Empires to rule over significant portions of Greater Iran.

• It is also the state which freed the Israelites (Jews) from their Babylonian captivity, and instituted Aramaic, the language in which the bible and many important historic records are written, to the greater near east as official language.

• It incorporated the following territories: in the east, modern Afghanistan and beyond into central Asia, and Pakistan; in the north and west, all of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the upper Balkans peninsula, and most of the Black Sea coastal regions; in the west and southwest the territories of modern Iraq, northern Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, all significant population centers of ancient Egypt and as far west as portions of Libya. Encompassing approximately 7.5 million square kilometers, the Achaemenid Empire was territorially the largest empire of classical antiquity.


• Cyrus was politically shrewd, modeling himself as the "savior" of conquered nations. To reinforce this image, he instituted policies of religious freedom, and abolished slavery in the newly acquired cities, most notably the Jews of Babylon.

• It was the general policy of the Achaemenids to continue the Assyrian and Babylonian practice of transferring large populations between areas.

• This caused a great deal of cultural diffusion, blending many of the disparate clans together, and thus reducing previous tribal (and territorial) loyalties. As a result, the Achaemenid era was known as a relatively peaceful period in Middle Eastern history.


• The Achaemenids thereafter consolidated

areas firmly under their control. It was

Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great who,

by sound and farsighted administrative

planning, brilliant military maneuvering,

and a humanistic world view, established

the greatness of the Achaemenids and in

less than thirty years raised them from an

obscure tribe to a world power.


• Darius in his inscriptions appears as a fervent worshiper of Ahura Mazda.

• A great statesman and organizer, Darius thoroughly revised the Persian system of administration and also the legal code. His revisions of the legal code revolved around laws of evidence, slave sales, deposits, bribery and assault.

• He divided the Persian Empire into twenty provinces, each under the supervision of a governor or satrap.

• The satrap position was usually hereditary and largely autonomous, allowing each province its own distinct laws, traditions, and elite class.

• Every province, however, was responsible for paying a gold or silver tribute to the emperor; many areas, such as Babylonia, underwent severe economic decline resulting from these quotas.


• Each province also had an independent financial controller and an independent military coordinator as well as the satrap, who controlled administration and the law.

• All three probably reported directly to the king. This distributed power within the province more evenly and lowered the chance of revolt.

• Darius also increased the bureaucracy of the empire, with many scribes employed to provide records of the administration.


• Darius I and later Achaemenid Emperors,

though acknowledging their devotion to

Ahura Mazda in inscriptions, appear to have

permitted religions to coexist.

• It was during the Achaemenid period that

Zoroastrianism gained momentum, and a

number of the Zoroastrian texts (that today

are part of the greater compendium of the

Avesta) have been attributed to that period.


• It is hardly likely that the kings of Magadha

were ignorant of what was happening in the

North-West and perhaps their expansionist

policy was in part inspired by the example

of the Persians.


• The scriptures of the Buddhists and Jainas give us little information on the events which took place after the deaths of the founders of the two sects, and therefore we know scarcely anything about the latter part of Ajatsatru‘s reign.

• However, we do know that in the succeeding century and a half Magadha continued to expand, for when the curtain is again lifted on India‘s past in the 4th century B.C., Pataliputra the new capital of Magadha, controls all of the Ganga basin, the rest of Northern India, with the exception of Rajasthan, Sind, the Punjab and the North West, is part of the Magadhan Empire and the other kingdoms are either annihilated or reduced to insignificant vassalage.


Alexander and the Mauryas

• In the middle of the 4th Century B.C. Mahapadma Nanda was emperor of Magadha.

• He was an unpopular upstart, energetic and ambitious, gained control of Kalinga (the modern Orissa and the northern coastal strip of Andhra Pradesh) and perhaps of other parts of the Deccan.

• His death was followed by a disputed succession which coincided with important events in the North-West.

• Out of the confusion of the times emerged the greatest and most powerful of India‘s many empires.


• Macedon or Macedonia was the name of an ancient kingdom in the northern-most part of ancient Greece.

• Philip II of Macedon (382 – 336 B.C.) was an Ancient Greek king from 359 B.C. until his assassination. He was father of Alexander III, Philip III and possibly Ptolemy I Soter, the founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty.

• Philip's military skills and expansionist vision of Macedonian greatness brought him early success.

• Philip created and led the League of Corinth in 337 B.C. Members of the League agreed never to wage war against each other, unless it was to suppress revolution.


• The League of Corinth (original name: Hellenes - 'The Greeks') was a federation of Greek states created by Philip during the winter of 338 B.C.337 B.C. to facilitate his use of military forces in his war against Persia. The name 'League of Corinth' was coined by modern historians.

The major provisions were:

• Member states' constitutions in force at the time of joining were guaranteed.

• The Synedrion, or congress of representatives, was to meet at Corinth.

• The League would act to prevent any acts of aggression or subversion against any member state.

• The League would maintain an army levied from member states in approximate proportion to their size.

• Philip was declared commander of the League's army.

• In addition to the provisions of the League, Philip garrisoned soldiers in Corinth, Thebes, and Ambracia. He was powerful enough to impose these measures because he had just defeated an alliance of Theban and Athenian forces at the Battle of Chaeronea.


• Philip was elected as leader (hegemon) of

the army of invasion against the Persian

Empire. In 336 B.C., when the invasion of

Persia was in its very early stage, Philip was

assassinated, and was succeeded on the

throne of Macedon by his son Alexander

III.


• The term Hellenistic (derived from Héllēn, the Greeks' traditional self-described ethnic name) was established by the German historian Johann Gustav Drovsen to refer to the spreading of Greek culture and colonisation over the non-Greek lands that were conquered by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC.

• The Hellenistic age marks the unification of the Greek world, sharing a common culture based on that of 5th and 4th century BC Athens, along with a fusion of Near Eastern cultures.

• The period is characterized by a new wave of Greek colonization which established Greek cities and Kingdoms in Asia and Africa.

• Those new cities were composed by Greek colonists who came from different parts of the Greek world, and not from a specific "mother city" (metropolis) as before.

• The main cultural centers expanded from mainland Greece, to Pergamon, Rhodes, as well as to new Greek colonies such as Antioch and Alexandria.

• This mixture of Greek-speakers gave birth to a common Attic-based dialect, known as Hellenistic Greek, which came to absorb and replace all idioms of the Greek language.


• Alexander conquered the Persian Empire,

including Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Judea,

Gaza, Egypt, Bactria and Mesopotamia and

extended the boundaries of his own empire

as far as the borders of Punjab.


• After the long campaign in Bactria, the

region watered by the River Oxus on the

borders of the Modern Soviet Union and

Afghanistan, Alexander crossed the Hindu

Kush and occupied the district of Kabul.

• Fiercely but unsuccessfully resisted by the

hillmen, he descended the Kabul Valley and

reached the Indus, which he crossed in the

spring of 326 B.C.


• Omphis (in Sanskrit, Ambhi), king of Takshasila, had already submitted, and the city offered no resistance. Omphis feared the most warlike king of the Punjab, Porus (in Sanskrit Paurava, which would connect him to the old Kuru tribe)

• Beyond the Jhelum, lay the territory of Porus, which Alexander captured after a surprise crossing of the Jhelum. Porus was captured.

• Porus was a very tall and handsome man whose courage and proud bearing made a great impression on the Greeks – when brought before his conqueror he was found to have received nine wounds, and he could barely stand; but when Alexander asked him how he wished to be treated he boldly replied: ―As befits me – like a king!‖


• After the defeat of Porus, Alexander continued his advance subduing numerous tribes and petty kingdoms; but at the Beas he was forced to turn back for his generals feared mutiny if his troops were made to advance further into unknown country.

• At the mouth of the Indus the army divided, part returning to Mesopotamia by sea and part led by Alexander himself, by land, along the coast through the desolate Makran.

• Alexander had wanted to retain control of his Indian conquests. He had left garrisons behind him and appointed satraps to govern the territories.

• But revolts and his sudden death in 323 B.C. made the Macedonian position in India untenable.


• The Greeks had known something of India before the invasion of Alexander but their knowledge was mostly in the nature of fantastic travellers‘ tales.

• For the first time Greeks and Indians came into close contact.

• The Greeks admired the courage of the Indian troops, the austerity of the naked ascetics whom they met at Taksasila, and probity and simplicity of the tribes of the Punjab and Sind.

• Greek colonies were established in Bactria, Afghanistan and North West India.

• Some of these prospered, for about seventy years later Greek was still the principal language spoken around Kandahar.


• Greek historians refer to three warlike peoples -viz. the Astakenoi, the Aspasioi and the Assakenoi, located in the northwest west of river Indus, whom Alexander had encountered during his campaign from Kapisi through Gandhara.

• The Aspasioi were cognate with the Assakenoi and were merely a western branch of them. Both Aspasioi and Assakenoi were a brave people and constituted a finest soldiery which had extorted the admiration of the foreigners.

• Alexander had personally directed his operations against these hardy mountaineers who offered him stubborn resistance in all of their mountainous strongholds.

• The Greek names Aspasioi and Asssakenoi derive from Sanskrit Ashva (or Persian Aspa). They appear as Ashvayanas and Ashvakayanas in Panini‘s Ashtadhyayi and Ashvakas in the Puranas. Since the Kambojas were famous for their excellent breed of horses as also for their expert cavalry skills, hence, in popular parlance, they were also known as Ashvakas.

• The Ashvayana and Ashvakayana clans had fought the Macedonians to a man. When worse came to worst, even the Ashvakayana Kamboj women had taken up arms and fought the invaders side by side with their husbands, thus preferring "a glorious death to a life of dishonor"


The Kambojas • Kambojas are a very ancient Kshatriya tribe of the north-western parts

of the Indian subcontinent and what is now Afghanistan, frequently mentioned in ancient texts including the Mahabharata but not in the Rig Veda. They apparently belong to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family.

• Numerous classical sources indicate that ancient Kamboja was a center of Iranian civilization. This is evident from the Mazdean religious customs of the ancient Kambojas, as well as from the Avestan language they spoke.

• It is now widely accepted among scholars that the Kambojas were an Avestan speaking group of East Iranians, and were located mainly in north-eastern Afghanistan and parts of Tajikistan.

• Some scholars also believe that the Zoroastrian religion originated in eastern Iran in the land of the Kambojas.

• The tribal name Kamboja has been traced to the royal name Kambujiya of the Old Persian Inscriptions (known as Cambyses to the Greeks)

• Kambujiya or Kambaujiya was the name of several great Persian kings of the Achaemenid line.


• The Mahabharata as well as Kautilya‘s Arthashastra attest that the horses from Kambojas were the foremost breed.

• Buddhist texts speak of Kamboja land as the land of horses.

– Kambojo assa.nam ayata.nam

– Translation:

– Kamboja, the land of horses (assa)

– The cluster assa which on adding the suffix -ka gives the Prakrit Assaka denotes the following:

– Assaka = The Kambojas connected with horses; horsemen; cavalry.

– Assaka = The Kamboja land or Janapada.


• Similarly, the Sanskrit Ashvaka can be derived

from Sanskrit Ashva which, likewise, denote the

following:

• Ashvaka = The Kambojas connected with horses;

horsemen; cavalry.

• Ashvaka = The Kamboja land or Janapada.

• The terms Assaka or Ashvaka, thus stood for the

Kamboja land, Kamboja people, Kamboja

horsemen or the Kamboja cavalry.

• The Assakenoi and Aspasio are stated to be a

section of the more general tribal name Kamboja.


• Cleophis (Sanskrit: Kripa) was the mother of Assakenos or Assacanus, the reigning war-leader of the Assakenoi or Assacani people at the time of Alexander‘s invasion.

• Their territory stretched as far as Indus on the east with the capital at Massaga (Sanskrit Mashakavati) which was a formidable fortress situated not far to the north of the Malakand Pass.

• In modern times, it corresponds to Mashkine located between the rivers Panjkora and Kunar about 24 miles from Bajore.

• The Assakenois were excellent breeders of horses as well as expert cavalrymen who also rented their cavalry services as mercenaries.


• Alexander personally led a campaign against the Aspasios and later the Assakenois.

• The Assakenois (Ashvakas) had opposed the invader with an army of 20,000 cavalry, 38,000 infantry and 30 elephants.

• A contingent of 7,000 Kamboj soldiers were brought from Abhisara. The Ashvakas had fought valiantly and offered a stubborn resistance to the invader in many of their strongholds.

• Massaga was the scene of the bloodiest fight.

• Alexander received a serious wound in the fighting at Massaga. The city could not be stormed even after five days of bloody fighting.


