Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (8 page)

Soon after the great victory, the
Bharatas consolidated their position by defeating a chieftain called Bheda on the
Yamuna
²⁷
. They were now the paramount power in the subcontinent with an empire that
stretched from Punjab, across Haryana to the area around Delhi–Meerut.
Their command over the
cultural heartland probably gave the
Bharatas influence that extended well outside the lands they directly controlled. It
is possible that they consciously consolidated their position by encouraging the
compilation of the Vedas. The Rig Veda is full of praise for the
Bharata–Trtsu tribe, its chief Sudasa and the sage Vashishtha, suggesting
that the book was put together under the patronage of the victorious tribe, probably
over several generations following the great battle.

The real genius of the Bharatas,
however, may lie in the fact that the Vedas do not confine themselves to the ideas
of the victors but deliberately include those of sages from other tribes, including
some of the defeated tribes. Thus, the hymns of the sage Vishwamitra, the great
rival of Vashishtha, are given an important place in the compilation. In doing so,
the Bharatas created a template of civilizational assimilation and accommodation
rather than imposition. It was a powerful idea and would allow, over time, for
people in faraway places like Bengal and Kerala to identify with this ancient
Haryanvi tribe.

This is why the Bharatas remain alive in
the name by which Indians have called their country since ancient times:
‘Bharat Varsha’ or the Land of the Bharatas. In time it would
come to denote the whole subcontinent. Later texts such as the Puranas would define
it as ‘The country that lies north of the seas and south of the snowy
mountains is called Bharatam, there dwell the descendants of Bharata’. It
remains the official name of India even today. Note that the name is also echoed
outside India. In the Malay language, for instance, ‘Barat’
means West, signifying the direction from which Indian merchants came to South-East
Asia.

Sudasa’s achievements may also
have triggered an imperial dream that would remain embedded in the Indian
consciousness. After his victories, Sudasa performed the Ashvamedha or horse
sacrifice and was declared a Chakravartin or Universal Monarch. The word
‘chakravarti’ itself means ‘wheels that can go
anywhere’, implying a monarch whose chariot can roll in any direction. The
spokes of the wheel symbolize the various cardinal directions. Over the centuries,
the symbolism of the wheel would be applied to both the temporal and the spiritual.
We see the symbol used in imperial Mauryan symbols, Buddhist art and in the modern
Indian nation’s flag.

Meanwhile, what happened to the defeated
tribes? Some of the tribes would remain in Punjab, although much weakened. We know
that the Druhya tribe was later chased away from Punjab to eastern Afghanistan.
Their king Gandhara gave the region its ancient Indian name, which lingers on in the
name of the Afghan city of Kandahar. The Puranas also tell us that the Druhyus would
later migrate farther north to Central Asia and turn into Mlechhas (or foreign
barbarians).
²⁸
After that we hear nothing more of them. Another tribe called the Purus
survived into the Mahabharata epic and probably accounts for King Porus who fought
against the invading army of Alexander the Great in the fourth century
BC
.

Some of the tribes, however, appear to
have fled further afield after the great battle. Two of them have names that suggest
interesting possibilities: the Pakhta and the Parsu. The former are also mentioned
by later Greek sources as Pactyians and one wonders if they are the ancestors of
Pakhtun (or Pashtun) tribes that still live in Afghanistan and north-
western Pakistan. This fits with the finding that, genetically
speaking, the Pashtuns are related to Indians and not to Central Asians or Arabs as
was previously thought.

Similarly, the Parsu are possibly
related to the Persians because this is the name by which the Assyrians refer to the
Persians in their inscriptions. This is not as fanciful a recreation of events as
may appear at first glance. There is a great deal of evidence that links the Rig
Vedic Indians to the ancient Persians. The Avesta, the oldest and most sacred text
of the Zoroastrian religion, is written in a language that is almost identical to
that of the Rig Veda. The older sections of the Avesta—called the
Gathas—are said to have been composed by the prophet Zarathustra himself.
They can be read as Rig Vedic Sanskrit by making a minor phonetic change. The
Avestan ‘h’ is the same as the Sanskrit ‘s’.
Thus, the word Sapta-Sindhu becomes Hapta-Hindu.
²⁹
A similar phonetic shift survives in the modern Indian language of Assamese and
is easy to master.

