The Making of India

A Political History

Ranbir Vohra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317455899
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Designed for undergraduate and graduate courses on Indian civilization and history, this text provides a sweeping look at the long and varied history of India and how this complex legacy has shaped, and is shaping, the nation's modern polity. It offers unique political-historical coverage of India from pre-history into the 21st century.

Part I

Pre-Modern India

From Pre-History to 1857

1
Traditional India

Overview and Comparison

Indian civilization is noted for its historical continuity and for the fact that elements of Indian tradition are so firmly embedded in the country’s culture that they persist in influencing contemporary social and political behavior. One of the best ways to comprehend the distinctive nature of the Indian traditional culture is to make a brief comparison between the great traditions of India and China and their historical development. The two countries have equally long and continuous civilizations, but the Chinese civilization offers a sharp contrast to that of the subcontinent—a contrast that accentuates and illuminates the uniqueness of India’s traditional culture.

The traditional ideology of the Chinese, popularly associated with Confucianism, is sociopolitical in nature, and it contributed to the making of a powerful, unified state and a self-confident, homogeneous society.¹ The vitality of the Indian tradition, on the other hand, lies in the socioreligious developments identified with ideas and practices connected with Hinduism.² India, unlike China, never developed a strong sense of political and social unity, and Indians are not a homogeneous people, but Hinduism contributed to the making of a social system that was held together by the strength of its religious philosophy and its unique caste structure. The difference between the two “unities” is that today there is no Chinese who does not consider himself as belonging to a single nation; even Chinese in Taiwan do not look upon themselves as a separate people, and most of them would welcome reunion with the motherland. In India, on the other hand, separatist tendencies are widely manifested in demands by several groups of the population for independent homelands.

Chinese philosophy is society-centered, or this-world-centered, and directs man to find fulfillment through sociopolitical activities, whereas Indian philosophy looks upon the world as fleeting, transitory, and “unreal,” and encourages human beings to seek spiritual realization of the Absolute (the Ultimate Reality, God), so that they can break their bondage to the chain of transmigration of the soul (which brings them back again and again into this world of sorrow). This liberation can only follow the annihilation of ego, which binds man to his finite individuality, enslaves him to the material world, and keeps him from achieving divine consciousness.

Urban civilization in India rose even before the Chinese Shang dynasty (c. 1600–c. 1100 BCE) and it was even more advanced than the Shang. But, unlike its Chinese counterpart, the highly urbanized Indus Valley civilization (c. 2500–c. 1700 BCE), which was first brought to light through archaeological findings in the twentieth century, did not leave a historical memory behind. The script used by the Indus Valley people has yet to be deciphered. It is only in the last few decades that archaeological findings have helped scholars to deduce that the Indus Valley civilization made an important contribution to the formation of Hinduism.

The collapse of the Indus Valley civilization synchronized with the invasion of northern India by pastoral Aryan tribes that settled in small territorial units and gradually extended their control over the Indo-Gangetic plain; much later their influence spread to south India.³ In China, too, the Zhou people, who lived beyond the pale, invaded Shang China and replaced the Shang (the Zhou dynasty lasted from c. 1100 until 256 BCE). But, in contrast to the Aryans, the Zhou accepted the higher Shang civilization, the Shang writing system (which developed into the modern Chinese script), and the Shang notion that there could be only one ruler of China. The Zhou laid the foundation for the future development of the Chinese ideal of a humanistic, unitary imperial state. The Aryans, who had their own well-developed language and culture, felt no compulsion to emulate the advanced Indus Valley civilization, to borrow its script or language, or to adopt any of its sociopolitical institutions.

From the sixth century BCE onward, China provides us with an increasing number of documents, the earliest ones written on bamboo slats and silk cloth, and it is significant that most of these documents reflect a pervasive concern for political and worldly affairs. The Chinese veneration for the written word, and their penchant for history writing (helped by the invention of paper in the Han dynasty, c. 200 BCE–c. 200 CE), has bequeathed to the world an extraordinary volume of written materials: archival records pertaining to governmental activities (e.g., taxes, legal cases), famines, court debates, imperial edicts, district gazetteers, dynastic histories, histories of important families, memoirs, and works of literary writers and philosophers.

In India, it took 1,000 years after the Aryan arrival before an urban civilization reemerged and Sanskrit, the language of the Aryans, came to be written down. Until archaeology can provide more information, our knowledge of this period in Indian history must be gleaned from the oral literature embodied in the Vedic hymns, prayers, and philosophical speculation, and from the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (which are not entirely dependable because of later accretions). Archaeological, epigraphic, and numismatic sources have begun to provide more firsthand information of life in India from the sixth century BCE, but even that evidence is extremely fragmentary, and political history, until the thirteenth century CE, has to be recreated from various indirect sources, leaving many gaps and uncertainties in our understanding of historical developments. India, however, did develop a strong oral tradition, and much of the literature from c. 1500 BCE to the Middle Ages, memorized by succeeding generations, was passed on through the centuries, though not always without interpolations. Significantly, these texts are mostly religious in nature, and though this may not prove that the Indians have “no sense of history,” it does indicate that Indians were more preoccupied with religion than with current affairs. The first historical chronicle, Rajatarangini (River of Kings), composed by the Kashmiri poet Kalhana in the twelfth century CE, concentrates primarily on the history of Kashmir. It is with the coming of the Muslims that history writing in India gained respectability.

In the middle of the first millennium BCE, when both India and China were plagued by internal wars, both also witnessed a great flowering of intellectual and philosophic thought. The thinkers in China (Confucius was one of them) tended to concern themselves with theories of kingship and the nature of government. They prepared the way for a unitary state to replace feudalism, and laid the foundations of a benevolent government and an egalitarian society. Meanwhile Indian philosophers (Buddha and Mahavira being the outstanding ones) were grappling with the problem of transmigration of souls, underplaying the importance of life in this world. Religion, not politics, came to dominate Indian social life.