• At the very outset, Alexander made a tactical move to retreat his forces so to beguile the Ashvakayanas to move out of their fort of Massaga. About seven thousand Ashvakayanas force-charged the Macedonians helter-skelter, whereupon, Alexander suddenly wheeled around and attacked back. A hand-to-hand fight ensued. At last the tribesmen retired to the citadel losing 200 men. Alexander pursued them and brought his famed Phalanx against their fortifications. But the Ashvakaynas poured a rain of arrows on the Macedonians from the citadel, one injuring Alexander himself.


• Next day, Alexander pounded the fort-wall

with his war engines (ballists) and his

soldiers tried to rush in through the breach,

but defenders gain set upon them with great

severity and repelled all their attacks

compelling Alexander to draw off his

forces.


• Next morning, the Macedonians returned to assault and started shooting from the Ballist machines and set up a huge wooden tower against the wall and shot from it at the tribesmen in the citadel. It took the Macedonians nine days to complete the tower.

• But still the defenders foiled their designs to force a passage inside. That day also went in vain.


• Next day, a bridge was thrown-in to reach the breach in the fort wall effected on second day, but, as the Macedonian troops thronged on it, it collapsed, hurtling them all down in terrible mess.

• Taking advantage of this, the defenders started pouring rain of arrows and stones and whatever articles they could snatch from top.

• Some of the Ashvakayanas issued from the posterns and struck the invaders hard at the close quarters. It was indeed a disaster day for the Macedonians.


• On the fifth day yet another effort was made to make a gang-way from a war engine to the wall. Again the tribesmen rejoined with full fury.

• Unfortunately as the Ashvakayana chief was supervising the war operations in the battlements, a missile from the Macedonian war ballist struck and felled him.

• The supreme command for the battle was taken over by Cleophis, the mother of the deceased leader, who also stood determined to defend her motherland to the last extremity.

• The example of Cleophis assuming the supreme command of the military also brought the entire women of the locality into the fighting.

• In this famous battle of Massaga which spread over several days, Macedonians suffered heavy losses.

• The tribesmen also, likewise, suffered heavy losses, and therefore, entered into a peace agreement with the invaders.


• The two sides came to an agreement ensuring the

safe vacation of the tribesmen and providing that

the mercenaries would join the Macedonians.

• When the tribesmen had evacuated the city, in

accordance with terms of the agreement, and

retired to a distance of 80 stadia, without

harboring any thought of treachery, Alexander

who was actuated by an implacable enmity and

had kept his troops under arms ready for action

suddenly pounced upon the tribesmen (who were

unaware and unprepared) and made a great

slaughter of their ranks.


• Baffled by this unbecoming behavior, which flouted all canons of propriety and dignified conduct, the tribesmen loudly protested that they were being attacked in violation of the sworn obligations and also reminded him by invoking the Greek gods in whose names Alexander had taken oaths to faithfully observe the terms of the agreement.

• But Alexander, throwing the gods and the oaths in their names, to the winds, retorted that the covenant merely bound him to let them depart from the city, and was by no means a league of perpetual amity between them and the Macedonians.


Diodorus gives a detailed account as to how the brave Ashvakayanas had conducted themselves when faced with the sudden treacherous onslaught from Alexander. Writes Diodorus:

• “Undismayed by the greatness of their danger, they drew their ranks together in the form of a ring within which they placed their women and children to guard them on all sides against their assailants. As they had now become desperate, and by their audacity and feats of valour, had made the conflict in which they closed, a hot work for the enemy,--great was the astonishment and alarm which the peril of the crisis had created. For, as the combatants were locked together fighting hand-to-hand, death and wounds were dealt round in every variety of form. While many were thus wounded, and not a few killed, the women, taking the arms of the fallen, fought side by side with their men. Accordingly, some of them who had supplied themselves with arms, did their best to cover their husbands with their shields, while the others, who were without arms, did much to impede the enemy by flinging themselves upon them and catching hold of their shields. The defenders, however, after fighting desperately along with their wives, were at last overpowered by superior numbers, and thus met a glorious death which they would have disdained to exchange for the life of dishonour”.


• The kingdoms and tribes of the North-West were disorganised and overthrown, but Alexander made so small an impression upon India that in the whole of her surviving ancient literature there is no reference to him.

• In later centuries the Indians came to know the Greeks, but of Greek influence in India at this time there is scarcely a trace.

• However, it may be that the invasion, and the political vacuum created in the North-West by Alexander‘s retreat, had indirect effects of the utmost importance.


• Classical sources speak of a young Indian named Sandrocottus – identical with the Chandragupta Maurya of Indian sources – who sided with the Greeks.

• Sandrocottus advised Alexander to advance beyond the Beas and attack the Nanda emperor, who was so unpopular that his people would rise in support of an invader.

• The Latin historian Justin adds that later Sandrocottus offended Alexander by his boldness of speech and the conqueror ordered that he should be put to death; but he escaped, and after many adventures succeeded in expelling the Greek garrisons and gaining the throne of India.

• Whether or not these stories are true, it is reasonable to believe that the emperor Chandragupta Maurya, who rose to power soon after Alexander‘s invasion, had at least heard of the emperor, and perhaps derived inspiration from his exploits.


• Both Indian and classical sources agree that Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the last of the Nandas and occupied his capital, Pataliputra.

• The latter add that after Alexander‘s retreat Chandragupta subdued the North-West driving out the Greek garrisons. (324-313 B.C)

• Though the detailed history of his rise to power is uncertain, it is evident that he was the chief architect of the greatest of India‘s ancient empires.

• According to all Indian traditions he was much aided in his conquests by a very able and unscrupulous Brahman adviser, called variously Kautilya, Chanakya and Vishnugupta.


• The Greeks were soon back at the doors of India.

• Alexander‘s general Seleucus Nicator had succeeded in gaining control of most of the Asiatic provinces of the shortlived Macedonian Empire, and turned his attention to the East.

• About 305 B.C. he met Chandragupta in battle and seems to have suffered the worst of the engagement.

• He was compelled to yield parts of what is now Afghanistan to Chandragupta, receiving in exchange only 500 elephants.

• The peace was concluded by a matrimonial alliance, the nature of which is uncertain.


• Seleucus sent an ambassador, Megasthenes, to reside at the Mauryan court at Pataliputra.

• Megasthenes, wrote a detailed account of Indian which became the standard textbook on the subject for later classical writers.

• Unfortunately no manuscript of Megasthenes‘ description of India has survived, but many Greek and Latin authors made abundant use of it, and from their works it may be partially reconstructed.


• It is evident from a comparison of the fragments

of Megasthenes with the Arthashastra that the

Mauryan empire had developed a highly organised

bureaucratic administration, which controlled the

whole economic life of the state, and that it had a

very thorough secret service system, which was

active among all classes from the highest ministers

to the submerged tenth of the towns.

• Megasthenes much admired Chandragupta for his

energetic administration of justice, which he

presided over personally in open Sabhas or what is

more known today by the Persian word Darbars.


• According to Jaina tradition, Chandragupta abdicated the throne, became a Jaina monk, and fasted to death, in the manner of Jain saints, at the great Jaina temple and monastery of Sravan Belgola, in the modern Mysore.

• Whatever the truth of this legend, he was succeeded after a reign of twenty four years by his son Bindusara, about whom little is known except that he was in touch with Antiochus I, the Seleucid king of Syria.

• It appears however, that he kept the kingdom intact and it is probable that he extended it to the Deccan.

• He was succeeded about 269 B.C. by his son Ashoka, the greatest and noblest ruler India has known, and indeed one of the great kings of the world.


• According to Buddhist sources, Ashoka usurped the throne, killed all possible rivals and began his reign as a tyrant, but this story is not borne out by Ashoka‘s own inscriptions, which are the oldest surviving Indian written documents of any historical significance.

• Ashoka‘s edicts are in the nature of official pronouncements of policy, and instructions to his officers and subjects.

• They tell us that when the king had been consecrated eight years he underwent a complete change of heart, and embarked upon a new policy.


In Ashoka’s own words –

• ―When the King, Priyadarshi Devanamapriya, had been consecrated eight years, Kalinga was conquered. 1,50,000 people were thence taken captive, 100,000 were killed, and many more died. Just after taking Kalinga, Devanamapriya began to follow dharma, to love dharma, to give instruction in dharma. When an unconquered country is conquered, people are killed, they die, or are made captive. That Devanamapriya finds very pitiful and grievous…Today, if a hundredth or a thousandth part of those who suffered in Kalinga were to be killed, to die, or to be taken captive, it would be very grievous to Devanamapriya. If anyone does him wrong it will be forgiven as far it can be forgiven. Devanamapriya even reasons with the forest tribes in his empire, and seeks to reform them. But Devanamapriya is not only compassionate, he is also powerful, and he tells them to repent, lest they be slain. For Devanamapriya desires safety, self-control, justice and happiness for all beings. Devanamapriya considers that the greatest of all victories is the victory of dharma, and that victory Devanamapriya has already won, here and on all his borders, even 600 leagues away in the realm of the Greek king Antiyoka, and beyond Antiyoka among the four kings Turamaya, Antikini, Maga and Alikasudara, and in the South among the Cholas and Pandyas and as far as Ceylon.


• The five Hellenic kings whose names appear in the extract are – Antiochus II Theos of Syria, Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt, Antigonus Gonatas of Macedonia, Magas of Cyrene and Alexander of Epirus.

• In place of the traditional policy of territorial expansion Ashoka substituted conquest by Dharma.

• He seems to have believed that by setting an example of enlightened government, he might convince his neighbours of the merit of his new policy and thus gain the moral leadership of the whole civilised world.

• He by no means gave up his imperial ambitions, but modified them in accordance with the humanitarian ethics of Buddhism.


• In domestic affairs the new policy was felt in a general relaxation of the stern government of earlier times.

• Ashoka declared all men as his children.

• He supported the doctrine of ahimsa, then rapidly spreading among religious people of all sects, banned animal sacrifices, at least in his capital, and regulated the slaughter of animals for food, completely forbidding the killing of certain species.

• He took pride in the fact that he had substituted pilgrimages to Buddhist holy places for hunting expeditions, the traditional sport of Indian kings.


Ashoka was however not a pacifist.

• The wild tribesmen of hill and forest were a constant source of danger to the more civilised villages. Ashoka clearly intended to civilise them but it is quite evident that he was ready to repress them by force if they continued their raids on his empire.

• He made no mention of reducing the army.

• Despite his remorse at the conquest of Kalinga, he was too much of a realist to restore it to its original rulers and continued to govern it as an integral part of his empire.

• He maintained the death penalty and merely granted a stay of three days to men condemned to death so that they might put their affairs in order and prepare their minds for the next world.


• Communications improved substantially in Ashoka‘s time. He planted fruit trees along the roads to provide shade and food, dug wells at intervals and set up rest houses for travellers.

• He developed the cultivation of medicinal herbs.

• He inaugurated a new class of official, the Dharma Mahamatra or Officers of Righteousness, who taking their orders from the centre, investigated affairs of all the provinces, to encourage good relations between man and man, and to ensure that local officials carried out the new policy.

• Ashoka‘s reforms thus tended to centralisation rather than devolution.


• It is evident that after his change of heart if not before, Ashoka‘s personal religion was Buddhism, and some authorities believe that he actually entered the Buddhist order.

• But the inscriptions show that he was no metaphysician and indeed he probably had little interest in or understanding of the Buddhist order.

• He never mentions Nirvana but does speak of heaven frequently.

• He seems to have held the belief that as a result of the growth of morality through his reforms, the gods had manifested themselves on earth, a phenomenon which had not occurred for many years previously.


• In fact, the Dharma officially propagated by Ashoka was not Buddhism but a system of moral consistent with the tenets of most of the sects of the Empire and calculated to lead to peace and fellowship in this world and heaven in the next.

• Ashoka‘s metaphysical presuppositions were not distinctively Buddhist, but were evidently those traditional in India at the time.

• Ashoka‘s Buddhism, though enthusiastic, was not exclusive. More than once he declared that all sects were worthy of respect, and he dedicated artificial caves to the sect of the Ajivakas, who were among the chief rivals of the Buddhists.

• His relation with the Buddhist clergy seems to have been Erastian for he had no compunction in prescribing passages of scripture which the order was specially to study and he instructed local officers to ensure that all ill-behaved Buddhist monks were unfrocked.


• It was in Ashoka‘s reign that Buddhism

ceased to be a simple Indian sect and began

its career as a world religion.

• According to tradition a great council of the

Buddhist clergy was held at Pataliputra at

which the Pali canon was finally codified,

and after which missions were sent

throughout the length and breadth of India

and beyond.


• In his latter years, Ashoka seems to have

lost his grip on the Empire.

• He died in 232 B.C.

• The Empire began to fall apart and little is

known of his successors apart from their

names.


