Instruction: Please read Page 140 to Page 232 and write a Reading Notes. 1. Please write least 5 pages reading notes. 2. Enough to cover most of the chapter. 3. Don’t write everything down, don’t highlight everything, don’t flag everything with sticky notes. Work to identify key ideas, key terms, key themes, and then write down your synthesis and summary of the ideas on every page of notes. If you like, please watch these videos. Here are just a few video explanations of some options and ideas for good note-taking methods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAhRf3U50lM&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtW9IyE04OQ&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NpBvG_oPoA&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErSjc1PEGKE Part III South Asia 5 INDIA6 RELIGIONS OF INDIA Why South Asia? “Eastward of India lies a tract which is entirely sand. Indeed, of all the inhabitants of Asia, concerning whom anything is known, the Indians dwell nearest to the east and the rising of the Sun,” wrote Herodotus in 440 B.C.E. Although there were peoples further east than India unknown to Herodotus, he used a familiar term for the region we now refer to as South Asia: India. The India to which Herodotus referred was not a single state but a vast geographical region and a civilization renowned in the West for its wealth and exoticism. It was the land beyond the Indus River, from which the name came. Alexander the Great had briefly conquered the Indus valley in 326 B.C.E., but died soon after. India (as the Greeks called it), al-Hind (as the Arabs called it), or Hindustan (as the Persians called it) was the region from the Indus River to the Brahmapu- tra, bounded on three sides by ocean and by the snowy mountains to the north. The people of this vast place had no single word for the region or each other. Other names were in use: Aryavarta was the Sanskrit name for the region of northern India where Sanskritic culture dominated. Bharat, after legendary King Bharata of the Puranas, is another. Bharat is currently one of the two offi- cial names for the Republic of India. Since 1947 Since 1947, however, the preferred name of the region long known as India has shifted to South Asia, a neutral term that incorporates seven modern states: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives. Some also include Afghanistan and Burma (Myanmar). For perhaps obvious reasons, people of these nations prefer not to be lumped together as “Indians.” What happened in 1947 to change this long usage? That was the year that Britain finally withdrew from the subcontinent after decades of the indepen- dence struggle and the disastrous Second World War. From the earliest forays of the East India Company in the eighteenth century, Britain had come to rule an “India” in its broadest historical sense, including what is now Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Burma (Burma, or Myanmar, is now considered part of Southeast Asia). At ...

1. Instruction:
Please read Page 140 to Page 232 and write a Reading Notes.
1. Please write least 5 pages reading notes.
2. Enough to cover most of the chapter.
3. Don’t write everything down, don’t highlight everything,
don’t flag everything with sticky notes. Work to identify key
ideas, key terms, key themes, and then write down your
synthesis and summary of the ideas on every page of notes.
If you like, please watch these videos.
Here are just a few video explanations of some options and
ideas for good note-taking methods:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAhRf3U50lM&feature=yo
utu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtW9IyE04OQ&feature=yo
utu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NpBvG_oPoA&feature=yo
utu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErSjc1PEGKE
Part III
South Asia
5 INDIA6 RELIGIONS OF INDIA

2. Why South Asia?
“Eastward of India lies a tract which is entirely sand. Indeed, of
all the inhabitants of Asia, concerning whom anything is known,
the Indians dwell nearest to the east and the rising of the Sun,”
wrote Herodotus in 440 B.C.E. Although there were peoples
further east than India unknown to Herodotus, he used a
familiar term for the region we now refer to as South Asia:
India.
The India to which Herodotus referred was not a single state but
a vast geographical region and a civilization renowned in the
West for its wealth and exoticism. It was the land beyond the
Indus River, from which the name came. Alexander the Great
had briefly conquered the Indus valley in 326 B.C.E., but died
soon after.
India (as the Greeks called it), al-Hind (as the Arabs called it),
or Hindustan (as the Persians called it) was the region from the
Indus River to the Brahmapu- tra, bounded on three sides by
ocean and by the snowy mountains to the north. The people of
this vast place had no single word for the region or each other.
Other names were in use: Aryavarta was the Sanskrit name for
the region of northern India where Sanskritic culture dominated.
Bharat, after legendary King Bharata of the Puranas, is another.
Bharat is currently one of the two offi- cial names for the
Republic of India.
Since 1947
Since 1947, however, the preferred name of the region long
known as India has shifted to South Asia, a neutral term that
incorporates seven modern states: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives. Some also include
Afghanistan and Burma (Myanmar). For perhaps obvious

3. reasons, people of these nations prefer not to be lumped
together as “Indians.” What happened in 1947 to change this
long usage? That was the year that Britain finally withdrew
from the subcontinent after decades of the indepen- dence
struggle and the disastrous Second World War. From the earliest
forays of the East India Company in the eighteenth century,
Britain had come to rule an “India” in its broadest historical
sense, including what is now Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and
Burma (Burma, or Myanmar, is now considered part of
Southeast Asia). At midnight, August 14, 1947, Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru spoke to the people of India in his famous
“Tryst with Destiny” speech with the ringing words: “Long
years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes
when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full mea-
sure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour,
when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” In
Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jin-
143
nah, the first prime minister, delivered a speech a few days
earlier, urging for- mation of a constitution in which each
person is “first, second and last a citizen of this State with
equal rights.”
These were high-minded and inspiring words, as such occasions
call for, but they overlooked the “orgy of murder, rape, and
plunder” that the Partition of India into two separate states (and
soon into a third) had actually endured. The Partition had been
along religious lines, an effort by the departing British to hand
Hindus and Muslims separate religion-based homelands, even
though Hindus and Muslims lived side by side in cities, towns,
and villages across the subcontinent, a distribution that could
never be reified into nations with clear borders. The attempt to
create such borders set millions of people on the move, Muslims
into new Muslim-dominated territory, Hindus and Sikhs trying

4. to escape into safe Hindu areas. Seventeen million people fled
one direction or another, but that did not and could not create
monoreligious nations. There had been one hundred million
Muslims in the British raj; sixty million ended up in Pakistan,1
leaving forty million Muslims in India. The effort was a con-
ceptual failure from the beginning; and before it was over,
nearly two million people had died, and the newly created
nations were primed for religious intol- erance that afflicts
South Asia to this day.
Why did Britain organize the Partition on the way out of India?
The details
were only worked out at the last minute in great haste, taking a
mere 40 days to draw the new map of South Asia. Not until two
days after Nehru’s historic midnight independence speech were
the exact borders announced. Why the rush? When Lord Louis
Mountbatten arrived in India as the last viceroy with the charge
to organize the transfer of power, he moved the date up by 10
months, perhaps attempting to shock Indian leaders into serious
negotiations. But why Partition at all?
The answer does not have to do with any long-term Hindu–
Muslim ani- mosity; as we’ll see in chapter 5, a peaceful Indo-
Islamic culture had been forged over nearly a thousand years.
People did not think of themselves fore- most as Hindu,
Muslim, or Sikh; they were more likely to think of themselves
in linguistic, ethnic, or regional terms, as Bengali or Punjabi or
Gujarati. The best explanation lies in the personalities and
leadership strategies of the Indian elite, especially Mohammed
Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, and Mohandas
Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, leaders of the Congress Party. By
the 1940s, these leaders had come into severe disagreement over
the shape of postcolonial India, as Jinnah strove to achieve
advantages and protections for the hundred million Muslims in
an India dominated by Hindus. He was not himself a very
devout or conservative Muslim. As Dalrymple describes him:
A staunch secularist, he drank whiskey, rarely went to a
mosque, and was clean-shaven and stylish, favoring beautifully

5. cut Savile Row suits and silk ties. Significantly, he chose to
marry a non-Muslim woman, the glamorous daughter of a Parsi
businessman. She was famous for her revealing saris and for
once bringing her husband ham sandwiches on voting day.
(2016)
144Part III: South Asia
Part III: South Asia 145
Most historians now believe that Jinnah backed himself into a
corner on creating a Pakistan, using it initially as a bargaining
chip to maneuver the Con- gress Party into conceding better
terms for the Muslim leadership but the idea got out of hand. A
passion for Pakistan that he had inflamed could not be con-
tained. As the Second World War ended and many of India’s
leadership were released from jail, the idea reached into the
streets where local political leaders inflamed Muslim–Hindu
feelings. Religious massacres began in Calcutta and spread to
other cities, and by 1947 everybody but Gandhi realized that
India had to be divided. To his dismay, his “nonviolent”
movement for independence culminated in a violent
dismemberment that left South Asia traumatized into the
present.
This is why we now speak of South Asia, rather than India. Yet
these are new boundaries, drawn up in 40 days in 1947. As we
look in the next two chap- ters at the great civilization that is
South Asia, we will find most present-day borders meaningless.
The Indus Valley civilization, whose main ruins at Mohenjo
Daro and Harappa are in Pakistan, spread across both sides of
the Indus and down as far south as Gujarat and eastward to the
Ganges. When “Muslim” invaders began entering India in the
eleventh century, they were iden- tified by the people (and
remembered in the Sanskrit texts), not as Muslims, but as Turks
and Afghans. Indians knew all about religious variety—the gods

6. were in the millions and the details varied village by village and
caste by caste—but ethnic and linguistic distinctions were worth
noticing and made a difference.
So, the term “South Asia” is important from 1947 on (e.g., Bose
and Jalal 1997; Mines and Lamb 2010). In the chapters that
follow, we will use the term “India” in its older sense, as a
broad, brilliant, multistranded civilization that is the core of
modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, as well as Nepal, Bhutan,
Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. However, we must admit that
research on “South Asia” overwhelmingly favors India. That is
partly for reasons described above, the status of “India” as both
geographic region and a civilization prior to 1947. The impetus
for replacing the generic India with a more inclusive South Asia
largely comes from Pakistani scholars and citizens (plus
diaspora descendants of the region now known as Pakistan), and
it does not seem to have promoted more intense study of Sri
Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, or the Maldives. We also
cannot forget that most South Asians are Indian; there are
almost 1.3 billion Indians, but only about 192 million Pakistanis
and 166 million Bangla- deshis. The next largest nation is Nepal
with almost 29 million.
These other South Asian nations stretch from the high
Himalayas (Nepal, Bhutan) to a tiny chain of 26 atolls (the
Maldives) and the larger teardrop- shaped island of Sri Lanka in
the Indian Ocean. Bangladesh lies on the delta of the great
Brahmaputra River that crosses Tibet and then swings south into
the Bay of Bengal. Their cultures have been shaped by the
influence of their neigh- bors: Nepal and Bhutan by Tibet and
Tibetan Buddhism, the Maldives by Arab Islam, and Sri Lanka
by Hinduism and Buddhism from South India, but all of them by
“India.”
ENDNOTE
1 Then an East and West Pakistan; later West Pakistan became

