Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c5: Chapter I. The Scene
Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c5
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Chapter I. The Scene
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If to far India's coast we sail, we encounter today insistent barriers which have nothing to do with a study of the subcontinent's ancient past. Variant uniforms and graces meet us at the gates of West and East Pakistan and of the thousand miles of the new India that divide them. Adam's Bridge has long ceased to offer the most tenuous and symbolic link with Ceylon. The antique fortress of Goa still wears the alien flag of Portugal. At Kātmāndu the traveller, who may now indeed arrive by air, is confronted by the guardians of Nepal, if less obdurately than of old. The Afghan sentry leans warily upon the closed gate at the head of the Khyber Pass, though little heeded by the nomads who were already passing that way from season to season long before his advent. In no sense, ancient or modern, does the term 'India' nominally contain this vast and changing amalgam. At the outset our artificial usage of the word in the context of this book must therefore be defined.
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India was the land of the great river Sindhu or Indus which, paradoxically, flows mostly within the modern state of Pakistan. The name or its substance was anciently extended, however vaguely, to the whole subcontinent, and even across the present Khyber barrier to the range of the Hindu Kush, north of Kābul. In that enlarged geographical connotation it will on occasion be used in these pages, without reference to the modern political map. It will relate to the whole subcontinent south of the Himālayas and the Hindu Kush, east of the Helmand Desert, and west of the Chin Hills. No doubt so cavalier a disregard of barbed wire will be resented, and resentment is readily intelligible. But even the clumsy carpet-bag term 'Indo-Pakistan subcontinent' fails to meet the case, and there is indeed no practical alternative to the retention and even the expansion of the traditional name. As one with good friends in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, I can only beg forgiveness for crossing and recrossing so many proud frontiers without passport. I must plead that my sole concern is with prehistoric and protohistoric geography prior to the 2nd century B.C.
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Within that vast territory of some two million square miles the familiar outlines may usefully be recalled. At first sight, the formidable mountain-ranges of the north give the subcontinent an aspect of exclusiveness which it does not in fact possess. For example, there are routes from China to the Brahmaputra in Assam; through Sikkim it is possible to reach the Tibetan plateau; farther west a number of feasible if arduous routes enter Kashmir from Turkestan. The most notable of these routes uses the famous Karakoram Pass, a desolate highway, if such it can be called, from High Asia into trans-Indus Kashmir. But neither this nor any other of these northern approaches has played any dominant rôle in the formation of Indian civilization. Their importance lay rather in the reverse direction, in that they were among the chosen channels for the diffusion of Buddhism and certain aspects of Buddhistic art from India into central Asia and China during the early centuries A.D.
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On the north-western frontier of India and thence southward to the Arabian Sea the picture is a very different one. Here the approaches to the subcontinent, though not always easy, are still frequented, with a preference for two or three main routes. They may be grouped into two series: a northern and a southern. The northern group links north Iran and the Oxus region with Kābul and the central reaches of the Indus; the southern group links central and south Iran alternatively with Kandahār, north Baluchistan and the more southerly regions of the Indus, or with Makrān and the Indus delta. These two groups are significant in the cultural relations of Iran and Mesopotamia with India, supplemented less tangibly by the bypass of the Persian Gulf.
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The northern group today converges on the Khyber Pass, which has been a major traffic-axis since the establishment of Peshāwar, the ancient Purushapura, as a metropolis about A.D. 100. An important earlier route, after penetrating the Hindu Kush south-east of the ancient Bactra and the modern Mazar-i-Sharif, followed the more northerly and devious line of the Kābul river with Chārsada, the ancient Pushkalāvati (twenty miles north-east of Peshāwar), as its immediate goal. South of the Khyber alternative tracks used and still use the Kurram valley and the Peiwar Pass; and farther south again the Tochi, Gumal and other valleys carry ancient thoroughfares from the direction of the Ghazni-Kandahār uplands. At this point, feeders from the southern group spread delta-like towards the Indus plain. The Zhob valley carries or carried a modest traffic north-north-eastwards from the direction of Quetta, itself the northernmost of the three focal points of the southern group; the others being Kalāt and Las Bela. South-eastwards from Quetta a route, now followed approximately by the railway, enters the plains *via* Sibi. Westwards from Quetta a camel-route leads towards Kirman and southern and western Iran. And at the southern end of our series, Las Bela, now ‘an insignificant Baluch town, . . . must have stood full in the tide of human immigration into India for centuries in the past. It is a true gateway’.¹
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We have then a well-known geographical picture of a subcontinent mainly barred from the north but accessible in the north-west to the plodding traffic of Asia throughout most of the year from the Iranian plateau and the Oxus valley. Commerce, migration and invasion have recurrently come this way in historical times, and similar movement is implicit in our prehistoric evidence.