• The Ashoka of the Buddhist legends is, in the words of a 19th century authority, ―half monster, half idiot‖, his humanity and practical benevolence overlaid by the accumulation of monkish legends of later centuries; but the king of the rock and pillar inscriptions comes alive, as a real man, and a man far ahead of his times.

• Ashoka was by no means an other-worldly dreamer, but every inch a king, a little naïve, often rather self-righteous and pompous, but indefatigable, strong willed and authoritative.


• It is with good reason that the

Indian Republic has adopted for

the device of its state seal the

capital of an Ashokan column.


The Age of Invasions


• The Mauryan kings continued to rule in Magadha until about 183 B.C.

• Pushyamitra Shunga, a Brahman general of Brihadratha, the last Mauryan king succeeded in gaining power by a palace revolution.

• Pushyamitra was a supporter of the orthodox faith, and revived the ancient Vedic sacrifices, including the ashwamedha.

• The kingdom of the Shungas was not a closely knit centralised empire like that of the Mauryas but one of a type which was to become normal in Hindu India and which may be loosely termed feudal.

• Its centre was in Vidisha which at most times seems to have been directly controlled by the king whose domains were surrounded by a circle of vassal states small and great, in varying degrees of subservience.


• Ashoka‘s renunciation of conquest was

soon forgotten.

• In general the history of post-Mauryan India

is one of the struggle of one dynasty with

another for regional dominance and the

political, though not the cultural, unity of

India was lost for nearly two thousand

years.


• Meanwhile on India‘s north western borders

events which were to have a profound effect

both on her own history and on that of Asia

generally were taking place. A series of

invasions, all inadequately documented,

brought the whole of what is now West

Pakistan, Malwa and Saurashtra, much of

Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and even for a

while part of Western Maharashtra under

the control of alien kings.


• The first invaders were the Bactrian Greeks.

• The Greco-Bactrian Kingdom was founded around 245 BC when the Seleucid military governor of Bactria, Sogdiana and Margiana, named Diodotus (Theodotos), wrested independence for his territory from the Seleucid ruler Antiochus II.

• The Greco-Bactrians were known for their high level of Hellenistic sophistication, and kept regular contact with both the Mediterranean and neighbouring India. They were on friendly terms with India and exchanged ambassadors.

• Diodotus was succeeded by his son, also named Diodotus who was soon overthrown and replaced by a usurper, Euthydemus.

• He came to terms with the Seleucid emperor Antiochus III and with his flank he expanded to the North West frontier.

• Early in the 2nd century B.C. Demetrius, the son and successor of Euthedemus, pressed further into India. He and his successors occupied most of the Indus valley and the Punjab and led great raids far into the Ganga valley.

• At least one of these raids, perhaps led by King Menander, reached Pataliputra.


• To the north there are indications that the

Greco-Bactrians may have led expeditions

as far as Kashgar and Urumqi and in

Chinese Turkestan, leading to the first

known contacts between China and the

West around 220 B.C.


• Little is know of the history of the Greeks in

India and their fortunes can only be faintly

reconstructed from their remarkable coins

most of which bear legends in Greek on the

obverse and in Prakrit on the reverse.

• However, from now on the Yavanas, a term

borrowed by India through the Persian from

the Greek, are mentioned from time to time

in Indian literature.


• It was through the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms that

western theories of astrology and medicine began

to enter India and perhaps the development of the

Sanskrit drama was in part inspired from this

source.

• More than one Indian tradition speaks of the great

Yavana raids.

• One of the Greek Kings of the Punjab is specially

remembered by Buddhism as the patron of the

philosopher-monk Nagasena; this was Milinda, or

Menander who ruled over Sialkot.


• The Greeks in turn were affected by Indian

culture. Some of the them became Buddhist.

A Greek ambassador Heliodorus erected a

column in honour of the early Vaisnavite

deity Vasudeva.

• The author of the law-book Manu, writing

probably a century or two later than

Heliodorus, describes the Yavanas as

degenerate Kshatriyas and thus gives them a

place in Hindu society.


• The Greco-Bactrian kingdoms, however,

did not long survive. Bactria itself was

occupied by the Parthians early in the

second of the 2nd century B.C and the

Greeks were confined to their possessions

in India and Afghanistan.

• A complex chain of causes, climatic and

political, led to new movements of the

peoples of Central Asia.


• Ancient China had always been a collection of more or less independent states in the north of China.

• The Shang and the Chou dominated the political landscape as the most powerful of those states, but they did not exercise uniform rule over neighboring regions.

• When the Chou began to weaken around 500 BC, these independent states began to war among themselves over territory and influence.

• So chaotic was this period that the Chinese refer to it as The Warring States period, and it did not end until the whole of north China was unified under a single empire, the Ch'in dynasty.


• In Chinese history, the Ch'in are the great, evil dynasty, but Western historians often stand in awe of the Ch'in.

• They were repressive, autocratic, and frequently cruel, but they were also brilliant political theorists and reformers who historically brought about one of the most energetic periods of Chinese government.

• Their story, however, is a very brief one. For from the time the Ch'in unified China in 221 BC, to the time of their fall fifteen years later in 206 BC, not even a generation had passed.

• For all that, so massive was their accomplishment that our name for China is derived from the Ch'in.


• The Ch'in were a small state in the western reaches of the Wei River.

• As with all states during the Warring States period, the Ch'in pursued an aggressive policy of territorial expansion.

• The Ch'in, however, had one great advantage: they had adopted a new style of government based on the principles of the Legalists.

• Ultimately based on Confucianism, Legalism held that human beings were fundamentally base and selfish and had to be strictly controlled through laws.

• These laws were effective only if punishments were severe and certain, so the Ch'in kingdom was frighteningly autocratic.


• But Legalist philosophy also demanded a strong central government, a strong military, a tightly controlled economy, and the strict regimentation of the citizens of the state.

• As a result, the Ch'in kingdom grew powerful and wealthy in a very short time.

• We traditionally date the start of the Ch'in dynasty to 256 BC, although the unification of China did not occur until 221 BC.

• By 256 BC, the Ch'in had become the most powerful state in China, and in 246 BC, the kingdom fell to a thirteen year old boy, Ch'eng.


• As a young man, he surrounded himself with

brilliant Legalist ministers. His most powerful and

trusted advisor was Li Ssu, one of the

foundational theorists of Legalism.

• Under their advice, in 232 BC, King Ch'eng, at the

age of twenty-seven, began a vigorous campaign

to unify and centralize all the northern kingdoms.

• The surrounding kingdoms were no match for the

wealth and military power of the Ch'in, and by

221 BC, Ch'eng conquered all of the northern

kingdoms.


• He assumed the title, Ch'in shih-huang-ti, or "The First Exalted Emperor of the Ch'in."

• Under the guidance and advice of Li Ssu, Ch'in shih-huang-ti created the form of government which served as the model for all future Chinese dynasties.

• The government was centralized around the emperor and his ministers. In order to facilitate that centralization, the Ch'in replaced the old, feudal system in which territory was controlled by more or less independent nobility with a strong, hierarchical bureaucracy.

• All the members of this bureaucracy, as well as the ministers of the state, would be appointed by the central government.

• In order to break the power of the aristocracy, he confiscated their lands and distributed them to the peasants.

• To facilitate the taxation process, government taxes were taken directly from the peasants rather than passing through the hands of the aristocracy.


• In order to cement the centralization of government, Ch'in shih-huang-ti embarked on an ambitious campaign of standardizing money and weights and measures.

• The Ch'in emperor also put the most severe of Legalist doctrines into practice as well. The laws of the unified empire were strict and harsh, particularly if you were in government. The penalty for any corruption at all among government servants was death.

• The Legalists also believed in centralization of thinking, fearful that any non-Legalist ways of thinking could lead to disruption and revolution. So all the other schools of philosophy were outlawed, especially Confucianism, and their books were burned and their teachers were executed.

• The Ch'in were also hard on commerce. Seeing it as a form of infection or parasitism, the Ch'in severely restricted trade and mercantilism, taxed the merchants heavily, and executed merchants for the most trivial offenses.


• The Ch'in, however, set their eyes on more than the administration of the northern territories.

• They turned south and steadily conquered the southern regions of China all the way to the Red River in north Vietnam.

• Their greatest enemy, however, was to the north.

• Called the Hsiung Nu, these nomadic, Hunnish people, had been making constant incursions into the northern territories all during the Chou period.

• The peoples north of China had originally developed as hunters and fishers, but when the region began to dry out and the forests receded, they turned to keeping flocks.

• As a result they learned horsemanship and began to wander nomadically; they also began to fight among themselves.

• This constant fighting made them highly skilled at fighting on horseback, and when they began to wander into the northern states of China, they made extremely formidable opponents for the infantry-based northern states.


• In response to these incursions, the northern

kingdoms all during the Chou period built walls

and fortifications along their northern borders.

• The Ch'in began a massive project of joining many

of these walls and fortifications.

• Although the Ch'in did not build the "Great Wall"

as historians used to claim (the Great Wall was

built during the Ming dynasty), this fortification

and building project during the Ch'in period was

in itself truly amazing.


• Ch'in shih-huang-ti died in 210 BC at the age of forty-nine; the amazing thing about the empire he had founded is that it collapsed only four years after his death.

• While the Legalist government of Ch'in shih-huang-ti was ruthlessly efficient in its control over the state and the bureaucracy, that ruthlessness proved to be its undoing.

• The emperor, who had hoped to found a dynasty lasting over ten thousand years, had alienated many people, particularly the landed aristocracy.

• The building projects of the Ch'in demanded forced labor and heavy taxation; people all throughout the empire were on the verge of revolt.

• Upon Ch'in shih-huang-ti's death, the two most powerful administrators, Li Ssu and Chao Kao, covered up his death and took over the government. They installed a puppet emperor.

• Both Li Ssu and Chao Kao ruthlessly enforced penalties on lower administrators; because of this, regional administrators kept secret the revolts and uprisings in their territories for fear of punishment.

• Eventually, Chao Kao eliminated Li Ssu, and the territorial uprisings became so severe that they could no longer be kept secret. By that point, it was too late, and the dynasty that was to last ten thousand years disappeared only four years after its founder died.


• The Central Asian pasture land was drying up simultaneously, driving large bands of nomads westwards, from the confines of China to the region east of the Caspian Sea.

• Soon a nomadic people called by the Chinese Yueh-chih or Yuezhi, was bearing heavily on the Scythian tribesmen on the borders of Bactria.

• The Scyths, whom India was to know as Shakas, were driven by pressure from the north and east to attack Bactria, which they occupied, soon to be followed by the Yuezhi.

• The Shakas moved on from Bactria to attack first the Parthian rulers of Iran and then the Greeks in India.

• By the middle of the 1st century B.C. only a few petty Greek chiefs still ruled in India and the power of the Shakas reached as far as Mathura.


• Yuezhi "The Great Clan of Yue", is the Chinese

name for an ancient Central Asian people.

• In Chinese the name translates literally as 'Moon

Clan.'

• They were originally settled in the arid grasslands

of the eastern Tarim Basin area, in what is today

Xinjiang and western Gansu, in China, before they

migrated to Transoxiana, Bactria and then

northern South Asia, where they formed the

Kushan Empire.


• The Kushan Empire circa 1st to the 3rd centuries was a state that at its height stretched from what is now Tajikistan to Afghanistan, Pakistan and down into the Ganges river valley in northern India.

• Chinese sources describe the Guishuang i.e. the "Kushans", as one of the five aristocratic tribes of the Yuezhi.

• The Yuezhi reached the Hellenic kingdom of Greco-Bactrian, in the Bactrian territory (northernmost Afghanistan and Uzbekistan) around 135 B.C.

• The Guishuang gained prominence over the other Yuezhi tribes, and welded them into a tight confederation under yabgu (Commander) Kujula Kadphises. The name Guishuang was adopted in the West and modified into Kushan to designate the confederation, although the Chinese continued to call them Yuezhi.


• Gradually wresting control of the area from the Scythian tribes, the Kushans expanded south into the region traditionally known as Gandhara and established twin capitals near present-day Kabul and Peshawar then known as Kapisa and Pushklavati respectively.

• The Kushans are believed to have been predominantly Zoroastrian and later Buddhist as well.

• However, from the time of Wima Takto, many Kushans started adopting aspects of Indian culture like the other nomadic groups who had invaded India, principally the Royal clans of Gujjars.


Gujjars

• The Hephthalites (425-557 A.D) were a people of obscure but possible Indo-European or Indo Iranian origin who at certain periods played an important role in the history of Persia and India.They were called Ephthalites by the Greeks, and Hunas by the Indians.

