Looking Differently at Ancient Indian History
— From a
Scientific Angle
Jawhar Sircar
Autumn Annual of Presidency
College Alumni Association
20 January
2019
This article
is an edited version of a talk delivered at the
Ramakrishna Mission Institute of
Culture, Gol Park, Kolkata on 25 August,
2017. It is based on the transcript prepared from the recording made by the
Institute, later published by it.
The topic which I have chosen to speak today seeks to bridge, to
some extent, the ever-increasing gulf between the social sciences
and the physical sciences. As academic disciplines improve their
coverage and become more organised, more systematic and reach higher levels of
understanding of reality in their own different ways, they become more and more exclusive. They begin to speak in languages that arise out of the
requirement of their own disciplines without realising that
their lexicon is hardly understood by anyone else who is not a part of their limited
domain. Therefore, we find that it
is extremely
difficult to put two specialists from two different disciplines together
and expect them to open
up a
meaningful conversation.
Within the
disciplines, too, more and more fragmentation occurs and very narrow domains of specialisation
emerge, which makes communication extremely
difficult even within the
same discipline — as each specialist really knows so
little about the
others’ specialisation. This is why it so imperative for at least a
few to connect the dots generated by separate findings and to keep trying to forge some degree of meaningful
communication among these walled disciplines, to achieve
a kind of a better understanding of reality.
Let us Link History
and Science
Let us take a typical social science
like history and try to understand it from the angle of some physical science,
say, physics or chemistry. This is
difficult to think of as all that most of us
remember of our encounters with history as a subject in school and
college is one that is rather discouraging.
We were made to think of history as an exercise in remembering the deeds of kings, emperors, leaders and challengers.
It appeared more concerned about dates — of war and peace
and of major events and who
won or who lost. Traditional approaches to
history, therefore, hardly go beyond this and rarely ever explain how
scientific and technological breakthroughs and advancements impacted society.
Many more would have been attracted to the subject had it narrated how the
advent of technology at each stage changed not only our values and world-views
but also our very existence. We normally come against an instant mental
block when we try to link history with science, as we are trained to treat them
as two different worlds — as belonging to two completely separate domains. At
the school and college level we are, of
course, told about the ‘Copper Age’ or the ‘iron age’ but we are hardly ever
told how succeeding technologies or ‘improved metals’ actually changed the very
face of civilisations. We come to know only bits and pieces of how science
impacted history — like how the invention of the steam engine spurred the
industrial revolution in Europe. But how many know, for instance, that
improvements in the technology of iron actually resulted in the spread of the
Mauryan empire?
As a result, the style of teaching history to
which all of us are exposed in our early years, one that only recounted dates
and events, usually ends up
in being very uninteresting. For
most
students it is just too boring. In fact,
I had carefully avoided studying history even though I had decided to study a social
science for my graduation as
I felt that studying
history was just too stuffy. It appeared to be confined only to past incidents and of persons
who are dead and gone , and appeared unconcerned with the exciting and
problematic present and could not care much about the enigmatic future.
Historians did not really strain to change these early impressions as they were
busy writing for each other’s consumption — not for us — and seemed to revel in
their own world of the past. It was only after I left the university and had
taken up a demanding job that I began to read
history in my spare time, on my own terms. It was only then that I began to see
the links between technology and civilisations — and soon succumbed
to the charms of history. My official task was very time
consuming but it was either full of
intense pressures and tension (as when facing law and order problems, every
day) or very mentally-debilitating (when tackling excessively rule-bound locked
minds and complicated bureaucratic procedures). It was during these days that
found that history and social anthropology to be fascinating distractions or
alternatives and they did help me understand social behaviour and political
structures that I was immersed in. In fact, I became so seriously engrossed in
these subjects that I took to burning midnight oil for several years, after
very tiring days in office or in public affairs, and earned my Masters degrees
in them, on my own. It is from this belated love for the subjects that I shall try to explain to you — in my own non-historian’s
language — some interesting linkages
between scientific break-throughs, especially in
metallurgy, and the corresponding
developments in Indian history.
Unless we learn to appreciate how each of the major phases of our
history was influenced
by the prevailing state of
technology, the two worlds will remain separate and even antagonistic to each
other.
Inserting Harappan Civilisation into Indian History
As there are many phases of Indian history, I will restrict myself to the three
of the
early stages of historical development in
India, namely, the
Harappan, the Aryan or Vedic, and the Mauryan. It is my first submission that if
Indians had not mastered theoretical and practical
physics in developing accurate measurement systems,
it would not have been possible
for them to create or sustain the Indus Valley or
the Harappan civilisation for
almost 2500 years. It
was only after we understood the
purport of the discovery of this civilisation
in the late 1950s could we claim the honour of
being one of the three oldest civilisations in the world — a distinction that belonged only on Egypt
and Mesopotamia till then. There is a fourth civilisation that is given equal antiquity
and that is
the Chinese one, even though it came up some seven-eight hundred years later. Until the Harappan
civilisation on the Indus Valley entered our text books around 1960, all us firmly believed that Indian civilisation
had really begun with the invasion
by the Aryans some time in the second millennium before the present era.