7. Bangladesh.
REFERENCES CITED
Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. 1997. Modern South Asia;
History, Culture, Political Econ- omy. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Dalrymple, William. 2016, June 29. The Great Divide: The
Violent Legacy of Indian Partition. The New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/ the-great-
divide-books-dalrymple
Mines, Diane P., and Sarah Lamb. 2010. Everyday Life in South
Asia. 2nd Ed. Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press.
146Part III: South Asia
5INDIA
147
CHRONOLOGY OF INDIAN HISTORY
2500
Indus Valley Civilization
(ca. 2500–1500 B.C.E.)
urbanization & city planning; worship of “Proto-Shiva” and
goddess; wheat and cotton cultivation; trade with Sumer
1500
Vedic Age
(ca. 1500–450 B.C.E.)
1500–1000 Indo-European Aryans enter from Northwest 1200–
900 Vedas composed by nomads in upper Punjab 1000–450
North Indian conquest and unification
950 Battle of Mahabharata said to have taken place 800–600
Brahmanas

8. 500–300 Upanishads
563–483 Buddha
300
Mauryan Dynasty
(323–185 B.C.E.)
326 Alexander the Great invades India
324 First unification of north India under Chandragupta
Maurya; capital at Pataliputra (Patna)
265–232 Emperor Ashoka; adoption of Buddhism throughout
empire
300 B.C.E.–300 C.E. Mahabharata
200 B.C.E–200 C.E. Ramayana by Valmiki 185 B.C.E. Mauryan
Dynasty ends
100 B.C.E.
300 C.E.
Satavahana
100 C.E. Dharmashastra by Manu 200 C.E. Arthashastra by
Kautilya 300 C.E. Kama-sutra by Vatsyayana
400
Gupta
(4th–6th century C.E.)
“The Classical Age”-Establishment of temple worship 350–750
early Puranas
399–414 Faxian visits India 460–477 Ajanta Caves
643 King Harsha’s Great Feast (reigned 606–647) 630–645
Xuanzang visits India
800
Pala
(8th–12th century)
900 and 1150 temples at Khajuraho
1001 Mahmud of Ghazni raids North India 1192–1192 Ghurids
establish capital at Delhi Gradual end of Buddhism in India
1200
Sultanate
(1210–1526)
Establishment of the Delhi Sultanate 1200 Gita Govinda by

9. Jayadeva
1325–1351 Muhammad bin Tughluq reigns 1200 early Sufi
orders established
750–1500 later Puranas; many new Ramayanas in regional
vernaculars
1469–1539 Guru Nanak founds Sikhism
1500
Mughal
(1526–1827
1526 Babur founds the Mughal Empire 1556–1605 Akbar
1574 Ramayana in Hindi by Tulsidas 1632–1653 Taj Mahal
built
1757–
1900
British
(late 18th c.–1947)
Independence
1757 British victory at Plassey
1757–1858 “John Company Raj”-rule by East India Company
1857 Anglo-Indian War (“Indian Mutiny”)
1858–1947 British Raj
1947
1947 Republic of India
1947 Islamic Republic of Pakistan
A Forgotten Past
In 1827 an English soldier of the East India Company deserted
his regi- ment, footing it with a friend westward toward the
Indus River and Central Asia. Fearful of being caught and
executed, he wore disguises and called him- self Charles
Masson. For a time he claimed to be an American citizen from
Kentucky. Although he wrote extensively about his experiences
in the four-vol- ume Narrative of Various Journeys in

10. Balochistan, Afghanistan, the Panjab and Kalat (1844), he
revealed little about his motivations or state of mind. From the
adventures recorded in his memoirs, however, it is clear he was
obsessed with the history and cultures of the Punjab and
Afghanistan.
In those days—the early nineteenth century—India’s history
was obscure. Whole civilizations had disappeared from
historical memory. India had no tra- dition of historiography
such as China’s, with its vast record-keeping bureau- cracy.
When in 1974 the huge burial army of the First Emperor (r.
221–210 B.C.E.) was rediscovered archaeologically, the finds
validated the claims of early Chinese historians who had written
about Qin Shihuang, the unifier of China. No such early
accounts of the doings of kings existed in India. Indian thinkers
were busy interpreting the Vedas, their most ancient and most
sacred texts, and then meditating on the meaning of Vedic
rituals and myths in the Brahmanas (ritual texts on the details of
sacrifice, constituting a portion of the Vedas). By the sixth and
fifth centuries B.C.E., new texts, the Upanishads, were creating
revolutionary new ideas about the soul (atman), human action
(karma), renun- ciation (sanyas), and life after death (samsara,
reincarnation). But India had no Sima Qian, the Grand Historian
(died ca. 110 B.C.E.), who pored through old texts written on
strips of bamboo to piece together a lengthy history of China’s
early dynasties, which became the starting point of all
subsequent histories.
Therefore, in Masson’s time (1820s–1840s), India’s ancient
history was known only through the Vedas, Brahmanas, and
Upanishads. They were writ-ten in Sanskrit, the earliest known
Indo-European language (see chapter 2). This meant that Indian
history began with the Bronze Age people who called
themselves “Aryans” (i.e., the Indo-European speakers), who
had established small kingdoms in the Ganges basin, with names
like Kuru, Pancala, Kosala, and Videha. Nothing was known of
any earlier civilization. Likewise, there was a blank where the
Buddha, Buddhism, and the great King Ashoka who spread

11. Buddhism throughout the subcontinent should have been.
Buddhisttexts in East and Southeast Asia claimed the Buddha
had lived and died in
Chapter opener photo: Rajasthani girl.
149
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12. e
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India, but India itself had no historical memory of this, and
Buddhism had dis- appeared from the land of its origination.

13. Masson had received a good education in England. He could
read Latin and Greek. He knew from Greek sources that
Alexander the Great had con- quered parts of northwestern India
in 326 B.C.E., and so he trudged on a peril- ous journey into the
upper Punjab region, the area of northern Pakistan where five
rivers join to become the Indus. He made records on the land
and people as he went, and collected oddities that he could
carry. There were many ancient coins, eventually 80,000 in his
collection, of bronze, silver, and gold depicting ancient kings
and gods, many of them Greek, providing the first strong evi-
dence that Alexander had left Greek kingdoms behind. He found
two heads of

14. Map 5.1 India.
SRI LANKA
COLOMBO
Madurai
MADRAS
Mysore
Arabian Sea
Goa
Bay of
Bengal
HYDERABAD
BOMBAY
I N D I A
BURMA
Bodh Gaya
CALCUTTA
Sanchi
Nalanda
Allahabad
BANGLADESH
PATNA
KARACHI
LUCKNOW
JAIPUR
NEPAL BHUTAN

15. Kapilavastu
DELHI
KATHMANDU
Mojenjo Daro
Harappa
SIMLA
PAKISTAN
Lahore
SOUTH ASIA
Peshawar
150Part III: South Asia
Chapter 5 India
151
Buddha that he and his companions mistook for a beautiful
female deity. There were rock-cut caves and arches with
gigantic stone Buddhas they identified as “female idols.” And
he opened up some 40 stupas—raised spherical structures, some
160 feet in circumference—and hauled off their treasures
without under- standing these were Buddhist monuments
(Omrani 2008). Rather, he thought they were burial places of
past kings, and the Buddha figures were their effigies.
Knowledge of Buddhism’s millennium in India would slowly
unfold over the nineteenth century as more adventurers,
scholars, and archaeologists turned their attention to caves,
ruins, sculptures, and art scattered throughout India.
In 1838 Masson made his most important discovery. He was
back in the Punjab, camped near a town on the Sutlej, one of the
branches of the Indus. As he writes in his memoirs:
A long march preceded our arrival at Haripah (Harappa),

16. through jangal (jungle) of the closest description. . . . When I
joined the camp I found it in front of the village and ruinous
brick castle. Behind us was a large circular mound, or
eminence, and to the west was an irregular rocky height,
crowned with the remains of buildings, in fragments of walls,
with niches, after the eastern manner. . . . The walls and towers
of the castle are remark- ably high, though, from having been
long deserted, they exhibit in some parts of the ravages of time
and decay. Between it and our camp extended a deep trench,
now overgrown with grasses and plants. . . . Tradition affirms
the existence here of a city, so considerable that it extended to
Chicha Watni, [20 miles] distant, and that it was destroyed by a
particular visita- tion of Providence, brought down by the lust
and crimes of the sovereign. (Masson 1844)
This was the first description of what turned out to be one of
two great cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, a heretofore
unknown urban civilization that preceded the Veda-writers by a
thousand years. It was a contemporary of Sumer and Egypt, and
it traded with them, but had disappeared without memory in
India itself.Puzzles of Indian Origins: The First Civilizations
The world’s earliest states, emerging in the second and third
millennia
B.C.E. in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, were the first
to face the ques- tions that all states, including modern ones,
face: How to mobilize power effec- tively? How to survive past
the first generation? How to manage the force that created the
state without immediately destroying it? How to get and keep
the loyalty of diverse groups drawn together in the state? How
to harness the eco- nomic resources needed to keep the state
afloat?
The first civilizations had accomplished a long evolution out of
farming communities whose growth and increased productivity
supported the nonpro- ductive elite that dominated them. The
list in box 5.1 identifies some of the pri- mary and secondary
features associated with early civilizations.
The political structure of a civilization is the state, where power

17. is central- ized in a monarch or oligarchy. As society grew more
complex, with new forms
Box 5.1 Characteristics of Civilizations
Primary Features
· The State:
· Centralized authority in a monarch, king, emperor, or
oligarchy
· Stratification of society with an aristocracy, priesthood,
military, and peasants
· A tax/tribute system for redistribution of surpluses upward
· High population densities
· Expanded food production to support economically
unproductive classes
· Urbanization: villages, towns, and a few true urban centers
with populations of 7,000–10,000
· Full-time craft specialists
Secondary Features
· Monumental art and architecture
· Long-distance trade
· Codified law
· Writing systems
· Mathematics and astronomy
· Religion in the service of the state
· Bifurcation of folk culture and court culture, with court-
sponsored arts and intel- lectual traditions
of specialization and stratification, the king gathered around
him a full-time warrior class; priests who functioned as
advisors, diviners, and intercessors with the gods; and a nobility
composed of the king’s family and lineage that grew larger and
more powerful by the generation. All these people had to be
supported by the agricultural classes. Independent cultivators

