THE STORY OF INDIA

[Guest guest]

THE STORY OF INDIA

Michael Wood, BBC Books, 2007

Excerpts :

Mahada excavations

...... Excavations at Mahada have turned up the skeletons of one

community of hunter-gatherers; they were

almost all around twenty years old, one was around thirty, none was

over forty. Their material life, though, is

depicted with brilliant vivacity on Late Middle Stone Age paintings in

the caves at Bhimbetka, which

show the communal animal hunts, the killings and propitiatory

ceremonies of these hunter-gatherers.

Of the early gods we know little, but looking at the dancing deity at

Bhimbetka with his bangles and trident,

one can't help but recall the image of the dancing Shiva seen on

pilgrim posters today.

The mother goddess too, with her full figure and 'eyes like fish',

represents an ancient and irrepressible

current in the Indian imagination, which has never been forsaken in

the face of the monotheisms of Islam

and Christianity, nor by the Westernization of modern times.

What is certain too is that the symbols of procreative power - the

stone lingam and yoni (male and female

principles) - that are found in the worship of Shiva come out of the

deep past. Not so long ago, when

archaeologists excavated a shrine near Allahabad, south of the Ganges

valley, a broken yoni stone from

around 14,000 years ago was instantly recognized by today's villagers.

These aspeccts of the indigenous culture of India are part of the

givenness of the deep past, which is

shared by all Indians, whatever their ancestry, language or religion.

Meghrgarh excavations

...... And among the most important archaeological discoveries of the

last hundred years was

the breakthrough made out in the wilds of Baluchistan.

...... The site spreads along the Bolan river, where the water comes

down steel blue and cold

across a gravel bed a couple of hundred yards wide. A century ago the

river changed course,

cutting through the site and exposing a cliff-like cross-section of

cultural deposits. The first

examination thirty years ago brought mind-boggling results. Charcoal

from one of the early

levels gave a carbon date of the sixth millennium BC, and there were

30 feet more debris

underneath it! To their amazeent, the French team realized they had a

site going back to

before 7000 BC, not just centuries, but millenia earlier than anything

yet known in the

subcontinent.

One of the biggest surprises was the scale of the place. The site at

Mehrgarh extended 1 mile

along the river, nearly 750 acres in all. One place remained where the

mud-brick walls, 100

yards long and 10 feet thick, still stood to a height of seventeen

courses. One of the precious

gifts of archaeology is that from so far back in the human past it can

reveal such intimate

details of the life lived. Seldom on Earth can one so closely inspect

the dwellings of such

distant ancestors. The packed, rectangular huoses were roofed with cut

branches, and walled

with wattle reed and mud, just as houses are still made in these hills

today.

The people of Mehrgarh made beautiful pottery patterned with geometric

lines and given a

lustrous burnished sheen like polished walnut. Thre were numerous

handmade terracotta

figurines, female figures, some holding a child.

The poeple here domesticated goats, sheep, cattle and water-buffalo,

though not the

horse. From the sixth millennium BC cattle were the cornerstone of

their economy, but the

river valley also teemed with gazelle, spotted deer, blackbuck and

wild sheep, the Indian

elephant and the rhino. Their chief crops were barley and wheat. From

the rampart of

mountains on the western horizon, tipped with snow in the spring, the

waters of the Bolan

river flowed down into the plain and on to the Indus, providing a

secure environment in which

to sustain human life; and, incredibly, human life lasted in this one

small place for over 4000

years.

The Mehrgarh excavation proved that there was settled, continuous

occupation in the

Indus region dating back to approximately 7000 BC, 4000 years before

the flowing of

India's first cities.

During this same period agricultural communities were forming across

the ancient Near East,

from Anatolia through Palestine to Iran.

Looking at it now, it is extraordinary to think that as late as the

1970s there was no evidence

of agriculture in India much before 3000 BC, underlining what a

revolution these new finds

have brought about. And this was not only a farming economy; there was

craft

specialization, including steatite cutting and long-distance trade in

turquoise and lapis.