• According to Chinese chronicles they were originally a tribe living to the north of the Great Wall and were known as Hoa or Hoa-tun. Elsewhere they were called White Huns or (Sveta) Hunas.


• The Bhishama Parava of the Mahabharata, supposed to have been edited around the 4th or 5th century, in one of its verses, mentions the Hunas with the Parasikas and other Mlechha tribes of the North West including the Yavanas, Chinas, Kambojas, Darunas, Sukritvahas, Kulatthas etc.

• The Guptas indeed had encounters with the Hunas from the north-west.

• It is known that the Huns invaded Gandhara and the Punjab from the Kabul valley.

• The Hunas suffered a defeat by Yashdharman of Malwa in 528.

• After the end of the sixth century little is recorded in India about the Huna, and what happened to them is unclear; some historians surmise that the remaining Huna were assimilated into northern India's population.


• The Gurjara clan appeared in northern India about the time of the Huna invasions of northern India, and later established a number of ruling dynasties in northern India, including the Pratiharas of Kanauj.

• Gurjara origins and their relationship to the Hephthalites are not well documented, and subject to considerable debate.

• However, Huna is one of the prominent gotras among Gurjars and many Huna (Gurjar) villages can still be found in Ghaziabad and Bulandshahr.


• Towards the end of the 1st century B.C. a line of kings with Iranian names, usually known as Pahlavas, gained the brief suzerainty of North West India.

• One of them Gondophares, was the ruler to whose kingdom St Thomas is said to have brought India‘s first knowledge of Christianity.

• In fact if we are to believe tradition, the first Christian converts in India were made by the Disciple Thomas himself, soon after the Crucifixion.

• Gondophares had sent an envoy to Syria to find a skilful architect who could build him a new city. The envoy returned with St Thomas who told the king of a City not made with hands and converted him and many members of his court.


• At Thomas died a martyr‘s death at the hands of a king called in Christian tradition Misdeos, who cannot be identified.

• Roman Catholics believe that the tomb of St Thomas is to be found in the cathedral at Mailapur, a suburb of Chennai, though the evidence for the Saint‘s martyrdom there is not sufficient to satisfy the historian.

• The first certain evidence of Christian activity in India is found in the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, an adventurous Alexandrian monk of the 6th century who left an account of his travels.


• He states that there were churches in Kerala and Ceylon, in the hands of Persian priests, and supervised by a Persian bishop at Kallian (perhaps modern Cochin).

• It is clear that the Indian Christians embraced the Nestorian heresy, which was then widespread in Persia.

• The Nestorians were active missionaries, and their intrepid monks even crossed the wastes of Central Asia and founded successful churches in China.


• Nestorianism is the doctrine that Jesus exists as two persons, the man Jesus and the divine Son of God rather than as a unified person. This doctrine is identified with Nestorius circa 386-451, Patriarch of Constantinopole. This view of Christ was condemned and the conflict over this view led to the Nestorian Schism, separating the Assyrian Church of the East from the Byzantine Church.

• The Assyrian Church refused to drop support for Nestorius and denounce him as a heretic, and it has continued to be called "Nestorian" in the West, to distinguish it from other ancient Eastern churches.

• However, the Church of the East does not regard its doctrine as truly Nestorian, but rather teaches the view of Babai the Great, that Christ has two qnome (essences) which are unmingled and eternally united in one parsopa (personality).


• According to some interpretations, the origin of this belief is mostly historical and linguistic: for example, the Greeks had two words for 'person', which translated poorly into Syriac, and the meanings of these terms were not even quite settled during Nestorius's lifetime.

• Nestorianism originated in the Church in the 5th century out of an attempt to rationally explain and understand the incarnation of the divine Logos, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity as the man Jesus Christ. Nestorianism taught that the human and divine essences of Christ are separate and that there are two persons, the man Jesus Christ and the divine Logos, which dwelt in the man.

• In consequence, Nestorians rejected such terminology as "God suffered" or "God was crucified", because the humanity of Jesus Christ which suffered is separate from his divinity. Likewise, they rejected the term Theotokos (Giver of birth to God/Mother of God) as a title of the Virgin Mary, suggesting instead the title Christotokos (Giver of birth to Christ/Mother of Christ), because in their view Mary gave birth to only the human person of Jesus and not the divine.


• When at a later date Islam stamped out both Zoroastrianism and Christianity in Persia, the Indian Christians turned for guidance to the patriarch of Antioch, and have maintained contact with Syria to this day.

• When European travellers again visited India they noticed the Christian churches of the South.

• Marco Polo at the end of the 13th century saw the tomb of St Thomas, and remarked on its popularity as a place of pilgrimage.

• But the Syrian Church was corrupt. There is no evidence that the Indian Christians ever accepted the doctrine of transmigration.

• Many Hindu customs were adopted, and the Kerala Christians, like the Buddhists and the Jainas before them, were in the process of becoming a rather heterodox Hindu sect.

• Jesuit missionaries of the 16th and 17th centuries succeeded in preventing further decadence. One section of the Syrian church in India accepted the authority of Rome, while the other, which remained true to its traditions, reformed and purified itself.


• At this time the Dravidian South first begins

to appear in the light of history.

• Traditionally the Tamil country has always

been divided into three kingdoms – Chola

(the Coromandel coast), Kerala or Chera

(Malabar) and Pandya (the southern tip of

the Peninsula).


• In the earliest stratum of Tamil literature, which was probably composed in the early centuries A.D., we find the three kingdoms in a state of almost continual warfare.

• There kings, and the lesser chieftains who are also mentioned, seem to have been more bloodthirsty than those of the North, and the literature contains hints of massacres and other atrocities such as are rarely heard of in Sanskrit literature.

• One passage even suggests cannibal feasts after battle.

• The ancient Tamil was a man very different from his gentle and thoughtful descendant.

• Wild and ruthless, delighting in war and drink, he compares strikingly with the grave and knightly warriors of the Sanskrit epics, which were probably receiving their final form at the time when the poems of the Tamil anthologies were being written.


• A few centuries were to alter the picture

somewhat but a streak of ruthlessness and

disregard for individual life is evident in the

Dravidian character down to the fall of

Vijayanagara.


• Very early the Tamils took to the sea. Even in the 2nd century B.C. they twice invaded Ceylon, the first time soon after the death of the great king Devanampiya Tissa, and the second a little later.

• The latter invasion resulted in the long occupation of the whole of the northern half of the island by the Tamil king Elaara, who was expelled with great difficulty by the Sinhalese national hero, King Dutugamunu.

• At about the same time Tamils found their way to South East Asia and in the 1st century, they were in close contact with Egypt and the Roman Empire.


The myth about the origin of the Sinhala Tribe

Mahabharata, Book 1, Chapter 177

• When the sage Vasistha was attacked by king Viswamitra's army, Vasistha's cow, Kamadehnu, brought forth from her tail, an army of Palhavas, and from her udders, an army of Dravidas and Shakas; and from her womb, an army of Yavanas, and from her dung, an army of Savaras; and from her urine, an army of Kanchis; and from her sides, an army of Savaras. And from the froth of her mouth came out hosts of Paundras and Kiratas, Yavanas and Sinhalas, and the barbarous tribes of Khasas and Chivukas and Pulindas and Chinas and Hunas with Keralas, and numerous other Mlechchhas.


• Sinhala is the Sanskrit word for the island

of Sri Lanka.

• Tissa, later Devanampiyatissa, 247-207

B.C., was one of the earliest rulers of Sri

Lanka based at the ancient capital of

Anuradhapura. His reign was notable for the

arrival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka under the

aegis of Mauryan Emperor Ashoka.


• Elara (235 - 161 BC), also known as Elalan, or Élaezha Chola, was a Tamil king who ruled Sri Lanka from 205 to 161 B.C. from the ancient capital of Anuradhapura.

• Sometimes referred to as ‗the Just King‘, Elara is a peculiar figure in the history of Sri Lanka and one with particular resonance given the ongoing ethnic strife in the country.

• On one hand he was an invader and usurper, and was eventually slain by the traditionally heroic king Dutugemunu.

• On the other hand he is often regarded as one of Sri Lanka's wisest and most just monarchs.


• In A.D. 320 there arose a new Chandra

Gupta, whose successors in great measure

restored the splendour of the Mauryas.

• He owed his rise to power largely to his

marriage with a princess Kumaradevi of the

tribe of the Licchavis, who reappear on the

scene, eight centuries after Ajatasatru

defeated them.


• The Buddhist commentaries contain a mythical account of the origin of the Licchavis.

• The queen of Benares gave birth to a lump of flesh, and, wishing to avoid disgrace, her ladies in waiting put it in a sealed casket and threw it into the Ganges.

• A deva wrote the king's name on the casket, which was picked up by an ascetic, who tended the embryo until two children, a boy and a girl, emerged from it.

• The ascetic fed them with milk. Whatever entered the stomachs of the children could be seen as though the stomach were transparent, so that they appeared skinless (nicchavi); some said the skin was so thin (līnachavī) that the stomach and whatever entered it appeared as though sewn together.

• From this the children came to be called Licchavi.

• When they were sixteen years old the villagers obtained land for them from the king, founded a town, and married them together.

• Their country came to be called Vajjī. They had sixteen pairs of twins, and their city had to be greatly enlarged - hence its name, Visālā or Vesāli.


• From the prominence given to the Licchavi princess in the genealogies of later Gupta kings, and the minting of special coins to commemorate her marriage to Chandra Gupta it seems that the tribe had profited by the absence of a strong central control to establish a new kingdom and had become influential in Magadha.

• Under Chandra Gupta‘s successor Samudra Gupta, Pataliputra once more became the centre of a great empire.


• Samudra Gupta‘s main effort was in the

direction of the west, where the Sakas had

ruled for over 200 years and the land was

enriched by the lucrative western trade.

• From their capital Ujjayini the Sakas still

controlled Malwa and Gujarat.

• It was Chandra Gupta II, the son of

Samudra Gupta who finally defeated the

Sakas soon after A.D 388.


• The reign of Chandra Gupta II perhaps

marks the high watermark of ancient Indian

culture.

• Later Indian legend tells of a great man and

good King Vikramaditya who drove the

Sakas out of Ujjayini and ruled over all

India, which was most prosperous and

happy beneath his sceptre.

• Vikramaditya was certainly a title of

Chandra Gupta II.


• The prosperity and happiness of Chandra Gupta‘s empire is attested by another foreign traveller, Fa-hsien, a Chinese monk who came to India in order to obtain authentic copies of the Buddhist scriptures.

• The pilgrim noted the peacefulness of India, the rarity of serious crime, and the mildness of the administration.

• In his remarks on social custom he noted that all respectable people were now vegetarians, meat eating being confined to low castes and ‗untouchables‘, in regard to whom he gives us the earliest clear reference to ―pollution on approach‖.


• His record shows that India had changed much since the days of Megasthenes, some 700 years earlier.

• The mild ethics of Buddhism and Jainism had gradually leavened Indian society, which was not more gentle and humane than in the days of the Mauryas.

• In place of the old sacrificial Brahmanism, Hinduism had appeared, in form not very different from that of recent centuries.

• Soon, however, harsher and more primitive elements were to re-emerge, but in the best days of the Gupta Empire Indian culture reached a perfection which it was never again to attain.


• At this time India was perhaps the happiest

and most civilised region of the world, for

the Roman Empire was nearing its

destruction and China was passing through

a time of troubles between the two great

periods of the Hans and the T‘angs.


• Chandra Gupta II was succeeded by his son Kumara Gupta I (415-454 A.D.)

• In the last years of Kumara Gupta‘s reign the empire suffered a severe blow, as with many other important events of early Indian history, details are annoyingly absent, but it is clear that among the chief enemies with whom the Guptas had to contend were new invades, called in India the Hunas.

• Once more Western India was prey of fierce raiders. Kumara Gupta and after him, his son Skanda Gupta, kept these raiders at bay.


• At the close of the fifth century fresh Huna

inroads occurred.

• For some 30 years, from A.D. 500 onwards,

Western India was in the hands of the Huna kings,

two of whom, Toramaana, and his son Mihirakula,

were apparently mighty monarchs.

• Mihirakula is remembered by the Chinese traveller

Hsuan Tsang as a fierce persecutor of Buddhism

and in Kashmir, one of the centres of his power,

memories of his sadistic tyranny were still alive in

the 12th century.


• Mihirakula is remembered in contemporary

Indian and Chinese histories for his cruelty

and his destruction of temples and

monasteries, with particular hostility

towards Buddhism. He claimed to be a

worshipper of Shiva.


• Mihirakula seems to have been driven from the

plain of the Ganga by Narasimha Gupta, or

Baladitya.

• About 530 Mihirakula was also defeated in

Western India, this time by Yashdharman, an

energetic king of Mandasor.