18. were turned into peasants, tied to the land by various devices
that squeezed them for surpluses to support the growing
nonproductive elite. A percentage of the harvest, often 25
percent or more, was demanded, which forced peasants to work
harder and find ways to grow more, because their own
subsistence needs remained the same. Political coercion
squeezed out an extra portion of grain to be passed upward as
taxation.
In the meantime, urban densities formed around the king’s court
and in a few trade centers, so that along with villages there was
a hierarchy of urban spaces: towns and one or two major cities
that were trade or court centers. In the earliest cities, 10,000
was a lot of people; by 2500 B.C.E., there were cities with
populations close to 50,000. Cultural and intellectual life began
to diverge from village culture in the courts of early kings.
Specialists of all sorts elabo- rated their own cultural domains:
a few carpenters turned into architects and engineers, building
palaces, temples, and mausoleums for their royal patrons.
Ministers codified the law. Priests pondered the old myths and
rites, raising new philosophical questions; they gazed at the
stars and developed astrology and astronomy. Mathematics grew
out of useful practices like engineering and astronomy. Royal
courts sponsored new forms of art: theater, music, dance, and
poetry. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is the development of
new uses for religion: the power of the state needed to be
legitimated somehow; new forms of religion emerged in the
service of the state.
Note that a civilization is something more than a state. States
are political formations of strongmen or warriors that can come
and go rather quickly, and most will not form a true civilization
around them. A civilization includes enduring cultural traditions
that can be maintained and passed on from genera- tion to
generation even when political centralization has lapsed,
whereas a state is a centralized social system that is much more

19. vulnerable to spinning into disorder at the death of a powerful
leader or collapsing into bitterly con- tested struggles for
leadership that end in fragmentation. So civilizations can
outlast particular states. Civilizations can also support several
competing regional states simultaneously. Indian civilization
has survived through eras when no state could be said to be
functioning, or when only small regional states existed.
Similarly Chinese civilization has stretched across eras when
the state itself disappeared in periodic chaos.Indus Valley
Civilization (2500–1500 B.C.E.)
The first urban society in India flourished in the Indus Valley
from 2500 to 1500 B.C.E. This was the world’s third
civilization, a thousand years later than the founding of Egypt
and Sumer. Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was in con- tact
with Sumer via a land route stretching from oasis to oasis across
the Ira- nian Plateau and via a much easier coastal route in the
shallow waters of the Arabian Sea and up the Persian Gulf. For
the civilizations to the west, India was the fabled source of
peacocks and monkeys, ivory and gems, spices and incense. The
villages, towns, and two great cities of IVC were dependent on
the Indus River for a water source and for transportation.
Farmers in the region grew wheat and cotton, which they
shipped by river to Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, where cotton
was woven into cloth.
However, IVC is the mystery civilization of Asia. While its two
major cit- ies, Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, have been
extensively excavated and now lie exposed once again to the
blistering sun of Pakistan (more than a thousand set- tlements
are known) only 10 percent of these sites have been excavated.
In the 1970s a third large city was discovered near the border of
India and Pakistan, but because of political tensions, it has not
been excavated.
Almost everything we would want to know about the people and
their cul- ture remains unexplained. Who were the people who
lived there? Were they ancestors of the Dravidians, who are
now the vast populations of the southern Indian states of

20. Tamilnadu, Kerala, and Mysore? There are a few tiny telltale
pockets of Dravidian-speakers stranded in the Indus Valley
region of Baluch-
istan, though now the languages of the northern states are all
Indo-European. Or were they the Aryans, the Indo-European-
speaking writers of the Vedas, the foundational documents of
Hinduism, as some argue? We will return to this question
shortly.
They certainly had a well-organized and centrally planned
society, but what kind of political order was responsible for this
is not clear from the archaeological record. They had a script,
but what ideas—if any—were cap- tured by it is unknown
because the script has never been deciphered. The reli- gious
ideas that motivated their lives have left traces only in rough
sculptural form. It is tempting to guess what ideas might lie
behind the ruins, sculptures, and seals, but they are only
guesses.
The cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were the most modern
cities of their time. They were built on a grid plan, with a broad
north-south street bisected by narrower east-west streets.
Houses built on these streets were often large and multiroomed
with windowless exterior walls, inner courtyards, and flat roofs.
Such houses are the main house style in much of India to this
day, allowing family life to be lived in inner privacy in the
courtyard and, on hot nights and cool winter days, on the
rooftop. Many had private interior wells with outlets in several
rooms of the house. Bathrooms were built against an exterior
wall, with sloping floors and chutes that drained bathwater to
the lane outside. From there, sewage was disposed through
brick-lined covered channels to cesspits outside the city. This
water and sanitation engineering was unmatched prior to the last
few centuries, and there are Indian towns today that do not
match it.
You might think a society this technologically advanced would

21. be able to write its language. Contemporary civilizations had
this knowledge: Sumerians had developed cuneiform and
Egyptians had hieroglyphics, both of which can now be read.
Early Chinese civilization, which developed later, also had a
script that can be read today. And Indus Valley traders must
have known of cuneiform writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
But Indus Valley Civilization does not appear to have advanced
far along this route. All known samples of Indus script come
from some 2,000 seals and a bit of graffiti on pottery. These
“seals” were terra cotta rectangles an inch or two in dimension.
Most seals carry two types of inscription: charming images of
animals or seated figures, and abstract figures that look like
possible writing (see box 5.2).
There are 419 to 676 characters with 200 in frequent use
(Robinson 2015). Over a hundred efforts have been made to
translate them, none of them yet suc- cessful. Most scholars
agree there are too many characters to be an alphabetic script
like ours, and not enough for a logographic one like Chinese. If
the char- acters formed an actual language, it may have been a
logo-syllabic script like Sumerian cuneiform. But there are no
true texts; the longest string of charac- ters is a mere 26 signs,
and the average is more like five or six. Thus it is unlikely that
the script was used to express complex ideas. Possibly the
inscrip- tions were names of merchant families used to identify
goods in long-distance
Box 5.2 “A Most Curious Object”: Indus Valley Seals

22. Male figure in a yogic posture, surrounded with animals, similar
to images of the later Hindu god Shiva. Also known as
Pashupati (Lord of the Beasts).
Human figure separating two tigers.
Elephant with script. Bull (or unicorn?) near manger or
sacrificial post.
Above are four of the more than 2,000 seals found in the Indus
Valley. Most have both script and animal depictions. The seals
were used to make impressions in soft clay that probably

23. identified bales of trade goods belonging to certain merchants.
More than 400 distinct characters have been cataloged from the
seals, too many for an alphabetic or syllabic language, but not
enough for a logographic one like Chi- nese. They have never
been deciphered and even the language is unknown.
trade. If it was language, was that language an early form of
Dravidian, or of Sanskrit, or of some other language such as
Munda? Each view has its parti- sans, but there is no consensus.
When it comes to religious ideas, again we have to guess on the
basis of intriguing clues. The seals that bear the puzzling
inscriptions also contain pic- tures of animals that were
important then: the humped bull, tiger, camel, ante- lope, and
elephant. Often animals are depicted tethered to an ornamented
post as if about to be sacrificed (or are these mangers from
which they eat?), and one shows a woman about to be
sacrificed, her arms raised in supplication. A frequent figure is
the so-called horned god, a male sitting in a yogic pose with his
hands on his knees and wearing a headpiece of buffalo horns. In
another, two worshippers kneel beside him with hooded cobras
towering over them. This deity so resembles the later god Shiva
that he is often referred to as the Proto-Shiva. The frequency of
religious themes on the seals could sustain a reli- gious, rather
than commercial, function.
Other hints of later Hindu practices are the many female
images, possibly goddesses, which far outnumber male images.
They are often crudely made of terra cotta, as if constructed for
popular use or to be discarded after brief use at a festival (as
they would be now). These “mother goddesses” (if that is what
they are) are lavishly decorated with layers of necklaces,
bangles, and belts, have fabulous fan-shaped headdresses, and
are bare-breasted. Perhaps this is how women of IVC dressed.
Or are they a forerunner of the primordial Shakti who takes
form in Kali, Durga, Saraswati, and other female deities? A few
bet- ter-made male images were also found, one assumed to be a

24. priest, another remarkably (but impossibly) Greek-looking from
the realism of his torso.
Most puzzling of all is the question of how IVC was organized.
Though it spread across a vaster region than either Sumer or
Egypt, a thousand miles from west to east, with over 1,000
towns and two great cities so far excavated or located, there is
precious little evidence of a strong centralized government
beyond the indirect evidence of the well-laid out cities. No
palace complex exists where a great king might have lived and
held court. No great temple com- plex bears testimony to a cult
of the divinities depicted on seals and suggested by terra cotta
statuettes. There is a large tank or bathing area, 40 feet long, 20
feet wide, and eight feet deep, that must have been used for
collective bathing (such tanks are now found in temple
compounds). There is no evidence of rivalry between states or
of warfare, and there is little weaponry. The closest to a
structural center of power that has been discovered is a pillared
hall with many tiny adjacent rooms called by archaeologists an
“assembly hall” or citadel located at the highest points at
Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. (A caveat: a Bud- dhist stupa was
built over a high point at Mohenjo Daro; no one knows what lies
beneath it.) So far, there is little to suggest the residence of a
great king here, but it just might be the center of a priesthood,
whose monks lived in the cubicles and functioned as a powerful
oligarchy in worship of a god and goddess, order- ing society
through their ritual authority and enforcing a rational plan in
the lay-
156Part III: South Asia
Chapter 5 India
157

25. ing out of the cities and maintaining water and sewage systems.
What seems most powerful, in IVC, is not monarchical authority
so much as some kind of cultural authority, the existence of a
conceptual plan for human social life that got peacefully re-
created wherever people settled and formed villages and towns.
A final question remains: what brought IVC to an end? Between
2000 and 1500 B.C.E. its cities were abandoned and finally all
memory of it was lost. Numerous theories have been advanced
to account for its fall; the most recent points to a 200-year
decrease in precipitation that may have led to the collapse
of IVC (Marris 2014).
Brief Outline of Indian History
Scholars (or students) sometimes joke that history is “one damn
thing after another.” It sometimes seems so. Unexpected events
become game changers; then the next astonishing thing happens.
Invaders, new religions, new twists on old religions, states rise
then fall, new technologies, political innovations, droughts and
plagues. . . . How can we think about the past without being
overwhelmed by it? All the more so when it is a stretch of three
or four millen- nia we are talking about. In this section, we
attempt to provide a simple frame- work for comprehending the
last three millennia of Indian history, which we structure into
six large eras: the Vedic Age, the Mauryan-Gupta Empires, the
Medieval Period, the Indo-Islamic Period, the British Colonial
Period, and the Period of Independence. Of course, periods
rarely have clear beginnings and endings, strands of culture
persist while new strands come to dominance, and there are
vague decades and centuries between periods that defy the
orderly structure of periodization. The focus here is on major
configurations of Indian society, relying heavily on clues from
the early texts (e.g., the Vedas, the Upani- shads, the epics),
which are religious and philosophical, for the most part. We
reserve discussion of the broad and profound ideas coming out
of them, i.e., the history and philosophies of Hinduism and
Buddhism, for chapter 6.The Vedic Age (1500–450 B.C.E.)
For Indus Valley Civilization we have ruins but no words; for