In the fifth millennium BC builders at Mehrgarh used the long

plano-convex brick found

later in Indus cities, and cotton was already cultivated as a mainstay

of India, as it is to this

day.

These new discoveries show beyond doubt that the rise of civilization

in the Indus was an Indian phenomenon; it did not, as was previously

believed,

arised from the diffusion of cultural ideas from Iraq.

Indeed, there are recongnizable traits in today's culture going back

to the Mehrgarh world.

Mehrgarh (and twenty villages like it are now known) ws already long

lived when changes

arrived around 4500 BC, perhaps with the arrival of new migrants from

the Iranian plateau.

These were possibly, as we shall see, speakers of an early form of the

Dravidian

languages still spoken widely over southern and eastern India.

During the last period of its life (3500-2500 BC), Mehrgarh was part

of a wider cultural zone

extending into Iran, whose people used stamp seals in terracotta,

constructed a large, brickplatform

monumental complex, made figurines of the mother goddess with

pendulous breasts

and fantastical headdresses, and bore some similarity to the brilliant

culture than thriving in

Iraq.

Then, in 2500 BC, the place was abandoned to be replaced by a new

settlement, Naushero,

5 miles away, with massive brick fortifications and impressive

buildings, including what may be

a temple. This settlement would last all the way into what we call the

Harrappan age -

the age of cities and writing.

So at last archaeologists have been able to trace Indian civilization

to one of its roots.

The root went back to 7000 bC, and it was indigenous.

Until then hunter-gatherers had lived all over the subcontinent, as

they still do, though now

being squeezed out by post-Independence nation states.

In these villages of Baluchistan direct continuities can be traced

with the world of historical

times, when, in the third millennium BC, huge cities arose, with

writing, architecture and

long-distance commerce, heralding the birth of Indian civilization.

(p.20-23)

The discoveries of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro

...... The finds at Harappa, and at Mohenjo-Daro in Sind in late 1923,

took place in the same

period of eighteen months or so that saw Leonard Woolley excavate the

tombs of Ur in Iraq,

and, of course, Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Although the finds at

Harappa were less spectacular in terms of artifacts, the significance

of the dig went way

beyond either.

The discoveries here and at Mohenjo-Daro represented the beginning of

the history of the

Indian subcontinent, taking its cities back to 3000 BC - before the

Pyramids of Gaza.

Until the dig at Harappa, it had been widely believed in Europe that

civilization in India was a

foreign import, that it was the creation of the classical

civilizations of the Mediterranean, and

the Judaeo-Christian traditon of the Near East, with a little help

from their ancient

predecessors in Egypt and Babylon.

Indian Brahmin priests, however, had asserted that their own

civilization went back

thousands of years. Their tradition of the great war in the epic poem

the Mahabharata took

it back 5000 years, while their traditional genealogies, the ancient

text known as Puranas,

contained king lists that, if taken literally, would take Indian

chronology back to the Bronze

Age. In the eighteenth century some Western thinkers had been prepared

to take these ideas

at face value and to seek connections (however misguided they might

seem now) with ancient

Egypt and the Bible. But the colonial orientalist project tended in

the main to dismiss Hindu

thought as superstition and fetishism, a more 'primitive' stage of

culture, which needed to be

emancipated by the science, reason and religion of the West. No one

believed that an

indigenous Indian civilization could go back far before the classical

civilizations of the

Mediterranean..........

The joint Pakistani and US team is currently engaged in a new dig.

Rolling back the

frontiers of knowledge still further, it is now possible to trace the

links with the earlier Baluchi

sites excavated by the French in Mehrgarh, and to put the Indus cities

in the context of a

10,000-year history of civilization in the subcontinent.

Mark Kenoyer, the American on the team, ..... told me:

'Even in today's Harappa you can see the legacy of the Indus cities

reflected in the layout of

houses and settlements, and in the traditional arts and crafts, which

still use the old

techniques. We have even found little clay toys that are identical to

the ones made in the

Punjab until today. These are the living links between the people of

the Indus cities and the

later population of Pakistan and India.'

