The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline
D. D. Kosambi
The Historical Perspective (Edited Excerpt)
A DISPASSIONATE observer who looks at India with detachment and penetration would be struck by two mutually contradictory features: diversity and unity at the same time.
The endless variety is striking, often incongruous. Costume, speech, the physical appearance of the people, customs, standards of living, food, climate, geographical features all offer the greatest possible differences. Richer Indians may be dressed in full European style, or in costumes that show Muslim influence, or in flowing and costly robes of many different colourful Indian types. At the lower end of the social scale are other Indians in rags, almost naked but for a small loincloth. There is no national language or alphabet; a dozen languages and scripts appear on the ten-rupee currency note. There is no Indian race. People with white skins and blue eyes are as unmistakably Indian as others with black skins and dark eyes.In between we find every other intermediate type, though the hair is generally black. There is no typical Indian diet, but more rice, vegetables, and spices are eaten than in Europe. The north Indian finds southern food unpalatable, and conversely. Some people will not touch meat, fish, or eggs; many would and do starve to death rather than eat beef, while others observe no such restrictions. These dietary conventions are not matters of taste but of religion. In climate also the country offers the full range. Perpetual snows in the Himalayas, north European weather in Kasmir, hot deserts in Rajasthan, basalt ridges and granite mountains on the peninsula, tropical heat at the southern tip, dense forests in laterite soil along the western scarp. A 2,000-mile-long coastline, the great Gangetic river system in a wide and fertile alluvial basin, other great rivers of lesser complexity, a few considerable lakes, the swamps of Cutch and Orissa, complete the sub-continental picture.
Cultural differences between Indians even in the same province, district, or city are as wide as the physical differences between the various parts of the country. Modern India produced an outstanding figure of world literature in Tagore. Within easy reach of Tagore's final residence may be found Santals and other illiterate primitive peoples still unaware of Tagore's existence. Some of them are hardly out of the food-gathering stage. An imposing modern city building such as a bank, government office, factory, or scientific institute may have been designed by some European architect or by his Indian pupil. The wretched workmen who actually built it generally use the crudest tools. Their payment might be made in a lump sum to a foreman who happens to be the chief of their small guild and the head of their clan at the same time. Certainly these workmen can rarely grasp the nature of the work done by the people for whom the structures were erected. Finance, bureaucratic administration, complicated machine production in a factory, and die very idea of science are beyond the mental reach of human beings who have lived in misery on the margin of over cultivated lands or in the forest. Most of them have been driven by famine conditions in the jungle to become the cheapest form of drudge labour in the city.
Yet in spite of this apparent diversity, there is a double unity. At the top there are certain common features due to the ruling class. The class is the Indian bourgeoisie, divided by language, regional history, and so on, but nevertheless grouped by similarity of interests.
The most noticeable feature of the Indian city bourgeoisie is the stamp of the foreigner. Fourteen years after independence English still remains the official language of administration, big business, and higher education in India. No significant attempts have been made to change over, beyond pious resolutions in shiftless committees. The intellectual apes the latest British fashions not only in clothing but even more in literature and the arts. The Indian novel and short story, even in the Indian languages, are modern creations based upon foreign models or foreign inspiration. The Indian drama is more than two thousand years old, but the literate Indian stage today, and overwhelmingly the Indian cinema, is patterned after the theatre and movies in other countries. Indian poetry has, however, resisted the change somewhat better, though foreign influence is demonstrable in choice of themes and freer metres.
The magnificent treasure of European (continental) literary and cultural tradition is generally ignored by this intelligentsia, except at third hand through badly chosen English books. The fact is that the entire bourgeois mode in India is a forced extraneous growth. The country had an immense feudal and pre-feudal accumulation of wealth which did not turn directly into modern capital. A great deal was expropriated by the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only when it reached England did it bring about the great industrial revolution in that country and become converted into modern capital in the strict sense of the terra by being tied to mechanised production. The change increased the drain upon India's resources because the administration and military establishment steadily became heavier. The money disbursed as pensions, dividends, and interest went mostly to England Moreover, India's raw materials were paid for at the conqueror's price. Indigo, jute, tea, tobacco, cotton were planted so extensively as to transform the economies of whole districts. Control remained in the hands of the foreigner, especially as the processing was done in England. A part of the finished product was sold at very favourable prices in the vast Indian market. The profits were pocketed by the financiers of London and the manufacturers of Birmingham and Manchester. There was inevitably a secondary growth of finance in the new cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. The discovery was made in the second half of the nineteenth century that Indian labour could be trained to work cheaply on machines. The textile mills of Bombay and the jute mills of Calcutta were the result of this discovery and of the taxes that had to be imposed upon British cloth to pay for suppression of the 1857 revolt.
A class of mechanical workers was also needed for the railways. The first Indian colleges and universities were due to the still earlier discovery that it was decidedly cheaper to train Indian clerical workers for administration and the counting houses than to import clerks from abroad. The Indians not only learned quickly but worked honestly and efficiently for a third to a tenth of the salary of a foreigner. Of course, all higher posts were reserved for the ruling class of conquerors.
What has been said so far might lend colour to the theory sometimes expressed that India was never a nation, that Indian culture and civilisation is a by-product of foreign conquest, whether Muslim or British. If this were so, the only Indian history worth writing would be the history of and by the conquerors. The textbooks that the foreigner has left behind him naturally heighten this impression. But when Alexander of Macedon was drawn to the East by the fabulous wealth and magic name of India, England and France were barely coming into the Iron Age. The discovery of America was due to the search for new trade routes to India; a reminder of this is seen in the name 'Indians' given to the American aborigines. The Arabs, when they were intellectually the most progressive and active people in the world, took their treatises on medicine and a good deal of their mathematics from Indian sources. Asian culture and civilisation have China and India as their two primary sources. Cotton textiles (even words
like 'calico', Chintz', 'dungaree', 'pyjamas', 'sash' and 'gingham' are of Indian origin) and sugar are India's specific contribution to everyday life, just as paper, tea, porcelain, silk are China's.