26. the Vedic Age, we have words but hardly any ruins. It’s nice to
have words: we can hear the voices of ancient people talking
about their world in a series of four books composed in the
earliest known forms of Sanskrit. The oldest of the four is the
Rig-Veda, formulated in the most obscure Sanskrit, probably
composed between 1500 and 1100 B.C.E. in the upper Indus
region and transmitted orally for more than a millennium. This
text is the oldest known form of any Indo- European language.
But it’s a conundrum: if we could read the Indus Valley Script,
would we find it’s the same people and culture of the Vedic
texts? Or is it a new population with a new culture entering
India from somewhere else?
The people of the Vedas called themselves Aryans, “noble
men,” and their language was an ancient form of Indo-
European, that vast language family that
Indus Valley Civilization (2500–1500 B.C.E.). [top] Exca-
vated ruins of Mohenjo Daro, with the later Buddhist stupa on
the citadel and the “great bath” in the foreground. [left] Early
nineteenth-century man- uscript page in Sanskrit from the Rig-
Veda (1500–450 B.C.E.). Who were the people who built the
IVC cities? Who wrote the Vedas? Were they the same or
different people? The earliest of the four Vedas was composed
around 1200
B.C.E. but not written down for perhaps another thousand years.
The consensus of schol- ars is that the Vedas were the sacred
texts of Indo-European- speaking people who migrated to India
from the northwest over several centuries after IVC had fallen
into decline.
includes Greek, Latin, and most European languages, including
English (see chapter 2). The Aryans, like the Hittites and

27. Greeks to whom they were linguis- tically related, were an
Indo-European-speaking society of Bronze-Age tribal warriors
who loved their horses, herded cattle, and were organized
patriarchi- cally under tribal chieftains called rajas. They
worshipped male gods whose names of Indra (Indara in Hittite),
Varuna (Uruvna), Mitra (Mitira), and the Naksatras (Nasatiya)
were widely known to Indo-Europeans, as evidenced by the
appearance in Hittite texts of about 1400 B.C.E. Like the
Greeks, they moved into a region where more advanced urban
civilizations were already in decline. Their religion of
transcendent gods of the heavens encountered and partially
replaced the earth goddesses of agricultural peoples. And like
the Greeks, they developed epic stories of heroic and embattled
kings based on pos- sible actual events early in the first
millennium B.C.E. and much later written down. The
Mahabharata, like the Iliad, is an epic tale of bloody warfare
among related princes, and the Ramayana, like the Odyssey, is
the tale of a long exilic journey in territories of mythical beings
ending with a joyful return home. The kidnapped Helen of Troy
whose abduction leads to the Trojan War has her counterpart in
the abduction of Sita, whose rescue dominates the Ramayana.
But might the newcomers not have been new at all, but simply a
survival of the people of IVC? Might the Vedas have been
composed in the Indus Valley? This theory has some popular
appeal because it places the most sacred sources of Hinduism
within India, not originating someplace else. However, the
textual evidence does not support this theory. Wendy Doniger, a
major authority on the Vedic literature, evaluates the textual
basis for the two theories (2009). If the Vedas were written in
the cities of Indus Valley, she writes, why do they appear to
know nothing of bricks, the basic building material of the Indus
peo- ple? Why do they describe a nomadic lifestyle? Why are
they so crazy about horses? The Indus Valley seals give us a
pretty good picture of the animals that were important to them:
bulls, rhinoceroses, elephants, tigers, snakes, croco- diles. Their
children fashioned dogs (with collars) out of clay. They had

28. domes- ticated camels, sheep, pigs, goats, and chickens. But no
horses. Whereas the Rig-Veda is “intensely horsey” (pp. 96–
99). Horses are “observed in affection- ate, minute, often gory,
detail. . . . The Vedic people not only had horses but were crazy
about horses.” Horses did not originate on the subcontinent and
do not thrive there; they have to be constantly imported.
Given the depiction of social life in the Vedas, it seems unlikely
these people were the IVC people. Rather, the “Aryans” of the
texts were part of a nomadic population that originated on the
steppes north of the Caucasus Mountains and spread gradually
in the second millennium B.C.E. into Europe, the Mediterra-
nean, the Iranian Plateau, and India. All the languages of North
India—Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, etc.—are closely
related Indo-European languages. Indo-European-speaking
peoples, whose sacred texts were the Vedas, gradually moved
eastward into the Ganges Valley, forming small kingdoms such
as Kuru, Pancala, Kosala, and Videha. Out of these Late Vedic
kingdoms came the tales
Chapter 5 India
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160 Part III: South Asia
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30. Map 5.2 Small kingdoms in the Late Vedic Period, 1100–500
B.C.E.
Videha
Pancala Kosala
India
Kuru
MT KAILASH
Gandhara
LEGEND
Furthest extension of
Aryan settlement
Path of former branch of Indus River
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of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, as well as new religious
ideas in the Upanishads. Kashi was the early name for Varanasi
(Banaras). After 500 B.C.E., Pataliputra would expand as the
capital of the Mauryan Empire.
For the first 500 years of the period we call the Vedic Age, the
newcomers made themselves at home in the upper reaches of the
Indus. They wrote of encountering empty cities and dark-
skinned people called Dasyus whom they scorned and fought.
For the next 500 years (from about 1000 to 450 B.C.E.) they
moved eastward, discovered the great Ganges system
(consisting of the Ganges River and a large number of
tributaries), and began setting up small kingdoms all across
North India. Certain of these kingdoms became famous in the
great epics. In the kingdom of the Kurus, the Pandavas and
Kauravas in the Mahab- harata were two hostile clans. Kosala,
with its capital city Ayodhya, was Rama’s kingdom, and Mithila
was the capital of King Janaka’s (Sita’s father) kingdom; these
are all figures in the Ramayana.
The Vedas and other texts being written in these small

32. kingdoms of the Gan- getic Basin describe a social order based
on three broad social categories called varnas: Brahmans,
Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas, categories that eventually evolve into
the caste system. At this point the varnas appear to be
functional social groups: Brahmans are priests and purohitas
(sacrificers), Kshatriyas are warriors and rulers, and Vaishyas
are everyone else: artisans, traders, and cultivators.
Box 5.3 Two Models for Kings in the Ramayana and
Mahabharata
Rama’s story is told and retold in hundreds of versions
throughout India and Southeast Asia, in poetry and prose,
almost always as a public event. It is chanted by pandits reading
from a text or enacted by traveling troupes of actors or per-
formed by puppets. For the last 150 years the Ramayana has
been an annual event at a site across the Ganges River from
Banaras. In nightly episodes lasting a month, Rama’s 14-year
exile is reenacted by actors and followed by audience-pilgrims
who literally journey from site to site where all the critical
locations, from Ayodhya to Sri Lanka, are reproduced around
the palaces and gardens of the Maharaja of Banaras. The actors
who play Rama, Sita, Lakshman, and Hanuman are svarup,
“forms” or incarnations of the divine figures themselves,
worshipped with garlands and pranams (a gesture of reverence
to the feet of superior beings) at the end of each performance.
Before the final performance of farewell to Rama and Sita, they
are carried by royal elephants to the palace, where the Maharaja
of Banaras, dressed simply as a devotee of Rama, washes their
feet and garlands, and feasts them.
A televised serial in 1987 had over 80 million viewers, the most
watched program ever on Indian television. Paula Richman
(1991:3) describes the reactions of viewers:
It was not just that people watched the show: they became so
involved in it that they were loath to see it end. . . . Sanitation
workers in Jalandhar went on strike because the serial was due

33. to end without depicting the events of the seventh, and final,
book of the Ramayana. The strike spread among sanitation
workers in many major cities in North India, compelling the
government to sponsor the desired episodes in order to prevent
a major health haz- ard. . . . Many people responded to the
image of Rama on the televi-
sion screen as if it were an icon in a temple. They bathed before
watch- ing, garlanded the set like a shrine, and considered the
viewing of Rama to be a religious experience.
After transforming India’s television audience into a devotional
congregation for a year, the Ramayana inspired a more omi-
nous event. On December 6, 1992, Hindu
When the Ramayana was serialized for Indian television, the
entire nation came to a standstill. Viewers treated it as a reli-
gious event, bathing prior to watching and lighting incense on
their television sets. Gift sets of the show came out on DVD,
such as this one of episodes 9–13 (out of 38).
mobs led by right-wing, religiously motivated political parties
demolished a six- teenth-century mosque said to have been built
by the first Mughal emperor, Babur, over the birthplace of Rama
in Ayodhya, setting off Hindu–Muslim riots across India in
which more than 5,000 people were killed.
(continued)
A text that has such life, age after age, is certainly a many-
stranded thing; each gen- eration and class brings its own
preoccupations to the narrative. Gandhi used the sym- bolism of
Ram rajya, Rama’s reign, to mobilize Indians around a vision of
a new golden age of an independent India, using a hymn to
Rama as a nationalist rallying song.

34. However, during the era when the Ramayana was composed and
had its first audiences—sometime between 750 and 500
B.C.E.—it was surely addressing differ- ent social concerns. As
we know from all the epics that describe life in those times (the
Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Harivamsa), it was a
violent era of bloody succession fights and conflict between
small kingdoms. Kingdoms built by strength of arms had not
found ways to “moralize” the exercise of power. The other great
epic from this period, the Mahabharata, is the most pessimistic
of all, describing a war of apocalyptic proportions with horrible
weapons of destruction that ends with eigh- teen million corpses
and the death of every principal character. King Dhritarashtra,
in

35. This sixteenth-century painting portrays the most famous epi-
sode in the Mahabharata in which Prince Arjuna (in chariot on
right, aiming his arrow) is urged into battle against his cousins
by his charioteer, who is Krishna in disguise. The gods watch
from on high.
desolation, says: “This world is savage. How can one
understand the savagery of this world?” and Bhishma replies:
“You are part of it.” The Mahabharata cannot imagine a dharma
for a kshatriya (warrior) other than this one:
[The kshatriya] must always be ready to slaughter the enemy, he
must show brav- ery in battle. . . . Killing is the chief dharma of
one who is a kshatriya. There is no higher duty for him than to
destroy enemies. . . . [A kshatriya] who would satisfy the claims
of his dharma, a king in particular, must fight.
Mahabharata 12.60.13–18
The most famous and beautiful section of the Mahabharata is
the Bhagavad-Gita (the “Song of God”), where the warrior-
prince Arjuna halts in his chariot, filled with dread at the
coming battle where he must kill his cousins or be killed by
them. The god Krishna has taken the form of his charioteer and
urges him on, giving him moral justification for it:
I am time grown old, creating world destruction set in motion to
annihilate the worlds;
even without you, all these warriors arrayed in hostile ranks
will cease to exist.
Therefore, arise and win glory!
Conquer your foes
and fulfill your kingship!
They are already slain by me.
Be just my instrument,
the archer at my side! (Miller 1986:11–12)