(p. 28-29)

The Indus civilization :

Roots of the idea of non-violence

...... It was bigger in area than Egypt and Mesopotamia or any other

ancient civilization. We

now know there were over 2000 major settlements, extending as far as

the Oxus river in

northern Afghanistan, some of which were big, planned cities on the

Near Eastern model. Most

of its mounds remain unexplored, including several huge ones near

Harappa..... Not only were

they vast, they were also populous. The size of the civilization is

estimated at anywhere

between 2 million and 5 million people, although no one knows for

certain.....

...... Mohenjo-Daro bears all the signs of a city that was willed into

existence by some powerful

person or groups of people; a 'founder city', like, say, Alexandria.

The streets were straight,

laid out on a north-south and east-west grid. The houses of brick on

top of stone foundations

seem to have been built to standard designs. Nearly all of them were

connected to a city-wide

drainage system, and each block had one or more water wells, but there

are no great tombas

as we find in, say, Egypt, Iraq or China, and no great palatial

buildings. Yet although there is

no material evidence for rulers, all around is indirect testimony to

some kind of powerful,

centrally directed organizing influence. Who oversaw foreign commerce

by sea and regulated

the system of weights? Who established the uniform sign system in the

script? How to

explain the apparently common religion, uniform pottery and coherent

Indus style of artefacts

over a period of 700 years, spanning nearly thirty generations?

'We have the strange situation of a complex ancient society without

the ostentations of

ideology or evidence of a focused leadership, like a king or queen,'

says Mark Kenoyer.

'There's no real model in history for a civilization like this one.'

Strangest of all for the archaeologists is that they found no evidence

of war and

conflict. In Egypt and Mesopotamia war was the great occupation of

Bronze Age rulers. In

inscriptions and images on stelas, art and sculpture, war is the

central theme. Here that is not

the case. And did the ancient Greeks not say of Indians that they

never waged aggressive war

beyond India out of their own deep-rooted cultural aversion and 'their

respect for justice' ?

Certainly they had fortified cities, but there were no images of war

on the thousands of Indus

seals, and no depiction of warfare, captive-taking or killing.

'Is it possible,' asks Mark Kenoyer, 'that in the long, gradual

evolution of over 4000 years of

local cultures before the age of cities, they worked out how to

organize their settlements,

interact with other communities, what to do with surpluses, how to

pass on knowledge and

how to resolve conflict? It's an intriguing idea that early India was

different from other

civilizations. The answer to that is that we don't know.'

Although the later history of India was often incredibly violent, it

is clear that the idea of

non-violence runs very deep in Indian thought ..... and it may not

have been new in the

fifth century B.C. [the time of Buddha and Mahavira] Jain culture in

particular has very

archaic features, and derives from the zone of the Indus civilization

in Gujarat. But if

anything like that were true, it would be unique in the violent

history of humanity.

(p. 32-33)

The collapse of Indus civilization

Towards 1800 BC, after 700 years of apparent stability, the Indus

civilization collapsed and its

cities were abandoned. Its disappearance, apparently leaving little

trace, poses another big

question: what led to its downfall? There have been many suggestions,

including, as we shall

see, outside invasion. But experts are now increasingly looking at

climate change as a chief

factor........

...... There were many causes of its decline, but modern archaeology

suggests big changes

occurred after some 700 years of stability in the Indus world.

Mohenjo-Daro was badly flooded

several times between 1900 and 1700 BC; the grand buildings on the

citadel were subdivided

into small houses and workshops; the great bath was build over.......

Although a population

remained in the Indus valley, many were leaving the area and farming

new lands on the

Jumna and Ganges rivers. It was the end of a great era, but a long,

slow decline rather

than a cataclysm.

So the world of the Indus cities collapsed, and a sub-Indus culture

emerged, mixing with new

elements. But was the fall of cities accompanied by the arrival of

newcomers, migrants or

invaders?