The texts are clear that the Avestan
people came to Iran from outside. Unlike the Rig Vedic Indians, they are much more
self-consciously an ethnic group and call themselves the Aryan people. This makes
sense because they were the outsiders in a foreign land and would have wanted to
differentiate themselves. Moreover, they are aware of Sapta-Sindhu but not of
western Iran, suggesting that they entered the country from the east. Unlike the
Vedas, the ancient Persians also talk of an original ‘Aryan’
homeland and even name the river Helmand in Afghanistan after the Saraswati (i.e.
Harahvaiti). Indeed, the Persian identity as ‘Aryans’ was so
strong that their country would come to be known as the
Land of
the Aryans or Iran. As recently as the late twentieth century, the Shah of Iran used
the title ‘Arya-mehr’ or Jewel of the Aryans. Contrast this with
the Indian identification with the Bharatas.

Another interesting indicator of the
sequence of events is the use of the terms ‘deva’ and
‘asura’. In the Rig Veda, the terms apply to different sets of
deities and do not have
clear connotations
of good and bad. The god Varun,
for instance, is described as an asura. However, in later Hinduism, the asuras would
be identified as demons and the devas as the gods. In contrast, devas refers to
demons in the Zoroastrian tradition of Persia while the word asura is transformed
into Ahura Mazda—the Great Lord.
³⁰
Since the deva–asura dichotomy is not clear cut in the Rig Veda but
becomes very distinct in later texts, it is reasonable to argue that these opposing
sets of meaning came to be attached at a later date. What caused this separation?
Did the Parsu have a religious dispute with the Bharatas? As they moved into the
Middle East, was the Persian nomenclature influenced by the Assyrian god called
Assur? One may never know for sure but these are some more intriguing
possibilities.

There is a lot more evidence of
Vedic-related tribes in the Middle-East in the second millennium
BC
. In 1380
BC
, the Hitties signed a treaty
with a people called the Mittani. This treaty is solemnized in the name of Vedic
gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and Nasatya. The Mittani appear to have been a military
elite who ruled over the Hurrian people living in northern Iraq and Syria. There are
records of their dealings with Egyptians, Hitties and the Assyrians. From their
names and gods, we can tell that the Mittani were outsiders who had
entered the region from the east. Yet again, we have evidence
of a westward movement that confounds the traditional view that Vedic people moved
eastward into India rather than the other way around. The peacocks that recur in
Mittani art tell of a people who remember not just their gods but also the fauna of
the land they left.

Amazingly, faint memories of these times
remain alive among the secretive and much persecuted Yezidi people. The Yezidi are a
tiny religious group of around 150,000 adherents who live among the Kurds of
northern Iraq, eastern Turkey and parts of Armenia. Their religion has ancient pagan
roots, albeit with an overlay of Islamic, Christian and Zoroastrian influence. They
faced centuries of persecution, especially under Ottoman rule, for being
‘devil worshippers’. Like Hindus, the Yezidis believe in
reincarnation and avatars, they pray facing the sun at dawn and dusk, and have a
system of endogamous castes. Their temples with conical spires look strikingly
similar to Hindu temples. The ‘Peacock Angel’ (Tawuse Melek)
plays a central role in the religion.
²⁷
The peacock is a native to the
Indian subcontinent and is not found naturally in Yezidi lands. Is it possible that
the Yezidis have somehow preserved an ancient link to India? Indeed, the Yezidi
themselves have a tradition that they came to the Middle East from India about 4000
years ago—around when the mature Harappan civilization would have begun to
disintegrate or perhaps the Battle of the Ten Kings took place. Does one of these
events explain the spread of R1a1, the genetic lineage that we discussed in the
previous chapter?

The world of the Harappans and the Rig
Veda dissolved as the Saraswati dried. No matter what one thinks of the
Harappan–Vedic debate, two things are clear. First,
geography and the forces of nature played an important role in the evolution of
Indian history. Second, the subcontinent has witnessed a great deal of migration and
churn. People, ideas and trade have moved in different directions at different
points of time and for different combinations of reasons. It is very different from
the conventional view that Indian history is only about unidirectional invasions
from the north-west. We now turn to India’s second age of urbanization,
centred in the Gangetic plains and recalled in the great epics.