We shall discuss a little later how text
books were changed but what is more important is once the dates of Mohenjo-Daro
and Harappa were confirmed, the beginning of India’s history was pushed back by
almost two thousand years. The start of the Harappan civilisation is usually taken as 3300 BC
and it lasted till about 1300 BC. Incidentally, these dates are
not negotiable as
these are not determined by any particular
government, though certain groups of ideologues do often try to
tamper with history to suit their own world-views. But history
has to be tested like all other sciences on the anvil of
truth or empiricism.
As
mentioned, students who studied Indian
history even in the late 1950s were not taught about the Harappan civilisation. Though Harappa was first ‘sighted’
in the middle of the 19th century early excavations began much
later, in 1921. But it was Mohenjo-Daro’s exciting discovery in 1922
that stole the show at that time. The report of the archeological excavation
prepared by Rakhal Das Banerji was accepted by the-then Director General, John
Marshall rather late and it took quite some time to factor in the findings from
the excavations in both Mohenjo-Daro and
Harappa before the ‘Indus Valley’ or ‘Harappan’ civilisation was admitted into Indian history.
I
am
fond of collecting old history
books and reading up what I cannot procure — just to get
a feel of what was actually admitted as and believed to history in those
decades. I checked up the 1958 edition of the Oxford History of India — a very
standard text book for school students that was originally written by Vincent
Smith and revised by Percival Spear. Strangely, I found no mention of the Indus
Valley or Harappan civilisation, even though it was Mortimer Wheeler who had assisted Spear in
updating the facts about ‘early Indian history’. This was extremely interesting
because Mortimer Wheeler was certainly more aware than anyone else of the ‘new
civilisation’ as he had led the major excavation in Harappa in 1946 as the
Director General of the Archeological Survey of India (ASI). It is rather odd,
therefore, that he made no mention of the great discovery of the Harappan
civilisation as late as 1958. In any case, once it was admitted into the history text books of colleges
and universities, the Indus Valley or Harappan civilisation ranked as the
first phase of India’s history and was
juxtaposed before the Vedic period as the first chapter in history books.
Mehergarh Precedes Harappan Civilisation
Returning to the significance of
Harappan and the other three civilisations
that are referred to
as the Copper Age or
Chalcolithic ones, we see how the use of
copper had distinguished them from
the rest of humanity in all other parts of the world. Most of the latter were in different stages of stone-age technology. All the
four great ancient civilisations were also
known as hydraulic civilisations as they were
dependent on rivers — that they had managed to control and utilise this priceless water resource. The point is, why did this advancement had taken place only in these
four areas of the
world? Why is it that the Indus Valley was so far ahead of Europe? We may use
their colonial language on
them
by saying that the ‘natives’ of Europe were then stuck in a more primitive stage of human growth, i.e., the Neolithic one or in the early Chalcolithic
stages that were characterised by small village and
farming communities. They could not even dream of the urban civilisations like Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa and western and northern Europe were still very much in their cave-dwelling and animal-skin existence.
Be that as it may, in order to understand the Indus Valley civilisation
that began around 3300 B.C.,
we need
to go
back by another
3,000 years — to 6500 B.C. which is around
8,500 years from
today. Not too many people have heard of the discovery at Mehergarh and there has not been sufficient public discussions on it and nor have history textbooks rooted it firmly in our minds. But those who
are in the profession of history and archeology are aware of the archeological site called Mehergarh near the
Bolan
Pass or modern-day Quetta in Baluchistan, in present-day Pakistan. This is regarded as the cradle of Indian civilisation and it was discovered
only in 1974 by a
group of archeologists under the leadership
of a French couple— Jean-Francois and Catherine Jarrige.
They worked in two phases and it was only after the second
phase that ended in 2000 A.D.
could the French exploration team establish that this Mehergarh was indeed
the precursor of the
great Indus Valley Civilisation. Naturally, books about Mehergarh started
coming
up only in the last few
years. We have to
understand one
scientific fact — that Stone Age civilisations tended to be located in rocky areas because
the main source of
strength of man lay in the use of stones or lithos. This is
why we refer to them as Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic —all lithic ages that were characterised by more and more skilful
use of stones. In
other words, they avoided river valleys, though they needed some clean
water to survive. They tried to stay clear of areas infested with
swamps, forests, and high grass where lived rhinoceros and other wild animals. The same
mighty river that we came
to worship later was then quite
a dreaded zone.