• Though Mihirakula apparently retained his hold

on Kashmir and parts of the North West, Huna

power never again seriously threatened India, and

the Hunas soon lost their individuality.


• These incursions were the death-blow of the

Gupta Empire and by A.D 550 it had completely

vanished.

• A new Gupta line ruled in Magadha until the 8th

century.

• North of the Ganga another kingdom, that of the

Maukharis, rose to prominence, and first gave

importance to the city of Kanyakubja, the modern

Kanauj, which until the coming of the Muslims

was to be the cultural centre of Northern India and

its largest and most prosperous city.


• In Gujarat a line of Gupta feudatories, the Maitrakas, became strong and independent. Evidently all semblance of political unity vanished.

• It is at this time that we first hear of the Gurjaras, a new people who were to provide one of the strongest dynasties of the Middle Ages.

• The invasion of the Hunas destroyed or dispersed the older martial tribes of Rajasthan and their places were taken by newcomers, either acclimatised invaders or indigenous tribes from the hills, from whom most of the Rajput clans of the Middle Ages were descended.


• The centre of interest now shifts for a time

to Sthanisvara (modern Thanesar) in the

watershed of the Satlaj and the Yamuna,

which is so important for India‘s security,

and where so many decisive battles have

been fought.


• Thanesar is an old and historic town on the

banks of the Ghaggar in Haryana of

Northern India. It is located in Kurukshetra

District, approximately 160 km northwest

of Delhi.

• The name Thanesar is derived from the

original name Sthaneshwar which means

Lord of the Place. (Sthan-Place/region,

Ishwar-Lord)


• A local king Prabhakarvardhana, his mother was a princess of the second Gupta line and his daughter Rajyashri was married to the Maukhari king, Grahavarman.

• The Guptas and the Maukharis were traditional rivals and as soon as Prabhakarvardhana died the two went to war.

• Prabhakarvardhana‘s son Rajyavardhana sided with the Maukharis, while the Guptas had the assistance of Shashanka, the king of Bengal. Both Grahavarman and Rajyavardhan were killed in this battle.

• Both kingdoms were now taken over by Harsha, or Harshavardhan, the second of Prabhakarvardhana.


• Harsha ascended the throne in 606 at the age of sixteen and in the forty one years of his reign he succeeded in partially restoring the glories of the Guptas.

• His reign is remarkably well documented.

• The poet Bana, who was patronised by Harsha, has left a florid account of the events leading to his rise of power.

• Hsuan Tsang was in close touch with Harsha, whom he much admired and who gave him an honoured place at his court.

• Harsha gained control of most of Northern India, from Gujarat to Bengal.

• Harsha travelled from province to province, both in his own domains and in those of his feudatories.

• He was a loyal and warm friend, fantastically generous to those whom he favoured.

• He loved philosophy and literature, and in his leisure found time to write three very competent dramas.

• Only in the Deccan Harsha could make no progress. Here he attacked the Chalukya king, Pulakesin II, but was thoroughly defeated.


• Hsuan Tsang shows that Buddhism was definitely declining in India at this time.

• Certain elements of later Hinduism, of which there are few traces in the time of the Guptas, were strongly in evidence. The growth of tantric cults, and the practices of widow-burning shows that a cultural decline had already set in.

• Law and order was on the decline. Hsuan Tsang was robbed twice by bandits in Harsha‘s domains and on one occasion was nearly sacrificed to the goddess Durga by river pirates in the very heart of the empire.


• On Harsha‘s death there was great confusion.

• A usurper, Arunashva, temporarily seized Kanyakubja, and attacked Wang Hsuan-ts‘e, who had come with a small detachment of troops as ambassador to Harsha from the Chinese Emperor T‘ai-tsung. Wang escaped with his little force and gathered an army from Tibet, Nepal and Assam, captured Arunashva and took him to China to end his days in attendance on the emperor.


• By the 9th and 10th century, the kings of the

South, notably the Rashtrakutas had begun

to climb northwards.

• However, none of the dyanasties could rule

any part of the country for long.


• In Afghanistan by now, a line of Turkish chieftains had established a powerful kingdom at Ghazni.

• In 986 one of their amirs, Sabuk Tigin, made his first attack on the most important king of North West India, Jayapala; in a second raid he occupied Peshawar.

• In 997 he was succeeded by his son Mahmud who soon embarked on a deliberate policy of raiding the rich and divided kingdoms of India.

• In 1001 he defeated and captured Jayapala, who committed suicide.


• Jayapala‘s son Anandapala formed a league of Hindu princes against the invaders, but the unwieldy and disunited Indian forces, basing their strategy and tactics on ancient precepts and relying on the unpredictable morale of the fighting elephant, were defeated near Peshawar by the smaller and more mobile Muslim army, and the whole of India lay open to the invader.

• Between 1001 and 1027 Mahmud made seventeen great raids on India.

• The whole western half of the land felt the force of the Turuskas – palaces and temples were looted and desecrated and enormous caravans of booth and slaves were taken back to Ghazni.

• The raids reached as far as the great shrine of Somnath in Saurashtra and the kingdom of the Chandellas in Bundelkhand.

• Kanyakubja and Mathura were captured and plundered.


• Ghazni City was a thriving Buddhist center before and during the 7th century A.D. In 683 A.D., Arab armies brought Islam to the nearby regions.

• Yaqub Saffari from Zarani reigned over the vast region. After the city was rebuilt by Yaqub‘s brother, it became the dazzling capital of the Ghaznavid Empire from 994 to 1160, encompassing much of northern India, Persia, and Central Asia.

• Many iconoclastic campaigns were launched from Ghazni into India. The Ghaznavids took Islam to India and returned with fabulous riches taken from both prince and temple god.

• The city was sacked in 1151 by the Ghorid Ala'uddin but then made into their secondary capital from 1173. It again flourished but only to be permanently devastated, this time in 1221 by the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan led by his son Ogedei Khan.


• Since the 1st century B.C., the border between the Roman (later Byzantine) and Parthian (later Sassanid dynastic) empires had been the Euphrates river. The border was constantly contested.

• Most battles, and thus most fortifications, were concentrated in the hilly regions of the north, as the vast Arabian or Syrian Desert (Roman Arabia) separated the rival empires in the south.

• The Byzantine clients were the Ghassanids; the Persian clients were the Lakhmids.

• The Ghassanids and Lakhmids feuded constantly — which kept them occupied, but did not greatly affect the Byzantines or Persians.


• The only dangers expected from the south were occasional raids by nomadic Arab tribesmen.

• Both empires therefore allied themselves with small, semi-independent Arab principalities, which served as buffer states and protected Byzantium and Persia from Bedouin attacks.

• In the 6th and 7th centuries, various factors destroyed the balance of power that had held for so many centuries.


• The Persian ruler Khusrau II (Parviz)

defeated a dangerous rebellion within his

own empire and then turned his energies

outwards, upon the traditional Byzantine

enemies.

• From 612 to 622, he extended the Persian

borders almost to the same extent that they

were under the Achaemenid dynasty.


• Khusrau II was assassinated in 628 and as a

result, there were numerous claimants to the

throne; from 628 to 632 there were ten

kings and queens of Persia.

• The last, Yazdegerd III, was a grandson of

Khusrau II and was said to be a mere child.


• By the time of Muhammad's death in 632, most of what is now considered Arabia was united under the new religion of Islam. However, Arabic-speaking nomads or villagers roamed over or settled on the edge of the Syrian steppe as well.

• Any regime that aimed to unite all Arabs would have to conquer the Syrian steppe.

• Under Muhammad's successor Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, the Muslims first re-established their control over Arabia and then launched campaigns against the remaining Arabs of Syria and Palestine.

• This put the nascent Islamic empire on a collision course with the Byzantine and Sassanid empires, which had been disputing these territories for centuries.

• The wars soon became a matter of conquest, rather than mere consolidation of the Arab tribes.


• The collapse of the Sassanid polity after the death of Khusrau II left the Persians in a weak position vis-a-vis Arab invaders.

• At first the Muslims merely attempted to consolidate their rule over the fringes of the desert and the Lakhmid Arabs. The border town of Hira fell to the Muslims in 633.

• The Sassanids had reorganized under a new king, Yazdegerd III.

• The main military commander of the Muslims, Khalid ibl al-Wahid, was able to conquer most of Mesopotamia from the Persians in a span of nine months, from April 633 until January 634.


• The Ghaznavid Empire Khorasanian

Sunni Muslim state founded by a dynasty of

Turkic mamluk origin, which existed from

975 to 1187.

• The dynasty was founded by Abu Mansur

Sebuk Tigin, a military general of the

Samanid sultans, with the city Ghazna as its

capital.


• The Samanids (819–999 were a Persian

dynasty in Central Asia and Greater

Khorasan, named after its founder Saman

Khuda who converted to Islam despite

being from Zoroastrian theocratic nobility.

It was among the first native Iranian

dynasties in Greater Iran and Central Asia

after the Arab conquest and the collapse of

the Sassanid Persian empire.


• The Ghaznevid Empire was perhaps the first significant Islamic empire in Asia and marked a break of political control from the Abassids and Baghdad. The Ghaznavid empire grew to cover much of present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and northwest India and Pakistan, and the Ghaznavids are generally credited with launching Islam into Hindu-dominated India.

• In addition to the wealth accumulated through raiding Indian cities, and exacting tribute from Indian Rajas the Ghaznavids also benefited from their position as an intermediary along the trade routes between China and the Mediterranean.

• They were however unable to hold power for long and by 1040 the Seljuks had taken over their Persian domains and a century later the Ghurids took over their remaining sub-continental lands.


• In the year 402(AD1011) Mahmood resolved on the conquest of Thanesar, in the kingdom of ‗Hindoostan‘. It had reached the ears of the King that Thanesar was held in the same veneration by idolaters, as Mecca by the faithful; that they had there set up a number of idols, the principal of which they called Jugsoma, pretending that it had existed ever since the creation.

• Mahmood having reached Punjab, required, according to the subsisting treaty with Anandapal, that his army should not be molested on its march through his country.


• An embassy was accordingly sent to inform the Raja of his intentions, and desiring him to send safe-guards into his towns and villages, which he would take care should be protected from the followers of his camp.

• Anandapala, agreeing to this proposal, prepared an entertainment for the reception of the King, at the same time issuing orders for all his subjects to supply the camp with every necessary of life.

• The Raja's brother, with two thousand horse was also sent to meet the army, and to deliver the following message:—―My brother is the subject and tributary of the King, but he begs permission to acquaint his Majesty, that Thanesar is the principal place of worship of the inhabitants of the country: that if it is required ―by the religion of Mahmood to subvert the religion of others, he has already acquitted himself of that duty, in the destruction of the temple of Nagrakote. But if he should be pleased to ―alter his resolution regarding Thanesar‖, Anandapal promises that the amount of the revenues of that country shall be annually paid to Mahmood; that a sum shall also be paid to reimburse him for the expense of his expedition, besides which, on his own part, he will present him with fifty ―elephants, and jewels to a considerable amount.‖


• Mahmood replied, ―The religion of the

faith-―ful inculcates the following tenet:

‗That in pro-―portion as the tenets of the

Prophet are ―diffused, and his followers

exert themselves in ―the subversion of

idolatry, so shall be their ―reward in

heaven;‘ that, therefore, it behoved ―him,

with the assistance of God, to root out the

―worship of idols from the face of all India.

―How then should he spare Tahnesur?‖


• This answer was communicated to the Raja of Dehli, who, resolving to oppose the invaders, sent messengers throughout ‗Hindoostan‘ to acquaint the other Rajas that Mahmood, without provocation, was marching with a vast army to destroy Thanesar, now under his immediate protection.

• He observed, that if a barrier was not expeditiously raised against this roaring torrent, the country of Hindoostan would be soon overwhelmed, and that it behoved them to unite their forces at Thanesar, to avert the impending calamity.


• Mahmood having reached Thanesar before the Hindus had time to take measures for its defence, the city was plundered, the idols broken, and the idol Jugsoma was sent to Ghazni to be trodden under foot.

• Mahmood, after the capture of Tahnesur, was desirous of proceeding to Dehli. But his nobles told him, that it would be impossible to keep possession of it, till he had rendered Multan a province of his own government, and secured himself from all apprehension of Anandapal, Raja of Lahore.

• The King resolved, therefore, for the present, to proceed no further, till he had accomplished these objects. Anandapal, however, conducted himself with so much policy and hospitality towards Mahmood, that he returned peaceably to Ghazni.

• On this occasion, the Mahomedan army brought to Ghazni 200,000 captives, and much wealth, so that the capital appeared like an Indian city, no soldier of the camp being without wealth, or without many slaves.