36. But the Ramayana has a new vision for kings. Its author,
Valmiki, writing the Rama- yana for kshatriya patrons,
suggested a different dharma for kshatriyas. Rama rejects “the
kshatriya’s code [rajadharma] where unrighteousness and
righteousness go hand in hand, a code that only debased,
vicious, covetous, and evil men observe” (Pollock 1986: 68).
Rama is the first kshatriya prince to renounce artha, power.
When palace intrigue puts his succession into jeopardy, instead
of plunging into warfare to claim his rightful throne—the
Mahabharata solution—he goes into a 14-year exile, liv- ing
like an ascetic in the wilderness. On his return to Ayodhya at
the end, purified by his suffering in exile, empowered by his
asceticism, and made wise enough to gov- ern, Rama ushers in a
utopian age of peace, abundance, and righteousness.
Clearly, there was another vast population in these regions who
were not Indo- Europeans (i.e., Aryans), who spoke other
languages, who supported themselves by cultivation outside the
small kingdoms being founded by the newcomers. These dark-
skinned Dasyus would slowly be absorbed into these kingdoms
as society grew larger and more complicated, and the
vocabulary and idioms of the texts would provide a conceptual
framework for incorporation. But that is a pro- cess that took
hundreds, indeed thousands, of years and is still going on.
Remem-
164Part III: South Asia
Chapter 5 India
163

37. ber the concept of “Zomia” discussed in part II: the zones of
resistance— mountains, jungles, and wastelands—where
independent peoples try to stay out of reach of states. Modern
India still has vast areas of such independent people resisting
absorption into the caste system, especially in eastern and
central India. Another body of texts attests to the emergence of
persons discontented with urban life in the small kingdoms,
opting instead for a lifestyle of spiritual practice and
renunciation. The Upanishads bring new religious ideas that
chal- lenge the dominance of priestly Brahmans and their
mastery of ritual on behalf of kings. The forest seemed to call to
people in the crowded cities of the late Vedic age. We hear of
forest-dwelling sages such as Valmiki, who tells the story of
Rama’s exile. Bands of renouncers traveled together, or
individual mystics holed up in caves and mountaintops seeking
a new reality that breaks with much of the worldview of the
Vedas and the Brahmans. Among these was Gautama (the
Buddha), who as a prince in the small kingdom of Sakya, had
everything a man of the Vedic age could want, but outside his
palace he encountered sickness, old age, and death, and decided
to join a band of renouncers to escape this world. (The main
story of the Buddha is told in the next chapter.) This was
certainly a critique of contemporary society. The state, it seems,
could not be everything to everyone. While marginal tribal
popula- tions tried to keep their distance and many of those at
the heart of it embraced
renunciation, nothing could stop the growing power of state
society.The Mauryan-Guptan Empires (323 B.C.E.–550 C.E.)
A century and a half after the death of the Buddha, Alexander
the Great invaded India in the west, the first firm date we have
in Indian history (i.e., 326 B.C.E.). Historians traveling with
Alexander reported the marvels of India: trees that produced
wool (cotton), trees so gigantic that 500 troops could shelter
under each one at noon, vast numbers of monkeys, and a large
city, Taxila, governed by good laws whose king welcomed
Alexander with kindness. They provided lengthy descriptions of

38. the customs of the country and described a society of multiple
castes and categories specialized by occupation. They noted
three kinds of religious men: Brahmans, who were ritualists and
advisors to kings; Buddhists, philosophers who were
contentious and fond of argument; and naked ascetics who lived
in the open air.
The small northern states were finally conquered and unified in
323 B.C.E. by Chandragupta Maurya, whose capital was at
Pataliputra (now Patna) in a region south of the Ganges River
known as Magadha (now south Bihar). At its peak, the Mauryan
Empire was larger than any Indian government until Brit- ish
times. A manuscript in Sanskrit discovered in 1905, probably
unread for a thousand years, revealed the real world of political
power underlying all the ancient religious texts that seems to
portray an “empire of the spirit.” It proved to be a text on
political power resembling Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or
Machia- velli’s The Prince—although written sometime during
the Mauryan Empire by a royal minister named Kautilya.
“Kautilya makes Machiavelli look like Mother
Teresa,” writes Doniger (2009:202). This work, the
Arthashastra, advocates not only military might but “wit and
intellect as well as guile, cunning, and deceit”—surveillance
and even assassination in the practice of statecraft (Khil- nani
2016:32). Here’s one example: impress people with your
brilliance by pre- dicting someone is going to die, then have
him killed. Kautilya assumed a world of kings in perpetual
conflict, of mandalas (circles) of competing inter- ests, where
spy craft was essential, bureaucrats were likely to be corrupt (he
identified 40 forms of embezzlement), and royal power needed
to be autho- rized by priestly ritual action. However, even with
all this political realism, kings needed to seem indifferent to
power and wealth for its own sake.
Kautilya comes as a shock up against the more common
idealized picture of ancient kings. Think especially of the

39. beloved Rama, whose golden age still stands as some kind of
moral political idea in modern India. Another king, forgotten
for ages in India but revered throughout the Buddhist world
much as Rama is revered in India, was Ashoka, known in his
time as King Piyadassi, “beloved-of-the- gods.” He inherited
the vast Mauryan Empire built by his grandfather and pushed it
further south in his early years in bloody wars against southern
kingdoms such as the Kalinga. Legends tell of his conversion to
Buddhism and repentance for the suffering his wars inflicted,
followed by development of a new moral code for kings, a
rajadhamma (rajadharma) of tolerance and compassion for his
subjects and improvements—we might call them
infrastructure—to make social life function better. He built a
road connecting the western cities like Taxila across the
agricul- tural lands of North India to his capital at Pataliputra
that came to be called the Grand Trunk Road (and still exists).
Along its route he planted banyan trees and mango groves and
dug ponds and built resting places for travelers.
Ashoka propagated Buddhism as the moral compass of his
empire in vivid and concrete ways. He is said to have divided
the remains of the Buddha into 84,000 caskets and built 84,000
stupas (among them were some of the stupas opened by Charles
Masson in Afghanistan) across his empire to hold them. These
became centers of spiritual power and merit, functioning like
temples to draw Buddhist pilgrims. He also had constructed
pillars and rock monuments memorializing his values at the
borders and in important centers of the empire. These continue
to be discovered; the number stands at 33 today (see box 5.4).
The inscriptions are in brahmi, a script created toward the end
of the first mil- lennium B.C.E., but gradually lost over the next
centuries, so that for long the monuments could not be read,
even by the greatest scholars.1
These rock edicts appear to be personal to Ashoka, often written
in his very voice, and give a glimpse of the Buddhist values he
extolled. For example, Rock Edict IV:
Promulgation of dhamma has increased that which did not exist

40. over many centuries: abstention from killing, kindness to
creatures, respect to relatives, respect for Brahmans and
Shramanas [ascetics], and obedience to mother, father and
elders. This dhamma conduct has increased in diverse ways, and
will increase more thanks to King Piyadassi, beloved of the
gods.
Box 5.4 The Words of Ashoka, from the Thirteenth Rock
Edict
When the king, devanampiya [“Beloved of the Gods,” i.e.,
Ashoka], had been con- secrated eight years, Kalinga was
conquered, 150,000 people were deported, 100,000 were killed,
and many times that number died. But after the conquest of
Kalinga, deva- nampiya began to follow dharma, to love
dharma, and to give instruction in dharma. Now devanampiya
regrets the conquest of Kalinga, for when an independent
country is conquered people are killed, they die, or are
deported, and that devanampiya finds very painful and grievous.
And this he finds even more grievous—that all the inhabit- ants
. . . suffer violence, murder, and separation from their loved
ones. . . . The par- ticipation of all men in common suffering is
grievous to devanampiya. Moreover there is no land, except that
of the Greeks, where groups of Brahmans and ascetics are not
found, or where men are not members of one sect or another.
For all beings devanampiya desires security, self-control, calm
of mind, and gentle- ness. Devanampiya considers that the
greatest victory is the victory of dharma; and this he has won
here and even 500 leagues beyond his frontiers in the realm of
the Greek king Antiochus, and beyond Antiochus among the
four kings Ptolemy, Antigo- nus, Magas, and Alexander. Even
where the envoys of devanampiya have not been sent, men hear
of the way in which he follows and teaches dharma, and they
too fol- low it and will follow it. Thus he achieves a universal
conquest, and conquest always gives a feeling of pleasure; yet it
is but a slight pleasure, for devanampiya only looks on that

41. which concerns the next life as of great importance.
I have had this inscription of dharma engraved that all my sons
and grandsons may not seek to gain new victories, that in
whatever victories they may gain they may prefer forgiveness
and light punishment, that they may consider the only victory
the victory of dharma, which is of value both in this world and
the next, and that all their pleasure may be in dharma.
Source: Modified from William Theodore De Bary, ed., Sources
of Indian Tradition. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1958, p. 144.
Some of the stone pillars were topped with four lions facing the
four direc- tions, with a wheel directly beneath them. The wheel
is the “wheel of dhamma,” the wheel that carries the teachings
of the Buddha across the land. Ashoka was a chakravartin, a
“universal ruler” over all the earth. That lion cap- ital is now
the symbol of the Republic of India, seen on the rupee note, on
the flag, and on public documents.
The Gupta Empire (320–550C.E.). After Ashoka’s death, the
Mauryan Empire dissolved, and there followed 500 years of
decentralization. During this time a thriving coastal trade took
Indian cultural influence—Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Indic
ideas of kingship—to Southeast Asia, especially to Thai- land
and Cambodia. But in 324 C.E. the empire was rebuilt from
Pataliputra on new lines. This empire, the Gupta, is often called
the “classical era” because of its inventiveness in art,
architecture, literature, science, and mathematics. Why
do the stars seem to move westward? Because the earth rotates
on an axis, wrote Aryabhata in the fifth century C.E. Other
thinkers developed trigonome- try, defined zero, and calculated
the solar year accurately. During this time the great narrative
cave art at Ajanta, depicting scenes from the life of the Buddha,

42. was produced. The Gupta age gradually reembraced
Brahmanical orthodoxy, returned to the Vedic rituals of
kingship including the dramatic spectacle of the horse sacrifice,
and reinvigorated the caste system.
We have a helpful firsthand account of life in Gupta India from
an unex- pected source: A Chinese Buddhist pilgrim known as
Faxian traveled all the way across Central Asia and down into
North India in search of authentic Buddhist knowledge and
texts, departing China in 399 and returning by sea around 410.
In his memoir, A Record of the Buddhist Kingdoms, he
described life in Pataliputra, kings who hosted him, and large
monasteries filled with shaven- headed monks. He witnessed
royal ceremonies honoring the Indic gods, bodhi- sattvas, and
the Buddha, led by Brahmans. Buddhism and Brahmanism were
equally honored, but not for long; two centuries later, another
even more famous Chinese pilgrim, Xuanzang, made the same
journey, but by this time (627 C.E.) the Gupta dynasty had
collapsed and Xuanzang encountered empty monasteries and a
much reduced Buddhist presence. (The religious import of these
journeys is discussed in more detail in chapter 6.)Medieval
Period (550–1210 C.E.)
Another period of decentralization began at the end of the
Gupta period, but these “between” eras were important moments
in Indian history. Numer- ous local kingdoms and monarchies
arose, such as in western India, with a pro- liferation of ruling
lineages that became the Rajputs (Chattopadhyaya 1997), who
claimed lineage glory and legitimacy by projecting genealogies
back to the sun or to various gods.
The caste system expanded during this period and achieved
much of the complexity we have known in recent times. The old
Vedic idea of varna got stretched, reinterpreted, and applied to
new groups of people being brought under the control of local
kingdoms. As independent tribes and cultivators got pulled into
the orbit of small states, they were assigned a position in the
varna system. Some warlike groups became Kshatriyas, but
most new groups were identified as Shudras. To the original