The Bolan Pass is in a rocky region and quite near to Hinglaj, one of
the
toughest among the
Shakta pilgrimages, and from
there, the Indus river is not very far away. It
is in this Mehergarh region that a
group of humans came out of the earlier phase
of depending only on hunting-gathering
that required mainly the adroit use of flints, blades and needles, to which their fingers and their brains had developed
to a great extent.
This is the area in which we find the old lithic civilisations of India transforming into animal herding civilisations. That means that man could escape from his total dependence upon
animals he killed, for food, clothing, bone
instruments and so on. The Mehergarh animal-herders did not have to kill animals all the time — they had learnt to domesticate many of them. The animal was
no more their enemy or prey but their servant. From that animal-rearing pastoral stage, the inhabitants moved on to agriculture
and if we are ever asked which is the first spot in the Indian subcontinent from where agriculture began, we can point unhesitatingly to Mehergarh. This
culture not only saw
the first
domestication of animals, but it also witnessed
the domestication of other crops,
almost a thousand years later. It is this ‘cradle’ that reveals the
different stages of growth of our ancestors.
But what is more important is that
it leads us to the next stage—from an isolated agricultural civilisation to a sprawling and
wondrous urban civilisation that the ancient world
had hardly seen, except in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Mehergarh displays the whole sequence of how this Neolithic
settlement began with
animal herding, moved on to the early agriculture — the first in the subcontinent of India
and subsequently gave birth to the mature urban civilisation of
Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa and other towns. Why did it happen? Why
it did not happen
in Bengal or
in other parts? This is the point we need to understand. It is
fascinating to go through the evidence of scientific and technological advancements that were made
during the journey of history. It began with the hunter-gatherer; it then moved to the animal
herder; then to the agriculturist and finally to the urban civilisation along
the Indus Valley.
Scientific Advancement in Mehergarh
One can only imagine
what a phenomenal pooling of scientific knowledge and technological innovations
must have come together to produce a civilisation like the Harappan, that was
essentially urban based was huge — its core area spread over more than a
thousand kilometres in length, and its width could vary from three to four
hundred to seven or eight hundred kilometres. And to be its precursor,
Mehergarh had obviously to reach a very high level
of scientific
advancement. To give an
example, we note how surprised
scientists were to
discover evidence of advanced dentistry in
the form of eleven drilled molar crowns in nine skeletons
that were as old as 8,000
years. It proved that the world’s
first proto-dentistry was practised here
and a Western scientific journal,
Nature, actually
declared in its April
2006 issue that Mehergarh was indeed the oldest
and the first Neolithic evidence of dentistry in the whole world.
This
is only the tip of the iceberg. We can deduce from
archeological evidence how scientific knowledge had been harnessed in a systematic manner in Mehergarh, and how it had
been applied in the technology of other applications in this particular civilisation. We
have
come across furnaces, ceramics, glazed pottery
and sophisticated firing techniques that
are as old as 4500 B.C. But we also find that by 3500
B.C., that is to say, exactly
a
thousand years later, the
quality of products and the intricacy of designs seemed to have suffered.
The reasons were mass production of items
and the movement away from stone and stone-earth-based ceramics and from terracotta to metals. This marks
the beginning of
the
metal age. Hence we find technologies here included stone and copper drills, up-draft skills
(when the draft is pushed
upward to capture the heat near the neck of chimney of large pit-kilns)
and copper melting crucibles.
In Mehergarh there is also evidence of manufacturing activity
based on metals, such as artefacts, implements, and items
of daily use. It
is here that we get two recorded evidence of being the first site in the
world to use the metallurgical technique of cire perdue—the lost wax process.
Much of our bronze and other casting work in India and in many parts of the world is still done
by this ‘lost wax’ method. In Bengal and in central India the Dhokra
artists use this technique where
the moulds for metal pots
are first made on a cast made of earth and plaster material. The designs and carvings that are visualised are all made on it at this stage on
the dummy mould. Then wax is put over the
worked-out mould, and then a second layer of earth is put over this wax coating. When finally, hot molten metal is poured into the entire cast through a
hole on the top, it just melts away the wax and takes on the space that lies between the outer and
inner moulds, both of which are broken once the metal cools. The metal pot that
emerges naturally has all the carvings and other design impressions that the
wax layer had. This whole process of
metal work is called cire perdue in French and adopted in English as the ‘lost wax
procedure’. It is one of
the
world’s oldest metallurgical techniques, and it means a
lot as it was first found
in Mehergarh. This discovery came from a 6,000-year-old wheel-shaped unalloyed
copper amulet. The
amulet itself will explain to you
how science
and superstition had gone
hand in hand — as is happening even today. In India, we must have learned to live with both
science and superstition from this earliest phase of our history.
