India’s great epic poem, the Mahabharata, began to be compiled or composed around 400 bce, but may have taken several centuries to reach its final form. Among its aims was the delineation of a type of monarchy: one section of the epic – the Santi Parvan – was devoted to setting out a theory of … Read more
POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS : The polities that emerged late during the first millennium bce were chiefdoms known as janapadas, and named after the land tracts they occupied. Their rulers were scions of the dominant clans of such communities, whose author- ity derived partly from the support of subordinate rajanyas (kshatriyas) and partly from the … Read more
THE STATUS OF WOMEN : In the early vedic period, caste development was apparently weak enough for marriage between groups to be common. Much in the Rigvedic corpus, too, suggests that the status of women was higher than it was to be in later centuries. For example, daughters as well as sons were given the … Read more
ARYAN SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION- By later vedic times – that is, between 1000 and 500 bce, when the sacrificial cult of Indo-Aryan brahmans had attained a prestigious place – the main locus of Aryan society had shifted from the river valleys of the Punjab and the plains of northern Rajasthan into the western parts of the … Read more
CLEARING THE FORESTS- Between 1000 and 500 bce iron tools and weapons provided the technological foundations for the expansion of agricultural communities over the entire basin of the Ganges. One important consequence of the replacement of copper and bronze implements by stronger iron weapons and tools was the greater ease in removing the forest cover … Read more
THE UPANISHADS- Along with the sacred, domestic and philosophical hymns, an ancillary canon came into existence as a comment upon them. There were three later Vedas: the Sama, Yajur and Atharva Vedas, dealing respectively with liturgical verses to be sung, with magical incantations to be pronounced, and with sacrificial formulae to guide the ritualists. Manuals … Read more
VEDIC CULTURE:- The vedic age has carried several different labels: ‘iron age India’, ‘the second urbanization’, and ‘Gangetic culture’; each can be justified, though the designation ‘vedic culture’ points to the main trajectory of historical development. It is now widely accepted that the subcontinent began to be infiltrated well before the middle of the first … Read more
HARAPPAN COMMERCE- If the notion of a centralized autocracy has been rejected, the degree of com- mercial activity involving cities and towns of the northwest is only now begin- ning to be adequately appreciated. Evidence from the cities of the Indus basin that have been extensively excavated indicates large populations of craftsmen producing commodities that … Read more
THE HARAPPAN STATE AND SOCIETY- It is this culture to which the now rejected paradigm outlined above pertains. Much has been learned about Harappan settlements in recent years. The number of known sites is now over 400 in a 1000 square mile triangle of the northwest. While few if any scholars currently support the idea … Read more
FROM AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITIES TO URBAN CONFIGURATIONS- Mehrgarh’s seventh millennium bce occupants made buildings of several rooms for habitation and storage out of mud-brick; they made stone tools for harvesting the barley and wheat they cultivated and for shaping ornaments out of local as well as imported substances; they buried their dead and interred tools and … Read more