• Mahmud did not remain in India, however,

for, though Muslim chroniclers depict him

as a staunch propagator of Islam, intent on

converting the infidel and bringing India

under the control of the true faith, his

expeditions were for the purpose rather of

plunder than of conquest.


• After the sack of Kanyakubja the great Pratihara dynasty which had been losing power for a hundred years, soon disappeared.

• Its last important king, Rajyapala was defeated and dethroned by his neighbour Vidyadhara the Chandella, whose kingdom had been a tributary to the Pratiharas.

• Vidyadhara took advantage of the fact that the Pratihara suffered at the hands of the Muslim invader.

• However, he too was week to resist Mahmud effectively and was forced to pay him tribute.


For about a century and half Northern India retained its independence.

• The Gaahadavaalas managed a prosperous kingdom at Varanasi and Kanyakubja.

• The Chahamanas rose in prominence and power in Rajasthan.

• The influence of the Chandellas of Bundelkhand rose and fell with the Pratiharas.

• The Caulukya or Solanki line, under the influence of Jainism, ruled Gujarat. In Malwa the Paramara dynasty flourished under Bhoja.

• Madhya Pradesh was in the hands of the Kalachuri dynasty.

• In Bengal the Palas were replaced by the Senas who were strong supporters of orthodox Hinduism and who inaugurated something of an anti Buddhist reaction.


• The conservative kings of India had learnt

no lessons from Mahmud‘s raids.

• They were incapable of serious cooperation

and their enormous armies were slow and

unwieldy.

Thus Northern India, in the twilight of

Hindu independence, was hopelessly

divided.


• At the end of the 12th century the three chief

kings of northen India – Prithviraj Chauhan,

Jayachandra Gaahadavaala, and

Paramardideva Chandela – were in a state

of tripartite war.


• A new Turkish ruling house supplanted the line of Mahmud in Afghanistan. In 1173 Giyas-ud-din of Ghor annexed Ghazni.

• His younger brother, Shihab-ud-din, usually known as Muhammad of Ghor, proceeded to conquer the Ghaznavid possessions in the Punjab and Sind, and then turned his attention to the Hindu states.

• The initiative in resistance came from Prithviraj, who patched up his quarrels and prepared to meet the invader.


• In 1191 the Hindu army met Muhammad at

Tarain, not from Thanesar, which had once

been the capital of the great Harsha.

• The invaders were defeated, but the

following year they returned with a larger

force.

• This time the mounted archers of the

Muslims overpowered the Hindu army and

Prithviraj was defeated and killed.


• Muhammad returned home, and left the work of conquest to his generals, the chief of these was Qutub-ud-din-Aibak.

• Aibak occupied Dehli, then an important city of the Chamana kingdom and made it the headquarters.

• Another general Muhammad ibn Bakhtiyar, pressed down to the Ganga and overran Bihar where he put many Buddhist monks to the sword.

• He then occupied Bengal.

• The Chandella kingdom of Bundelkhand fell in 1203.


• Qutab-ud-din was a Tajik of the Aybak Region of Balkh and was born somewhere in Central Asia.

• When yet a child, he was captured and sold as a slave (mamluk). He was purchased by the chief Qazi of Nishapur, a town in the province of Khorasan in northeastern Iran.

• The Qazi treated him like one of his own sons, and Aibak received a good education, including training in archery and horsemanship. When his master died, his master's sons, who were jealous of Aibak, sold him to a slave merchant.

• Qutab-ud-din was purchased by Sultan Muhammad Ghori, ruler of Ghor in central Afghanistan.

• In 1206 Muhammad, who had succeeded his brother as Sultan of Ghor, was assassinated and his general Qutab-ud-din, became the first sultan of Dehli.


• In Rajasthan and other outlying districts Hindu kingdoms continued, sometimes paying tribute to the more energetic sultans but often virtually free, while regions with sharply defined natural boundaries, like Kashmir, Nepal, Assam and Orissa, retained their autonomy.

• These kingdoms had always been in effect independent, only occasionally rendering tribute and homage to the greater kings of the Plains.

• From now on, until the 18th century, Muslim rulers dominated Northern India, and the great days of Hindu civilisation were at an end.


• While in Northern India Hindu culture declined somewhat after the Gupta Age, it flourished and advanced in the Deccan.

• By this time the Aryan and Dravidian contact produced a vigorous cultural synthesis which in turn had an immense influence on Indian civilisation as a whole.

• Power was focussed in the Western Deccan and in the Chola country or the Coromandel coast.


• The Chola Dynasty ruled until the 13th century and originated in the fertile valley of the Kaveri River.

• The Cholas were at the height of their power during the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries.

• Under Rajaraja and his son Rajendra Chola, the dynasty became a military, economic and cultural power in Asia.

• The Chola territories stretched from the islands of the Maldives in the South to as far North as the banks of the Godavari River in Andhra Pradesh.

•


• Rajaraja Chola conquered peninsular South India, annexed parts of Sri Lanka and occupied the islands of the Maldives.

• Rajendra Chola sent a victorious expedition to North India that touched the river Ganga and defeated Mahipala, ruler of Pataliputra. He also successfully raided kingdoms of the Malay Archipelago.

• The power of the Cholas declined around the 12th century with the rise of the Pandyas and the Hoysala, eventually coming to an end towards the end of the 13th century.


• The Pandyan kingdom was an ancient

Tamil state of unknown antiquity. The

Pandyas ruled initially from Korkai, a sea

port on the southern most tip of the Indian

peninsula, and in later times moved to

Madurai.

• The fortunes of the Pandyas swung wildly

till the 13th century.


• The early Pandyan dynasty went into obscurity during the invasion of the Kalabhras.

• The dynasty revived under Kadungon in the early 6th century, pushed the Kalabhras out of the Tamil country and ruled from Madurai.

• They again went into decline with the rise of the Cholas in the 9th century and were in constant conflict with them.

• The Pandyas allied themselves with the Sinhalese and the Cheras in harassing the Chola empire until they found an opportunity for reviving their fortunes during the late 13th century.


• Pandyas entered their golden age under Jatavarman Sundara Pandvan (c.1251) who expanded their empire into Telugu country and invaded Sri Lanka to conquer the northern half of the island.

• They also had extensive trade links with the Southeast Asian maritime empires of Srivijaya and their successors.

• During their history the Pandyas were repeatedly in conflict with the Pallavas, Cholas, Hoysalas and finally the Muslim invaders from the Delhi Sultanate.

• The Pandyan Kingdom finally became extinct after the establishment of the Madurai Sultanate in the 16th century.


• The Chera dynasty was the third important Tamil

dynasty that ruled from ancient times until around

the fifteenth century CE.

• The early Cheras ruled over the Malabar Coast,

Coimbatore, Karur and Salem Districts in South

India, which now forms part of the modern day

Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

• All the three dynasties began ruling before the

Sangam era (300BCE - 200CE) during which the

Tamil language, arts and literature flourished.


• Sangams were Tamil academies, which according to Tamil legends, enabled poets and authors to gather periodically to publish their work.

• The earliest extant works of Tamil date back to 200 BC.

• The literature of this period has been referred to as The Sangam literature and the period in which these works were composed itself is referred to as the Sangam period alluding to the legends.

• Scientifically and historically, the legends of multiple Sangams existing prior to the period of the earliest extant works in Tamil have been dismissed due to lack of any tangible proof.


• According to the Sangam legends first described in the Irayanaar Agapporul and a commentary to it by Nakkirar (c. seventh/eighth century CE.) there were three Sangams spanning thousands of years.

• The first Sangam, whose seat was southern Madurai (later submerged into the Indian Ocean South and West of Kanyakumari), lasted a total of 4440 years, and over 4000 poets which supposedly included some gods of the Hindu pantheon, took part in it.


• The second Sangam was convened in

Kapatapuram, which finds mention in the

Valmiki Ramayana (Kishkinda Kanda

42:13). This Sangam lasted for 3700 years

and had 3700 poets participating. This city

also was submerged in the sea.

• The third Sangam is described as believed

to be located in the current city of Madurai

and lasted for 1850 years under 49 kings


• The word Sangam is probably of Indo-Aryan origin, coming from Sangha, the Buddhist and Jain term for an assembly of monks.

• In Tamil the word means "assembly" or "academy".

• In 470, a Dravida Sangha was established in Madurai by a Jain named Vajranandi. The Dravida Sangha took much interest in the Tamil language and literature.

• During that time the Tamil country was ruled by the Kalabhra dynasty.


• Kalabhras were a South Indian dynasty that ruled over the entire Tamil country between the 3rd and the 6th century C.E., displacing the ancient Chola, Pandya and Chera dynasties.

• Information about their origin and details about their reign is scarce. They left no artefacts or monuments, and the only sources of information are scattered mentions in Buddhist and Jain literature.

• The Kalabhras were displaced around the 6th century with the revival of Pallava and Pandya power.


• Historians speculate that the Kalabhras followed the Buddhist or Jain faiths and were antagonistic towards the Hindu and Brahman religions of the majority population of the Tamil region during the early centuries C.E.

• In consequence, Hindu scholars and authors who followed their decline in the 7th and 8th century C.E. generally tended to paint their rule in a negative light.

• It is perhaps due to this reason, the period of their rule is known as a ‗Dark Age‘.


• The Hoysala Empire was a prominent South Indian empire that ruled most of the modern day state of Karnataka between the 10th and the 14th centuries.

• The capital of the empire was initially based at Belur but was later moved to Halebidu.

• The Hoysala rulers were originally hill peoples of Malnad Karnataka, an elevated region in the Western Ghats range. In the 12th century, taking advantage of the internecine warfare between the then ruling Western Chalukyas and Kalachuri kingdoms, they annexed areas of present day Karnataka and the fertile areas north of the Kaveri River delta in present day Tamil Nadu.

• By the 13th century, they governed most of present-day Karnataka, parts of Tamil Nadu and parts of western Andhra Pradesh.


• It was however, the Cholas who were the most

prominent of the South Indian dynasties.

• Rajendra Chola had sent out a naval expedition

that occupied parts of Burma, Malaya and

Sumatra.

• This was perhaps done with the intention of

suppressing the piratical activities of the

Indonesian kings, who interfered with the

flourishing trade between South India and China.

• This naval expedition is unique in the annals of

India.


• The Chola power began to decline as the Sinhalese

kings began to gain over them.

• The Pandyan kings too, along with the Chalukyas,

put pressure till Chola power was restricted to the

region around Kanchi and Tanjavur.

• Administratively the Chola Empire is remarkable

for the influence exerted by local autonomous

bodies; villages and district councils, under the

supervision of the central government, introduced

an element into the structure of the state which, if

not democratic, was at least popular.


• The Cholas fell in the 13th century when

their territory was shared by the Hoysalas of

Mysore and the revived Pandya dynasty of

Madurai.

• Now the Deccan was to feel the force of

Islam, which was already the master of

Northern India.


• In the reign of the able sultan of Delhi, Ala-

ud-din Khalji (1296-1315) a series of

brilliant raids led by the eunuch general

Malik Kafur, a converted Hindu, crushed

the Deccan kingdoms, and for a time

Muslim sultanate was set up even in

Madurai, in the extreme south.


• The Dravidians were not finally subjugated however.

• In 1336, within a few years of Malik Kafur‘s raids, an independent Hindu kingdom was found at Vijayanagar, on the Tungabhadra River.

• After desperately resisting the Bahmani sultans of the Northern Deccans, established its hegemony over the whole Peninsula from the Krishna River southwards.

• Learning from the Muslim enemies, the kings of Vijayanagara maintained their independence until the middle of the 16th century.

• Of the splendour and affluence of their capital we have European accounts, from the Italian Nicolo dei Conti, and from Portuguese travellers Paes and Nuniz.

• In fact, the king Krishna Deva Raya, (1509-1529), had he lived longer, might have driven the Muslims from the Deccan altogether.

• His successors were lesser men.

• In 1565, Rama Raja, the ruler of Vijayanagara then, was utterly defeated at Talikota by a coalition of the Deccan sultans, the city was mercilessly sacked and the greatness of the empire was at an end.


• This was the last important Hindu kingdom

of the older type.

• That of the Marathas arose in the Western

Deccan in the late 17th century and was the

most powerful element in Indian politics in

the 18th.


• The Bahmani Sultanate (Also called the Bahmanid Empire) was a Muslim state of the Deccan.

• The sultanate was founded on 3rd of August 1347 by the Turkish governor Zafar Khan or Ala-ud-Din Bahman Shah, who revolted against the Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughlaq.

• Nazir uddin Ismail Shah who had revolted against the Delhi Sultanate stepped down on that day in favour of Zafar Khan who ascended the throne with the title of Alauddin Bahman Shah.

