India

The Definitive History

D. R. SarDesai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429979507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book deals with the sweep of traditional Indian history as well as with the post-independence events, judicially balancing narrative and analysis in the conceptual framework of postcolonial and postmodernist approaches, covering the process of change in India through the centuries.

1

Land and the Human Fabric

The history of India is the story of a civilization whose past is well incorporated into its present. No major civilization in the world, with the possible exception of China, has demonstrated a greater continuity from ancient to contemporary times than India. Other major riverine civilizations such as Egypt on the banks of the Nile and the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Chaldean on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates were radically altered in terms of their human fabric and cultural content over the millennia. The present-day people in those riverine civilizations and their ways of life are, in so many respects, so different from their ancient past. By contrast, the people of the Indian subcontinent, in its different segments and spaces, have cultural elements drawn all the way from the Neolithic period to the present.

Some statistical indicators may be relevant to appreciate the importance of the study of India for the modern world. Some of its distinctions are laudable, whereas others are clearly of dubious value. India is the second most populated country in the world, behind China, with an estimated population in 2006 of 1.3 billion, making Indians between onefifth and one-sixth of the human race. Its economy, the second fastest growing in the world, is also the fourth largest. India constitutes the largest democracy and has one of the freest presses in the world. Indians are proud that their country is a member of the “nuclear club,” has a space program, and has the third largest scientific human-resources pool in the world.

India covers an area of roughly 1.2 million square miles (about one-third the area of the United States, with more than four times its population), about 2,008 miles from north to south and about 1,833 miles from west to east at its widest points, with a land frontier of 9,425 miles and a coastline of 3,535 miles.¹ Located in the Northern Hemisphere and extending between latitudes 8 and 37 degrees north and longitudes 61 and 97 degrees east, the country has a single time zone based on the longitude of 87.5 passing through Allahabad (Prayag). The single time zone is annoying to at least one group in India, the cricket lovers (which includes almost everyone), for the visibility is reduced early in the day in the eastern parts of the country, notably Calcutta (Kolkata), where so many test matches are played. Apart from the mainland, India includes numerous islands, the largest of which are the Lakshadweep in the Indian Ocean and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. It has land borders with six countries: Bangladesh (2,533 miles), China (2,122 miles), Pakistan (1,820 miles), Nepal (1,056 miles), Myanmar (914 miles), and Bhutan (378 miles).

Geography

Does the lay of the land have an influence on the historical development of its people? In the nineteenth century, two major scholars agreed with the proposition but not on the details. Carl Ritter (1779–1859), a German geographer, held that the form and shape of continents are responsible for their general cultural growth. Diversified geographical conditions and an irregular coastline are ideal for an exuberant culture, in his view. Likewise, the more compact and homogenous a continent, the more backward its inhabitants, breeding stagnation. He had Europe and the Indian subcontinent, respectively, as contrasting entities in mind. On the other hand, Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862), an English historian, emphasized two factors: those that stimulate the imagination and those that sharpen understanding. As an example of the first category, he pointed to India, where the works of nature—be they the perpetually snowcapped mountains or mighty rivers, tropical forests or long coastline, torrential rains or water-starved deserts—are overawing enough to make human beings feel insignificant. Human beings in such environments tend to become pessimists and fatalists, he said, denying all value to life and repudiating the ability of man to understand and control the world.

The Indian Constitution recognizes two names for the country, both of which have geographical significance: India and Bharat. The latter is a short form for Bharatvarsha, the land of Bharata, a famous king in ancient India. The subcontinent was regarded in Bharata’s time as part of a larger unit called Jambudwipa, innermost of the seven concentric island-continents into which the earth as conceived by Hindu cosmographers was divided. (The Indian subcontinent, shaped like an irregular quadrilateral, appeared to some ancient Indian writers in Sanskrit as a “many-sided diamond.”) The name India comes from the Greek Indos, which itself is derived from the river Indus, whose ancient name was Sindhu; the land watered by Indus and its tributaries was called Saptasindhava (Hapta Hindu in Greek), meaning “the seven Sindhus.”