How Science & Technology Sustained
Harappan Civilisation
A vast city-based
civilisation like the Harappan (3300 - 1300 BCE) that arose out of the
achievements of Mehergarh (7000-2500 BCE) has often astounded historians,
archeologists, anthropologists and even scientists. In its heydays, this
civilisation had a
population of over five million inhabitants, which is an astounding number in
those days. Harappan civilisation was actually among the rare ones in the
world where scientific techniques were devised as early as 3000 BC to produce intricate hand-crafted
carnelian products and seal carvings, in addition to a host of other items of
daily use and recreation. Their incidentally, the seals used for trade ,
decorated with carvings of animals and mythical beings, indicate that Harappan
cities conducted thriving trade with lands as far away as Mesopotamia. Indus
Valley cities improved upon the technology
of metallurgy of Mehergarh and it is clear that they made extensive use of
copper, bronze, lead, and tin. These cities are remarkable for their urban
planning, baked brick houses, elaborate drainage systems, water supply systems,
and clusters of large non-residential buildings — all of which point to the
commendable advancements made in so many sciences. The profusion of toys that
was found in the cities and the fact that very few weapons of war are evidence
that suggests peace and prosperity. Those who wonder how such a superior
urban civilisation as in Harappa suddenly appeared in around 3300
B.C. need
to understand that it was
not sudden at all as its feeder cultures like Mehergarh were already evolving and moving ahead towards
this reality for
3,000 years.
Recent studies have
proved that
in the Harappan civilisation people were not voracious consumers
of rice or wheat like most of the
people of India. For
a civilisation to have one or more towns or cities meant that all those
who dwelt away from agriculture would need to be fed by the rural, agricultural
communities. So, town-based civilisations would
normally come up only after
the arrival of
iron, because iron-tipped ploughs were
capable of generating surplus food that could then feed non-farm, town-centric
people. Until the arrival of iron in the first millennium BC, every person had
to play a role in agriculture as wooden tipped ploughs barely produced enough
to feed only those who lent their hand in farming operations. The question now is:
how did a Copper Age civilisation feed townsmen as copper could not
be put on to
the tip of the plough? To produce agricultural surpluses with Copper-Age technology was surely difficult but the very existence of Mohenjodaro,
Harappa, Lothal
and other
Harappan towns proves that it was possible. This was
done by a combination of diet, agronomic practices, skilful use of water, using
cattle to move ploughs and by utilising wheel-based and copper-tipped auxiliary
agricultural implements. Recent studies prove that the Harappan people consumed dry staples that they had begun to eat at Mehergarh — like barley, oats, jowar, bajra and other crops that grew with minimal
doses of water.
The surmise we
arrive at from this is that their interaction with the mighty
Indus river was limited to transportation and not linked to
agriculture. The Indus river
was always feared for its floods.
By choosing dry-zone crops, they were not at the mercy of the river and clearly
preferred ‘culturally accepted’
food that was conditioned during the
neolithic and early chalcolithic existence, in a less-fertile dry area. They did have some
wheat, but wheat was not central
to
their diet. It was like our soya. Let us
not forget that the Harappan civilisation made extensive use of animals and the toy bullock-carts we find these
are an exact replica or prototype of our standard Indian one that we have used
for so many millennia. It speaks volumes about the management of water, agronomic
inputs, copper, brass and stone implements that they made use
of in the pre-iron
Copper Age to produce
reasonable agricultural surpluses to feed those
who did not till the land.
These were urban-settled classes like craftsmen,
traders, dealers, priests,
intellectuals, administrators, soldiers and sailors and, of course, the
‘other thinking classes’ that included scientists and technologists.
The latter were the ones who devised how loads and buildings were to be
built and how water was to to flow in and how waste materials were to drain
away. Very few of us know that the world’s first home toilet, commonly known as the commode,
was found here in Harappa. It was designed to flush out human
refuse scientifically by
using gradient and gravity
and we wonder what happened to such advanced toilet facilities and habits in
later periods of Indian history — when the culture of defecation degenerated in
India. In fact, the ancient Indus
systems of sewerage and drainage that were developed and used in cities
throughout the region were far more advanced than any found in contemporary
urban sites in Egypt and Mesopotamia — and this could only happen when science
and technology had reached new heights in that age. We hardly refer to these
marvels of engineering — while Europeans simply cannot stop going into raptures
about the Roman system of aqueducts, that were constructed three thousand years
later in the fully-blossomed ‘iron age’.
We hardly ever ponder and discuss how major public buildings like town granaries,
massive citadels and public baths were to constructed and maintained in an age
when implements and techniques had to be improvised from wood, stone, copper
and brass — without the benefit of steel. This class made life more easier by
factoring in science into the scheme of things and they were surely rewarded by
the Harappans — whose civilisation was so
dependent on their towns and in trading
activities. The planners, scientists
and administrators of Harappan civilisation surely managed to devise perfect systems of food
procurement, food management, storage and distribution to survive for two thousand years and more. This
is evidenced in
the
grain storage facilities and the plentiful
remains of food
that
have been found
in the houses — which indicates that there was no shortage.
