The Birth of Civilization in Ancient India

India possesses one of the most ancient civilizations on Earth. Not only did it come third after Mesopotamia and Egypt, it shares with China the distinction of having the longest-running continuous culture in the world. The key to this longevity was not geography as one might suppose since the origins of Indian civilization are quite near some of the most daunting terrain in the world. Shielded by the Himalaya Mountains and the Indian Ocean, the area first populated in India might be assumed to have dwelt in isolation. Instead, the unique way of life born along the Indus River Valley was the product of the confluence of many outside “invaders.” This unique culture created such a stable society as to endure transplantation and invasion unlike any other culture since.

The Indian subcontinent is about one-half the size of the United States (but today possesses over three times the population). For most of the length of the Himalayas they form an impenetrable barrier between India and the rest of Asia. At least two gateways, however, exist across the tallest mountains in the world at the Khyber Pass and the Bolan Pass in northwest India. The people who migrated (a more appropriate word than invaded) include at least Aryans, Bactrians, Greeks, Huns, Mongols, Persians, Afghans, and Arabs. All right, some of these came as invaders. You can probably name which ones. Numerous races, tribes, and conquerors brought a steady influx of new ideas, especially religious ideas, and Indian religion, dress, and even the varied skin colors of Indian peoples speak of a great mixing. The shared results produced an enduring culture.

The earliest beginnings of the civilization of India classify it among other river civilizations we have studied, and the river in question is not the Ganges but the Indus as we have said. For all the important symbolism of the great river to the east, the beginnings were along the fertile valley of the Indus in the west. The Indus River tumbles down from melting snows in the Himalayans. The river winds its way across dry, hot plains until it empties in a grand delta into the Arabian Sea. Rain occurs with any reliability only in the south due to monsoons. In between is one of the hottest yet one of the most fertile places on Earth.

The flooding of the Indus that brought nutrients to the soil also brought destruction to the homes of the earliest settlers of this region around 4,000 B. C. Not until they learned to bake the mud bricks for their homes in kilns rather than in the sun did their homes become durable enough to permit permanent settlement. Then the rich resources of the river valley could be routinely enjoyed. These resources included annual replenishment of fertile mud for miles around, ample drinking and irrigation water, fish, timber from lush forests, and the river itself as a highway to transport all the rest. Food supplies increased and permitted the qualities of civilization that caused towns to turn into thriving cities by 2,300 B. C.

We know this earliest civilization by the name of its northernmost principal city, Harappa. Harappan society produced weavers, tanners, potters, and furniture makers. They developed a script from pictograms but their writing is as of yet undecipherable. The Harappan civilization extended 1,000 miles from north to south along the Indus Valley. Unfortunately, a good portion of the materials left from this era were used to make railroad beds until archaeologists proved they were the remnants of an ancient people. Now over 100 sites have been excavated revealing two large cities: Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro farther south.

Each of these cities claimed around 40,000 inhabitants, and they were both designed almost exactly alike. A central fortress was raised on a mud-brick foundation surrounded by walls of kiln-dried brick. Straight, wide streets extended out from the fortress forming a city proper of at least a square mile. The streets delineated carefully designed blocks of buildings and had sewer drains unparalleled in the world until those built by Rome. A definite social structure was apparent since homes ranged from large and luxurious to the very small. Workshops revealed an increasing level of skilled craftsmanship.

Strange clues to Harappan life have been excavated in as many as nine layers of this city rebuilt again and again on ever-rising mounds. A profound dearth of weaponry may indicate a strong government enforced by religious harmony. Little changed in over 1,000 years for the implements and designs of buildings remain nearly identical from the earliest levels to the top. Until someone discerns how to read the hundreds of inscribed stone seals discovered in this region we won’t know any more about the key to Harappan unity.

Theories abound as to what undid all the Harappans did. What is clear is that the end of Harappan society approximately coincides with the migration into the same region by Aryans from what is today Iran. Aryans later attained a written language we can read since it formed the basis for some modern Indian languages. Aryan legends speak of moving into the Indus Valley and “freeing the rivers” from a people they called the Dasyus. No clear evidence exists, however, that proves the Dasyus were the Harappans. Mohenjo-Daro has some tell-tale grouped skeletons and burned walls destruction signs, but other Harappan cities appear to have been merely abandoned.

Harappans lacked iron tools that would have been necessary for expanding their growing civilization into the thick forests surrounding them, so another theory is that famine drove them out. The Indus does not flood predictably. In fact, floods changed the course of the river entirely at times leaving some cities high and dry and inundating others. A key piece of evidence here would be proof that the wheat-growing Harappans discovered how to cultivate rice and moved east to the much swampier Ganges valley. Many scholars believe the Harappans were not “wiped out” by the Aryans but merely transplanted their culture either to the east or to the south pretty much voluntarily, perhaps hopefully.

Curious cultural clues indicate that the Harappans are still among us. We know that many ancient cultural traits evident in the archaeological record still make up much of modern Indian culture including common children’s toys, jewelry, hairstyles, and even a preference for showers poured from above for bathing as opposed to sitting down! Harappans worshipped a horned fertility god—a bull. Ancient stone carvings show a Harappan religious figure sitting with his legs crossed exactly as Hindu holy men do in modern India.