For different reasons, which we need not go into here, the wars and political chaos in both countries culminated in the emergence of universal empires: the Han (c. 200 BCE–c. 200 CE) in China and the Mauryan empire (322–185 BCE) in India. However, whereas the Chinese imperial system achieved permanence and stability as it adroitly combined the use of overwhelming military power with the sociopolitically oriented Confucian ideology of a unitary, humane government, the Indian empire lacked a strong, unifying sociopolitical credo. The weak philosophic ideal of a centrally administered universal empire died with the collapse of the Mauryas. Not until the establishment of the British government was India to see an imperial system that extended over the entire subcontinent and maintained a direct structural relationship between the center and the villages. Ashoka, the greatest of the Mauryas, who had converted to Buddhism, did leave behind a legacy of religious toleration and the ideal that the duty of the king was to give charitable donations to all religious sects and to foster dharma (correct conduct based on religious values).

In spite of periodic invasions and a few eras of internal breakdown of government, the history of China from the Han to the nineteenth century saw the diffusion and strengthening of Chinese culture, which helped to produce a relatively close-knit society. In India, the rise and fall of innumerable native and foreign dynasties from the Mauryas to imperial Britain divided the country more than ever, facilitating the growth of regional culture areas with their own languages. Hinduism, which had spread throughout the subcontinent, did provide the philosophic underpinnings for common religious and social attitudes, and for the caste system, which became an integral and enduring part of the social organization in village and non-village India. Since caste itself is divisive, however, the “unity in diversity” achieved in the subcontinent is a distinctively Indian phenomenon. Even the Muslim and the British rulers could not destroy this basic structure of society.

Buddhism reached China by the end of the Han dynasty, over the next few centuries, when China was in a state of political disunity, it spread through the entire country; indeed, by the seventh century, it had become the state religion of China. Yet Buddhist ethics and values were antithetical to Confucianism’s “this world” ideology, and so, soon after the empire had been reunified by the Tang (618–907) and Confucianism had made a comeback, Buddhism not only lost its high position but came to be viewed as an alien religion that had to be suppressed. Buddhism, officially controlled and regulated, did continue as a popular religion of the masses, but the mainstream of Chinese intellectual life shifted back to Confucian scholarship. The Confucian goals of a harmonious, hierarchical society, in which man could fulfill himself only through service to society and state, were once again affirmed. The strength of revived Confucian culture can be judged from the fact that when the “barbarian” Mongols conquered China in the thirteenth century, the Yuan dynasty they established there lasted only eighty-nine years (1279–1368), collapsing under the weight of a massive Chinese rebellion.

The Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which replaced the Mongol government, revived and strengthened the sense of Chinese identity and unity to such a degree that China can be said to have, at last, become a Confucian state par excellence. The highly centralized state, working through an elaborate hierarchy of central and provincial administrative offices manned by officials recruited through the Confucian examination system, was so stable and orderly that, when the Ming fell and the government was seized by the “barbarian” Manchus (Qing dynasty: 1644–1911), the invaders assiduously adopted and promoted Ming “culturalism,” ensuring the continuity of the Confucian state.

If foreign invaders of China found it impossible to avoid being assimilated into the Chinese sociopolitical system, invaders of India, too, got absorbed into the Indian socioreligious system. The important political difference between the two countries was that in China the assimilation meant the continuity of a unified, centrally administered state, whereas in India it meant a proliferation of castes and independent kingdoms. Even the two attempts made by Hindu rulers (Guptas, 320–480; Harsha, 606–647) to repeat the Mauryan experiment resulted only in loose-knit empires limited to north India; the rulers exercised suzerainty over local dynasties but never established a Chinese-style centralized bureaucratic control system. Wars, fought primarily by military castes, led to an extension of overlord-ship but did not infringe on the entrenched socioreligious system or the lives of the population at large. The most significant development in the subcontinent, prior to the arrival of Muslims in the twelfth century, was the gradual replacement of Buddhism by Hinduism, which matured and became the primary religion of India, providing the country a unifying ethos.

Muslim invasions, and the subsequent establishment of Muslim kingdoms and the Mughal empire, introduced a radically new element to the subcontinent: Islam. A strong, militant religion, Islam was wholly opposed to everything that Hinduism represented. It posited that there was only one true God, Allah, and it demanded that true believers, who formed the casteless, egalitarian Islamic religious community, should be ready to sacrifice themselves for the advancement of their religion as soldiers of Allah. The religious laws of Islam governed all aspects of the personal, social, and political life of its followers. Yet, the conquerors, regardless of whether they were Arabs, Turks, Turko-Mongols, or Afghans, were few in number and therefore unable to attempt the conversion of the vast local population to Islam. At the height of their domination of the subcontinent, the Muslim rulers and the Muslim ruling class monopolized power at the center and the provincial capitals; although they brought large regions under their direct control, they had to keep many local Hindu chieftains as tributaries and to allow the traditional Hindu so-cioreligious system to function in the countryside and the villages. Consequently, except in the Kashmir valley and the area that today constitutes Bangladesh, there were no large-scale forcible conversions of Hindus. The Mughal period (1526–1858) was distinctly a period of religious tolerance, and even though Aurangzeb (1658–1707)—the only truly orthodox Mughal emperor—undid some of the good work of his p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Part I Pre-Modern India from Pre-History to 1857
• Part II India under the British, 1858–1947 the Establishment of a Nonsecular Polity
• Part III Independent India the Search for National Identity
• Index
• About the Author