The question of newcomers is one of the biggest issues in Indian

history today, massively

controversial in recent years, with heavily politicized debates about

Indian identity.

The next phase of the story centres on one plain and incontrovertible

fact: the speakers of

the language spoken across northern India to Bengal, languages that

are first traceable

after the end of the cities, are closely related to the family of

languages across Eurasia known

as Indo-European.

(p.33-37)

The coming of the Aryans

....... This word (Aryan) is used by the early Sanskrit speakers, the

Rig-Vedic people, to

describe themselves; it means 'noble ones', and comes from the same

linguistic root as the

names Eire and Iran - 'the land of the Aryans'. But the whole question

of the Aryans is now

massively controversial in India.....

Many Indian scholars and polemicists have gone back to the earlier

idea that the Aryans were

indigenous to India, that the Indo-European languages spread from

India westwards into

Europe, and hence that the Indus civilization was Aryan and

Sanskritic, and the earliest and

most sacred texts of the Aryans, the hymns of the Rig-Veda, describe

the world of Mohenjo-

Daro and Harappa. It is now claimed by some that the Aryan hypothesis

is nothing but a form

of orientalism created by the British to justify their rule (even

though the theory was actually

created by Germans).

The question is very complex, but there is one thing on which all

competent linguists agree:

Jones was right - the languages [sanskrit, Latin, Greek and modern

Western languages] are

connected;

and the time depth of the 'family tree' of the Indo-European languages

precludes the idea of

India as the place of origin.

The Sanskrit language must have originated outside India.

But how far back?

And from where?

Was it brought by invaders or travellers, by elites or mass migration?

This is now one of the hottest arguments in modern India, where the

battle over history tha

began under the British in the nineteenth century is now at the heart

of politics and education

because it bears on central questions of identity. Even DNA evidence

has been brought into

play........ The answers are likely to involve a combination of

textual history, archaeology and

linguistics, maybe genetics too. But all the arguments go back to the

oldest Indian sacred text

[Rig-Veda] - a text composed in the second millennium BC, and,

incredibly, transmitted orally

from then until the Middle Ages, passed from teacher to pupil, as it

still is in the traditional

Vedic schools.

(p.37-38)

The Rig-Veda

..... It is a collection of notoriously riddling and difficult texts,

full of inscutable allusions, in very

archaic language. The majority are hymns of praise and supplication

addressed to the gods;

many sing the delight of soma, the sacred drink; there are also battle

songs that celebrate the

crushing of enemies, and verses giving thanks in response to the gifts

of chieftains (a wellknown

genre in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse poetry too).

As for the date, it's impossible to be exact, but one very important

clue was unearthed in the

1920s. In the text of a treaty from the kingdom of Mitanni in northern

Syria, datable to

around 1380 BC, the names of the rulers, to scholars' great surprise,

could be read perfectly

as Sanskrit. The treaty also lists the Vedic gods Indra, Mitra and

Varuna, in the very order

in which they appear in a formulaic phrase in the Rig-Veda. The text

also invokes the

Nasdatya or Asvins, the heavenly twins who are very important in Vedic

poems. Another

Mitanni text, on chariots and horse training, written in the

Indo-European language used by

the rulers of Mitanni, is so close to Sanskrit in its numerals and

technical terms that it is hard

to imagine the languages of the Mitanni and the Aryans had been

separated for very long.

The mysterious Mitanni rulers were probably a warrior elite who came

into northern Syria

around 1700 BC and ruled what is now the area of Kurdistan. Their

texts strongly suggest the

early Rig-Vedic hymns came from a similar time, that is, not long

before c.1400 BC.

Further clues back this up. The Rig-Veda hymns describe a bronze-using

world (iron first

appears in India around 1200 BC); their authors seem unaware of great

cities, such as

Mohenjo-Daro, and know only of ruins whose people have fled, 'driven

away by Agni, the god

of fire'.

All this combines to suggest that the bulk of [Rig-Vedic] hymns were

composed after

the Indus civilization.