Four Main Divisions

The subcontinent, the area of historical development under our consideration, has four major geographical divisions, the first of which is the Himalayan and sub-Himalayan region. Looking at a map, South Asia, specifically the Indian subcontinent, appears separated from the rest of Asia. Geographers tell us that the subcontinent was at one time a mass of land attached to the southeastern part of the African continent or a loose entity in the Indian Ocean until it became attached to the Asian geographical plate. In a mountain-building movement, beginning violently about 70 million years ago, sediments and basement rocks rose to dramatic heights, in the process forming one of the youngest major mountain systems in the world: the Hindu Kush Range in the west; the Arakan Yoma in the east; and the highest, perpetually snowcapped mountains in the world, the Himalayas (Hima for snow and alaya for abode or home) in the north. Among the Himalayas’ peaks is Mount Everest, the highest in the world at roughly 29,000 feet. The mountain ranges stretch from the Baluchistan-Iran border in the west, northward toward Tibet, and eastward all the way to Myanmar, a distance of more than 4,000 miles. The mountains protect the subcontinent from the cold winds of China and central Asia and are the birthplace of its principal rivers—the Indus, Ganges (Ganga), Jumna (Yamuna), and Brahmaputra— which bring rich alluvial soil to the plains below. The mountains fence the subcontinent but do not protect it from external enemies, some of whom have used the major passes as pathways for invasion and for trade. Some of the major passes include the Khyber, Khurram, Gumal, Bolan (near Quetta in Baluchistan), and Jelep La and Nathu La through the Chumbi and the Satlej valleys.

The second major division may be designated the great northern plains, from the Arabian Sea in Sind to the Bay of Bengal and between the Himalayas and the Vindhyas. Of these plains, the Indus valley (mostly in today’s Pakistan) and the Punjab (Punch for five, aab for water) would be barren but for the mighty river Indus and its five main tributaries. The Indian part of the plains here covers the Indian Punjab and Haryana. The Ganges and the Jumna form the Doab (which means “land between two rivers”), an important and fertile part of the great northern plains. Thanks to the moderate rainfall and perennial river water supply, agriculture flourishes and presently supports a population of more than 300 million. The two rivers meet at Allahabad and flow as one river, the Ganges, all the way to Bengal, where it meets the Brahmaputra River and forms a combined delta. The region is at once notorious for the disasters caused by the annual flooding occasioned by heavy monsoons as well as for the delta’s very fertile soil, annually replenished by two rivers bringing down rich alluvium. The Indus-Ganges plain has a very low, almost imperceptible, gradient of about six inches per mile, making the vast area cultivable and easy for transportation.

The Ganges flows through Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, and Bangladesh and is joined, besides the Jumna at Allahabad, by relatively smaller streams such as the Ghāghara, Gomti, Gandak, and Kosi. The Jumna’s principal tributaries include the Chambal, Betwa, and Ken. The Brahmaputra rises in eastern Tibet and, flowing along the eastern Himalayas, drops south into Assam and continues roughly between the Naga Hills on the east and the Khasi and Garo Hills on the west to Bengal. The Ganges-Jumna-Brahmaputra basin is the largest river basin in the country, roughly 1,000 miles long from Delhi to Bengal, covering one-quarter of the country’s total area. The basin forms a phenomenal plain with a drop of only six hundred feet in elevation, averaging six inches per mile. Whereas the northern rivers are perennial thanks to the melting of snow in the Himalayas as well as the monsoon rains, the peninsular rivers are completely dependent on the monsoon rains and, though they are generally well fed, remain starved of water for parts of the year.

The two major river basins—the Indus-Saraswati and Ganges-Jumna— gave rise to two major prehistoric civilizations. The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), whose beginnings lie around 6000–5000 BCE, was notable for its urban culture from about 2600 BCE to 1300 BCE. Although the development in the Saraswati Valley paralleled that of the Indus Valley, the economic and cultural development in the Doab, between the Ganges and the Jumna rivers, was contemporaneous with the later phase of the Indus-Saraswati Civilization.

The third major geographical component is the Great Indian or Thar Desert, which is a poor southwestern extension of the Indus-Ganges plain. Most of the desert lies in India, with a smaller portion in Pakistan. Divided into two segments, the desert extends from the Rann of Kutch northward up to the Luni River, while the smaller desert portion covers the region north of the Luni to Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, with a small stretch between the two deserts marked by rocky terrain and limestone ridges. Both the great and the little deserts, in their western flanks, mark the boundary between India and Pakistan.