The Gangetic plain was the birthplace of
the next cycle of urbanization. From 1300 to 400
BC
, the
area was made up of a network of small kingdoms and republics. Many of them were
centred around towns. We come across place-names that are still in use, and
remarkable socio-cultural continuities. Modern Indian children are still brought up
on legends and bedtime stories that originate from this era. For the first time, we
see an awareness of the whole subcontinent as a geographical and civilizational
unit. It is also a time that we witness the growing cultural importance of the
Asiatic lion—an animal that would come to occupy a central role in Indian
symbolism. One of the most important cultural contributions of the period was the
composition of the two great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. They tell us a lot
about how the geographical conception of India evolved in the Iron Age.

The great epics Ramayana and
Mahabharata have long been central to Indian culture. From religious philosophy to
art and common idiom, they remain a part of everyday life. Their depiction as a
television serial in the late eighties brought the country to a virtual standstill
whenever an episode was aired. A dispute over the birthplace of Rama, the central
character of the Ramayana, fundamentally changed Indian politics in the early
nineties.

According to tradition, the two epics
are ‘itihasa’ or history. It is quite possible that that the
central storylines, especially in the case of the Mahabharata, is loosely based on
real events. However, in this book I am not concerned with the historical
authenticity of the events described in the epics. My interest is in the expansion
of geographical knowledge that we can discern from them.

The texts went through many changes over
the centuries before they reached their current form, so one must not take all the
information too literally. Nonetheless, in the understanding of the terrain there is
a shift from the Vedic focus on the Sapta-Sindhu and neighbouring areas.
Interestingly, the two epics have very different cardinal orientations. The
geography of the Ramayana is oriented along a North–South axis while the
Mahabharata is generally oriented on an East–West axis. This is not a
total coincidence for they are aligned to two major trade routes. The Dakshina Path
(or Southern Road) that made its way from the Gangetic plains though Central India
to the southern tip of the peninsula while the Uttara Path (or Northern Road) that
ran from eastern
Afghanistan, through Punjab and the Gangetic
plains, to the seaports of Bengal.

Ancient Highways

As we shall see, these two highways have
played a very important role in shaping the geographical and political history of
India. The Uttara Path was a well-trodden route by the Iron
Age
and formalized during the Mauryan Empire. Since then, it has been almost
continuously rebuilt in some approximation to the original.
¹
Sher Shah Suri, the Mughals, and the British invested heavily in maintaining
it. The British called it the Grand Trunk Road and it was described by Rudyad
Kipling as ‘a river of life as never exists in this world’.
²
It survives today as National Highway 1 between Delhi and Amritsar and National
Highway 2 between Delhi and Kolkata, and is part of the Golden Quadrilateral
network.

In contrast, the path of the Southern
Road has drifted over time although certain nodes remained important over long
periods. During the early Iron Age, the Dakshina Path probably began near Allahabad
where two navigable rivers, the Ganga and Yamuna, flowed into each other. It then
went in a south-westerly direction through Chitrakoot and Panchavati (near Nashik)
and eventually to Kishkindha (near Hampi, modern Karnataka). This would be the route
followed by Rama during his exile.

The Ramayana is traditionally said to be
the older of the two texts, although some scholars dispute this. There are several
versions of the epic, including versions that remain popular in other parts of Asia.
The most prestigious and possibly oldest version, however, is the one composed in
Sanskrit by the sage Valmiki. He was a former brigand as well as an
outcaste—someone we would today call a Harijan or Dalit (that is, a member
of the lowest castes). It is interesting that this early example of Dalit literature
would come to occupy such an important place in later orthodoxy.

Despite many differences, the various
versions of the Ramayana do agree on the basic storyline: Rama is the young
and popular crown prince of Ayodhya (now a small town in the
state of Uttar Pradesh). However, he is forced to give up his claim to the throne
and is exiled for fourteen years. Along with his wife Sita and younger brother
Lakshman, Rama heads south, crosses the river Ganga near modern-day Allahabad and
goes to live in the forests of Central India. After several years of living
peacefully in the forest, Sita is abducted by Ravana, the powerful king of Lanka.
Rama and his brother set out to find her. On the way, at a place called Kishkindha,
they befriend a tribe of monkeys that promises to help them. Hanuman, the strongest
of the monkeys, visits Lanka and discovers that Sita is being held captive in
Ravana’s palace garden. Together with the army of monkeys, Rama marches on
Lanka but finds that the sea bars the way. So Rama and the monkeys build a bridge
(more accurately a causeway) from Rameswaram to Lanka. A great battle ensues in
which Ravana is defeated and killed, and Sita is rescued. Rama, Sita and Lakshman
then return to Ayodhya and Rama regains his throne. Most versions of the story end
here but some versions also tell of events after Rama’s return to Ayodhya.
(This bit appears to be have been added at a much later date.)

