A NATURE-GODDESS. Sculpted in the 11th or 12th Century A. D., embodies the spirit of a tree. Throughout the long history of civilization in India, sacred trees—as well as certain rivers, mountains, plants and animals—were worshiped as aspects of a universe that was considered inherently divine.
Historic India is not a country. It is a culture, one of the oldest and most consistent on earth. That culture has been a contemporary to almost all civilizations. It existed, in nascent form, when the sun rose on Egypt's first kingdom in the Fourth Millennium B. C. Well developed, it was present when the sun sparkled on classical Greece in the Fifth Century B. C. and set on the British Empire in this century. The culture consists predominantly of a religion and a mode of living called Hinduism.
Hinduism took root, grew and reached a confident maturity in the vast period this book describes—the time between the Third Millennium B. C. and the 17th Century A. D. Toward the end of this long period, it faced its first serious cultural challenge when Muslims, men of an equally mature way of life, ruled most of the land of India. Yet through all of historic India, the great power of Hindu culture has been manifest.
Across the world and through the centuries India has made her greatness known. The spirit of Hinduism first intrigued the West centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, and it has been a source of wonder and speculation for our philosophers and poets ever since. Ancient Greeks and Romans admired the richness and the royal perquisites of two of the great Indian empires (the. Mauryan of the Third Century B. C. and the Gupta of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries A. D.). Buddhism, which originated in India in the Sixth Century B. C., went with missionaries to the ancient courts of China and Japan, where it reached its most elaborate of several varying forms. From the Second to the Ninth Century A. D., Hinduism was the major civilizing force throughout Southeast Asia.
Despite these triumphs, historic India has often puzzled or frustrated Western observers. Again and again, such observers have reported their sense of a vast cultural and psychological distance between India and the West. Here is an admonition from Alberuni, an 11th Century Muslim scholar who dedicated 13 years to studying India.
The reader must always bear in mind that the Hindus entirely differ from us in every respect. . . . They differ from us in every
Thing which other nations have in common. . . . They totally differ from us in religion. ... In all manners and usages they differ from us to such a degree as to frighten their children with us.
Many Westerners tend to criticize India's differences as shortcomings. Ignoring the integrity and historical validity of Indian culture. Westerners have criticized the Hindu attitude toward progress, which Hindus regard as impossible beyond predetermined limits; or the Indian insistence that individual men must follow hereditary occupations set down and perpetuated by the caste system; or India's inability, except on rare occasions, to rise above the political level of petty warring states.
Such attitudes and failures may indeed seem puzzling, even reprehensible, in light of the Western legacy from Judea and Greece. In fact, however, they stem from India's own legacy and do not represent waywardness or mystery so much as they represent profound differences between Indian and Western beliefs. Truly basic beliefs are rarely discussed among us; many of them lie so deep as to be subconscious or inarticulate. But certain basic beliefs or concepts reflect vast differences between India and the West.
For example, the Western concept of time is different from the Indian. Westerners view time as a steady, straight progression. We "know" that there is past, present and future, and we "know" that when a moment is gone, it is gone forever. An event occurring now is fully believed to be in some respect different from similar events of the past and events of the future. Hindus "know" exactly the opposite. For them, everything that happens has happened before and will happen again; anything that has not happened will never happen. Hindus view time as a revolving circle, without beginning and without end, and they hold that everything in the universe, including
A JAUNTY DANCING GIRL, riaked except for her necklace and bangles, was cast in bronze in the Indus Valley n the Second Millennium B. C. The figure's Negroid features are thought to be characteristic of some of the earliest inhabitants in the area.
The gods or God, is bound together within the constantly repeated cycle of time.
Most Westerners adhere to a concept of absolute truth: a fact is either true or false, and what is true for one man is true for all. Hindus believe that there are many kinds of truth, truths that are different for every age, every occupation, every class of men. Indeed, one of Hinduism's objections to Judaism, Christianity and Islam is that they preach one truth for all men.
Like many Westerners, Hindus believe in the idea that every good act reaps a good result and every evil act an evil one—but Hinduism goes far beyond the West in its belief. The Hindu law of ethical cause and effect, called karma, is considered neither man-made nor god-made; for Hindus, it is a natural law, as impersonal, impartial and inexorable as the law of gravity.
