BY
W. H. MORELAND, C.S.I., C.I.E.
AND
ATUL CHANDRA CHATTERJEE
G.C.I.E., K. C.S.I.
A GENERAL VIEW ·
THROUGH the long period of Hindu political supremacy, we must think of India as usually parcelled out among a number of kingdoms of varying size and importance, occupying more or less completely the productive regions of the country, while the forests, hills and deserts were the home of tribes in a lower stage of organisation; and we must regard the kingdoms as frequently at war among themselves, as well as with the tribes on their borders, except for the limited intervals when peace was imposed by the authority of a transient paramount power. The political history of this period cannot be recounted as a whole, because the facts are not on record. The literature produced during it was, indeed, varied and extensive; in addition to the works on law, religion and philosophy, which have already been men- tioned, there is extant a rich mass of poetry, epic, dramatic and lyric, a wealth of technical literature, dealing with a wide range of arts and sciences, from grammar and mathe- matics to erotics, and, belonging to the later centuries, a smaller number of tales and romances embodying some historical matter; but there is practically nothing that can fairly be called history, or even chronicle.1
CHRONOLOGY
Certain
his- torical traditions, to which we shall come later, are embedded in the
literature, but it is a remarkable fact that among all the learning, fancy, and
speculation of the period, there is nothing to be compared with what we have
received from the Hebrews, the Greeks or
the Romans-no Book of Kings, no Herodotus, no Livy. Such knowledge of political
events and conditions as we possess is derived largely from foreign sources, in
some cases Greek, in others Tibetan or Chinese, supplementing the extensive,
but incomplete, series of coins and inscriptions discovered in recent times;
and the story has to be told in successive episodes rather than as a continuous
narrative.
For
the earliest centuries the chronology remains uncer- tain, but as time goes on
dated inscriptions and coins come to our aid. Their interpretation has not been
a simple matter, for the various eras used in them had already become obsolete
when western scholars first approached the subject; but a starting-point was
obtained when Sir William Jones recognised that the Sandrokottos mentioned by
the Greek historians about 300 B.C. must be the Maurya Emperor Chandragupta,
and from about this date onwards Indian chronology becomes increasingly
precise, though there is still room for difference of opinion regarding
particular points.
Unfortunately,
this chronological precision does not extend to the dates at which the
literature was produced. Very few works can be ' dated 'in the usual sense of
the word, and for some of the most important of them it is impossible to assign
even the century with certainty, so that the infor- mation they furnish
regarding social and economic life cannot be placed in its correct historical
setting. It is possible, for instance, to reconstruct in broad outline the life
depicted in the epics, but we cannot be confident that all the data relate to
one period, either that of the events described or that of the authors who
described them, nor can we say what that period was. Such historical value
therefore as the epics possess depends mainly on the traditions which they
embody.
There
is but little to be learned in this way from the Rāmāyana of Valmiki, the
second of the great Indian epics, which recounts the adventures of Rama, King
of Kosala, or Oudh, at an epoch which is quite uncertain. The story itself, how
Rama's wife, Sīta, was abducted by a demon king and carried away to Ceylon,
whence Räma eventually recovered her, is perhaps the most popular tale in
India, and is presented every year in elaborate dramatic performances; it has
been interpreted in various ways by western scholars, but the historian can say
only that probably there is a nucleus of fact. The kingdom of Kosala was, as we
shall see, cer- tainly important in the early part of the Hindu period, and
there are some faint indications that the story may belong to about the seventh
century B.C., though the epic was not written till long after; but it seems
impossible to disentangle any concrete facts from the fantastic tales of South
India, or to say more than that Rama was probably a real person whose exploits
excited the popular imagination, until in course of time he was deified in
tradition, and that later on the Brahmans, recognising the strength of this
tradition, regularised it by additions to the epic which present the hero as an
incarnation of Vishnu.
The
other great epic, the Mahabharata, embodies ele- ments of somewhat higher value
to the historian. It is a gradual growth, containing a nucleus of royal
traditions, which later priestly writers have enriched with huge masses of
didactic matter. The nucleus consists of true epic stuff, and may be regarded
as glorified history. Two parties, the Kurus and the Pandus, living near Delhi,
furnish the prin- cipal actors. In the course of a gambling match, marked by a
certain amount of sharp practice, the king of the Pandus lost everything he
had-wife, family, and kingdom—and, as the result of the last throw of the dice,
went into banishment for twelve years; after these had elapsed, he collected
allies, with whose aid he eventually defeated and exterminated the Kurus. The
name of the latter tribe is prominent in the Vedic literature, and the nucleus
of the epic may record events which occurred as far back, perhaps, as the tenth
century B.C.; but the story has been enriched in the course of the long time
which elapsed before the poem assumed its present form, and tribes or nations
which belong to later periods have been brought in as allies to one or other of
the original protagonists.
THE
EPICS
It
is impossible, therefore, to accept with entire confidence the interpretations
which have been put forward, representing the war as a clash of cultures or philosophies
determining the fate of India: there may have been some great principle at
stake, or there may have been merely a tribal quarrel, fought out to the end.