The mere variety that India offers is not enough to characterise the ancient civilisation of the country. The continuity of Indian culture in its own country is perhaps its most important feature. How Indian culture influenced other countries is a matter for other books. Our task here is to trace its origins and the main character of its development in India.
At the very outset we are faced with what appears to be an insuperable difficulty. India has virtually no historical records worth the name. Chinese imperial annals, county records, the work of early historians like Ssu-ma Chien, inscriptions on graves and oracle-bones enable the historyof China to be traced with some certainty from about 1400 B.C. Rome and Greece offer lets antiquity, but far better historical literature. Even the Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Sumerian records have been read. In India there is only vague popular tradition, with very little documentation above the level of myth and legend. We cannot reconstruct anything like a complete list of kings. Sometimes whole dynasties have been forgotten. What little is left is so nebulous that virtually no dates can be determined for any Indian personality till the Muslim period. It is very difficult to say over how much territory a great king actually ruled. There are no court annals in existence, with a partial exception for Kasmir and Cambi. Similarly for great names in Indian literature. The works survive, but the author's date is rarely known. With luck, it may be possible to determine roughly die century to which the writing belonged; often it can only be said that the writer existed. Sometimes even that is doubtful; many a work known by a particular author's name could not possibly have been written by any one person.
This has led otherwise intelligent scholars to state that India has no history. Certainly, no ancient Indian history is possible with the detailed accuracy of a history of Rome or Greece. But what is history? If history means only the succession of outstanding megalomaniac names and imposing battles, Indian history would be difficult to write. If, however, it is more important to know whether a given people had the plough or not than to know the name of their king, then India has a history. For this work, I shall adopt the following definition: History is the presentation in chronological order of successive changes in the means and relations of production. This definition has the advantage that history can be written as distinct from a series of historical episodes. Culture must then be understood also in the sense of the ethnographer, to describe the essential ways of life of the whole people. Let us examine these definitions more closely.
Some people regard culture as purely a matter of intellectual and spiritual values, in the sense of religion, philosophy, legal systems, literature, art, music, and the like. Sometimes this is extended to include refinements in the manners of the ruling class. History, according to these intellectuals, is based upon and should deal only with such "culture"; nothing else matters. There are difficulties in taking this type of culture as the mainspring of history. Three of the greatest such formal cultures combined in Central Asia: Indian, Chinese, and Greek; supplemented with two great religions, Buddhism and Christianity. The region had a central position in trade with high political importance under the Kushana empire. The archaeologist still digs up beautiful relics in Central Asia.
But the original contribution of this well-developed Central Asia to human culture and to the history of mankind remains small. The Arabs coming from a decidedly less 'cultured' environments did much more to preserve, develop, and transmit to posterity the great discoveries of Greek and Indian science. Even the occasional Central Asian such as Al-Biruni who participated in the process wrote in Arabic as a member of an Islamic culture, not of the Central Asian. The 'uncultured' Mongol conquest which destroyed the efflorescence of Central Asia beyond recovery had no such effect upon Chinese culture, which was only stimulated to further advance.
Man does not live by bread alone, but we have not yet developed a human breed that can live without bread, or at least some form of food. Strictly speaking, unleavened bread is a late neolithic discovery, a considerable advance in the preparation and preservation of food. 'Give us this day our daily bread' still forms part of the Christian's daily prayer, though Christian theology places the world of the spirit above all material considerations. The basis of any formal culture must lie in the availability of a food supply beyond that needed to support the actual food-producer. To build the imposing ziggurat temples of Mesopotamia, the Great Wall of China, the pyramids of Egypt, or modern skyscrapers, there must have been a correspondingly imposing surplus of food at the time. Surplus production depends upon the technique and instruments used - 'the means of production', to adopt a convenient though badly abused term. The method by which surplus - not only surplus food but all other produce - passes into the hands of the ultimate user is determined by - and in turn determines -the form of society, the 'relations of production'.
Our position has also to be very far from a mechanical determinism, particularly in dealing with India, where form is given the utmost importance while content is ignored. Economic determinism will not do. It is not inevitable, nor even true, that a given amount of wealth will lead to a given type of development. The complete historical process through which the social form has been reached is also of prime importance. The gold and silver of the Americas which had kept the Amerinds in savagery only strengthened feudal and religious reaction in Spanish hands. A fraction of the same wealth pirated by Drake and other English sea-captains was of immense help in lifting England out of the feudal into the mercantile and bourgeois era. At every stage the survival of previous forms and the ideology of the top classes exert tremendous force - whether by tradition or revolt against tradition - upon any social movement. Language itself was formed out of the process of exchange, new goods, fresh ideas, and corresponding new words all going together. Any important advance in the means of production immediately leads to a great increase in population, which necessarily means different relations of production. The chief who can regulate single-handed the affairs of a hundred people could not do this for a hundred thousand people without assistance. This would imply the creation of a nobility or a council of elders. The district with only two primitive hamlets needs no government; the same district with 20,000 large villages must have one and can support it. So, we have a peculiar zigzag process, particularly in India. A new stage of production manifests itself in formal change of some sort; when the production is primitive, the change is often religious. The new form, if it does increase production, is acclaimed and becomes set. However, this must also lead to a decided increase of population. If the superstructure cannot be adjusted during growth, then there is eventual conflict. Sometimes the old form is broken by a revolution in the guise of a reformation. Sometimes the class that gains by preserving the older form wins, in which case there is stagnation, degeneracy, or atrophy.