Though many, perhaps most. Westerners believe in an afterlife, they also believe that a man leads only one life here on earth. Hindus, on the other hand, believe firmly in the idea of rebirth, or reincarnation. Transmigrating from one body to the next, a Hindu soul gathers the good or evil fruits of the acts of previous lifetimes.
Indians also are deeply committed to a concept called dharma, which has no direct counterpart in the West. Students of Hinduism have rendered the term as "moral code," and "sacred obligation," but the most accurate English equivalent is perhaps "duty," for dharma is the dutiful way of life. For a religious Westerner, a righteous life may be either its own reward or an assurance of a happy afterlife. For a Hindu, it is intricately bound up with, other Hindu concepts. Like Hindu truths, dharmas are different for different people, and they influence karma and reincarnation. By following his dharma correctly in each life, a man affects his karma so that he may be reborn into better lives during the repeated cycles of time.
What is so unique about historic India is not one or another of these basic beliefs, but the entire fabric of Hinduism—of which these concepts are the vital strands. Taken together, the principles are guidelines for living, as well as tenets of a religious faith. And they are all the more difficult for Westerners to comprehend because they are inseparably intertwined with a distinctive social arrangement: the caste system. Together these conceptual and social strands constitute the very warp and woof of Hinduism.
Caste is the living enactment of the Hindu ideas of difference—different truths, different lives through rebirth, different karmas and dharmas. In the Hindu caste system, the unit of society has not been the individual, but the group he belonged to. All people were divided into hereditary groups that were socially isolated from the others by elaborate regulations and restrictions and by hierarchal position. Status was and is intrinsic to Hinduism; everything Hindu has a "higher" or '"lower" standing, and every caste has a social standing superior or inferior to that of every other caste.
The structure of caste and the basic ideas of Hindu philosophy have contributed to almost every accomplishment—and failure—of historic India. In turn, that unique combination of social structure and philosophical ideas was the result of contributions from a bewildering variety of sources. Just as historic Europe developed its character through invasions of many peoples and diverse philosophies, so India owes its culture to onslaughts of new people whose ideas made them the unwitting progenitors of Hinduism.
Yet the molding of Indian civilization followed a pattern quite different from that of the West. In Europe during the Age of Barbarians (400 to 1050 A. D.), small groups either fought each other to a finish or merged into larger groups. The Celts of Britain, for example, were driven out of their homeland by invading Germanic peoples, who then established an Anglo-Saxon culture in Britain; the Anglo-Saxons were conquered by the Normans, and the result was England and an English people. It was impossible for European tribes remaining within the same territory to coexist; they invariably merged with one another. But in India—perhaps because an enormous number of dissimilar peoples had to find a way to live together-separate coexistence, not merger, became the clue to survival.
The land that has accepted such a great variety of unlike immigrants is huge—a peninsula so large that it is often called a subcontinent—but few lands have had to reconcile so many different racial strains, so many unlike social patterns and such a sheer multitude of people. By the end of the Fourth Century B. C. India's population had already reached 100 million. Many of these people were descendants of invaders; and in later centuries, other invaders came to India. Quickly or slowly, all the invaders and all their descendants became parts of the mosaic of historic India.
On first glance it may not be immediately apparent how new arrivals reached the interior of India. The Indian peninsula is nearly sealed off from the rest of the world by the towering Himalayas and the Hindu Kush mountain range, which together form the northern boundary of India—a boundary that is virtually a great wall as much as 150 miles thick, 2,000 miles long and 25,000 feet (or nearly five miles) high. But the mountains are not so impassable as their awesome girth suggests. Melting snows course down them to form rivers; the rivers have carved out a series of passes—some of which are as spectacular as the mountains themselves—and these passes have allowed invading tribes free entrance from the northwest since the start of India's history.
The migrants came down through the mountain passes, leaving behind them the endless string of peaks and the chasmlike valleys of the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas. Emerging from some twisting gorge, such as the 34-mile-long Khyber Pass, they first encountered the hilly region of the Punjab. Traveling southeast, they found the land leveling out. For the first time in their lives, perhaps, they saw unbroken horizons in all directions. At this point, the migrants would be in the fertile Indo-Gangetic plain, which sweeps across the subcontinent in a great arc that, like the mountains that lie to the north, measures 2,000 miles from west to east and 150 to 200 miles from north to south.