Earliest Instruments to Measure
However, to excel in
trade
and commodity management
one needs measurement
and measuring instruments. Archaeologists have found a series of weights
in bundles, not just in one place, but in all the
Harappan cities. These weights also had a
very
perfect similarity between each
unit which indicates a rare degree of perfection in applied metrology. The
first and accurate measurement scale in the whole world has been found
in Lothal of the Harappan civilisation.
This first
‘ruler’ with precise demarcation of linear
measurement has been found here and it is dated to 2400 B.C. The
smallest division, approximately 1.6 mm, was marked on an ivory scale found in
Lothal, a prominent Indus Valley city in the modern Indian state of Gujarat. It
stands as the smallest division ever recorded on a Bronze Age scale. In
his book, The Measure
of All
Things : The Story of Man and Measurement published in 2007, Ian Whitelaw, notes that this ruler is
divided into units corresponding to 1.32 inches or 33.5 millimetres, and these are marked out
in decimal subdivisions with amazing accuracy to within 0.005
of an inch. That means that
they had a ‘master ruler’ on the basis of
which
they could calibrate and compare these markings.
Ancient bricks found throughout
the
region were absolutely
uniform in size — which, again, proves the progress of science and technology
some five thousand years ago — and their dimensions corresponded exactly to these units of
measurement. In fact, it is very interesting that these units
match the indigenous Indian unit called angulam. This measure is found not only in Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro
— it continued throughout
the history of India
in our ‘native architecture’ all the way up to the Islamic period.
The angulam as a measure in Indian architecture ended only when
the British systems of
measurements were thrust on
us.
The Vedic Age
& Problem of Material Civilisation
The next historical
stage that we will discuss is usually called the Vedic
Age that was dominated by
the
so-called Aryans who spoke Sanskrit
and composed the Rig Veda. It is dated from 1500 B.C. to around 600
B.C.
and our problem here is to locate the contribution of science and
technology. The literary text, the Rig
Veda, is surely a superb literary composition though it hardly follows any
clear linear path, but it hardly describes the material side of this civilisation. It was composed by a very literate
class, possibly for an enlightened
group but to consider it as the definitive text that dominated the life of all
Indians during the period of nine hundred years of its purported ‘sway’ is
difficult to digest. This would require a lot more of historical and scientific
proof than we have at present. It did not, for instance, endear itself to the
people of India beyond the Punjab region, where the Rig Vedic Aryans were
located then. What this means is that most people living in the subcontinent of
India neither understood it or really cared about it — but Indian history is
fixated on this narrative. As hinted, we are not even sure how many among the
cattle-rearing group of so-called Aryans were really capable of
understanding a complex oral text or really interested in esoteric philosophy.
Besides, what was its corresponding material civilisation and its state of
scientific knowledge?
In
any case, historians have raised the
point whether it is appropriate to call the entire period as Vedic as the Aryans definitely
constituted a
small
minority, and their influence was geographically
restricted to just fifteen to twenty per cent of
India’s land mass. So
how can we attribute the entire historical stage of the whole of the subcontinent
to one text or the way of life or world views of one superior minority as the civilisation of all of India at that time? There are proofs of the existence of several other contemporary civilisations in India many of which were technologically more advanced. These
are issues that standard
histories do not like to touch as it
destabilises the comfortable existing narrative. But there are people like us who just have to raise these disturbing questions. Besides, were the
Aryans really invincible? If we take
their own evidence
stated in the Puranas, we come
across stories of how the Rakshasas
and Daityas frequently captured Indraloka (the abode of
Indra and the gods), and how
they drove away the Aryaputras. The
mighty Aryans had then to seek
the intervention of some
superior force — a super
god or great goddess.
The Puranas also mention of mythical
sages like Shukrà chà rya, who
were the gurus of the anti-Aryan forces and were masters or technology. Sanskrit texts frequently mention that
Rakshasas often had weapons and powers that were definitely superior to the ones
that the Aryans possessed. These are just apocryphal references
to the constant wars between the indigenous people of India who were hopelessly
fragmented into small tribes and the better-organised invaders who had iron to
slash their defences and the horse to ride over them.