43. three varnas—Brahmans (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors and
rulers), and Vaishyas (merchants, artisans)—was added a fourth
category: Shudra. Vaishyas came to refer primarily to mer-
chants, and Shudras were everyone else: artisans, servants,
agriculturalists. These were little more than labels to show the
rank of groups within society as a whole and the overall
structure of dominance and subordination, but the labels did not
constitute actual communities of intermarrying families; those
groups were called jati, that is, the actual group we call “caste”
in English (see the section titled “The Caste System”).
Two Rajput warriors in a wall fresco in Jodhpur, Rajasthan.
Also during these centuries, Hinduism was changing, or as some
argue, it was actually coming into existence, depending on how
one wants to think of the Brahman-dominated practices of
previous centuries all the way back to the Vedic Age. Where
Brahman ritualism had been court- and household-based, there
emerged a new intense devotionalism to particular gods for
whom tem- ples were built as centers of worship. The most
popular deities were not exactly new, but newly dominant,
especially three: Shiva, Vishnu, and the divine femi- nine, Devi
(Shakti). These high gods and goddesses were known through
com- pilations of mythology about them in the many Puranas,
and numerous other deities were declared to be incarnations of a
single high god. For example, Kali, Durga, Sati, Sita, Saraswati,
Chinnamasta, and Gauri are all forms of Devi. Vishnu had 10
incarnations, including Krishna, Ram, and the Buddha.The
Indo-Islamic Period (Twelfth to Nineteenth Centuries)
The Indo-Islamic period began with a series of hit-and-run
incursions from the west, but finally produced two settled
historic periods in which rich hybrid cultures were created by
the intermixture of Afghan-Turkish-Persian-Mongol- Indian

44. cultural strands. Everything was affected: society, religion, art,
and architecture, so that we can speak of a civilization that
became “Indo-Islamic.” For most of this time, local populations
lived peacefully together in towns and
villages across the subcontinent, their temples, mosques, saints’
tombs, and shrines patronized by everyone.
By the eleventh century, India had become “an ocean world-
economy” with important trade to West Asia and to China (Bose
and Jalal 1998). Arab traders settled along India’s west coast,
bringing the first inklings of Islam but not really intent on
religious proselytizing. Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India 17
times between 1000 and 1027, primarily going after treasure
from India’s great temples and monasteries, slaughtering
“shaven-headed (Buddhist) monks” along the way. By the end
of this period, Buddhism had disappeared from India, the
surviving monks fleeing north to Nepal or south to Sri Lanka.
These invaders were ethnic Turks, who were moving from
Central Asia not only into India but also westward, where they
founded the Ottoman Empire.
In 1192 Mohammad Ghori, a Turk, established the first
Sultanate in Delhi. This was the beginning of cultural
assimilation and fusion that grew into Indo- Islamic culture.
Though as Muslims they brought Sharia law with them, they did
not impose it on the indigenous population, who continued to be
governed by local traditions. They brought other new ideas from
West Asia: a fierce egalitari- anism that resisted the caste
system and therefore made Islam appealing to many of the
lowest social orders, although they could not entirely resist the
hier- archizing influence of caste, especially in relation to low-
caste converts to Islam. They contributed a strong belief in
monotheism, in contrast to India’s polythe- ism. The newcomers
were mostly Sunni, but the mystical form of Islam known as
Sufism better suited Indian sensibilities. They brought new
forms of architec- ture: the dome, the mosque, the tomb. Kings

45. were not god-kings, as in Indic forms of kingship, but humans
who ruled by Allah’s will, as the Prophet Muhammad himself
had been not only the final Prophet but also a warrior chief. The
Mughals replaced the Sultanate in 1526, when a Turk named
Babur, who was descended from the Mongol Genghis Khan on
his mother’s side, defeated the last of the Delhi sultans. The
Mughals expanded their control over India through a century of
acquisitions and created a rich and brilliant court in Delhi
where the so-called “Great Mughals” patronized poetry, art, and
archi-
tecture for the next two centuries.
No personality radiates from Indian history with the vibrancy of
Akbar. He was a contemporary of Elizabeth I and part of a new
cultural strand in India for whom the actions of kings were
worthy themes to write about; therefore, we know a great deal
about him. At the age of 13, in 1556, he inherited the Mughal
Empire founded by his grandfather Babur. By his 20s, he had
consoli- dated and expanded the empire by conquest north and
south so that, by his death in 1605, his domain stretched from
Afghanistan to Bengal, from the Himalayas to the Deccan. India
has had conquerors aplenty; it is not Akbar the warrior who
leaps from the pages of history, but a vivid personality whose
actual face is known from dozens of paintings and whose life
and times were recorded in admiring detail by contemporary
writers. His biography, the Akbar- nama, was written in his
lifetime by Abu’l Fazl and illustrated by court painters
chosen and personally overseen by Akbar himself (see the
image on the facing page). The 19-year-old emperor is at the
epicenter of one scene in which a charging bull elephant chases
another across a pontoon bridge. Holding him- self by a bare
foot hooked under the harness of “Sky-Rocket” (Hawa’i), the
meanest, most wicked elephant in India, Akbar has driven him
against an equally aggressive elephant, now fleeing in defeat.
The pontoon bridge breaks under the fury of their charge,

46. throwing men into the water on either side, while others rush to
pull the emperor from the danger he has put himself in.
Akbar maintained a workshop of over a hundred artists who
painted epi- sodes from past and recent history, recorded scenes
of Hindu life, and exhaus-
Emperor Akbar commis- sioned an illustrated chron- icle of his
reign, called the Akbarnama, which was produced between 1590
and 1595. This painting was part of a two-page composition,
showing an event when Akbar mounted his most difficult
elephant, Hawa’i, then faced off with an equally difficult
elephant of his enemy on a bridge of boats, which collapses
under the weight. The artists were Basawan and Chetar.
tively illustrated events from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, and
Harivamsa, which Akbar had translated for the Muslim elite. He

47. sat for his own portraits and also had all his noblemen sit for
theirs, so that paintings of the emperor holding darbar (court)
are filled with faces that really sat before the emperor. But the
Akbarnama is the masterpiece, a work in 12 volumes with 1,400
illustra- tions, which took 15 years to complete (Welch
1978:40). These remarkably detailed paintings are all the more
amazing for being miniatures. The scene of Akbar and the two
elephants was only 13" by 8". They were painted in opaque
watercolor with brushes made of a few hairs plucked from
kittens or baby squirrels, which fit on the fingertip of the artist.
The glint of sunlight burnishing a North Indian scene was
accomplished with pounded gold mixed with a little silver or
copper.
Akbar was the greatest of the “Great Mughals,” a line of
brilliant, long- lived, cultured, often enlightened, and frequently
cruel rulers whose zenith were the four men, Akbar, Jahangir,
Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb, whose four reigns spanned the
years from 1556 to 1707. Later Mughals continued to patronize
the arts, but it was the “Great Mughals” whose patronage was
responsible for the most significant examples of Indo-Islamic
architecture such as the Taj Mahal, commissioned by the
“Engineer Shah”—Shah Jahan—for his favorite wife, Mumtaz
Mahal.
After the “Four Great Mughals,” weaker rulers followed in the
eighteenth century as the British were maneuvering into India to
trade. The “Last Mughal,” Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in exile in
Burma in 1862.British Colonial Period (Eighteenth to Twentieth
Centuries)
On December 31, 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal
charter to the East India Company, a group of 215 London
merchants who put up shares to form one of the first joint stock
companies in the world. (The Dutch had organized one the year
before.) The company was given a monopoly on trade to the
East, espe- cially India, China, and Indonesia, where the Dutch
dominated the lucrative spice trade. Eleven years later, an
English representative, Sir Thomas Roe, was in the Mughal

48. court of Emperor Jahangir, petitioning for a monopoly on trade
in India with promises of rare goods from Europe in return for
permission to build factories (i.e., warehouses and trade
centers) in various strategic spots in India. Over the next
century and a half, the East India Company expanded its
factories in India and squeezed out its European competitors,
the Dutch, Portu- guese, and French.
Increasingly powerful in India, the Company became a de facto
political
entity, supported by their own private army and with forts in
Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, competing with the many Indian
princes as the Mughals slowly lost control of their empire. The
Company was nicknamed “John Company Raj,” governing large
sections in the vicinity of their forts and competing polit- ically
and militarily with local princes. In two major battles in 1757
and 1764, the Company under Robert Clive defeated the Mughal
Emperor Shah Alam II
172Part III: South Asia
Chapter 5 India
171
and was granted a vast territory to rule and right to collect
revenues; this grant is known as the Diwani of Bengal. The East
India Company was now a great Raj of India, in control of a
region that included much of what is now Bengal, Bihar, Orissa,
and Bangladesh.
For the next century the Company learned to govern India under
a mix of indigenous and British customs and laws. They
attempted to rationalize taxation and land revenues, reshaping
the structure of land use and the landed class. They built a large
army based on a small number of English officers and a large

49. force of sepoys, that is, “native” regiments. However, in 1857 a
bloody rebellion broke out (called the “First War of
Independence” or the “Indian Mutiny,” depending on your point
of view), in which atrocities on all sides included the slaughter
of women and children. This was the end of John Company Raj,
as the British Crown took over direct control and Victoria
became Empress of India.
Under British rule, modern institutions in education, medicine,
land reform, and democratic values produced a Western-
educated Indian elite with an eye on ultimate independence. In
1885 the Indian National Congress was formed, fostering
nationalist sentiments over the next half century under the key
concept of swaraj—self-government. Under the leadership of
Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah,
and after World War II had exhausted Britain, swaraj was
attained on August 15, 1947 (see chapter 12).Era of
Independence
When the flags of the Republic of India and the Islamic
Republic of Paki- stan were raised over Delhi and Lahore, the
British Indian Empire was divided into two (and later three)
nations, with large Hindu and Muslim majorities in their
respective nations, but with substantial minorities of the other
group. However, these were not the only sources of identity
politics causing friction. There were 562 “princely states” that
had never been entirely absorbed by the British government of
India and whose rulers had to be retired so that all of India
could be part of the republic. There were numerous regional and
linguis- tic divisions. The 29 current states (there are also seven
union territories) are the product of no less than 12 redrawings
of boundaries to satisfy “linguistic nationalism,” the latest in
2014. No one language, faith, or race holds India together; yet it
is the world’s largest democracy, a secular state with a constitu-
tion guaranteeing free speech, a free press, and equality before
the law. It did NOT ban the caste system (our next topic), as
many people believe, but it did ban “untouchability” and some
of the worst offenses of caste.

