Living Prehistory in India (edited)
D. D. Kosambi
The basic task of the prehistorian is to learn as much as he can about the lives of the vanished people he chooses to study. Since by definition he works with evidence other than written records, he sometimes turns for illuminating parallels to living peoples who themselves have not written history. Perhaps nowhere in the world can such parallels be found more readily than in India. For one thing, even the written material from ancient India cannot be considered history. Scarcely a single historical figure who lived before the Muslim period (beginning in the twelfth century) can be dated with any degree of accuracy, and more general accounts show little concern for facts or common sense. What is perhaps more to the point, there exist in India today many tribal peoples whose customs go back to preliterate times. Representing some 30 million (about 6 per cent) of India's total population of 440 million, these peoples preserve many features—in fossilized form, as it were—of Indian prehistory.
How is it that peoples whose way of life has remained largely unchanged from prehistoric times have survived in India, which has had cities and civilization since early in the third millennium BC? The answer lies in the availability of food. In India today food shortages are all too well known, but they are a comparatively recent development; even now they are limited to village farmers working marginal lands and to the nation's impoverished city dwellers. In most of India nature is so kind that for thousands of years it has been possible for people to live with comparative ease simply by hunting and primitive food-gathering. This is still the case in areas where over-cultivation and excessive clearing of forest have not eliminated the land's natural cover. Not only are fish and game abundant but also a variety of other natural products are enough in themselves to provide a balanced diet. Fruits, nuts, berries, leafy vegetables, tubers such as the yam, mushrooms, honey—more than 100 such natural products can be gathered in season. A large number of foodstuffs that can be stored from one season to the next grow in both wild and cultivated forms. In this category are sesamum (which provides an edible oil), emmer wheat, rice, a wide variety of beans and the sorghum and millets. Indeed, in the days of Gautama Buddha (sixth and fifth centuries BC) the millet Panicum frumentaceum was gathered wild and not cultivated at all. This abundance of vegetable resources, supplemented by the milk and other dairy products available to the herders of cattle, sheep and goats, means that even hunting is not really crucial to survival. One can support life reasonably well in the balmy Indian climate without killing anything. This is a basic reality that does more than merely account for the survival of primitive tribal groups in India today: it clarifies the origins of Indian social thought. The characteristically Indian religions—such as Buddhism and Jainism—regard the taking of life as a sin. It is scarcely conceivable that such an ethic could have developed if an economy of bloodless food-gathering had not provided prehistoric Indians with an adequate livelihood.
The Iron Age people who practised plough agriculture in India were at first limited to the plain of the Ganges. From that rich region they moved southward into the Deccan: the great forested plateau of peninsular India [see illustration]. This invasion was not accompanied by the violence that marked Rome's Iron Age conquest of tribal Gaul and pacification of the forests beyond the Rhine. As the advancing ploughmen from the north met the forest herders and food-gatherers of the south, the contact seems to have initiated a process of mutual acculturation. The food-gatherers learned to adjust to agriculture and the farmers not only came to rely heavily on food-gathering to supplement their diet but also brought wild foodstuffs under cultivation. This two-sided adjustment between gatherer and producer provides both the fabric and the pattern of India's past. It is notably reflected in today's social organization and accounts for the origin of caste and the caste system. In many parts of India the names of the local tribal people are identical with those of the local agricultural castes, even though the difference in caste between tribesman and farmer prevents intermarriage and other forms of contact between them. The identity of names probably stems from an original unity, when immigrant farmers and indigenous food-gathering tribesmen at first made common cause in the forest region. The two major characteristics of the caste system—prohibitions against marriage outside the group and against acceptance of food from the hands of a stranger—are taboos that are typical of food gathering tribal societies. One can imagine the caste system originating as a somewhat later effort of the indigenous food-gatherers to establish themselves as being superior to the immigrant ploughmen.
If this is the case, one may ask why the caste of farmers is now higher than that of tribesmen. Answers are not hard to find. First, whatever their initial handicaps, the farmers, simply by practising agriculture, had a sounder economic base than the tribal people, and in India, as elsewhere, social rank corresponds closely to position on the economic scale. Second, because of their somewhat better food supply the farmers must almost from the first have multiplied faster than the tribesmen and thus would soon have outnumbered and dominated them.