While there is no doubt
about
the superiority of
the
Sanskrit language and the philosophy that is embedded in the Rig Veda, there are strong doubts about the contribution of the Aryans to the material civilisation of India. In fact, we note a perceptible movement
backwards, — from the highly urban civilisation of the Harappans to the
rural-pastoral culture of the Aryans. We find
it strange that there is no archeological stage in the history
of India
that
is branded as ‘Aryan’
or ‘Vedic’, even though
before and after
this phase we
get other archeological phases like the Harappan, Mauryan, Kushà na or Sunga that are denoted by the ruling
class. The Harappans or Mauryas left their indelible stamps on their material civilisations, through their
contribution to art, architecture, pottery, crafts, techniques, colours and
many other aspects. We do not get any such or corresponding items that are known to be representing the culture of
the Vedic people or the Aryans. We have no Aryan style of art,
sculpture or architecture. The main problem with historians and ideologues is
that they do not want to come to terms with our
real history and declare that there is really very little by way of a material
civilisation left behind by the Aryans — because it militates against what they have been taught. We
hardly ever raise the issue of degradation in terms of material culture and of
science and technology during the Vedic period. We are so dazzled by just one
bright text of a small minority that we fail to notice how we moved
downwards from a superior world of international commerce of the Harappan phase to we reach
a phase when cattle and cow-sheds become the centre of life, and the
most
important source of wealth.
In fact, an entire genealogy
is based on cattle or gotra,
meaning ‘from the same cowshed’.
Pottery During That Period
However, archaeologists have categorised two types of
pottery found in regions inhabited by the Aryans
as BRW and PGW, or Black and Red Ware and Printed Grey
Ware, though they do not directly attribute
it to the Aryans. The first, namely the BRW pottery
represents the early Iron Age culture of
North India, dated roughly
between the 12th
and the 9th centuries
BC, which overlaps with the Vedic period, ie three to four hundred
years after the Aryans appeared in Indian history — when we note how a
pastoral civilisation was trying to learn some agriculture
as well. When we can admire this ‘journey’ from the
cow to the plough, we are actually referring to the second agricultural economy when farming started occupying the centre-stage once again, some four
millennia after the story of Indian agriculture began in Mehergarh. These are the fascinating ups and downs of history where we witness how its forward and backward movements take place
among people in the same broad geographical area.
The second type of pottery of this period is known as
the PGW (Printed Grey Ware) and it began
around the same
time, in 12th century.
But it appeared in full
bloom only after the Aryans
and their mixed groups had presumably crossed the Yamuna
in large numbers, between the 9th and 6th
centuries B.C.
The archeological
remains of
PGW also indicate the domestication of
horse, an animal that is hardly seen in the Indus Valley period, and also
to the frequent use of
iron. In fact, the Aryan victories which ultimately took place
was not due to a
superior language or
not
even because they surely had a more organised system of thinking and culture. It was largely because of
the
use of iron and the horse that simply over-powered the
indigenous stone-age or copper-age civilisations of India. It was something
similar to the hegemony
of the white Americans
over the Inca, Aztec and other
native civilisations that were inferior
in terms of warfare and fire-power. The
archeological remains associated
with this Painted Grey Ware also indicate
domestication and we
find
that Ahichatra in Bareilly district
of U.P. is the most important site that is on
the
Gangetic plains.
We must remember that the Gangetic plains were thickly forested and full
of rivers and swamps till the middle of the first millennium BC. Historians
generally believe that it was during the mature stage of the Iron Age that iron and fire were used to slash and burn through these
forests
and clear the Ganga-Yamuna region.
Romila Thapar calls this
slash-and-burn philosophy,
when the Aryans moved in from
the terai that was less
inhabited and then moved
downwards. They went along the
river, killing or capturing people and animals who inhabited the river and
swamp areas. Coming to technology, we must admit that no Copper Age civilisation could have captured the Gangetic
belt that was heavily forested. So we had to wait for the
arrival of iron which started
in 1000 B.C. and reached maturity around 600
B.C. Without iron and without the new lands and people of the
Ganga basin that were brought under ‘Aryandom’, there would have
been no true Indian civilisation. When I was in Delhi I was fond of
saying that India does not begin from either the Khyber Pass or the Bolan Pass or even from the Indus and Punjab. India begins after we cross the Nizamuddin bridge
over the Yamuna and enter the Gangetic plains. That is where the crucible of Indian thought and philosophy was developed and from where it spread.
The Janapadas or kingdoms that came up in the Gangetic plains dominated the landscape with iron
swords and iron weapons. They were actually the result of scientific and metallurgical advancements — when Iron Age Aryans on horseback subjugated the
primarily Copper Age
culture of the indigenous Indians.
It were the defeated indigenous Indians who
were called dà navas,
rà kshasas, pishà cas, dà sas
and so on. Genetic
sciences have proved that most Indians have predominantly the blood of the
defeated people, with just a dash of so-called ‘Aryan’ genes — which is
irrespective of which caste we refer to.