50. The Caste System
Caste is a controversial topic. It is indiscreet to refer to it in
public settings. It is rude to ask a person’s caste. Many Hindu
organizations deny that caste is intrinsic to the Hindu religion
(e.g., HAF 2011). The pervasive hierarchy of the caste system is
contradicted by the principle of equality under the law of the
Indian constitution. Scholars have written about the “eternal”
caste system, the “immutable” caste system, as if it has existed
unchanged forever. Many people think the constitution and the
law have abolished it. Some claim it no longer exists.
Yet, the caste system is ever present in the background. People
guess each other’s caste if they don’t already know it. Surnames
often reveal it, and in vil- lage India, everyone knows
everyone’s caste. Politicians play to caste blocs, and people
vote in caste blocs. Matrimonial advertisements almost always
state or imply the caste of the girl (or boy) they are looking for.
Yet in a nation of 1.3 billion people, caste is still a central
organizing principle that impinges on almost all identities (even
Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Chris- tians, who
all formally oppose it but have been unsuccessful in totally
escaping from it) and provides the principal social identity and
local community for the vast majority of Hindus. It is also
considered a social problem requiring gov- ernment efforts of
uplift and remediation for the two hundred million Dalits
(“oppressed,” formerly known as “untouchables”), roughly 20
percent of the population. The Indian constitution recognizes
“Scheduled Castes” and “Scheduled Tribes,” both historically
oppressed groups that have legally defined rights such as
reserved seats in government and places in universities. There
are also “Other Backward Castes,” which seems like an
aspersion until you realize they have certain privileges coming
out of the reservations systems, which have led to even some
high-caste groups claiming to be “Backwards” in order to claim
these advantages (see the section, “Social Justice: Reservations

51. for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes”).Ancient Sources
on the Caste System
The earliest sources on caste are the Vedas and other early
texts, most of them the products of Brahman writers and
therefore conveying a Brahmanical social ideology. Do these
texts portray the actual world of the times, or an ideal world of
the Brahmans’ imagining? We cannot firmly answer that
question, other than to point out that over centuries these texts
took on a normative role that acted back on society by forcing
conformity. Even if they started out ideal- istically, they ended
up by defining the moral order for society. In this sense it is
correct to say that the caste system is the moral order for much
of Indian soci- ety, past and present.
Take, for instance, the Myth of the Cosmic Sacrifice, found in
the Rig-Veda (10.90). This is only one of several creation
myths, but it is the one most rele- vant to the social order (see
box 5.5). Purusha is some kind of primeval man or cosmic being
whose sacrifice by the gods—who seem to already exist—brings
the whole universe into existence. They kill and dismember
him; his mouth becomes the priests (Brahmans, who utter the
sacred speech); his arms are the Kshatriya (warriors, kings); his
thighs the Vaishya (the common people, food producers), and
his feet the Shudras (servants). This order is not horizontal but
vertical: Brahmans are superior to Kshatriyas, Kshatriyas to
Vaishyas, and
Box 5.5 The Cosmic Sacrifice
When the gods performed the sacrifice with Purusha as the
offering, spring was the clarified butter, summer the fuel,
autumn the oblation. They anointed Purusha, the sacrifice born
at the beginning, upon the sacred grass. With him the gods,
perfected beings, and sages sacrificed. From that sacrifice in
which everything was offered, the melted fat was collected, and
he made it into those beasts who live in the air, in the forest,
and in villages. From that sacrifice in which everything was

52. offered, the verses and chants were born, the meters were born
from it, and from it the formulas were born. Horses were born
from it, and those other animals that have two rows of teeth;
cows were born from it, and from it goats and sheep were born.
When they divided Purusha, into how many parts did they
apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms and
thighs and feet? His mouth became the Brah- min; his arms
were made into the Kshatriya (warrior); his thighs the Vaishyas
(the peo- ple); and from his feet the Shudras (servants) were
born. The moon was born from his mind; from his eye the sun
was born. Indra and Agni came from his mouth, and from his
vital breath the Wind was born. From his navel the middle realm
of space arose; from his head the sky evolved. From his two feet
came the earth, and the quarters of the sky from his ear. Thus
they set the worlds in order.
There were seven enclosing-sticks for him and thrice seven
fuel-sticks, when the gods, performing the sacrifice, bound
Purusha as the sacrificial beast. With the sacri- fice the gods
sacrificed to the sacrifice. These were the first dharmas. These
very pow- ers reached the dome of the sky where dwell the
perfected beings, the ancient gods.
Rig Veda 10.90
Source: Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, 1988.
Vaishyas to Shudras. From this same sacrifice came not only the
four human orders but all the beasts of the air (birds), forests
(wild animals), and villages (domesticated animals), as well as
the sacred language of verses, chants, and formulas. So, we are
to assume, the four hierarchical categories of humans were
established at the very founding of the universe, the core of the
human social order, on a par with the animal species.
This four-way classification is known as the varna system, a
simple for- mula that can be stretched in numerous ways; it
provides four slots to which all kinds of social groups can be
assigned. As new social groups or farming com- munities or

53. tribes were encountered and absorbed by society, their
subgroups were assigned to one of these four categories. In
South India, the actual groups were different from those in the
north or west, yet the varna system served well enough to
categorize groups into the hierarchical order so that an unknown
group’s place in the hierarchy could be recognized from any
part of India.
However, these varna categories are not castes. Though there
are four main varnas, there are thousands of castes, and these
are the actual relevant commu- nities for individuals and
families. In any one area there may only be a handful
or a few dozen castes, all interconnected through occupation
and the varna hierarchy. The word caste comes from Portuguese
for “race” or “breed,” which somewhat captures the actual
Indian term, jati, which means “birth” and is also the term for
“kind” or “species,” as in a kind of being or a species of animal
(Marriott and Inden 1977). Cows, dogs, tigers, Brahmans,
Rajputs, Chamars are all jatis: kinds of beings, each with
respective characteristics; they have dis- positions, customs,
lifestyles, occupations, food preferences, and limitations on
mating. The differences among animal species appear to be the
model for dif- ferences among human species. Of course with
animals these characteristics are biological while among
humans they can be altered or ignored. But they shouldn’t be.
That’s the conventional and ancient morality. The sense is that
this is a given, natural, and moral order; it exists from the
foundations of the universe; and the word for that is dharma.
Dharma is also sometimes translated as “reli- gion,” or
“morality,” or “righteousness,” or the “cosmic order.” The
ancient texts that outline these principles are known as the
Dharmashastras—the teachings on dharma. And dharma is not
universal; it is specific to the social units known as castes.
In the Bhagavad-Gita, Prince Arjuna on the battlefield is
reluctant to go forward and kill his own relatives, the Kauravas,

54. with whom he is at war. His charioteer, who happens to be
Krishna in disguise, reminds him of his duty: “Killing is the
chief dharma of one who is a Kshatriya.” It is not you who kills,
but me, he says; “be just my instrument, the archer at my side!”
And he adds: “How many times should I remind you that it is
better to do one’s duty [dharma], though imperfect, than the
duty of another even well performed?” Though this statement
encourages one to embrace one’s own jati-dharma, else- where
in the Gita Krishna says: “All beings are equal to Me. There is
none especially hateful to Me, nor one who is especially dear to
Me. But all those who worship Me with devotion are in Me, and
so am I in them” (Bhagavad- Gita 9.29). In other words, there is
a higher equality—being beloved by Krishna—that transcends
the caste system.
Social processes that evolved as moral imperatives over
centuries make it extremely difficult to escape them. There is no
changing the caste identity into which one is born—everyone
will continue to identify you with your caste; your family will
ensure that your spouse is from the same group, your children
will have the same identity, and no matter what you accomplish
in life, you will die as a member of your caste.Economics of
Caste: The Jajmani System
In the past, and still to a certain degree in the present for many
people, there was an occupation associated with jati. Name an
occupation—priest, pot- ter, goldsmith, carpenter, farmer,
sweeper, scribe, bangle maker, cowherd, gar- dener, barber,
dancer, musician, thief—all were considered hereditary jatis.
Some were considered “high,” some “low,” depending on the
purity or impu- rity of the occupation. Many of these hereditary
occupations were viewed as
rights similar to labor unions; in many villages, for example, a
rich landowner could not cut his own hair because that was the
barber’s right. The barber’s wife was entitled to aid the
landlord’s and the Brahman’s wives in childbirth. In exchange

55. for these services there were customary benefits: a bit of land to
work, a small share of the landowner’s harvest, hand-me-down
clothes, meals. These exchanges of services and benefits were
crucial for survival and the basis of the nonmonetized village
economy. Yet, not everyone today will actually engage in this
occupation, even though there is believed to be a natural
affinity toward that kind of work among people born into that
caste.
It is in India’s 640,000 villages, where 68 percent of Indians
live (according to the 2011 census), that the caste system is
most evident. In the mid-twentieth century, when American
anthropologists began doing research in India, it was to the
villages they headed. In India they were keenly aware that one
village cannot stand for a whole civilization, yet what went on
in those villages was a natural starting point, and
anthropological methods could best be applied. Other scholars
would have to study urban centers, the state, the texts, and his-
tory. As a result, early anthropology in India emphasized the
caste system that so deeply organized village life.
This young man is a member of the potter (Kumhar) caste in a
north Indian town. His caste has a monopoly on making pottery
of all kinds (here he is making roof tiles). He is married to a
girl of the same caste. Occupational specialization was a key
characteristic of the caste system and its local economy for
centuries, although it is now possible for people to leave these
hereditary occupations for new ones.
Though the specific set of castes varied from region to region,
many fea- tures turned up almost everyplace. In a typical village
you find a dominant caste that is the major landowner, owning
much or all the land, or even the whole village. In Madhopur
(Cohn 1955) and Sirkanda (Berreman 1963) it was the Rajputs.
In Kishan Garhi it was the Jats (Marriott 1955). In Kumbapettai