• The Bahmani capital was Ahsanabad or Gulbarga between 1347 and 1425 when it was moved to Muhammadabad or Bidar.

• The Bahmani contested the control of the Deccan with the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire.

• The sultanate reached the peak of its power during the vizierate (1466-1481) of Mahmud Gawan.

• After 1518 the sultanate broke up into five states: Ahmedanagar, Berar, Bidar, Bijapur, and Golconda.


• The ultimate importance of this period in the history of the Peninsula was cultural and religious.

• Jainism was once very strong in Mysore and other parts of the South, and often, under royal patronage, it became virtually the state religion.

• But in the Tamil country at this period a new ecstatically devotional theism arose, looking for inspiration rather to hymns in the vernacular than to the vedas or earlier sacred texts in Sanskrit.

• This was subsequently to set the standard for the popular religion of the whole of India.


• This brief outline of the political history of Hindu India shows that she produced many bold adventurers and imperious conquerors.

• They were ruthless in gaining and retaining power and looked on war as a normal political expedient.

• Except during the Mauryan period political unity was unknown, and the highly organised and tightly controlled administration of the ancient Indian state had no counterpart in inter-state relations, where endemic anarchy was only mitigated by a tradition of fair play in warfare, which was by no means always followed.


• Here, and in the conservatism of the medieval period, lay the great weakness of Hindu India, which made her a prey to successive invaders.

• Of these, the wild tribes of Central Asia were rapidly assimilated, but the Muslims, with their rigidly codified religion, were too much for even the omnivorous Hindu culture to digest.

• Interaction between the two religions and ways of life indeed took place.

• It is not wholly surprising, however, that, when India began to reassert herself, two nations should have replaced the single British Raj.



Medieval Empires

The Age of the Buddha

• Inadequate sources

• Produced philosophers, ascetics, merchant princes

and men of action

• Chief kingdoms- Kosala and Magadha

• Control of course of Ganga as much as possible

• Game of conquest- Bimbisara and Ajatshatru

• Aim- Far flung empire, expansionist policy

• Persian influence



Medieval Empires

Alexander and the Mauryas

• Alexander inspired Chandragupta Maurya

• Mauryan empire-organized, secret service

system

• Chandragupta Bindusara Ashoka

• Centralization rather than devolution

• Spread of Buddhism



Medieval Empires

The Age of Invasions

• Not much information

• Greek invasion

• Kanishka invasion

• Iranian invasion



Medieval Empires

The Guptas and Harsha

• Chandragupta`s rise to power

• Indian culture attained perfection

• Huna invasion

• Sthanvishvara- Harshavardhana

• Law and order declined

• Buddhism grew



Medieval Empires

The Middle Ages in the North

• Palas and the Pratiharas became powerful

• North India was hopelessly divided

• Prithviraj Chauhan, Jayaccandra Gaharwar,

Parmar Chandel- tripartite war

• Mahmud of Ghazni`s invasion

• Qutubuddin- first Sultan of Delhi



Medieval Empires

• Hindu culture flourished in

the Deccan

• Chalukyas and the Cholas

• Alauddin Khilji and Malik

Kafur

• Dravidians –Rama Raja

• Marathas- Western Deccan

• Conclusion

• Bold adventurers

• imperious conquerors

• Power- political expedient

• No political unity

• Prey to successive

invaders

• Omnivorous Hindus-

found Muslims difficult to

digest

• Modus vivendi

• Separate two nations

The Middle Ages in the Peninsula


Chapter IV. THE STATE: Political

Life and Thought

Sources

• Dandaniti

• Kautilya Arthashastra

• Mahabharata

• Santi Parvan

• Nitisara

• Nitivakyamrta



Life and Thought

• Legend of Soma

• Kingship based on human

need and military

necessity

• Leader in war

• Divine appointment-

Vajapeya, Asvamedha,

Abhisheka

• Buddhist- mystical

• Europe- contractual

• Indian thought

• Royal divinity

• Matsyanyaya

• Brahmans and Sacred Law- challenge the Raja

• Rama and Sita

Kingship



Life and Thought

Royal Function

• Protection of life, property and traditional custom,

purity of caste and class

• Fair inheritance, widows, orphans, larger staff

• Patronized art, letter and learning

• Succession- primogeniture, voluntary abdication-

satisfy the desire

• Childless- magnets of the realm e.g. Harsha



Life and Thought

Quasi-Feudalism

• Vassal

• Tribute

• Revolting Vassal- threat

• Help



Life and Thought

Oligarchies and Republics

• Bodies governing tribal states

• Tributary to the greater kingdom

• Internal autonomy

• Democracy

• E.g. Shakyas, who dwelt on the borders of

Nepal to whom Buddha belonged



Life and Thought

Councillors and Officials

• Powerful body who could advice the king against

his decision

• Inheritance

• Change of job- permissible

• Public life was controlled by the government

• More than one head

• Grants became common

• Quasi-feudal system 6/10/2012 258 Sanjay Ranade, Head,DCJ, UoM


Life and Thought

Local Administration

• Provisions-Divisions-Districts

• Governor

• Revenue collection

• Preservation of law and order

• Prevention of disaster

• Cleanliness of streets



Life and Thought

Village Administration

• Village was the unit of the government

• Districts were classified according to the no. of

villages

• Village headman and village council

• Headman- One of the wealthier peasants, oppressive

local tyrant

• Village- wards or sections with a representative in

the council 6/10/2012 260 Sanjay Ranade, Head,DCJ, UoM


Life and Thought

Public Finance

• Regular system of taxation

• Tax- bhaga or share

• Tax- paid in kind

• Exemptions or Remissions

• Craftsmen

• Accountancy

• King- the Ultimate Authority

• Rent for tenancy 6/10/2012 261 Sanjay Ranade, Head,DCJ, UoM


Life and Thought

Legal Literature

• Kalpa Sutras

• Sutras + Shastra= Smriti

• Manu Smriti

• Mitakshara

• Dharamratna



Life and Thought

The Basis of Law

• Rta- forerunner of the concept of Dharma

• Dharma= Sacred Law

• Danda= Military force or coercion

• King's responsibility was maintaining

Dharma by means of Danda

• Failure could cost him his throne



Life and Thought

Crime

• Decreasing



Life and Thought

Administration of Justice

• King- sole source of justice

• King's legal adviser- Pradvivaka

• Standards for judges

• Tortures- whipping

• Ordeal- touching red hot iron ploughshare



Life and Thought

Punishment

• Religious penance, imprisonment

• Beheading

• Hanging, burning alive

• Capital

• According to class:- upper class- higher

code of conduct



Life and Thought

Secret Service

• Least pleasant feature – Espionage system

• Satr- orphan trained from childhood and

masquerading as a holy man or a fortune

teller

• Desperado – assassination of enemies



Life and Thought

Hindu Militarism

• No permanent empire- Indian sub-continent

• Size of the land

• Kings were not able

• Ministerial cadre of low quality

• Righteous Conquest- vassal

• Greed and demoniac building up empire

• Doctrine of circles – Mandala

• Inter state anarchy encouraged 6/10/2012 268 Sanjay Ranade, Head,DCJ, UoM


Life and Thought

• Six Types of troops

• Traditional divisions

• Elephants

• Cavalry

• Chariots

• Infantry

• Sub-committee- to control

• Incendiary

• Battle- religious rite and

hence proper day and time.

• Conclusion-Weakest: Inter

state relations and war

• Failed in empire building

• Could not withstand Turks

Military Organization and Technique


Chapter V. SOCIETY: Class, Family

and Individual

Laws of Class and Stage of Life

• Not same for all

• Varnashrama Dharma



and Individual

• Division

• Fundamental, primeval

and divinely ordained

• Three higher classes –

Dvija

• Brahman

• Kshatriya

• Vaishya

• Shudra

The Four Great Classes



and Individual

Untouchables

• Below Shudras

• Candala

• Cremation

• Wooden clappers- polluting approach

• Buddhist monks

• Caste system was fluid

• Rise in caste for a group was possible 6/10/2012 272 Sanjay Ranade, Head,DCJ, UoM


and Individual

Confusion of Class

• Rise was difficult

• Becoming outcast was easier

• Class system was fragile

• Purity of classes- king

• King Vena- miscegenation

• Confusion began

• Interclass marriage- permitted



and Individual

Caste

• The association of many different racial and other

groups in a cultural system for thousands of years.

• Being a Lower caste was more difficult than being

of low Varna. More than being Sudra being Ahir,

Sonar or Kayastha mattered

• Natural response of small and primitive people.

• Provided social security.

• Powerful in the survival of Hinduism.



and Individual

Slavery

• Dasa

Gotra and Pravara

• Gotra - Clan

• Pravara- founder of

the Gotra and sages

who were the remote

ancestors

The Family

• Unit

• Shraadh

• Property

The four stages of Life

The Child

Initiation



and Individual

Education

• Vedas

• Vedangas

• Monasteries

Marriage

• Promotion of Religion

• Progeny

• Rati

• Strict rules

• Age limits

• Types

• Dharma, artha and kama

Sexual Relations

Divorce

Polygamy

Old Age and Death

• Another stage

• Funeral ceremonies

Women

• Minor at law

• No life of religion or ascetic

• Parda in North India

• Husband

• Prostitution- Normal /Devdasi

• Widows- Inauspicious


Chapter VI. EVERYDAY LIFE: The

Daily Round in City and Village

The Village

• Cluster of huts grouped round a well or pond, near which was a small open space with a few trees.

• Land- king was the Ultimate authority

• King took efforts to prevent and relieve famine

• Irrigation works




Agriculture and Stockbreeding

• Wheat, corn, barley, sugarcane, spices, mango,

coconut, toddy, palm, areca, date palm, almond,

walnut.

• Use of manure

• Cattle- ploughing, transport and food.

• Abhiras- scattered localities, cult of Krishna

• Buffalo, horses, elephant, dog, cheetah, fowl,

silkworms- everyday life




The Wild Tribes

• Source of danger- ferocious and barbaric

tradition

• Lost their identity due to the growth of

Hindu civilization.

• Virtual independence

• Protection of the king- if won over




• Takshashila

• Doubt over planning

• Two foci- Palace and

temple

• Palace- mostly in the

centre of the city.

• Temple- source of

wealth

• Corporate body

• Houses had barrel vaulted

roofs, windows, balconies.

• Expanse of water, swings-

features of garden.

• Poor lived in huts.

• Ancient Indian city was a

source of pride.

The Town




The man about town

• Description of his room

• Poet, sculpture, wood carving and clay

modelling.




Amusements

• Festivals such as Holi

• Gambling- royal consecration

• Chess-three cultures

• Chariot racing

• Boxing and wrestling

• Animal fights

• Music and dancing

• Professional entertainers

Clothes and the Ornaments

• Garments were

fundamentally same.

• Lower and the upper

garment.

• Footwear, Jewellery and

cosmetics

• Women headdresses on

festive occassions

• Brahmans- top knot




Food and Drink

• Ashoka- vegetarianism

• New Hinduism and Buddhism

• Water, milk and curd

• Ghee, sesame or mustard oil

• Modern Hinduism Alcoholic beverages- taboo

• Arthashastra-superintendent of liquor

• Drinking should be controlled

Economic Life

• Brahmans were rich

• Ideals did not exclude money making

• Large manufactories worked by hired labour existed.

• Workmen's co-operative group

• Division of labour

• Arthashastra suggests stable level of prices for staple commodities.




Guilds

• Shreni- industrial and mercantile organization

• Single corporate body- craftsmen co-operative and individual workmen.

• Fixed rules for work and prices for commodities

• Powerful- controlled the social and economic life.

• Chief- Elder

• Hereditary

• Self-respect

Technical Achievement

• Delicacy and skill

• Semi-transparent silks and muslins

• Northern Black- bright hard polish of a type of pottery.




Trade and Finance

• Oldest Indian coinage

• Cowry shells

• Coins- far beyond the border

• Usury, money lending except Brahmans

• Sreshthin- leading members of guild

• Honourable position

• Mercantile companies- co-operative ventures in production, distribution ,protection and furthering activities

Caravans and Trade-routes

• Trade routes were existent

• Larger rivers were not bridged

• Rainy season- roads were impassable

• Robbers

• Caravan leader- sarthavaha

• Land pilot

• Luxury articles, metals, foodstuffs




• Contacts were made

• Nailing ship‘s timbers was known.

• Coastal shipping plied to the South and to Ceylon

• Monsoon winds helped crossing the Indian ocean.

• Tamil kings developed harbours and encouraged sea-trade.

• Luxuries, metals, live animals and birds were exported.

• Contacts between India and the West are testified in language.

• Muslim invasion- religious objections on sea travel were raised.