Iron Age Impacts Agriculture
& Society
We had briefly touched
upon agriculture in the Copper Age earlier but when the metallurgy of the Iron Age introduced iron-tipped ploughs and implements, agriculture went
through a quantum leap. Not only was it possible cultivate more areas
and tougher soils with lesser effort, it was also possible to free large parts of
the population from
agriculture. The greater surpluses that iron ploughs produced
could now feed the townsman and the craftsman as well as the ruling class which dominated all others with soldiers with iron swords, spears, bows
and
arrows, besides horsemen, policemen and bureaucrats. This
ushered in the arrival of
monarchical domination through kingdoms and janapadas and led to the rapid breakdown of
typical tribal democracy that Aryan cultures had practiced
for so many centuries. This is also the period when we get the stories of
tensions developing between
the two. When we
study mythology we see the same tensions
between the free people who lived in the hills, and the
new rà jàs who lived
in the plains. Daksha-Yagna
is a very typical such story where we
come across the tension between a free man of
the hills represented by Shiva taking on the might of several
Gangetic monarchies and combative rà jàs who possessed superior arms. In fact, both Buddha and Mahavira
were born in hill republics and preached its greater egalitarian spirit among
the hierarchical population of the plains kingdoms.
That reminds us that
iron-tipped ploughs freed
large parts of
the population from
the
boredom of agriculture and led to speculation. In other
words, the same agricultural surplus produced in the Iron Age also fed the speculators of thoughts and ideas, called the
philosophers. We find that it was in and around the sixth century when the use of
iron
reached a certain maturity, the world
got all its philosophers — Lao Tse, Confucius, Gautam Buddha, Ahura Mazda, Abraham, and Mahà vira. History that we
are usually taught in educational institutions does not
give adequate emphasis on
such linkages and tell us how scientific developments changed the very faith of people
at periodic intervals. We just have to look
beyond the Rà jà s, Rishis, Munis, Aryans, Danavas and their wars and conquests to go to the root technology
that made it all possible.
Technology of Zinc, Brass &
Steel
Before we come to the last phase of our
examination of
the
role of science in shaping history we need to take a little detour in the technology of zinc that developed in settlements in
India in the late Vedic period. Brass, as we all know, is an attractive
golden coloured alloy of copper and zinc and it is more ductile and strong. It has better resistance to corrosion and is a very useful metal. A team of
scientists from the British Museum and the Baroda University unearthed the first use of
zinc
and the early
technique of zinc smelting
at the old Zawar in Udaipur, Rajasthan. I must pause for a second here, because I have not mentioned the oldest and richest settlement of copper in India. The rulers of Khetri
had drawn their sustenance
from this copper for several centuries and it was one such ruler who had
helped Swami Vivekananda attend the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in
1893. Zawar is famous not only for its monopoly of excellent zinc ore, it is also considered to
be
the oldest site of industrial
zinc production of the
whole world. During the process, zinc ore was roasted in smaller-sized retorts which prevented the production of typical
slag, which made extraction more efficient and economic. These are some examples of the indigenous processes that developed
in India at that point of time.
Good quality brass alloys require more than 28 percent zinc in them but
in most parts of the ancient world we come across brass or other alloys with less than twenty-eight per cent of
zinc. In India, however, we come across
better quality brass and the one we come across in Takshashilà , dated around
third century B.C contains
as high as 34.34 per cent
of zinc — which is far more
superior brass. Recently, two brass bangles belonging
to the Kushà na period have been discovered
in Uttar Pradesh which revealed thirty-five per cent
zinc of exceptional quality. In
ancient India production of zinc metal was common,
and the process of producing
metallic zinc had been described in several ancient Sanskrit works. We also knew the use of zinc oxide in medicines and we come across references to zinc oxide use in those prescribed in the Charaka Samhità . So the mastery of
zinc
was another factor in our favour
but how much of it came to good use in warfare remains questionable.
In the South, we get solid
evidence of the earliest production of high
carbon steel in the whole of
the
Indian sub-continent. These sites were at Kodumanal
in Tamil Nadu, at Golconda
in Telangana and
nearby
north-eastern Karnataka, and
in northern Sri Lanka. This came to be
known as Ooty steel of South India and by the 6th century B.C. it exported globally. But the fact that Tamil Sangam poetry mentions that the South had knowledge of exceptional steel technology
long before the fourth century BC could not
prevent it from being defeated by the Mauryas. This is being underlined to also
explain that history is not always decided by scientific and technological
advances. We come across references in Arabic and Latin literature to the people of South Indian people as
the finest steel-makers in the world. This steel was exported
to the Romans and the Arabs called it Damascus steel. We need to cross 1000
degree Centigrade temperature while heating iron and alloys
to get steel
— which was very difficult
with the quality of coal
that was available and the design of furnaces. Therefore, bellows were used to
raise temperature and the bigger the bellow and smaller the furnace, the higher would be the
temperature. In the fifth century, we find the Chinese and local Sri
Lankans had mastered the art. Incidentally, Sri Lankans used the
monsoon winds and their steel furnaces were driven
by very high wind speeds during
the
monsoon period.