Although there are caste inequalities between farmers and tribal peoples today, plentiful evidence of mutual acculturation remains, particularly in the area of religion. Many of the supposedly 'Hindu' gods of the Brahmin pantheon, for example, have their actual origin in tribal cults. By the same token, when tribal people abandon their aboriginal ways and take to farming for a livelihood, they abandon their ancient gods and adopt Hindu religious practices. Much of the ritual that accompanies both the Hindu religion and the aboriginal ones seems bizarre to modern eyes. Nonetheless, to dismiss ritual as mere superstition (or worse, to follow the fad of explaining it in psychoanalytic terms) is to throw away a genuine opportunity to study both the history and the prehistory of India. My own fieldwork has been confined to portions of the Deccan plateau and the adjacent west coast of peninsular India, an area in which my familiarity with local dialects and customs has made detailed investigations of tribal and village life possible. One of the first tribal groups I had a chance to study was the Ras Phase Pardhi. These people, who now live in Maharashtra, originally came from Gujarat to the north and speak a dialect of Gujarati. The Pardhi are nomadic and are accompanied on their travels by a few scrawny cattle. The men do some casual labour and are skilled at stalking and snaring birds and other small game. The basic Pardhi occupations today, however, are begging and theft—practised by men and women alike. The Pardhi consider stealing a crime only if the victim is a fellow tribesman. Pardhi religious ritual is a mixture of adopted and aboriginal elements. The principal object of worship is a silver plaque of modern manufacture that bears the image of a Hindu goddess. Nonetheless, the major ritual—a fertility dance—gives every sign of being genuinely ancient. The performer is a male, the head of one of the small bands into which the tribe is divided. He dresses as a woman and is not merely a priest in the ritual. In his own words, ‘I am the goddess.’
Part of the fertility ritual provides an interesting example of reciprocal acculturation between Hindu and aborigine. The dancer at one point plunges his hand into a pan of boiling oil, evidently without ill effect. This kind of ordeal is apparently an ancient Pardhi custom. At a Pardhi trial, for example, one proof of innocence is to walk a fixed number of steps while carrying a red-hot piece of iron. The parallel Hindu ordeal—walking on hot coals—has no sanction in Brahmin scripture; ordeals are not mentioned in the earliest Hindu sacred books. In fact, fire walking apparently did not become a part of Hindu ritual until about the beginning of the Christian era, when it was adopted primarily as a means of proving innocence in the face of strong evidence of guilt. One can scarcely avoid the conjecture that the Hindu ordeal was adopted from some aboriginal Indian rite such as the ones preserved today in the Pardhi dance or trial. Another primitive group in the Deccan—the Dhangars—are a caste rather than a tribe. Some of them are farmers; others specialize in the manufacture of woolen blankets. At least one Dhangar family, the Holkars, took up the military life early in the eighteenth century and rose to princely status as the maharajas of Indore. Today the members of one Dhangar group follow tribal ways and earn a living as itinerant herdsmen.
Each Dhangar band numbers about twelve people. Leading a flock of perhaps 300 sheep, the band spends the eight dry months of the year in a round of travel that rarely covers less than 200 miles and may range as far as 400 miles. The women of the band travel the roads, moving from one pre-selected campsite to another and preparing the meals. The men herd the grazing sheep cross-country and leave them in some farmer's field at night. The sheep's overnight droppings are valuable fertilizer for which the farmer pays either in cash or in produce. These payments, together with small earnings from the sale of wool, a few skins and occasionally an animal provide the livelihood of these pastoral nomads.
One of the traditional rituals in the Maharashtra region of the Deccan—the great pilgrimage to Pandharpur—may have originated in the days when everyone's life involved the kind of seasonal wandering that is still the way of the Dhangar shepherds. At the very least the pilgrimage is out of keeping with a settled agricultural way of life. The journey to Pandharpur can take as long as three or four months and traditionally begins at the start of the rainy season. That such a custom could have arisen in a farming society seems improbable; the rainy months are the ones during which the farmer does the larger part of his productive work. Other seemingly illogical mixtures of old ways and new are common in peninsular India. One example I have observed combines the plow technology of later times with a much earlier form of agriculture—the 'slash and burn' method, in which farmland is created by cutting down and burning the natural vegetation. When the farmers of Maharashtra grow millet today, they clear hillsides by the slash-and-burn technique and plant the crop with the aid of primitive digging sticks. In the level valley fields where wheat and rice are raised, however, the same farmers plough and fertilize by modern methods.
The most spectacular example of fossilized ritual I have encountered is bagad, or 'hook-swinging.' Both the law and public opinion discourage this practice in India today, but hook-swinging posts are still to be found near many temples throughout the Deccan. According to historical accounts the ritual required that a pair of sharp metal hooks be thrust into a selected victim's back, penetrating the flesh just above the hips. The hooked man was then hoisted clear of the ground and left to swing, painfully suspended only by the two hooks. This gruesome rite was conducted on one special day each year. Foreign observers could discover no particular reason for it and rather too willingly attribute it to the savagery of the people who practised it. None of these people had told them that to be hook-swung was a signal honour and a prerogative jealously guarded by a very few of the oldest farming families in each district.
