CUp to the end of the first millennium A.D., we can
think of India as
the domain of a single civilization. Not everybody in the subcontinent
was part of this civilization. Down to the present day there are
significant tribal populations that are outside Hindu society, and
there were probably more in the past; some of them are hunters and
gatherers. Moreover, many aspects of the civilization varied from one
part of India to another even at an elite level. Regions differed, for
example, as to whether months began at new moon (as in most of the
south) or full moon (as in most of the north). At a popular level the
regional variations must have been even greater. But there was still an
overarching cultural unity. Brahmins, for instance, were quite often on
the move. We know of Kashmiri Brahmins from the far north who settled
among the Tamils in the far south. Manuscripts also traveled; Sanskrit
texts written in the south in the script of Kerala show misreadings
that could have arisen only in the process of copying from originals
written in the script of Kashmir. By contrast, there was no parallel to
this pan-Indian Aryan and Sanskrit role in the ethnic and linguistic
makeup of the Mesoamerican cultural zone.
Cultural unity was not, however, matched by political
unity. From time
to time Indian history had its imperial episodes, as when empires were
created and sustained by states based in the northeast. The Mauryas
from the fourth to the second century B.C. were the earliest example of
this, and the Guptas from the fourth to the sixth century A.D. were
another. But these empires did not extend to the far south. The empire
builders of the second millennium A.D. did better in this respect-but
they were Muslim or British. This meant that some of India at all
times, and most of it at most times, was divided among a plurality of
regional states. Yet, as long as these states lavished patronage on the
Brahmins, the overarching cultural unity of India was not in danger.
It is a frustrating, but also interesting, feature
of Indian history
that our knowledge of the fortunes of these states, large and small, is
rather poor. For pre-Muslim India we have no equivalent to the rich
historiography of China or the Islamic world. Instead, the history of
these states must be reconstructed from the evidence of inscriptions,
coins, and stray references in the literary sources. Usually this
evidence is fragmentary at best, though there is a notable exception:
the Mauryan emperor Agoka in the mid- third century B.C. is a
distinctly historical figure. This great patron of the Buddhists has
lef rock inscriptions in which he explains himself as a vegetarian
universalist. Thus he tells us that formerly hundreds of thousands of
animals were slaughtered daily in the royal kitchens, but that this has
now been reduced to two peacocks and sometimes a deer, and that even
this will be phased out. He describes his remorse at the mass killing
and deportation that had accompanied his conquest of the independent
state of Kalinga; and he affirms that it is his duty to promote the
welfare of the whole world, and so discharge his debt to all beings.
But Agoka is unique, and his inscriptions, for all
their interest, are
no substitute for a good chronicle. Why, then, do we have so little in
the way of historical writing to inform us about the course of events
in India? The obvious explanation would be that Indians did not write
it. After all the ancient Egyptians did not produce anything that could
really be called a chronicle. But a Chinese visitor of the seventh
century A.D. refers to Indian officials charged with the writing of
history, and the problem may rather have been that Indian society, and
more especially its Brahmin cultural elite, did not preserve what these
historians wrote once the dynasty they served had come to an end.
What this society did preserve, and in enormous quantities,
was a
literature of a broadly religious character. Since this preservation
turned on continuous transmission, the texts available to us today are
by and large only those of the schools of thought that survived.