This gives us a triangulation:

the composition of the hymns perhaps spreads over a few centuries,

beginning around 1500

BC, though possibly a little earlier.

(p. 40)

The home of the Aryans

...... the snow-capped ridges of the Hindu Kush, its ranges scored with

the ancient passes that

lead from central Asia down into India. It was from this region, the

Rig-Veda says, that the

Aryans spread eastwards into India from the fertile lands watered by

the Kabul river, the

Kharrum, the Gomal and the Swat. From here, as it says in a later

text, 'some went east ....

but some stayed at home in the west', among them the Gandhari tribe,

who gave their name

to the whole of what is now known as the Northwest Frontier.

Archaeology, linguistics and genetics - plus common sense - are all

consonant with the idea of

a progressive migration of early Indo-European speakers taking place

over several

centuries.

As we have seen, the world portrayed by the Rig-Vedic poets bears no

recognizable relation

to that of the Indus civilization; it has no memory of vast cities,

except as ruins.

While the early poems of the Rig-Veda are set in the Punjab and

eastern Afghanistan, the

valleys of the Kabul river, the Swat and the Upper Indus, there are

strong indications in those

verses that this was not the Aryans' original homeland. They were

aware that they had

migrated from afar: that 'Indra had carried Yadu and Turvasa across

the waters, crossing

many rivers' going through 'narrow passes'. Remnants of these waves of

migration are still

traceable by linguists: most famous are the so-called Kaffirs of the

Hindu Kush, the pagans of

Chitral, descendants of Indo-Aryan peoples who, until the nineteenth

century, spread over a

much wider area of Afghan Nuristan........

(p. 41-42)

New discoveries in central Asia

Gonur Tepe, Turkmenistan...... Under an awning Russian and Turkmen

archaeologists are

examining dramatic finds from a horse sacrifice buried around 1900BC.

Victor Sarainidi is there to greet us. He can only be described as a

living legend.......

Sarianidi already has many great discoveries to his credit: it was he

who dug up the amazing

hoard of Bactrian gold at Tilya Tepe in northern Afghanistan......

Sarianidi had mapped more

than 2000 Bronze Age sites in the area of the Murghab oasis, sites

that seem to have

suffered a dramatic collpase due to climate change in the same period

as the decline of the

Indus cities. Here, he thought, might be the biggest. Sure enough, out

in the open desert, he

found a huge defended area, plus a separate enclosed space that he

interprets as a temenos

(sacred enclosure).

The finds include not only horses and wheeled vehicles, but curved

mud-brick fire altars - like

elongated horseshoes - of the same shape and design as those still

used in Vedic rites in

India. Sunken bowls have also been found, containing traces of

ingredients used for a sacred

drink based on ephedra, a twiggy mountain plant believed to be the

base ingredient of the Rig-

Vedic soma. When infused in boiling water, ephedra produces quite a

powerful sensation of

euphoria (as I can testify).......

Sarianidi takes me over to a square pit containing a horse burial; the

foal's skeleton is still

perfect. 'They practised horse sacrifice as a special ritual - like

the Aryans in India and

other Indo-European peoples, even as far as the ancient Irish.'

Vedic culture

There is no evidence of which people lived on this site: they did not

use writing, but the

material culture has too many affinities with the texts of the ancient

Indo-Iranians and

Indo-Aryans not to draw parallels. It is hard to look at the finds -

horse burials, spoked

chariot wheels, the ephedra-based sacred drink, the fire altars - and

not think of the

Vedic culture.

Sarinidi thinks he may have found the ancestor of the early Iranian

branch of the Indo-

European migration into Iran and the subcontinent. But he has also

found material links with

northern Mesopotamia: he believes that the people who settled Gonur

Tepe had previously

had contact with the cultural zone of Mesopotamia, and were part of

the movement that

left the Indo-European-speaking dynasty of the Mitanni in northern

Syria around the fifteenth

century BC.