And for the first time, such migrants discovered the Indian sun, a blazing fury. They could soon shed their shaggy clothes of animal skins and their warm leg-wrappings, following the lead of people already settled in this climate, and learn to wear the dhoti, a cotton cloth swathed around the waist. During the few months of the winter when the weather turned cool, they added a warm shawl about the head and shoulders.
Once in the Indo-Gangetic plain, some migrants went southwestward along the Indus River and found themselves in the region called the Sind—a cul-de-sac that is cut off from India's heartland by the huge Thar Desert. Luckier ones moved southeastward, on the lush path that lies between the rambling Ganges River and the foothills of the Himalayas. Continuing southeastward, they would arrive at the Bay of Bengal, where the Ganges delta was eventually to provide the great natural ocean harbor of Calcutta.
Traveling south from the plain by an alternate route, some migrants followed the Chambal River to enter a different kind of land. They would be on the Deccan plateau, a harsh, infertile grassland sloping west to east and broken by scrub and clumps of trees. East and west, at the borders of
HISTORIC ROUTES, some followed for thousands of years, led waves of newcomers into India. By land, most immigrants entered through the mountain passes in the northwest and then fanned out. By water, foreigners approached India across the Arabian Sea and ranged along both the east and west coasts.
The Deccan, were more mountain ranges, the Ghats—so-called for the passes (ghats) that penetrate them—and narrow coastal plains. There the peninsula is shaped like an arrowhead, pointing south to the sea; its edges consist of tropical beaches stretching back into lush, green foliage.
The migrants who ventured south of the fertile Indo-Gangetic plain, whether just onto the high plateau or all the way to the coast, found themselves in a hostile world. This land was difficult to invade or control. Just getting into it was no easy task: a junglelike river valley of the Narmada, and a high escarpment, the Vindhya Mountains, cut the Deccan off from the Indo-Gangetic plain. Once the invaders reached the plateau, they faced new difficulties. The monsoon winds—cool and dry in the winter, drenching in the summer, always uncertain in the time of their coming—made either farming or herding a risky business. And only some straggling migrants continued southward through the Deccan, for innumerable rivers flowed from west to east across the land—rivers just wide enough to make the prospect of crossing look formidable.
Naturally enough, most of the people who entered India at the northwest mountain passes stopped north of the Deccan. For the few who penetrated the plateau and continued still farther, a completely new country unfolded. South of the Deccan the land slopes downward to the sea, forming a low, temperate coastal plain. This is today the land of the dark-skinned Dravidian people, whose ancestors were among the earliest migrants to India, and whose physical characteristics and social customs still prevail. Migrants from the north who later came to southern India never outnumbered or overwhelmed the Dravidian population. But they share with the Dravidians—and with all Hindus today—a reverence for the last possible spot that migrants could reach on the
Subcontinent: the southern tip of the great Indian landmass, now called Cape Comorin, where the white sand of the Arabian Sea, the black sand of the Bay of Bengal and the red sand of the Indian Ocean meet.
Whoever the first Dravidian people may have been, however and whenever they reached southern India, they must have encountered other peoples already settled on the land. For there is evidence that, before the dawn of history, the vast and segmented territories of the south supported Stone Age cave dwellers who are thought to have been Negroid and who left the first archeological traces. These early inhabitants of India had cultural characteristics at which we can only guess, but one characteristic we may assume: they were fiercely protective of their way of life and determined to preserve it against the competing life-patterns of those who entered their territory. Somehow, against all the odds, pockets of primitive peoples still exist in India, clinging to their age-old ways. Some of these groups have matrilinear societies ruled entirely by women—a structure their forebears no doubt observed as well. But they live side by side with patrilinear societies, where a man is head of the family and a male chief heads the social unit. This and other features of society were brought by later migrants.
By 1500 B. C. a long series of invasions had got under way. A main source of new peoples was Central Asia, which, as one historian puts it, was periodically "in ferment, bubbling with activity like some human volcano. . . throwing off streams of human lava." But for India, always so strangely vulnerable to invasion, migrating peoples could come from anywhere and everywhere. From the north and from the west, Indo-Europeans, Persians, Greeks, Scythians, Huns, Arabs, Turks, Mongols and uncountable others flowed in. For thousands and thousands of years, migrants or
A PASSAGE TO INDIA for migrants and conquerors was afforded by mountain passes between the 16,000-foot peaks of the Hindu Kush, near the border of modern Afghanistan. This 80-mile-long gorge, still used by wandering goatherds, was part of the route taken by Alexander the Great in 329 B. C.