Of greater cultural significance is the appearance in the Mahabharata of Krishna as the charioteer of the Pându leader, and his recognition as an incarnation of Vishnu. The most important of the didactic enrichments of the epic story, known as the Bhagavadgītā, or 'Song of the Adorable One,' is put into his mouth, and the action of the battle is suspended while he explains at length the relation of the practical life to the pursuit of ultimate salvation. It is probable that Krishna, like Rāma, was originally a popular hero, and that he reached the pantheon by the same road, so that the two most prominent figures in modern Hindu worship have a similar origin.
Related
to this epic are the later texts known as Purānas, which, like it, contain a
nucleus of royal tradition, embedded in a mass of didactic matter. The nucleus
consists mainly of traditional genealogies of the royal families ruling in the
Gangetic plain after the war described in the Mahābhārata, but these have been
greatly corrupted in the course of time, and, taken by themselves, cannot be
used with confidence as the basis of political history. They suffice, however,
to furnish the outlines of political geography as it stood in the sixth century
B.C., and may thus be employed to set the stage, as it were, for the events to
be described in succeeding chapters. Using the administrative nomenclature of
the present day, the various states may be located as follows, though of course
their boundaries cannot be determined with precision.
One
important kingdom was Magadha, situated in that portion of Bihar which lies
south of the Ganges, and across the river was Videha, or North Bihar, while to
the west of these lay Kashi or Benares, and Kosala or Oudh. The region which
comprises these four states was the scene of the most conspicuous events of
which there is a record during the early part of the period; it was here that
two new religious movements, Jainism and Buddhism, arose; and Magadha expanded
in course of time into the first of the
great Indian empires of which we have any definite knowledge, Bengal and Orissa, the countries lying to the
east of this region, barely appear in the early history; while for the upper
Gangetic plain on the west, occupied by the Pūru1 and Panchāla kingdoms,
practically nothing has survived beyond the corrupt dynastic lists. Similar
lists show merely that there were other Hindu kingdoms south and west of the
Jumna, occupying East Rajputana and Mālwa, as far almost as the Narbada. South
India, the great region beyond this river, scarcely comes into the picture
before the third century B.C., while the Indus plain lies outside the scope of
these records, and, as we shall see, a portion of it belonged to the Persian
Empire for a large part of the earlier period.
In
this connection it may be noted that, while hereditary kingship was the
standard institution, it had not yet become universal, for in the early period
considerable areas were ruled by tribal oligarchies, either independent, or
subject to the overlordship of a king. The Buddhist literature indicates that
in the sixth century North Bihār contained a group of ten such oligarchies,
among them Videha, which has been mentioned above; and, while this particular
region was soon to pass under the sovereignty of Magadha, similar oligarchies
persisted further west, along the Himalayas, in the Punjab, in Rājputāna, and
in Sind. Their history is obscure in detail, but in a general way it may be
said that, as time went on, oligarchy tended to give way to kingship as each
strong ruler in turn subdued the tribes on his borders and incorporated them in
his kingdom.
A
question of great interest in connection with the sources of history for these
early days is the date when the art of writing came into use. Apart from the
script found at Mohenjo-daro, and not yet deciphered, two early forms of
writing, kharoshthi and brahmi, are known in India. The former was derived from
the Aramaic alphabet which was used in the Persian Empire, and was introduced
thence in the sixth century into the Indus region, but did not spread The Purus of these records include tribes
known by different names in earlier texts, particularly the Kurus.
THE
ART OF WRITING
over the rest of the country. The brahmi script has been recognized as the source of all the Indian alphabets now in use, except of course the Arabic, which arrived much later; but its history is as yet uncertain. Some scholars have supposed that it was brought to India by Mesopotamian traders, and was used at first only in commerce2 ; more recently the view has been put forward that it is a develop- ment of the script which has been found at Mohenjo-daro; but all we know is that its adaptation to express the sounds used in Sanskrit had been completed by or before the fourth century B.C. The older view was that India did not possess the art of writing, at any rate before 800 B.C., and that the large mass of Vedic literature was both composed and trans- mitted orally. The obvious difficulties presented by this view as regards composition have been reinforced by recog- nition of the fact that writing is a very old art, and that it was already practiced in the Indus plain in the third millen- nium. We know now that it existed at that period not only in India but also in China, in Mesopotamia, and in the Mediterranean region; and when the art had once been acquired, it is very difficult to believe that it should ever be discarded, though from time to time one script might supersede another. We know, too, that the usual writing materials in India were birch-bark in the North and palm- leaves in the South, and their perishable nature would account sufficiently for the absence of any surviving manuscripts, while the practice of making inscriptions on stone or metal has not been traced back beyond the third century B.C. The history of writing in India cannot then be the subject of any dogmatic statements: we know that it was common in the Indus plain in the third millennium, but we do not yet know whether the practice continued, with a development of the script, into the historical period, or was abandoned and then reintroduced from outside.
Foot Notes
1 The only known exception is a work of the twelfth century a.D., known as the Rājataringinî, which purports to be history; but it is quite untrustworthy for the earlier period.
2 Buhler derives it from the most ancient form of the North Semitic alphabet. See his On the Origin of the Brahma Alphabet, 2nd ed. (Strass- burg, 1898).
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