Today hooks are still set in living flesh each year in a few remote villages. I was recently able to witness such a ceremony. I must preserve the anonymity of both the village and the participants in the ritual, but I can say that it took place at the time of the April full moon. In this village the man to be swung must be selected from among the young married men of clan X, in spite of the fact that the village headman, the leading village families and all the richest farmers are members of clan Y. This privilege stems from the fact that the earliest immigrants in the area were members of clan X, and that it was they who first heard the call of the god Mhatoba, in whose honor the ritual takes place.
Assuming that the account of Mhatoba’s original bloody rites is authentic, how are these rites related to the prehistory of peninsular India? An answer to this question requires an examination of the deity’s history. Mhatoba is a god to whom tradition assigns two distinct places of origin. One is the same jungle, 40 miles from his present temple, from which his worshippers procure the bagad crossbeam each year. Here Mhatoba has a second temple. It stands on a hillock, at the base of which I have found a fair number of crude microliths; the presence of these stone tools is good evidence that the area supported a prehistoric population. At this place of worship Mhatoba is called Bapuji-Baba, or ‘Father-God’, and it is dangerous for any woman to approach him.
Mhatoba’s other place of origin is about the same distance from the hook-swingers’ village but in a different direction. The site is unmarked, but tradition states that at this place the deity first appeared and immediately made his presence known by kidnapping seven virgin sisters. Mhatoba thereupon travelled cross-country to the vicinity of the hook-swingers’ village, where he paused by a pool in the river. There, for no known reason, he drowned all seven sisters. When a passing member of the Koli tribe ventured to criticize Mhatoba's behaviour, the god drowned him as well. Near the pool today there is a shrine to the seven sisters and the unfortunate Koli. The pool itself is considered cursed. No one bathes there, nor is its water used for farm animals. Within the shrine the crude representations of the seven sisters are coated with red lead, which is commonly used by Indian villagers as a substitute for the blood of sacrificial animals [see illustration]. I have found surface deposits of microliths nearby, as I did at the temple where Mhatoba is known as Bapuji-Baba.
In spite of his murder of the kidnapped maidens, Mhatoba is known in one aspect as a 'married' god. Next to his statue in the hook-swingers' temple stands a statue of a goddess named Jogubai. The hilltop Mhatoba, with his reputation for being dangerous to women, has no such consort. Why should the god be single in one aspect and married in the other? To find the answer I undertook a survey of all the district's temples. I quickly learned that the goddess Jogubai, like Mhatoba, was worshipped in several places, although there was no tradition that she had come to the district from some other region. I also encountered several more Mhatobas. In many places Mhatoba and Jogubai were 'married', as they are at the hook-swingers' temple. In other places, however, either the god or the goddess was worshipped alone, and the local worshippers knew nothing about Mhatoba or Jogubai being 'married' elsewhere.
It is my belief that Mhatoba and Jogubai are a pair of deities who originally belonged to two different population groups and quite probably to different eras of prehistory as well. As I interpret the evidence, Mhatoba was at first an aggressively male god of the kind who was worshipped by the Gavalis, a late wave of pastoral invaders who entered the Deccan from northern India.
If it is correct to assume that the mother-goddess was first in the area and that the father-god was a pastoralist intruder, how do the traditions of the hook-swingers' village fit such a sequence? In their temple goddess and god are joined in 'marriage'; I take this to be symbolic of a situation in which conflict between food-gatherer and pastoralist was resolved by peaceful fusion. The virgins drowned by Mhatoba might represent a sacred college of priestesses dedicated to the worship of the mother-goddess. The fact that Mhatoba is now married to Jogubai shows that even the destruction of her priestesses was not enough to suppress her worship.
The conflict between mother-goddess and father-god could not have been resolved peaceably everywhere. Throughout Indian theological art, from the earliest representation of a horned 'proto-Shiva' on Harappan seals of the third millennium BC to gaudy pictures sold in Indian bazaars today, runs a theme of conflict between a female deity and a 'buffalo demon', in which the goddess is the victor. In Kalighat paintings, for example, Shiva's wife Parvati tramples him. The goddess Durga-Parvati is called 'she who tramples the buffalo demon.'
This much is certain: The prehistoric fusion of two distinctly different societies has left marks that remain to this day. Indeed, in some parts of the countryside both the buffalo demon and the goddess who tramples him are worshipped by the same believers but in separate shrines. Two points, however, should be made clear. First, although instances of goddess-worship are still to be found all over India, there is no reason to believe the country's prehistoric food-gatherers were worshippers of a universal mother-goddess. To attribute any universal custom to primitive and segregated peoples is obviously hazardous. Second, it is important to emphasize that even when some ancient monument is found to be a centre of goddess-worship today, there is little possibility that the modern cult represents a survival from prehistory.