The big picture, then, is that the ancestors of Aryans were part of a

huge language group

who spread out from the area between the Caspian and the Aral seas

4000 years ago, and

whose language lies at the root of modern European languages,

including English, Welsh,

Gaelic, Latin and Greek, but also Persian and the main modern north

Indian languages. They

were people with new technology (horse-drawn chariots) and a religion

that was, in a broad

sense, 'Vedic'.

Then, in the second millennium BC, the 'Aryans' were driven by climate

change and

population pressure to move south in several waves into Iran and India

- a momentous event

for India and the world.

...... Sarianidi sums it up like this:

'They came into the oasis towards 2000 BC and left in 1800 BC or a

little later when the

Murghab delta dried up.'

So they were caught up in the same big climate change that affected

the Indus civilization.

From here they followed the water, moving south towards Herat and east

towards the Oxus,

from where the hindu Kush rises across the plain of northern

Afghanistan on the southern

horizon. From the Oxus it is only 200 miles to the Khyber, and the

first sight of the plains of

India. These migrations will have involved many such groups, and they

may have taken place

over centuries, a slow leakage across the hills of Afghanistan,

fighting along the way to carve

kingdoms for themselves in the rich plains of northern India.

(p.43-45)

...... Despite the massive academic controversy over these matters in

India, the evidence of

the Rig-Veda shows that the newcomers saw themselves as conquerors,

modelled on

Indra himself. Entire tribes or groups of tribes entered the

subcontinent, conquering

whoever stood in their way.

Later verses in the Rig-Veda tell something of the battles in northern

India as the Aryans

expanded their lands eastwards, sometimes fighting against natives

with strange, non-Aryan

names, sometimes allied to indigenous chiefs, sometimes fighting each

other. In places they

coexisted with the local powers: one verse says that the forts of one

enemy of the Aryans,

a king called Sambara, were stormed only 'in the fortieth year'.

These all sound like real historical events recorded in the bards' verses.

As they moved east, gaining more land, the mountains always 'on the

left' (still the Sanskritic

term for 'north'), the conquest of the sub-Harappan peoples of the

Punjab is a continuing

theme in the Rig-Veda:

'You put down 50,000 blacks. You beat thin their forts like a

threadbare garment.'

Indra himself 'destroyed the ninety-nine forts of Sambara ... Indra

destroyed a hundred stone

forts ... and put to sleep 30,000 Dasas'.

These figures need not be taken any more seriously than those for the

Greek and Trojan heros

in Homer, but the drift is clear. This was not a small-scale trickle;

nor was it a more or less

peaceful migration.

...... Thus they came to control access to the richest lands in India,

using horses, chariots and

their superior weaponry (made of iron) to spread their powers over the

indigenous peoples,

the post-Harappan population and the older stratum, many of whom had

lived in the adjacent

forests since the Stone Age.....

(p. 45-46)

Madurai: the first great civilization of the south

...... Marco Polo spent two months here in 1273, and he found it 'the

most noble and splendid

province in the world'. Approaching Madurai in the early morning

before the onset of the heat,

you can see why. The sky is clear and the air fresh, and apart from a

gentl haze over the city,

you can see all the way to the giant brown rock of Tirupparankunram,

the home of the god

Murugan, whose hill shrine there has been celebrated in Tamil poetry

and song since the

Roman period.....

At the hear of the city is the great temple with its huge gate towers

and labyrinthine corridors.

In my experience, it's a building hard to beat anywhere in the world

for sheer atmosphere.

It's a Shiva temple, but is actually dedicated to Shiva's wife, who is

still regarded as the real

patron of the city. Here she is called Minakshi, 'the fish-eyed

goddess', a very archaic

name, which probably goes back deep into the cultural and linguistic

prehistory of the south.

The goddess of the city is mentioned in Tamil poetry as far back as

the Roman period, but her

name and attributes may point to a more distant connection with the

culture of the Bronze Age

and before.

The culture here grew over many centuries, and to sketch its backgound

we need to go back

for a moment to the aftermath of the Indus cities, the age of the

Rig-Veda in the north. Here

in the south the first recognizable culture begins in the Pandyan

lands on the coast, 50 miles

south of Madurai at the mouth of the Tambrapani river.