Marauders moved in through the northwest passes, wandered to the fertile plains and were trapped, so to speak. Once on the peninsula, they might settle or they might be restless, but they would not leave. Their descendants stayed in India forever.
If most of these peoples had been even somewhat related—or if the influx had ever stopped— India today might be a region where one religion or one life-style predominated. Similar peoples would have homogenized into a unified population and one mainspring idea could have governed them all. But always pouring in were completely different kinds of people at completely different levels of culture. There were black and white and yellow races. There were nomads, traders and armies. There were large, refined societies with poets and troubadours, and there were tiny clans of still primitive root-grubbers. Through Hinduism, India found room for them all.
Hinduism did not absorb these people; it enfolded them. Any group with special customs could be dropped into India and, by living apart, live amicably side by side with those already there. The new group then became a caste of its own. Occasionally social reformers who strove to weaken or destroy the caste system arose—only to discover that their splinter groups fell into the caste pattern; as anticaste groups, they formed new castes in the old society.
India's characteristic refusal to act as a sort of social blending-machine has always seemed peculiar to most non-Indians; to many, her separation of groups and isolation of people by caste has seemed peculiarly inhuman. But the caste system may have produced the only reasonable way for India to make an orderly process of growth. While inherently different groups could live their intimate lives distinctively and separately from the others, they could all at the same time contribute their work to the commonweal.
From the rich and wildly heterogeneous mixture of peoples that is India burst repeated explosions of culture. Hindu art, literature and science made truly golden ages of the Mauryan Empire in the Third Century B. C. and the Gupta Empire in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries A. D. Some 1,200 years later, Muslim tradition—which was influenced but never overwhelmed by Hinduism—created yet another period of glory in the Mughal Empire.
In the Mauryan period the vitality of Indian life is reflected in achievements in stone sculpture, an art as old as the foundations of Hinduism itself. Centuries later, during the Gupta period, the great religious sculpture of India, both Buddhist and Hindu, gave witness to Hinduism at its height. Gupta poetry and drama, written in India's classic Sanskrit language, are considered peers of the finest Western literature, and it was Gupta science that gave the world the concept of zero, and the so-called Arabic numerals.
In the time of the Mughal Empire, India displayed an ability to combine its Hindu culture, which was by then ancient, with that of the Muslims, who for eight centuries had been moving into the subcontinent. The Mughal Age glittered with exquisite Indo-Islamic painting, pulsated with Indo-Islamic music and, perhaps most memorably, endowed future generations with masterpieces of Indo-Islamic architecture, the most celebrated of which is the Taj Mahal, with its glorious dome, marble facades and jeweled inlays.
Cultural splendor is not the only product of India's diversity and separateness: political disunity has also been a constant and plaguing result. Hundreds of tiny states—kingdoms, principalities, the holdings of petty nobles—have proliferated to a degree that makes the fragmented Europe of medieval times seem positively monolithic.
This diversity has made India one of the most resilient of lands. Though there have been enough dynastic wars, palace revolts and popular uprisings in historic India to fill a library of history books, no recorded wars ever turned the whole land against itself. India's flexible character has always contrasted with the brittleness characteristic of Europe: at different times powerful kingdoms have dominated Europe and presented a certain brilliant face to the world; such kingdoms have shattered under the impact of new political ideas and popular tensions. But India is not brittle politically; history has effected few disruptions in its political pattern of numerous small states—a pattern that has prevailed for over 3,000 years.
Historic India is not brittle philosophically either. Indeed, Hinduism's strength is its resiliency. It bends to fulfill the varying needs of the land's dissimilar peoples. For millennia traders and travelers—and invaders—have provided almost continuous contact between India and the world outside, and as a result India's intellectuals have been exposed to the philosophies of other cultures in many eras. Yet, through the ages, Indians who could brilliantly analyze other attitudes adhered to their own point of view.
Hinduism seems to have given the people of India extraordinarily satisfactory answers to questions that have concerned men since they began to think: What is man, what is nature, what is God? Why does man live? How should he best live with himself, with other men, with the mysteries of nature and the cosmos?
These are hardly questions that occupy the daily thought of people in any country, but they are questions whose answers help to form the culture of the country and affect the least sophisticated person in it. India's indigenous answers to questions about the universe and humanity have permitted millions of people to come to terms with existence and to understand each other in a manner that is one of the world's greatest wonders.
World History