Strength of Mauryas Lay in Iron
& Coal
Now we come to the last part of
our discussion where we try to explain
why Pataliputra, the modern-day
Patna, could dominate India in
the 4th century BC and bring
almost all of it under
the first pan-Indian empire of
the
Mauryas. DD Kosambi has explained that the eastward thrust of
Indian civilisation was
successful because it could access
the best ores and good quality of coal. In very simplistic
terms, it was the
Mauryan control of two
critical resources, iron
ore and coal, that made it possible for it to forge superior steel weapons and implements — with
which it dominated the sub continent. As
we know, almost all the best coal reserves
in India are in the Manbhum-Singhbhum-Raniganj areas, and all the
steel plants that came up in India initially (except Salem) are
in this area— Bokaro,
Bhilai Rourkela, Asansol, Kulti, Durgapur. Why? Because we have
both coal and iron ore. It
is due to
the
same mastery over coal and iron that helped
Pataliputra under
the Mauryas
to become so strong
and invincible. But, as touched upon, a major power required not only
the best of resources and scientific
achievements — it also needed organisation and leadership. Chandragupta Maurya
had the benefit of the intelligence of Chanakya,
who could capitalise on the technology
of mining and steel-making. It is said that Chanakya actually came
from KÃ nchipuram in Tamil country,
who travelled all the way to TakshashilÃ
in the extreme North West to study and teach and then moved to Pataliputra in
the East for his career. His text, the Arthashà stra, laid
down the basis of the first great empire in India. Its twelfth chapter deals extensively with mines and metallurgy. He
declares that the Superintendents of metallurgy
had to be proficient
in geometry, geology, metallurgy and smelting of gems as
well. One of the tasks of the Mines department was to
locate new mines with ore-bearing earth, rocks
and liquids, which proves beyond doubt that not only had Chanakya exceptional knowledge
of mining and metallurgy but also that the Mauryan empire was making good
use of science and technology.
In his new book called Arthashà stra : The
Science of
Wealth, Thomas Trautmann explains how
scientific discoveries and technologies were
used to strengthen the kingdom. He states that
the treasury had its source in the mines. From
the
treasury, the army came into being, and with the treasury
and the army, the world was subjugated.
Trautmann further points out that discussions of economic topography in the Arthashà stra connect trade
with routes and not market places. A close reading reveals
that trade is
thought in terms of transporting
goods from workshops to the buyers,
not inter-city trading. That was
centralisation in the style of the erstwhile
Soviet state. The Mauryas exploited
their advantages and reached a stage when they could control everything. In fact, Asoka’s devastating Kalinga war is
attributed to shortage of raw
materials such
as surface coal and iron. The richest ores were then
available in the Kalinga region and Ashoka just had to go there
because he had to get his supplies.
In Conclusion
We have gone over a fairly
long talk and what irks me the most in history is that it is so firmly rooted
in agreed narratives and approved texts. Conventional history focuses on what is proved beyond doubt and is thus
acceptable as material for standard textbooks
and reference books. They hardly link
the text to the context and are tied down to hard records and evidence, thereby often limiting their
perspective. Since I am not a
teacher of history, just a perennially curious student, i have the liberty of
staying away from safe histories. Instead I
have always been impressed with
D. D. Kosambi’s approach to
studying history,
which gives as much importance to the context as it does to the text. He has left behind a wealth of information on the material
view of history and has
also been bold enough to deal with popular beliefs, myths, legends and superstitions. He was one who was not content to just narrate the
history of the the eastward
surge of the Aryans in terms of dates and events, but explained it in terms of the necessity to access India’s finest natural ore deposits that lay in the east Gangetic plains. The east became the centre of two of the
greatest empires of India, the Mauryas and the Guptas, because it had excellent copper, iron and coal. We need to take a look
at history from such points of views. I will refer to a statement made
by Dr Kosambi where he remarked that Magadha’s great
source of power was
not
only in its resources but also in the formation of a state. He called it “a state that used metals systematically
to clear the land and to bring it under the plough. It was also iron that allowed it to dominate the rest of India.”
I wish to point out that the way we are taught history in schools and colleges needs to be
changed to make it more interesting. We need to understand not only what has actually happened which, of
course, has to
be factually correct, but
what
were the
reasons that made them happen. Because the inquisitive minds of students at that stage would like to know why
is it that ‘X’ happened and why ‘Y’ won over ‘Z’, not just the fact that ‘Y’ won
over
‘Z’ in such-and-such
battle in so-and-so year. Historians have a wealth of knowledge at their
disposal and can surely connect the dots. They are capable of the “big, grand,
narrative”, the “panoramic view from above” but professional compulsions drive
them to swim near the shallow banks of rivers and not be too adventurous in
stating what they believe could well have happened but they are unable to lay
their hands on hard evidence. We may or may not accept that economics
necessarily determines human history, but none can deny that developments in
material civilisation, which arises from consciousness of resources and their
harnessing through advancements in science and technology do dominate society
and its values. We need to see the science that lies hidden behind history.