Adichanallur excavations

Excavations here at Adhichanallur over a century ago found a large,

megalithic settlement

dating back before 1000 BC, with clear links to later Tamil culture.

Particularly striking was

evidence for the worship of a male god, whose emblems were a

leaf-bladed lance and a

peacock - very like the Tamils' favourite god today, Murugan, the 'red

one', the lord of the

hills. There were even signs of devotees piercing their jaws with

mouth-locks, a custom still

practised.

The excavation was reopened in 2005 with immediate and fascinating

results. Archaeologists

uncovered a mud-brick fortification wall faced with stone, a potters'

quarter, a smithy, a place

for bead manufacture, and numerous high-status burials in a huge

burial ground extending

over some 150 acres. Among the most remarkable of the new finds were

pieces of a burial

urn beautifully appliqued with raised motifs depicting a horned deer

with raised tail, a

crocodile, a crane sitting on a paddy stalk, a sheaf of standing

paddy, and the tall, slender

figure of a woman with palms spread out - perhaps the earliest

examples of art in the south

yet known.

The finds at Adichanallur strongly suggest that some living Tamil

traditions, such as devotion

to Murugan, are very archaic indeed: so too, no doubt, is the

bull-running festival, which draws

2 million people every year to Madurai and is mentioned in early Tamil

poetry.

The sensational find in 2006 of a votive stone axe head bearing four

signs in the Indus script,

unearthed on the Cavery river near the ancient town of Mayavaram, has

added to these

tantilizing hints. Deposited in the Iron Age, but probably an older

hierloom, how it got there is

a moot point. Did it come after the Indus age? Was it brought by

migrants or by trade? Was

the stone itself quarried in the north or the south? The find might

even point to the ancient

links with the northwest claimed in the oral traditions of some

surviving clans and castes in

the deep south, one of which (close to Adichanallur) in a poem of the

Roman period is credited

with an ancestry going back forty-eight generations!

(p. 107-110)

Western contacts with early Tamil kingdoms

The Pandyan kingdom was know was known to the Greeks from the first

century BC, and

Madurai later appears on Ptolemy's world map. In return, Greeks appear

in Tamil peoms - as

royal mercenaries living in some sort of colony, and walking around

the streets gawking like

tourists: 'dumb mlechhas' (foreigners). There are even fascinating

references to Graeco-

Roman sculptors working here, a picture coloured by hoards of Roman

coins picked up in the

city and across Tamil Nadu - further proof of commercial links with

the Roman world, which we

saw in Muziris. In 21 BC, during the reign of Augustus, a Pandyan

embassy went from

Madurai all the way by sea to Rome.

The cultural per-eminence of Madurai dates from this period. Tradition

holds tht the city was

the centre of the sangam, or academy, of Tamil poets. In Tamil

literature there are, in

fact, legends of several still earlier, antediluvian sangams, but the

one in the Roman

period is real enough.

Already in the second century BC this poetic tradition was the subject

of linguistic analysis: the

Tolkappiyam, the earliest Tamil treatise on grammar and poetics,

presupposes older and now

lost poetry......

(p. 111-112)

Throwing light on a lost classical civilization

Tamil literature is as rich as any in western Europe - only Greek and

Latin are older. However,

the Tamil literature of the late Roman and early medieval periods was

largely lost until the

nineteenth century, and some that was written by Jains and Buddhists

was lost for good. As

print took over, Western forms of education came to the fore and their

European Christian

canons of literary value deemed the old palm-leaf manuscripts to be no

longer of worth, so

they were destroyed.