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South of the northern barriers lie the Great Plains of India, with an average width from north to south of some 200 miles and an average height of 500 feet above the sea. On the map their shape is that of a leaning gable, with the ridge in the neighbourhood of Siālkot, north of Lahore. The shorter and more westerly slope of the gable is the Plain of the Indus, the more easterly the Plain of the Ganges, with Ambālā and Simla in the divide. The prehistory and much of the history of the two plains, in spite of their superficial continuity, is strikingly different, for reasons which must be discussed in due course. Here it will suffice to observe that the land of the middle and lower Indus, with the lost rivers of the Sarasvati or Ghaggar system which at one time ran parallel or perhaps tributary to it, is barred by desert towards the south-east and was alternatively threatened or reinforced from the Baluch highland towards the west; it remained essentially submontane. The obstructive desert, the Thar, may not in the earlier part of our period have been of its present large dimensions, but at least its mountainous south-eastern flank, the Arāvalli Range, was a durable barrier to the spread of early cultures. Round the northerly end of the Range there was, in the Bronze Age (earlier half of the 1st millennium B.C.) some interconnection between Bikaner and the Jumna-Ganges plains, as is shown by the distribution of the Painted Grey Ware (p. 26); and, round the southerly end of the Range and the desert, the Indus Civilization crept from the mouths of the Indus into Kāthiāwād and beyond. The Ganges, on the other hand, with the mighty Jumna to the west of it and a host of imposing tributaries along its great length, culminating in the maze-like mingling of its delta with that of the Brahmaputra, escapes into a more leisurely landscape, choked at one time with the vast jungles that form the background of the Indian epics. Invasion from the passes of the north-west frontier—its normal source—surged laterally across the middle Indus plain but then encountered the Jumna-Ganges plain at the head of its longer axis. There, in the environs of Pānipat north of Delhi, the passage narrows between the Jumna and the Ghaggar, and further progress eastwards was liable to challenge. The barrier once passed, the Ganges valley lay open towards Bihār and Bengal, though distance and jungle were still substantial obstacles to penetration.
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The northern Plains are bounded towards the south by the Vindhya Range which, with its outliers and extensions (notably, the Arāvallis on the west and the Kaimur Range on the east), divides northern India from Gujarāt, the Deccan and the South. Parallel with the Range lies the Narbadā or Narmadā river, which may be regarded as the equivalent riverine frontier, though it is also the axis of a Central India with cultural problems of its own. Thence southwards the core of peninsular India is the great plateau which rises to an average height of 2,000 feet or more, with occasional peaks in the neighbourhood of 9,000 feet. On the west the plateau tumbles steeply to a narrow coastal strip in what are known as the Western Ghāts, which receive the full impact of the summer monsoon. On the east a broader plain, between the Eastern Ghāts and the Bay of Bengal, is enlarged by the valleys of the major rivers which cut back deeply into the central highland. Towards the southern end, at Pālghāt and Coimbatore, rivers falling east and west actually combine to lower a pass through the upland, thus providing an easy cross-country route of considerable interest in the protohistoric period. Through this gap in the 1st century A.D. Roman trafficking, represented by hoards of Roman coins, penetrated from the west coast to the east, avoiding the troublesome navigation of Cape Comorin. By the same accepted way a legend brought St. Thomas to Madras. The pass is marked today by the passage of a trans-peninsular railway.
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Such are the outstanding features of the Indian map. They comprise the Indus basin, with southerly extension into Gujarāt;
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the Ganges basin; the Bengal-Assam borderland of riverine plain, hill and jungle; central India with north-westerly extension into Gujarāt; and the southern plateau with its flanking coastlands. Other features will be noted as need arises, but at this point a plea may be inserted. The time has come for a careful study of the human geography of the subcontinent in far smaller sub-units than have hitherto been attempted with any approach to systematic completeness. Professor B. Subbarao has made a useful beginning in Gujarāt, but more is needed. Areas, say, a hundred miles—or even five hundred miles—square, selected arbitrarily at any point of the map and analysed in respect of settlement and traffic at all periods down to the present day, would be of incalculable value to our understanding of the land, its peoples, and their secular interaction. Such analysis is an urgent preamble to further progress in the studies with which this little book is concerned.