As one can see, the Ramayana is a
journey from the Gangetic plains to the southern tip of India and on to Sri Lanka.
It could be argued that the epic pre-dates geographical knowledge about South India
and that the place-names were retro-fitted in later times to flow with the story.
However, having visited some of the sites, I think this is unlikely. Take for
instance Kishkindha, the kingdom of the monkeys. The site is across the river from
the medieval ruins of Vijayanagar at Hampi. The terrain consists of strange
rock-outcrops, caves with
Neolithic paintings, and bands of
monkeys scampering over the boulders.

It is such an evocative landscape that
it is likely that Valmiki either visited it or had heard detailed descriptions of it
from merchants plying the Dakshina Path or Southern Road. There are small details
that seem too much of a coincidence to be purely imaginary. The lake of Pampa, where
Rama first meets Hanuman, is indeed a beautiful place with lotuses in bloom and a
multitude of birds, surrounded by a ring of rocky hills. Not far away from this site
is a sloth bear reserve that recalls Jambavan, Hanuman’s sloth bear
friend. Archaeologists have found the remains of several Neolithic settlements in
the area. It is easy to believe that this setting was once populated by a Neolithic
tribe that used the monkey as a totem and gave rise to the legend.

The same can be said of the bridge from
Rameswaram to Lanka. There exists a 30-km-long chain of shoals and sand-banks that
links India to the northern tip of Sri Lanka. Whether one believes that these are
the remains of Rama’s bridge or the result of a geological process, it
cannot be denied that this is a remarkable feature. The true scale of the bridge is
best seen in a satellite or aerial photograph. Again, the composer of the epic
clearly knew about it.

Moreover, we can tell a lot about how
Iron Age Indians perceived the geographical extent of their civilization from the
way Ravana is depicted. He is the villain of the Ramayana but is not presented as a
Mlechha (or barbarian). He is very much an insider: a learned Brahmin and a
worshipper of Shiva. Whatever his failings, Ravana and his southern kingdom are
categorically within the Indian civilizational milieu. Indeed,
the Kanyakubja Brahmins of Vidisha claim Ravana as one of their own and still
worship him!
³
The exchange of goods and ideas along the Southern Road, therefore, had linked
the north and the south of India long before political unification under the
Mauryans in the third century
BC
.

The Mahabharata is 100,000 verses long
and said to the longest composition in the world. According to tradition, it was
composed by the sage Vyas but it appears to have been expanded over the centuries.
We know that a shorter version of the epic was definitely in existence by the fifth
century
BC
but it probably reached its current form
centuries later. It is the story of the bitter rivalry between cousins—the
five Pandav brothers and the Kauravs—for control over the kingdom of
Hasthinapur. They initially agree to divide the kingdom and the Pandavs build a new
capital called Indraprastha. The new capital was so beautiful that the Kauravs were
filled with envy. They challenged the Pandavs to a game of dice that is fixed by
their maternal uncle Shakuni. The Pandavs gamble away their kingdom and are exiled
for thirteen years. During this time the Pandavs wander across India. However, when
they return after thirteen years, the Kauravs refuse to return the kingdom.

The dispute culminates in the great
battle of Kurukshetra in which virtually all the kingdoms of India are said to have
taken sides. Krishna, leader of the Yadav clan and king of Dwarka, sided with the
Pandavs and played an important role. The Pandavs win the war but at great cost. The
Kauravs and their allies are almost all annihilated. The last act of the battle
takes place away from the main battlefield. Bhim, strongest of the Pandav brothers,
kills Duryodhan, the leader
of the Kauravs, in single combat on
the banks of the Saraswati. By now it would have dwindled to a shadow of its former
self—perhaps no more than a rain-fed seasonal river.

Many of the places mentioned in the
Mahabharata are located around Delhi. For instance, Gurgaon, now a modern boom-town
full of gleaming office-towers and shopping-malls, was a village that belonged to
Dronacharya, the teacher who trained the cousins in martial arts. The name Gurgaon
literally means the ‘Village of the Teacher’. The Pandav capital
of Indraprastha is said to be located under the Purana Qila in Delhi. Similarly, the
site of Hastinapur is identified with a site near modern Meerut. The battlefield of
Kurukshetra is nearby, in the state of Haryana. Farther afield, we have the cities
of Mathura and Kashi (or Varanasi) which remain very sacred cities for Hindus.