In the mid-nineteenth century the task of recovering those lost

writings began when the

scholar Swaminath Aiyar, a young student at the time, met a district

magistrate who

revealed that manuscripts of the ancient classics still survived. As

Aiyar describes in his great

autobiography (1941), over the next few decades he laboriously

criss-crossed the south by

train and bullock cart, gathering up ancient palm-leaf manuscripts

before they were thrown out

or burnt as rubbish. To his utter amazement, as he delved around

temple towns such as

Kumbakonum, he even stumbled upon living chains of tradition, such as

the annual

readings of ancient poems by the Tamil Jains, a tradition of

expounding that I was astounded

to discover even now (just) survives in some small Jain communities in

rural Tamil Nadu.

...........

.......The tale (of Silapaddikaram) moves between Madurai and the

now-vanished city of

Kaveripatnam, whose temples and 'tall mansions' stood at the mouth of

the Cavery river

before they were washed away by the sea or covered in dunes. .......

Combine the Tamil poems with the Greek and Roman gazetteers, contracts

and geographies,

and together they tell us a big story about India opening up to the world.

But the Periplus [Periplus of the Erythruaean Sea, a Greek merchant's

guide to the India

trade from the 70s or 80s of the first century AD] also offers

fascinating clues to the very

beginning of Indian commerce with China. According to the Periplus, it

was the Tamils who

ran the trade up the east coast of India, with big, sea-going

catamarans made of split

logs..... The port of the Ganges mentioned by the Greek navigator,

where goods were

transported by land towads China, we now know from recent excavations

was Tamluk, which

stood, and still stands, on a tributary of the Hooghly river 30 miles

south of Calcutta in West

Bengal.

(p. 113-115)

Trade, seafaring & ship-building

Night is falling off the shore of Cranganore, close enough to the

Kerala coast to waft the fresh

smell of palm forests after rain. Our boat is a 120-foot ocean-going

uru, the same size as the

Roman ships that plied between the Red Sea and India 2000 years ago.

Ours is a boat of

Cuddalore, with a Tamil-speaking crew, trading between the Andamans,

Sikkal in Gujarat and

the Gulf, carrying a cargo of cement, pepper and spices. After four

months at sea the crew are

looking forward to the thrills of the old port of Dubai .....

Trade is one of the key factors in civilization. By allowing

civilizations to make contact, to

share and test ideas, trade also allows them to grow. Our image of

India, influenced by

colonial writing and historiography, has so often been of a

civilization stopped in time, stuck in

the past, but in fact Indian civilization has always grown and changed

through dialogue with

other civilizations. The tidal waves of Indian history have produced

great native dynasties, but

also great foreign rulers, and receptivity to outside ideas has always

been part of the Indian

experience. Many of the greatest developments in the story of India

have been shaped by

dialogue with other civilizations, which began back in the Harappan

age, when Indian ships

traded with the Gulf. Contacts with the Persian world had grown

intensive from 500 BC, but it

was only in the last centuries BC that regular sea routes opened up

between the Mediterranean

and peninsular India. The opening of the Spice Route to the

Mediterranean spurred contacts

between Rome and the kingdoms of southern India, while the development

of the Silk Route

established contacts between China, Europe and India. ......

Our boat is heading up to Gujarat via the old port of Mumbai. Indians

have sailed this coast

up to the Gulf since at least the third millennium BC. ....

They still use the old technology too. The construction yards at

Beypore near Calicut almost

died in the 1980s, when their manpower and skills passed to the Gulf,

where the money lay.

But the old shipbuilding arts have been rekindled in recent years -

for good economic reasons.

The old boats quite simply are still good value. The builder's boast

is that an owner will make

his or her money back in four years, when the lifespan of a good boat

is over forty. ......

The mestiry (master builder) here, though, is a Hindu: named Gokuldas,

he is only in his

thirties, and his father and ancestors were also boat carpenters

'since 500 years'. ....

'We use no plans, even for boats this size,' says Gokuldas. 'There is

a lot of secret calculatios

and mathematics involved in the process of building an uru. All the

secrets are passed on

from father to son. That's how we do it with no technical drawing -

how we make such big

ships to full perfection. The curve of the ship and the overall shape

and structure come from

working out in the mind.'

(p. 99-101)

 

Also see http://www.pbs.org/thestoryofindia/