The fourth major segment is peninsular India, which is separated from the north by the Vindhya Mountains, or Satpura Range, stretching from the west and declining eastward, more or less along the Tropic of Cancer. It has two subdivisions: the Deccan tableland and the two coastal strips in the west and the east. In contrast to the youthful Himalayan range, the mountains of peninsular India are ancient, estimated to be 3.8 billion years old, creating a region of relative stability and providing the Deccan with very fertile lava soil.

The incline of the Vindhyas eastward has determined the west-east flow of the major rivers in peninsular India, including the Godavari, which has the second-largest river basin, covering 10 percent of the country’s area, and the Mahanadi, the third-largest river basin. The Narmada flows east to west, mostly along the Vindhyas in the northern part of the Deccan. The Krishna and the Kçveri are the two other principal rivers of peninsular India. Two west coast rivers—the Tapti (Tçpi) in the north and the Penner in the south—are together responsible for 10–11 percent of the country’s water resources. The Vindhyas along with the Western Ghats (also known as the Sahyadri Mountains) and the Eastern Ghats form a triangle enclosing the Deccan plateau and, meeting in the south, forming the Nilgiri Hills.

The two Ghats (literally “steps”) drop sharply to the sea in the west, forming a narrow coastal strip with the Arabian Sea, known as the Konkan in the north and central region and as the Malabar Coast and Cardamom Hills in the south; in the east, the Ghats form a broader coastal strip, known as the Coromandel Coast. The Western Ghats have an average elevation of 3,000 to 4,000 feet, whereas the Eastern Ghats are lower, averaging only about 2,000 feet above sea level. The relatively infertile coastal strips, as compared to the very fertile Deccan, have compelled their inhabitants to look to the sea for their livelihood, through fishing or maritime trade.

The southernmost point of the Indian subcontinent is Cape Comorin, where the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the Arabian Sea meet.

Climate

The climate on the subcontinent is as varied as its flora and fauna, its people and their dress and cuisine. It varies from the year-round snowcapped mountains in the north to the year-round hot weather in the south. Although the entire country falls in the tropical monsoon region, the length of the season and the amount of precipitation vary from place to place with the direction of the monsoon. There are two monsoons: southwest from June to September and northeast from November to January. The former starts in the Indian Ocean as a northwest monsoon in May. Then its clouds change direction due to the equatorial tilt to the southwest. There have been different theories about the phenomenon of the monsoons. The one most favored presently is that the low-pressure areas created by the intense summer heat of April and May attract the cooler, precipitation-laden winds from the Indian Ocean. They hit the entire west coast and in attempting to cross the Western Ghats drop a large part of their precipitation, amounting to between 100 and 120 inches from late May or early June until mid-September. As the monsoon winds advance northward, the news of them hitting Sri Lanka and then Kerala, generally in the beginning of June, gives much awaited notice of their impending arrival in Goa and Bombay (Mumbai), four to ten days thence. Across the Western Ghats, the Deccan plateau gets between 20 and 40 inches of rain, depending on the distance from the Ghats.

Another “branch” of the monsoon, by passing Sri Lanka, advances northward through the Bay of Bengal to India’s West Bengal and Bangladesh, to Assam and the Arakan Yoma, making Cheerapunji the wettest spot on earth, with precipitation averaging 456 inches annually. Here it does not rain, it pours— in sheets.

The second monsoon, moving to the northeast, is relatively much milder, with a much shorter season. It operates more like a “retreating” monsoon, covers the early winter months, blows over the Bay of Bengal, and hits the Coromandel Coast, Orissa, and southern Bengal. While Bombay enjoys its much desired mild winter, the southern metropolis of Madras (Chennai) could be experiencing a flood thanks to the northeastern monsoon.

Despite all the industrial development in India and its recent globalization and increased lucrative employment owing to outsourcing, India’s economy is overwhelmingly agricultural and depends heavily on the monsoon rains. It is no wonder that throughout the ages, the Indian people have been god-fearing, praying to the gods for early, plentiful, but not too plentiful, precipitation. The Indian way of life—the seasonal cycle of the people’s activities, their religious observances and festivals, as well their marriage “season”—is principally based on the expected timing of the rains. A timely monsoon and a good harvest translate into substantial purchasing power in India’s villages, where nearly three-quarters of its population live.