56. (Gough 1954) and in Karimpur (Wiser and Wiser 1963) it was
Brahmans. In Pahansu it was Gujars (Raheja 1988). In Rampura
it was Okkaligas (Srinivas 1963). Note that these villages are
distributed across India: Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Mysore,
Madras.
These dominant castes may be high or low in the varna
hierarchy, but they are invariably powerful as a result of the
resources they control and, usually, the number of their
households. For example, in Rampura village, the dominant
Okkaliga caste was by far the largest, with 735 persons; the
next largest was the Kuruba, a sheepherding caste of 235
persons. The Okkaligas were the most powerful caste, but not
the highest ranking; that was the Brahmans with a grand total of
15 persons. Because of their control of the most crucial
resource—land—the dominant caste is linked with other village
castes in a complex economic and ritual network. The others
provide extra labor during tilling and harvesting and provide
services to the landowners’ households. The landowner is the
patron (jajman) and the economic system that connects his caste
with others is known as the jajmani system. It is about
economic and rit- ual interdependence.Case Study: Two
Hundred Years of Caste in a North Indian Village
In contemporary India, these village jajmani systems have
undergone changes that have been documented by more recent
anthropologists. A particu- larly vivid example comes from the
state of Bihar in the northeastern part of India (Chakravarti
1986, 2001a, 2001b). The village of Aganbigha was founded
200 years ago by a man named Ishwar, a member of the
Bhumihar caste, who was granted land by the maharaja. He
immediately set about assembling a full complement of serving
castes to establish a classic jajmani system. These Bhu- mihars
considered themselves too high ranking to personally cultivate
the land, so they brought in lower-caste cultivators to actually
work it. Under British law, both the Bhumihars and these lower
caste cultivators had rights in the land.
In order to expand cultivation to marshy land nearby, the

57. Bhumihars brought in members of a tribal group, the Santhals,
to reclaim the land, work- ing on it for half the produce.
However, when the Santhals began to claim offi- cial
cultivation rights to this land, the Bhumihar landowners
attempted to replace them with Yadavas, a more pliable caste
willing to accept their place in the caste hierarchy. At the same
time the Bhumihar landowners began calling themselves
“farmers” (kisans) rather than the more prestigious
“landowners” (zamindar) in order to claim land rights for
themselves. Throughout the 1930s there was a great deal of
agitation by various agricultural castes over land rights
led by the reforming Swami Sahananda, himself a Bhumihar, in
the mode of Mahatma Gandhi.
In the 1960s, agriculture began to be restructured along
capitalist lines. Trac- tors put plows out of business, along with
the farmers who previously owned them and plowed fields for
the landowners. Previously it took 60 days to plow 25 acres
with oxen; with a tractor it could be done in 20 hours. The
Yadavas, San- thals, and other farming castes were reduced to
day laborers at the lowest possi- ble wages, as the Bhumihars
controlled more and more land. Meanwhile, Bhumihars became
more and more powerful in regional politics; one of their
members became the chief minister of Bihar. In 2010 a rumor
circulated that a bill was being considered that would
redistribute land away from Bhumihar landowners to the
impoverished former cultivators; but the chief minister sided
with the Bhumihars, declaring this was just a vicious rumor and
whoever was spreading it was “sowing seeds of hatred and
discontent” (Ahmad 2010).
This case study, which could be multiplied hundredfold,
illustrates the con- tinuing relevance of caste identities in rural
economics. It is still true that “the circumstances of birth into a
low-ranking caste tend to determine their social and material
conditions” (Chakravarti 2001b:1459). (For more on the ritual

58. aspects of the caste system, see chapter 6.)Social Justice:
Reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
Earlier we described the caste system ideologically and
economically, but both views are from the top: the Brahman
(mythological) view, and the Kshatriya (landholder) view. The
system looks very different from the bottom, from those who
have suffered for centuries under the disabilities of caste.
Perhaps the best way to convey the experience of untouchability
is by story. The following was told by the great leader of the
untouchables, Ambed- kar, in 1936:
A most recent event is reported from the village Chakwara in
Jaipur state. It seems from the reports that have appeared in the
newspapers that an untouchable of Chakwara who had returned
from a pilgrimage had arranged to give a dinner to his fellow
untouchables of the village as an act of religious piety. The host
desired to treat the guests to a sumptuous meal and the items
served included ghee (butter). But while the assembly of
untouchables was engaged in partaking of the food, the Hindus
in their hundreds, armed with lathis [heavy sticks used as
weapons], rushed to the scene, despoiled the food and
belaboured the untouchables who left the food they were served
with and ran away for their lives. And why was this murderous
assault committed on defenseless untouchables? The reason
given is that the untouchable host was imprudent enough to
serve ghee and his untouchable guests were foolish enough to
taste it. Ghee is undoubtedly a luxury for the rich. But no one
would think that the consumption of ghee was a mark of high
social status. The Hindus of Chakwara thought other- wise and
in righteous indignation avenged themselves for the wrong done
to them by the untouchables, who insulted them by treating ghee
as an item of food which they ought to have known could not be
theirs, consistently with the dignity of the Hindus. This means
that an untouchable must not use ghee even if he can afford to
buy it, since it is an act of arrogance towards the Hindus.

59. (Ambedkar 1987)
This story could be multiplied a million times over in India’s
history, and although this event took place in 1936, these
attitudes still prevailed 66 years later in the same village where
untouchables were still not allowed to bathe in the public pond.
They organized a protest, demanding their rights according to
the Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989. More than 50 of the
Dalits were injured by caste Hindus who resisted these efforts
(Prakash 2003).
The framers of the Indian constitution understood that centuries
of institu- tionalized and religiously enforced inequality could
not easily be mitigated, and so it established a system of
affirmative action to ensure that members of oppressed castes
and tribes would have opportunities for education, social
advancement, and representation in government. A list, or
“schedule,” of his- torically oppressed castes was created, as
was another list of oppressed tribes. Special opportunities
became available to members of these Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes, such as reserved seats in universities,
scholarships and loans, and specified numbers of seats in
legislative bodies. These advantages soon became politically
hot, as other castes claimed that they, too, were disad-
vantaged. To accommodate these groups, a category called
“Other Backward Castes” was created. Just how complicated,
and contested, this whole issue is can be seen in box 5.6 (on the
following page), which describes a man of the powerful Patidar
caste in Gujarat who is seeking “Backward” status.
It is a good question how much these remedies have helped the
groups they were aimed to aid. Very often the reserved seats at
universities go unfilled, while qualified higher caste applicants
are turned away. Poverty remains very high, and untouchability
discrimination is still very common. Perhaps the greatest asset
of Dalit communities is the voting box. They are a powerful
bloc of two hundred million voters who are wooed by both
major parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (now in office) and the
Congress Party. A member of the Dalit Koli caste from Bihar,

60. Ram Nath Kovind, was voted in as president of India in June
2017. Although this is largely a ceremonial role, it is presti-
gious and indicates the political influence Dalit groups now
wield.
The Dharma of Women
Traditional India was a patriarchal society in which males were
dominant and played public roles while women were sheltered
in domestic roles in the home “behind the curtain,” that is, in
parda (purdah). The higher the status of the family and caste,
the more extreme was the seclusion of women. Con- versely, the
lower the status of the family, the more women may leave the
home, often doing public jobs like sweeping and carrying loads.
While modern
Box 5.6 Dominant Caste Seeks Backward Status
It was a headline story on August 26, 2016: “Riots Break Out in
India Over a Domi- nant Caste’s Attempt to Gain ‘Backward’
Status.” A young man of the Patidar caste, one of the most
prosperous and powerful castes in the state of Gujarat, has
become leader of a movement to downgrade the status of his
caste. Down is not the usual direction of social aspirations.
Any list of famous Patels (i.e., Patidars) will include high
achievers all over the world. In the US, Patels are said to own
25 percent of the motel industry. They are big players in the
international diamond trade. In Gujarat, they are 20 percent of
the pop- ulation, and in rural areas they are the dominant caste,
controlling most of the land. Their new, downward aspirations
only make sense in relation to India’s effort to bring fairness
and equal opportunity to communities long depressed by the
caste system.
Historically, the caste system grouped its higher and lower jatis
according to the varna system: Brahmans (priests and scholars),
Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (merchants), Shudras
(artisans and cultivators). Large numbers of castes were outside
this system and thus considered even lower: once called
Untouchables, then Harijans (a term invented by Gandhi), and

61. now Dalits (“oppressed”). In addition, there were tribal groups,
even farther outside this system.
In an effort to convert this dominance hierarchy into a social
support and uplift pro- gram, the Government of India created a
parallel hierarchy to offer opportunities for those previously
oppressed. Along with this new hierarchy came privileges
available only to those in underprivileged categories. This new
system’s categories are: “For- ward” castes (those already
favored and successful, for whom there were now no special
privileges, groups such as Brahmans, Rajputs, Patidars, and
Sikhs), “Back- ward” castes (many Shudra communities), which
came to be known as OBCs (“Other Backward Classes”), the
“Scheduled Castes” (SCs) (Dalits), and “Scheduled Tribes”
(STs) (tribal groups such as the Gonds, Santhals, and Nagas).
The government main- tains lists of approved castes in each
category and modifies them from time to time, and the lists vary
state by state.
The privileges reserved for OBCs, Scheduled Castes, and
Scheduled Tribes are significant, including reserved seats (i.e.,
quotas) in legislative bodies, reserved seats in universities, and
reserved positions in state and national government jobs. For
instance, in Gujarat OBCs get 27 percent, Scheduled Castes get
7 percent, and Scheduled Tribes get 15 percent. Altogether,
nearly 50 percent of such opportunities are reserved for non-
Forward groups. This means that all Forward groups can com-
pete for only the 50 percent of nonreserved university and
government opportunities. And the problem is that far more of
the Forward groups have the education and skills to compete
than do the SC/ST and OBC groups, because lack of primary
and sec- ondary education and family wealth still hold them
back. Across India, it is often the case that jobs and university
positions go unfilled because they are “reserved,” and there are
not enough qualified persons to take those jobs.
Finally we come back to our young Patidar, Hardik Patel, who
is 22 years old, has a BA in commerce, and is a member of a
middle-class family that owns a small busi- ness in Gujarat. He

62. argues that hardworking, ambitious young people in his own
com- munity are unfairly kept out of the 50 percent of reserved
seats that anyway often go unfilled and are faced with intense
competition in the other 50 percent. And this move- ment,
which has parallels in other parts of India, points out that many
of the “Forward”
castes have numerous members who are also impoverished and
could use help. Brahmans across India, for instance, are
frequently among the poorest villagers, even though their status
in the caste hierarchy is high.
This background explains why Hardik Patel wants his caste to
be declared “Back- ward” in order to have access to all jobs.
Source: Iyengar 2015.
India has greatly improved the status of women, who may now
be seen every- where in public and in almost all careers, this
section attempts to explain the logic and workings of patriarchy
in the traditional order.Patriarchy
It is always culture that determines (i.e., constructs) what it
sees as the “nature” of men and women. Are men and women
more or less equal, capable of doing pretty much the same
things and participating equally in society? Or are men and
women so different from each other that on every imaginable
scale—emotion, intelligence, capability, strength, shrewdness—
they are oppo- sites and must be assigned totally distinct and
nonoverlapping roles in society? Anthropologist Sherry Ortner
has argued (1996) that it was the rise of the state that produced
the greatest extremes between men and women. In state societ-
ies, the patriarchal extended family emerged as the state’s
lowest-level unit; male heads of household were responsible for
“their” women (and also junior males). In many ways this was