Two Thousand Years of South Asian History in Two and q Half Pages

Marc Jason Gilbert

This resource was developed to assist teachers unfamiliar with South Asian civilization to introduce it into their world history courses and elsewhere in their curriculum. The narrative history offered here suggests an approach that may have utility to a non-specialist. A brief list of source materials is offered that may be sufficient for classroom treatment of the subject.

South Asian civilization has very deep roots that stretch back to the Neolithic Agrarian cities of the valley of the Indus River and its tributaries which were fully established by 2000 BCE. These cities were laid out in a grid pattern and had excellent gravity-fed sewage systems and home ventilation systems which used the physics of natural airflow patterns to cool houses built around a central patio. They also conducted a brisk trade with Mesopotamia via the Persian Gulf. The religion and art of these cities have suggested to some a sense of seeking the unity of all things by mastering the forces of the physical world through meditation and self-control. This civilization was destroyed by a combination of flooding and earthquakes around 1500 BCE. At about this time, nomadic peoples from the north entered the subcontinent. These Indo-European-speaking peoples, often called Indo Aryans, sang songs of conquest, but the cities on the Indus plain were by then largely deserted.

As the nomadic Indo-Europeans spread throughout northern India, they became a settled people, formed into competing states and so suffered the emergence of warfare springing up between long-allied clans. Such major social transformations were expressed, as it is so often among Indo-European peoples (like the Greek Iliad and Odyssey) in epic poetry, in the Indian case, in the epic story, The Mahabharata. But as this epic literature developed, it also came to reflect changes in religious outlook which evolved from the early Indo-Aryan lusty world view (heroic atmospheric deities similar to those of the Greeks, rituals and sacrifices of material things) which today is called Brahminism toward the possibly Indus Valley view that such sacrifices were a symbolic burning away of the material world, of a rising above human desire. The burning away the fruits of selfish action and desire (karma) to achieve release (moksha) from rebirth into the material world (samsara) and thereby achieving ultimate union of the soul (atman) with the Divine Consciousness (Brahman) is described in the Upanishads, a text added to the Vedas and thus often called "Vedanta". Siddhartha Gautama Shakya (the Buddha--bodhi means enlightened) was an Indian philosopher who achieved this journey toward enlightenment and taught that much of early Aryan religion and its holy books (the Vedas) were mere superstition, and that Indo-Aryan social hierarchy (the caste system or jati, rating groups of families according to the spiritual purity of their occupations in legendary histories) was morally indefensible (one can be born into a low status life because of the karma incurred in a past life, but even a high-born priest is only as good as his heart--birth cannot secure goodness). His four Noble Truths identified the frustrations of a changing world as the source of all human pain and advocated a middle way between asceticism (abandoning all earthy attachments, fasting) and living life as if there was no spiritual dimension beyond mere ritual sacrifice. Ultimately Buddhists came to interpret Buddha's teachings (The Middle Path) as indicating that through his own enlightenment, Buddha attained the power to guide and sustain all seekers after truth. He, or rather the merit and consciousness he achieved, thus could provide for their redemption through personal devotion to him and his teachings.

Indo-Aryan priests were challenged by all these new religious ideas, but, whereas the Aryans may have possibly absorbed the ideas of the Indus Valley, they certainly absorbed Buddha's ideas, a process suggested by the Bhagavad Gita, a chapter of the Mahabharata written and rewritten over time to reflect the absorption, or synthesis of new ideas into their great traditions without rejecting the old ones. The Bhagavad Gita seems to embrace orthodox reformers such as the writers of the Upanishads and heterodox philosophers such as Buddha by offering four pathways to moksha: karma, jana, yoga and puja (self-less action, pursuit of philosophical wisdom, physical self-discipline as a door to perception, and devotion to God). Caste remained at the core of normative behavior, but to the enlightened philosopher, all existence was one. This synthesis is also reflected in the evolution of varnasharamadharma. This term, which parallels the biblical injunction that for every time there is a season, posits that for each varna (caste) there is a corresponding religious path(dharma) for each of the four traditional stages of life (asharama: student, householder, forest dweller and wandering mendicant). The asceticism of the Upanishads and Buddhist monks were thus absorbed into the final stages of a Hindu's life.