Dress and Cuisine

Generally, North Indians, with Punjabis leading, are a wheat-producing and wheat-consuming people, whereas for most of the coastal population, as well as all over South India, Orissa, Bengal, and Assam, rice is the staple crop and food; they tend to eat rice for their major meals and derivatives of rice for breakfast and snacks. The coastal population and Bengalis (not necessarily coastal), Keralites, and Konkani-speaking people add fish to their diet, and the popular belief is that it accounts for their well-acknowledged cerebral power.

Brahmans all over the country except in the Konkan and Bengal are vegetarians; so are Jains and upper-caste people, particularly Vaishyas in Gujarat. There are a hundred different cuisines all over the country, each claiming to be the best in the country, if not in the world, yet two styles have become popular among visitors to most major cities and towns countrywide: Mughlai, which is vegetarian and nonvegetarian, largely Punjabi, with a somewhat liberal use of ghee (clarified butter) and the use of a tan-door (an oven usually implanted in the ground), and South Indian vegetarian cuisine, which is somewhat less oily but spicier. Although the homogenization of food in the two styles has dominated the urban restaurant scene, households continue to be loyal to the different cuisines that have come down by tradition, possibly through the centuries.

There is a greater homogenization in women’s dress in cities and towns. Whereas women in the countryside and in tribal communities continue to wear traditional or regional dress, most urban-ite young females and college coeds sport salwar (loose pants) and a khameez (long shirt), in the latest designer styles for the affluent; the not-so-young women tend to wear saris, in the preferred Bengali style. Not a little of this homogenization is owed to Bollywood movie and television stars, who, as anywhere else, wield enormous influence over the youth and those who think young.

Speaking of homogenization contributing to national unity are two elements, completely unplanned by politicians and unforeseen by the constitution. These are Bollywood Hindi movies and popular television serials and the game of cricket. More has been done, unwittingly, by Hindi movies than all the well-planned government campaigns to popularize Hindi. And most Indians think cricket was invented by the English but is really an Indian sport, played all over the country, not only on the formal (battle)fields but also in the lanes and by-lanes of the cities and even villages. Its one-day matches and the traditional five-day tests in which the country is represented by the best players from all over the nation invoke and confirm nationalism, patriotism, and unity among all, regardless of caste, creed, or gender. Every activity stops or at least becomes secondary or worse when it comes to a popular television serial or watching cricket.

Political Structure

Officially, the Republic of India or Bharat (its ancient name) consists of twenty-nine states and six union territories. The latter do not have a parliamentary democracy in the same sense as the states, where the executive is responsible to and removable by an elected legislature. The territories are administered “centrally” for special reasons. The chief executive there, usually a lieutenant governor, is appointed by and responsible to the central or union government. The union territories include Chandigarh, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Pondicherry, Lakshadweep, and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Until 2004, as the capital of the country, Delhi (like Washington, D.C.) was centrally administered. It was conferred the status of a state on certain conditions, such as that federally owned lands and structures are outside its jurisdiction. There are also restrictions on its authority in regard to law and order and the security provided the central government ministers, high officials, members of parliament, and diplomats. Chandigarh, which serves as the common capital of two states, Punjab and Haryana, is, for that reason, centrally administered. Dadra and Nagar Haveli, as well as Daman and Diu, were, along with Goa, parts of Portuguese holdings in India. Goa, which was a union...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Chronology
• Preface
• 1 Land and the Human Fabric
• 2 India in Prehistoric Times
• 3 The Vedic Age, Ca. 1200 BCE–600 BCE
• 4 Birth of Two Religions: Buddhism and Jainism
• 5 State and Politics in Ancient India
• 6 The Era of Consolidation: Political and Cultural
• 7 Early Islam: The Sultanate
• 8 Peninsular Kingdoms: Vijayanagar and Bahmani
• 9 The Great Mughals: Babar to Aurangzeb
• 10 The Rise of the Marathas and the Sikhs
• 11 The European Powers in India
• 12 Reaction to British Rule
• 13 The Indian Nationalist Movement, 1850–1919
• 14 The Road to Freedom Through Partition
• 15 The March of Indian Democracy, Part I
• 16 The March of Indian Democracy, Part II
• 17 The Princely States and the Kashmir Question
• 18 Toward Economic Freedom
• 19 India’s Foreign Policy
• Selected Bibliography
• Index