• Xenophobia

• Landlubbers

Sea-trade and Overseas Contacts


Chapter VII.RELIGION: Cults, Doctrines and

Metaphysics

Gods of the Rig Veda

• Mother Goddess and horned fertility God

• Male

• Indra- war and weather God

• Surya

• Agni

• Soma

• Varuna

• Yama

• Rudra

Sacrifice

• Centre of the Aryan cult

• Gratification of Gods

• Prajapati- from whom the Universe is produced

• Order of nature was dependent on the Brahmans

• Could turn the sacrifice against his patrons

• Basic doctrine of the Brahmanas

• Rig Veda rose in importance.

1) The Religion of the Vedas


Chapter VII.RELIGION: Cults, Doctrines and Metaphysics

New Developments of Doctrine

• Samsara, transmigration and karma- soul theory

• Mystery of suffering- Karma

• Meditation and Asceticism

Asceticism

• Munis and vratya

• Magical power

• Above the sacrificial priest

• Darkness to darkness deeper

• Cosmic mysteries, future and work miracles

• Mysticism and Asceticism- strong and thus pessimism

• Insecurity about the future

Speculation and Gnosis

• Cosmic mystery

• Asceticism- thirst for knowledge

• Symbolism of sacrifice

• Speculations

• Creation-legend of Purusha

• Upanishads- Brahman and Atman

• Tat vam asi

• Universal essence- not this

Ethics of Upanishads

• Salvation by knowledge

• Asceticism not essential

• Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi



Metaphysics

The Growth of Buddhism

• Sthaviravadins and Mahasanghikas

• Ashoka

• Stupa

• Sarasvativadins

• The Great Vehicle

• The Lesser Vehicle

• Buddhism was affected by the Hinduism.

• Muslims

The Lesser Vehicle

• Pali canon

• Three Pitakas

• Questions of Menander

• Psychological

• Dukkha- tanha

• Individual satisfaction

• Ignorance of selfhood

• Idea of permanence- basic ignorance

• Universe is soulless

• Transmigration –nothing passes over from one life to another.

• New being suffers as a result of actions of those who have died.

2) Buddhism



Metaphysics

• Nirvana

• Other sects

• Existence of the world without the intervention of a creator.

• Cycles- Buddha cycle

• Example and advice-own salvation

The Evolution of the Great Vehicle

• Last Buddha

• Future Buddha

• Bodhisattva

• Mahayana or The Great Vehicle

The Great Vehicle

• Bodhisattva-----Buddha

• Not enter Nirvana

• Transference of merit

• Suffering-Bodhisattva

• Buddha- spiritual being

• Three bodies

• Docetic heresy in Christianity

• Two schools

• Madhyamika- The Void (sunyukta)

• Yogacara- suchness (tathata)



Metaphysics

The Vehicle of the Thunderbolt

• Female divinities

• Sexual symbolism was incorporated

• Magical mysticism

• Lesser vehicle- release through self-

discipline and meditation

• Greater Vehicle- grace and help of

Buddhas and Bodhisattvas

• Magical power- vajra-Vajrayana or

the Vehicle of Thunderbolt

• Divinities- Taras or Saviouresses

• Tantric Buddhism

• Purpose- supernormal power

• Psychopathic and taboos on

sexual rites

The Buddhist Order

• Three yellow or orange robes of

the Order

• Ceremonially shaving the head.

• Three Jewels and Ten precepts

• Religious exercises and study

• Noble Eightfold path

Buddhist Ethics and Morality

• High system of Ethics

• Scriptures- monks and nuns

• Moral values 6/10/2012 291 Sanjay Ranade, Head,DCJ, UoM


Metaphysics

Jainism

• Migration in the times of Chandragupta led to the schism of Jainism.

• Digambaras and Shvetambaras

• Universal Law- differ only in Karmas

• Interaction of living souls

• Soul- all knowing, blissful but differing only in the karma

• Karma-result of activity

• Monastic life- salvation

• Ahimsa

• Literature- dull and pedantic

The Ajivikas

• Body of ascetics practicing complete

nudity.

• Niyati

Scepticism and Materialism

• Ignoring the Gods

• Materialist schools- religious

observances are futile

• Shake the foundations of the

Established Order

• Tattvopaplavasimha- demolishing

basic principles of the religious

principles.

3)Jainism and other Unorthodox Sects



Metaphysics

Development and Literature

• Cult of Vasudeva

• Vishnu

• Parashurama

• Shiva

• Skanda

• Ganesha

• Rama

• Vedas, Brahmanas and Upanishads

• Epics

• Puranas

• Hymns

Vishnu

• Ten incarnations

Shiva

• Non Aryan fertility deity

The relations of Vishnu and Shiva

• Vaishnavite

• Saivite

• Trimurti

• Harihara- characteristics of both

4) Hinduism



Metaphysics

The Mother Goddess

• Shakti

• Various forms

• Ardhanarishvara

Lesser Gods

• Brahma, Surya, Chandra, Indra,Shakra, Varuna, Yama, Kubera, Ganesha, Hanumant, Kama, Lakshmi, Saraswati.

Demigods and Spirits

• Shitala, Mariyammai, Nagas, Yakshas, Gandharvas, Vidyadharas, Rishis, Asuras.

• Animals, Tree cults, Hills, rivers

Cosmogony

• Basic cycle- kalpa 4320 million years

• Cosmic day- God creates and again absorbs the universe.

• Manvantaras and Mahayugas

• End of Kali-yuga

• Similar to Greece

• Vedanta

The Soul, Karma and Samsara

• Karma- past deeds

• Samsara-ever-rolling wheel

The Six Systems of Salvation

• Nyaya, vaisheshika, sankhya, yoga, mimamsa, vedanta


Chapter VII. RELIGION: Cults, Doctrines and Metaphysics

Theism and Devotion

• Vaisnavite- Pancharatna- Shankarsana, Pradyumna and Aniruddha

• Bhakti in Bhagvad Gita- respect and love

• Ramanuja‘s God

• Madhva‘s theology

• Saivism- Tamil, Trika,Lingayats

Hindu Rites and Ceremonies

• Yajna, puja, arca

• Animal sacrifices

• Tantric rites

Hindu Ethics

• Layman- religion, profession and material pleasure

• Mercy, compassion, friendliness

• Virtues of Brahman and Shudras

• Gita- transcended the contemporary social and religious law. Deed and not the result.

Non-Indian Religions

• Missionaries- Christianity

• Jews

• Zoroastrians

• Toleration contributed to its resilience- assured survival of Hinduism


Chapter VIII. THE ARTS: Architecture, Sculpture,

Painting, Music and The Dance

The Spirit of Indian Art

• Religious art forms- secular craftsmen

• Inspiration- the sensual vitality

The Earliest Architecture

• Less aesthetic merit

• Stone- foreign contacts and disappearance of timber forests

• Fragmentary distinctive - influenced by Persia and Greece

The Stupa

• Cult of Stupas- Buddhism

• Gateway-primitive but with good finish

• Became more ornate

• E.g. Bharhut and Sanchi

Cave temples

• Size and splendour

• Caves- splendid sculpture and lovely paintings

• Caitya hall at Warli

• Cave temple- temple

• Seven Pagodas- Wood construction

• Building in stone 6/10/2012 296 Sanjay Ranade, Head,DCJ, UoM

Chapter VIII. THE ARTS: Architecture,

Sculpture, Painting, Music and The Dance

Temples

• Techniques improved gradually

• Ornately decorated

• Tower above- entrance gateway

• Fortification of temple

• Pandyan style

• Florid carving

• Maithuna figures

• Introduction of small transepts to the assembly hall

• Conclusion:

• Temple building was the prime focus

Sculpture

• Western influence

• Material prosperity

• Carvings on rails and gateways

• Carvings- high excellence

• Images for worship

• Grace and realism

• Outlook of the times- Sun God of Gwalior

• Finish

Terracottas

• Small images and plaques of baked clay in bright colours.

• Crude

• artistic 6/10/2012 297 Sanjay Ranade, Head,DCJ, UoM

Chapter VIII. THE ARTS: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting,

Music and The Dance

Metal Sculpture and Engraving

• Buddhist

• Physical features, Contours of

face and limb

• Individuality and beauty- Tamil

craftsmen

• God- essence

Painting

• Sharply outlined, Careful

Modelling, Secular

• Stood out from the wall

• Religious feeling

• Islamic influence- attention turned

to miniatures and book illustration

• Chinese influence

Minor arts

• Not highly excelled

• Coins- crude and ugly

Music

• Liturgical singing

• Heptatonic scale

• Seven notes

• Ragas and Raginis

• Improviser

• Throaty singing

The Dance

• Music and gesture

• Hand gesture

• Not for higher class


Chapter IX. LANGUAGE AND

LITERATURE

Sanskrit

• Remote cousin of all languages of Europe

• Vedic Sanskrit- tonic accent Greek influence

• Aspirated consonants

• Retroflex consonants

• Phonetics and Grammar- purity of the Vedas

• Alphabet

• Panini‘s grammar

• Paninian Sanskrit

• Inflexion

• Compound noun

• Long compounds

• Controversy over the meanings- conventional and prototype

Prakrits and Pali

• Simpler in sound and grammar

• Pali

• Magadhi

• Sauraseni, Maharashtri

• Apabhramsa- Jaina writers

• Development of modern languages

• Sinhalese

I. Language



LITERATURE

Dravidian Languages

• Tamil, Canarese, Telugu, Malayalam

• Dravidian languages

• Influence of Sanskrit

Writing

• Brahmi

• Origin

• Skillfully adapted

• Ornamentation increased

• Nagari

• Southern Deccan and Ceylon

• All scripts can be traced back to Brahmi

• Kharosthi

• Writing material

• Ink



LITERATURE

Vedic Literature

• Four Vedas, Brahmanas and the Upanishads

• Nature

• Secular

• Sacrifice

Epic Literature

• Mahabharata and Ramayana

• Mahabharata

• Clichés and epithets

• Simple outline

• Real characters

• Santi Parvan- interpolation

• Ramayana

• Greater art but less vigour

• Beautiful descriptive writing

• Didactic literature

Classical Sanskrit Poetry

• Artificial, over-ornate, lacking in true feeling

• Static society

• Social custom

• Never in revolt

• Love, nature, panegyrics and story-telling

• Purpose- emotive

II. Literature



LITERATURE

• Dhvani

• Alamkara

• Stanza- unit

• Kalidasa- bird‘s eye view of

approach

• Erotic- Jayadeva

Narrative

• Simplicity

• Directness

• Humour and pathos

The Drama

• Origin obscure

• Numerous and varied

• Happy Endings

• Legends of Gods and ancient

heroes

• Hero, heroine, villian and

vidushaka

• Kalidasa, Vishakhadatta,

Harsha, Bhavabhuti


Chapter IX. LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Sanskrit Prose Literature

• Different from the Pali stories

• Simple, long compounds, secular, well delineated characters

• Subandhu, Bana

• Panchatantra- fables

Pali literature

• Simple, prosaic and repetitive

Prakrit literature

• Lengthy descriptions of Tirthankaras, pious monks, mighty kings, wealthy merchants, prosperous cities- uninspired dryness

• concise

• Higher educated audience

• Popular influence

Tamil Literature

• Three literary academies

• Eight Anthologies

• No formal unrealistic idealization

• Initial rhyme

• Aryan influence-next stratum

• Sanskrit influence

• Educated audience

• True tragedy

Folk poetry

• Echoes of folk song and popular oral literature


Chapter X. EPILOGUE: The Heritage of India

• Tolerant

• Mutual Influence

• No Fertilizing Effect

• Hindu rules became stricter

• Aurangzeb- reversed

• Western Deccan- Shivaji

• Sikhs of Punjab

• Hindu revival

• Marathas did not encourage reforms in Hindu society

• Influence of Europe-true revival

• British- alien

• Missionary activity

• Hindus gave in

• Ram Mohan Roy- a new sect

• Hindu culture- permanent value

• Arya Samaj

• Theosophical society and Ramakrishna Mission

• Mahatma Gandhi

• Shift in the emphasis of the Hindu thought

• New generation-Rooted in their own traditions

• Useless thoughts have perished

• The cultural tradition will never be lost.

The Impact of the West


Chapter X. EPILOGUE: The Heritage of India

• South East Asia

• China

• Spiritual influences on the West

• Traders

• Mahatma Gandhi

• Upanishads

• Modus vivendi- liberal democracy and communism

• Single culture

• Heritage of all mankind.

The World’s Debt to India


More about the book

• Hypothesis

• Rationale

• Background

• Methods

• Limitations

• Results- Conclusion

• Discussion

• Significance

• Recommendations


Thank you!


Documents

The wonder that was india