A further such synthesis came after Islam arrived in India. Muslim warriors first built a conquest state in north India, but Muslims only expanded their empire and established a lasting presence in India with the great Mogul Empire. This empire began in 1526, but its solid foundations were laid by Emperor Akbar (died, 1605) who built an efficient early modern state based on religious toleration and by making full use of India's native genius in art, government and trade. Even the Muslim fundamentalist zeal of his great-grandson (Aurangzeb) could not destroy this legacy of strength through toleration, but it did weaken the Mogul Empire sufficiently to hasten its piecemeal conquest by British merchants, who exploited divisions within India after the Mogul Empire broke up into smaller Hindu and Muslim states. The British came to India seeking its vast wealth, but were initially frustrated, as were all who wished to trade with India, by India's lack of need to buy foreign goods. To trade at all, Britain had to hire Indian cotton weavers to provide cotton that they could transport efficiently to China to sell for a profit and use that profit to buy goods in India and China (called the "country trade" and not dissimilar from the "triangle trade" of British North Americans). Eventually, British traders realized that conditions in India could not stop them from controlling the India cotton growers and other producers directly by conquering their local rulers. They completed this task by 1818, but did little more at first as they learned about India's past achievements and feared to provoke a response that might rally all Indians against them. In 1857, many traditional and conservative Indian leaders did, in fact, lead a great rebellion against the British, but these leaders were themselves divided by tradition rivalries (Hindu and Muslim, for example) and they failed to dislodge the British. In reply, the British traders were replaced by the government of the Imperial Britain, who hired many Western-educated Indians to ostensibly help run the government more sensibly than that which had led to the war of 1857.

These "New Indians" themselves valued the ideals of freedom imbedded in their increasingly Anglophile education as well as Indian ideals, and they began campaigning to win the right of self-government from Britain. Mohandas K. Gandhi (the Maha - 'great' ataman- 'souled one'), blended Western and Indian values of attaining liberty through non-violent civil disobedience into a strategy for both securing political freedom and building social harmony. This strategy was called "Satyagraha" (holding fast to the truth) and was successfully employed by Gandhi to fatally undermine the will of Imperial Britain and, in the hands of Martin Luther king, Jr., to later undermine white supremacy in America. After independence, India continued to experiment with blending Western ideas with Indian ones (from socialism to a free market system, for example). It is currently struggling to form new solutions in the face of old problems, such as the battle over caste now fought in terms of affirmative action and the battle for identity and dominance now fought in terms of Hindu fundamentalism. These new solutions may greatly revise South Asian civilization, but they may also lead to a continuation of its tradition of synthesizing the old with the new.

Sources:

Texts: Stanley Wolpert , New History of India World History, Sixth Edition, Oxford University Press, 1999. Traditional, accessible narrative with good bibliography.

Peter Stearns, Michael Adas, Stuart Schwartz and Marc Jason Gilbert, World Civilizations: The Global Experience, Third revised edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 2000. Text blends the idealism of this writer (a student of Wolpert's) with the cynicism of his co-authors. The product is the better for it. The relevant chapters of this text feature numerous web links to South Asian history. Its associated web page --www.awl.com/stearns-- includes web links keyed to questions for study of the region prepared by this writer.

Film: Puja--Expressions of Devotion (VHS, 29 minutes) 1996, produced by the Arthur M Sackler Gallery, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Novels for Classroom use (various editons; all available in paperback): Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve touches all students. It provides a peasant woman's view of the impact of modernization on an Indian village.

E. M. Forster's A Passage to India remains the best introduction to the mindset of the society of the Raj. Even Its flaws (Forster's admitted lack of understanding of Hindus among them) are good talking points.

Professor Marc Jason Gilbert, Department of History, North Georgia College and State University, Dahlonega, Georgia 30597; Phone: (706) 864-1911, Fax: (706) 864-1873, E-mail: mgilbert@ngcsu.edu .