The early Aryans were nothing like the culture they either destroyed or merely followed. They were a rugged, war-like people from Central Asia (get used to that kind) who were great herdsmen of cattle who were for all intents and purposes barbarians in comparison to the Harappans. Compared to the fired-brick houses of the Harappans, Aryans’ dwellings were crude huts. Aryans even fought amongst themselves as various tribal chieftains vied for local supremacy. Aryans had one great skill—they could make fine chariots. We know they fought in armor with bows and arrows, swords, spears, battle axes, and war drums. We also know Aryans liked to drink intoxicating beverages. An entire book of religious hymns exists in praise of soma which was a liquor made from a drug thought to be similar to hashish.

Wherever the Harappans went, we know the Aryans eventually left the Indus Valley around 1,000 B. C. and migrated toward the Ganges. They did develop iron tools that helped them break through the forests. Iron also allowed them to plow harder northern soils and expand the population of India over more and more of its modern extent. The Aryans were the first to call forth kings in India as they settled into more agricultural, sedentary lives. Their religious practices, language, and social customs formed a major cultural legacy for the future of India. The language of Sanskrit is now “dead” in that it is not spoken but by a few Hindu priests in their prayers. However, this ancient Aryan language is as important to, say, Hindi, as Latin is to, say, English. The Aryan religious texts and practices form the background for the Hindu and Buddhist religions, as has been discussed in class. Perhaps most fundamental to modern Indian life, however, is the rigid social class structure inherited from the social structure of the Aryans.

In fact, the continuity between ancient and modern India is so profound that if a modern Indian potter were transported back over 2,000 years he could easily fit his life into that of his ancestors. Not only would the techniques of his craft be roughly the same, but his dress, his diet, and his style of eating would be “kosher” if he stopped for a meal at a house that would closely resemble his house back in the future. The “caste” system familiar to him from his own era would also have been in effect for his own great-grandfather 80 times removed. The caste system dictated where both ancient and modern potters lived, their style of dress, their diet, their times for prayer, whom they married—the whole pattern of their lives from birth to death. Through all the convulsive confusion of many races, tribes, languages, occupations, skin tones, religious practices, and geographical phenomena one might say that the caste system provides the one thread of unity over time that is the definition of continuity. That last is sort of a caste-system pun in that high-caste Brahmans are given a thread to wear around their necks at physical maturity and they are supposed to wear it the rest of their lives as a sign of their caste.

Origins of the caste system go back at least to Aryan tribal divisions of labor in all the various occupations of society. Families protected trade secrets as a measure of job security, and a system that required sons to take their fathers’ professions ensured stability. No one knows at what point these divisions took on spiritual purification norms and social status customs but they did. Economically the caste system did and still does organize Indian culture into groups of laundrymen, moneylenders, potters, gardeners, oil-pressers, exorcists, street-sweepers, and even thieves and prostitutes. A finely-tuned system of interdependence was the result. Farmers raised food for carpenters who built the farm buildings while both groups turned their laundry over to launderers. The economic security, while stifling innovation, also provided social security in that each caste took care of its own, even the lazy. Social harmony was provided in a diverse culture in that, while you might not like your weird neighbors, you knew they performed some essential function for the greater good of the whole.

These rules gained complexity over time. Because of the caste system’s basis in structure and purity, each caste has a set of rules determining who may cook the food its members eat and who may serve them water. A Brahman will eat grain cooked in water only if the cook is another high-caste Brahman. He can, however, eat vegetables cooked in butter by cooks from a caste immediately below him, but of course he cannot eat with those cooks. Some castes eat fish but not other meats. Others eat no meat but will eat eggs. Most of the highest castes are vegetarians. The fact that a man would be aghast marrying someone who could not dine at table with him gave rise to the even more complex sets of rules determining who can marry whom. The rules are now so complex there are castes today whose members can only marry inside of fifteen families.

These rules of an ever-descending level of purity of course leave some caste at the bottom. The lowest caste can defile higher-caste members by merely allowing themselves to be seen. There is a caste so high that its members always dine in wet clothing they have just laundered themselves to avoid wearing a garment that while drying on a line might have had even a shadow of these lowest-caste untouchables cast across it.

By the way, Indian peoples do not use the word “caste.” That word comes from Portuguese merchants who were among the first Westerners to observe that, “No one changes from his father’s trade. . .” The Portuguese word for clan is casta. Indian peoples use their word for “color” hinting at racial derivations or the word jati which means “birth.” Even linguistically the caste system bears all the marks of humiliating racial discrimination just much more finely tuned than that of our own past(?).

Drawbacks to the caste system partly explain why India has suffered so much from outside invasions. Only certain members of society were ever allowed to study fighting, weaponry, or techniques of military command. Certain castes encouraged their young men at certain ages to be sober-minded students and at others to be pleasure-seekers. An ill-timed invasion could catch the warrior classes, well, largely indisposed. Furthermore there is a great stifling in a culture when a child has to “mature in the pattern of his parents.” For a genius musician to be born to a potter’s family was an exercise in futility—going outside the way of the group was seen to be tampering defiantly with universal order. One of the most anti-progress scriptures found in any culture is the line from the Bhagavad Gita, “It is better to do one’s own duty badly than to do another’s duty well.” Compare that to “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. . .” Only recently have caste lines begun to weaken and laws against untouchability been passed. The cultural strengths and weaknesses of the caste system are, like everything else, being reassessed in the aftermath of the tidal wave of information that makes up the age in which we live.