Some of the Iron Age sites have been
excavated, starting in the 1950s and have thrown up remains of ancient settlements.
For instance, there is a strong traditional belief that Indraprastha was located on
the same site as the sixteenth-century Purana Qila (or Old Fort) in the middle of
modern Delhi. The site even had a village called Indrapat till the nineteenth
century. Excavation between 1954 and 1971 found that there was indeed a major
settlement here that dates at least to the fourth century
BC
. Pottery shards suggest there may be an older Iron Age settlement
somewhere close by. Sadly, the exploratory excavation of Mahabharata sites of the
fifties and sixties was not properly followed up in later decades.

One of the more intriguing
Mahabharata-related sites is that of Dwarka in the westernmost tip of Gujarat. It
said to have been founded by Krishna as his capital after he led his
people from Mathura to Gujarat. Thirty-six years after the
Kurukshetra battle, the city is said to have been devoured by the sea. Underwater
surveys near the temple-town of Dwarka and the nearby island of Bet Dwarka have come
up with stone anchors, a sunken jetty and elaborate walls suggesting the existence
of an ancient port in the area. Although I am not entirely convinced by all of the
claims made about the site, it is yet another reminder of how the forces of nature
have directed the course of history
⁴
.

All this does not confirm the events of
the Mahabharata, but it strongly suggests that the composers of the epic were
talking about real places. Such findings are not unique to India. Till the
nineteenth century, the places mentioned in Homer’s
Iliad
were
considered to be mythical. However, Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in
the late nineteenth century showed that Troy and many of the places mentioned in the
Greek epics were real places. Similarly, Chinese legends about the ancient Shang
dynasty (1600-1046
BC
) have now been confirmed by modern
archaeology. Inscriptions on oracle bones and bronze artifacts confirm much of what
is mentioned in the ancient texts. Of course, there are gaps between
thearchaeological findings and the information in the texts
⁵
, but this is only to be expected after such a long lapse of time.

As mentioned earlier, the Mahabharata
largely has an East–West orientation unlike the North–South
orientation of the Ramayana. Most of the action takes place around Delhi and the
Gangetic plains but the eastern and western extremes of the subcontinent also play
an important role in the unfolding events. The Kauravs’ mother Gandhari is
from the kingdom of Gandhar which is now eastern Afghanistan. Her devious
brother Shakuni instigates his nephews against the Pandavs,
fixes the game of dice and ultimately causes the war.

On the other geographical extreme,
India’s North East finds mention for the first time. Arjuna, the most
dashing of the Pandav brothers, makes his way to remote Manipur during his years of
exile. There he meets the warrior-princess Chitrangada. They fall in love and marry,
albeit on the condition that Chitrangada would not have to follow Arjuna back to the
Gangetic plains. Their son eventually becomes the king of Manipur and would
participate in the Kurukshetra battle.

The people of the tiny Bishnupriya
community that still lives in Manipur and neighbouring states trace their origins to
the Mahabharata. They speak a language that is related to Assamese and has many
Tibeto–Burman words, but still preserves several features of archaic
Prakrit. Does the Chitrangada legend preserve the memory of an ancient migration
into this area? The Bishnupriyas were a powerful clan in Manipur till the nineteenth
century when a Burmese invasion scattered them. They now live in a few villages in
Assam and Manipur, and there is a danger that their language and unique culture will
get lost within a generation or two.
⁶

Since the Kurukshetra battle is said to
have involved all the tribes and kingdoms of India, the Mahabharata gives us long
lists of kingdoms, clans and cities. Many of them were probably added to the text in
later times. Nonetheless, it gives an idea of the Indian world view during the Iron
Age. The name Mahabharata is itself interesting as it can be read to mean
‘Greater India’. This would make sense for an epic that claims
to tell the story involving all the clans of the subcontinent.
The text itself explains the name in terms of a primordial Emperor Bharata who is
said to have conquered the whole country (but plays no important role in the central
plot). The epic is therefore told as a history of the Bharata people. Since there is
no independent evidence of an all-conquering Emperor Bharata, one wonders if this is
an echo of the powerful Bharata tribe mentioned in the Rig Veda. Did
Sudas’s victory against the ten tribes create a dream of civilizational
nationhood that gets echoed over the millennia?